[VERY image heavy]Jool system probing mission! [Part 4, finishing the mission!]

[stupid_chris]

I've been looking at this forum a bit lately and after seeing the incredible amount of amazing missions that came out of here, I thought I might as well make one myself (hoping it will catch some attention).

I've been brainstorming the idea for a while and I thought I could make a mission to land a probe on each of Jool's moons in one mission. I'll be using a few part packs along the way as well as MechJeb, mainly to aesthetic purposes and to prevent from needing 500 parts for the whole ship and to for orbital info and other things.

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Part 1: Going to Jool

Part 2: Refueling mission

Part 3: Landing Jeb on Vall and bringing him home

Part 4: Completing the probe mission

Mods used (for now): NovaPunch2, AIES Aerospace, KW Rocketry, Procedural Fairings, Planet Corportation Heatshields, MechJeb2, Universe Replacer, KAS, Mobius RocketWorks, KSPX

This mission is now finished. I'll probably create a post with the craft files when I find the times, thanks all for watching, and feel free to give me feedback if you want me to make a new mission at some point!

Imgur album for the whole mission

Note: All images are click through for high resolutions

Edited September 3, 2013 by stupid_chris
Fourth part out

[stupid_chris]

Here we go for the first part!

Designing the ship

Laythe lander

The lander has approximately 800m/s of delta V and a parachute hidden inside the probe core for a soft landing. I also stuck a 2,5m heatshield with heatspikes to protect it during atmospheric entry under the assembly. The whole thing weighting only 1,3t. It's equipped with all the scientific instruments to send back surface data to Kerbin.

Vall lander

More than enough delta V to land, all the scientific instruments too to get some surface data to Kerbin. Probably my favourite lander of all those I made for the mission, it looks pretty good to me, and all for only 1,4t.

Tylo lander

I'll admit this lander is probably a bit overkill. But it was the easiest solution to have both enough fuel and still look good all while keeping a reasonable part count. The result is nice, just a fat ass of a lander, with all the scientific instruments too, because data. The heaviest of them all, 8,8t for this big baby.

Pol/Bop lander

Since both moons have similar characteristic, I decided a pair of twin landers for both Pol and Bop would be the most efficient idea. All the instruments on those too, everything coming bundled up for only 0,6t each!

Transfer ship

All the landers are stacked under fairings to protect them during the aerobraking maneuvers at Jool and Laythe. The "Little Mother" will be the one carrying the weight of the mission, giving a reasonable TWR/ISP ratio, compared to the terrible weight of the LV-Ns and NERVAs. Two large panels will assre the power supply for the mission and an AIES retractable dish will assure communications with Kerbin and data transfer during the mission.

The launcher

A combination of both KW Rocketry and NovaPunch got us this very large launcher. It should have just enough delta V to send the transfer stage nearly into orbit with just a few m/s to spare, leaving the core launcher to fall back to Kerbin.

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Going to Jool

The mission will start by putting the whole transfer ship in low Kerbin orbit, then proceed to go to Jool, aerobrake in it's atmosphere, get an encounter with Laythe for a second aerobrake, then the Laythe lander will be released. Then the ship will proceed outwards to the other moons, dropping landers along the way, by going to Vall, then Tylo, proceeding with Bop and finishing at Pol.

The whole rocket on the pad, 703,2t of fuel and engines ready to shoot up there.

The rocket was surprisingly solid, going to orbit was a breeze. A lot of fuel was burned that day, those engines are hungry.

The transfer ship and it's nine engines, all firing up to Jool. The TWR of the rocket was really nice, the whole burn only took a minute and a half.

By some insane luck, I have a Laythe encounter directly from interplanetary space, looks like we will not aerobrake at Jool today. Hopefully the fairings will hold together through this massive aerobrake.

That aerobrake was rather intense. The rocket went under up to 6G of deceleration. Those were probably the most intense atmospheric entry effects I've seen. The whole thing held trough though. The first maneuver left me in a highly eccentric orbit, which I correct at a second pass to lower the orbit at 80km.

The landing went well. I had to deorbit the lander through the main ship because the heatshield was blocking the landers engines. Shooting for those tiny islands is kinda hards with such a mastodon. Then The heatshield did his job and a half powered landing completed dropped the probe softly on a mountainside near one of the shores.

Scientific data from Laythe (at 2km ASL):

Gravity - 7,79m/s²

Accelerometer - 0.79G

Temperature - -8.64°C

Pressure - 0.4880atm

Burning to Vall orbit, fuel levels are... extremely low. I may or may not have needed to borrow fuel from the Tylo lander's fuel tank.

