Jool 5 - First Tylo landing achieved!

[sedativechunk]

So I am attempting the "Jool 5 challenge", right now I am doing a trial run and if all goes well I am going to redo the entire challenge on a live Twitch stream. Anyway I had a textbook mission so far to Jool and Laythe landing, and now I attempted Tylo. Since playing this game religiously since May of this year, I've crashed every ship sent to Tylo until today! I built a craft using the ALCOR lander (although the rast prop monitors bugged out for some reason this made it difficult to tell my radar altitude) but everything else went fine. I created the ship using five poodle engines with ejectable fuel tanks to lower mass for the landing on this gravitational monster of a moon. I did a test flight on the Mun just to see how the ship maneuvered. It's a little slugish maneuvering at first but with the fuel tanks ejected one by one the ship runs great. There is about 1/3 of fuel left in the outer tanks right now and the ship is now landed on Tylo! The ship is also going to be reused on Vall, Bop, and Pol using the central poodle engine. Feremone Kerman and Edlu Kerman have stepped foot on Tylo today!

[Xavven]

Congratulations!

[Stratzenblitz75]

Congrats on the Tylo landing! It certainly is tough celestial body to conquer.

Although, this should probably go in the mission reports rather than the general discussions.

[JebNeedsHelp]

Nice! I still haven't made a Tylo landing which kept the whole ship intact....

[Brotoro]

Congrats on conquering Tylo. Have some kerbal snacks.

[NecroBones]

Congrats! Yeah, Tylo is a little unforgiving. I found that if I accidentally cut my engines to zero (hit the wrong key), the lander starts falling pretty quickly, since it's 0.8G at the surface. Throttle control is key!

[Cmdr. Arn1e]

Congrats

But be prepared for a mod to move this to the aforementioned Mission Reports sub-forum

[KerikBalm]

I recently did a tylo landing.

I'm doing a Jool-*4* mission, so its going to be a lot easier.

Laythe is getting its own dedicated long term mission and fuel depots.

Originally, I was thinking of doing a fuel depot around tylo and a SSTO lander (as I've done for Mun, Minmus, Eve, Laythe, and Moho -> though moho's fuel depot doesn't contain much fuel), and was designing a SSTO lander.

I then decided that I was just doing the same mission profile over and over again, and I decided to try for Jool-4... still I'd never done such a landing, so I first tested the single stage lander (that would have similar stats to my staging lander for Jool-4)

I budgeted something like 5,000 m/s, or maybe 4,900 -> somewhere around there, for the mission -> text edited it into tylo orbit, and tried (note, my aerospikes are modded to produce 200 thrust, not 175, but max thrust wasn't needed anyway).

the first landing attempt worked, I momentarily over did it with throttle, slowing my descent to a mere 7 m/s while still too high.

I did end up with less dV to spare than I had hoped:

[Duban]

I recently did a tylo landing.

I'm doing a Jool-*4* mission, so its going to be a lot easier.

Laythe is getting its own dedicated long term mission and fuel depots.

Originally, I was thinking of doing a fuel depot around tylo and a SSTO lander (as I've done for Mun, Minmus, Eve, Laythe, and Moho -> though moho's fuel depot doesn't contain much fuel), and was designing a SSTO lander.

I then decided that I was just doing the same mission profile over and over again, and I decided to try for Jool-4... still I'd never done such a landing, so I first tested the single stage lander (that would have similar stats to my staging lander for Jool-4)

I budgeted something like 5,000 m/s, or maybe 4,900 -> somewhere around there, for the mission -> text edited it into tylo orbit, and tried (note, my aerospikes are modded to produce 200 thrust, not 175, but max thrust wasn't needed anyway).

the first landing attempt worked, I momentarily over did it with throttle, slowing my descent to a mere 7 m/s while still too high.

I did end up with less dV to spare than I had hoped:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xap1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/10644428_10103065172726113_3016715501731693213_n.jpg?oh=b69c0c001ce3ced7a29d5b9c150cdd5a&oe=54B9F822&__gda__=1425031065_a7e0cde00ef1d4666ba053e62500fe37

Nice job doing one of the hardest missions out there. You would probably be better off using rockomax 48-7Ses for the engines than the heavier LV-909s. Their low mass and high TWR is amazing, especially for missions like Tylo.

Here is my last Tylo landing (extremely light weight). Maybe it can give you a few ideas on how to improve your lander.

http://imgur.com/a/tiydy

Edited October 26, 2014 by Duban

[sedativechunk]

An update I have escaped Tylo successfully and I now did a successful landing on Vall using my re-usable lander with the extra fuel tanks expended. Next will be Bop and Pol, and hopefully I will have enough fuel to return home afterwards! I still probably have at least 15,000 tons of fuel on board, but most of my expendable fuel tanks on my main carrier are gone.

As far as Tylo goes, I built a ship capable of roughly 7,000 m/s capability of Delta V. This was based off the numbers Scott Manley's lander had. Now, let's talk engines. Duban, you were mentioning the Rockomax 48-7. That is a great design you came up with. That is personally one of my favorite engines in the game and I built my mun lander out of that as well as a few others. With that being said, I had many concerns over using that particular engine for Tylo. I'm not a math guru, but I did some calculations. Descent on a curve starting from 24k kilometers above the surface starting at a speed of roughly 2,200 m/s in orbit, I was afraid that those tiny rockomax engines would not slow down enough by the time I needed to land at an altitude of at least 2,000 meters above sea level. I went with the next tier in terms of ISP efficient engines, the Poodle engines. I built and tested my lander on Kerbin. I figured because the gravitational force is very similar, if Kerbin worked out then Tylo should, and the Poodle engines seemed most efficient. Not to mention, a long time ago I built a skycrane that dropped a manned rover on Moho similar to the curiosity rover out of four poodle engines.

The rockomax is an interesting idea, perhaps I will try that for the next design. As part of the challenge however, I wanted to bring as much science with me including a goo container and science module, so that might make it more difficult with a rockomax engine.

[Cmdr. Arn1e]

Been working on the same thing, should be testing my Tylo lander today, will post my findings