The trash bins are a gutsy call-I was trying to figure out another way, but my lander tests on Kerbin are coming up short with alternative engine schemes. I thought asparagus staging only made sense for liquid-fueled rockets to try and minimize the weight of the attached liquid fuel tanks. I'll play around and post anything that works. I guess an alternative to this would be to use a 3200L tank with a mainsail under it for the off planet boost along with radial mounted NERVAs for the transfer stage. The real challenge I see is trying to make a launcher than can lift this whole thing at once. Of course, if that isn't enough to get you to LKO (I wouldn't launch till you can have done this), then maybe you could add a second stage of SRB's under the first one, maybe have that whole stack fire at once just to blast you up to altitude. Trying to change heading while 8 SRB's are firing is very difficult. I don't know whether or not this will work - but it will at least give you a bit of control over your ascent profile because you can adjust your heading between firings. This will make most efficient use of the SRB's as they won't all be firing in the dense atmosphere and you'll be shedding weight as you go along. While they obviously can't cross-feed fuel, I would set it up so that two SRB's fire and then are ejected from the lander when they burn out and another two are activated. To be really effective, but a parachute or two on the top of the lander that deploy first that will bring the whole lander perpendicular to the surface before deploying the rest - this will cut down on wobbling considerably after deployment. I would attach parachutes to all of the SRB's so that no burns are necessary on the decent to save fuel. I would use as small of a tank for the NERVA as necessary since you won't need a ton of fuel, but going smaller than a 1600L tank may not give you enough space to radially attach enough SRB's, so that's something that will have to be played with. I would use just one NERVA for interplanetary transfer, but a ring of maybe 8 small SRB's around it. I think the small SRB's are going to be the only thing capable of getting a lander off of Eve. This is a pic of my Kerbonauts stranded on the surface (on an ice field at the pole): Plus, bringing a trajectory in for a direct straight to ground path burns way more fuel then burning at periapsis and orbiting, so that also screwed me. It was straight down and they couldn't really kill my velocity in an efficient manner. This bit me in the arse because when you do that with NERVAs, you don't really have the thrust to slow down adequately in a way you could if you orbited and just grazed the atmosphere for a bit and come in obliquely. I also figured that since it was my first effort and I spent so much time and fuel trying to get closer, that I would just go for a dive straight towards the planet instead of trying to orbit and such. Then I had to make crazy corrections because I was coming in from under the south pole, so it took a while to figure out which way I needed to burn to do it. This meant I was making a correction burn right outside of Kerbin orbit. I found the further away from the target that you make the corrections, the less fuel it takes to do so. I did have a quicksave for right after I got an encouter solution, so I just reloaded and kept trying to find a way to get it closer with a minimum amount of fuel. I spent a lot of fuel bringing that in, which was trial and error at first. My intial Duna rendevouz burn put me at a periapsis of something on the order of 500million km or something outrageous.
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