Jool-5 And Then Some

[cubinator]

"And Then Some" hardly does it justice.

This is my submission for the Ultimate Jool-5 Challenge ISRU level. My ship is a single-stage lander with about 5300 m/s deltaV in space. It is capable of landing on all landable bodies, and of returning from all but Eve. I would have put Science on it (I could really gather a ton) but I built it in Sandbox mode, and I am definitely NOT going back to do a few tweaks to the design and then do the ENTIRE mission again.

I took screenshots throughout. After carefully sorting through almost a hundred pictures to pick out the important ones, the page reloaded and I lost all my progress so I said screw it and uploaded them all. Apparently I can't just upload an album with 749 pictures, so I'll just upload several albums which in sequence will give the full scope of the mission. I also am not going to put descriptions of every single picture especially since most of it is pretty trivial, like transfer burns and parachutes opening. If you want to know more about any part of my mission, feel free to ask and I will be happy to try as best I can to answer.

Enough chitchat, let's get to the fun stuff!

 

The first part of the mission went pretty well, it was the part with the tightest deltaV budget. After I refueled on Minmus, I didn't really have to care about efficiency for a while. Landing on Ike went well, but Duna took a couple of tries. After that, I went to Dres. That also was pretty uneventful, I landed in a flat area that looks like a crater got filled in with dirt, with the downside that the landscape was as exciting as Iowa. Then I went off to the Jool System. I decided to go to Laythe first. The landing was ok, but the launch went sour, at which point I discovered I had not quicksaved on the surface. So I had to land again. It took a couple tries, but I remembered to quicksave on the surface and again attempted an ascent. The ship liked flipping once I got to Mach 1, so I decided to orient towards prograde and do minor adjustments from there. The ascent wasn't very efficient because of the tendency to point the other way, and then the engines glitched and stopped producing thrust unless I was pressing the rotation keys. I figured it out and went with it, but once I got to orbit, I couldn't get anywhere else. So I landed again. The first spot I went to didn't have ore, so I reloaded and went closer to the original flag. It worked, I refueled, the ship launched much better, and so I went to Pol.

 

Timewarp ate my ship, so I reloaded and tried again. That time it worked, flag planted, ship refueled. I went to Tylo after that. The first time, I started my landing burn way too late and crashed. Second time, though, it went flawlessly. Then I went back to Pol because it takes the least dV. The timewarp thing happened many times. That should be fixed. Eventually I landed successfully and refueled. I went to Vall afterwards, and the game teleported me underground...or something like that. It caught me by surprise the first time, but second time I landed fine. After getting back up into orbit, Bop was the last place to visit. I got into a polar orbit, and noticed something on the ground. *SPOILERS EASTER EGG*

I landed by it and it was the dead Kraken. I planted a flag on it, refueled, and went to the equator. Looking back, it was pretty pointless because of my already inclined Joolian orbit. After that, I fueled up and went to Eeloo.

 

Got into Eeloo orbit just fine, landed just fine, fueled just fine, went back to Dres, just fine although I didn't bother for a proper transfer because I didn't want to do a plane change. Landed in a slightly less flat area, but it was juuuust fine. My parachutes gave me a little trouble on Duna, so I just went down all-powered. All was fine, got back to orbit fine, and went to the Mun. Getting to the Mun and seeing Kerbin in the sky made me feel really homesick for Kerbin, but I still had work to do. I went deeper towards Kerbol to Eve and it's moon Gilly.

 

After landing on Gilly, I tried really, really hard to get in a situation where I *might* be able to get to Eve and back. Too hard, probably.

 

Once I finally got to the highest peak, and therefore the highest chance of return, I tried to go up and didn't get very far at all. *sigh* all that work for nothing. So I performed a quicksave transplant with the Gilly quicksave I had saved on my desktop from earlier, and went to Moho, the last planet I had left. I got into orbit, landed, refueled, planted flag, launched, got into orbit again, and then, it was finally time to go home. It took a few orbits to get a close approach, and I tweaked it into an encounter. Aerobraking took a few tries, a few orbits, and a few explosions before I finally splashed down in the ocean east of the KSC. Jeb, Bill, Bob, and Val arrived safely home, and their vessel in one piece after 66 years and a lot of quicksaves.

