OJT's Jool 5 Mission

[OJT]

Hello there

Been playing the game for about 280 hours on Steam and enjoying every second of it. I advanced quite far in my Career save and explored big part of the Kerbol System. Then I saw the Jool 5 thread and decided to attempt it myself. I will be attempting both Level 3 (land one unique Kerbal per each moon) and Jebediah's Level (collect as much science) challenges for my Jool 5 attempt. Game difficulty is Normal

Part 0: Prep Work

We gonna start... with unmanned mission first. Thing is, Jool is pretty much the only planet that I didn't research extensively and except for couple of relays and (partially successful) Laythe drone landing I haven't done much around there. Doing unmanned mission first will give me a good training on maneuvering inside the Joolian System and it is also a good opportunity to establish a satellite network (KerbNet can be useful to determine landing spots and various biomes). Also, I will launch satellites with Resource Scanners to determine good landing spots for ISRU mining

Here's the satellite stack: 16 big dish relays, 4 per each inner moon and 2 per each outer moon. 4 resource scanners, 1 per inner moon and the 4th one will first scan Bop and then travel to Pol

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Here's the launch vehicle. I sadly don't have Making History DLC, so the fairing had to be somewhat oversized to fit everything in

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Launch to LKO was trivial (as trivial as you can get with a rocket of that size)

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After trans-joolian insertion burn and over a ingame year of travel time the carrier reaches Joolian System

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I inserted the carrier into elliptical Jool orbit that intersected Vall's orbit and deployed the first batch of satellites

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Every satellite is based on MTM Stage with 4 ion engines and 2 RTGs. The satellites have full targeting capability, lots of xenon gas and enough TWR to not make the burns too slow. However battery charge turned out to be, let's say, lower than I needed, but I didn't know it at the time and this will come back later

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First on the list was Vall. And there came up the first problem: apparently RTGs don't replenish the charge of the craft when it is not in the focus. Because of that, after making my Vall insertion burns and reaching the moon, half of my satellites were lower on charge than I needed them to be (and we all know how power-hungry ion engines are). I persevered, however, and managed to place all satellites into orbits around Vall

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Next one was Tylo. Armed with newfound knowledge about RTGs, I stayed with each satellite after Tylo insertion burn to let it replenish the charge and this time I placed all satellites without any problems

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Laythe was by far the one that took longest. First, due to poor planning the encounter speed of my satellites was too high, which required very long circularization burns. Second, even though MTM Stage packs 4000 electric charge in it, it only has enough charge to fire the ion engines continuously for 2 minutes. Third, because you can only control one ship at the time (duh) and I needed to do very long burns on 5 satellites, I only managed to successfully circularize one. Due to that, I had to improvise gravity assists on the fly (although I know the basics of it, I've never done any in game), but I somehow managed it: couple of orbits around Jool, 3 correction burns and two Tylo assists later my satellites encountered Laythe with more sensible speeds and I easily placed them into orbits. Took way longer than it should've, but at least I grabbed some nice snaps

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After the Laythe shenanigans, reaching Bop and Pol was a piece of cake. The practice with gravity assists also helped: I used Tylo again to slingshot my sats to required paths. It didn't go completely without any screwups though: when I was focusing on something else one of the Bop relays disappeared without any trace. It wasn't on orbit that would intersect other moons' SOIs, it even had an alarm set for a correction burn, but it simply vanished. I still have no idea what could've happened to it. A sacrifice to Kraken I guess lol

Bop pics

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After the Resource ScanSat scanned Bop, it went to Pol and scanned it aswell

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And this concludes the prequel to my Jool 5 attempt: a satellite network established, resources of all moons scanned, valuable lessons about orbital mechanics learned. Stay tuned for next part lads 

[RealKerbal3x]

@OJT Welcome to the forums, and great first post!

