To Eve and back again, in 22 pictures

[Magzimum]

So, as I played my career, I got a contract to explore Eve. Since this was already the 2nd career I played, I did not just want to send a probe. No, Jeb was gonna go. I tried and failed many times. The 1st one flipped in Eve's atmosphere and burned up, 2nd one was just crap in every way, 3rd one flipped again, 4th one landed but had not enough TWR to get off Eve (super frustrating, as it was really close), and the 5th one was finally the good design. It needed some more tweaking to make sure it did not flip (because during test flights I was not satisfied yet) so I put some giant wings with Airbrakes on it. 

I present you, the Eve lander Mk5, aka "The Moose".

Jeb was not enthusiastic to fly this thing. 997 parts, 21 stages, 58.9 m high. Total cost 1,200,441 funds. No mods except KER. Regular career (normal settings). It launched at 4 frames per second, which dropped a little more as aero forces kicked in a little higher up. It remained playable though (FYI, I have a 4-core Intel i5-4570 CPU with 8 GB of RAM, and a GeForce GT 640, running Linux Mint 17.1, so not an expensive system, but a light operating system).

Because of the enormous drag on the top of the rocket, it was easy on the throttle and straight up until at least 10 km. By 25 km, it was still going mostly upwards. The bottom stage consisted of the SRBs, the big tanks you see separated below and the central bottom stage (blue vectors you see below together with a central mammoth). The liquid tanks were staged in with fuel lines to the central one.

Then the four mainsails with orange tanks were the 2nd stage which carried it to orbit. They had roughly 500 m/s worth of dV left when it got to LKO. Below, The Moose is already accelerating to get to the transfer orbit towards Eve when it finally sheds the last big engines (and due to the heat of the sepatrons blows up a small liquid fuel tank at the top of the mothership, as you can see by the cloud of dust). 

Mother Goose and Goose Lander then made it to Eve with little problem. The Nerv stage had over 2500 m/s, which is easily enough to get to Eve. And since it would shed the enormous lander, would have about 3000 m/s for the return trip too. The huge lander was attached by only a docking point Jr (and MANY struts), because I only wanted to bring down the smallest docking port to Eve's surface.

Notice that the periapsis of both lander and mothership is 69000 m at the time of separation. The lander used NO engines... so the mothership slowed it down into a low periapsis, and then quickly accelerated again in order to not burn up in Eve's atmosphere. Since the lander was already on the right course, it could just deploy its heat shield, and wait for the fireworks. 

Below you can see the antlers of The Moose a bit better. They had to be this huge because the lander has some stabilizing fins at its bottom which stick out from the heatshield, making the bottom drag even bigger. (Sure, this could have been fixed by just making the bottom more narrow, but remember that in my previous attempt I did not have enough TWR - I was gonna bring the big engines to Eve this time). By now,  

Fireworks: 

Because the periapsis was on the dark side of Eve from the moment I arrived in Eve orbit, the landing was also in the dark. Not sure if it is interesting, but here's a picture of the antlers coming off.

And one of the parachutes. They slowed down the lander to a blistering 8 or 9 m/s, which was more than I had anticipated. 

The rough landing broke off 7 of the 8 the landing gear, but nothing else. The 8th one then decided to join its friends a little while later, so below you see exactly none. It was a perfect landing! 

Of course, the whole point of the entire mission was to have Jeb do the Mun-Eve-walk and plant that flag. Picture below shows Jeb, but also shows the first stage of the lander. Yes, that's nearly 100 sepatrons. I want to give that lander a quick boost, then go easy through the thick soup of Eve, before accelerating at higher altitudes. So I put on a stage that burns for only 5 seconds. I put them on small tanks. The entire first stage (tanks and sepatrons) comes off after 5-6 seconds. Probably a bit unnecessary though... luckily, the framerate remained ok. 

Also, I didn't fully realize how big that lander was until Jeb climbed out. 

Anyway, here's the mandatory Jeb-picture-with-lander-in-the-background:

I had mounted some extra batteries and reaction wheels at the base of the lander. I sepated some time before take off. I think those parts are what blows up on liftoff. I wasn't missing any parts on the lander... It happened on every attempt I made to reach orbit (I must have tried at least 30 times). Made for a good show though!

All pics below are not from the actual launch. I forgot to take screenshots. So, I loaded the save-game from right before launch, and did it again just now, for this post. I did not play through all the way until docking, so headings and velocities may be slightly off from here onwards, but this attempt made it close to orbit before the game crashed... at least it shows how the thing works, if anyone cares.   

Here the sepatrons already come off, at just 139 m above the surface. They really did just a few m/s extra, but I could max. out the engines on a large part of the flight now.

The main problem with this rocket was the slanted fuel tanks on the 4 tanks on the side. Upon separation, they moved slightly inwards (due to the thick atmosphere), and crashed into the central tank. 9 out of 10 attempts, this was the reason to reset and try again. To overcome this, I had to keep the velocity under 300 m/s on separation, go straight up, perfectly prograde, throttle to zero, separate, and throttle to max quickly again. The problem did not occur on Kerbin testflights. Took me a few attempts to learn it on Eve.  

Once separated, the central stage had low TWR, so it just served to lift the lander out of Eve's atmosphere.

2nd stage, with 1 vector as main engine has way more TWR. Here horizontal acceleration starts...

... continues... (I actually had to throttle down sometimes to avoid blowing it up.)

... and ends. It has an awesome TWR of 10-12 once the side tanks come off. Pics above and below are still that reenactment that I just made. Wish I had pics of the real launch, but I don't. Heading may be off, but this thing was getting close to orbit too, before the game crashed on me. Final stage is 5 toroidal tanks inside a 1.25m service bay, with a terrier. No pic of it in action though. Note the G-force in the pic below!  

Final orbit was just 2.1 degree off from the mothership. That's the real launch again... here my nerves had calmed down enough to take a screenshot again. 

Finally, it docked again. Quite a wobbly connection, but strong enough to make it home.

The docked lander cans next to the central pod are two Gilly landers that use only RCS (seriously, Gilly is a joke). This mission also passed by Gilly and landed in all 3 of its biomes... but I won't bore you with those pics too. I don't want to be the guy who lures people in with "some holiday pictures", only to reveal later he's shot 2000 photographs, and you're in for a marathon.

Final picture: I had to launch a little "Get Jeb Home - mission", because I forgot to add parachutes for the Kerbin landing. Typical. Anyway, everything was equipped with docking ports, so not really a major challenge once the mission was back in Kerbin orbit. This is right before the main chutes deploy. Landing is at night... because if I can do that on Eve, why not on Kerbin too? (Real reason was that I did not want to land the thing on land because it may fall over and blow up... so I aimed for a large ocean). 

If you made it this far, thanks for your interest! Looking forward to your comments of this overdimensioned Eve adventure!  

[Mikki]

I never made it to Eve and back , your mission looks so easy but i know it isn`t really that piece of cake...
After the next update i will give it a try again...

Well done, this matches a Eve Rocks challenge entry! Excellent! 

[Magzimum]

Yeah, it wasn't easy. To my surprise, landing was harder than getting back to orbit for me. Landing such a huge lander is not easy at all. This mission must have taken at least 100 hrs of preparation, trying, failing, fixing and trying again. 

[Starlionblue]

Most impressive.