What does it take to land on Eve and return? Although I did this previously, its time I revisited this challenge since we now have access to new parts and Docking is now an option.
I am very happy to see this :) I had a huge mission to Eve in progress, but when 0.21 hit, I left it unfinished. Last week I started over and now I have a large overbuilt lander in orbit of Kerbin waiting for Eve window. I look forward to see what will you came up with!
Hey Scott, I'm glad to see you finnaly tackle a trip to Eve with more modern parts. I've been testing ideas for trips there. I've decided to send two craft to Eve, one as a transfer vehicle between planets, and one for decsent/ascent. For acenst, I think since the atmosphere is so thick, it would be most effective to begin with a sort of staged spaceplane.
Excellent! A new series start! I am looking forward to this one. I have landed on Eve (pre-.21) and attempted to build a lander that could get back to orbit... but was never able to get it to make orbit.
A week ago I did a one way (without crew) trip to Eve and brought a small (I think about 4ton) rocket glider.I also used my space tug module to measure everything KSP alows it and put it into Excel graphs.I still got to learn many things(especially how to make small efficient designs),but its nice to see that at least some basic aspects of my missions are good.And I always do everything to "fly safe" with my Kerbals :-) Thanks for inspiration! And sorry for my english,I am from Czech Republic
With reusable space program appearing to be all but dead, I think this will become my new favorite series of yours. Pick a planet (or moon) and conduct missions that resemble real life and how agencies like nasa would put people on these planets and bring them home
I see that you plan your missions more like in Take On Mars. More smaller missions to test and gather data, then use it to plan big mission. I love it.
When you said "things were different" my aerospike nostalgia immediately kicked in. Those were the days, it was like having jets that worked all the way out to space!
Airliner Jet engines are actually high bypass turbofans, most of their thrust comes from air being pushed around the outside of the core engine, so, you could build a high bypass turbofan that burns fuel/oxidizer to run the rest of teh engine and gets more thrust.
I saw the title and was really hoping you'd be doing this without mods. Glad to see all you used was the fairings and MapSat. As, fairings are just looks (good looking rocket by the way) and Map sat is just making up for the lack of science tools at this point but not affecting the flying portion.
It is nice to see a well prepared mission in KSP, where the norm is to assemble a couple of parts and burn to a planet with very little previous preparation ;) I especially liked the part of using the descent of the probe to gather intel about the pressure profile and terminal v on Eve ... ;) The real beef in this mission will be to deliver atleast 5k dV ( probably 7-8 is more realistical ) to the surface of Eve to get out of there. With no kethane, it will be easily the hardest part ...
In a future series, maybe Scott could go for "maximum realism", which is to say using remotetech, deadly reentry, one of the life support plugins, and so on. It could even have the same acronym as reusable space program; Realistic space program!
According to the Online Etymological Dictionary the earliest reference to the term "or bust" is from 1851. It likely originated from steamboat crews who would push the boilers on the boat as hard as they could to either reach a destination in record time or "bust" (explode) them in the process.
Yes. I'm working on an unmanned glider that I hope to take to Eve. Although when you launch a spaceplane atop a rocket, it is likely to make the game's wee little tiny little cute tiny wee tiny aerodynamics engine cry, and flip the ship on its nose.
I've done a sea-level probe craft in about 37 tons. Throw a ladder on that and it'll take a Kerbal from sea level. 45 tons from the highest point was several versions ago, before people started hanging Kerbals on ladders to get even smaller Eve ascent vehicles, before the lighter 1-man lander can, before seats, before the revised terrain added an even taller mountain.
This is exactly what I was looking for... seeing what it took to get to Eve and back. I watched your other,, outdated video and was a bit a bit disapointed... 3 mins later I see this... This proves my theory, all scotsmen can sense eachother's thoughts, haha
If you can build your Eve ascent vehicle small enough to fit on a mobile landing platform with wheels, you can make it drive up the closest mountain to your landing site and not be too picky about where you land. Roughly 3 main options: tiny ladder-abusing craft can be as small as 5 tons, using a seat should be somewhere around 15-25, or conventional with a pod is 35-40+. Looking forward to see which you go for.
You will never be able to catch up with another object in the same orbit, since two objects at the same orbit have the same speed. You either need to decrease your orbital altitude to speed up and catch up, or increase your orbital altitude to slow down enough to let the other object catch you. Once the two objects get close enough (say 500m), you can then drop back into the same orbit and it will be much easier to make complete contact.
The devs send him pre-release updates, so he gets to explore new content before anyone else, so it's easily possible that he was the first person (other than the devs).
your new save comes with some pre-made rockets. The Kerbal X is a good teaching rocket because it uses asparagus staging and is extremely stable. I've landed on the Mun with it but the fuel budget is tight.
The use of mods in this is tasteful. I don't mean to hate on mods of course. It's just a more comparable experience when people play vanilla, which makes the challenge aspect of it more relevant to viewers like me.
Scott, it would be super cool if you could do a kind of Casual Lets Play of KSP when career comes out, it would be something that you could really benefit from!