Looking forward to more

[Zacspace]

It might interest you to know before attempting the full run that you can use a Tylo gravity assist to capture into Jool, no burn required. When you're doing your correction burn around the sun you can exchange prograde/retrograde for radial in/out velocity (or vice-versa) to change the timing of your encounter so that you directly encounter whichever of Jool's moon you want, at whatever part of its orbit you want. A Tylo assist can not only save you the Jool capture burn, but also correct your inclination and even set you up for another encounter.

Here's a screenshot from a mission I recently flew to Vall that hopefully illustrates what I'm talking about. You'll want to encounter Tylo about where I did for best results. The only caveat is that you can encounter Jool too fast for any of this to work, so you want to make sure when you plot your transfer burn from Kerbin that your Jool encounter is petty close to your apoapsis

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[FleshJeb]

Those screenshots are pure art. Well done.

[OJT]

Hey lads

It's been quite a while since my first post. Real life has been quite busy and I didn't have much free time to play KSP. But I was playing a bit every now and then and making slow progress on my Jool 5 challenge and now I have something that could be posted here. Mind you, it won't be as long as the thread opener, but still 

Part 1: Landers

After establishing satellite network in Joolian System and determining spots rich with ore and suitable for landings, it is now time for actual manned mission preparations

Mission structure will be nothing original and it has been done countless amounts of times by fellow players: mothership with landers. The whole shabang goes to Jool. Mothership enters orbit of moon. Lander undocks. Goes down. Lands. Comes back up. Docks with mothership. Mothership escapes moon's SOI. Then repeat this four more times. Then return to Kerbin. Simple (well, not really, but anyway). In Part 1 we are gonna focus on landers

Level 3 states that one unique Kerbonaut must land on every moon, which means we need to take at least 5 kerbals with us. However, it doesn't require landing said Kerbonauts in separate landers, which means I can build a mothership that has enough space for at least 5 kerbals, make the landers single-seaters and just switch up pilots while in orbit before every landing. This will save me the weight of the whole ship and save me the hassle of figuring out how to mount 5 separate landers to mothership without screwing up the balance

Jool has 5 moons (hence the name of the challenge, duh). Out of those 5 moons, Laythe is the only one that has atmosphere. Not only that, Laythe has a rather thick atmosphere, reaching 0.6 atm at sea level, which makes making the lander a plane feasible. Not only that, Laythe has oxygenated atmosphere, which allows us to use jet engines, which are much more efficient and will significantly increase the range of the plane when flying in low atmosphere. Therefore, Laythe lander will be a plane

The other 4 moons are airless bodies. Tylo in particular has a rather high surface gravity, so the lander will need to have good TWR to be able to land comfortably and it will need around 4700 m/s dV to land from low orbit and return back to it. However, if I can design a lander that will be able to land on Tylo and return to mothership, then this lander will easily manage to land on the other moons and return to mothership. Therefore in total I will need only two landers: a plane for Laythe and a conventional lander for the rest

The Laythe lander will be based on same principles as my Kerbin SSTO that won me the K-Prize badge

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It is a deltawing with front canards, 2 RAPIER engines for atmospheric flight, 1 NERVA for orbital maneuvering and a cargo bay to carry goodies. It flies really stable and has decent TWR and dV. It is a design that worked really well for me and proved to be very reliable, so my Laythe lander will be heavily inspired by it

This is my first version

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It has a few differences compared to Kerbin SSTO. First, it is noticeably downsized. Second, it has side-mounted air intakes instead of shock intake, because the nose had to accommodate a docking port. Third, cargo bay is substituted with service bays. And fourth, it is a single seater. But the rest is quite similar. Due to smaller size it also has more TWR while retaining similar dV. It easily survived reentry into Laythe atmosphere and flies quite nicely under its own power during my tests in Sandbox.

