Voyajool - 600 ton mission to Jool&friends

[vencaslac]

Hello everyone, I'm Kirk and I'd like to give you guys a little sneak peak of an upcoming series of a mission to Jool called Voyajool. It is a sequel to my previous

.

Here are a few shots of the ship I'm planning to use and the stats associated with it:

As you can tell it's quite large and as a result, quite laggy indeed.

The mission plan:

1) Perform a multi orbit Kerbin escape

2) Perform Hohmann transfer to the Jool system and necessary mid course corrections / discard any empty fuel tanks to conserve mass

3) Perform aerocapture at Jool and leave one probe in a polar orbit around the planet itself

4) Put the ship in a parking orbit around Laythe where I can either:

a) Launch the plane on a recon mission to find a suitable landing site followed by the large lander reconfigured to piggy back the single seat rover

Reconfigure a drive unit with additional fuel and the small lander to visit the outer moons first

5) Put one probe in a preferably polar elliptical orbit around each body (to facilitate both close in and far out data capture)

6) Land on each body and retrieve surface samples and return to mothership

7) Reconfigure the ship for a return voyage

8) Return to LKO and land both landers at KSC to recover data.

Ship features:

6 Xenon probes equiped with scientific equipment

Fully modular design that can be reconfigured to meet mission specific goals

2 Manned landers, one for high gravity moons and planets and one for lower (Munlike and below) gravity moons

2 Completely detachable and autonomous quadnuke drive units

11 fully autonomous fuel tanks capable of performing on orbit assembly of the ship - each tank can store 4000 units of electric charge giving it more than adequate operating autonomy.

1 fully autonomous payload deorbiting unit capable not only of this task but also remote randez-vous and recovery of on orbit assets that are either stranded or damaged.

1 Manned exploration rover designed specifically with Laythe in mind but which may be usable on low gravity moons where the onboard RCS is able to comfortably lift it off the ground.

The build took 22 launches all together not including refueling which is under way and may take one or two additional launches. I'll be taking the fantastic three to Jool. Docking some of the parts was a real challenge (especially the probes) and magnet wobble has caused the small lander to clip into the large one... It will hopefully not tear itself and the ship to shreds when detached... That would be bad .

Thanks for checking out this thread and make sure to keep an eye on it in the next few days as I'll be updating it as the episodes are released.

Edited November 16, 2013 by vencaslac