OTHER INFO:

The only mod I used was BetterTimeWarp, to make the long transfers less tedious I didn't use the Physics Warp function of the mod because I didn't know if it would be legal, and it always seems to make my ships explode anyway. The ship was built fully stock. Note that although Hyperedit was installed, I NEVER PRESSED THAT BUTTON AT ALL FOR THE ENTIRE TIME THAT SHIP WAS ACTIVE, EVEN FOR OTHER VESSELS!

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to acknowledge all the hard work I put into this. Feel free to comment and ask about the mission, the design, and anything I can help you with for your own submission. Also, let me know if there are any other challenges that this mission qualifies for, as it was a very long mission and I did a lot of stuff.

That's all for now!

Edited December 20, 2015 by cubinator
Albums now visible again!

[xebx]

Well done !

Jool-5 and Duna Gilly Eeloo etc with the same reuse-able one stage rocket, that's a lot ! (and a lot of pic too)

Yes Eve requires a very specific lander.

Your report/ship gives me idea to finalize the design of my Mk5 driller, it will be an insane 17 kerbals huge driller main ship with 6000 m/s delta-V (one KR2 engine) low-med twr able to land on all moons (except Laythe and Tylo that will be done in my jool-5 with another lander) and Duna, Moho, Dres and Eeloo.

In the end i shall have sent all my team (14 kerbals) on all possible celestial bodies, using only 3-4 different ships.

Now i just need to check the windows, and work on the best ways and slingshots.

[cubinator]

Thanks! Yeah, it really was a long mission. I wish I could have done Eve, but it was not really designed for atmospheric flights (even Duna gave me some trouble.) I was thinking if I were to do it again, I might make a big secondary booster that could be detachable and add more TWR on Eve, fly the full thing to Minmus, then land on Eve and detach on ascent, then it would be the same ship as this, but with Science. I'm definitely not going to do such a gargantuan mission in the near future, currently I've downloaded Realism Overhaul and am playing with that. Good luck on your mega-missions!

[waterlubber]

Curious, why not use a KR-2L or the aerospikes in space instead of the heavily inefficient Mammoth?

Edit: I'm such a dufus, sorry for the [minor] necro

Edited December 17, 2015 by waterlubber

[cubinator]

18 minutes ago, waterlubber said:

Curious, why not use a KR-2L or the aerospikes in space instead of the heavily inefficient Mammoth?

"Heavily inefficient?" The Mammoth is actually pretty darn efficient. It has an IsP of 295 at sea level and 315 in vacuum, so I don't have to worry about atmosphere and fuel efficiency, and it has colossal thrust. I actually tried a lot of different designs, including aerospikes. The problem I found with the aerospikes was that I needed a lot of them to produce enough thrust. The Mammoth was a good trade off.

The part that made it really hard to find a good design was the ISRU. I found that it's not that hard to get a ship with enough delta-V, but it is really hard to get a ship with enough deltaV and have a heavy ISRU unit and drill. The Mammoth had enough thrust to lift all the fuel it needed to have enough dV to get to Minmus without staging. That's the trick, if you can land it on Minmus and refuel, you can go anywhere. That's actually the idea that started the whole project.

Here's one of the earlier prototypes, I think it was Mk8 or something:

Yeah, the designs got pretty radical. If I had simply gone with the "moar booster" technique, I would have had to make it much, much bigger to have enough deltaV and TWR. The end design had just enough to do it, recall that when I started out I needed two aerospikes for a few seconds to get my TWR above 1.

25 minutes ago, waterlubber said:

I'm such a dufus, sorry for the [minor] necro

Nah, I'm happy to help with questions.