seanth

A proposal: Several people have engaged in voyages of discovery on Kerbin without planes or spacecraft. There was a charity journey by land to the north pole, and two (soon to be three) people have circumnavigated the planet with boats. I'm sure there have been other heroic journeys that I'm not aware of. I propose that a number of terrain features be named after the forum members that have engaged in these endeavors. Having said that: The following proposed names have to do with this thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/25016-In-search-of-Ferdinand-Magellan/ Point of Thersis: The forum member Thersis crashed their naval ship after travelling 534km of KSP. This point is roughly that distance. William's Point: William Kerbin was the pilot of the second naval vessel to circumnavigate Kerbin. Isthmus of Kamm: The forum member Kerbies_are_my_Minions (KAMM) was the first to circumnavigate Kerbin by boat as far as I know. He would have been the first to cross this isthmus to do so. Strait of Zakku: the forum member Ekku Zakku was the second person to circumnavigate Kerbin. Russell's reef: I noticed this area as I was attempting the 3rd circumnavigation. Named after one of Kerbies_are_my_minions' crew, Russel Kerbin Kai's reef: I noticed this area as I was attempting the 3rd circumnavigation. Named after one of Kerbies_are_my_minions' crew, Kai Kerbin Inattention Island: I nearly plowed full speed into this island when I got distracted and wasn't watching my boat. So, in closing and summary, I propose the KGSS honor these and other ground and water based explorers. <bows>

Finally made it across the isthmus. Six hours (including a significant period of time during the night when I ran out of electrical power and just had to wait for the sun), and it is not trivial. If this were multiplayer, I'd almost be tempted to return to drop some solar lights to mark what I consider a good path. My craft pretty much hated slopes that approached 10° up due to how I positioned the front drive wheels and the rear wheels. It's a boat. It was never meant to hike ~150km overland. 17hrs 39min (in game time) into my attempt. Anyway, I'm back in the water and continuing on. To document it, I'm screen capturing KSP every 10 seconds like I did before. My calculations are starting to worry me a bit, though. Before setting out, I did the maths and added what I thought would be enough additional fuel. Now I'm not so sure.... If I make it, I'll upload the raw video, and then maybe make an edited one later. EDIT: once I get the video up, I'm super curious to hear from the first two successful circumnavigators to see if the isthmus terrain was as rough for them as they'll see in the video EDIT #2: I think, given the difficulty and spirit of exploration involved in doing this, it would be nice if Kerbin geography was named after people that are doing this (and other non-aircraft exploration of Kerbin). To that end http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/10088-Kerbin-Geographic-And-Science-Society?p=656269&viewfull=1#post656269. So, to use the map's names, I'm through the Strait of Zakku and just passed Kai's reef. Now is rest time.

A potential underwater anomaly, near the northern isthmus on Kerbin. I had just crossed the isthmus and was ready to continue in an attempt to circumnavigate the planet in a boat. It was night, and I noticed it was unusually shallow for a long time, so I clicked on some lights. I had a script running to take images every 10 seconds (to document the circumnavigation) and the light revealed what looks like a large platform that rapidly drops off. I was tempted to stop and investigate, but fuel is tight in my attempt. I captured these three images: What's not very clear from the images is the very straight line where it went from shallow to a very steep, straight slope down. It's near 48° 33' 24"N 94° 32' 33" E.

Looks like this: That map shows me a few possible passes with minimal backtracking. I'll try and resume my trip later today.

Hmmm. I may be stuck. How did people get across the northern isthmus? I went east from the space center and have crossed most of the isthmus, but the hills east of the largest lake in the isthmus are very steep. I am not convinced my poor little boat can get over them, and back tracking will use more fuel. Anyway, I'm paused for the night and will look at things closer tomorrow.

