Disaster in Jool Space!

Our brave crew on the Discovery on Laythe tried to transmit some science data back to Kerbin. It said it transmitted, though that's a bit hard to believe considering where the antenna is pointing.

Time to launch the next lander! The Leonov is heading for adventure.

Only to meet disaster at Tylo! Why am I having so many Δv problems? Oh... wait... are we orbiting Jool retrograde? Yes we are. Urgh. That explains some things.

Well lets abuse a quicksave and try to see if we can do some sort of slingshot maneuver to get us prograde, or at least out to an outer moon. This attempt to bounce off of Laythe went poorly, got a little too close:

Another quicksave abuse and we eventually bounced to Tylo again:

But not enough Δv! Can Billy-Bobry eject and use his jetpack at the last minute to make a safe landing? No! And this time it was perma-death for our brave crew. He did have some pretty amazing last views on his way down.

Well let's hope our last lander, the Leonov 2 has better luck.

This time we're going to go prograde by aerobraking at Laythe. And it works!

Behind Jool in eclipse... well should be an eclipse. How is Kerbol doing that?

Could only get a good encounter with Pol, so Pol it is:

Had a horrible time landing, some sort of Kraken kept blowing us up every time we tried to land, even though we were far above the surface (in a valley) and only going 2 m/s.

Eventually had to waste a lot of fuel to land on top of a mountain which finally worked!

Meanwhile the Spaceman Spiff decided that it, too, wanted to be prograde. So off it is to aerobrake on Laythe. Also to enter low orbit and see if we can rescue the lander.

Back to our crew on the ground. The sea looked close so Derler thought he'd go take a look. "Be back in 5 minutes" he told Milford.

Distances are deceiving though, it was nearly a 2km trudge to get to the shore:

Meanwhile Milford was back in the capsule, and got so excited when he heard the Spaceman Spiff was in orbit he neglected to check that Derler was back in the command chair! Oh no! Here he is trying for orbit:

Could he make it? No! About 500 m/s too little! Disaster! Discovery is perma-lost!

Well it looks like Derler is going to be stuck for a while. The Spaceman Spiff is losing more shuttles than the U.S.S. Voyager it seems (especially if you count quicksaves).

They decide to head to Pol to see what the last remaining crew is up to.

Well Ading is being goofy and jumping around... until he noticed that the flag had disappeared! He freaked out (way too much Kraken on this moon), reboarded the ship, and went to orbit... leaving behind Kellas!

He did manage to dock with the Spaceman Spiff. Wow, docking is much easier with nearly empty ships.

The Leonov 2 topped off with fuel and swapped in a new crew (Ading refuses to go on another lander mission). Maybe there's enough ΔV to land on one of the other moons before heading home.