eddiew

Interlude; finishing my stock bucket list Ok, so I've been too lax about updating this thread to now be bothered going back through 'what did you do in ksp today' to find and copy every post with commentary. Suffice to say that with 1.6.0 'soon but not now' when I picked up the game after a break, I thought I'd do a quick stock-system run and actually do the Eve expedition that I never got round to back in 1.2.2 The complete album with 54 images is available here: https://imgur.com/a/O2mCdNm And a few highlights so's you know the sort of thing you'd be in for...

After over a month of active rovering, all points of interest have been hit (well ok there are a couple more biomes but I really can't be bothered documenting them so...) and the expedition returns to a scenic spot near their escape vehicle. Indeed we didn't send W-EVE-1L anywhere, because there wasn't a lot of point. With the return window less than 50 days away and the lab having already transmitted over 20,000 data points, the crew decide it is time to head back to space once more. The return route passes by their old drop pod - still on its side due to reasons we may never understand. (This ascent. Is. Horrible. It's been a week IRL since designing and testing EEVEE, and although I know it can make 150x150 with 300m/s to spare, I have apparently forgotten how to fly it properly. 5-6 simulations result in crashing back down to the surface before finally figuring it out. Mostly it ended up being about maintaining pure vertical until half way through the 2nd pair of boosters, and hold the TWR around 1.6-1.7 to avoid wasting fuel fighting atmospheric drag. Need to be around 35-40km up by the time the aerospike kicks in. Very very unforgiving planet to leave indeed. Also I realised upon boarding that there is no way to transfer leftover science to the upper pod. Oh well.) And with that, I think I will bring this 1.5.1 career to a close! Eve was my bucket-list item left over from my 1.2.2 career back in 2016, where I only ever did a single land-and-return, with 1 kerbal, no rover, and some slightly cheaty modded parts. This lander, though modded, is mainly stock and stockalike parts, and I'm happy to call that a legit Eve exploration. The big legs, which I think are Lithobrake Exploration Tech, are vastly more stable than stock legs and don't fall apart upon contact with the ground; like the drop pod's did. The big radial attachers are Space Y and have inbuilt ullage motors - which is massively useful for getting spent boosters the heck away from your rocket. Big chutes also probably from Lithobrake. The nice roundy cockpit is Airplane Plus. There are stock answers to all these problems, but these mods can reduce your part count by a lot Scorpio's wheels are from Kerbal Foundries Continued and are just amazing. They work like wheels rather than... whatever it is stock wheels work like. And they have gears so you can handle hills better and/or draw less power at the expense of speed. And of course, Bon Voyage is amazing for not spending your whole life roving. Set waypoints, autopilot to them in seconds, do the interesting bits. I did end up driving probably 200km manually because I like the challenging terrain, but when it's 3000km of undulating dunes that's something to let the BV autopilot handle! There is a complete album of this career from start to end (or end to start thanks to the way it's ordered) available on imgur: https://imgur.com/a/O2mCdNm

Eve's poles are creepy at night... So once the sun rises, the team heads southwards and upwards. Quite a lot of upwards. Then lots of downwards. Then upwards again. And a little more upwards... Fortunately Scorpio seems to have even more gears available, and continues to cope with the increasingly fierce slopes. Except perhaps that one we can see ahead. (Because rocky textures always mean steep terrain.) That one we might need to find a route around. And so our four explorers go into the history books as the first to ascend Eve's greatest mountain. (Annoyingly, the peak isn't actually in the Olympus biome. According to KSP's map, the peak is about 400m down the slope again, but kerbals never let facts get in the way of a good narrative.) ((Also the altimetry map goes to 7200m, but I couldn't be bothered working out which pixel I needed to aim at, so not-Olympus will do.))

Would love to see some shots of this thing in action in situ Seems remarkably compact for what it is ^^

Day 17. Eve continues to look the same everywhere. ...so yeah, a waypoint in a lake. Smooth move, cartography! Pay attention to the altitude maps next time please. On the up side, the massive lake surrounded by mountains is surprisingly scenic, especially when the sun is low to the horizon. The wash of green makes it almost seem as if one could take off their helmet and smell the flowers. Fortunately nobody does. Also, @Shadowmage was kind enough to tip me off that by assigning Scorpio's wheels to a group, any adjustments would happen to all of them. Switching gear is now 8x faster than before! Also the crew are starting to think they have evidence that the universe is a simulation... Best not send that photo to the papers!

