Which is harder, Eve land and return, or Jool-5?

[m4rt14n]

Can u use the new SLS parts and engines for eve return? All the posts Ive seen so far have ugly strutted up flat rockets

[Superfluous J]

Can u use the new SLS parts and engines for eve return? All the posts Ive seen so far have ugly strutted up flat rockets

You CAN, but they don't help much. And if you think you have to strut the crap out of your tiny pancake rockets, try landing a multiple-asparagus-SLS rocket on Eve.

[Xavven]

... try landing a multiple-asparagus-SLS rocket on Eve.

LOL! The first image that appeared in my head was, "***CRUNCH!!!***"

[Xavven]

Neither Eve nor Jool-5 is hard, once you've achieved a basic level of competence in most aspects of the game. Both of them are tedious to plan and execute. I have returned from Eve a couple of times, but I've never finished a Jool-5 ship to the point I would have wanted to fly it, so Jool-5 is probably the more tedious and less fun of the two.

To a certain extent, I agree. There is a difficulty element and then there's a tedium element. As others have mentioned, Eve's toughest part is designing the return lander. The rest is just the tedium of launching it from Kerbin, getting it over to Eve, refueling it if necessary, etc. But I still think it's "hard" at least in the relative sense -- e.g. I wouldn't throw a newbie at an Eve return, but I would definitely task them with Mun/Minmus.

[Jouni]

To a certain extent, I agree. There is a difficulty element and then there's a tedium element. As others have mentioned, Eve's toughest part is designing the return lander. The rest is just the tedium of launching it from Kerbin, getting it over to Eve, refueling it if necessary, etc.

The hardest part in an Eve landing is designing a lander that survives the landing in one piece. The second hardest part is ladder placement. Designing a lander with enough delta-v at a high enough TWR is easy, once you really understand what the rocket equation means.

But I still think it's "hard" at least in the relative sense -- e.g. I wouldn't throw a newbie at an Eve return, but I would definitely task them with Mun/Minmus.

I like to call things hard only if they remain hard for experienced players. For example, landing on Tylo is not that hard in itself, as you can learn to do it reliably, as long as you have enough spare fuel and powerful enough engines. On the other hand, landing on Tylo with a low-TWR lander is hard, because the stock game doesn't come with the necessary planning tools.

[Vaporo]

If you're using FAR, Eve landing is harder. Otherwise, Jool-5. It is EXTREMELY difficult to construct something that doesn't tear itself to shreds on the way down, is aerodynamically stable on the way down, and then is aerodynamically stable on the way back up. On the upside, you can use a much smaller lander, as you don't have to fight the souposphere on the way up.

[Laie]

Who's the better artist, Lady Gaga or Frank Sinatra?

[Red Iron Crown]

I have successfully done an Eve ascent but not a Jool-5 (tried a couple of times), so I'd have to say Jool-5 is harder.

Eve is primarily a design challenge, in that you need to make a lander with a pile of dV and a high TWR. Once that is done, the mission itself is not overly challenging as the transfers are easy ones, the landing is trivial if you use chutes, and the ascent is not overly difficult once you figure out it's best to go straight vertical until 30km or so.

Jool-5 is more of a design, planning, and piloting challenge. You must create a mission profile and dV budget, then design your landers and mothership within those constraints. There are more transfers to complete successfully, mess one up and you might not have enough fuel to finish. A Tylo landing is one of the game's big piloting challenges, involving a white-knuckle high-G suicide burn if you do it efficiently. There are just many more opportunities to fail a Jool-5, IMO.

That said, both are big accomplishments of which any player should be proud.

[Empiro]

I've done the Jool-5 with a pretty big craft (it had extra living quarters, a science lab, and enough life support to last the mission). The design phase took a very long time, but the execution isn't too bad if you allow yourself to reload if you splatter into Tylo. If you use a multi-stage lander for Tylo, then it's likely that the ascent stage can handle all of Vall, Bop, and Pol. The design of a light-weight spaceplane for Laythe also takes a while (for example, I used a B9 VTOL engine to make the landing easier). But once you have all that, it's really just a matter of strapping on enough fuel to visit all of Jool and having enough patience to perform the long burns.

