Go to near Kerbol space, and come back

[wumpus]

22 hours ago, Snark said:

Where are you getting these numbers?  You're vastly overstating the dV needed to get to the sun from Kerbin, and understating the dV needed to get to Jool.

Miss-reading the subway map.  ~20k is for low Kerbol orbit, 6k is for kerbol intercept (which likely includes reducing your Ap within Kerbol's SOI).  The Jool transfer is presumably ideal from LKO to Jool intercept (no idea how long that will take).  Still, cutting the delta-v in half means reducing the order of magnitude of fuel needed by a half.  That's huge.

Don't forget that your 4km/s has to be done nearly in one burn (you can burn somewhat less than 1km/s first if you want, but the rest only gets Oberth advantage on a single burn).  It will involve a big, big, craft for a direct flight.  Or you can send a relatively tiny ship to Jool first.

[Snark]

15 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Don't forget that your 4km/s has to be done nearly in one burn (you can burn somewhat less than 1km/s first if you want, but the rest only gets Oberth advantage on a single burn).  It will involve a big, big, craft for a direct flight.  Or you can send a relatively tiny ship to Jool first.

*shrug*  I've sent some pretty small, light craft to a low solar Pe from Kerbin LKO just fine.  4 km/s is easily doable for a small, light craft if it's designed efficiently, even without ion engines or the like.

And going to Jool may save a couple of km/s on the initial burn, but it doesn't help on the return leg-- the OP mentioned that this is a crewed ship and life support is an issue.  If you're bombing all the way down from Jool to make your low solar pass, getting back home to Kerbin again is complicated just that much more.

So... if someone wants to do the Jool thing just because they like to make life more difficult than it has to be-- i.e. for the challenge, which is a perfectly good reason to play KSP!-- then there's nothing at all wrong with that.  But it's really not making things significantly easier (and, in a lot of ways, it makes life harder)  to go via Jool rather than via direct burn.

[Jouni]

I did something similar back in 0.23. A 5:2 resonance with Kerbin is easy to achieve. It takes around 4.2 km/s from LKO to get the solar periapsis down to ~893250 km, and then you have an encounter with Kerbin 5 orbits later.

In my case, the encounter was quite close.

Spoiler

 

[NordicToast]

I'd recommend the Better Time Warp mod. Its extremely useful for really long missions

[Spricigo]

15 minutes ago, NordicToast said:

I'd recommend the Better Time Warp mod. Its extremely useful for really long missions

I recommend Kerbal Alarm Clock instead. Because a Space Program worth its salt will not be running a single mission at time.