damerell

I'm very glad I only had to refuel the Kerbian Sea Monster once in my sea circumnavigation. RSS Earth is still lingering in the back of my mind...

Some jagged hills coming up. Indeed, in them I had a spin - which I regret I did not capture on a screenshot - and knocked off more of the rollcage. Mountains ahead. But mostly from there easy roving, albeit with one or two steep climbs, to cross the 180 degree mark. The Hangarmoth is at 116 degrees East, so I am past 3/4 distance, but what a slog it has been.

I'm up to the Mk VIII (en route to Eeloo), I know what I'd change on a potential Mk IX (if only there were some planets left), and at that, that is rolling the iterations of the Minmus and Mun rovers into one Mark each. I know the feeling.

Spotting what proved to be the rim of Gagarin a long way off. Out of Gagarin, in the relatively small gap between craters. Not so dramatic a climb out as Grissom. Into Tycho. Could this be the far rim? It's lighter coloured, but there's no sense of distance under these conditions. I think it was, but I'm honestly not sure. Out of Tycho. Now to head North back to the equator. Past halfway round, and no more craters, just a steady slog back to the Hangarmoth.

I'm (once again) admiring the ingenuity of @Pouicpouic's "one way up for land, one way up for water" design. I wish I'd thought of that.

Do you have a craft file for the ground vehicle, please? As you may infer, I've seen this before, and I'm trying to bring to mind what I fiddled with that fixed it.

What happens when you try?

Into the Gagarin crater. Also no dramatic crater wall, but the ground is much darker inside it. It also has long extents of dead-flat ground, unlike what I saw of the Grissom crater.

No screenshot, but somewhere around the Grissom crater I found I was outdriving the dawn, so stopped for about half a Tylo-day to get Kerbol high in the sky again.

Around here, to my surprise, I ran into a vast expanse of almost Minmus-ish flatness. The rover just could go straight on with no input. I crossed a brief bit of higher terrain - I considered steering around it, but I'd rather see a little action - only to find more very flat terrain. At 60 degrees West. I hope the craters will spice things up a bit. It's a far cry here from heel-and-toe roving around Moho in the dark.

As mentioned upthread, you could look at the netkan files that are generated for CKAN. Those have links in, which you could then manually download. Or you could just use CKAN.

If it works on 1.12, it'll probably work on 1.12.5, but just use CKAN, that sort of compatibility question has usually been answered and it's easy to experiment.

Into the Grissom crater. Nothing too dramatic - I'd come down a long slope, but the biome just changed with no sharp transition in the landscape. I think this is the lowest altitude I recorded at the bottom of the crater. Of course it's hard to tell how far away and large terrain features are in KSP, but I thought this might be the other side of the crater, and huge. I wasn't wrong. Huge enough that I had to stop halfway up for a brew-up. The big dorsal battery on the Eve rover was a good idea and maybe should have been adopted for the regular rovers. I adjusted the scripts to run the fuel cells a bit more aggressively (the higher the EC level at which they kick in, the bigger the risk of running out of LFO, but that risk seems very small - and it does also reduce the chance of running dry of EC on a big climb like this). The meridian. I started at 116 degrees East, so nearly 1/3 distance. Tylo remains annoyingly large.

Jool properly up; I'd enjoy a nice view of it for some time, especially from the upper deck of the cab. The inner moons await us. I've lost a section of the rollcage. How? When? This rover has only been here and Bop, and I don't remember any major spills on Bop. Here the terrain finally started to turn rough. I imagine anyone reading this knows there's more to Elcano than pushing the throttle against the stop and waiting, but Tylo hasn't had very much more - for hours I've had to touch the steering every once in a while. Perhaps as we approach the crater the roving will get tougher.

Sometimes screenshots are just there to document progress; I cut down on those by using ScanSAT's BTDT tracker, which paints my path on the map. I had a similar struggle refuelling the Kerbian Sea Monster; I blithely said since it and the refuelling aircraft are the same hull on the same landing gear, same height, right? No, me, one of them is _full of fuel_. I think if I go for the sheer madness of an RSS Earth voyage my plan would be a combination of KIS/KAS winches to drag the docking ports together and simply offsetting the port slightly on the refuelling aircraft. It might be easier to meet in the sea and use Sink Em All to affect buoyancy, but then it would be much harder to bring the ports into rough proximity and much harder for a kerbal to hook winches onto the other vessel (some kind of gantry over the sea?) - but it might be necessary if there isn't, say, a suitable island in the middle of the Pacific big enough to show up on RSS Earth. Ah, that got misread; I meant, beyond what we'd already got. I'm still not the ruleskerbal, but I think it would be much more pleasing to have some kind of recognition of abnormal stunts (surface circumnavigation of Laythe, no-jumps-at-all circumnavigation of Gilly, RSS Earth) and call this surface-Kerbin, not Mariner-Kerbin. Even Master Submariner would not normally crawl along the bottom. :-)

That's certainly different, although I admit I'm not completely sure jet engines work underwater. I look forward to the screenshots, even if they are mostly blue.

