I can now successfully land on Eve using a nuclear engine and several parachutes on my lander. I had originally tested taking off at Kerbin by equipping a pair of solid fuel boosters, but of course having more than twice the gravity at Eve meant this was more or less useless.
I've been looking around for an estimate of the amount of thrust/weight needed escape Eve's atmosphere but haven't found it yet. How could I go about calculating what to add to my lander given a certain weight of the lander?
Best Answer
Eve has an atmosphere ranging all the way up to around 100,000m with surface pressure being about five times as high as on Kerbin, and almost twice as much gravity (with 16.7m/s2 gravitational pull).
Depending on the height from which you're launching, you will need between ~8,000m/s and ~11,500m/s of Δv to achieve orbital velocity around Eve, which should give an orbital velocity of ~3,500m/s.
Eve's escape velocity is ~5,000m/s, so in order to return from a 100km Eve orbit to Kerbin, another ~1,500m/s Δv is required.