Landing on Vall was a breeze, the lander did amazingly well and the landscape is insane. Touched down in a relatively flat spot (compared to the rest of the moon). Vall looks awesome as usual.

Scientific data from Vall:

Gravity - 2.29m/s²

Accelerometer - 0.23G

Temperature - -20.83°C

Pressure - Vacuum

Turns out I undershooted how much fuel I'd need. Result: not a drop left halfway through the mission. Sounds like I'll need to send a refueling mission. Jebediah will be happy, free trip to a big green gassy ball!

The second part, "Refuelling the probe mission" can be found here

Imgur album for all the images of this part

Edited September 3, 2013 by stupid_chris

[Kerbal01]

Did you leave docking ports on to refuel the tank or will you use KAS cables?

[stupid_chris]

I thought I had enough fuel, so there were no dockingports. KAS it will be, thank god for dismountable connectors.

[Mr Shifty]

Very cool! It's amazing how compact you got the final ship to be: only 261 parts. Wow! I wonder if you'd be willing to post the craft files; those landers look very nice.

[stupid_chris]

Heh the secret is part packs. Having one big NovaPunch tank instead of twenty orange tanks saves parts I was considering posting the craft files, I think I'll do so when the mission is over.

[stupid_chris]

Here we go for part two, refueling the probe ship!

Designing the refuelling mission

Refuelling ship

With nearly 12km/s of delta V, Anearly 150t of fuel, this thing should do the job. By fiddling with the numbers a bit, I believe I should have enough fuel to make it to the probe ship, refuel it, then bring Jeb home. I also added a hitchhiker to the thing, I don't want Jeb stuck in that small tin can for the whole trip. I also added a LES because well, the launcher is gonna be a bit big, I don't want anything bad to happen to him.

The launcher

That's why even Jeb needs an LES. Did you ever try slapping two Saturn V to a giant NERVA? Probably not, well you're gonna see this today! The thing is quite huge, but it does the job of getting the huge refuelling craft to space very well.

Manned Vall lander

Surprise! Seriously it would be a shame to get there and not land, wouldn't it. Jebediah categorically refused to go if he couldn't have fun, so I designed this small lander to go along. It's just under 10t and shouldn't lower the delta V too much. I even managed to balance the RCS on the second stage so that while both empty and full the COM would be at the same place. Docking will be a piece of cake.

The launcher

I didn't feel like bothering with a multi staged launcher this time and from the weight I was pretty sure I could go to space on a single stage. Came up with this and it does the job perfectly. TWR a bit low on launch but it still gets the job done. I'll ned to deorbit this one though, so I hid RCS and a probe core in the interstage fuel tank. Should do the job.

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Sending the ship to LKO

A part of me is saying this rocket is a really bad idea but this is going to be great anyway.

It flies pretty well to be honest. Wobble was minimal (although there were a lot of very heavy duty NovaPunch struts involved but shh). It went to space like if it was meant to (okay it was too but shhhhh).

This one actually looks like a real rocket. It's pretty nice. The flight might be long due to relatively low TWR but it will be awesome nonetheless.

And as predicted, it did indeed go to space. Had enough fuel to deorbit, Now it's just a matter of getting to the Jeb.

And here we go, the lander is now connected to the main ship. Time to head off to Jool

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Going to Jool and refuelling the probe mission

First off, I had to boost myself in a higher orbit. The whole craft was at a 75km orbit, and with a TWR of 0.21 and a 15min burn ahead, that would mean getting back in the atmosphere. Screw you Oberth, I'll be burning from 200km.

The burn was indeed pretty long, 15mins in it's whole. And no physical time warp. The docking connection was very solid at normal speed, but as soon as I switched to 2x, the thing went nuts and would spin around like a kid in a merry go round. However I did get there and even had a better result than the planned maneuver by getting an actual encounter instead of a very close approach. I'll take that!

I was lucky enough to have the Mun eclipse the sun while getting out of the Kerbin system and then getting a close view of Minmus. Then when getting in the Jool system I had an encounter with Tylo. Not bad.

Jeb ent back to his small pod and plunged into Jool's atmosphere. The thing held tight, even though the lander might not have liked his experience. It still went better than expected. Next stop is Vall!

Used a gravity assist from Laythe to get in a similar orbit to Vall and then a simple Hohmann transfer got me there. Barely used any fuel at all, about 400m/s for the transfer and capture. We just have to get close to the ship now!

And here we are! Jeb finally got to get a bit of fresh air (oh the irony). A few operations needed now to refuel our big baby.

