Jool system dv budget

[Lunar Sea]

Planning my first foray to Jool and man it looks expensive. It's essentially a Jool-4 mission with a 10-ton lander that drops down to 4 ton for the smaller moons. My mothership should have about 5500 dv on arrival to the system and after checking tools like http://13375.de/KSPDeltaVMap/, it looks like it's going to come up short. Transfers between the moons average 1000dv, then there's orbit capture burns, then it's another 2500-3000 to transfer back to Kerbin. Am I reading this wrong? 

Edited June 1, 2016 by Lunar Sea

[Empiro]

2 hours ago, Lunar Sea said:

Planning my first foray to Jool and man it looks expensive. It's essentially a Jool-4 mission with a 10-ton lander that drops down to 4 ton for the smaller moons. My mothership should have about 5500 dv on arrival to the system and after checking tools like http://13375.de/KSPDeltaVMap/, it looks like it's going to come up short. Transfers between the moons average 1000dv, then there's orbit capture burns, then it's another 2500-3000 to transfer back to Kerbin. Am I reading this wrong? 

It does take quite a bit of fuel to visit all the moons of Jool. However, the tool you're using seems to be extremely inaccurate. It substantially overstates the delta-V required for most of the transfers.

I prefer a tool such as: https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/

However, even that tool doesn't allow you to plan a direct transfer from one of the moons to Kerbin. For example, a direct Laythe->Kerbin transfer is around 1300 m/s, much less than what many delta-V maps would seem to suggest.

Don't forget that you can save quite a bit by using gravity assists to move around the Jool system. A reverse gravity assist from Laythe or Tylo can easily place you in a nice elliptical orbit that lets you get Low Jool science while letting you visit any of the inner moons with relative ease.

[Lunar Sea]

Cool, that is definitely encouraging. I'm hoping 5500 dv is sufficient, and since the lander weight is substantially lessened after Laythe hopefully that should help. 

[Warzouz]

Here is the Jool delta-V map I use for Jool subsystem interplanetary transfers.

Edited June 2, 2016 by Warzouz