Tests also revealed big downsides of the plane however. It doesn't glide well at speeds that I would consider safe for landings and landings themselves were very tricky due to the combination of narrow wheelbase and the tricycle landing gear. And since Laythe doesn't have any dedicated flat runways like KSC, I went back to the drawing board and did some readjustments

Here is the second version

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This has bigger wings and 4 landing gears that are spread out wider, and this version handled the landing tests without any serious issues. There is some minor stuff that I will need to work on, but apart from that this pretty much is the plane that will go to the mission

Now comes the Airless Moon Lander concept (name might not be final)

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This bad boy has 3 Aerospike engines and ISRU mining equipment, which means I won't need to carry around fuel for both landing and takeoffs. It also has enough dV (with 400 m/s spare) to land on Tylo from 25km orbit. The mining equipment isn't as efficient as full sized equivalents, so I will need to pick my landing spots carefully (another reason I sent the resource scansats in the prequel), and there is some stuff that I must add to the lander (namely more radiators and some RCS for docking) but, as is the case with Laythe lander, this is pretty much a finished product

 

That is the landers covered. In Part 2 we will make the mothership, so stay tuned for that 

[OJT]

Hello there

Long time no see, right? My exam phase was long and took a lot of time, to the point that I barely had free time to do chores, let alone play KSP (I probably launched the game once or twice in the last month). But now I am done with exams and have plenty of time, which means... a new part of Jool 5 prep comes up!

Part 2: Main Ship

Requirements for the main ship are quite straightforward: must have space for 5 kerbonauts, must have lots of deltaV, must have docking ports for landers. All of this can be covered relatively easy: Hitchhiker Container and a Command Pod will have more than enough seats (HH Container also has storage space for goodies). DeltaV requirements will be achieved with NERVA stack and Mk3 Liquid Fuel tanks. Docking ports will be to the sides of the mothership.

There's one issue though: main ship will be massive. So, to launch it will require enormous launch vehicle. The whole stack is so huge that I can't zoom out enough in VAB to take a picture of it. So the pictures will be on the launch pad

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Launch vehicle has 3 stages. First two stages are Mammoth engines. Third stage is powered with Rhinos. Final circularization is done by mothership itself. Coming up with this setup took a lot of trial and error: unscheduled disassemblies during staging, Kraken attacks etc. I tried various boosters, from liquid fuel powered to SRBs. What I ended up with is quite reliable and reaches orbit without issues as long as the launch profile is steep.

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Let's take a closer look at the main ship itself. It is very long, easily the longest rocket I've built in this game. It has 8 largest reaction wheels, 4 at each end, and even with those it turns quite slowly (but not nearly as slow as without them... don't even ask). Two RTGs supply electricity to two largest batteries. No RCS because I deemed it unnecessary. Docking ports on the sides for each lander. 8 NERVA engines and over 10 thousand m/s of deltaV. Only downside is low TWR (around 0.2) so the burns will be quite long, but I am a patient man lol

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Aside from the mothership build, I also slightly adjusted my landers: both of them got RCS thrusters for simpler docking, and the Laythe Plane got extra fuel tanks on the wings, making the plane a bit longer. It still flies alright and is so good that it actually doubles as Kerbin SSTO: plane's picture is made in Kerbin orbit after the ascent

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This concludes the preparation phase for Jool 5 mission: all ships are ready and tried and tested in Sandbox. In next part we will be doing the actual mission in my actual Career save. I only need to wait for transfer window and scoop up my best pilots from Duna (will be done off-screen).

See you's all in Part 3! (and it will come sooner than usual, trust me )

[AtomicTech]

1 minute ago, OJT said:

Hello there

Long time no see, right? My exam phase was long and took a lot of time, to the point that I barely had free time to do chores, let alone play KSP (I probably launched the game once or twice in the last month). But now I am done with exams and have plenty of time, which means... a new part of Jool 5 prep comes up!

Part 2: Main Ship

Requirements for the main ship are quite straightforward: must have space for 5 kerbonauts, must have lots of deltaV, must have docking ports for landers. All of this can be covered relatively easy: Hitchhiker Container and a Command Pod will have more than enough seats (HH Container also has storage space for goodies). DeltaV requirements will be achieved with NERVA stack and Mk3 Liquid Fuel tanks. Docking ports will be to the sides of the mothership.