Ohhh... I kind of left the group setting alone because I wasn't sure what it did x)

Just dropping a thought off; is it possible to have increment/decrement gear as an action button? With 8 wheels on my current rover, it would have been lovely to have a shift-up and shift-down button for all of them at once x)

"Eve looks the same everywhere." Ascending to the brow of this ridge was an exercise in patience, calling for a low gear and a switchback path up the side. Turns out that Scorpio doesn't quite generate enough power when the motors are being taxed this hard, and several breaks are needed before the rover finally reaches the crest and the crew can see down into the vast crater on the far side. The descent is quicker than the climb, but much riskier. This is the steepest slope yet encountered on Eve, and despite the atmospheric drag, there's a possibility that Scorpio could become a runaway, overloading its wheels and sending the forward section crunching down into the terrain. Fortunately, Scorpio comes with adjustable suspension, and Bill is able to add a respectable amount of ground clearance at the front. Nursing the brake pedal, Jeb manages to get everyone down safely with only minimal loss of snacks. And it turns out the lab is now full of data - but the crew confirms that they intend to reach all waypoints anyway. Worst case, they'll load the surface samples onto EEVEE for analysis back on Kerbin.

Aha! I was speculating that it might relate to the wheels being only like 95% submerged and thus kicking a bit more water out the back than the front - but then I thought that was a pretty fancy thing for KSP to model. I didn't bank on modder attention to detail Definitely be making use of this feature in future - now that I know it is a feature. Would lowering spring force have made the wheels ride a little higher in the water for better propulsion? Also, did you know that scaled-up medium wheels have a higher maximum safe speed than large wheels? They burn a lot more power than the big ones, but they make for a much faster ride with no burst tyres...

Ah. I'll assume you mean in other careers

That is rather impressive... I use Editor Extensions for rings. Go for <many> symmetry with the ring pieces surface-attached to the central axis, drag them out until they're the appropriate distance away to look nice. No mismatch regardless of how many spokes or ring segments you want to use

...it floats... and it has propulsion in the 'water'... Ok, so on the return leg it decided to move at 0.9m/s, but since that fell to zero when turning off the throttle and went back to 0.9 when driving, it's pretty hard to argue that this thing does have some level of amphibious capacity. Which we didn't expect. Mission control gives the engineering department a long, hard stare and asks why Scorpio wasn't expected to work in the oceans to start with? We knew there were oceans. We have technology that would have made oceanic movement viable. The rover floats, but nobody joined the dots and make the rover a boat. Someone has just lost their snack expenses for a month.

As above, really. Science instruments are so tiny that you should be carrying all of them all the time. An exception can occasionally be made for the materials lab due to its bulk, but even that is only 0.1t and really should be viable on anything. Since Duna's atmo is so thin, you could be brave and scrape the top kilometre without actually losing any speed. Wire up an action button to fire every experiment at once for speed. Unless you want to RP it and send different missions for difference science packages, which is an excuse to design more vessels and if you're enjoying doing that and don't need to save funds, then by all means do so. And indeed the gravioli detector is a great package since you'll get biome science at all altitudes and will likely get a good couple of hundred points out of it (Why are you going to Dres before Duna? Duna is notably easier...)

With the escape vehicle, rover and crew pod all safely on Eve's amethyst surface, all the ingredients are in the pressure cooker. All we need to do now is light the flame and... and I don't know where that metaphor is going. To the space world! Jeb denies all knowledge of why the drop pod tried to self destruct the moment he disembarked. Fortunately it was only a temporary shelter anyway, and now that the crew is aboard Scorpius, it can be allowed to roll away to wherever it prefers to live. Turns out Eve is... really big. Even the "nearby" waypoint in the Lowlands requires more hours than there are hours of daylight remaining, and it is next morning before Bill finally spots the telltale glimmer on the horizon that marks the Western Sea just "a little way" beyond.

