Eve Ascent Mission One (with pictures)

[jBeta]

After a few fun but not so meaningful missions, I decided to try what is probably the most challenging of basic missions in the current game: Eve ascent. I perhaps didn't expect it to be so difficult. I had sent a couple probes to Eve and hadn't researched it on the forums much, because exploration is more fun sometimes. Therefore, this approach might not seem like a mission at first, but I kind of made up the mission as I went.

This is light on the fiction aspect, but more like self documentary. Hey, I don't know what it is, or if it belongs here, but I decided to write it.

After writing this up and getting an idea how much time that took and how much mission I covered, I imagine there will be two more "Parts" after this.

Update: This story/report is in 4 parts (posts.) There are a few craft files at the end of part 4.

Part One:

Chapter One: Try it.

The first thing I did is probably the least realistic thing one would do. I picked a small vehicle that I knew could make a Kerbin ascent, and sent poor Jorski Kerman out to try it on Eve. I did modify it slightly to use the Mk-1 lander can, and added drogue chutes. Now I knew it wouldn't make it, but I wanted to get a feel for the atmosphere. I should have sent it unmanned, but I'm pretty sure those Kerbals can photosynthesize and hibernate indefinitely. This was Eve-4. (Eve 1-3 were unmanned probes)

Upon arrival to Eve, I moved the return pod to the Rockomax stack, and sent the lander down for a test landing. The landing went smoothly but I used more fuel than I had hoped. However, the ascent was not as impressive.

As you can see, it didn't make it very far. From the Wiki page, I knew that landing on a mountain might help. It did quite a bit, but not near enough.

So now I had stranded Jorski on Eve. I began work to build a new vehicle, this time taking some clues from a few forum posts on the subject. Aerospike engines get a lot of praise here, as well as asparagus staging, so I came up with Eve-5's design:

…And it had its own flaws... Actually I did manage to launch it correctly, but it didn't get far. I didn't get a screenshot of that attempt. That was March 31...

Chapter 2: ARM Update!

Just as I began to re-evaluate how much time I was spending on this mission, version .23.5 was released. And Behold: Bigger rockets! "Oh this has got to be a lot easier now!" I thought. So I started incorporating some new parts in my design, subtly at first. Eve-6 was born:

Now if you are looking closely you may notice undeployed chutes and Ronzon on board. It turns out the KSP had enough data at this point to rig up an Eve ascent simulator at KSC, saving the need for long expensive journeys to Eve to test ships. Yep. That's my story, and I'm sticking with it. Still though, not enough:

Note: Most of those objects in the picture above are not actually around Eve, but on Kerbin and other places in the background.

After fiddling with the design and finding no good way to add stages to it without fundamental changes, I decided to throw out the design and start from scratch. This time, I would go big. Really big. Enter Eve-7:

One thing I really liked about the .23.5 update was the LES. I first put one on Eve-7 for posterity, but then realized it made a very convenient way to dispose of my science package when no longer needed. I previously used a method of dropping them from the bottom of the vehicle before landing, or other tricks, but this was a nice way to re-purpose the LES after launch. I would have it also for Eve ascent in theory but wouldn't use it for that, because being stranded there without a return vessel is not much better than a fiery death.

The metal structure on the bottom of the ascent vehicle is my landing structure. It's angled 10 degrees down, but you can't see that here. I didn't put any actual landing legs on it, just used the flex of the metal.

The however-many jumbo-64 tanks are an asparagus heavy lifter that I used for a previous mission. It has 17 Mainsails at its core, and something like 48 Skippers on the rest.

Chapter 3: Manned Mission Two Begins

Having gone through Kerbin based testing, and being utterly convinced that such a large rocket could not possibly fail, the engineers decided to skip the “Eve Simulator.†(What that means is that I wanted to test the entire trip this time with the new design.) Jack and Raymore Kerman were convinced by the engineers and sheer size of this creation, and signed on for the trip (leaving one seat for the return of Jorski of course.)

They launched into orbit, but were forced to use some of their Eve ascent fuel to make it. They would also need fuel for the insertion. Thus the refuelling began.