There's one issue though: main ship will be massive. So, to launch it will require enormous launch vehicle. The whole stack is so huge that I can't zoom out enough in VAB to take a picture of it. So the pictures will be on the launch pad

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Launch vehicle has 3 stages. First two stages are Mammoth engines. Third stage is powered with Rhinos. Final circularization is done by mothership itself. Coming up with this setup took a lot of trial and error: unscheduled disassemblies during staging, Kraken attacks etc. I tried various boosters, from liquid fuel powered to SRBs. What I ended up with is quite reliable and reaches orbit without issues as long as the launch profile is steep.

  Hide contents

Let's take a closer look at the main ship itself. It is very long, easily the longest rocket I've built in this game. It has 8 largest reaction wheels, 4 at each end, and even with those it turns quite slowly (but not nearly as slow as without them... don't even ask). Two RTGs supply electricity to two largest batteries. No RCS because I deemed it unnecessary. Docking ports on the sides for each lander. 8 NERVA engines and over 10 thousand m/s of deltaV. Only downside is low TWR (around 0.2) so the burns will be quite long, but I am a patient man lol

  Hide contents

Aside from the mothership build, I also slightly adjusted my landers: both of them got RCS thrusters for simpler docking, and the Laythe Plane got extra fuel tanks on the wings, making the plane a bit longer. It still flies alright and is so good that it actually doubles as Kerbin SSTO: plane's picture is made in Kerbin orbit after the ascent

  Hide contents

 

This concludes the preparation phase for Jool 5 mission: all ships are ready and tried and tested in Sandbox. In next part we will be doing the actual mission in my actual Career save. I only need to wait for transfer window and scoop up my best pilots from Duna (will be done off-screen).

See you's all in Part 3! (and it will come sooner than usual, trust me )

Can't wait!

[OJT]

Well, I did promise next part will come soon right? Here it is

Part 3: Astronauts

For my Level 3 Jool 5 Mission I need 5 astronauts. To make matters for myself easier, all 5 astronauts will be pilots. So, all I need is to put my 5 best pilots into the ship and send them away... Except that literally all of my pilots are scattered all around the Kerbol System: couple of pilots are on long-duration Eve mission, some are on Duna, others on Ike and two more on Minmus. So I needed to scoop up my pilots

Returning Eve pilots is out of the question because (1)  Eve returns are a lot of hassle (2) I kinda need them on Eve in the first place. So my plan is to scoop up the rest. I decided to start with Duna pilots

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This ship acted as a surface base, has ISRU equipment and can easily reach Duna orbit with plenty of dV left. It also has parachutes and therefore can land on Kerbin with right reentry trajectory (even without any heatshields). So, all I needed to do is to fly this to Ike, grab the pilots there and fly home

I reached Ike without any issues and landed near the Ike research rover. Rover then drove a bit and parked next to the ship

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I then swapped around the occupants (2 scientists from Duna ship to 2 pilots from Ike rover) and departed home

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Couple of aerobrakes later I safely landed in the desert

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With Duna pilots returned, I only needed to pick up Minmus pilots. I quickly threw around a simple autonomous lander and sent it to Minmus. And there an interesting predicament came up. The Minmus base the pilots were sitting in was a RV van heavily inspired by "The Breaking Bad" that I built and sent to Minmus as a joke (I posted it on the forum couple of months ago)

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The issue was, one of the pilots was sitting inside the Lab, and even though there was seemingly enough space between the side of the van and the hatch, the pilot couldn't exit due to hatch being obstructed. Thankfully, there also was an Engineer onboard this mission, so all I needed to do was to disassemble half of the van to open up the hatch (you can also see the lander in the background

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All said and done, the Minmus pilots were back on Kerbin and I can finally present to you the Jool 5 crew

From left to right: Vasya Kerman, Megsel Kerman, Jebediah Kerman, Valentina Kerman and Nelzon Kerman.

