Landing a large base on Eve!
Let’s start by saying that this mission was not easy at all. I was in need of a challenge, by taking this mission I didn’t know it would take 1 month to complete!
The objectives here are, from harder to standard:
- support 11 kerbal
- have 5,000 units of fuel
- have 500 units of monopropellant
- have a mobile processing lab
- have an antenna
- have a viewing cupola
The cost of the craft is around 310,000, which is kinda reasonable for something that ambitious.
Eve is a planet with a dense and large atmosphere. It starts around 100km and requires large heatshields to land without overheating and exploding. The fuel required for the base is way too heavy to be launched and landed. Instead, we’ll be mining resources on Eve itself. For that, we need ore tanks, drills, a converter (ISRU) and radiators to dissipate the heat.
Still, this base is pretty huge and heavy. The boosters stages themselves required a fair amount of work.
Being pretty new to mining and aerobraking, those parts too took a large amount of time to engineer and test. Different journals of previous prototypes can be found here:
- https://imgur . com/a/yJCv8Gy
- https://imgur . com/a/pN44Ttm
Fist stage requires gimballing engines or else it would tip over. The craft has a Δv of roughly 6800m/s, more than enough to reach Eve with the correct transfer window.
We even ended up having a spare 400m/s after deorbit on Eve. You’re never too careful.
Waiting for apoapsis to circularize around kerbin.
Our journey can now begin, we’re in orbit!
A burn of 1031m/s of Δv will put us in an encounter with Eve. Minor corrections of tens of m/s will be used to have a closer approach.
Time to go interplanetary :)
Playing with manoeuver node controls to have a closer approach. That way, we will need less Δv to be as close as possible to the planet.
With small corrections, we end up having a periapsis of 140km. With the atmosphere starting at 100km, we’re in the green.
Circularized around Eve! The orbit is roughly 100km - 111km.
We’re now waiting for the perfect spot to deorbit ourselves. Eve having large oceans, we need to pick carefully where we do the deorbit burn. We want to land on the ground to be able to mine, remember?
Deorbit in progress!
Stage separation.
Inflating heatshields, still pointing retrograde.
Monitoring of drag and temperature on descent. Everything is holding up.
The craft survived reentry! We’re now waiting for a ~5,000m altitude to deploy the chutes and later ditch the heatshields.
Chutes deployed and ready to open in 100 meters! We’re going at 47m/s, that’s ~170km/h. Less than a skydiver.
You can see here we have a Δv of 63m/s. We packed some fuel and motors to be able not to land on the heatshhields we’ll jettison.
Jettisoning heatshields.
Without those 60m/s of Δv, we would land on the heatshields, not a good idea. The burn should have been enough.
We’re right in the middle of the land, everything looking good so far.
We cleared the landing site!
aaand… touchdown!! Nothing broke, the landing speed of 6.2m/s was gentle enough for the struts to absorb the impact.
Deploying solar panels, radiators and antenna.
The ISRU is converting the mined ore into Liquid Fueld and Oxidizer.
The radiators do absorb the heat produced by the drills and ISRU.
We don’t have enough batteries to survive the night with all the radiators. 3 will have to be enough.
Liquid Fuel, Oxidizer and Monopropellant to the max!
Well done, little base.