Tylo... We all know it's there, But few have conquered it

[CalMacDa]

Tis is a thread for the discussion and sharing of ships from Tylo. Read the title! That is how I view Tylo. It will be interesting to see how some of you have landed on it. It's as big a Kerbin, but parachutes are useless due to the the lack of an atmosphere. So, share your magnificent ships that have conquered this monstrosity and we'll see what has worked and failed.

[Nemrav]

I "landed" on Tylo (with a boom, that destroyed the entire ship), maybe your poll should include an option to better describe that situation....

The vehicle of choice was a very weak mun lander (better 4 minmus). I didn't know the horrors of tylo, so I thought "oh, that looks like an easy moon to land on, I'l do a return mission"

That was also the end of my first Jool mission. It was in 0.22, because I remember it was career mode, and well was a noob back then....

[Stratzenblitz75]

You don't need that much to land on Tylo:

The trick is to take an efficient landing profile: start in as low of an orbit as possible and control vertical speed to prevent high speed litho-braking.

[zekes]

I wish i had a better picture than this - 0.18 landing with a tiny, TINY probe on Tylo. It lost the bottom half upon landing but it survived to sit, alone, forever (or untill i lost the save).

I was going to go back and land two kerbals there, but the JOOL-5 mission that was planned never really got off the ground.

The trick is to take an efficient landing profile: start in as low of an orbit as possible and control vertical speed to prevent high speed litho-braking.

I was actually thinking of making a long pole (POL GET IT) of a ship and just slamming it into Tylo to stop it - probably not feasible though.

[ghpstage]

Sent a probe there on my first visit recently, ran out of fuel and 'landed'. Ran out of fuel and 'landed' at 450m/s.

I have another en route, with a whole hell of a lot more dV. It had 7200m/s while in LKO, hopefully it will be enough for a one way trip!

[CalMacDa]

Interesting. With a big enough mechanism, you could lithobrake (use the ground to stop you). Thats tough though. Never tried it

[MGCJerry]

I was goofing off with a "stupid rocket", and somehow managed an encounter with Tylo. Being I've only crashed on Duna by chance (another "stupid rocket", and the realization theres an atmosphere ) and been nowhere else outside of Kerbin's SoI, it made really interesting. Yea, so I crashed on Tylo... Never did get screenshots though.

[Superfluous J]

I've landed on every landable body in the game (ie, not Jool or Sun but all the others) and returned the Kerbal who did so home safely.

This includes Tylo

Edited January 7, 2015 by 5thHorseman

[Whirligig Girl]

I did this during a slow day in class once. It was a test mission for the type of lander, and it succeeded. It would've been able to go back if it came with a return ship.

[RocketPilot573]

I have landed there 3 times. The first with a probe, and then 2 manned missions that returned. Interestingly, neither of those landers actually made it back to Tylo orbit. The Kerbals had to bail out and the ship waiting in orbit had to come pick them up.

[problemecium]

Officially, I've never been to Tylo. But I did HyperEdit a lander into Tylo's orbit and proceed to successfully land and return to orbit from there. But I didn't come all the way from Kerbin, so it doesn't count.

[merendel]

Personaly I didnt find it all that hard. I've done it a couple of times with parts that were prety much what you'd expect from an early mun landing, just more of them. I just designed a squat lander that could self launch from kerbin and put itself in orbit around mun. I then took that design and mounted it on top of a launcher and transfer stage and sent it off to jool. The greatly reduced lander (after looseing all its radial stages during landing and asscent) hooked back onto the transfer stage with a docking port and returned to kerbin.

Really the only hard part was controlling the touchdown. Gravity is high enough that its tricky finding just the right amount of throttle to come down slowly but not too slow. Even a second or two of underthrottle can pick up enough speed to break something. Fuel margins are also tight enough that you cant hover for long looking for an ideal landing site if you come down on a slope. otherwise all you need is a craft with 5.5k dv or so with a TWR in the 1.5 range or better.

I dont go back there often though. the planet is just to much a pain to land on to make a ground base viable when there are much better targets for that kinda thing nearby. Just 1 mission to get surface sience (most likely a mobile lab rover with an asscent pod now) and then ignore the place till the next career restart aside from a sweet gravity assist target.

[Merinsan]

I landed on Tylo way back (I think 0.18), but never did a return mission. Landing is not that hard, just uses a lot of fuel. My first attempt used nukes, which was a bad idea. I think my second (successful) attempt used aerospikes.

I haven't been back there since. To be honest, every time a new version comes out I restart, and I have not been able to progress fast enough to get there before the next update!

[a2soup]

I stopped by Tylo in the course of a grand science tour (doing every experiment) I started 0.25 (I'm still finishing it up!). Since it was a grand tour, it was in my interest to make the lander as small and versatile as possible.

