technion

It's already a large, heavy part. It's far quicker to do two return trips from the Mun in small craft than to haul a science lab out there and transmit - not to mention as takii pointed out, it's not a 100% transmit.

In career mode, getting enough science to actually unlock those decouplers would be very hard to do without ever making orbit. In a tier 0 scenario, the easiest option I started with was building the bottom stage to consist of just one tank, then having all the boosters around it stage away with it.

You could just wait until you take off and EVA in space. Unless you're talking about dropping a mobile lab on the ground somewhere.

It doesn't take much to unlock the LV-909. Putting a small tank and one LV-909 on top of enough T-30's to get into orbit is enough to do a Mun flyby. It's enough to land actually.. but you're asking about avoiding that. Doing a mun flyby and grabbing an EVA and crew report is worth a lot.

Thanks for this guys. I've noted you can reactivate any of these experiments easily enough already, being able to grab that data with an EVA is what I was missing.

Hi, I'm just about to unlock the science lab and I want to make sure I use it correct. I understand that I can do a crew report, EVA or surface sample, and "store" in a lander, then "take" from that lander and move into the science lab for a 100% transmit. The wiki page also says the science lab can be used on a mystery goo and Science Jr. How exactly do you move the science from these parts into a science lab?

Thanks, the weight advice makes a lot of sense. I was far more concerned about running out of power than keeping it light, and had two gigantors with a lot of battery reserves. Plus, I came in from about 8km height. It'll be a while before I can try this now I've restarted in .23 career mode, but I'm looking forward to it.

You inspired my Ion driven Gilly lander - which worked great. I tried taking a very similar probe to yours to Minmus though, and there was no way it had the power to kill the velocity before smashing into the surface. I had enough power to throttle two engines to 100%, and it wasn't even remotely survivable. What's the trick?

Sometimes.. because it works. My Gilly lander is tiny and had no issues making the trip from low Eve orbit and back again. If I tried to create a larger system, I have a feeling I would have strapped it with T45's and loaded it up with so much junk it couldn't make the trip.

Just to clarify, was this a "return trip" to Duna? If you can do that, you can manage a one-way probe to any of the Jool moons.

Erm, closest I have is my "complete" Eve mission craft, featuring this rover on one side and a gilly probe on the other. Feel free to pull subassembly out of it. https://lolware.net/kerbal/Eve%20Mission.craft

After using this on Eve I'm going to use it everywhere. This design means you don't have to land on the wheels, and you don't end up dropping it from any height. Here the lander lands on its legs. Then you retract those legs and slowly drop the lander. Decoupling doesn't look like it did anything. Until you extend the legs again, and find your lander separated.

It's over a 59KM drive. Sure, I could have tried to land closer, but frankly, even if it took a few hours, that's not that much in the scheme of this mission. Eve.. it's a lonely place. It ended up taking about 35 minutes. Here we are at our launch vehicle. Repairing the legs. Turned out to be pointless, they broke immediately, before you could even retract them. Lift off! Two stages into the launch. Now we're at a height that sensible people launch from. Four stages in. By 5km, the lifter is much smaller and this stage lasts a lot longer because there's no fuel being fed anywhere. At about 10km, the internal section of the rocket takes over. Second last stage. It's amazing how far we still have to go at this point. Orbit done! Our hero kerbal awaits a pickup - dangerously close to the atmosphere.

EVA into our lander. Detached and preparing for landing. There is more than enough dv to plan an appropriate landing. The fiery ascent. Coming in for landing. This vehicle doesn't actually need to rocket assist the landing. But if you got em, use em. This lander was specially designed to solve one particular issue: Every lander I had seen involved some form of "drop it from a short height". On Eve, that invariably meant something exploding. Here you see the lander just held above ground by the landing struts, which are shaking and shivering under the weight. Now all we do is activate those gears and lift the legs, for the slowest ever touchdown by a rover. Then we can decouple and lift the lander back up. Taking a sudden turn will send the detached decoupler to the side. And we're away.

