What was your first flight to Eeloo like? BTW Happy 2014!

[GamerMitch]

As of 6:30 p.m. CST (In the USA) on New Years Eve, I made it to Eeloo for the first time:cool:! When I first got the game, I thought to myself,"I'll never make it to Eeloo, It's too hard!" but after some inspiration from Thor LP's Insane Science Division, I took a shot at it, and it worked. Here is the launch:

Eeloo High Orbit:

Eeloo Low Orbit:

Touchdown!

So, if you've been to Eeloo before, what was it like?

Also, here is the .CRAFT file: http://www./download/1n...bx/APSIS.craft

Make sure to add chutes to the lander as necessary.

Edited January 1, 2014 by GamerMitch

[astropapi1]

He's not coming back, is he?

[JiWint]

In one flight? whoah.

The only way I could trap jeb on eeloo at 0.21 was to dock multiple orange tanks,and a portable engine module

[regex]

Congrats! My first flight to Eeloo was full stock 0.20 and it was quite a hair-raising experience. I used a pretty big tug with eight LV-Ns and four drop tanks pushing a 20-ton lander with two rovers.

[Xarian]

Congrats. Most of my experience is in making hypersonic aircraft and space stations. Can barely make it to Minmus, otherwise.

[Dedjal]

I do not understand how people manage to do so much and go so far on so little fuel.

Ssto's. Half an hour flight before they get into orbit.

How do they manage it!?

My planes run out of juice before I lose sight of the ksc.

My first trip to Eelo, aswell as returning, took orbital assembly of a giant ship.

Lander, return vessel and a little rover, strapped upon 3 orange tanks of fuel.

It still had to refuel on the way back.

Phase angles, time of departure, asparagus thingie etc. All on the paper. I do all those things.

It still eats fuel like an hungry ogre.

I do not use mainsail nor skipper in my designs.

I keep beneath the thermal velocity or what it is called.

I'm almost willing to bet that the amount of fuel that I tend to use for going to the mun and back is what people would normally use on a field trip to Moho.

So seeing the OPs design makes me jealous

well done.

[The Destroyer]

I WAS going to land... but I forgot landing legs on the HOME, and didn't know that the nuclear reactor didn't carry fuel. So it ended up as an orbital station... never been there since.

[Brotoro]

My first flight to Eeloo was back in version 0.18-something

and is written up here.

[InterCity]

Well, my first flight to Eeloo ended in a flaming ball of debris. Luckily it was just a probe lander.

When i finally sent Bill there, I used the KW rocketry mod. For me, it was just two SPS's from the mod (rockomax equivalent to LV-N), one and half orange tank and a 10-ton two stage lander. It was overengineered (delta-v about 9000 m/s at surface) and ugly, but it has done the job. When i was returning , I had enough fuel to land at Mun and safely get home (done this to say "hello" to Jeb and his guys at the Mun kethane mining base).

But that was back in .21, ribbons reseted since that

[Xacktar]

My first, and only, flight to Eeloo was with a tiny Ion probe I had built to reach both it and Moho.

The one to Eeloo had enough fuel left over to land on the surface... even though I didn't bring any landing gear.

Edited January 1, 2014 by Xacktar

[ComradeGoat]

My first Eeloo trip had the lander eaten by a clipping error :-(

[SpaceSphereOfDeath]

My first flight was 0.18.2 it went well and I made it there within 3 hours of the update so I may of been within the first 100 to make it there.

The flight was similar to scott manley's one, just with more thrust and fuel. It was a sucssesfull return and (my still) my fastest areobraking (6.7km/s)

Eeloo fact of the day: it's the only body with no ground scatter at all

[Spatzimaus]

I've only been to Eeloo once, as part of Jeb's Grand Tour back in 0.19:

Those pictures are in order of where I landed, although I actually stopped on Mun twice (once at the start of the trip, and then the midpoint stop as shown in that picture) before returning to Kerbin. The ship shown there, the Nimbus, was a 55-ton Kethane-refining vessel using 12 hybrid ion engines (roughly equivalent to an LV-N) as its primary propulsion. The ability to refuel on the ground was the main factor in being able to land on Moho, Tylo, etc., and I had a network of refueling ships in various spots as well. For Eve it had to tack on an additional module containing Kethane-burning turbines (but it brought that module back up to orbit), but for every other body besides Kerbin it was an SSTO.

As to the original point of this thread? Honestly, I was disappointed in Eeloo. Very little in the way of terrain, no atmosphere, weak gravity... by the time I got there that sort of landing had become very routine. The only real challenge was in matching its orbit, but even that isn't a big deal once you learn to make designs with large delta-V capacities. (My primary spaceplane has a couple ion engines on it so that it can fly straight to Laythe from Kerbin. Making a design that can get to Eeloo just isn't a challenge any more.) On the Grand Tour, going to Eeloo wasn't bad because I headed there from an easy refueling at Pol; the harder part was going from Eeloo back down the well to Gilly, which is why I stopped back in Kerbin's SOI on the way. But even if you don't have a fuel network set up it isn't hard to get there.

