technion

Well played. Moho is, hands down, the hardest planetary body to make a return mission from. I mean, the ground-level ascent from Eve is well respect as hard.. but everyone knows what they are in for with that. What engine did your lander have? Because it looks like the ant engine to my eyes but there's no way that would provide the TWR.

Clearly the right response here is to complain about Microsoft's poor IE code No but seriously, I Googled this quite a bit, and for several key searches, this thread is the only relevant hit. You would think a major imgur problem would be more prevalent, so I don't know if there's anything that could possibly be locally configured here that would cause it.

There's definitely bugs outside the "SOI transition" issue. I setup a Duna transfer last night. I used KAC to safely leave Kerbin's SOI, after I did that, the intercept had a pe of 5 million km. Then I timed warped a bit, but killed it about halfway there - no transitions had been made. There was no intercept at all any more, and I had a 200ms correcting burn to get it again.

I did the Jool 5 with DRE, and ended up doing a direct capture to Tylo. It only took around 1100dv to capture there.

One of the harder missions in the game - well done. How many legs did you use? I can never seem to avoid them breaking in Eve.

That's good stuff - I applaud any progress there. You get Facebook and Youtube over HTTPS nowadays - there's no room to argue it's for "financial data" any more.

The air on Duna is so thin it'll barely make a noticeable difference. The air on Eve is.. I doubt anything still carrying air intakes is going to get back into orbit

I've done direct insertions at Tylo which have only taken a fairly small insertion burn - I'm sure that's much better than a Jool aerocapture, after which I'll invariably be on an orbital plane nothing like my target and have a fairly inconvenient intercept. That said, Vall is a lot smaller. I have a feeling the insertion will be quite large, which will change things.

You may be surprised - getting to Duna is only marginally harder than getting to Minmus. Since you don't appear to be looking to pack a lander, I'd probably just say "try it" with whatever you last took to Minmus. As for supplies, I don't run any of those mods so I'm not sure.

I see this advice every where, but... By the time I shut the jets down and run rockets exclusively, I tend to be at the 30km+ mark, and the air up there is thin enough to not be that significant. And after twenty seconds, it's 45km+, and even more insignificant. Intakes do have a high drag, but the rest of the spaceplane also has parts that contribute to drag. It's not like you get "no drag" after closing them. I ended up having a hard time seeing the difference between shutting down those intakes, and not doing so.

I should have said this earlier but.. I don't see parachutes. You are using chutes to land on Duna right?

A similar issue is the trip I just made to Moho. While setting up the transfer with precisenode, literally one dv in any direction was enough to lose the intercept, and 2dv in some directions was enough to even lose the separation markers. This means the burn needs to be exceedingly accurate. The moment you try to do it over multiple periapsis kicks, where the time you spent doing one orbit can be significant, you'll end up way from the target.

I know it's the controversial thing, but I'd drop several of them. There's 18T worth of LV-N there and that reaches a point where the efficiency gains from the engine are overtaken by all that weight. Personally, I would: * Ditch the four on the outside altogether, and replace them with skippers * Run fuel lines from the outside tanks to the inside * Run the outside tanks as a "transfer booster" stage, which will make the transfer much more efficiency and fuel friendly * Decouple those tanks when empty * Reduce the engines on the orange tank from four to three. That central stage should still provide enough dv for capture + return home (I'm assuming most of that top part is the lander and not returning)

The whole point of being in a jet is that the whole "land too early" shouldn't be possible. If you're 50km away and coming down... point the nose up a bit and just keep flying.

Sounds like an interesting experiment. Landing on Eve, particularly with FAR.. I would imagine would bring you to loser than that speed.

That is the best idea on the entire internet.

I feel suddenly obligated to hope above hopes for a scramjet mod.

Maybe I worded it poorly. If I'm sitting in a polar orbit of Tylo, and luck would have it that, at what would otherwise be a great time for an ejection point, that orbit is perpendicular to Tylo's orbit, odds are it's going to be a multi-step transfer.

The thing that just about kills me in touring Jool, is the inclinations. I would transfer from Tylo to Laythe, and end up in a highly inclined orbit. From there, the next transfer can only be done in an expensive version.

Yep, I tried hitting Dres today for the first time in a while. The SOI on that planet is tiny, and the six minute burn time I had was way too inaccurate to hit it. Sure, I could have broken that up into two, three minute burns. But after the first one, one full orbit will end up being a few days in length, and by that time, the ejection window and angle is no longer precise, and the correcting burn is significant.

Why not show us your rocket? The first question will be how efficiently it's designed. You may simply not be taking enough dv.

It's one thing when some jerk randomly decides to troll you (it's the internet, grow up, etc etc). It's another when you spend literally months of your life working on something to give to the community and just get whingers and people deciding to make personal attacks in return. I maintain or contribute to a string of open source projects and it's ridiculous how strongly a person can decide to get childish and offensive when a request that either contradicts the entire goal of your project ("please remove these security features because I don't understand why they are needed so they should just be removed"), or constitutes tonnes of work for no gain ("this C should be rewritten in assembly" - I kid you not).

Well played on the landing. With fuel that sparse, the precision to drop yourself near the old lander must have taken some work. Regarding the 15 minute burn however, that's really the problem with Moho. Everyone talks about nuke's being the correct way to obtain so much dv - but at the speed you tend to go screaming past Moho's SOI, you either need a lot of nukes, or something with more thrust to run this well. The good news at least, is that it doesn't take much to get home due to aerobraking. One large grey tank and one LV-N on each side seems to manage it.

I'd suggest posting this in the support forum because I believe you've identified a bug. That Pe would definitely still count as "in orbit".

I've made several efforts at this. The newer NASA parts are incredibly helpful at getting something capable of an Eve ascent, all the way to Eve. Previously, my lifters would have a monstrous lifter underneath them, and still empty their first two stages getting in orbit. Then I'd go out send a tug, then make a third launch with a refueller before departing. The new parts make things way easier. That said, trying to build your actual lifter using a 3M engine is insanity.