Pics or it didn't happen 
...
Hey, like Vegas, what happens in the Kerbal solar system.....gets out almost immediately, because every character assassin and their mother has a cellphone camera. Huh. Dammit.
Picking up from where the last batch of screenshots left off, there was no specific refueling port on the interplanetary stage, so I needed to park the lander and rover assembly to use the docking port on the interplanetary stage's nose. Incidentally, after refueling this beast, the fuel depot is almost empty again.
The flight to Duna was uneventful.
I was planning on doing an aerobraking maneuver to capture, without having to use fuel to burn off all of my speed, but as I was plotting out the maneuver, I got a lucky encounter with Ike, before my Duna-periapsis dropped into the atmosphere. Rather than capturing over Duna, transfering, and capturing again over Ike, I decided to just use that lucky encounter, doing the one partial capture and the final capture over Ike.
After waiting for sunrise over the stranded oiler, it was time to split up the ship and drop the lander. I'll mention at this point that a side-effect of the structural girders is that, after all of the outer engines and fuel tanks have been dropped, they do help kill the rocket's resemblence to a giant sex toy.
It got exactly one-and-a-half kilometers before knocking its nose off. (Incidentally, this demonstrates why, in biology, there may be evolutionary selection against an organism growing its brain in its nose.)
Right, let's get the lander down, close to target, then.
By the fair and scientific process of "Not it," Lanbald Kerman was chosen to fly out to the rover to try to salvage this mission.
The drive was tricky, because there is no position in which those landing legs stop dragging on the ground, but it turns out that there's a certain correlation between being slow to say, "Not it," and being a decent driver. Lanbald managed to ride on two wheels in a couple stretches to get his speed up, and recovered from some pretty
stupid sick flips. He even got where he was going alive! Think about that, the next time you shove that bloke into the center seat in the back of your car.
Unfortunately, the rover's nose was too blunted, after losing the probe core, to get underneath any part of the lander. I tried pushing the lander backwards, down the hill to see if supplementing the RCS with some momentum would do the trick, but all that accomplished was getting the lander further down the hill. ... Okay, the docking port got sheared off as well.
With that, then, it was time to send Lanbald back to the oiler and the interplanetary vehicle back to Kerbin.
Upon return, though, Nelfurt Kerman noticed something about my planned aerobraking maneuver that I did not.
Even if you're going four kilometers a second on entry, a twenty-five kilometer periapsis is too low to recover an orbit.
On the bright side, I don't have to rescue those Kerbonauts. I also don't have to listen to Nelfurt's smug, "I told you so." Heh. Joke's on you, asshole.
