A Lasting Presence: Beyond flags and footsteps

[thiosk]

My single most ambitious KSP mission is approaching. A gilly sample return, a lander on eve, a permanent manned orbital space station in eve equatorial, and transfer stage recovery is planned. This is quite exciting! 8 Kerbals are going boldly, and ~5-6 will remain at the new eve station, which will form the core for ongoing efforts culminating in eventual sample return missions.

I stole a few design ideas from the community. Particularly, the transfer stage was taken conceptually from a Bronco Interplanetary Tug design on spaceport. It is so pretty, and it handles like a dream.

Critical notes:

At current payload weight, I've got 930 dV in the ejection stage, and an additional 4000 dV on the transfer stage. The ejection is going to get me pretty close to eve as it stands, without even having to burn the primary stage too much. I've got two more docking ports on the side of the ship, so I can probably launch and dock two more missions. The gilly return and eve probe will probably return enough data to fill out all but the peskiest of my tech tree. I'm considering some additions to the space station, but I don't want to bork the center of mass on the ship and complicate the ejection burn. Dumping all the mass at eve and returning with just the lander and maybe command pod should be pretty easy.

Comments and suggestions for additional missions are requested!

an additional view without annotation

Really proud of this mission. Looking forward to it!

Edited December 2, 2013 by thiosk

[thiosk]

Two successful missions to eve later, we have a functional resupply and staging area in equatorial eve orbit.

The gilly lander was stupidly equipped with bi-coupled pods for extra sample return points. Unfortunately, this made moving it around rather annoying: I can hang it off the side of the transfer stage, where it wobbles to and fro under acceleration. Because i've never gone to gilly before, I built a little transfer stage with plenty of gas on the sidedrop tanks, similarly equipped with a bicoupled twin docking ports. Once I complete my necessary work this evening, my reward will be linking them up and flying for a gilly mission.

I hope I can land the probe, I hear gilly is a source of much *fun*.

Provided it goes off, the lander and the transit stage will rendezvous and head back to eve station to await the launch window.

Edited December 4, 2013 by thiosk

[Galane]

I've tried some landings on Gilly, going there by hyperedit to test landers. It's small, the gravity is light, it's extremely lumpy and it seems as if most of it slopes downhill. If you can't land somewhere "flat" relative to Gilly's center of mass you'll be tumbling (very very slowly) downwards unless your vehicle has a very wide landing gear spread in relation to its height.

Fortunately the light gravity makes it easy to liftoff if your lander starts to fall over.

My recommendation from limited testing experience would be to land only on hilltops or valley bottoms, or use nested telescoping pistons from Infernal Robotics to mount landing legs to so you can extend them way out.

[technion]

Gilly's center of mass you'll be tumbling (very very slowly) downwards unless your vehicle has a very wide landing gear spread in relation to its height.

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I landed on a pretty steep slope, and basically just sat there on one leg until I disabled SAS and allowed the rocket to fall. I didn't have legs, but wide arms the engines sat on.

I don't know if it's just me or a property of Gilly, but I usually assume the navball changes to "surface" near landing, but it had to be done manually on Gilly. Until I figured that out, I kept wondering why my speed was 1.0m/s, yet the ground would come crashing to me and destroy the rocket.