Stuck in orbit with a messy ship

[James_Eh]

So, I have assembled a mess in orbit and can't decide where to go. It's all un-Kerballed so I can F5 and rethink things, but...

Possible targets are: Leythe, Eve, or Duna.

Standard 3-orange tank drive section. Attached to the tank in the left of the picture is what I saw as an Eve land/return vehicle. On the right side is a rover with a hitchhiker attached (poodle for landing where parachutes don't cut it). Plan was to land the rover, fool around, then land the ascent craft, climb the ladder and sit in the command seats, and come back to the drive section.

But now I'm scared. I don't want to go back to Laythe, I just spent forever fighting with Jool/Tylo to bring that crew home. I don't think the ascent craft has enough oomph to get home from Eve. And if I go to Duna, I will crash into Ike. Guaranteed.

And now, just because I looked carefully at this post before hitting "Post", I have realized (dammit) that there will be nowhere for the Kerbonauts to return to, except for their command seats, and since I don't think they should fly millions of KM in little seats, I have to revert YET AGAIN and stick a capsule onto the main orange tank. Maybe this should have gone into the thread about "Why I hate KSP."

[Specialist290]

And now, just because I looked carefully at this post before hitting "Post", I have realized (dammit) that there will be nowhere for the Kerbonauts to return to, except for their command seats, and since I don't think they should fly millions of KM in little seats, I have to revert YET AGAIN and stick a capsule onto the main orange tank.

It's always the little things...

Anyway, once you've gotten the bugs worked out of the design, let us know how the mission itself goes

[Brotoro]

After all that work putting this into orbit, you could just send up a capsule module to dock onto that center Senior docking port. Much cheaper.

[James_Eh]

Redesigned as per discussions above. Then worried about the lateral forces on the large docking clamps for the whole flight to Duna, but with the exception of one RCS thruster inexplicably floating off into the void, all went well. (MechJeb was no help for the burns though. Too much steering correction = flexing all over the place. Had to do all burns manually. Time warp during burn also generated a floppy craft. Bit of a long afternoon... This is my definition of a sub-standard design - if you can't hand off control to the computer, you have improvements to make.)

Anyhooo, it was apres-Superbowl as we approached Duna. Did the gentlest aerobrake I could figure that would leave me inside Ike orbit, because I had no faith that the craft wasn't going to break into 3 separate flaming bits. (In case anybody is wondering, the rover is intentionally huge and heavy to balance the other docked craft.)

Suddenly I realized that it looked like I had the BEST EVER rocket-powered rover that I could possibly land all in one piece on Duna. I imagined speeds of 200 m/s and more. Never mind all of this separating and dropping stuff, we'd go in all at once !!!!

Then Ike loomed over the horizon and scared me sober. I shook off the Superbowl-induced silliness, and detached the rover and landed safely. We are now tootling about at 14 m/s looking for a flat spot for the other half to come down.

Grrr can't make picture appear!

Edited February 4, 2014 by James_Eh
Picture not appearing

[James_Eh]

[technion]

. Attached to the tank in the left of the picture is what I saw as an Eve land/return vehicle.

If you're referring to that small thing with turbojets - no. Jets don't work on Eve.