Challenge Wheel - 1000 Units of Dres Ore to Minmus

[Dcseal]

Spin the Challenge Wheel: 1000 Units of Dres Ore to Minmus

 

Alright, so here's kspnerd's spin the wheel challenge. I was tasked with taking a wingless, kerballess ship to Dres, mining 1000 units of ore, and hauling it to Minmus. Near Future Tech really comes quite in handy here.

I decided to build an argon-fueled ISV using the "Repulsor" Pulsed Inductive Thruster, with extra large solar panels & a nuclear reactor to boot. 

Spoiler

 

After construction was complete, the Orpheus was ready to fly. We had just under 20km/s of delta-v, ugly radiators that clipped through the solar panels, a full probe & antenna suite and a not-yet-empty upper stage, which meant we could start our Dres injection burn with at least some meaningful power.

I plotted a course for Dres & began the burn!

Spoiler

The upper stage was emptied after completing roughly 20% of our injection burn, and upon powering up the reactor, PI thruster & radiators, all of the Orpheus's mighty flaws came to show all at once. Firstly, I could only run the reactor at half power, due to the two radiators not providing sufficent enough cooling. Secondly, and more importantly, our TWR was stupidly low. (Something like 0.04) The injection burn was going to take about forty minutes, so I turned on hyper-physwarp and sat back.

Spoiler

Braking at Dres took another excruciatingly long burn (50+ minutes, not 4 days, I had the thrust limiter at >1 for mid-transfer corrections) but eventually we were in LDO. Our brave lander undocked, descended to Dres's surface, and began the months-long mining process. I hadn't packaged a survey probe, large drills, ore sampling equipment or anything of the like on the trip. Since I'd have to wait for the kerbin transfer window anyway, the lander could afford take it's sweet time mining at something close to 0.003 ore/s. 

After a long wait, the tanks were full: 1001 Dres ore, ready to be hauled to the Minmus surface. I fired up the engines again:

Spoiler

Arriving at Kerbin...

Spoiler

(Note: I'm thrusting almost vertically here to correct some inclination as i've mostly slowed down on my encounter path.)

Because of the obscene efficency of the argon thruster, I opted to just entirely cirualize to a somewhat eliptical orbit (below Minmus's orbit), fully correct inclination, and then burn again for an encounter.

Spoiler

Fired my suicide burn a fraction of a second too late, resulting in destruction of the underbelly antenna on landing. Whoops!

 

Annnnd we're down. 1000 (and 1, bonus points) units of Dres Ore^TM succesfully hauled to Minmus, with just roughly over 100m/s of DV left in our lander. The Orpheus was de-orbited into Minmus's surface shortly after.

 

W/ UI

Spoiler

 

Edited November 7, 2022 by Dcseal
20km/s of DV, not 2

[Vanamonde]

Congratulations on your ambitious mission.