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As of late, I stumbled upon the mod Beyond Jool. An alternate outer planets mod to OPM, it is very well made and one I would highly recommend you try out. Now, after getting some SpaceDust configs into the pack and realising that I need a much more powerful computer to begin attempting Tyrant, the mod's big bad and (spoilers) the villain of this post, I decided to do a Cassini-esqe mission to Sarkin. Mission Goals - Orbit Sarkin, the mods Saturn analogue - Fly-by all of Sarkin's moons - Land a probe on one of the atmospheric moons The Launch Launching the rocket took 2 attempts as attaching the interstage to the bottom caused the entire lower stage to remain on the rocket. The transfer stage has about 3400 m/s on it, as before it goes to Sarkin, I've decided to make a quick pit stop Wait, that's another modpack! Yes, this is Crokslev, from the Minor Planets Expansion. I wanted to do this as 1) Beyond Jool has MPE compatibility and 2) MPE's 1.1 update has given Crokslev a significant glow-up. I did pay for this, as my shoddy trajectory cost me the whole transfer stage to recorrect. But, 5 years later, I had arrived. The Landings You may notice 2 atmospheric probes on the probe. These are for the 2 bodies small enough not to incinerate a probe - Moach, a dead moon still retaining an oxygenated atmosphere, and Volatus, the Titan analogue orbiting Tyrant. Approaching Moach - the probes are detatched early so as to save fuel on the main probe. Tyrant visible in background. Unfortunately, the first one was wrecked, as the drogues were not enough to slow the craft. This looks quite intimidating. Until recently, this used to be identical in colour to Eve. The aerobrake in question, done against Volatus' orbit. Sarkin and Tyrant overhead. Tyrant, by the way, is a terrestrial with greater GeeASL and radius than Alternis Tylo. Touchdown! The Volatus lander was much more successful. Although the entry speeds were upwards of 8km/s, I correctly judged the thick atmosphere would slow the craft fast enough to keep it only slightly charred. At least I had one success. Foreshadowing + The rest of the flybys Unfortunately, my sporadic quicksaving came back to bite me when a borked fly-by of Tyrant left me in a revesed orbit of Sarkin. However, I was still able to fly-by the other inner moons, Kotta and Aron. Kotta, an oblate moon. The large crater on the right is Sushut Crater. Aron, the Enceladus analogue. The 'Crater of Nertea' is plainly visible. The 'Grand' Finale Now, I was at this point hoping to do a dive into Sarkin similar to the one done by Cassini. This plan was thwarted by two factors (Sarkin's atmosphere being very short and thus getting very thick very quickly, and the orbital velocity being 25km/s), which, instead of a fireworks show, instantly deleted the craft. Conclusion While the mission achieved most of it's objectives, the lengths to get to Crokslev and the sabotage by myself Tyrant left me unable to reach the other two moons, Sapp and (big shocker) Eeloo. Despite this, I enjoyed the rest of the mission.

The thing is this: I originally created a ship to "imitate" the Cassini-Huygens, the section that would land on Laythe I separated it successfully, I was about to enter Laythe but it just touched the atmosphere and went off to Jool. Nor did he fall into the latter but accelerated a lot. The discussion is, is this normal? I have not been able to calculate to what percentage of the speed of light this speed corresponds; Here an image.