The Quest for a Good Jool Ship

Now that Bob was rescued, it's time to build a ship capable of taking a few landers to the Jool system.

It's decided that this will be too big to single launch, so the ship will be assembled in orbit.

Here's the launch of the prototype ship core:

Now we need to refuel that in orbit, so attempt to design a refuel ship.

The refuel ship could not match orbits, and poor Arling had an unlucky landing into the side of a mountain:

Let's try again with a different design:

Eventually managed to match orbits:

It was just beyond our skill level to dock such an unwieldily ship. Especially trying to side-dock.

So in the end we de-orbited both ships and had to head back to the VAB to re-think things.

Meanwhile development of the landers progressed.

This lander can just barely make Kerbal orbit, and successfully land again.

Now to attempt a tanker docking with a lander left in orbit.

Hmmm OK we are not going to space today.

Let's try that again with more rigging.

Eventually matched orbits!

And the first docking ever! Hooray! We even successfully refueled after figuring out how to edit the settings.cfg file to make the Mod key be RightShift on Linux, as otherwise it was not possible to manual fuel transfer.

Next some more test flights before attempting to launch a redesigned ship core...