Being the most skilled and the only pilot with 5 star rating, Jeb was chosen as the captain of this mission

This concludes Part 3! In Part 4 we will be flying to Jool (about damn time we do lmao). Stay tuned!

Edited January 20, 2022 by OJT

[Maria Sirona]

This is awesome

 

[OJT]

The Day has come!

Part 4: Launch, Departure & Arrival

Joolian system is connected to KSC, ships are ready, astronauts are back, it's about time we do this thing! First off is the Mothership. Vasya is controlling the ship, Valentina and Nelzon in the passenger seats

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Mothership in orbit. Next up is the Non-Atmospheric Lander. Megsel Kerman is onboard of this flight, but ascension to orbit and encounter with Mothership will be done by an autonomous module. Megsel will be doing the docking procedure

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After encountering the Mothership, Megsel docked the lander

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Lander and Mothership are docked. Now it's the Laythe Plane's turn. Jebediah is flying it as the most skillful pilot of the mission. First part of the ascent with RAPIERs, second part with NERVA

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Encountered the Mothership. Docked to it. The whole stack assembled

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Now is the time for the reason this thread was made in the first place . I did two long burns at periapsis and then did two correction burns midway to set up a Tylo encounter

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And finally, after over 3 years of travel, Jool 5 Mission finally commences

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Tylo fly-by to put me closer to Jool. We will be returning here later

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Jool is geniunely stunning. And that's while being roughly the same size as real-life Earth! It's hard to mentally comprehend how massive Jupiter would look like at this distance

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I did a circularization burn at Jool periapsis, did one orbit around and then did a burn for Vall encounter

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After reaching Vall, I did one more burn and set the Mothership on the elliptical orbit around it

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And this is where this part ends. The journey to Jool took me quite a lot of time, but now that we are set here, the next parts of this thread will be much more interesting in content. See you guys in the next post! 

[Maria Sirona]

I think those ships need names. May i suggest Unelma, the finnish (my native language) word for dream, to be the mothership's name?

[OJT]

On 1/22/2022 at 11:17 AM, Maria Sirona said:

I think those ships need names. May i suggest Unelma, the finnish (my native language) word for dream, to be the mothership's name?

I am not that much into specific names for ships because it makes them harder to search for in VAB/SPH. Most of my ships have practical names like "Duna Lander" or "SENTINEL Telescope Drone". With that being said, mothership does have a name: I named it King Joolian. But I still appreciate the suggestion :thumbsup:

Speaking of King Joolian...

Part 5: Vall

As you've seen in my previous post, we parked in very eccentric Vall orbit. First we done the experiments high above Vall at apoapsis, then we burned to lower the periapsis into low space region and did the low space experiments. A small blunder came up however: I completely forgot that Mystery Goo containers can only be reset by scientists and all of my astronauts are pilots. Whoops! Thankfully I didn't conduct the Materials study and left it for future Tylo landing

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After circularizing in low orbit, I transferred my first pilot into the lander and sent her off. Megsel Kerman will have the honor of doing the first landing of Jool 5 mission

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I was landing in the spot with one of the richest ore concentrations due to low efficiency of my drills and the area seemed rather mountainous from high up, but thankfully as I got closer the spot turned out to be somewhat flat, so landing was not hard

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First landing of this mission! Only downside (well, for Megsel at least) is that she had to spend over 100 days on the surface before the ship refueled. I hope she grabbed some books to read. Or a Nintendo Switch

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With ship refueled, she sets off back to orbit

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Small correction burn later she encounters the Joolian and docks to it

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Vall is off the list! Only 4 moons left. Next up is Pol: I've set up the maneuver (THANK GOD for the Transfer Planner from latest patch or I'd spent ages trying to figure out how to get there) and did the ejection burn

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Why I chose to go to Pol next? First, I wanted to cross off the Outer Moons as soon as possible, since if I do the remaining Inner Moons at the end I will be close to Jool and subsequent Kerbin transfer burn will be more efficient due to Oberth effect. Second, two of my five pilots only have 2 star ratings which limits their SAS ability a bit and due to lower gravity and lower dV requirements of Bop and Pol, orbit rendezvous will have wider margin of error. Third, at this point King Joolian was starting to run low on fuel and very low gravity of Pol provided perfect opportunity for refueling.

