Ziv

Hey, I checked them, both are accepted!

sdj64: Congratulations, you have finished the JOOL-5 Challenge on err... both Level 2 and Level 3! Hi again, I appreciate your "docking bay" and heat shilds on your main ship. Your Laythe lander plane looks compact and fun. Your other lander+tug is a nice minimalistic stock solution. Your Tylo gravity assist to match planes with Bop is really clever! By the way if you go to Bop when it is crossing the main moon's plane then it's also cheap to get there (Oh yeah, I see you did that on the way back). Hmm, your solution may be better on dV too, I'm not sure, but I really like it! Haha, impatient Alan Kerman endangered the mission with that plane-landing on Vall! Thank god they managed it! This picture is priceless! At Tylo landing you were lucky that you had two tanks only so the fuel flow direction issue was easily solvable. I usually don't like shuttle return to Kerbin but in this case I'm okay with it because you put a lot of additional effort and idea into this mission. Good job, which level do you want me to put your mission?

Haha, I liked that you added your unsuccessful launch attempts too! Oh, poor Kerbal(s) that have died there! I'm sorry but I got confused a lot of times while reviewing your entry as there are hardly any fuel/dV data and pictures about your: - Jool to Tylo - your reserves in your Tylo lander before departure - your Tylo-Laythe flight path - the Laythe landing seems absolutely fine but then jumping to Vall with the lander, even without refueling (?) leaves me without any exact information - your Vall landing without any initial/on the surface/arriving back fuel/dV stat - your redocking at Laythe (arriving back to Laythe with aerobrake can cause you many trouble (orbital direction, inclination, etc) and may need a lot of dV to redocking, so I always have to see that part - no fuel/dV data and flight path from Laythe to Pol, and from Pol to Bop Can you please provide pictures about these steps? Otherwise the mission looks good, so if I see you had all the fuel/dV and flown all the parts then it will be all right!

If you think JOOL-5 is easy and time consuming and doesn't sound fun for you then just skip it. This challenge is not obligatory at all! By the way if you can develop a rocket in half a day which goes to every body in the Kerbol system then you can attempt the Jebediah's Level + Grand Tour. If you feel like a pro then do it with 0.22 where there was no decent ion engine, the biggest tank was the orange one and the ships were much more wobbly and broke apart easier. And don't check the mission of others, use your own ideas only. Don't use mods and don't use hyperedit to test your ship before the mission. If you do it then I'll hat off in front of you. But I must warn you that it may be hard, and will be time consuming!

Hi, there's a rule for this: 4. Unlimited launches are allowed to Kerbin orbit to put the main ship together but this is also part of the challenge and has to be documented well. No hyperedit! I want the JOOL-5 Challenge missions to be flown at 100%, from surface to surface. Planning, testing (here you can use hyperedit) and putting the ship together in orbit is also part of the fun. And better planning leads to less launches, refuelings and/or dockings!

Hey, it depends on how busy my real life is. It usually takes somewhere between 1 and 7 days. Don't worry I remembered that you sent an entry, I'm going to review it now!

Links please! Make my job easier...

:D

I consider the JOOL-5 as a realistic mission from Kerbin surface to Kerbin surface. So every launch, every refueling and every landing has to be played and documented until all the Kerbals arrive back onto the surface of Kerbin.

Hi, can you please tell me what mods did you use? And can you please upload pictures with the info screens about the fuel levels and deltaVs on during the key moments? (launch, moving between planets/moons, before/during/after landing, docking-redocking, return to home) Because this is not enough for me to check if your mission happened as it is on the pictures.

hazard-ish: Congratulations, you have finished the JOOL-5 Challenge on Level 1! WHAT? NO QUICK SAVES??? OMG, you just got a "Realistic Space Explorer" Award!!! Your Laythe and Tylo landers are nice low-weight ones. I liked the Laythe lander deorbiter module! People usually think there's no need for any dV to land on Laythe but deorbiting can cost some hundred dV too. Talking about fuel efficiency, your landing on Tylo was not efficient because you stopped very high above and fought the gravity during 23 km of descending. You could have saved some hundered m/s dV if you just lower your orbit and brake just above the ground. But you managed the landing so good job anyway. I was very surprised when you landed on Vall with your main ship!!! I've never seen a solution like this but I really liked it! Makes the whole mission a lot easier! I also like how you decoupled the empty fuel tanks from the main ship during the mission. Seems like a good planning! Good job on the EVA landings too! Nice mission, thank you for participating!

