Planning a Jool tour

[Roastduck]

I want to hit each of Jool's moons, in descending order, ending with a triumphant journey into Jool's atmosphere. For this, I calculated that I need roughly 19,000m/s delta-v in total, using http://i.imgur.com/NKZhU57.png]this map. I have my own lifter I'm currently designing, but how would you guys go about sending a 10 ton probe on this mission? I'm anticipating multiple years spent waiting for transfer windows between moons.

This is the probe I'm sending, with a few last-minute modifications:

[JiWint]

just use one mobile processing lab with 1 materials bay and 1 goo canister.And what's that thing at the bottom,above rcs tank?

[Superfluous J]

Mobile lab will kill the 2 kerbals inside when it burns up in Jool's atmosphere.

I'd put the Jr's on decouplers so I could drop 'em one by one as I use 'em up. Or maybe 2 per decoupler.

If you're not planning on landing anywhere, don't bother getting into orbits around the moons You can hit all 5 pretty quickly and fuel-cheaply if you just do flybys.

As to getting it there, just keep adding fuel and boosters until you've got about 1500 dV or so, and then put that all on top of a lifter that can get it into Low Kerbal Orbit (4500-5000 dV)

[KvickFlygarn87]

just use one mobile processing lab with 1 materials bay and 1 goo canister.And what's that thing at the bottom,above rcs tank?

That'd be a KSPI radiator.

[Traches]

By the looks of that dV measurement... You're planning on landing on every single joolian moon, with a single probe? With a 10 ton payload? I won't say it's not gonna happen, but I will say it's going to require a ship so big you'll be looking at a slideshow the whole time.

19,000 m/s dV with enough thrust for Tylo & Laythe will be really hard to do. You'd be much better off sending a single small probe off the main package for each moon.

If you are going to stick with a single ship, you'll have to cut its dry mass down to almost nothing. I'd ditch the goo and material bays, just go with the sooper tiny experiments.

Edited January 3, 2014 by Traches

[celem]

I'd second 5thHorseman's suggestion of decouplers under the jr's. If you go this route then you can weld (regular attach) 1 pod to each sci-jr, since these 1-shot experiments are gonna get used up at the same rate they can be jettisoned together. You already have the 4-symmetry that will work with this; as you flyby each moon you grab a high-space reading, then a low-space one on the opposite sci-jr, transmit them both and jettison the matched pair of experiments before moving to the next moon.

Transfering from stable orbit around each moon means a lot of window calculations and considerably more dV for little benefit (provided you are comfortable setting up the low-space flybys, cant recommend conics mode 0 enough). (Given that you have KSPI im assuming enough dV to do this the long way is readily available; it would just be much faster, ingame time and your time, to grab the readings on flyby) Im assuming no landings are planned since that doesnt seem setup to land on anything but the smallest worlds.

Edit: also, you are like 2 sci-jr's/pods short of optimal as far as i can see. A high/low space read for each moon, assuming no attempt to read laythes atmosphere (since that rarely works in aerobrake, requires sub-orbital trajectory) is 10, then you need 4 for jool, high/low space and high/low atmosphere for the impactor stage. 14 total.

Edited January 3, 2014 by celem

[SRV Ron]

Design a ship that can land probes while doing a flyby. That way you can get science from the probes and a ton of it when you return.

Take advantage of aerobraking and slingshot maneuvers to get your ship to a flyby and drop probes as needed. This updated player designed payload has eight probes and did a direct flight to Jool aerobraking to orbital capture.