Jeb got aquainted with the KAS system and pluged in the winch to the other ship and started to transfer fuel over to our probe mission.

Was able to cokmpletely full off the probe ship, and 2100m/s are left in the refuelling craft! Once we will have discareded the lander, it'll be far more than enough to go back home. Next stop, landing Jeb on Vall!

The third part can be found here!

Imgur album for this part of the mission

Edited September 3, 2013 by stupid_chris

[suzin.felipe]

Awesome album. Should have made it in video so we could put next to "Constellation Mission" from Katateochi. They would be both in a class of their own.

[stupid_chris]

Eh, my video editing skills aren't that good yet. But thanks for the feedback!

[stupid_chris]

Here we go for the third part!

Landing Jeb on Vall

Jeb entered the lander without hesitation, even though the thing is nothing but a tin can on top of a bunch of explosive fuel meant to land on a tiny ice ball using toothpicks as legs.

Landing was a breeze, still plenty of fuel left, and the high TWR made the braking burns pretty quick. Jeb is nuts about thinking to get to explore the place.

Jeb just had to set a flag down. He's also upset at our engineers for not putting enough fuel in the probe ship. The thing stinks to him and he believes there's not enough SRBs. However he's glad he gets to jump higher or a few minutes.

Jeb couldn't help himself to go check out the probe lander. Of course, he also couldn't help himself to do a glorious dance on the radio dish, which sent an order to the KSC to eat donuts. Weird.

While going back to his lander, Jeb miscalculated how fast he was approaching the ground. He ended up tumbleweeding past it like a pro. Before lealving he made shure to take a selfie with the lander and the scenery. Gorgeous.

The ascent went very well, the second stage has a ridiculous TWR so it was a piece of cake to get the required vertical velocity and the gravity turn was very... intense. Almost crashed into a mountaintop that stretched up to 6km though, that thing is dangerous.

Docked back to the now nearly empty refuelling craft and sent Jeb back to his pod, then discarded the second stage of the lander, we're not gonna need it anymore.

Boosted the ship back to Jool orbit then did a Hohmann transfer back to Kerbin, Jeb is on his way home!

Home sweet home! Aerobraking in Kerbin's atmosphere before landing the capsule.

Releasing the capsule on a return course with the KSC and returning the big craft to a low orbit, we're gonna take care of it afterwhile.

After burning up in the atmosphere a bit, Jeb landed back on Kerbin, just a few KM away from the KSC. The space center crew will come pick him up shortly.

The remaining refuelling vessel is too big to reenter safely. it also has quite the amount of nuclear material in the NERVA, so it might not be best to crash it onto Kerbin. I could've kept in in orbit for refuel and reuse, but I doubted I would have enouther use for it, so I went on and simply crashed it into the Mun. Rest in peace old one.

The fourth part of the mission can be found here!

Imgur album for this part

Edited September 3, 2013 by stupid_chris

[suzin.felipe]

I love your designs, and even downloaded AIES so I start doing some cool looking lander and probes as well.

Looking forward for the next part of your mission.

[stupid_chris]

It's all done, just needs me writing it, I planned to do it this week, but school kinda kept me away from most KSP related things. I'll see about it today.

[Climberfx]

Cool Missions Chris, and great concepts.

[stupid_chris]

Alright, here we go now. Hopefully this won't be too long, even though the BBcode bar isn't there...

Landing the last probes on Jool's moons

The transfer to Tylo went smoothly, and the release of the Tylo lander went well. Now that this one is dropped off, the whole probe ship weights much less. I also transferred a part of the lander's fuel back to the ship before decoupling sine it had too much, this way I can maximize the fuel in the ship.

Landed on Tylo! The lander was meant with a rather nice TWR, so it didn't need burning for too long and went down quitenicely without having to fight the gravity too much.

Scientific data from Tylo:

Gravity - 7.85m/s²

Accelerometer - 0.80G

Temperature - 0.96°C

Pressure - Vacuum

Now we are heading to Pol! Why not Bop yet? Well it's inclination is much bigger than Pol's, and making a plane change closer to Jool is much more fuel consuming than being further out. For this reason, I only made a small plane change for Pol, and when coming back we'll be able to do the rest of the plane change from further out of the system, thus it will be much less fuel expensive.

And there we go, Pol landing complete! Apart from being really long due to very slow orbital velocity, it went rather well. Touched down on a mountainside, I must admit the view is also quite amazing.

