Decided to do the insane in KSP and fly to all of Jool's moons and back, with a 1-man ship powered by an ion engine. Well they actually buffed the ion engine a while back so it's not as tedious as it used to be. A 2-stage lifter set me on a Kerbin escape trajectory 500 m/s short of a transfer to Jool. The rest was done using the single ion engine, xenon, solar energy and patience.
Laythe, note that I have the astronomer's visual pack installed hence the clouds and some other pretty effects. Clouds seen from space are static, but the ones while you are flying in atmo move and overall behave as they should.
On the nightside the clouds glow due to bioluminescence which is idiotic but modders gonna modder. Considering by how much radiation those cloud should get bombarded with exotic isotopes would be a better explanation. Whole moon should be sterile above the sea surface.
Noticed I lowered my trajectory so low I actually almost hit a mountain on Vall. Managed to avoid it with an emergency burn with only 20 seconds to spare.
Vall from orbit.
Tylo looks fairly dull, needs procedural craters like those on the Mun.
The glow/bloom added in the mod makes it look better from orbit though.
Bop, just a space potato.
Pol, the other Joolian space potato.
Clouds and aurora when returning back to Kerbin.
More clouds and aurorae, I actually have the middle resolution textures for those installed.
Aurorae are sadly static, guy needs to animate them.
Back home with barely any xenon left. I entered orbit with a low periapsis around every moon of Jool but Laythe. On Laythe I just dipped into atmo to aerobrake but decided not to enter orbit around it. If I did I probably would end up with empty xenon tanks.
Conclusion: the ion engine is far less tedious now, longest burn I had was 20 minutes for 1 km/s of delta-v but with physics time warp x4 it was merely 5 minutes. Everything else was below 6 minutes of game time, 90 seconds of real time.