(OLD) The Ultimate Jool-5 Challenge:land Kerbals on all moons and return in one big mission

[Mesklin]

Ziv, for Tylo I used drop tank, more detail report you can see late this day (I hope ) or tomorrow (exactly). And yes, I can send rescue expedition with fuel to Jool, but I want to return to Kerbin without additional fuel. Theoretically, I can reach Dune with 930 m/s dV, then aerobrake in Dune atmosphere combined with grav sling, then fly to Kerbin and I decided to try to do it.

[mcirish3]

Layth mission Complete. Refueling in progress. I have pics of the Layth mission at the end of the album below.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[Ziv]

mcirish3: Wow, those clouds look beautiful! I should use this mod too! And the aerobraking looks dangerous with this huge ship... wasn't it wobbling too much?

Congrats for the first landing! I saw you run out of fuel... so the main ship will go and catch it?

Hm, and you don't use MechJeb?? That's much harder that way! Respect!

Edited December 11, 2013 by Ziv

[Mesklin]

Here is next part of report about my Jool-5 expedition:

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Previous two parts you can find here:

Part 1 and Part 2

[mcirish3]

mcirish3: Wow, those clouds look beautiful! I should use this mod too! And the aerobraking looks dangerous with this huge ship... wasn't it wobbling too much?

Congrats for the first landing! I saw you run out of fuel... so the main ship will go and catch it?

Hm, and you don't use MechJeb?? That's much harder that way! Respect!

I did wable some but I am using, as I said earlier, joint reinforcement mod, which is one of the mods that let me continue this mission. I love the clouds mod, and since peeps said they did not have the ram to run the mod he made the memory reduction mod too.

I have a stable orbit so yes main ship will come get it. But it did not have to since I had a refueling tanker on the way and it has already refueled the landing craft. Remember my RCS is gone on both the main ship and the lander so docking without refueling would have been very difficult. I will add pics of the refueling process once it is over. I am not to proud of that part since I was not very efficient in my fuel usage on the refueling ship as I should have been. I should have had twice as much fuel as I do.

No, I don't need MechJeb, been playing this game for over a year and a half I mastered piloting a long time ago. That said I still goof up landing some times, and I had to f5 reload a lot for Layth since the land is so mountainous. It took forever to find a reasonably flat landing location. I only use mechjeb when I don't want to pilot and given the size and difficulty of this challenge I choose to go without.

Besides I am playing on my original 0.22 save file in career mode, and I did all the other missions you see in my signature below without mechjeb.

Edited December 11, 2013 by mcirish3

[Ziv]

Mesklin: Hm, if I would saw your lander for Tylo in the hangar I would say it's not capable to land there because the high mass (two nuke = 4.5 tons, two mk1 = 1.2 tons, +fuel and science with 120 Thrust only) so, nice job! Now you only need a refueling mission to bring the crew back safely and you accomplished the JOOL-5 mission!

mcirish3: oh yeah, the joint reinforcement mod, of course. Yeah, I was thinking at your Laythe landing pictures that you had to need a reasonably flat surface... and don't worry about the need for refuel, I was not even able to get back to orbit in my first mission and the Moon-orbit Module had to catch the lander. You made it back to orbit at least and a very close orbit to the main ship!

"I am not to proud of that part since I was not very efficient in my fuel usage on the refueling ship as I should have been. I should have had twice as much fuel as I do." - Or you should lower the mass as it is in Jebediah's lone JOOL-5 mission.

Respect for making the mission(s) without MechJeb or any other information giving mod!

Edited December 11, 2013 by Ziv

[Vaebn]

Here you go Ziv.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

I've gone a little bit "misson reporty" on this, writing quite a bit of commentary for the pictures, so I hope people will click to see the album in imgur.

Edited December 11, 2013 by Vaebn

[SSSPutnik]

Nice one indeed!

[Ziv]

Vaebn: great job and good comments for the pictures! I love the simplicity of your (universal) ship. That's nice that both of the Kerbals have their own big and comfortable room for the long travels!

Yeah, the drawback of this is the hard to achieve and long trans-planetary burns, and to move a huge lander with empty tanks at most of the worlds. It was especially funny to see the landing at Pol with the "almost empty" fuel tanks!

