Duna-2: My second-ever Dunar landing!

[Tex]

And THIS time, I remembered to put the batteries on!

So for those of you who don't know, my mission report, A Spacetime Odyssey (linked in my signature) is telling my story as I play KSP and learn about how it works and things like that.

Another factoid: Though I've been playing the game for over a year, I have only attempted four interplanetary missions, to mixed success over the months I've played. My first Dunar mission was a success, the second one a flop, my first Dres flyby a success, I guess, but this is the tale of my third Dunar mission, and probably the most pivotal one in my Kerbonaut career thus far!

Some images from the mission:

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So here's a breakdown of what happened:

First things first, I redesigned my original Duna spacecraft design. I added batteries, I mean. The first one did not have any batteries besides what the OCTO core provided, which was a whopping 10.2 units of charge. Wow.

After fixing this design flaw, I launched into a standard parking orbit around Kerbin (this one had an apoapse of about 400km, I think) and then something unforseeable happened. A staging error. I hit the spacebar and accidentally jettisoned and ENTIRE orange tank and engine... Which was meant to be my escape stage. Yikes.

Fortunately, I knew that my last stage (besides the lander itself, the one with LV-Ns in the album above) had over 5000 m/s of delta-v, so I had reason to believe it would be sufficient to take me to Duna. I lined up the escape burn, which was a technique I first learned about after anguishing over how I would ever be able to do interplanetary missions and finally watching a Scott Manley video to help me, escaped Kerbin, and warped over to Duna.

The retrofire was perhaps the hairiest part of the mission. I was burning, burning, burning, and trying with all my might to get a periapse marker or else I would sail right on by Duna like the last mission... sweat poured down my face (not really) as I watched the fuel marker tick down... 100 units of liquid fuel... 80... 50... 30... And right then, the path began curving and I got a periapse of perhaps 8km above the Dunar surface on the day side.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS

From then it was a simple matter of transmitting science, slowing and skimming Ike's SoI by a hair's breadth, and finally going and landing on the Dunar surface. It felt amazing because it was the first time I'd landed on anything besides Kerbin and its moons in such a long time... Must've been months!

I've learned a lot from this mission, and just felt like I'd share it with you awesome people! Thanks a million for reading!

Oh yeah, and if any of you catch the reference I snuck into the newsflash on the mission in my mission report... You are awesome.

[CitizenAerospace]

Awesome, I've been playing since 0.18 I think (or 0.19) and I think I've only attempted 2 or 3 interplanetary missions (The second one was a cluster-launch of about 5 probes though)! I've just screwed around so much in the Kerbin SOI that I've had so much to do without even thinking about the other planets... but now, I think it might be time to branch out.

[Tex]

Once I learned how to properly transfer, I think it was pretty easy from there, honestly XD The saying goes: Once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere.

I'm already planning an Ike, an Eve, and a Gilly exploration mission.