Again I'd like to note that a better way to plan this mission would have some of these things going in a different order, but this was essentially my first attempt at such a complicated mission. In the future I will try to do things like send the Kerbals last.

As I sent up refueling flights one problem I had was to stow the LES with science package until assembly operations were complete. I sent up a “temporary†docking node to help with this, and also decided to try out the new claw. Yes, it's for catching asteroids, but wow is it useful. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets nerfed in a later version. It serves as a dock-anywhere device, essentially making it a refueling device, and general purpose fix any ship device. I'll have an example of that later. But transferring fuel through it is somewhat questionable.

Meanwhile, at KSC...

The engineers eventually got Eve-7 programmed into the Eve Simulator, (or Eve-ulator as they now called it.) They had focused on launch before, but now they were running landing simulations. (In other words, I decided to send the not yet fully fueled ship to Eve.) My first test landing ended up on water, which was OK for this test. It revealed what could turn out to be a serious design oversight:

Two of my ladders were missing! Well, not missing really, when I quickly realized what had happened. I had ladders pointing both up and down from a decoupler on that central engine. I had not originally planned to lose that decoupler before landing, but I forgot to put a docking clamp in here:

I had actually noticed the lack of docking clamp earlier, in Kerbin orbit. I was originally planning to replace the Mainsails with nuclear engines, but upon noticing that I forgot a docking port there, I just thought “Oh well, I'll use the Mainsails.†That meant that I had to use more fuel, but it seemed better than launching another Eve-7 at the time.

On a side note, you might already see another oversight related to that decoupler:

I added those inner 4 structural panels late in the design to make sure the Kerbals had something to step on under the ladders. They trapped the Mainsail stack like a peg in a hole (or something.) Fortunately, brute force worked to free the spent stage without any damage.

Back to the Eve-ulation. Somehow, this happened. I honestly don't remember why:

Well, whatever, I had to end the Eve-ulation (reload my quicksave in Kerbin orbit) to see if I could salvage this ladder situation. Sure, they could land and just take off, but that means no flag planting or surface samples. Unacceptable. So what could I send up there that will help the situation?

On a side note, at some point I had started deciding to add things to the mission, such as a rover. I was only thinking about ascent before, but really why waste such a huge trip? I also wanted to add a small glider, but had little experience with planes at this point, so that idea was shelved. The rover idea however, presented an opportunity to get around the ladder situation:

I tested it at KSC, but I can't rely on landing on a flat surface, and water would of course make the rover useless. I needed a fallback plan. Something like this perhaps:

Mmmmno.

If I could only attach parts to something already in orbit... Wait... Yes, that's it! Meet the ladder-grabber:

The above is actually the second and more precise mk-2 design. I had already sent the rover-ladder, and ladder-grabber mk-1 to rendezvous with Eve-7, but the latter didn't work so well:

Up went the ladder-grabber mk-2. You can see in this next picture why I think the new grabber/claw maybe makes things a little too easy in some cases. I am starting to get really lazy with my docking skills:

I'm also inadvertently well on my way to assembling a small space station on this thing. A little rearranging things later, and the ladder-grabber mk-2 slides into place:

Jack tests it out:

Yeah, I thought he might be happy about this.

So now I had 2 methods to get Kerbanauts beck on to the ship. The ladder-grabber looked like it had already solved the problem, but I did't know if it would stay attached throughout landing on Eve. But at that point, Eve-7 had been retroffitted, finished it's refueling, and was redy to embark.

Part 2 coming soon...

Edited May 9, 2014 by jBeta

[jBeta]

Part 2:

Chapter 4: Eve-7 Journeys to Eve.

Jack and Raymore were on their way! Hmm... It was a little concerning how fast that full fuel tank was depleting. Speaking of that I just realized there were only 16 Mainsails, as I put half a dozen Rockomax SAS devices in place of the middle one... Anywho...

At some point Raymore suggested jettisoning these Docking clamp probes, as they probably wouldn't need them. The ladder-grabber mk-1, despite its complete failure during testing, was also kept as a 3rd fallback in case of ladder issues and actually can be used to move things around if really necessary.