Hm, maybe you should consider making the ship in three stages instead of two: lander, lander-additional or moon-orbit module, and the fuel section. This way at bigger bodies you can use the lander+additional module together for landing, and for smaller worlds (like Bop, Pol and maybe Vall) you can left the fuel in Jool orbit and bring the lander to the moon with the (this way) moon-orbit module and back to the fuel section when the lander returned. This way you don't have to move the heavy fuel into orbit around each moon.

Flag of happiness. Hehe, that's cool if there is a "Repair leg" option on EVA, I didn't know that! And I really like the small "rescue engines" on the big fuel tanks if the lander get stranded without fuel somewhere close!

Your Tylo ascent was exciting too! And that's cool that you didn't need refueling (but given the nukes and 7 orange tanks that's not a big surprise).

But I'm sorry, you didn't make the challenge because your Kerbals didn't arrive back to the surface of Kerbin.... just kidding! Pretty cool stuff, thanks for participating! Now you earned the possibility to add the JOOL-5 badge to your pofile signature at the bottom (and this one goes to all other buddies here too who achieved this challenge!):

Settings (top right) -> Edit Signature (left menu) -> add this text and delete the spaces after all the '[':

[ URL=http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/57197-THE-ULTIMATE-JOOL-5-CHALLENGE-land-Kerbals-on-all-moons-and-return-in-one-big-misson][img ]http://i.imgur.com/Z5hSyCv.png

Edited December 12, 2013 by Ziv

[Ziv]

Jebediah's lone JOOL-5 mission continues! ->

After the landing on Laythe, the next moon is Vall:

this little lander has a tremendous amount of Delta-V (4648 m/s) and a surface TWR from 10 to 23 (on Vall, depending on fuel amount) so landing on Vall was pretty easy. Jebediah was unlucky and landed at a very flat and boring surface:

getting back to orbit. Jebediah enjoys the beauty of the icy mountains... (and still has 1800 m/s for getting back to the main ship)

Jeb is very excited about Tylo so he quickly progress there:

Landing and getting back from Tylo is very hard and from a 50km orbit it needs at least 5500-6000 m/s and that's more what this small (but otherwise remarkable) lander is capable for. So here comes the Tylo additional module with more fuel+engines and wider landing gears...:

Three of the additional fuel tank were already emptied and dropped. This way the main lander engines can work too, increasing the TWR and so the fuel efficiency...:

(the little lander was not perfectly aligned with the additional module but that wasn't a problem)

MAYDAY, MAYDAY, JEBEDIAH IS IN TROUBLE! The fuel in the Tylo module already run out at 10km! The engines stopped and they are now just dead weight! The wide and strong landing gears would be good for the landing but this way this would take much more very precious fuel! Jebediah makes a quick decision and drop them too...:

There would be an additional fuel tank for helping the ascending back to orbit but now that's used for the landing... but that one too runs out of fuel at 4km and was dropped too:

...aaand the touchdown! It was sure that this will happen with the smaller lander too (with more than 3.8 TWR) but will the fuel be enough for a return???

Jebediah: What a huge, barren, dead piece of ... rock this planet is. Whose idea was to come here??? Oh, it was me. Anyway, this landing was one of the biggest challenge in my life! Now let's prepare for the next one: getting away from here!

The best way to get away from Tylo is to turn immediately to east after launch and keep the direction of moving (the yellow hollow sign on the navigator ball) just slightly above the horizon...:

....aaand back in orbit! 73x33 km but that's a stable orbit so no danger anymore. And the little lander still has 1331 m/s! It was 3826 m/s on the surface so it took 2500 m/s to reach this low orbit. Jebediah is truly glad and cheerful!

The main ship stayed in a high eccentric orbit so it can leave Tylo at apoapsis easily. The changing in orbit costs 757 m/s for Jebediah so that's great that he still has a lot of deltaV in the lander...

And here he is back after the sucesful Tylo landing! Only some drops of fuel left... that was close! Jebediah is thinking about the next two small moon... they will be pretty easy with this agile little lander. Maybe he will do them in one go...!

The full story: http://imgur.com/a/1EWoP#0

Edited December 12, 2013 by Ziv

[700NitroXpress]

Ziv: Questions

Why isn't there something on your leaderboard that shows what level the winners have completed the challenge at?

