technion

We went for a sprint to the ocean. It was boring.. but it was another whole surface sample. Climbing back in. You'll note the same mistake as the tylo lander. I couldn't retrieve the science. Fortunately, with this rocket, I could bring all the experiments into orbit and grab them there. Note the downward facing intakes were dropped. For some reason (but I'm guessing) I never saw any exhaust this launch. Grabbing the data. Finally blowing the science like we were meant to on the ground. Recovered!

Laythe presented its own challenges. I had a very difficult time landing anywhere but the ocean. Then I thought.. I have a jet. Making a flight where I want to land. After dealing with rockets all this time, it's amazing what I can do with a jet. Whoohooo! Bringing it down. Parachutes deployed quite low. Success!

Only Bill doesn't go to the mothership. He heads to his next lander. Draining fuel from those counterweights. Relocating to the front of the rocket, ensuring we stay symmetrical. Blowing those empty tanks. Put back together.

Back to the mothership.. looking considerably smaller already. Tylo really is a pain. There are a lot of contradictory guides around, and that's what I expected. You need to find what works for your rocket and its TWR. I couldn't land if my pe was > 100km. It was a suicide burn from about 60km. One stage in, dropped four tanks with LN-909s. This landing was awful. I must have made 10+ attempts to get it to not either burn too much fuel, or crash into the planet. Then I had to deal with a tendency to flip this lander, probably another 10+ tries. Having come down with nine tanks, I'm down to three, and two of them are nearly empty. dv planning is weird. Welcome to my failure! Despite having tested - extensively I might add - that the ladder allows a kerbal to drop a flag and return, I did not place the appropriate ladders to allow all the science instruments to be gathered. Hence, somehow we managed to reach the materials bay, but the rest of those instruments were just wasted. We fire that section away to make the reorbit lighter. Away we go. The standard rockomax needed a bit extra to get a TWR > 1 on Tylo, so you can see some radials around this section. I was VERY worried about whether it was going to pull this off. Turns out the final stage had plenty of fuel left! Enough to manage the rendezvous even.

There's another lander destined to leave from this Tylo orbit, an unmanned probe heading to Jool. It feels so wrong plotting courses to just fly right into a planet. Science! Aerobraking into the planet. Doing ALLL the science. The chutes aren't to allow any form of landing, but to give all the science the time to transmit before we hit the bottom. Hard to see, but there are RTG's topping it up while everything transmits.

Heading to Tylo first was strategic.. even if it wasn't the first place we landed. Here we are separating our Pol lander, designed to get to Pol and back under its own power from Tylo orbit. This was supposed to be ion powered. But even on Pol, I couldn't build an ion unit with a TWR > 1 carrying a materials bay. So the first stages are liquid fuelled, with ion engines for use for the trip back from Pol. Yo Pol! Samples. Samples everywhere. Time to leave. Laythe! Where'd you.... Turns out the > 3000 dv in ion engines weren't even needed, even to get into a Laythe orbit.

The burn to Jool was long.. now you see why I packed so many nukes. Transfer windows? Who's ever heard of such a thing? After enough burning, the side tanks drop. Being asparagus staged, this works very well to provide a large dv. Aerobraking over Jool always looks amazing. High over Jool. The first EVA of the mission, heading into the Tylo lander.

Now comes the transport. It's the largest transport I've ever launched into orbit, and naturally required the largest lifter I've ever build. It also has two more landers tag along. Seriously powerful takeoff. With all the lifter gone, this is the transport stage. It still has a lot of work to circularise. Just look at the length of that burn. The dilemma: By the time we create the node, we're a minute late on the burn. It's not because I sat around waiting, it's because we've just dropped the mainsails. You can still manage orbit but it takes some work. The mothership dropping the small transport it's been using so far, which will deorbit. Successful docking. Putting two senior docking ports together when they align the ship is soooo much easier than standard docking ports radially attached. The final launch: A fuel top up. Transferring fuel across. It's ridiculous how much the transport burnt while circularising and rendezvousing. Separation of the final product!

Hey guys, This is a log for my visit to all five Jool moons. It took a tonne of planning, I'm amazed it went through as well as it did. It was done in .23 career mode. This is the main command module. You can see on each side going up with it, the small landers for Bop and Vall, each fitted with a materials bay and science instruments. Launch Parked in a high orbit for dockings. Next in orbit is the Laythe lander. It's a demonstration of the new RAPIER engine. Docking really was painful, because I had that bug where the nav ball targets don't line up. Once docked, I transferred the lander, and filled up on fuel. The tylo lander launched next. This asparagus staged unit had a heck of a lot more dv than flight engineer knows about. Docked on the other side of the Laythe lander. Now the counterweight tanks on the Laythe lander make sense. The assembled rocket with most of the landers.