In this picture, you can see the main lander on the bottom (which did many other easier landings solo) with a supplementary Tylo module on top. The lander used the fuel in the top module to land and the fuel in the side tanks to ascend.

The top module had to be jettisoned before ascent. I did this in a very Kerbal way using the last drop of fuel remaining in the top tanks. I had to use docking ports instead of a decoupler because the top module was only attached after the lander had already done a lot of other stuff.

After ascending to a low orbit, the lander had 575 m/s ∆v left to rendezvous and dock with the mothership before continuing on. I was quite proud of the efficiency and versatility achieved by this design!

Edited January 7, 2015 by a2soup

[Renegrade]

Here's my 0.24 lander from my Land Everywhere and Return campaign:

I have to admit I went a little silly with this one. The engine design is hybrid - there are four 48-7Ses on the bottom of the second last stage, a 909 on the center stage, and none on the initial stage (basically those are just drop tanks).

The design starts at 1.44 Tylo TWR, and climbs up to 4.09 just as it lands on the last fumes of the second stage. Takeoff starts at 1.82 and ends at 4.25. The landing stages have 3,409m/sec total, and the takeoff stage 3,242. It's not a re-usable design, obviously.

Unfortunately I forgot to put ladders on to it to retrieve the science data - I believe I was forced to leave the one-shot science modules behind with data in them. Or I may have recovered the data while doing a very dangerous EVA after liftoff - there was about 600 surplus delta-v after landing in the legs-and-science stage (according to the screenshots). I can't remember anymore which path I chose though, as that was some time ago now.

There's a gap under the docking port as there's an OCTO2 hiding there. The vessel was sent on to Tylo on it's own with a transfer stage, and then later a crew ferry brought the crew to Tylo and back to the Jool 1 station.

The insert on the left is during descent, and the one on the right is actually before descent. The middle one is of course, landed.

I have to say that aside from the gravity, Tylo is an exceedingly blah place. I actually mistook the screenshots for Mun landing ones (or maybe Dres) initially. Vall, Laythe, and Pol all look more interesting (Bop is an angry space spud), and a lot of the other planets have their own neat features (atmospheres or muns). Oh well, at least Tylo doesn't have (as far as I've seen) those invisible, fatal walls in the sky that Pol has.

[bsalis]

Landed and returned to orbit in single stage

[KerbMav]

My Jool mission had one manned lander (3 crew, 2.5m) for all moons. For Tylo the ship carried three extra tanks, one with extra engines, that were jettisoned during decent. Had to make use of TAC Fuel Balancer, because the whole thing was assembled in orbit right before the landing and fuel flow was weird somehow without it.

Maybe I will manage to finally make that mission report at some time in the future ...

[magnemoe]

Has landed multiple times but always with mechjeb, tried manual landings but things happens too fast during the final part.

My favorite was an unmanned rover who run out of fuel right over the surface, the result was that the skycrane disintegrated around the rover who was intact.

[SkyRex94]

I only say: Jool-5 Challenge . (look Signature)

[Janos1986]

The farthest I've gone is Dres.

I always felt the need to flesh out all the biomes with all the science instruments before moving to the next celestial body, so by the time I got near Jool, a new update came out with radical changes on gameplay, so I had to scrap the old saves and begin anew.

[GoSlash27]

Tylo isn't all that difficult.

I demonstrated a pinpoint technique and vehicle in a tutorial here.

You can do it with a much smaller and lighter lander if you're not worried about your exact landing location.

Best,

-Slashy

[Starhawk]

I built this lander in 0.23.5 or 0.24. This was back before I joined the forum, so I didn't know about the challenges. I had already landed at Laythe once, so I designed the mission to visit the other four moons. If I had pulled off Laythe on that mission I would have met the rules for Jool-5.

Anyway, this lander went to Tylo first, dumped the lower stage on Tylo ascent, and then went on to land at Vall, Bop, and Pol. Had to rendezvous with the support ship each time, but MechJeb took some of the tedium out of the process.

It took a big lifter to orbit this. The lifter was then refueled in Kerbin orbit to become the IP stage. I had to do a separate launch for the support ship, and it, too, was topped up with fuel before heading for Jool.

[prophet_01]

The farthest I've gone is Dres.

I always felt the need to flesh out all the biomes with all the science instruments before moving to the next celestial body, so by the time I got near Jool, a new update came out with radical changes on gameplay, so I had to scrap the old saves and begin anew.

Pretty much this... there is just so much new stuff that was added. I started over again with every new update. It's been a rly long time since I went to jool Back then when career wasn't even released. I only landed on laythe during that mission... I want to do a new jool mission for like a year by now, but I get distracted by all the other cool stuff

[CalMacDa]

The poll numbers are interesting... 1\3 have landed and came back

[Voculus]

I've returned only once, but it required a rescue ship, after the lander was mostly destroyed upon landing. Even the rescue craft was short of fuel, but I was able to make orbit with Jeb's EVA pack.