Eve lander design tips anyone?

[Nicias]

Thanks for your reply.

I know  you don't need to dock after I get back up. But how did you get that thing to Eve in the first place?

Testing a design on Eve is a PITA, so I wanted to get a checklist before then of things I can do on Kerbin.

Right now my checklist is:

1. Launches fine on Kerbin under (1.7g).
2. Is "pointy."
3. has about 9k dV (vac) on vectors & spikes.
4. Eve SLTWR of 1.2 or above on each stage start.

Then I might start testing it on Eve. (Does hyperedit's ship lander work reliably?)

 

[Palaceviking]

Have you considered taking a detachable isru? reason being - you want a low cog for landing and a high one for take off.

[Foxster]

I just couple the transfer stage to the undeployed inflatable heatshield that is on the bottom of the lander. 

I'd go with more TWR than that. You need to punch up through the atmosphere or you will lose a lot of dV. Try for 1.5+. 

I'd definitely use HE to get the craft down but I have hit some major bugs with transferring craft into orbit with HE. Use the new Alt-F12 cheat option to set the orbit at Eve and then land with HE.  

[foamyesque]

1 hour ago, Palaceviking said:

Have you considered taking a detachable isru? reason being - you want a low cog for landing and a high one for take off.

 

Just one more reason to use a plane!

EDIT:

 

Like, say, this:

 

 

Need to see if it still works with the changes that have been made to engines and atmospheres, though.

 

 

Edited December 12, 2016 by foamyesque

[Palaceviking]

Just now, foamyesque said:

 

Just one more reason to use a plane!

EDIT:

 

Like, say, this:

 

 

Need to see if it still works with the changes that have been made to engines and atmospheres, though.

 

 

That's quite cheap for a monster like that aswell, inbuilt isru?, what's the comms like? can I beg a craft file,

[foamyesque]

11 minutes ago, Palaceviking said:

That's quite cheap for a monster like that aswell, inbuilt isru?, what's the comms like? can I beg a craft file,

Jettisonable inbuild ISRU that's capable of independent (if limited) operations and self-landing if you give it enough time for its chutes to open, yes (about 200m above the ground). It's mounted at the front of the center stack in an upside down CRG-50. This is just the lander stack (for both Eve and Kerbin, hence the wings on the cockpit stage), FWIW; the full stack has a couple of recoverable boosters, a scan satellite, and a refuel drone that gets left in Eve orbit. Includes rovers for shenaniganry in the rear cargo bays on the drop tanks. It predates comms, so I have no idea what capabilities it has, but it does carry a deployable antenna on the back of the center stack and one of the biggest mountable antennas on the scan sat.

 

Looking at it now, there's a number of changes I'd make to clean up the aerodynamics, I think, but by and large I quite like the design.

Edited December 12, 2016 by foamyesque

[Nicias]

3 hours ago, Foxster said:

I just couple the transfer stage to the undeployed inflatable heatshield that is on the bottom of the lander. 

I'd go with more TWR than that. You need to punch up through the atmosphere or you will lose a lot of dV. Try for 1.5+. 

I'd definitely use HE to get the craft down but I have hit some major bugs with transferring craft into orbit with HE. Use the new Alt-F12 cheat option to set the orbit at Eve and then land with HE.  

Alt+F12 followed by HE worked perfectly. 

I wanted to use the heatshield on my lander to aerocapture the whole rig (including transfer ship) that means it has to be exposed. I did a quick experiment and a the mk1-0 pod is almost all of the way to mk1-0 pod & nosecone compared to lander-can+docking port. I think I'll use the mk1-0 pod with a decoupler then a docking port to attach to my transfer ship. 

My design worked, with 2k extra dV, from about 1km altitude using Gravityturn (the mod) with a start of 200 mps and a target of 110 (all else default settings). The flipping was my fault. I had changed one of the decouplers to "enable crossfeed" and forgot that it didn't change both symmetric pairs. So I was getting uneven fuel usage and uneven engine flameouts on my asparaguses.

I'm going to try to slim it down now. It weighs 71 tons empty. (ISRU to fuel up when I get there)