The journey was uneventful mostly, and they arrived at Eve using aerocapture to settle into a stable orbit. Now I know that I didn't do the math, but I really thought 17.625 full jumbo-64 tanks would be sufficient to deliver the landing craft fully fueled. I guess not.

You may recall that the original plan was to replace them with something more fuel efficient. I did attempt to dock a nuclear tug to the front of Eve-7 at Kerbin and push it, but that whole thing gyrated out of control and flew apart. So, I would have to send fuel to Eve, which would take some time.

Chapter 5: More Fuel, and Expanded Mission

I took this opportunity to change my "mission" parameters once again. I would send an ion powered Gilly lander along for the ride. I needed a place to dock it, and Raymore threw away some adapters which would have worked, so I sent one of those to.

Geez, I might as well be building an Eve Space Station. Here are 2 not so great pictures of the cluster... of stuff.. that was amassing in LEO:

Now back to Jorski, Who had awoken from stasis to hear that Jack and Raymore were in Eve orbit, although at somewhat of an inconvenient inclination. It turns out that he had not actually attempted landing on Eve with Eve-4. That was also a simulation... or.. Ah forget it, I had restored a quicksave after he landed before. The ship he had at his disposal was intended to be his return vessel, and I was still planning on using it thus. The Mk1-2 pod could attach backwards to the engine stack. All that being said, Jorski needed to meet up with the others, and his ship was more maneuverable.

Let me point out something that always happens to me. I always seem to be a docking port short. Sometimes by mistake, sometimes on purpose. Looking at that image of Eve-4, you can see the command module has a docking port, but the lander can does not - it can only disconnect. Same with the science package and the rocket stack. That was on purpose, but it meant that the lander could not dock with anything and refuel (well, except for the claw). That's ok, I decided to move the command module on to the rocket stack in return configuration, and ditch the lander on a suborbital trajectory. The science package was not wasted: Jorski got some Eve orbit readings to return to Kerbin for more science value. (A probe had only transmitted it before)

First the return vessel docked directly to Eve-7:

Then Jorski docked with the refueling ship:

At this point I had realized that I still did not have enough fuel to land a fully fueled Eve-7, let alone return to Kerbin afterwards. In case it isn't obvious, I don't use MechJeb or any other add-ons. I have no idea how much my ships weigh (but I enjoy playing the game that way nonetheless.) So I hope Jorski, and now Jack and Raymore can forgive me.

Chapter 6: More "More Fuel," and Expanded "Expanded Mission"

One more fuel shipment would "probably" have sufficed, but I decided to send two more fuel shipments, along with some more docking nodes, a bunch of RCS, and a mobile processing lab. Yep, I had decided to change the mission parameters again. Since I had half of a space station assembled already, I decided to erect a permenant ESS.

Refuel 1 leaves immediately even though the launch window is months away:

Refuel 2 left months later at a much better opportunity, but Refuel 1 still beat it to Eve. I'll skip ahead of all the refueling to what I ended up with: The fledgeling ESS attached to a fully fueled Eve-7:

And again you can see part of ESS is still "docked" by claw/grabber to a random metal plate. By now though the frame rate was becoming so bad it took me way to long to move things around. I would sort out the ESS later.

The important thing is, they could finally land!

Chapter 7: Landing Two... or One... or Whatever.

Jorski heads over to join Jack and Raymore in Eve-7 for the first time since their rendezvous:

A long painfully boring session of rearranging docked bits and pieces results in the final descent setup. The claw releases the LES that it has been holding since Kerbin (I believe) and heads over to join the new "ESS":

The landing burn was fired just long enough to get in the atmosphere at 90km... One pass showed me that wasn't enough and I bumped it down to 80km. Then I had to restore a quicksave for some reason I can't remember, but I seem to recall dropping something instead of deploying my parachutes.

Anyway, here's the final approach ending up only a few kilometers from that bay:

I had the drogue chutes set for 3 different altitudes 50m apart to be careful, and the regular chutes in 2 sets 50 apart.

