Interstellar Tylo trip

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Hey guys,

This mission involves landing a large spacestation on Tylo. The goal was to land with as little fuel as possible, then use a refinery to refuel an aluminium booster to re-establish orbit.

As always, I host on an experimental server. Users may have an even more interesting time accessing my images because I've reduced AES support and configured preference for more secure ciphers - feedback welcome on the viewing experience.

This mission is a great example of Interstellar providing gameplay options, which are significantly more difficult than stock. It sounds overpowered to perform a kethane-like refuel on a planet, however, the aluminium hybrid rocket has an ISP that's absolutely terrible (286 VAC) and has a dry weight of 3 tonne (17 full, where, attached to a lander can, a single one still didn't provide enough dv to return to orbit from Tylo). Then I had the weight of the refinery. In short, it would have been far easier to land a small tank and a 47-8S to achieve the same mission.

Here's the rocket that left Kerbal. Note the absolutely terrible aerodynamics of the refinery.

Trying to launch with FAR without flipping the rocket was an exercise in hilarity.

Detaching the launch stage. We also needed to perform an EVA to shutdown the reactor.

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Here's the tug we used. It takes a lot of fuel and thrust to move this much of a rocket to Tylo.

Just enough fuel to orbit. Trying to turn this thing is terrible. I should have added far more monoprop control rockets.

Transfer to Jool couldn't be better.

The transport docket with the lander ready to transfer.

Took a lot of fiddling but we arranged a direct Tylo injection. Note, the major thing here is that we couldn't cheaply direct inject to Jool or Laythe due to DRE.

Wow that's the cheapest capture I could ever imagine after a direct transfer from Kerbin. Alexmoon told me to expect to burn 1300+.

Capture.

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Time to engage the fission reactor. We've configured it to use the higher powered, short lived ThF4 fuel.

The transport can start the deorbit process.

Here we use the efficient thermal rocket nozzle, with the inefficient aluminium booster to bring in a safe landing. Honestly with the weight of these things, tests demonstrated the rocket was a lot easier to land without them. But that didn't satisfy the reborbit objective.

Touching down with literally no fuel left in the top stage.

We separated one of these proves and sent it up north to run a seismic probe.

And a second one went south.

Finally, the third probe went up and straight down to generate an impact event.

It creates plenty of science for both probes.

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This bug is highly annoying. I can't access the bottom of the window for the ISRU refinery. It takes a lot of circling around to get to the top one pixel of the tabs to start mining alumina. Here we refuel the top boosters.

Obligatory shot.

This jetpack from the Kerbalquest mod was supposed to be my ticket back to the rocket. I did a few seconds of testing on Kerbin and concluded it was hard but should be fine. After nearly two hours of trying to get back into the rocket, I've concluded instead that this mod is simply bugged to all hell and isn't a feasible alternative to ladders.

If I stuffed up and didn't test a ladder, I would write it off as my fault and start again. Really though, if this mod allowed a Kerbal to fly straight up, as opposed to straight under the ground and bringing on blackscreen crashes, we'd be fine. So, I used hack gravity as a way out and don't feel bad about it.

Finally, this is the return to orbit. Incredibly difficult to steer, overly heavy, the two boosters separate the lander can for reorbit. One kerbal stayed behind on a permanent space station.

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Finally, here comes the rescue rocket. Its transfer stage uses an interstellar methane powered engine.

Another somehow perfect transfer.

That's one expensive capture though

Sitting in orbit after working through a rendezvous. You can see we not only used the entire methane tank, but half of the command module, which I planned to return with.

Somehow I didn't take any further screenshots, but after transferring our kerbal, the command module had roughly 2800dv, and transferred home in a single burn from Tylo.

[Tangle]

Tylo by way of Alpha Centauri?

Heh.

Well done!