technion

I'm incredibly interested in how you got a plane to fly 40km on Eve. I can't imagine having the fuel to do that without a jet engine - but they don't work on Eve. Can you tell us more about that craft?

I'm generally against cheating. But those situations where you have a ladder, bob gets to the top and then just falls because he won't walk forward, it feels more like "fixing a bug" than cheating.

Hey guys, This is my first attempt at a rover so I'm sure this is a stupid question. Why does this keep digging itself forward? It does it regardless of SAS, and it does it as soon as the physics kick in, before trying to drive anywhere. As you can see, it doesn't appear to have all its weight at the front.

Wow that was close - as Eve ascents seem to be! Great report.

I only just completed this. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/60438-Return-mission-from-Eve-GROUND-LEVEL You seem to have a make a choice. Plan on getting a high altitude, which means tonnes of work in space trying to plan it, or, as in my case, build even bigger until it an take off from anywhere.

Despite being called "laythe traveller", this transport has become a staple on many of my missions. Once in orbit, we can kill the mainsails. Total weight of the assembled craft, ready to inject to Eve. How it looks. When enough fuel is burned, you can undock the transport and finish the capture on the booster. Approaching Eve Coming in for landing. The booster will be destroyed here. Parachutes leading the water landing. Touchdown! My Eve ascender is sitting in water.

A whole new transport booster on its way. Docked and filling up the lander. Firing the outside tanks on the booster. Finally - we have full tanks and nuclear engines.

This is my transport booster. It was built to provide extra thrust, but it serves to drop just under three grey tanks to a refuelling rocket. Dumping the lifter. Coming in to dock. Detaching after transferring all its fuel to my lander. It's still over 2000 points down.

There have been several attempts here. Lander one, after making the flight the whole way to Eve, came down on a 3km mountain (through sheer luck) and was incredibly close to orbiting from there. For the second revision, no problem, more fuel should help. Instead of placing that fuel on the outer stage where I planned, it landed on the inner stage. The problem with this was, after losing some of the outer engines, the TWR dropped enough that, at about 10KM, the speed went to 0 and then we started falling back to ground. Not great. Third revision aimed to fix that, and it almost did. From a height of 1800, it was able to build an appropriate Apopsis, kill the engine, and hang out two minutes until it got there. At which point, it was out of electricity and couldn't fire up to circularise. Yes, the deliberate decision that we wouldn't need the weight of a battery on the last stage had killed this revision. The fourth time I prepared to haul a lander the whole way there, it looked like this. Lifting this sucker into orbit takes quite an effort. I'm certainly not happy with the small engine -> large tank join, which would buckle under too much thrust. Getting there. This lifter violated one of my cardinal rules - I hate launching just to refuel. It was just so heavy that attempts to expand the lifter kept failing. Here you can see it circularising.

A return trip to Eve is one of the more interesting missions. The ultimate guide to this, in the form of Scott Manley's youtube series, established a highly efficient method of doing so. You'd have to be an idiot to go out of your way to take a LESS efficient path. Today, I am that idiot. Lander design is, obviously, the major component of this. All my previous landers in Duna and Laythe were aerospike driven. That worked great- but by the time you've strapped enough aerospikes and fuel together to achieve orbit from Eve at any level, you've got a ridiculous craft. They say you can move anything with enough dv - but it's not totally true. If it's not practical limits about what you can land without having explode, it's limitations on what your CPU can handle. Meanwhile, the inspiration from Scott's craft, featuring a series of small rockomax powered units was very appealing. How did it scale up though? Not great unfortunately. You reach a point where the outer stages run dry in two seconds. The design was therefore, a hybrid. Featuring an outer shell of aerospikes, and an inner section of small tanks and rockomax engines. I intend on using this to achieve orbit.

The issue for me is that a transfer is rarely perfect, and the more time I spent on "exact dv" and "perfect transfers", the more time I spent running out of fuel, stranded. I have a fairly generic transport that pulled my launcher to Laythe. Is it overkill for a small moho probe? yes. But I can launch it in one launch, and it's NOT going to run out of fuel, so I use it.

