The mythical Eve ascent

[technion]

Hey guys,

After watching several of the youtubes I put together a goal of an Eve ascent. I've put 12 of the LT-2 landing struts on and worked on a process of quicksave/quickload to land myself on a bit of a mountain. I've run into two problems in this trial run. The first is that my final stage didn't have the power storage to allow me to light up the engine once I got to my apopsis Having fixed that, on to the second issue.

Even landing at 4m/s, the landing struts dig into the ground and take a serious amount of work to get going. I have eight aerospikes and four RT-10 SRB's running at full like for like five seconds before it flips out of the ground and starts actually moving. It feels like it defeats the purpose of these things if they aren't capable of taking a landing at this speed.

To save me two days of flying out there to test it - would wheels resolve this (even if they broke on landing) for this scenario? I can't help but notice that the RoveMax M1 is lighter and has a higher impact tolerance than the legs.

[DrMonte]

You can pull the gear up and then down. This is the way to pull the legs out of the sand if this is the problem.

Also EVA can fix it if it's broken.

[technion]

I like how you said "the gear". I tried this already - using my action group to pop all of them. Aerospikes die if they touch the ground. Why didn't I think of doing this one at a time..

[DrMonte]

I like how you said "the gear". I tried this already - using my action group to pop all of them. Aerospikes die if they touch the ground. Why didn't I think of doing this one at a time..

I say "gear" because the button is called this way. You don't need action group for that - it's 'G'.

[TechnicalK3rbal]

Turn the rockets on.

Then life the gear.

[kahlzun]

The airplane landing wheels were massless in the last version, haven't tested them in this one yet...

[superm18]

use the small gear bay like this:

they don't give way like the landing legs and have much higher impact tolerance

[NoPanShabuShabu]

Another thing you could try is putting your landing legs on radial decouplers and pop them off when the rockets are firing on full. This will also reduce the weight of the ship.

[DrMonte]

Another thing you could try is putting your landing legs on radial decouplers and pop them off when the rockets are firing on full. This will also reduce the weight of the ship.

That is a question to be answered - Does a decouplers weight + leg weight traveled some distance like to Eve or Jool substitute just leg weight + it's ascent from alien planet?

[Traches]

When the regular landing legs don't cut it, just use I beams. They're astoundingly strong; if you hit the ground too hard, your ship will break well before they do.

[NoPanShabuShabu]

That is a question to be answered - Does a decouplers weight + leg weight traveled some distance like to Eve or Jool substitute just leg weight + it's ascent from alien planet?

For any other body than Eve, I wouldn't waste my time with the decouplers. When it comes to Eve though, every kilogram counts. Your kerbals aren't going to get killed because of the loss of DV caused by 0.025T per decoupler going to Eve, but getting off can be a lot tighter.

[NoPanShabuShabu]

When the regular landing legs don't cut it, just use I beams. They're astoundingly strong; if you hit the ground too hard, your ship will break well before they do.

In .21 my Eve ascender got by with 6 LT-2 landing legs just fine. I threw together pretty much the same thing last night in the Suicide Simulator, and it took 24 LT-2 legs now in .22. With 12, they would break and the ship would come apart on the ground. Tried the I-beams a little while ago, and they are a lot better.

[technion]

I say "gear" because the button is called this way. You don't need action group for that - it's 'G'.

I meant specifically the pluralisation. Any time I used the action group ( or the G button, I didn't know about that!), every single one retracted and my aerospikes impaled themselves on the ground. One at a time however - much better. It's so obvious - I'm kicking myself that I never thought of it.

[celem]

It's a useful trick to remember. While it seems most common on Eve (and makes some kinda sense, very massy ship under high G-field on dubious surface), you can sometimes get one or more legs 'stuck' like this on just about any body. I find I'll often get one of the legs stuck in the ground on moons with a lotta slopes.

Leg up/down always clears this, though on low-G worlds you can actually tear it free with a delicate combo of rcs/torque

Good luck with your eve-ascent. Not got this one down yet in .22 as I havent yet unlocked the aerospikes and have no designs for this flight that dont use them