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Hello everyone! The capstone of stock KSP missions is the “grand tour” - landing on every planet and moon in the Kerbol system. (You can technically land on Jool but that’s not traditionally counted). A single launch grand tour is a feat of precision engineering, careful mission planning, and the dedication to actually fly fifteen landings and return safely. The first mission I'm really proud of was a grand tour mission (which was also my first ever Eve return), and I posted an album of it on this forum. The mothership looked something like this: And this was the entire craft: Like most grand tours, this is a very large rocket, and I completed this mission mostly through pure brute force. I did use some gravity assists, but this rocket absolutely conforms to the "More Boosters" philosophy more than anything. This was done in October of 2020, shortly after I started playing the game, and you can see that in the distinct lack of optimized craft design. But that was two years ago, and since then I've gotten much better at craft optimization, gravity assists, piloting, and the game in general. Probably the best example of this was the Eve lander of this early mission, which looked like this: It’s a pretty large lander and way overbuilt for Eve, but it got the job done. And then a while ago I did a 7.5 ton Eve mission, which I later cut down to just under 7 tons. This is still the record for lowest mass kerballed Eve return without abusing “magic wing” type glitches, even without ISRU. It gave me an idea - since this Eve lander was so much smaller than my first one, could I make a grand tour mission, but this time putting a special focus on minimizing mass? I first started thinking about a minimalist grand tour in February of 2022, but exams prevented me from doing much more. I revisited the concept in June, and managed to cobble together something vaguely resembling a craft - but I was occupied with graduating college, and it never flew. Here’s a picture of it anyway - it is similar in concept to my final design: This was only part of the final craft, and was already projected to be much smaller than my previous grand tour - at the time I estimated a final mass of around 20 tons. As far as I’m aware, this would still be the lowest mass grand tour ever, as the lightest I know of is Brad Whistance’s 25 ton craft which made heavy use of ISRU. But this was unsatisfying - I was still leaving a lot of mass on the table. My original grand tour mission used Mammoth engines on the first stage. I wanted to have the mass of my entire craft be less than the fifteen tons of a single one of those engines. About a month ago, I finalized the design of the craft: 14.45 tons - well within my mass goal of 15 tons. As you’ll see, I could have pushed this even lower, but I chose not to because I had already met my goal. A breakdown of the craft design is below. I made a video showcasing this mission, also. I've put my comments on it (time stamped) in a spoiler box below.