TIL that when going to Eve, one should always take a slow transfer. Reason being that if you take more than half an orbit to get there, you must pass through either the AN or DN, and you'll have a chance to make a cheap inclination adjustment for an equatorial orbit on arrival. Shame that this is probably my last Eve transfer of this career - and possibly the last expedition of the career, because, tbh, I've done the stock system in 1.3.1 and I don't quite feel a need to revisit any of that unless I do something drastic with mods. I've rovered Duna, Ike, Moho, Dres and Tylo, spaceplaned Laythe, hopped around Gilly, Vall, Bop and Pol. But I only landed once on Eve, with a basic one-drop one-ascent lander. So Eve it is. And since it's probably the last one, let's do it properly. We know Eve is a brutal planet; it likes to eat anything thrown at it, and the descent is arguably more harrowing than the ascent. For safety, we'll ensure that all the infrastructure to sustain and return kerbonauts has already landed before we send the crew down to join them. Everything will be dropped from an equatorial orbit onto terrain already scouted by the W-EVE-1L rover. EEVEE; weighing just over 115 tons, this tough 'little' vessel will get four kerbals from Eve's surface to 200x200km orbit. With good piloting. If it survives the drop. Scorpio; a new breed of heavy rover. Bullfrog worked well on Duna, but Eve is a literal pressure cooker where a hole in the hull means the lethal atmosphere comes in. Styx Ferry; because the smaller and simpler the drop pod, the safer it will be. Getting down to Eve's surface is a doddle with two pods, a heatshield and a parachute. EEVEE handles the descent admirably. Although she does wobble a little at 2200m/s, by that point the dangerous heating is behind her and soon she can kick loose her heatshield and airbrakes and settle down onto a modest 6-degree hillside as scouted by W-EVE-1L. Scorpio's ride is a little rougher. Resembling something between a whale and a ham shank, the centre of mass may be slightly out because he soon wants to turn sideways into the brutal airstream. Fortunately the fairing survives the heat intact, allowing the rover to kick loose of all its descent accessories. Or at least it would, if it wasn't that the heatshield falls slower than the rover which falls slower than the tailfin, which ultimately results in an awkward balancing game until the parachutes deploy. Landing within metres of the fairing base, Scorpio takes note of his position and prepares to collect the crew once they arrive. With EEVEE and Scorpio both safely on the ground, mission control gives the nod to drop the crew into the seething pink atmosphere below. Jeb, Bob, Bill and Erin enter the pod, buckle up and prepare for the roughest descent they'll ever experience. Which it turns out, was the easiest of the three. An oversized heatshield and simple aerodynamics ensure stability all the way, and though the outside pressure rises fast, nothing comes even close to thermal failure. The final landing site is on a relatively severe 13 degree incline, but only 17km from Scorpio seems like a win. Worst case we can gear him down to make it up the slope. Valentina will stay aboard the Styx Ferry to be their comms link and supply navigational data. Sorry Val, but you did get to do all the Duna expeditions so it's about time we let Jeb take the wheel. *edit* For a moment, I thought disaster had struck... there is no Bon Voyage module on Scorpio! But it turns out I wrote a patch ages ago to assign BV functions to external command chairs, and he does actually have one of those so... game on!

Have... have you tried not running with a mod that is specifically designed to give you bad luck? Duna doesn't need a heatshield anyway ^^;

7:30pm. I have forgotten the taste of food. Daylight is a mere memory. Is there a world beyond my curtains? I am no longer sure. Perhaps this is all that there is to the universe. However... Which makes me happy I had been considering dropping a lab-rover down with a crew to be recovered "later" but it turns out that I already have the tech needed to bring them home. After 5 simulated drops, I'm happy to say that it's not 'hard' to get EEVEE down to the surface without anything blowing up. A retrograde probe core aligned with the ejectable fins gives a decent measure of control and allows the vessel to keep the heatshield between itself and the... heat. Ascent is largely a matter of overriding the pilot's instinct to lean eastward. Don't do that before at least 10km. Not even a little bit. The most efficient ascents have maintained a gentle 1.5-1.6 TWR all the way. Final crew transfer to Eve Station will have to be done via EVA since there is no room for a docking port. EEVEE sims have targeted the highlands biome, about 1-2km above sea level, and some of the landing sites have been somewhat 'suboptimal' with regards to the landscape. Lithobrake Exploration landing legs prove much more competent than stock legs in the high gravity. The W-EVE-1L rover's landing site turns out to be pretty respectable and will serve as a useful target. Whether I can launch this 115 ton monster and get it into low equatorial Eve orbit... that's yet to be seen. There's enough data aboard Eve Station to unlock 5m rocket parts, which I hope will trivialise the matter of lifting power. Also 2 of my 3 scientists are on that station and since it has a return capsule, they might as well come home before launching the next mission. Also... we're going to need a bigger rover. Something a little... sturdier than we used on Duna. Engineering have released this artists' concept.

