Kerbal Space Program - 7.5 tons to Eve and back

My first low mass mission. As far as I know this is the lightest Eve sample return mission ever. Inspired by 勾兑面粉's excellent 8.1 ton mission, which was the previous record.
Breaking Ground DLC was used for the prop engines.
Edit: There are lighter missions which have abused aero glitches. I should say that this is the lightest Eve mission that does not abuse "magic wings."
Music: Dimrain47 - Buzztone Symphony

[@Stratzenblitz75]

Nice

[@BenV198]

Woah

[@moonman2183]

sup

[@Boomchacle]

I like how the kerbal didn't even need the parachute

[@alarik2691]

I few years back I got obsessed with a similar idea (lightest possible Eve surface -> Eve orbit, without using zero-drag-lift exploits). I spent maybe a hundred or so hours on this, so I know of the challenges and most optimizations. All I can say is that you bested me and I applaud you.
Assuming only one LV-1R (and two LV-1) was used in the upper stage, the only fundamental weight saving I can think of (for the Eve surface -> Eve orbit part) is what I call an "anti-"fairing, which involves .craft editing (but not .cfg editing - meaning that the craft remains fully "portable" to any vanilla KSP install).

[@lt_duckweed]

Dope

[@Suppise152]

Wizardry

[@JYF921]

Amazing

[@FatOnAxis]

Wow very impressive. Is the drag of the basic fin enough to stop in burning up in rentry?

[@proxima_fish]

Not on a normal reentry, which is why I had to do more than 50 aerobrake passes at Eve.
If you mean the descent down to Eve's surface, I turned on the rotors so the fins would spin, since in KSP spinning makes a lot of stuff less hot.

[@FatOnAxis]

@@proxima_fish Thanks that makes sense.

[@Nicolas_Gamer5476]

gg nice, i am doing the 10 ton tylo mission but having troubles with getting it to orbit

[@thatgpu]

10 tons is already insanely light, but then people made 6 ton Jool-5s...

[@Nicolas_Gamer5476]

@@thatgpu im bad at the game so...

[@deathpacito_8273]

'ery Noice

[@Jonathan-ol9si]

1:17 why not circularize on the day part of eve instead?

[@proxima_fish]

That’s just how the Eve encounter was lined up

[@baactiba3039]

@@Jonathan-ol9si I don't see how it makes a difference except in time. For the circularization part I think it'd help to be on the dark side because it would force players to maximize the oberth effect.
I assume you meant capture in the original post tho :P

[@alexwimmer5198]

Only ways I can think of doing that would be doing a gravity assist off of Eve to get a lot of radial component relative to Eve, and then re-encountering it on the other side of the sun, so that capturing the "right" way doesn't put the craft on the dark side, or instead doing the encounter the "normal" way, capture on the day side (so orbiting the wrong way), and then expending about 50m/s of dV to turn your orbit around.

[@Boomchacle]

@@Jonathan-ol9si What's the difference?

[@Jonathan-ol9si]

@@Boomchacle constant sun exposure so your batteries don't run out at periapsis stopping you from fully utilising the oberth effect