Landing on Eve and returning to Kerbal

[Entelin]

Here is the ship I built to land on Eve and return to Kerbal. It's all stock, and was launched in two parts, then refueled in Kerbal orbit before heading to Eve. On my way back to kerbal with the lander the time accel kraken killed my landing legs, but it didn't matter as you can see from the last screenshot

Mission success!

Edited August 22, 2013 by Entelin

[Entelin]

btw I would give the part files, but while it got the job done, it could have been better. There were some stability issues, the planetary stage was over powered, it was short on RCS (mostly because of the instability), and took forever to refuel in orbit because of all the little tanks. So I think I would rework it with a heavier launch vehicle from kerbal to limit the refueling, remove some nuclear engines, and strengthen the linkage between the two halves. If anyone wants what I have though let me know and I'll post it.

[Sirine]

I wish for more detail and pic.

And btw, manual or MechJeb?

[Entelin]

I wish I had more pics but these are the only ones I took, I would have to fly the mission again (which I might at some point), but like I mentioned I would want to adjust its design a bit to address some of the design flaws.

Flown manually.

I do use mechjeb's information windows, I hate having to switch to planetary view just to see your apoapsis for example. However I always fly everything I make manually, I have from time to time tried mechjebs autopilot stuff but for some reason my ships fall apart half the time under its control..... :/ Besides the flying part is half the fun

More detail:

It takes 11500dv to get into orbit from eve at sealevel. The lander has right around that, its very tight. It also jettisons all its parachutes before takeoff to shave off mass (you can see they are all on radial decouplers). Once in orbit, what remains of the lander returns to the interplanetary stage, fills back up on fuel, crossfeed is disabled, and the remainder of the fuel on the planetary stage is burned on the way back to kerbal (there wasn't much left), the lander then finishes the burn and lands under its own power on kerbal (parachutes are too expensive to take off with), I think I only had 130ish or so dv remaining when falling into kerbal's atmosphere, which fortunately is all you need, thanks to the drag (even without parachutes).

Actually I can take some screenshots of the two parts in the hanger:

Edited August 23, 2013 by Entelin

[Sirine]

I can see your lander use a lot of Aerospike engines. And I don't see any SAS or ASAS...

Just wander how do you overcome the unstable issues when the fuel tank near empty?

I can't even pointing upward with that many Aerospike engines around.

[KOCOUR]

Whats the part count? Did your PC blow up? Mine definitelly would. :-)

[Entelin]

That's correct, there was no sas on the lander at all. It keeps straight because the inner set of engines are not aerospikes. As for part count, it's really not that high only 500 or so all in all.

[SuperWeegee4000]

Don't you mean Kerbin?

Anyways, what was the part count on that thing?