It seemed to work nicely, but I still was coming in at about 20 m/s, so I burned the central rocket and got down to about 17. I was worried, but it worked! Eve-7 has landed!

And that seems like a good place to end Part 2. I know, it kind of stinks that the main question is whether it will launch, and I haven't answered that yet. I promise to answer that in part 3.

Edited April 28, 2014 by jBeta
sp

[jBeta]

Part 3:

Chapter 8: Eve's Surface

The crew was excited enough just to finally be staged for the ultimate test of this vessel. There were, however, some other things to do first... Like sciency exloration things.

First the rover had to be deployed. They undocked the regular-to-senior docking adapter from the command pod, and fired the LES. I was surprised how high that LES launched on Eve:

I really like that LES. I tried making one using sepratrons in the past, but it didn't work well and looked ugly.

They deployed the rover's parachute and sparated the LES from the rover. The docking adapter was then decoupled from the rover, and exploded on the surface.

A fling of the Landing gear and the rover righted itself. I really did test some of this stuff, see?

Jorski is given the well-deserved honor of being the first Kerbal on Eve:

"It looks just like in the simulator!" He said.

The others joined him for the requisite team photo:

Ok, enough celebrating... The three of them found it odd that the landing structure was now underground. When they landed, it was not. (I had reloaded the game at some point to find this.) No matter: the landing structure was built with that in mind based on Eve-ulator tests which showed a tendancy for things to "sink" into Eve's surface. (I suspect it's because the "flex" is not stored in the save file.)

Jorski gathered the science experiments and returned to the command pod. Jack and Raymore took the rover and headed for the bay they saw about 5km North. The electric charge remained full for the whole trip. The rover has seven OX-STAT panels.

Raymore collects an ocean sample. I believe it has no seperate science value in game, but that's OK. (Actually it looks like it does have seperate science value, even without official "biomes" for Eve in game. The Wiki article has me a little confused about that.)

It was now time to return to Eve-7... and hopefully to Kerbin.

Chapter 9: Ascension

Jack and Raymore returned to the command pod. They left the rover a safe distance from the ascent vehicle. The ladder-grabber is no longer needed, so they detach it.

Jack pushes up the throttle and fires stage 1. There are four size 3 decouplers that should decouple simultaneously. They don't. The buried landing structure also gets very angry, as it likes its new home.

Long story short: I had to edit the quicksave file to add about 3-4 meters to "hgt" so that the ship would spawn above the surface and settle like it was when it landed. I also had to just hammer away at the space bar until all the decouplers fired and engines ignited. But after a few tries I got a good launch.

Alas, Eve-7 simply couldn't do it. I tried several stagings and can't remember how high I got, but I eventually realized it wasn't near enough. Maybe from a mountain, but that was not an option now.

One of the main problems is the topmopst size-3 tank which was smaller in earlier iterations of this design. That threw off the stage below it, which effectively made me lose a stage. That said, even without that mistake this design just wasn't good enough.

Chapter 10: Eve-8

Ok, I could undo the landing of course, but what fun would that be? Not all was lost. I had at least one thing now that I didn't before: A LOT of fuel on Eve's surface. And a rover. And a semi-useful KSS. OK, three things.

I needed a fuel rover to transfer that fuel to the eventual Eve-8. I started to design that first to see if it would even work.

Here's an early test desgin, and the basic concept of what I would be doing:

Gotta love the part grabber! I must say this is one case where the dock-anywhere idea seems to make sense, except for the fact I can transfer fuel through just about any part I believe. Well, we can just pretend there is a hose there instead.

Having given more thought to Eve-8, I shifted the engineers' attention there. The upper stage was eliminated at first, but later added back as a removable X200-16 tank, with radial Mark 55 engines. I was leaving room to fine tune the upper stage later. I knew I needed more stages so I used the same basic design, but switched to 6-symmetry, essentially adding 2 stages. I also discovered a new feature of .23.5 that wasn't really announced: RGB settings on the Illuminators! Yes, I overdid it. My logic was that the color pattern would help a lot with docking. In later ships I toned it down to a more conservative approach though (red green port and starboard)

I'm also sending a 3 person rover this time, without the ladder. Speaking of ladders, the former design flaw was fixed of course, and I moved the ladder to one of the "middle" tanks. The Mainsail stack was also now attached by clamp-o-tron Sr. and coupld be replaced.