Eve is much more challenging if you're trying to do it "legit" -- for example, no external command chairs. The craft needs to be built with tons of delta-V, lots of thrust, and a way to actually land without breaking the gears or toppling over.

Edited December 14, 2014 by Empiro

[GigaG]

I'm not voting, having not done both.

I've done an Eve return, but it required ejecting and orbiting with the jetpack and sending a pickup ship after landing on Eve's highest mountain range. (Somehow I left its aerospikes burning fuel at low thrust post-landing, had I not wasted that delta-v I might have not needed ejection.) It also used the RLA stockalike mod, among others IIRC. I also needed the trajectory mod. Lots of quicksaving involved, too.

As for Jool's moons, I don't usually do that. Here's my experience-

-I've done Bop. I think I was planning on Pol too, but the lander was a tiny ion-powered lander with command seats and a docking port, and upon exiting the ship, the docking port would cause a Kerbal to kraken away at high speed, so I went home after Bop IIRC.

-I tried to do Laythe, but the game suddenly Krakened out soon after landing and I don't think I opened that save again.

-I once tried to send a ship with landers for Bop, Pol, and Vall, but the ship was so shaky at the docking portsthat it would be a nightmare mission to time warp through the series of long nuke burns. It also required a series of decoupling and redocking landers to the sides of the ship, which I failed at IIRC. I don't think I got the thing out of Kerbin orbit. Haven't opened that save since - I spent lots of funds on that mission, and it frustrated me. (This was my first Kerballed Jool attempt.)

Those are not in order. The two that I listed first may or may not have been modded.

As for which is harder, it depends. The Eve mission takes a lot of design, but it is made quite a bit easier when you accept using the Kerbal's jetpack for final orbit insertion. It also is useful to have the trajectories mod. Jool-5 also takes lots of design - but in that case you have to make several specialized ships, possibly dock them together in LKO, and then hope you can boost them to Jool and do the maneuvers to get to every moon. Both are really hard - it depends on your skill set, I guess.

Edited December 14, 2014 by GigaG

[Spartwo]

Jool-5s are easier, grand tours are both bundled into one.

[MalfunctionM1Ke]

Who's the better artist, Lady Gaga or Frank Sinatra?

Always Sinatra...

[NecroBones]

Neither Eve nor Jool-5 is hard, once you've achieved a basic level of competence in most aspects of the game. Both of them are tedious to plan and execute. I have returned from Eve a couple of times, but I've never finished a Jool-5 ship to the point I would have wanted to fly it, so Jool-5 is probably the more tedious and less fun of the two.

I see your point, but I also offer a counterpoint. The Jool-5 was so complex and time-consuming, that it's unlikely I'll do it again. However, while I was doing it, it was one of the most rewarding and satisfying missions I've flown. I had to think about what I was doing at every step of the way. It was all about careful planning, making good maneuvers, and sometimes changing those plans on the fly because of how the moons have happened to line up, or because of design considerations that you didn't fully take into account. You have to do a little of everything (atmospheric landings, high gravity and low gravity airless landings, etc), since Jool is almost a mini solar system in itself.

So the Jool-5, while it is a big undertaking with lots of really long burn-times (and low framerate at the start of the mission.. heh), it is also a lot of fun... If you enjoy missions with both creative planning, and thinking on your feet, so to speak.

[GRS]

Definitely Jool 5, created a Direct ascent, nearly 6000 tons Eve and back rocket that works fine, probably with loads of overkill, Jool 5 is a different story...not even my 21000 ton rocket can do it.

[purpleivan]

I've done both Jool-5 and the Eve return (a few times) and to me they have similar levels of difficulty, but in different areas.

The biggest difference is time. Eve return is something that can be done in an afternoon, but Jool-5 is likely to be something that takes a few days, so there's a practical difficulty in terms of commitment of time that it has, that Eve return doesn't.

For that reason alone, Jool-5 is something I've only done twice whereas Eve return I've more than a half dozen times.

Another big difference is the type of skill demands of the two, with Eve being fundamentally about the design of a single vehicle for the purposes of a difficult ascent, and Jool-5 being more about mission planning and general piloting.