I'm not sure that is completely true. I'm not using any modified parts to get the kethane drills to sink. Only the ones provided by Squad. Now, I did modify the winches I am using to be 100m vs 50m, but that isn't messing with part masses. I'm happy to post images and/or share the .craft file for those interested. The rules of a game I'm getting ready for are that I allow myself a certain fixed amount of fuel at the start of a game. After that point, I start using only a set of custom parts, which are just the Squad parts but without any fuel. I will _have_ to mine kethane on Kerbin in order to do anything. It also means I'll have to design rockets in such a way that I'll be able to fuel them from tanker trucks or something. It's certainly not as cost effective as free fuel, but I'm curious how hard it is. That plus using Deadly Reentry is Ironman/Impossible mode, I think.

I like your idea of using the hooks to anchor the drills. I think, though, you'd need to make custom ballast parts for what you are describing to work. As far as I know, the only parts (other than submarine parts) that will sink are the big orange fuel tanks, and the largest kethane tank full of kethane. I went with the orange tanks simply for ease of design. However, now that I can harvest kethane, I can make a kethane-tank version of the mining rig. I'd really love to see other people's designs if they try something similar

My first attempt at circumnavigation ended poorly, due to the intersection of poor design, poor planning, and poor piloting. A few notes first. I started thinking about circumnavigating the planet via boat in relation to some deep water kethane drilling designs I've been working on (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/49318-Deep-water-kethan-mining). The logic being that I want to make sure I can reach any ocean on the planet with my ship designs. So, technically, I wouldn't need to circumnavigate the planet; I'd just need to go half way and back. But if you're going to do that, might as well loop it. I grabbed a map of Kerbin off the web and planned my route: The ship designs that did this before me are much, much faster than my designs. But my designs are based on craft built to transport heavy cargo, such as two completely full orange tanks. So, I'm completely ok with my top speed of ~60m/s. Once I decided to make the attempt, quick maths indicated a travel time of around 31 hours. There's no way I would record 31 hours of video to act as documentation that I had succeeded, so I wrote a short little script that would take a screen shot of KSP every 10 seconds and then I'd make the images into a video. In my first attempt, I reached the northern isthmus at night. My craft has two battery powered rover wheels mounted at the front, the plan being to use battery power to cross the land to save on fuel. Unfortunately, it being night, my ability to travel was limited to battery power, which I didn't have much of. Did I mention bad planning? Once my battery ran out, I planned on just stopping for the night and waiting for the sun to continue. But I hit the breaks too hard, snapped a front strut, and the trip was ended. The time lapse of my attempt can be seen at http://youtu.be/ZWWQpWAplDg The ship is completely stock parts, with the exception of a mechjeb controller. I use a combination of the rover autopilot, landing guidance, and spaceplane guidance to control my ocean-going craft over long distance. The rover autopilot is for moving the craft over land, as necessary. The landing guidance allows me to click on the map (or enter coordinates) to get ship headings and distance values. With the destination data, I can point my ship in the desired direction, get the heading, enter it into the spaceplane controller and have it maintain that heading. I set a timer on my mobile to let me know when I'm approaching the destination, and then I make adjustments as the ship reaches the end of one leg and I prepare the same thing for the second leg. I think of it as my Kerbal pilot being left in charge while I do dishes or whatever.

Is this still a thing? I'm about 5 game hrs into a water-based circumnavigation and then thought to check out the forums. My goal is to circumnavigate without needing to refuel, but based on this shakedown run, I think I'm short by about 5000L 500L (2013.09.16: dumb typo edit) of fuel. Anyway, if this is still considered active, I'll post stats, images and a timelapse video of my trip

