Orbit altitude for dropping off a lander for Gilly?

[Galane]

When entering the Eve/Gilly system I want to drop off a lander into an Eve orbit from which it can most easily reach Gilly. It won't have the fuel to get out there from low Eve orbit so I'll need to drop it out far enough then lower the main ship's orbit down so I can drop a lander and rover onto Eve.

Later I'll take the main ship and the recovered lander can back out to Gilly to refuel with the lander left out there for the trip back to Kerbin.

Is there a way to alter the warp altitude limit for Gilly? What's the minimum altitude around Gilly that can be made without hitting anything, in any inclination?

[Kasuha]

Highest elevation on Gilly is 6400 m so any orbit above that should be safe. I'd make it 10 km.

About the most efficient approach is to:

- adjust your intercept trajectory so it has periapsis low above Eve's equator

- brake or aerobrake on Eve into an elliptic orbit that has apoapsis on level of Gilly's apoapsis (~50,000 km). Make sure this apoapsis is approximately in Gilly's orbital plane

- coast to that apoapsis and either leave your lander there to raise the periapsis and catch up with Gilly (about 300 m/s dv needed) or perform that maneuver with the ship, intercept Gilly, and release the lander within Gilly's SOI

[capi3101]

I'd follow Kashua's advice. I will only add that if it's your first time out to Gilly, you should know that it's a really small target - its SOI is just over 125 kilometers across, so your burn is going to have to be pretty precise if you want to get the intercept - there won't be much separation between colliding with Gilly and missing it completely. Don't want to make you nervous or anything, just a friendly head's up.

[Geschosskopf]

I'd follow Kashua's advice. I will only add that if it's your first time out to Gilly, you should know that it's a really small target - its SOI is just over 125 kilometers across, so your burn is going to have to be pretty precise if you want to get the intercept - there won't be much separation between colliding with Gilly and missing it completely. Don't want to make you nervous or anything, just a friendly head's up.

I'd also add that any Gilly lander should have 4-6 "place anywhere" RCS jets pointing up from the top surface, and enough monopopellant to run them for a while. All velocities within Gilly's tiny SOI are so low that you can literally die of old age waiting for your lander to fall to Gilly's surface. Having vertical RCS jets to push you toward the ground therefore recommended. In the alternative, you can point the lander towards the ground and thrust that way with the main engine. Your choice.

[cantab]

Eh, landing on Gilly conventionally isn't *that* time-consuming. No need to rush things, but a mod showing surface altitude helps as it does everywhere so you know when to brake.

[Eric S]

I'd follow Kashua's advice. I will only add that if it's your first time out to Gilly, you should know that it's a really small target - its SOI is just over 125 kilometers across, so your burn is going to have to be pretty precise if you want to get the intercept - there won't be much separation between colliding with Gilly and missing it completely. Don't want to make you nervous or anything, just a friendly head's up.

Another heads up, you don't land on Gilly so much as dock with it. I'll second the idea of making sure you have RCS on the craft, though I've never seen much point to the linear RCS thruster and just use quads.

[Galane]

I've done plenty of testing around Eve and Gilly using hyperedit and have flown the return ship from Eve to Kerbin. With the changes in .24.x and some mods I'm having to do some redesign before I do the full mission "for real".

It took a rather large number of attempts to come up with an Eve lander that could return two Kerbals inna can back to orbit. I may have to do more work on it to be able to get the crew down on ladders instead of using a KAS winch.