Final refueling operations are underway, and whilst the little oilers were racing about, I took a few screenshots of the fleet:
Interplanetary Oiler #1
Interplanetary Spacebus #1
Eve Station Power Module
Interplanetary Spacebus #2
Interplanetary Oiler #2
Eve Station Hub
Some design notes:
• The eagle-eyed will note that the first interplanetary oiler is lacking some struts that are present on the second. That's because I stupidly undocked the command module and redocked it shortly after. Problem is, undocking disconnects struts, and redocking does not reconnect them. The command module is fairly small, so I'm not too concerned about it getting twisted off in later maneuvers, but we'll see.
• The spacebusses use an inline docking port, rather than the usual shielded, nose-mounted port, because I couldn't make the lander work without the drogue chute on the nose. Without it, during landing tests, the radial chutes would deploy, stopping the command pod, while the habitation module would just keep on going. The drogue chute made the whole process gentle enough to not rip the whole vehicle apart.
• Nothing too special about the power module, except that I went with quad-ion-drives for its final propulsion stage. What else was I going to do with all of those solar arrays and 2000 units of battery capacity? I could have actually supported more ion drives with that solar array, but only if the thing was facing directly at the sun, not to mention the structure holding the engines would have gotten prohibitively long or blocked the inner solar panels.
• On the station hub, it's difficult to see, but there is a tiny decoupler, positioned between the two ion drives, which will jettison the NERVA and fuel tank. Ultimately, this will be necessary, because once their command pods are removed, there's nothing left to guide the oiler payloads in to dock with the hub, so the hub will have to dock with them. Having a rocket dangling off the back would be less-than-ideal, during a sideways docking maneuver.
• I've thought about pre-assembing the station in Kerbin orbit, and sending the whole thing to Eve in one go, instead of trying to juggle a fleet of station components and return vehicles. There's two reasons I won't go that route. First, the docking nodes are made of jelly, and I don't trust them to hold together while such a beast of a vessel tries to maneuver. More importantly, can you imagine trying to turn such a huge vehicle? There's not enough RCS fuel in the world, even taking into account that I'm still playing 0.18.1, with the super-cheaty RCS.
And some preliminary notes on the flight plan:
• The outer fuel tanks of the spacebusses all have LV-909's attached. I'll probably deactivate them all to save on fuel, relying entirely on the NERVA for maneuver burns, at least on the way out. That probably won't be necessary, but the only transit test this thing has undergone was when a lighter version made a trip out to Duna, so I want to play it safe with these, on the trip to Eve, since everyone is relying on these craft being able to return to Kerbin.
• Some of the ships, the station hub, in particular, and the power module to a lesser degree, have very little liquid fuel for the journey. To maximize my fuel margins, I'm planning on splitting the ejection burn for each ship up into three burns, one to get to 3,000-5,000km above Kerbin, the next to get to 20,000-30,000km above Kerbin, and the last to get out of Kerbin's SOI and set up a rough encounter with Eve. On the final pass, all manned vessels shall deploy someone to apply their "Hermann Oberth is my copilot" bumper stickers.
• I'm not 100% sure what to do with the interplanetary oilers' command pods, prior to the crews abandoning them. I feel like one of them has to become a Gilly lander, if only to spite that little bastard of a moon for eating my only successful interplanetary mission in 0.17. The problem with that is that I have to have one of the spacebusses waste fuel going out to Gilly to pick up the crew out there, instead of near Eve, and the Kerbonaut(s) who land the pod will have to EVA into orbit to meet the bus. Now, it's Gilly, so EVA-to-orbit is certainly possible, but I've certainly never done it before.
• Aside from that, the efficiency-kick should ensure that the spacebusses have plenty of fuel for a straightforward return trip (expeditions to Gilly notwithstanding), and everything else is meant to stay in orbit of Eve.