The refueling began again, and the first tanker brang along my "final" design of the fuel rover:

As I sent fuel ships up to LKO, I came up with an idea to replace my aging (and mostly depleated) fuel depot. It had a design that was mostly modular with random ships attached as the storage units. Those ships could in theory be use as tugs for future missions, but I never use them. I modified my Eve-8 design to create my second generation fuel depot "Fuel-X2"

It was mostly empty when it got to Eve-8, but "mostly" means it still brought up about 30k units of fuel. Eventually Eve-8 had enough for the trip, and I was able to mount one of the fuel tankers on the bottom for the journey to Eve. First the fuel rover would depart:

Then later Eve-8:

I can't remember why now (I'm just looking through screenshots to build this story), but the nuclear tug wasn't working out for Eve-8 so at some point I reloaded an old save and ditched it, to use only Eve-8's central engine. 16 LV-N engines have less than half of the thrust of that one KR-2L engine.

The rover arrived at Eve first. I had to land as close as possible to Eve-7, so I looked to the forum for help on that topic. I found a very helpful post here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/37327-Atmospheric-Landing-Charts-Pinpoint-landings%21-NEW-UPDATE-No-Protractor-Required%21?highlight=pinpoint+landing

Uh-oh, it's going to be close...

Whew, it doesn't get much close than that. I actually used RCS to push away from the ocean, and it probably helped. There's a reason I attached that docking adapter to the rover: I had landed once before this and discovered that those large solar panels shatter at a few m/s when deployed. I wanted the few OX-STAT panels on the adapter so that I wouldn't have to worry about running out of power. I later learned that disabling the electric charge on the RGU can save it as a backup for dead probes. I wish I figured that out a long time ago. Very useful.

The rover met up with Eve-7 and took its first load of fuel. Jorski went out to have a look, but then realized that the ladder-grabber had been discarded. It's a good thing that the rover-ladder was still usable.

Eve-8 was now ready to arrive.

This is taking longer than I thought, so the plot will continue in Part 4.

Edited April 30, 2014 by jBeta
sp

[jBeta]

Part 4:

Chapter 11: Infinite Number of Universes

During the review of Eve-7's landing the engineers investigated why the ship landed so much faster than expected, and it was eventually revealed that the mass of fuel was being interpreted as pounds, not kilograms. The result was a lighter simulated vehicle. KSC scientists and engineers were making numerous changes to the Eve-ulator to fix the error. Raymore had also communicated concerns for the newly arrived fuel-rover, which was already showing signs of wheel fatigue from the 5km drive to Eve-7 without even bearing any fuel. He shared his findings with the Eve-ulator techs, and the new simulator physics were tested. Soon their concerns were verified.

That problem was not major, as one of the other rovers could ride along side as an escort to make repairs as needed.

In addition, the flight planners were also plotting revised descent profiles for the mission. It would take up to 10 fuel-rover trips to transfer the fuel, so proximity was important. Unfortunately, the Eve-ulator did not have the CPU power to simulate reliably at closer than 2.5km. A safe separation of 5km was chosen as ideal. Eve-8 was designed to have some breathing room with 36 drogue chutes, and 20 XL parachutes: an increase of 2 and 16 respectively over Eve-7. The new simulations made for a landing at just under 10m/s, which was still within an acceptable range.

The launch simulations however, would create their biggest concern. Launches from a similar altitude as Eve-7 (which is at about 200m ASL) would not quite make it

Eve-8 may have been able to launch from even just 500m higher, but that was irrelevant at this point. The decision was made to have her rendezvous with ESS and store the fuel for later.

Chapter 12: Eve-9 (are you surprised yet?)