Small plane adjustment

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And we arrive at Pol, the smallest and furthest moon of Jool

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Nothing to do with Pol, just a cool snap I took during flyby

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After that we circularized at Pol and conducted all orbit experiments at the same time

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And this concludes Part 5! We landed on Vall and reached Pol. In next part, we will be landing on Pol... multiple times to refuel the Joolian. See you guys later 

[Maria Sirona]

4 hours ago, OJT said:

King Joolian

OK

4 hours ago, OJT said:

. Megsel Kerman will have the honor of doing the first landing of Jool 5 mission

Oh... So no Val on Vall

[OJT]

HAHA FUNNY NUMBER MEME!!!1!1! This mothership refueling operation is gonna make me crazy. Next part might take a while

[Vagrant203]

aayyyyyyy

[OJT]

Alright, let's pick up from where we left off

Part 6: Pol, too much Pol

We continue from the low Pol orbit. There, Valentina Kerman boards the lander and proceeds to descend to Pol surface

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Low gravity, overpowered engines: landing was a piece of cake

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Here she is posing, blissfully unaware of what's gonna come next

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What came next, you may ask?

Refueling. A LOT of refueling

I mentioned in the last part that my main ship was running quite low on fuel, so I needed to refuel it in order to complete the mission. I did anticipate it, hence one of the reasons why my lander has ISRU equipment. But I completely underestimated the length of refueling (which, in hindsight I should've probably noticed)

The King Joolian has capacity of almost 40 thousand units of liquid fuel. The lander only packs 1800 units. And out of those units I had to leave around 200 in the ship to have fuel to return to surface after filling up the ship, and I needed around 100 units to rendezvous with the mothership from surface. Which allowes me to refill 1500 units per one run. By the time I reached Pol main ship was basically empty... Which meant that I had to do lots of refuel runs while using fairly inefficient ISRU equipment

Land, mine, take off, refill. Land, mine, take off, refill. I spent the last three days (and around 13 ingame years) doing nothing but refueling the mothership. The process was very grinding, but there simply was no other way about it. Thankfully, I have a lot of patience

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Picture below IS Pol. Astronomers Visual Pack adds dust clouds to some non-atmospheric bodies

In the meanwhile, I used the opportunity and landed on all of the biomes of Pol, namely Lowlands, Midlands, Highlands and Poles

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After long and grueling refueling phase, King Joolian was filled up, Pol was fully explored and Val could finally come and rest, because she definitely earned it like no one else did in this mission

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After that, the ship departed towards its next destination - Bop

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And so the Pol chapter ends. I don't think I will want to return here any time soon

Edited January 27, 2022 by OJT

[OJT]

And we're jumping straight into the next one!

Part 7: Bop

Small midcourse correction, and we arrive at Bop

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You know the drill by now: orbit experiments, pilot exchange and subsequent landing. Nelzon Kerman is our designated pilot for this moon

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Since Bop also had relatively low gravity, I used it to my advantage and hopped around the whole moon and collected science, just like on Pol

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During the exploration, Nelzon found something unexpected: a proof of extraterrestrial life! Unfortunately, Val took so long refueling the ship that the alien died of boredom

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After exploring every biome (namely Peaks, Slopes. Poles, Ridge and Valley), Nelzon returned to King Joolian

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With outer moons out of the way, we will return to inner moons to finish up the mission

[OJT]

Ooooh baby, a triple!

