Off to Laythe! Still in orbit, in fact, as I'm still plotting out the best way to get home. Minor highlights so far:
Sunrise on Jool with Laythe in the background. Other than being pretty, notice the navball: I fucked up and did a retrograde aerobreak (That green circle indicates the vector for current velocity. Being on the 270 line means I'm going west/clockwise, but all stellar bodies orbit east/counterclockwise). Fortunately, that mistake only cost me 200dV to setup a retrograde capture on Laythe, but it screwed up my plans for dropping my probes far out and doing some easy burns to match the outer moons.
Separation before dropping to Laythe's surface. I actually managed to safely land in water on my first attempt, but somehow the decouplers got screwed up and I blew my engines instead of my empty fuel tanks, and the engines promptly curved inward, got caught on my ship, and sent it spiraling out of control. Note that my fuel isn't maxed. I made the call to keep ~1800ish units of fuel in the tanker as I ballparked that as a good minimum to get home. I didn't jettison my two empty T-800 tanks as they had chutes on top, my landing gear, and losing the symmetry would've resulted in me tipping in the water (I would've been good for space flight, just not a water landing), but that latter one wasn't planned for as I was expecting a water landing to result in immediate failure.
No pictures of Laythe, unfortunately. Not sure how I fucked that up.
Back in orbit and refueling from the tanker. Definitely better at docking now. Notice both the fuel levels and the fact that I've shed everything but the nuclear engines on the ship. I ended up with
eight, that's six seconds of burn, fuel left after getting into a not-quite-circular orbit (75;67). Thankfully, I just went for a straight east ascent and didn't try to match my tug's inclination, as I probably wouldn't have made it into orbit if I tried. This meant that I had to do a 320ish dV burn on the tanker, but thanks to shedding all my periphery tanks, I didn't have enough room for all the remaining fuel anyhow. In fact, without the tanker, my ship has room for 1620, so the tanker will be left with a full two units of fuel to offer the next ship that visits Laythe.
And now to play the waiting game while the planets align themselves for the return home.
. So it's over, I just reload it an......