Ok, enough retcon. I've been playing this game for 5 months and just this week realized that the little "i"nformation thing on the right or the map screen tells me the total mass of my ship. That would have been good to know... Anyway...

I had realized at this point that I would have had better luck with much smaller fuel tanks and engines, but I had been working on this mission for two weeks already, so a complete redesign of my vehicle was not something I really wanted to do. (I'm sure I will in the future though.) Eve-9 would add 3 similar stages, hopefully filling the gap to make ascent possible. If it didn't work, I would have to start from scratch.

Most of the Eve-ulator techs had been sacked, and the new hires now ironically referred to it as the "Evul8r." Their tests of Eve-9 indicated KSC would have to launch it with the 6 new fuel tanks empty, as the Mainsail/Rockomax heavy lifter was finally at its limit. (Of course I am thinking about a Size 3 replacement core for that eventually, but I don't want to re-invent the wheel while I'm using it.) Achieving Kerbin orbit used 95 percent of its fuel. The behemoth swallowed tankers in LKO with a thirst that was unquenchable. The last of the original Fuel-X depot was spent at this point, sending some of its remaining modules to dock with Fuel-X2. The launch window had arrived before refueling was complete however, so Eve-9 departed with just enough fuel to reach Eve orbit.

KSC was aware that there was still not enough fuel for the return flight, but they wanted to take this opportunity to expand the mission parameters yet again. Meet Eve-Glider-1 (No, I'm not very good with naming ships):

You may recall that I have little experience with planes and gliders, but I happened to stumble upon a forum post about infini-gliders which inspired this design, originally just to fly around Kerbin for fun. The KSC folks wanted to make an ion-powered UAV, but alas I chose to save some time and send this.

The final fuel shipment for Eve-9 also would utilize a new modular fuel tanker design the engineers came up with and just really wanted to try out. One goal was to shorten the burn time away from Kerbin, and another to see how it would maneuver and hold up compared to a series of linear docked ships.

The tanker with glider and its boost stage were launched, and rendezvoused in orbit. The glider made the first launch quite a challenge to steer, but it managed. The assist vehicle had some roll issues as well, but made it nonetheless.

It turned out that the entire capacity of the booster stage was used up just to get out of Kerbin orbit. (Well, it was half empty after refueling the main ship.) A bit disappointing, but I'll definitely try this approach again in the future. It did serve its purpose, and the full refuel tanker with glider was on its way to meet up with Eve-9.

Chapter 13: The Journey Onward

Eve-8 Met up with the ESS to dock. It was a fun session of rearranging many bits and pieces.

Eve-9 arrived some months later, and used aerocapture to achieve an orbit similar to ESS, although off by about 20 degrees. A few orbits later, Eve-9 rendezvoused with ESS. After several docking attempts failed, ladder-grabber Mk-1 was utilized to clamp on wherever possible.

Shortly after, the final fuel shipment arrived and docked at ESS after releasing the glider to land on its own.

The release of the glider did not give it an optimal approach to the Eve-7 landing site, but it was a great opportunity to capture some images of the Eve terrain.

After some time, the glider finally made it and successfully landed close to Eve-7.

Jorski, Jack, and Raymore had used the extra time they had on eve to make modifications to the fuel rover using unessential parts that were laying around. The FL-R1 RCS tank was cut-up to make two more wheels. Some seats were also rigged-up from various structural pieces. Now they could ride along and keep an eye on the wheels. Finally, the leftover OX-STAT panels were mounted on the upper front and back just to make monitoring electric charge less of a concern.

The landing gear was also later converted into ladders when they realized they couldn't reach the seats.

Chapter 13: The Eve-9 Attempt

Eve-9 gathered the Eve-8 rover assembly, and parted with ESS to make its final approach.

Everything went smoothly (ok, the second time) and Eve-9 was coming in a little over 5km from Eve-7.

Success! After landing, the rover was deployed via LES and landed successfully.

The refueling operations began, and the fuel-rover worked like a charm. Meanwhile, Jorski climbed on to the glider to do a little sight-seeing.

