Grand Tour Delta-V

[Empiro]

I don't know if this would be acceptable for a "true" Grand Tour, but it seems to me that as soon as you make LKO, you'd want to split off your ship and send fuel tanks off separately.

You don't want to be hauling fuel for exploring all of Jool while you're messing around Eve and Moho, so just send that fuel off to Jool from Kerbin.

You'd naturally want to go to Eve first to get that out of the way, and then at every step of the way you dock with fuel tanks sent from LKO, each of which has just enough fuel to refill your lander to land on whatever body you're around and transfer you to the next destination. This way, you're not carrying fuel around that you won't immediately use, and you won't run into the worst parts of the rocket equation.

You'd still need a huge launch craft, but it won't be nearly as big as trying to get 20+km/s worth of delta-V.

Edited December 8, 2015 by Empiro