Eve & Gilly: My biggest undertaking (image heavy)

[Ice30]

Hi! First post around here so i'm not sure who is interested in my accomplishments in KSP but I thought I would post them up anyway! Maybe it will help other kerbonauts

I have been playing KSP for just over a month now and am completely hooked. I been playing in career mode and have visited most planets\moons and unlocked all tech, so I thought it was time for a manned science mission to Eve.

The only mods I have used in this mission are flight engineer, docking struts (I learnt it's impossible to dock large ships together without this as it wobbles to all hell), mechjeb (originally did not want to use mechjeb but had to, you'll see why), scansat and some visual improvement mods.

Ok so here goes.

As my space agency had never actually visited eve or it's moon Gilly before a preliminary feasibility mission was required due to the known conditions of eve's atmosphere and probable gravity. It was assumed that due to Gilly's small size and in turn it's low gravity a survey mission would not be required there as worst case scenario the Gilly mission could be aborted and it wouldn't greatly effect the delta-V required to return home after the mission to Eve. It was also known that Eve's atmosphere is incredibly thick so a high altitude landing site would be very important to avoid the worst of it.

The survey mission would consist of 4 parts:

1. Establishment of 4 polar elevation survey satelites
   
2. Review of elevation data and landing site selection
   
3. Landing of science rover
   
4. Land based selection of landing site for manned mission
   

The science rover would contain two lots of experiments so that the rover could be driven into a shallow part of the ocean and conduct experiments and then drive onto the land (and eventually the high altitude manned landing site) and conduct the rest of the experiments. The experiments would then be left in this state for later retrieval by the manned mission.

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This mission was conducted without mechjeb (which I had never used up to this point) and I found that landing my rover where I wanted it to land manually was practically impossible! (Especially with the visual enhancement mod which made the atmosphere so hazy you could not see where you were going to end up, so I had to turn that off temporarily) I had serious issues trying to land within a few kilometres of where I wanted to. So after this experience I decided to use mechjeb for the manned mission as the landing site I chose was next to some very steep slopes so precision landing was paramount.

After this mission an 87 tonne lander with 8300m/s delta v and high TWR was designed with the help of flight engineer (to easily calculate delta v). The lander uses a large fuel tank to maneuver it away from the interplanetary section and into a landing trajectory. The fuel tank is then ditched when no more\very little burn would be required for landing, which would be taken care of with parachutes. Due to the high gravity on eve many landing gears would be needed to provide a nice cushion to land on. All these landing gears and parachutes would then be ditched at the moment of lift off from eve.

Introducing the Titan 1:

To avoid a monstrous design the Titan 1 booster stage has enough delta V to get into a 100x100 orbit around kerbin (it also ditches all debris back into kerbin as I am already developing some pretty scary conditions at my favorite 100x100 orbit). The interplanetary\return home stage would then be docked with the lander. Another refueling ship would be required to top up the tanks of RCS fuel and a small amount of liquid fuel, this refueling stage would also include a landing attachment for turning the pod used on eve into a gilly lander equipped with experiments and a wide dispersion of 3 landing gears. This attachment would also prove useful for bringing the eve pod (which has no RCS thrusters to save weight) back to the station. The return home ship would be able to bring the eve pod back to kerbin for keepsake (and bonus science points).

Docking interplanetary stage with the Titan 1:

The flight to eve went pretty well, however even with mechjeb the landing on the high point of eve was very difficult as mechjeb kept wanting to do a suicide burn instead of gently using my parachutes which meant that I was still hurtling towards the surface when my parachutes deployed which completely ripped my lander apart. After many reloads I figured out that if I offset my landing location by 5 minutes (in degrees, minutes seconds) away from my desired landing location, turned mechjeb off when I was on target and then deployed my chutes, I ended up pretty spot on to where I actually wanted to be.

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After successfully landing I was like WooHooo!! haha. After that Jeb climbed into the rover and despite mission control's protests he took off down an incredibly steep slope towards the ocean to go for a swim (and an ocean sample).

Jeb tackling some crazy 4wd'ing:

Jeb enthusiastically jumps into the ocean only to realize he hates swimming:

Jeb eventually got bored of hanging around eve and was reminded by mission control he should not spend more than one eve day on the surface (which means due to the rotation of the planet an additional burn would be required for rendezvousing with the station, which was no problem as I still had 1-200 delta V left)

The last couple of photos show the gilly lander converter (or the claw as I call it)

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After that everything was docked back to the interplanetary stage and a burn towards gilly was performed. However this is where I had problems... The interplanetary stage was running low on fuel and did not have enough to retrograde at Gilly. So instead of partially refueling it out of the return home stage (which had a pretty liberal amount of delta v anyway) it was actually more efficient (delta-v wise) to assemble the return home stage, dock the claw onto it (which made it annoyingly lop sided and very hard to fly) and then fly the landing pod, separately, to Gilly. A small amount of fuel (about 80ms worth) was left in the interplanetary stage so that it could retrograde and crash back into eve and the two flights were underway. Due to the pods incredible TWR of about 300 or so the pod was maneuvered to undertake the retro burn first (as I like to start with success ). This worked well and I got the pod into a good orbit around Gilly. The hard part was the lopsided return home stage, which I failed to fully retro at Gilly... However my burn was enough to closely match Gilly's orbit and after several days another intercept with Gilly was made in which I was able to finish the retro burn. This time Bill took the helm and completed a successful mission at Gilly. You can tell how pleased he was:

The mission home was split up into two landings. The pod would be landed first which would be the most dangerous as it has no parachutes and would fully rely on a retroburn (which I would leave to mechjeb since it seemed to so badly want to do it before on eve). All the scientific data was moved to the main return lander as this pod has parachutes and landing gears so I knew that it would return home unscathed. I fired a small retroburn of the main return lander just after intercept with kerbin to delay the lander by about 45 minutes to give me time to perform both landings. Both landings were successful and a whopping 3582 science points were accumulated (not including roughly 4-500 or so worth of transmitted data).

The rest of the screenshots:

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Hope you enjoyed my story!

Edited March 13, 2014 by Ice30

[Vanamonde]

Nice mission, and nice report. I've made some of these reports myself, and know how much work goes into them. Welcome to the forum!

(Oh, and moved to mission reports.)

Edited March 13, 2014 by Vanamonde

[Ice30]

Hm I tried editing my post because the html tags stopped working and now it has disappeared Tried posting the thread again but now awaiting approval.... Help?

[USKnight]

Dear Ice30,

Pretty impressive accomplishments. Eve is a harsh mistress... or so I've heard. My Space Program has not left Kerbin's sphere of influence. Nice pics and a good plan! Oh and welcome to the forums!

[Geschosskopf]

Welcome aboard and WTG! Eve is a big deal and the write-up was great as well.

[Commander Zoom]

Great mission, great post! Congratulations and welcome to the game/the forum!

[Kialar]

Ice30, you really have my greatest respect.

[Scotius]

It's always good to see how others tackled the challenge. And succeeded Congrats for Eve landing and return.

[Brotoro]

Congratulations on conquering Eve!

[Ice30]

Thanks everyone. Since conquering eve I have been trying to make extremely efficient rockets to travel to some of the closer planets. I will post my creations once I have finished!