Are these supposed to be "return" missions? The challenge significantly increases where an exit from Laythe and Tylo are concerned.

Once you can make it there, you can make it anywhere Any plans on a return trip?

Hey guys, Curious point here. Not long back I completed my highly victorious Laythe land + return. Except, even when I was on an ejection burn, I could see ways to improve the craft. I know it could be more efficient and powerful. I'm not sure if I can bring myself to spend another weekend on a mission I've already done just to do it better though. What would you guys do?

After finding the top Eve ascent vehicle wasn't able to ascend from Eve, I'm about to launch this whole thing again. I'll shift the panels around and lock the gimbals, and report back on the next trip.

Alkopop you're 90% of the way there. One tank and one small engine can make that return trip - just remember the parachutes!

Thanks guys, but I think we can chalk this up to a bug. Specifically, I made the burn the "long" way, then when all remaining fuel was in the top section, I went to undock the bottom one. Only, I got the "can't undock" bug. After undocking the top section, then redocking it just to fix said bug, suddenly this problem went away... Dogface, answer your question, I have one ASAS between the two orange tanks, one right under the lander at the top, and one on top of that monopropellant tank you see. I realise these were probably overkill, but each section that went up and docked had its own SAS and I never planned a method of removing them.

Hey guys, I'm having some trouble with my transporter. The bottom part of this is my "traditional" transport. The top part is a booster I built (because 40 minutes burns were a problem). The odd thing is, if I burn just the three bottom rockets (as below) it works fine. If I burn just the top three, it also works fine. But fire all six, and it pulls to one side quite strongly (even with three ASAS modules there). This contradicts my understanding of weight or thrust, or whatever is causing this. Any advice appreciated - I've pulled three nukes on this mission I don't seem able to use.

I meant specifically the pluralisation. Any time I used the action group ( or the G button, I didn't know about that!), every single one retracted and my aerospikes impaled themselves on the ground. One at a time however - much better. It's so obvious - I'm kicking myself that I never thought of it.

DMagic, that's a great report, thanks for that. To confirm, you talk about landing an unmanned unit. With a seat on top, do you see that managing to circularise an orbit and make a return?

Thanks guys. I deployed a few ion probes around planets and never felt there was a point (once they were in orbit, who cared how efficient they were?). So I've been looking for an excuse to use one. I plan on getting there with a convention engine, then staging the return to pretty much a chair and an engine.

Hey guys, Before I get there and find out the hard way.. Am I correct in the expectation that, with the amazing gravity in Gilly, a lander with a small ascent stage powered by an ion probe could escape its SOI and get back to a low Eve orbit ?

I like how you said "the gear". I tried this already - using my action group to pop all of them. Aerospikes die if they touch the ground. Why didn't I think of doing this one at a time..

This is what I don't understand about these missions. If I was to go to Eve, I'd use something like Kasuha's rocket. And, reading his report, most of those three and a half tanks were needed to do the job. Then I see Johnno, and you seem to have a lot more engines (weight), a much bigger lander, and a rover, and basically one orange tank. How can you haul so much on so little?

Hey guys, After watching several of the youtubes I put together a goal of an Eve ascent. I've put 12 of the LT-2 landing struts on and worked on a process of quicksave/quickload to land myself on a bit of a mountain. I've run into two problems in this trial run. The first is that my final stage didn't have the power storage to allow me to light up the engine once I got to my apopsis Having fixed that, on to the second issue. Even landing at 4m/s, the landing struts dig into the ground and take a serious amount of work to get going. I have eight aerospikes and four RT-10 SRB's running at full like for like five seconds before it flips out of the ground and starts actually moving. It feels like it defeats the purpose of these things if they aren't capable of taking a landing at this speed. To save me two days of flying out there to test it - would wheels resolve this (even if they broke on landing) for this scenario? I can't help but notice that the RoveMax M1 is lighter and has a higher impact tolerance than the legs.