[godemperorzack]

DELETE

Edited January 15, 2019 by godemperorzack

[septemberWaves]

The difficulty with Eve is designing a full-scale launch vehicle and then figuring out some way to actually transport it to the surface of Eve; but since it has a significant atmosphere and high gravity the process is somewhat similar to designing a launch vehicle for Kerbin. If you can build a direct-ascent Mun lander, that's similar in terms of delta-v to what's needed to reach orbit from the surface of Eve; of course, there is also the issue of engine I_sp, but vector engines are typically effective; and though the average direct-ascent Mun lander can't make it to orbit from Eve's surface, I mostly just mean that it's a similar process and it's comparable to something which most players going interplanetary have already done. Getting something similar in scale to a stock Saturn V equivalent to the surface of Eve isn't exactly easy, but it's a lot easier than landing a Tylo lander because Eve allows for the use of parachutes.

Jool 5 on the other hand, is in theory less difficult, but in practice it can be worse, largely just because of Tylo. Landing anything on Tylo is a nightmare. Landers for non-atmospheric worlds can typically use nice and efficient vacuum engines, but if you want to do that with Tylo you have to be incredibly minimalistic. The thrust that you need to get to the surface of Tylo safely (as well as what you need to escape it) is so great that vacuum engines don't have the power for most lander designs, but scaling up to more powerful engines means an increase in mass, which means you need an increase in fuel, which means once again you need more thrust. You can be clever and use an engine which gives you a sufficient TWR only right as you're about to land, but doing that necessitates an inefficient descent profile in order to counteract the force of gravity at the same time as reducing horizontal velocity, because otherwise you don't have enough time before impact to be able to just point retrograde and burn like you would on any other non-atmospheric world. Tylo is a nightmare, and although I have done return missions to it before it's probably my least-visited stock celestial body, and I have yet to make a Tylo lander that works and looks good.

[Starhawk]

This thread makes me look back at the enormous changes to KSP since I first started playing.

When this thread was created and when the bulk of the discussion took place KSP's aerodynamic model was extremely simplistic compared to the current version.  Back then there was no heating in atmo despite the pretty visual plasma effects.  This meant you could aerobrake any ship at any atmospheric body.  The drag values didn't use any data about the ship's orientation so you could perform aerobraking/aerocapture with your ship at any attitude whatsoever.  The atmospheric drag model back then meant that you never used nosecones as they were completely cosmetic and added mass and part count.  You could build huge pancake ships held together with dozens and dozens of struts and still fly them straight in the atmosphere.

Engines back then modelled the lack of efficiency due to atmospheric pressure as an increase in fuel consumption rather than a decrease in thrust (as in real life).  In the current version only specially designed engines offer any efficient thrust in a high pressure environment, so only a few of the engines in the game are useful low in Eve's atmosphere.

Back then, I designed an Eve ascent vehicle with approximately 12 000 m/s of dV.  Nowadays I use something like 8 000 m/s as a rough guide.

Back then, I made ridiculous looking pancake ships.  Nowadays, drag is everything so I make pointy, tall, smooth ships.

Back then, as indicated above, I would just smash the ship into the atmo to capture into orbit.  Nowadays I don't even consider aerobraking at Eve. (I had a few bad experiences while they were tuning the aerodynamic and thermodynamic models). Getting through atmospheric entry and aerobraking is now a significant part of the design challenge for Eve.

Back then, piloting an Eve ascender to orbit was easy because the atmo didn't push your ship into different orientations.  Nowadays, even with a good design, careful piloting through the ascent is critical.

There was no ISRU in the game so Eve ascent ships had to land fully fuelled.  I still don't generally use ISRU at Eve, but it would make the trip down the atmo somewhat less dramatic, I suppose.  ISRU changes everything about Jool 5.  One of the biggest design challenges was always about bringing enough fuel for all the maneuvers and all the landings.

I could go on (and on).

 

The changes to the game have dramatically altered both of these challenges in so many ways that the original reasons given for considering one or the other more difficult don't even exist anymore.

And the original was definitely an apples-to-oranges comparison.  Or Gaga-to-Sinatra, if you prefer.

 

Happy landings!