Post and Discuss Your Kerbol Grand Tours Here!

[Thunderous Echo]

KERBOL GRAND TOURS

ANY MISSION TO EVERY PLANET

This is a thread for all people who have landed on every celestial body in the game in one mission (except Jool and Sun-Kerbol, of course). Everybody plays by different rules, so post anything you think qualifies.

I did not realize I had to say this, but please post only this type of missions, not flyby tours.

Also, please only stock or stockalike tours, warp drives and kethane hopping are not quite the spirit of this thread.

Rep will be distributed.

Also, should you want a badge to commemorate your efforts, please visit this generally accepted badge system: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/25188-Planet-Ribbons-Redux

Edited December 9, 2014 by Thunderous Echo

[StevenLawyer]

I've made a single launch stock grand tour ship capable of putting Jeb or Bill down and back up from every single landable planet, including Eve, all without any refuel or support launches. All landings and re-ascents can be done in capsule and include a rover for exploring while on the planet. Except for Eve, which has an asparagus staging one time use ship, all other bodies are landed on using the same re-usable lander with dockable (and re-usable) rover. The mother ship also has six unmanned reusable probes with mini-rovers. I've finished the grand-tour mission with fuel to spare.

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[Pecan]

Should be in Mission Reports, no?

Edit for below: fair enough, just a suggestion. Carry on having fun :-)

Edited December 8, 2014 by Pecan

[Thunderous Echo]

I've made a single launch stock grand tour ship capable of putting Jeb or Bill down and back up from every single landable planet, including Eve, all without any refuel or support launches. All landings and re-ascents can be done in capsule and include a rover for exploring while on the planet. Except for Eve, which has an asparagus staging one time use ship, all other bodies are landed on using the same re-usable lander with dockable (and re-usable) rover. The mother ship also has six unmanned reusable probes with mini-rovers. I've finished the grand-tour mission with fuel to spare.

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Yes, I've been watching your tour! It looks great so far, your style is unique, and I look forward to seeing the rest!

[Thunderous Echo]

Should be in Mission Reports, no?

Well, in Mission Reports, you start a thread to show off your mission. This is more of a communal thing.

[Thunderous Echo]

Anyway, here's my Grand Tour:

ECHO'S KERBOL GRAND TOUR

(Ultimate Jool-5 Jebediah's Level + Grand Tour + 17 Reddit Weekly Challenges)

[Spatzimaus]

Since you asked nicely, here was mine from back in 0.21:

(The images are in the order I landed on each body. I landed on Mun twice, once at the very start and then once in the middle as a refueling stop between Eeloo and Gilly.)

The vessel in question is the Nimbus, Jeb's personal vessel:

Basically, it's a flexible exploration design with an onboard Kethane refinery and drill. On most bodies I just needed to land on a Kethane deposit, which made places like Tylo a lot more manageable as you could use almost all your fuel descending, refuel on the ground, use almost all getting back to orbit, and then refuel there from an orbital depot. (The flip side is that sort of precision landing is NOT easy on bodies with an atmosphere, especially with most Kethane deposits on Laythe being in the water.)

It's not quite an SSTO, as it couldn't escape from Kerbin or Eve without booster stages. For Eve, it docked with a custom bottom stage using its lower 2.5m docking port and some quantum struts, but for all of the other moons it was fully capable as-is.

I'm making a much better version of the Nimbus in 0.25, but it's frankly not that necessary for a simple reason: most of the bodies are pretty darn boring. Once you've been to a place like Tylo at least once, there's not a whole lot of reason to want to go back. It doesn't have biomes, oceans, atmospheres, or even interesting canyons and mountains unless you're using one of the mods that remakes the various bodies.

Also, I've been doing a lot more with spaceplanes and rovers, because they're just more fun to use. So it might be a while before I repeat that journey.

Edited December 8, 2014 by Spatzimaus

[magnemoe]

An grand tour with kethane is much easier than an normal one, if you make your lander and miner so it has 3.5km/s dV and an TWR of 1.2 or higher you can use it everywhere except Eve. Its mostly an issue of having enough engines as you want decent fuel tanks to refuel the main ship, did that back in 0.18

An mission without kethane tend to be big, I made an 100 ton grand tour, 666 ton on pad. This used rover seats on all landers, even just ladders on Eve, Moho and Tylo lander.

It also used an stage who went from Duna to Tylo via Laythe while the main ship went to Ike, then to Dress, Layte where the first stage dropped an lander, met the first stage and transfered fuel and landed on Tylo. An seperate ion stage for Moho with an separate lander,

[cantab]

Landing? No. But I did send this little guy on a multi-flyby mission past every planet plus the Mun and Ike. Thirteen gravity assists over 35 Earth years. Its near-twin missed out on the Mun and Eeloo, but instead impacted the Sun.

(Ignore delta-V figure, I used a docking port instead of a decoupler so it's miscalculated, the true delta-V is just over 8000 m/s.)

[Stratzenblitz75]

What is this!? A place to discuss grand tours? Yes please! There has been a distinctive lack of threads to discuss this kind of achievement.

