Yet another Jool 5 tour

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Hey guys,

This is my third round at Jool 5. I wanted to make things a bit different this time, so I've gone for a much more minimal approach. It's not "minimum mass challenge" minimal, but my previous attempts carried tonnes worth of oversized landers taking materials bays to every part of the system.

As always, I play with DRE and FAR, which makes for a much more difficult challenge than is common. Alexmoon will often point out a 3000dv injection at Jool, which most people just aerobrake away. And of course, I'm still running an experimental SSL server to store these.

Here's the launch rocket. Those new lifter modules really do have a huge thrust, with two and a half orange tanks on top of each one, the middle stage of this rocket still doesn't fire on launch.

Through the launch process:

Circularising, just dropped the lifter stage.

Setting up in orbit.

Transfer to Jool.

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I really don't see this game as playable without precisenode. Manouvers like this take a lot of playing around at increments of 1dv.

Here we do a direct injection to Tylo. It's an incredibly lucky intercept. To be honest, I had several goes at this. Just a -+2 prograde soon after leaving Kerbin can make the difference between the 791 capture you see here, and the 3800 capture I planned the first time around.

Capturing. Note the skippers. I really shun the nukes when the rocket is this size. The inaccuracy caused by your ejection burn taking 25 minutes usually ends up costing you more than it saves by the time you correct.

For some reason I don't have a shot of the first stage of the Tylo lander - probably due to the frustration of the many attempts to land here sanely. You can see it on the top of the rocket in previous pictures. Here's the lander. The idea was to use this stage only right before landing.

Unfortunately when that shot was taken, it didn't land with enough fuel. This time it did.

Obligatory.

Back off this rock.

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Detaching the next component. This is what I meant by lightweight - it's an ion driven unit.

In full action. I found this still isn't enough solar panels to fully power the ion engine when out at Jool.

Capture at Bop. These transfers were done much better than I have in previous missions.

The thing about Bop's craters is sometimes it's hard to land in the sun, even when you land in the sun.

Landing flag.

Tiny transfer to Pol.

Despite the low gravity, I came in very hard and bounced. This was mainly pilot error. But things seemed OK so I kept on.

Nope, several legs wouldn't retract after launch and required repair.

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Mothership gets moving. Destination Laythe. The budget was for the skipper stage to last until the start of this burn, so there was room to spare.

This has to be the easiest capture ever. I didn't think this was possible.

Transferring to the lander.

This silly tank was a spacer. Without it, you couldn't EVA from the main capsule because the lander obstructed the exit. Transferred fuel out of it before losing it.

I wish I had a better photo of this. DRE made this landing terrible. The first round hit the atmosphere at over 3km/s, and quickly blew to pieces. I ended up setting the Pe to 35km, and slowing braking into the atmosphere over four different orbits. When it finally came in, it did so almost horizontally and took a long time to slow down.

Problem #2: This ship's drag was low enough that it didn't slow enough safely deploy chutes (DRE remember), until under around 1,500m, which is below the threshold for the drogues to deploy immediately. It took a few tries to make that happen without ripping it to pieces. Of course I could have used the throttle, but there was no dv budgeted for landing.

Landing. I've stopped caring if I land in water. The only way around that on Laythe is to bring a jet and fly where you want.

Bringing it back up.

Coming in for rendezvous.

Done.

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Transfer to Vall.

The entire mothership landed on Vall. I know it violates minimal principles, but the ion lander couldn't get the TWR here, Laythe and Tylo landers had a tiny final stage, and packing another entire lander was uninteresting. I've never tried to land something this heavy though.

This took a lot of tries.

So here's the tip. LOCK SUSPENSION. I never actually used this before. But after about five tries where, even at 4m/s, you would land and then quickly bounce on one side and flip over, I found this gem of an option.

With landing flag.

Getting out of here.

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The final steps, getting our ion lander out to the mothership.

Oh hi.

This was totally unplanned. I didn't look at a planner or really do anything, I just decided to see what would happen if I burnt prograde for a bit, and look, a trip home.

Deadly re-entry is not so deadly when you're just capsule with a heavy heat shield. This is probably the fastest I've ever returned to Kerbin and it did require a pretty exact Pe to do safely.

See what I mean. There's enough science there to unlock half the tree (even though it was nearly complete when this mission started).