Right, that makes sense. Is it TweakScaled? I've had some very odd results with TweakScaled parts.

Tylo is, I am told, very large - but much easier terrain than Eve so far (and I don't seem to be encountering the random pinging up into the sky other circumnavigators in earlier KSPs reported). I can crank the rover around at 40 m/s without difficulty, meaning it'll be... a mere 26 hours of roving, assuming there are no mountains to drive up, which there are. In this gravity I'm using a tiny amount of LFO to supplement the reactor, but it'll last out. This makes for easy roving at high speeds, but not much interest for screenshots, and I'm pretty glad I have Locked Tomb podcasts to listen to. I am trying to work my way up to 6 degrees North to run through at least one of the craters. Joolrise. For once, since it's green and Tylo is grey, I didn't think a body rising was an odd-shaped mountain.

What makes you think the solar panel is the offending part?

In preparation for Tylo I transferred the large-world team, who have only roved on Eve, to the Hangarmoth. They replaced the low-g world team. This is completely gratuitous, but it's pleasing, especially on finding out that a kerbal who goes EVA from the command pod on the Hangarmoth and lets go naturally ends up on a trajectory that brings them close to the nearest airlock on the Queen Agaster. My trajectory planning for Tylo was er not ideal; I am going to just skim close to the surface - alarmingly close - and zoom straight back up to apoapsis. Close enough to Jool now to see alignments of moons. And, a pleasing surprise, after yet another rewrite of the landing script, it plunked me down on Tylo without accident - in a spot with Ore, Metallic Ore, and Uranite. Still bleeding away atomic pulse units, but there are only two medium-sized worlds left to land on.

Goodness me, don't be at all, you organise the challenge. Drill difficulties were on Pol, but it changed while I was away from the mothership, and it seemed not unrelated to the "soft ground" the rover sank into. USI Life Support is doing a good job of making my game tricky by limiting the time the Hangarmoth can spend down on any given world digging up stuff; of course I'd be sad if I had to literally abandon, but by a happy coincidence it's come out just right where every time I land I have to think how much I can improve my resource situation.

You're permitted to refuel. I'm not the ruleskerbal, but I don't see why attaching a fresh RTG would be prohibited - assuming you can manufacture one extra-Kerbol (but more generally, if I can take a spaceship interstellar and deal with its electricity needs, surely I can also deal with a rover's?). I guess I'm concerned with the feelbad of being, well, where I am (halfway through the Joolian moons), wanting to get KSP2 and play it, but then either having to repeat a bunch of worlds or lock myself out of Grand Master. However, I _don't_ plan to get KSP2 in the immediate future - certainly not until I finish up Elcano - so IDK if someone who does wants to comment. There's a Pol and a Bop in the 2% right now. ;-)

I think I expect KSP2 to have all the same planets as KSP1 at the same size, and a similarly janky wheel implementation. If so I'd suggest Grand Master is for doing all those planets whichever version of KSP you did them in, mix and match, whatever. That would cause the least disruption to people who switch to KSP2 during the challenge, and neither option would really be enormously harder than the other (and honestly, if KSP2 has a non-janky wheel implementation, great, lucky KSP2 players...) There could then be a "Grand Master 2" badge which includes all of KSP2's additional planets, but permits you to use KSP1 circumnavigations started before the release of KSP2 for credit (so you don't have to rove around Eve a second time with a slightly different user interface, but you have to use KSP2 for the KSP2 badge when it becomes feasible).

The rare docking manuever which went smoothly. Practice makes less terrible, I guess? And we're en route to Tylo, the last big world on the itinerary. I had a bit of a worry when I wondered where a big chunk of my LFO had gone - but no, the docked package is just considerably heavier so the dV is lower. Obvious in retrospect.

Ah, I see. I used wheels to go and to stop (very slowly), I only used the engines to stick me to the ground. I'm done with Bop: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/146923-elcano-iv-circumnavigate-all-the-things/&do=findComment&comment=4229774