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?