An update: To reach depths greater than ~350m, I needed to refine the design a bit and use more weight (two orange tanks). The transport of the entire mining rig is proving difficult and might end up requiring a two step process: A ship to deliver the mining rig to the spot in the ocean, and a second ship designed to transfer the liquid fuel and oxidizer into it. Right now, raising a two tank mining rig into one of my transports using winches creates a shifting center of balance. Which is fine on land, but results in near disasters at sea. It also means that top speeds are limited to under 5m/s. One possibility is to make the mining rig more modular. This would allow it to be more easily transported in pieces to other planets. Maybe something like: Orange tank+2 small drills+docking port|docking port+5 winches+docking port|docking port+orange tank+5 winches+docking port|docking port+surface buoy That way the central port+tank+winches+port are modular, letting you have as many or as few as you need, and something that could be assembled on the surface of a planet/moon with the help of a small tugboat. Anyway, here's the KSS Tippy Canoe (the transport ship) docked with the kethane mining rig (Deep Six). The drills are in 600m of water and successfully extracting the kethane. You can just make out the drill activity in the lower center of the image. And in this next image, a test kethane transporter is docked with the KSS Tippy Canoe and is being loaded with kethane. The initial plan was to dock the tanker directly to the mining surface buoy, but a docking bug kept me from from undocking the Tippy Canoe (docking the tanker ship to the Tippy Canoe "fixed" the bug, but since I was already docked, why bother undocking). I'm worried that the kethane tanker design is just too big for the amount of kethane it can hold (a maximum of 192,000 liters). The plan is to completely fill the tanker and then see how it handles and what it's maximum speed is in a destructive test. I have left KSP running for 24hrs to allow the tanker to load, which is approximately 6.5 hrs of in game time. I'm assuming the lag is due to the three craft (mining rig, Tippy Canoe, and tanker) all docked together and making a pretty giant craft (remember that the drills are 600m away from the tanker). Anyway, it's paint drying, so I just let it run. I'd time warp things, but I'm afraid what the full tanker would do when suddenly do when exposed to 1x physics. On a somewhat related note: do the oceans have currents? I've noticed that the ships are drifting over time, and that there is a bow in the 600m long cable as it runs from the surface down to the bottom. I suspect what I'm seeing is an effect of the physics engine sort-of-kind-of changing ship positions in water relative to the rotation of the planet. A coriolis effect, of sorts.

The orange tanks will sink in water (as will the largest filled kethane tank). The trick is to attach items to an orange tank, but not so many items that the tank becomes boyant again. In my experiments, I found that an orange tank with full oxidizer and 1000L of liquid fuel will sink with two small kethane drills and some attached KAS winches. Since the orange tank is attached to things at the surface, you can pump fuel around and change the buoyancy. With zero L of liquid fuel, the orange tank and drills will start ascending from the bottom.

Plugins: Kerbal attachment system, Kethane Pack After a bit of experimentation, I've successfully managed to mine kethane in just over 300m of water. The rig I built should allow me to reach a depth of 600m, but this was just a test. I know that there are submarine parts one can get through addons, but if you attach to a submarine using a docking port, everything behaves like a part of the sub, which is not what the exercise was about. I really wanted a floating refinery that tanker could dock with and fill up on kethane. Starting with one of the orange tanks, I attached two of the small kethan drills, and a series of KAS winches. At the top of the winches is the floating "refinery." Surface docking station and the "waterstrider" transport used to deliver the kethane rig A top-down view of the surface docking station. Far under water (~300m) can be seen the orange tank. Despite the dark, you can see the kethane plume coming up from the mining activity, as well as one of the KAS winches. The single largest problem in the whole design was transporting the whole thing off shore. I have a series of "water strider" style transporters for ocean transport, but this thing was slightly wider than most other things I have transported (like a terrestrial kethane mining and refining setup for use on a continent across the ocean). Once in place, it works fine, but setting the rig up is difficult because as the tanks sinks, the center of balance for the entire craft moves. In the end there is a craft that is over 300m in length, making it very hard to click on any desired part. I found the best way to deploy the "drill head" (the orange tank and the kethane drills) is to extend the winch closest to the surface and work my way down the chain. While this was a successful test, there are still aspects that require refinement. Particularly the transport ship. The ship, without cargo, can average 60m/s on water. With a moderate load, 40m/s. This underwater mining setup had it's weight distributed in such an odd way that the whole craft nearly turtled. A bit more work and I think it should be possible to average speeds of at least 20m/s.