Eve Experts?

[SgìobairOg]

Ah there's my problem, forgot the cardinal rule, "check your version".

[OgreMagi]

I went another way, I used the kethane zero by pass turbine and added a small rocket on to it,

did a parachute landing then took off with the kethane zero and push up high into the atmosphere, the used the rocket . worked out well enough.

[Raptor9]

Well, I finally did it. Got a Mk1-2 Command Pod off of the Eve surface, with a little bit of monopropellant left for rendezvous (final stage used four mono engines for one last oomph). Before you all start sending me virtual high-fives, I will admit that a few weeks ago I installed Stock Drag Fix, so that shaved off the last 250 delta-V I needed to complete my gravity burn. Now I just need to finish the design with a few small things like a battery, a few OX-STAT panels, a ladder, etc. Nothing that should cause a significant penalty.

A little summary of what it does, and I apologize if I'm going over stuff that readers may already know. The stock aerodynamics model uses the total mass of the spacecraft to guess-timate a drag cross-section of the ship. The kicker here is that if you have, for example, a spaceplane take off fully-fueled from the KSC runway, it will gradually have a reduction in it's drag coefficient as fuel is burned off. Since fuel (and other resources of the like) adds to total mass, fuel causes drag. The Stock Drag Fix removes internal resource mass from the drag calculation.

Is this a cheat? I'll let you all decide. Until reading the forum post for that fix, I had no idea that a full fuel tank had more drag than an empty one, and that seems absurd to me.

Edited December 6, 2014 by Raptor9