Hi, what kind of engine do you use for the return ship? I'm afraid that's a nuke heavily clipping through the fuel tanks. If yes, I don't think that's within the rules...

Meithan: Congratulations, you have finished the JOOL-5 Challenge on Level 1! Your mission report is exceptionally well detailed, that's very nice and will be useful for many others, that's for sure! And writing a computer program to calculate the changes of mass, fuel and deltaV well, that's a whole new level! And you went with a good old modular lander with only one lander can method, that's cool, it's been a while when somebody went this way. I also liked that you left your main ship in orbit between the moons and used a moon-tug to bring your lander to the moons - that's the most optimal in terms of fuel/weight but people usually put their main ship around the moons which means they move a huge weight and waste a lot of fuel. I guess they are afraid of docking in a Jool orbit - maybe they think it's like docking around Kerbol, which can be really hard for beginners. But around Jool it's very similar to any planet. I guess maybe you had some hard time docking the lander together sometimes as there were no probe cores on the lander engines, don't you? And there was no fuel consumption tracking on your main ship but as it went only from Kerbin to Jool orbit and back home, that must not be so bad... hmm, bu it refueled the lander-tug many times, hmm... maybe was it close? Do you have any screenshots on this? Anyway, it seems possible for me so I believe it worked well. I usually don't like shuttles to end the mission but it would be easy for you to put a docking port + parachute module on the ship and I guess you might want to use your main ship later too, so it's all right. Good job, thank you for the very detailed mission report!

@Laie: I had the same problem at JOOL-5 at the beginning and there were two ways ahead of me: introducing some kind of point system to get rid off the subjective judgement but this will change the motivation from doing an Eve-return to be the first on the list and will hold back many "less-interesting" attempts (as we discussed before), or just add detailed comments in the notes so the readers can see and distinct the missions on their own. I decided on the second way. There might be a list order so the better/complex/more elegant mission goes first in the lists but that would be subjective too. I decided to just note the details of the missions which will indicate how it was built up. Sometimes I used bold text, and when himynameisjake made a JOOL-5 Grand Tour he got a whole new level.

Mining on Gilly doesn't make sense, it would be too difficult compared to an Eve surface miner which is landed with the rocket. If you decouple that during reentry then it doesn't even need wheels to go close enough for mining/refueling. I forgot about the rule that your lander have to go down as a stock ship too, but that doesn't really make it harder because attaching a minimalistic mining-rover to it and detaching during reentry is easy too. It rolls there and the Kerbal links it to the rocket with a KAS pipe. I made a quick sample rover and it weighs 2.3 tons. It has a mining head, kethane tanks on the sides and a converter as the body, and a KAS container for the pipe ends which can be used to connect the rover with the rocket. It doesn't need too much logistics so I think doing this is much easier than a stock landing/leaving. Landing on Eve with the stock game is the hardest single mission what I can imagine and should be legendary. Launching an empty return rocket from Kerbin and bringing it to Eve and landing it there and then refueling is much easier than doing the same with a fully fueled one. So I think it is important to distinct them somehow. By the way I like both stock and Kethane mod and my mission will involve a Kethane surface explorer plane anyway. But I'm going to wait on Laie's decision about this topic if I want to send an empty rocket or a fueled one.

Kethane refueling needs only a miner head on the side with a tiny Kethane tank and a converter to make Kethane into liquid fuel and oxidizer. It's less than 2 tons alltogether, and after refueling it can be detached from the rocket's side so it may become a stock rocket.