Or has everyone done Level 1 only?

Any bonus for doing the challenge with a completely stock game with no mods or optimal flight window information or anything like that?

[Commissioner Tadpole]

I'm going to plant an Extraplanetary Launch Pad on Minmus' surface and launch the rocket for this mission there, because otherwise this is impossible.

[Ziv]

700NitroXpress: Yes, you are absolutely right! I was thinking about this yesterday already... it turned out that not only the Level 1-2-3-Jeb is the difference but the number of launches, refuelings, number of landers / lander modules, etc... and I want to collect the mission informations for the different achieved missions and add them after the names with links to the posts so they would be easily find and see. Maybe I will do that today!

Edited December 12, 2013 by Ziv

[Ziv]

I'm going to plant an Extraplanetary Launch Pad on Minmus' surface and launch the rocket for this mission there, because otherwise this is impossible.

Hehe, I see you have problems with launching stuff from Kerbin to space. Do you know how to dock in space? Because that way you could build your main ship in more than one launch... or you might use NovaPunch, there are some really big and strong fuel+engines there. Or you can make this Minmus base and launchpad if you want. I like that how many ideas you come up for this very hard mission!

For me this is not a challenge with strict rules to find the optimal solution (you will need the optimization of your ship within your idea anyway!) but to think about different ways to achieve the same thing... but I will add distinctions and more details on the leaderboard soon!

Edited December 12, 2013 by Ziv

[700NitroXpress]

700NitroXpress: Yes, you are absolutely right! I was thinking about this yesterday already... it turned out that not only the Level 1-2-3-Jeb is the difference but the number of launches, refuelings, number of landers / lander modules, etc... and I want to collect the mission informations for the different achieved missions and add them after the names with links to the posts so they would be easily find and see. Maybe I will do that today!

Alright then, good to hear. I'm going for Level 3 all vanilla game. I also intend to land all 5 kerbals on the KSC runway while still in my command ship as the main command module is a SSTO.

Here's my ship pics so far. This is 7 launches total, one for the main command ship, one for the super sized transfer stage, 4 for the lander pods, and 1 for a refueling launch before takeoff for the mission.

[Ziv]

700NitroXpress: Cool, welcome aboard and good luck! Wow, I see you love the Asparagus staging! I guess your landers have a tremendous amount of delta-V! Did you check it somehow?

And how many is the part count for the ship at the beginning?

[700NitroXpress]

700NitroXpress: Cool, welcome aboard and good luck! Wow, I see you love the Asparagus staging! I guess your landers have a tremendous amount of delta-V! Did you check it somehow?

And how many is the part count for the ship at the beginning?

Yeah, the landers use regular asparagus staging. However, the transfer stage uses my drop tank to regular asparagus staging. Each one of those landers is capable of achieving orbit of Kerban at 100 km orbit with 50% fuel remaining in the last stage so I'm fairly confident that they'll have more than enough to handle every moon. I've only ever landed on Laythe and Vall, so the others will be interesting.

As for part count of the whole thing, I didn't really check it at the beginning, but it's around 1300 parts and 500 tons total at the start from LKO. After half way through the transfer stage and 1/4 of the way to Jool, which is where I am now. I'm at 1211 parts and 410 tons. So it's getting lighter as I go, but the part count won't reduce by much until after the landings.

I'll get the actual figures for you once I arrive at Jool. Got a 30 minute burn time from the time of this post.

I'm also encouraging my guys taking part in my Versatility Marathon Challenge to go and take on this challenge during the holiday break, I'm seeing a lot of skilled ship designers over there, so I want them to give this challenge a shot with their current ships or make a new one for this challenge. I really like this challenge and I've been meaning to do it for a while, just wasn't sure how long it would take, or what ship design to go with.

Edited December 12, 2013 by 700NitroXpress

[700NitroXpress]

Ziv:

Shouldn't it be 1st, 2nd, 3rd?

Not 1st, 2st, 3st

[700NitroXpress]

Here are my mission updates:

Screenshot 1: Jool Inclination burn

Screenshot 2: Jool Intercept trajectory

Screenshot 3: Dropping one set of drop tanks

Screenshot 4: Arrival at Jool, commencing Laythe inclination burn

[Ziv]

Ups, I corrected the 1st, 2st, 3st, thank you. Wow, I see you got rid of most of your engines!