Scientific data from Pol:

Gravity - 0.37m/s²

Accelerometer - 0.04G

Temperature - -6.12°C

Pressure - Vacuum

And now onto our final destination, Bop! Getting there was easy, most of the delta V needed was to do the plane change. Else, it went pretty well, and the probe ship is now in Bop orbit.

Just as for Pol, landing on Bop was rather lenghty. Also, the very high mountains and inconsistent terrain made it hard to find a nice spot to land. I was planning to go to a valley past the mountain, but the map view and real view differed. Since I was obviously going to crash into the mountainside, I decided to simply land on the spot.

Sceintific data from Bop:

Gravity - 0.36m/s²

Accelerometer - 0.04G

Temperature - -198.54°C (what)

Pressure - Vacuum

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Extra: Impacting the probe ship into Jool

Once again, I have another thing hidden for this mission. I sure did not intend to leave this ship in Bop orbit, and we're going to crash it into Jool as I equipped it with sdcientific instruments! The only problem is that the ship has 500m/s left of delta V, and from Bop, it would be a 1500m/s burn to dip into Jool's atmosphere... How we're gonna do it? well, we're gonna gravity assist our way there. However, first, we need to cancel out this awkward orbital plane if we're going to gravity assist properly. Only this burn is almost 300m/s...

First, a gravity assist at Tylo is kind of obvious. With such a gravity well, it would be a shame to ignore it. With a PE of about 2200km, I managed to curve my path enough to lower my Jool PE to a few thousand km. Close but not there yet.

Since we still had a small gap to fill up, the following natural step is a Laythe assist. I already had a near encounter with it from my Tylo assist, so by playing for a fair bit with the RCS translation controls, I managed to get a nice assist at 900km that sends me straight into Jool's atmosphere!

The probe ship reentered the atmosphere quite... brilliantly? The lights show was sure awesome. It's also interesting to note that the atmosphere decelerated me at up to 103m/s². The trip down took nearly 10 minutes, and by the end, the temperature was so high the engines would show heating effects... when I hadn't touched the throttle at all. The ship finally crashed deep into Jool, but not without transmiting data Back to Kerbin!

Scientific data from the Jool impactor (maximum values):

Gravity - 7,85m/s²

Accelerometer - 10,5G

Temperature - 965,31°C

Pressure - 15.0011atm

Imgur album for this part of the mission

This concludes the mission folks. If downloads for these ships are ever made available, I'll add a link here. Thanks for reading!

Edited September 3, 2013 by stupid_chris

[suzin.felipe]

Nice flying mate. Loved the mission and the writhe up.

Also, how much d-V did you have in that transfer module originally?

[wasmic]

That mission was geniously designed. How did you get the procedural fairings to separate in two pieces instead of four?

[magnemoe]

Nice flying mate. Loved the mission and the writhe up.

Also, how much d-V did you have in that transfer module originally?

Think it was 3500 m/s from LKO, far to little, during my grand tour 2 I used 550 m/s from Laythe to Val, over 1000 m/s to low Tylo orbit, a bit over 1000 m/s to Pol and 400 m/s to Bop. Now this was an return mission, for an one way mission it would probably be better to do an Laythe aerobrake followed by separation, this way you do not have to take the heavy Tylo lander and the transfer stage into Val orbit and it would not take much fuel to get the small Pol and Bop probes to target.

[stupid_chris]

Nice flying mate. Loved the mission and the writhe up.

Also, how much d-V did you have in that transfer module originally?

Think it was 3500 m/s from LKO, far to little, during my grand tour 2 I used 550 m/s from Laythe to Val, over 1000 m/s to low Tylo orbit, a bit over 1000 m/s to Pol and 400 m/s to Bop. Now this was an return mission, for an one way mission it would probably be better to do an Laythe aerobrake followed by separation, this way you do not have to take the heavy Tylo lander and the transfer stage into Val orbit and it would not take much fuel to get the small Pol and Bop probes to target.

Yeah from LKO I had about 3300m/s, which was indeed not enough. It was my first mission to more than one of Jool's moons and I wasn't sure exactly how much to expect for the transfers. I gave it a quick thought and decided this design was very nice looking and that a refuelling mission would be cool anyway. And yeah, getting rid of the Tylo lander before would've been better, but having the landers in an ascending order of weight makes the whole craft more stable, a big weight at the top isn't physics friendly. Going up and down would also eat up a bit more delta V and I guesstimated that this layout would be more stable for minimal losses in delta V.

That mission was geniously designed. How did you get the procedural fairings to separate in two pieces instead of four?

Actually the fairings went in three pieces. That's decided by the fairing base, in that case the 3,75m Pfairing base gets a three folded fairing.