The refueling took 9 trips, leaving just a little bit of fuel left over. The crew boarded Eve-9 for what hopefully was their final time seeing so much purple. It was beautiful at first, but it really did start to look grey after a while.

Eve-9 had landed at about 40m ASL, so it was about 160m lower than Eve-7. Oh well, time for launch. Everything was running as planned, and before they knew it, they were out of Eve's atmosphere! But with only the last X200-16 tank left, they still had to achieve orbit. This is where the Evul8r tests always produced the most uncertainty.

Success! Finally the worst of it was over. There was not enough fuel left on the pod to do much, so they waited for a tug from the ESS to arrive.

Chapter 14: Gilly and Home

In their eagerness to get off of Eve, none of the crew thought to wait until the ESS's orbital plane intersected their coordinates. In fact, they chose a terrible time to launch creating a huge inclination difference between ESS and their pod. (I don't know why that didn't occur to me at the time, but I just now realized it from the screenshots. It probably involved beer.) One of the nuclear tugs was sent to pick them up. It used about a third of its remaining fuel to get to them, and there was a questionable amount for return to Kerbin, let alone visit Gilly. The decision was made to return to the ESS and (you guessed it) send another "final" shipment of fuel.

I decided to have the engineers build a new truss for the ESS for some future rearranging. A strange fluke in the launch made it necessary to constantly transfer fuel from one outer tank to the middle to maintain balance. (This was a few days before I discovered a bad stick of RAM in my PC, so it's hard to say what happened)

The shipment arrived at the ESS, and they prepared for the trip to Gilly.

Achieving orbit of Gilly was more like a docking maneuver than anything else. It was quite a strange feeling like a sneeze could send you out of orbit.

Jorski was again given the honor of making the descent.

The ion engine worked nicely. On approach it's kind of difficult to discern exactly what is a hill and what is level. Despite encountering a steep slope, landing was a breeze. He left the SAS on just in case. Science was done, and a photo was taken.

After doing a little sightseeing, it was time to depart. Jorski found that attempting to match orbits with the return vessel was a rather annoying prospect. Making one orbit of the oversized asteroid took way too long for his taste, and since there was still an abundance of Xenon available, he just pointed straight at the ship and hit the gas.

He docked with the return vessel, and they were on their way back to Kerbin at last!

They charted an intercept course and watched the pale blue dot slowly grow brighter until Kerbin was within their grasp.

The return vessel was ditched and the two still connected pods hit the atmosphere. The chutes were apparently already deployed sometime in the past.

I kept the vessels connected to speed up recovery operations. The chutes managed to work without tearing the vessels apart.

And that happy landing was the end of their journey.

Final Thoughts:

I know some people would rather plan an Eve ascent mission more carefully than this, and kudos to you who take that approach. Hopefully some mistakes I made can help someone to avoid them in their own planning. I know that it will help me to do that better in any future Eve missions.

Craft Files:

Although I don't strongly recommend using most of these, here are a few selected crafts from the mission that may be of interest. They are provided as-is with no warranty.

Eve-9:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30669875/Eve-9-4L.craft

Fuel Transfer Vehicle: (Hey, why didn't I call it that before? Oh well)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30669875/Fuel-Rover-5E.craft

IG-type glider:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30669875/small-glider-2.craft

A Fuel Tanker: (with a truss for the Eve Space Station)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30669875/Eve-Fuel-12N.craft

Edited May 9, 2014 by jBeta
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[Zylark]

I'm soon embarking on an Eve mission myself. I know it'll be difficult. Especially since I'm not only bringing a proper lander-can to do it and not "cheating" by using a command seat - I'm also intending to bring a Science Jr pod with a few extra instruments bolted on back into orbit. So far I'm thinking less is more, though I have let myself be inspired by others design.

Here's what I got so far. It'll get to Kerbin Orbit with about 2500 atmospheric dV left over. But I'm thinking it is not quite enough. Initial dV is a bit over 5000 in total (over 6 stages), I'm thinking just to be safe I'll need 7000. Now, the dV readout from Mech-Jeb doesn't take into account the shedding of parts during the ascent, so it is basically a guessing game. What it do get right though is the initial TWR, which is only 1.27. Meaning I'll burn a lot of fuel just getting it up to 200m/s, which will be my speed limit until I hit some thinner atmosphere. No need to introduce more drag than necessary (burning fuel to no use) by going too fast down in the thickest soup of Eve air.