Well, it's 4pm and I haven't had breakfast... or even left my seat... but, I do have this thing now: Roughly 115 tons, onion staging of 4 vectors and a central aerospike (not to be used below 30km). I know it will lift 3 kerbals off Eve into a 200x200km orbit, but getting it to the surface is awkward. Naturally I want to use the inflatable heatshield, but it's so draggy that I can't get rid of the dang thing from underneath the rocket!

Most likely this is my own fault, just curious if anyone else has it. Upgraded my 1.5.1 to 1.6.0 when it came out. About 4 days later found the lander can bug, couldn't solve it, didn't want to lose the time played, didn't want to stay on a known buggy version, so edited the file to change all "1.6.0" back to "1.5.1" and it now loads in my old 1.5 install again. But it will not now upgrade, and I suspect I'm stuck on the previous version forever. Manually replacing 1.5.1 with 1.6.1 doesn't help. /shrug

With the sun rising over W-EVE-1L, and Eve Station sweeping into the sky above, it was time to begin the long 80km trek towards what the survey scanners tell us is most likely a liquid ocean. We're hoping for blueberry, but we'd settle for blackcurrant. W-EVE-1L turns out to be remarkably stable, maintaining a cruising speed of 50m/s without so much as threatening to slip or spin. Eve herself may be helping us here, with her high gravity and dense atmosphere having eroded the landscape to a gently undulating series of hills. And here we must leave our brave little rover, because the Eve environment is pretty brutal and without an engineer on-sight, he's sadly starting to struggle. -- Or more accurately my homebrew ruleset only allows gathering of 3 biomes worth of data with an un-kermanned rover. I am however using Science Relay to beam experiment results to the orbital lab, which now has about a thousand data points to chew through. Also I really like roving around Eve... not sure if it's the colours, the oceans, or just the easy driving, but it's remarkably satisfying. Very tempted to drop a lab and a kermanned rover down there on the assumption that we will develop the tech to bring them back "later"... The question is, who would be crazy enough to volunteer for that? And can the program manage with senior crew being on a long-term assignment?

Allow me to quote myself from back in the 0.25 days when I was running with RemoteTech... Bonus with modern KSP, you don't have a single point of contact with the ground - it does however apply really well to probe rovers on other planets if you really really want constant comms. The actual probability of reaching "any" relay is proportional to how high their APs are. The more eccentric their orbit, the longer they hang around at high altitude and the faster they sweep around their PE.

Check the Waypoint Manager mod for better waypoint management It is however not at all pointless. I suspect you can bullseye a location to within a few hundred metres using the map view waypoint - and they seem to have a radius of about 600m.

For being so close to the sun, Eve can be really frikking dark... especially when your engineering department completely underestimates the fuel needed to perform a plane change to the equatorial, and you end up having to dive into the atmosphere from a high AP, on the night side. At least we have Jeb on hand to remote control the descent! Despite the failure of planning, W-EVE-1L survives his descent through the soupy atmosphere, and has the fortune to land somewhere that is at least solid. Probably best to wait for sunrise before continuing... what with the rover being solar powered and all.

As above, all the Near Future mods are solid additions, and Editor Extensions is a must-have. Also consider... Kerbal Foundries Continued for wheels that work like wheels and don't flip your rover Space Y for really big rockets RLA Reborn to add some engine/fuel/thruster options at pretty much all stock sizes SXT, MK2 Expansion, and Airplane plus for plane+spaceplane related parts DeepSky/ThorTech for some overpowered spaceplane related parts For career mode, I would strongly recommend using Community Tech Tree with these, as it'll give you more depth and make you work a bit harder to unlock the best stuff.

Catastrophically misjudged how much fuel I needed to get to a low equatorial orbit around Eve... PE is on the dark side and don't want to wait 4 months for that to change. A'ight, going in from a high AP, in the dark. Break out the 'simulator' boys... this one's gonna need some fine tuning. Hindsight; should have just waited 4 months for the PE to be on the light side. Next scheduled vessel manoeuvre is 1 year 70 days away anyway, I could have just waited.