It could be just me but I never found this to be the case. Assuming I've recently hit F5 and not afraid to hit F9, responding to this scenario by opening up full throttle when you think those clamps should be touching often makes them connect.

I'd be very interested in seeing this calculated. Getting maximum efficiency on the burn is one thing, but my last mission took six launches just to assemble - and each one of those involved either abandoning fuel or using it to extend to orbit. I ended up launching form 1.5M km, fully fuelled, with the hope that allows more total dv than spending reasonable a portion of my burn getting the ap from 70km up to that level.

Thanks for that. I'm quite low on fuel so I'll got for that option. So you would suggest the best place to deal with alignment after escaping jool?

Hey guys, Having just completed a Joolean tour I'm looking to return home to Kerbin. I'm currently in a Bop orbit - and it's a perfectly polar orbit, due I guess to a badly managed intercept. I didn't appreciate how lucky I was with every previous intercept having a near 0 heading. Now, unlike the perfectly planned transfers between moons, planning ejection isn't so obvious. 1. I'm imagining the most efficient thing is to first escape to Jool such that the pe gets nice and low, for maximum oberth effect. However, I can't see to plot an escape from this angle that actually reduces it. That means just escaping, followed by a less efficient burn to drop it. 2. Attempts to flatten the orbit around Bop seem incredibly expensive. Where is the best place to do it?

I saw a serious example of this last week. I was working on a Tylo landing. Turning a "just captured" elliptical orbit into a circular one was going to be hell, and doing it in my mothership scheduled a ridiculously long burn time. It was far more efficient to just drop the lander in that orbit, and let it deorbit from the pe. Once it got back into orbit, having a very lightweight lander meet that elliptical orbit on half of one small tank and rockomax engine was a lot more efficient than trying to circularise the mothership.

Just an FYI. Everyone says there are no biomes outside of kerbin and its moons. But I just gathered science from laythe's ground, and another set from laythe's oceans.

What legs does it have? I've had a lander drop perfectly vertically on duna at 2m/s and flip on its side because of those silly micro-legs.

The frustrating part: Using the previous post to create a highly efficient Duna intercept using "method 3" taking 1165 dv, followed swiftly by spending 1800dv correcting an inclination that's almost 90 degrees to ike (which I was heading for)

It is worth noting, a small tank and command module have a much better dv with an LN-909 or similar than an LV-N, due to the impact of that weight.

Just be aware that "physics warp" (described here using the alt key) does "bad things". Small rockets will probably be fine, but those large rockets you're trying to push to Jool have a reasonable chance of randomly exploding during a physics warp. The general rule is: * Quicksave first if you're going to do it. * Don't even try on a large rocket Getting back from the Mun really shouldn't take long though. Are you using ion engines or something?

When testing my Eve ascent vehicle, I successfully launched from Kerbin, and flew straight up until I made it to Jool. So it CAN be done. Given what a horribly overpowered rocket this was for Kerbin, that doesn't mean you want to do it.

I've built tonnes of ion systems and never use RCS. You are either missing a probe core (since the seat isn't actually a control module) or electricity.

You can store one sample per biome. For example, you can take an EVA report in orbit and another on the ground. The point of having two astronauts is that you can split up the ship. For example, take an MK-2 to the Mun. Fit it with a smaller lander, featuring a one kerbal lander can on the top. One kerbal can now stay in the main ship, whilst the other gets transferred to the lander can. Which in turn lands, then comes back into orbit. People will disagree but I feel this is the easiest way to make it to the Mun, and is great practice for larger missions. If you only took one kerbal, you wouldn't be able to control the main ship to perform the rendezvous once he left it.

We need a mod that lets you send chimps up a few orbits with that and you'll unlock probes.

The issue is where you've put it (the mun). I pretty much gave up on rovers on low gravity bodies, for the reasons you mention. You'll enjoy driving 60km on Eve though

Whilst mods will always an answer, the concern is that there's something you're likely doing wrong. Let's start with this: have you landed and gathered surface samples, crew reports and EVA reports from several of Kerbin's biomes and low orbit? Then, a mun flyby - before trying to land there. Once you have that, a picture of your current rocket would probably lead us to advising what's wrong.