My illustrated career mode trip to Duna in 0.23 (picture heavy)

[running]

Ok so I've build a base on Duna before. But this time I'm doing career mode and I want my manned mission to Duna to be a succesfull round trip making use of the science lab.

(All stock parts, only "cheat"i've used is F9 and tat was only a few times for the Duna landing and the few times I sped up time to fast and missed burn points)

So first step is to bring a ton of fuel in orbit around Duna and do some science on the way over.:

Next step is to launch a second ton of fuel and hook up the 2 in orbit around Duna so it starts to look like a space station.

Followed by a rocket that brings over the science lab (no crew on board):

So the science lab is docked to the station. (but without a crew it doesn't add much yet.)

Now the tugboat part that brought the lab to Duna is in the way for the lander to attach to later on, so I undocket it from the lander, rotated the space station 180 degrees and docked it again.

At this point the space station is filled to the brink with fuel and everything is set for the crew to arrive:

Of course we do a little flyby of Ike first:

and after a bit of rotating the lander with crew fits on top of the science lab:

Now I sent over the 2 scientists while Jeb stayed behind to fly the lander and they start to work on the science already gathered.

Some experiments are cleaned so we are ready for our trip to Duna itself.

Landing it safely was a bit of a pain as I tried to conserve fuel to much but in the end we got there:

So after some succesfull science it was back to the space station. I forgot to undock the empty science lab before liftoff, so I undocked it during takeoff. It crashed to the ground leaving not a single piece of debris...like I planned it like that.

Arriving at the space station I had to loose some parts of the lander to be able to dock.

After refueling, I undocked the lander and undocked the tugboat that brought over the science lab. I connected the two vessels within 100 meters of the space station and left for Kerbin:

On it's way back I ditched the lander nukes as they where no longer needed.

I parked the tugboat in orbit around Kerbin so it could be refueled and reused in a future missions.

I deorbitted the lander and sent it for a nice dip in the Kerbin oceans:

Bringing back material bay and goo samples from high sun orbit, low Ike orbit, while flyig over Duna and Duna surface among other instruments and ground samples.

In total I got way over 3000 science points out of this. (could be more I didn't keep track of it that well.)

It's interesting how you really feel like comming home from a long trip to a far away place when you arrive back at Kerbin.

[BlackBicycle]

Been there.... And don't call this "career", will you? You have all the stuff unlocked, so this is barely the career...

But your signature kicks ass!! : ) On behalf of my wife and me - thanks for a good laugh : )

[running]

Well actually, I haven't unlocked everything yet, but yes I got the nukes, the main sails and the orange fuel tanks.

So I'm still playing career and science still matters to me.