Part 8: Tylo

Only two moons left. Let's do this

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After circularizing at Tylo (I somehow forgot to take any snaps of me circularizing), Vasya Kerman boards the lander and proceeds to land. He is the second most skilled pilot in this mission after Jebediah, and since Jeb called dibs on Laythe landing, Vasya will be taking on Tylo

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Ladders are out, Vasya descends and plants the flag

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After climbing back (it did take a bit of perseverance not gonna lie), Vasya takes off, reaches orbit, rendezvous with the Joolian and docks to it. This whole section might seem quite uneventful, and it honestly was. But after what I went through on Pol, I really do appreciate this uneventfulness

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Everything out of the way! Except for Laythe. Where we are heading now 

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[OJT]

I really hope that I don't trigger any antispam-bots or something lmao

Part 9: Laythe

The final frontier!

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King Joolian circularized and experiments conducted. Now it's the time for the mission commander to show what he's made of. Jebediah Kerman takes the reigns of the plane

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Undocked from the main ship, Jeb burns retrograde and enters the atmosphere

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The plane slows down in lower layers of the atmosphere and glides towards the islands. Islands were mapped by satellites prior to descent sequence

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Finding a flat spot, Jeb lands the plane. I forgot how good of a glider this plane was during this mission. Never turned the RAPIERS on throughout the entire descent

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The plane has lots of dV in atmospheric flight, and the island I landed on had multiple biomes that I could explore. So I spent the next hour flying around, conducting experiments and collecting surface samples

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After finishing up, I aligned the plane of the plane with the plane of the mothership (that's quite a mouthful) and flew to orbit

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Then I proceeded to encountering the mothership and docking to it

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All of Jool's moons have been visited! Now all we need to do is to return home

[OJT]

After 20 years on the outer Kerbol System, it was time to go home

Part 10: Homecoming

These landers served me well throughout the whole mission. Unfortunately the mission ends here for them, since I need to discard them to have enough dV to return home. First goes the plane

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And then the lander

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Main ship burns to escape Laythe and enter orbit around Jool

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After this, I made couple of gravity assists off Tylo and Laythe, did a burn, made another Laythe gravity assist and left Jool's SOI

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2 years later, we arrive home, at last! I did try to aerobrake at upper atmosphere layers just to see what would happen. This failed miserably. Thankfully I made saves and circularized with engines

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Couple of more burns and I put the ship in equatorial low Kerbin orbit

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To pick up the pilots and science experiments, I quickly threw around an autonomous ship and sent it up

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Return vessel encountered the main ship and clawed up to it. Return vessel had databank storage, so data from mothership could be transferred automatically. Pilots boarded the vessel and left the mothership in low Kerbin orbit

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After carefully planned retrograde burn, the capsule landed near KSC

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Our team of brave kerbonauts, safe and sound on Kerbin soil

 

And here it is! Jool 5 Mission completed on Level 3 with additional Jeb's Level challenge, amassing 26871.3 Science points all from Joolian system. Further in the spoiler are the stats of my pilots, showing their landing XP

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And this concludes my Jool 5 thread. This whole mission was a lot of fun, it took a lot of time, and I will definitely be taking a break from this game for some time lol. See you all next time

[king of nowhere]

On 1/27/2022 at 10:37 AM, OJT said:

 

After long and grueling refueling phase,

 

 

On 1/27/2022 at 11:03 AM, OJT said:

after what I went through l, I really do appreciate this uneventfulness

 

it's like i'm reading my own mission reports, but without all the hassle of actually making them

[OJT]

10 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

 

it's like i'm reading my own mission reports, but without all the hassle of actually making them

I don't think my shenanigans come even close to your Grand Tour missions

Although now that I think of it, I think this mission took more in-game years than DREAM BIG, but my point still stands

[Admiral Fluffy]

On 1/27/2022 at 2:37 AM, OJT said:

Astronomers Visual Pack

Thank you for finally making that name known to me. I've been wanting to know what mod adds the dust for a while.

[OJT]

43 minutes ago, Admiral Fluffy said:

Thank you for finally making that name known to me. I've been wanting to know what mod adds the dust for a while.

Spectra also adds dust as far as I know, but I prefer the looks of AVP