Land a Plane on Eve

[antiquark]

Challenge: land a plane on Eve!

Here's my failed attempt. It failed because the super-dense atmosphere made my airplane point nose-down, I could barely make it level. Yeah, the center of gravity needs tweaking.

Sorry, I didn't take any screenshots while I was flailing around in the atmosphere, I was preoccupied . Also I didn't make note of how efficient the jet engines were, however they were producing some thrust.

The booster on the pad.

A couple of nuke engines got it to Eve's orbit.

There's Eve, lets dump the nuke booster.

Gee, wonder if I can land this thing?

[antiquark]

Second attempt:

Revamped the plane, aligned the center of gravity to the lift, and gave the wings a good dihedral for stability.

Note the auto-everything. It was mostly useless, I had to manually override the pitch control, because the autopilot wanted to aim the nose into the ground.

I landed! On the dark side! However while landing, I hit a pothole and it ripped off one of my jet engines. Oh well, I guess there go my plans go get home.

I tried to take off again, and of course asploded everything.

Thanks to "quicksave" I might try landing this one again...

[antiquark]

Okay, tried it again... I was able to land, but when I tried to take off, I couldn't reach any altitude for my rocket engine to engage. I sort of just wallowed around at 2000m. I'll have to continue my investigations.

Found a nice long stretch of smooth terrain on the daylight side...

Actually landed!