My First Eve MIssion fingers crossed

[Nich]

This will be my first time ever doing Eve.  I got a contract to explore Gilly and the Eve window was up So i figured might as well conquer the purple beast while I am there.  Up first I have my obligatory Gilly base for a contract.  That and Explore Gilly paid for the mission.

Up Next is my new Interplanetary Crew transporter.  With 4 years of supplies and almost 8000 dv.  I hope she will see plenty of action.  No more stinking command pods for years.

Up next is my pride and joy Da Bizness is a rocket plane with science and drilling equipment to refuel the assent vehicle.  This will be the deciding factor of the mission.  With 3800 dv in LKO I am unsure if it will be able to enter Eve without burning up.  After transfer and capture there should be almost 1000 dv left for deorbit.  Any aerobraking should make me much more comfortable as I would have liked 1500 dv for reentry.

And Finally the Crown Jewel.  My lander with a little over 8100 dv and 1.37 initial TWR.  As long as I can get this refueled before food runs out should be fine.

For logistics I decided to send a bunch of fuel/supplies with heat shields along with the mission in hopes of spending less time refueling and more time SCIENCING.  Mission is projected for 1 window but I should have supplies for 2 if I want to extend it.  I will post another pic later after I have completed Air braking.

[Cydonian Monk]

Good luck. Eve is no fair maiden, but an angry, scornful creature that will gladly devour all your best intentions. My successful landings and (one) return would be completely impossible in the current version of KSP thanks to thermodynamics.

[max_creative]

Have a good landing lithobraking! Hope nothing explodes and sends the mk2 plane-ish thing into eve! Remember: any landing you can walk away from is a good one! If you do crash, you will be stuck playing monopoly until a giant kerbodyne lander saves them!

[Wallygator]

Eve frightens me. 

I just want to say good luck, we are all counting on you. 

[Nich]

Flotilla transfer went pretty well although not one of my craft were showing an intercept when I went to them.  At the end I learned I could mess around with the node and the projected path would show up again.  Correction burns required were 37, 94 (chased the marker and over burned), 35, 5.3, and 4.1.  Can you tell I got better at burning.  My Pride and joy Da Bizness had some issues with off center thrust and miss aligned thrust (started rolling) in the end she only required 5.3 dv correction.  I suspect the wings the engines are mounted to are flexing just enough to make it hard for the SAS to control with reaction wheels.  I just about had a seizure looking at the strobing orbit lines trying to fix my PE at Eve.

[Nich]

Finally finished up the Duna Exploration and Kerbin contracts so I was able to time warp to the Eve encounter.  Unfortunately transfers did not go as efficiently as hoped.  A couple significant correction burns were required and the flotilla almost came in on a retrograde orbit.  Only the Gilly base needed to do a 180 and it had plenty of fuel.  Assent vehicle and crew transport had plenty of dv for capture but refuel and space plane were short.  Luckily I was able to aerobrake at 85km.  It was extremely painful (100ish passes between the 2) as my current save is getting too crowded and even craft with only 50 parts are running in the yellow.  My 200 part creations are becoming slide shows.  Refuel is in a polar orbit so I can drop supplies and fuel to the plane anywhere on the planet as needed.  Plane has 1800 dv in the tank for deorbit burn so burning up or missing the lander should not be a problem.  Crew transport had to do a very eccentric orbit so it could align planes with the lander for a crew transfer.  They were off by 15 degrees from the lander and 30 degrees from the plane.  To make things worse AN/DN was very low (less then 150km) however at the edge of the SOI I was able to do 2 burns to match planes with the assent vehicle for only 170 dv.  Can wait so see how decent goes.

 

 

[Mister Dilsby]

I really like that rocket plane. And kudos for doing this with life support!

[Starhawk]

I read somewhere on the forum that wings make for excellent aerobraking at Eve.  That would work really well for the plane depending how much control authority you have.

I, too, congratulate you for choosing to do this with life support.

Happy landings!

[VASMIR]

Moar!

[Nich]

"SIM testing" has shown Da Bizness (space plane) has some serious issues with re-entry heating.  1200 m/s at 50km = death if the nose goes straight prograde.  Unfortunately this craft is so stable it is hard to keep it off prograde.  However with some fancy flying I was able to get it down to the ground.  

Plane actually flew very poorly for my expectations.  I was able to set up a proper glide around 28km with a glide slope of 6:1 or 7:1 which seems very low.  At least with these numbers I only need to get within 170 km of the assent vehicle.

This however brought about further issues.  Due to poor planing the engineer will be going down with the assent craft.  Without an engineer onboard it will take a 388 kerbal days to refill the tanks.  The plane only has 396 days of supplies so getting within close range of the assent vehicle is critical.

The assent vehicle (Wall-e) performed spectacularly but still disappointed as I only used 150 out of 2600 available abator.  Landing gear nearly blew and I lost a couple of airbrakes.  Airbrakes were a waste of mass as I ended up having to use spin stabilization to keep the craft steady