Reusable, Single-Launch Real Solar System Grand Tour with Stock Parts

[Entropian]

Yep, I took it a step further this time.  Ultimately, the only thing stopping me from doing a reusable grand tour instead of the expendable one I did a while ago was the Venus ascent vehicle.  After a lot of experimentation, I came up with an ascent mechanism that utilizes suborbital docking to catch the ascent vehicle and boost it back to orbit before it gets too deep in the atmosphere.  Anyways, here's the video:

 

 

[Admiral Fluffy]

I call hax

[Ultimate Steve]

Hats off to you, this is probably one of the top 10 most impressive things done in KSP up to this point. Could you post the craft files by chance? I'd like to see the secret sauce on that Venus lander, and maybe apply it to my Eve stuff going forward.

I know I expressed thoughts like this in the YouTube comments earlier, but I'm still very surprised that you got away without significant heat shielding. How does the RSS heat model work? It can't be the stock model, as stuff burns up at 3km/s or so. It can't be the RO model because everything except heat shields melt. Is it just a scaled up stock heat model?

[Entropian]

5 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Hats off to you, this is probably one of the top 10 most impressive things done in KSP up to this point. Could you post the craft files by chance? I'd like to see the secret sauce on that Venus lander, and maybe apply it to my Eve stuff going forward.

I know I expressed thoughts like this in the YouTube comments earlier, but I'm still very surprised that you got away without significant heat shielding. How does the RSS heat model work? It can't be the stock model, as stuff burns up at 3km/s or so. It can't be the RO model because everything except heat shields melt. Is it just a scaled up stock heat model?

Thanks!  Honestly, there isn't really any secret sauce.  The Venus lander is pretty much just a fairing with a couple hundred fuel tanks clipped in with a lawn chair, RTGs, and an OKTO2 (I think); a service bay with ducted fan setups; and 2 Vectors.  I tried a spaceplane-based ascent vehicle as well but I found that the gravity was so high that by the point where the wing area was high enough, the it increased the weight far too much.  Ultimately, what I found worked best was just moar boosters on a pretty conventional setup.

I agree with you about the heating model discrepancy, but I have no idea how the RSS heat model works.  All I can tell you is that there weren't many problems with heating on reentry, possibly because of the high drag inflatable heat shield allowing me to reenter at a higher altitude, or the NERVs somehow shielding parts of the craft.  The only heating problems I encountered were on the return from the Pluto-Charon system when I aerobraked at Jupiter on the way to Earth (I didn't include this and a lot of other flybys I did to make the video a semi-watchable length).

EDIT: Thought I probably should add that I maxed out the critical temperature at around 95% on that Jupiter aerobrake but I forget which part it was.

Edited March 31, 2022 by Entropian