So I'll have to bolt on something to help it with the initial climb. Still thinking a bit about that little detail. I just know I don't want it to grow too big, as I think for Eve it may just be a bit counter-productive. Though of-course, I've never actually landed there before - much less tried to get back to orbit.

Edited April 29, 2014 by Zylark

[jBeta]

...

I just know I don't want it to grow too big, as I think for Eve it may just be a bit counter-productive. Though of-course, I've never actually landed there before - much less tried to get back to orbit.

Yes, absolutely good thinking. I'm not going to spoil the rest of my story quite yet, but I think it's safe to say at this point that it can be done with much less than I am using. It looks like you are planning better than me

Edit: One thing I've realized is this: Kerbin in my opinion has three "stages" to the ascent and they're easy to figure out. Eve has 4 or 5, depending on if you land at sea level or a few thousand meters. I honestly still haven't sorted that out. At any rate, it's just simply more complicated, and since there's no launch pad there, it's hard to experiment.

Edited April 29, 2014 by jBeta

[sdj64]

Hey jBeta, size does not equal delta-V. If you're opposed to using mods or if your mods don't give the correct dV (probably likely given the complexity of staging in most Eve landers), try launching the lander from Kerbin. If you can get it from the ground to an escape trajectory moving at least 7000 m/s or so, you should be good to get it into Eve orbit.

Zylark, your lander looks good but it seems like Mechjeb is not sure about what the actual delta-V is so you might want to try that method as well.

[jBeta]

Wow, 7000? You have given me something very useful that I will have to retroactively test. I so far have used no mods at all. Not that I'm against it, and am looking forward to trying some, but I'm basically just still trying to pwn the core game

[Zylark]

If you can get it from the ground to an escape trajectory moving at least 7000 m/s or so, you should be good to get it into Eve orbit.

Zylark, your lander looks good but it seems like Mechjeb is not sure about what the actual delta-V is so you might want to try that method as well.

It should. Once in orbit moving at a brisk ~2400 m/s it got about 5000 dV left in vacuum. Thing about this lander is, it's part of my career (To the Planets) and part of the challenge of it, is not to cheat but rather plan well ahead and not rely on trial and error. So far it's gone really well. Thanks much in part by input such as yours, reading the forums and wiki and of course plenty of youtube videos.

Sending a lander off to escape trajectory just for the purpose of "simulating" would go against the grain of my career "roleplaying". Though I will test stuff out in the career like a real space program would - one small step at a time, and no-one dies or are left stranded with any luck

Oh, and as for initial lift-off from Eve, I'm thinking about bolting on some Kethane jets once I get them unlocked. Which is pretty soon as my Duna science mission is already returning to Kerbin.

Edited April 29, 2014 by Zylark

[jBeta]

Bump for finishing part 4. Also, sorry it took so long. I didn't have time to finish it for a while, and Part 4 was a bit more difficult to sort-out and really could have been expanded to 5 parts.

[sdj64]

Good job finishing the mission! Cool glider and Gilly lander. The Eve Space Station turned out to be really impressive, even though it's a pile of fuel tankers and old lander designs. It's one of the biggest space stations I've ever seen on KSP.

[jBeta]

Good job finishing the mission! Cool glider and Gilly lander. The Eve Space Station turned out to be really impressive, even though it's a pile of fuel tankers and old lander designs. It's one of the biggest space stations I've ever seen on KSP.

Thanks! I actually started working on a smarter lander for Eve today, but this time I'm not going to rush it. Aside from the landers, I think the ESS is 90 percent RCS tanks I think I'm going to be working on testing new designs around Kerbin for a while though like building a spaceplane that can reach orbit, which still eludes me. I need to read up on that. Maybe it's also time for me to try out some mods.