Well anyways, I have these two, both were done in stock + KER:

My first grand tour was the Sigma Mission. I only wanted to land on each body so I didn't take any science with me. I basically strapped an Ion powered chair, a chemical powered chair, and an asparagus powered chair (LOL) to an LV-N powered core. Once in orbit, the vessel was 36 tons. Only the Ion chair and Jeb returned home:

Javascript is disabled. View full album

My second grand tour and my largest one was the Outer Wilds Mission. This time, I took 5 Kerbals with me and science equipment so that I could qualify for the Jool-5 challenge-Jeb's Level. Similar deal as before, except this time I had two main landers (One chemical powered chair, and one asparagus powered chair/rover for Eve) and some science experiments. I returned the 5 Kerbals and the science lab back to Kerbin after 33 years in space:

Javascript is disabled. View full album

This was the grand tour that made me hate science in KSP.

My third grand tour was the... Oh wait, I'm not supposed to talk about that one...

Now, I just realized, I forgot to give Thunderous Echo and kookoo_gr rep for their grand tours! Let me fix that...

[Overfloater]

A while ago I launched this pile of poo:

It works same as my Jool 5 mission, just with MOAR BOOSTERS & an extra lander.

So far I did Laythe & Vall, been procrastinating for 2 months now.

How do people have motivation to do such mission more than once?

[LABHOUSE]

A while ago I launched this pile of poo:

http://i.imgur.com/LVEmCxO.jpg

It works same as my Jool 5 mission, just with MOAR BOOSTERS & an extra lander.

So far I did Laythe & Vall, been procrastinating for 2 months now.

How do people have motivation to do such mission more than once?

Looks like my 6500 delta v ssto. How much delta v does it have?

[Thunderous Echo]

Landing? No. But I did send this little guy on a multi-flyby mission past every planet plus the Mun and Ike. Thirteen gravity assists over 35 Earth years. Its near-twin missed out on the Mun and Eeloo, but instead impacted the Sun.

(Ignore delta-V figure, I used a docking port instead of a decoupler so it's miscalculated, the true delta-V is just over 8000 m/s.)

Cantab, I hate to spoil your fun, but this is a Grand Tour thread. Please do not post this kind of mission here.

Edited December 8, 2014 by Thunderous Echo

[Thunderous Echo]

Wow! Was not expecting so many tours! StevenLawyer, Stratzenblitz75, Overfloater, and Spatzimaus, tank you for submitting!

Stratzenblitz, TWO *cough cough* three *cough cough* Grand Tours? Amazing! I've had to take a couple ideas for myself, for my eventual (possible) low-mass grand tour. (Wink.)

Overfloater, it looks good so far! I saw the original Jool-5, and am a loyal and long-time subscriber, so I have faith in you!

(Nice Tylo lander, I could not have thought of something so cheap and reusable).

Spatzimaus, I've always wanted to try a kethane-hopping mission like that, so thanks for proving it possible!

(Unfortunately, as this is not the spirit of the thread, I have had to change the opening to this thread. Sorry, but this is really about the joy of planning and manipulating).

But, for those who only posted the first parts of your tours, this thread has enough room for you to put in the whole thing! Post away!

Edited December 8, 2014 by Thunderous Echo

[Spatzimaus]

(Unfortunately, as this is not the spirit of the thread, I have had to change the opening to this thread. Sorry, but this is really about the joy of planning and manipulating).

The "spirit of the thread"? This was a thread to post Grand Tours, NOT only missions that fit your personal idea of what a tour is. Go read the "How would you define a Grand Tour?" thread (also on the front page) and you'll see that you're in the minority on what is and isn't allowed. Especially since all real-world concepts for manned multibody missions include on-site refueling, of course.

So if you're going to start "disqualifying" anyone whose missions don't fit your personal template, it's not enough to change the first post; you should also change the title of the thread, because it's no longer a Grand Tour thread.

[Thunderous Echo]

The "spirit of the thread"? This was a thread to post Grand Tours, NOT only missions that fit your personal idea of what a tour is. Go read the "How would you define a Grand Tour?" thread (also on the front page) and you'll see that you're in the minority on what is and isn't allowed. Especially since all real-world concepts for manned multibody missions include on-site refueling, of course.

So if you're going to start "disqualifying" anyone whose missions don't fit your personal template, it's not enough to change the first post; you should also change the title of the thread, because it's no longer a Grand Tour thread.

I read the "How would you define a Grand Tour?" thread before starting this one.

I would change the title, but the forums won't let me. I would hope, though, that people would read the thread starter before posting.

I apologize if I have angered you, but I did not realize what I had to specify.

[Thunderous Echo]

I have had an epiphany.

Complicated missions (such as Grand Tours) are often confusing when represented in Imgur albums or YouTube videos, so I have created a new system to represent "What you did"

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/102508-How-to-show-What-you-did-Mission-Profile-Notation?p=1589067#post1589067

I will sketch up my own Grand Tour with this and then see what you guys think.

Edited December 10, 2014 by Thunderous Echo

[Thunderous Echo]

Hey Overfloater, this should seem familiar:

Edited December 11, 2014 by Thunderous Echo