"it makes no sense in any way" - well, in real life space exploration you CAN'T refuel. So it depends on what your gameplay style is like. And on the other hand empty tanks and refueling makes this challenge much-much easier. This is the real point and question here. I agree with Norcalplanner, maybe there should be an other category for refueling, because that's not a good thing if a normal stock 3rd level is harder than a refueling Jebediah's Level.

Hmm, if refueling is accepted then it's a LOT more easier because: - I don't have to push a 400+ tons rocket to Eve. Pushing 40 tons only downsizes my main ship about 1/5th size at least. - easier to land (less part count and landing struts and so) - refueling is easy too because I don't need to land any tanker-rover or anything, a little miner head is enough on the side of the rocket which will be decoupled before takeoff - making Jebediah's Level may be a lot easier because a miner head is less weight than tons of extra fuel for a soft rocket-powered touchdown. considering these, do you still allow refueling?

Hey Meithan, yeah, I like to check all the fuel levels for both the main ship and the lander(s) during the mission so I can be sure everything was possible and done as it is seen on the pictures. Your mission is pretty well documented and I see you uploaded some spreadsheets too so they may be enough, we will see. If your fuel consumption was not too narrow then deltaV stats will be enough. I don't have time to check it right now but will do it soon!

Kethane is a new fuel type. The planet need to be scanned for Kethane and if you land on a kethane spot you can drill and it will fill up the Kethane tanks (the drill needs only electricity). Then with a converter part you can convert Kethane to any kind of fuel. Some month ago I left Eve with a Kethane Jet too, it makes leaving Eve reasonably easy as astrobond's pictures show. By the way I will use Kethane in my mission too, but only for my atmospheric explorer plane. But my Eve Crew Return Vehicle will go there and land refueled. This raises a question anyway: If I use some fuel to land without parachutes and then refuel it back then is it within the rules? Personally I would not like that because landing an empty return rocket would be far more easier. I already spent a lot of time broking down the engines or watching as the weight of the fuel tears apart my rocket. And allowing the refueling of the return rocket will mean most of the entries will use some refueling method so the Challenge would bend into that way.

I wanted to say aerospike in my comment but wrote skipper accidentally. So aerospikes are the best for lower stages, but you need tons of them to have an above one TWR. And you have to stage a lot of them quickly so I decided to go with stronger engines and stage fuel tanks only at the beginning... the less engines one has to lift and the more time one engines used the better...

Yes, as Gravaar says, thank you! I don't mind Hyperedit testing before launching the real mission and I couldn't check it anyway. It makes sense to do that but when I was a first-timer I've never been to the Jool system before, not even with hyperedit, and planned my mission that way... so it was really the first time there for my Kerbals and for me, and it was a really awesome and exciting feeling to see the moons for the first time. And at that time I didn't find any real solution sample on the net about lander-tugs and so, so it was an unforgettable feeling to do that mission. So I would encourage newbies to take more time on planning and Kerbin/Mun/etc testing only and go there as a real First-time Explorer!

Yes, I had the same conclusion that skippers are the best for the lower stages, but my ship become too big on part count and I want to bring a whole base with many buildings, and a plane, rover, etc... so I had to change it to some bigger rocket engines. Its bottom looks similar to your one on the previus picture!

Sullivap: Congratulations, you have finished the JOOL-5 Challenge! thanks for the clarification of the main ship fuel consumption! I finish my review here: I liked how you built up your main ship, with the separated Tylo lander at the back, but sending up in two pieces. And the main ship looks nice with the lights as it goes into deep space. Splitting up the ship before Jool aerobrake was a good idea, I guess you saved a lot of deltaV. Maybe only the aerobrake timing could be some problem, if they were too close to each other? Anyway, not putting your main ship around Tylo was a huge weight and fuel saver, that's for sure! So your Tylo solution was really well thought and elegant. And the rest of the mission was well done too! Thank you for participating!

Trajectories is allowed because it's just an informative mode. Time control is allowed too.