I'd imagine.. it would have no engines, no fuel, and no drag Obviously it could cap at 0.

Hi, This sounds (I know I know.. always harder than it sounds) quite easy to implement. If a nosecone could have, say, -0.2 drag, it would actually HELP the aerodynamics (like it's meant to in real world).

Why do I do all the cool stuff in the dark? EVA sending a kerbal to the Gilly probe. Detached. Wow that's tiny for something heading off to a moon landing. Intercept. Coming in. Note the navball still says "orbit". The fact I expected it to automatically change to "surface" led to several high impact crashes. Incredibly slow waiting for gravity to pull us down. Almost... Protip: you can land at 0.6m/s and still watch a gigantor explode. Luckily I also packed generators on this flight and can fold these away. Success kerbal!

My Laythe lander had a ladder that sat at 45 degrees and clipped more than 3/4 its size through the fuel tank because nothing I did with the main ladder itself would allow Jeb to climb it. That much clipping feels much more wrong than the original scenario, but it's the only one that works. To me, that's buggy.

Having taken off from Eve sea level - I had to add SRBs. I could literally fire the rocket at full throttle all day and it never took off. Four SRBs got it moving. I'm sure you could achieve the same with liquid fuel engines, but it all equates to "more thrust".

I landed on a pretty steep slope, and basically just sat there on one leg until I disabled SAS and allowed the rocket to fall. I didn't have legs, but wide arms the engines sat on. I don't know if it's just me or a property of Gilly, but I usually assume the navball changes to "surface" near landing, but it had to be done manually on Gilly. Until I figured that out, I kept wondering why my speed was 1.0m/s, yet the ground would come crashing to me and destroy the rocket.

Speaking for myself, I've read dozens of great mission reports, but since bumping every one of them just to say "great report" sounded silly, I didn't. If you're keen on this mission, I'd urge you to continue to go for it. On my current Eve mission, I didn't at any point make any effort to deal with launch windows. I appreciate it's not "optimal", but you said yourself your rocket have more dv than needed anyway. Speaking of optimal, I see a lot of engines, but no nukes. This will have a significant impact on your interplanetary transfer.

The whole thing can be seen as it travelled like this. You can see here - though I didn't notice it until getting to Eve, the small liquid rocket booster we attached to the bottom of the Gilly unit has sheared off. I didn't expect it to be necessary, but now we'll have to find out the hard way. Showing the statistics of all components. The build of this rocket couldn't handle as much aerobraking as was necessary, so it took a small burn to get captured. Tell me again why I contemplated requiring the transport booster? The orange tank at the bottom is completely full. I put the mothership on a matching orbit with Gilly. It seemed to have enough fuel to want to take advantage of.

In the interests of "doing it for real", here's where we ended up planning our ship (where a rover could get to it). Here's the rocket that will be doing the main Eve mission. The left side features an ion driven lander destined for Gilly (with an extra tank as counterweight). The right features my lander with rover. Is this what people call a skycrane? There's some interesting views of the docking ports here during the high-thrust take off. Circularising. The same transport seen earlier, launching again. Starting the ejection burn, amazed again at how effective it is when you still have some mainsail fuel to burn.

Stupid indeed. This is one of those reasons SRBs exist. This rocket literally couldn't leave the water until I fired them. Roughly five seconds at full throttle and nothing moved until those SRBs started. Here we see 12 aerospikes, 4 SRBs, and 20 of those radial rockomax engines getting us moving. After alternating asparagus staging with droptanks, we get down to four aerospikes powering on. One of the final stages. Ready for our circularising burn. Just look at the dv required... it's amazing what a punch a tiny tank + engine can pack. Whoa! Through the magic of quicksave.. back in orbit to plan a ground landing for rendezvous with the team.

The two things I see in this game are typically "return manned missions" and "one way probes". I'd like to suggest a "return probe mission", if for no other reason than, if you can successfully manage that, then replacing that probe with a lander module should confirm you can manage a return manned trip.