u/lefayad1991

Now that I have a method to return our brave colonizing Kerbalnauts from Eve, I wanted to figure out how to return from the next planetary body primed for colonization: Laythe.

The first challenge I was presented with was finding a suitable launch site. I didn't want to have to use any D/V on the descent and trying to come down on an exact landing spot with just parachutes is wicked hard so, I figured, "The base will float...why doesn't the rocket?"

If Sea Dragon and the "Of Course I Still Love You" landing platform had a baby, the Leviathan would be born.

Kerbals would take a short zodiac from the Laythe Station (yet to be named) to the floating launch platform, load the ship and blast off into space.

Currently the entire thing goes down in one piece but I would like to toy around with the Coreworks mod and try to see if I could extract Oxidizer from the atmosphere and refuel the craft that way. Ideally I am making all my colony planets as reusable as possible so eventually I would like to design an ascent vehicle that could be used multiple times to ferry kerbals from an orbital station down to the surface but for now this is what I have.

I am not exaggerating when I say I have put thousands of hours of my life into this game but one thing I have never accomplished is land Kerbals on Eve and brought them back to Kerbin.

I didn't want to bring a massive rocket down to Eve because I'm trying to go for a somewhat grounded approach so I thought...instead of bringing a massive rocket to Eve...what if I bring a small rocket inside a big fucking balloon.

*Nathan Fielder voice* The Solution:

Dirigible

Assisted

Eve Ascent

Vehicle

Thanks to the excellent "Hooligan Labs" and "Heisenberg Air Parts Pack" mods, I worked roughly 20 hours designing and testing this beast.

At full buoyancy it can get to almost 34 km above the surface of Eve before releasing the ascent vehicle, lifting 3 brave Kerbals into a stable orbit around Eve of 150 km.

The beautiful thing about this craft is that it's electric powered nature means we can travel to the equator before launch regardless of wherever the surface colony's location is.

I have recently decided to do my own take on the Jool, Sarnus, Urlum, and Neidon missions by creating a probe that will be able to descend down onto each natural satellite around the planet without being able to harvest resources in-situ.

In order to accomplish this task I set about creating a new probe that was up to the challenge:

The Multi-Satellite Landing Craft (Punny name to be determined later) was born:
The craft is comprised of two separate vessels docked together:

1. A small probe covered in scientific experiments and with enough rockets and propellent to descent to the surface and to return to orbit from most moons.

2. A large mothership that acts as both a tugboat and a refueling station for the probe. The mothership is a simple design: one large tank that acts as a fuel tank for the probe surrounded by radially attached liquid fuel tanks each equipped with a nuclear engine giving this sucker a little under 11,000 m/s of D/V

This was a fun challenge because my first design was only meant to visit moons without an atmosphere as the heatshield would be too heavy to lug around with me around the system while attached to the probe itself...so...what if we don't attach the heatshield until we need it?

Thus the idea for the Atmospheric Re-Entry Modules (ARMs) was born.

Attached to the mothership vessel are two separate heatshields and separate parachute clusters that the probe will attach itself to in preparation for descent onto a moon that has an atmosphere.

I decided to test my design around Kerbin orbit and decided to show off my first SUCCESSFUL test flight for you guys.