[SSSPutnik]

My trips not going well. I have left Kerb in SOI OK, but have discovered flaws in ship.

Fuel is not flowing from one of the primary tanks into engines. The engine module is drawing fuel from the other tanks but its creating a weight imbalance.

Worked around it by pumping fuel around.

However, potential killer is nasty wobbles building, which lead to tanks breaking from lander, engines included. (During main Jool burn).

I may be able to nurse it along but its painful.

Other option is to drop the landers now and rendezvous in Jool system with main ship.

Unsure what's causing the wobble, fuels balanced, engine gimbal off. Been playing with SAS but nothing seems to fix it.

Grrrr....

[Ziv]

Jebediah's JOOL-5 mission continues after the Tylo landing... getting to Bop was easy with this little and ultralight lander:

Jeb has decided to skip the redocking to the main ship and went straight to Pol... it takes just 105 m/s:

Still 2815 m/s for landing and getting back... it will be too easy!

Wohoo, you have to look out on this little moon too! Jeb almost hit a huge rock.

Little problem: after landing on Bop with a commander seat and not getting back and putting down the Samples and EVA reports in the Mk1 can, Jebediah's pockets are full so he can't get any more from Pol too... and he doesn't even get a flag to plant! He was a little bit disappointed, but he really enjoyed the view and this special little moon.

Jeb started to sneeze more often, so he decided to leave. He has still more than enough fuel to get back home, so he gladly smiles into the darkness of space. Now it's sure that he has done the JOOL-5 mission!

The last docking back to the main ship. The lander still has 1545 m/s, and the main fuel tanks has some fuel too. More than enough! Let's go home!

Jebediah: hey guys, look what I have found after leaving Jool: it's just 80 m/s to rendezvous with Dres! Hm, I have to visit my old friend on the way home...

KSC: No way Jeb, come home! You may have enough fuel but we can't stand the risk to run out of it...

Jebediah: Don't worry, I'll check the fuel level every time!

KSC: Ahh...

Jebediah: Oh yeah, here it is... this little dark, lonely dwarf. I'm going to let my main ship pass Dres while I land there. This way I don't have to put its weight into orbit and back, so saving a lot of fuel. I will catch up with it after the landing!

KSC: DON'T DO THAT! Your main ship will go far and you will need to sit in your lander for a while to catch it up!

Jebediah: No problem, I will enjoy the stars while getting back! But now, Prepare for the landing!

Jebediah: And here I am. At the side of a big crater, on Dres. After landing on all the Jool's moon... I have to say, I love my job!

the full story: http://imgur.com/a/1EWoP#0

Edited December 13, 2013 by Ziv

[700NitroXpress]

Ups, I corrected the 1st, 2st, 3st, thank you. Wow, I see you got rid of most of your engines!

Yeah, a lot of the engines are gone, but this has more than enough fuel for visiting all of the moons, the return journey is another story. I'm not sure if it will make the trip all the way back to Kerban, but getting to Duna should be no problem so I could put it into orbit around Duna and refuel there, then just head back to Kerban and land on the Runway. We'll see, I don't know how it will react with all of the landers gone. Under that docking shield is another set of engines.

[700NitroXpress]

Ziv: How would you treat an armada mission?

Multiple ships that are all launched into LKO and then all transferred out to Jool at the same time as one mission. Is this kind of thing allowed?

[Ziv]

Hm, hard question, because this challenge is about sending ONE mission to Jool and back (because of funding cuts). So this is about somehow optimizing this mission into one big journey. If you send five separate missions to each moon and back then it's not one mission, even if it's done in the same time. Or, for example, if you would launch one big ship with crew and landers but the Tylo lander will be sent later then it's not really one mission, that would be easier and so it wouldn't be correct against the other contenders if I would accept that. So I should say you have to go to Jool as one ship and come back as one (you can drop the landers and unused stuff before returning, of course).

But on the other hand I created this challenge to encourage people to do this huge mission and to think about the best solutions (for different levels or with science), plan great ships and see how many ways there are, what are good and what are bad... and, at first, to have fun! So if you want to go this way then do it and I can put your name and infos at the Mixed Solution category. Or... put those ships into one!