It'd be nice if Eeloo gained the cryovolcanoes the developers had talked about, or at least a thin atmosphere, but that may or may not ever happen given that a lot of the talk about moving it to be a moon of a second gas giant revolved around the work of someone who's no longer employed by Squad.

[celem]

Horrible, missed the encounter with a manned mission and didn't notice quite how bad my trajectory was until it was too late to do anything about it in a vaguely fuel-efficient manner. Jeb ended up doing a trip with a total time of 9 years and didnt even score a flyby (though he did flyby the Mun eventually on his return and claimed that was the plan all along. Took the 'very' scenic route.).

Once I got used to intercepting it however it became a fairly simple mission, I tend to try and catch it right as it crosses Jool's orbit to remove as much as possible of the need for an inclination change. (though the direct burn is usually somewhat more expensive). Over-engineered trip #2 to death and had enough spare in the CM to make an unscheduled Dres stop on the way back in. Thankfully I had brought the lander back from eeloo with me rather than ditching it empty in orbit, so we got a touchdown at Dres too.

[Scarecrow88]

Mine went very well, and didn't seem particularly difficult. Straight forward mission that just got the job done as planned.

Slowing down for orbital insertion

Planting the obligatory flag

Leaving for home

I can't remember which version I did that in, possibly 0.19 or 0.20 but I still have the game files and saves from all the earlier versions I have played, and I believe the lander is still orbiting Eeloo in that particular save.

[Scotius]

My first (and only) flight to Eeloo? Lonely, very lonely. Poor Bob spent years and years in the void. He was sent on a very inefficient trajectory going far beyond Eeloo's orbit. Even on max time acceleration things were moving tragically slowly out there. And after getting into orbit his ship was so low on fuel, i've decided to skip the landing - getting rescue mission there would be problematic in case he got stranded. So back to Kerbin he went, and everyone rejoiced

[Epthelyn]

Oddly enough, my first flight to Eeloo could've also been followed by the first return to Kerbin of any landing-on-planet mission (aside from moons). However, I completely ignored all launch windows, got impatient with slowly orbiting Kerbol and ended up using roughly 8km/s dV to get into orbit around Eeloo. I landed successfully with very little fuel left and only found out a couple of days later that actually the rocket was capable of returning to Kerbin if I had been a little more careful.

So far that's the only time my relaxed attitude to efficiency has ever really been a problem

EDIT:

I forgot I had this saved somewhere

August 27th 2013

Edited January 1, 2014 by Epthelyn

[Limit]

My first and last mission to Eeloo was an 8 man interplanetary vessel with a 3 man lander:

The lander turned out to be grossly over engineered, didn't know what to expect with Eeloo

The aerobraking on the return to Kerbin was pretty spectacular

Left the vessel in an 80x80 parking orbit ready for refueling and re-use

Edited January 1, 2014 by Limit

[GamerMitch]

Also, here is the ship file.

http://www./download/1n...bx/APSIS.craft

Have Fun With it!

p.s. make sure you add parachutes as appropriate.

[GamerMitch]

He's not coming back, is he?

no, the APSIS is only 1-way except on Gilly.

[TheDarkStar]

My first trip was just after it was released, and I just sent a relatively small, non-docked ship. I returned with a 5 part ship. It just isn't that hard to get to for me; you just need more fuel and have longer burn times (since you really only need one or two LV-Ns).

[Themohawkninja]

Long, boring and annoying. I had no idea what the phase angle should be and I missed by so much that the mission ended up lasting over 1000 days IIRC... and that was just getting TO Eeloo.

Luckily, it was just an unmanned probe, and therefore wasn't meant to come home.

Haven't been back since.

[Jacob01]

My first trip went quite well. Everything went good, except for some reason the mapper on the probe didn't work. When I got there, I had enough fuel to change from a equatorial orbit, to a polar and back again so I managed to scan Eeloo for Kethane. I just changed the orbit back to equatorial and released the probe. Everything went perfect appart from the mapper.

[RocketPilot573]

I only went to Eeloo once, which was with a probe lander (before rover wheels were added). I did it like an hour after the update came out that added it (0.18.2), and got there on my first try.

[GamerMitch]

I only went to Eeloo once, which was with a probe lander (before rover wheels were added). I did it like an hour after the update came out that added it (0.18.2), and got there on my first try.

Nice! I think I joined in Sept. 2013 which was about .20 or .21 and I had only gone to the Mun(In the demo) so going to any planet for me was crazy at the time.