My craziest Laythe mission

[Oxytropis]

The completely stock, career mode, science probe,"lollipop" sitting pretty on the launchpad. No mech jeb or other spaceport addons in my ksp, and I only quicksave when I'm intentionally messing around(like launching a rover off a cliff). Also no SaS or control surfaces besides the tiny amount of torque supplied by the probe core itself. turning is accomplished via vectoring engines.

Well this isn't the actual ship, I had to modify it slightly by adding sepratrons to the top solid boosters so that they don't take out the bottom half of the ship when being separated. Adding them ended up being quite funny, when released they fly faster than the ship (your throttled down to less than a quarter during that point in staging) they do flips and spin all over the place just ahead of you. Needless to say I decided I like the design and will keep it this way. Other than that it's exactly as pictured.

The transfer to Jool went fine, I had everything set up almost perfectly. The Jool aerobrake would do most of work for me, and I would just need to correct on the other side of it for an easy Laythe aerobrake and a small burn to achieve Laythe orbit. Unfortunately stupid me forgot one thing, and that was to orient the ship so the solar panels would see the sun.. needless to say this happened.

scary stuff, having no power...and only 62.2m/s left....(the language I used is not suitable for these forums.).

so after missing Laythe, and its influence not helping the situation all that much. I assumed I was gonna just fall into Jool until the kracken devoured my ship

At the start of the second round into Jools atmosphere I got lucky and the force of hitting the chlorine soup spun my ship just enough to get a solar panel to see a glimmer of sunlight. I was finally able to regain control of the ship, and just in time too. I managed to burn early enough and escaped the green giant's death grip. \o/

Surprisingly I was still in decent shape for a Laythe encounter, unfortunately obtaining orbit and picking a landing spot was a luxury my fuel tanks couldn't afford.

So now I have a Laythe ocean buoy. I can't complain though I got a ton of science points and even managed to get a couple of Jool reports after I escaped it (enough to unlock the radioisotope thermoelectric generators and a few others )

Edited October 30, 2013 by Oxytropis

[Specialist290]

A happy ending to a sequence of harrowing events. Glad to see you managed to reach your destination despite all those setbacks.