The Excursion to Mt. Keverest [1.0.5+]

[klesh]

Very nice, but your entry wont be considered, because in the rules it says stock only.

Right, which is why I said it wasn't part of the challenge. Just providing some of the science info and confirmation of the proper height.

[Candlelight]

Right, which is why I said it wasn't part of the challenge. Just providing some of the science info and confirmation of the proper height.

Oh, alright... Hope you had fun !

[Torquimedes]

Scientist Bob needed some meteorological readings taken from the summit of Mt. Keverest to test his theory about a coming “aeropocalypseâ€Â. Engineer Bill decided the fastest way to put Jeb on that peak was to modify the PowerChute for suborbital hypersonic flight with a turbojet and another fuel tank. Since Jeb was currently engaged in “manned cannon round†experiments, Bill decided he could do his own incremental engineering evaluation test flights. Then the design would be finalized before Jeb was available for the official flight to Keverest.

While flight testing and recording necessary design improvements, Bill discovered the turbojet's tendency to "soup skip" across the upper atmosphere and accidentally overshot Keverest by half a continent. So he flew back to land, but ran out of electricity since night had fallen over Keverest. Without power for SAS to hold a hover for landing, Bill pulled the chutes high over the peaks and descended onto a slope. The Powerchute tipped over (without exploding any bits) and settled into the valley.

Without power to right his craft, or a radio to call for rescue, Bill decided to hike up ridges until he found Keverest and complete the mission by twilight. He marveled at the view from the top of the world until the sun rose, giving him enough light to find his craft and power to fly it home again.

Bill managed to arrive over KSC with a few drops of fuel left. Hovering in to land, he lost power for SAS control because he was landing in the dark again. He panicked and popped the chutes, and happened to plop right onto the runway.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Edited May 28, 2015 by Torquimedes

[Torquimedes]

For those folks who have asked how Bill managed to right the Powerchute to fly home again...

PowerChute has a probe core and reaction wheel, but only solar panels for power. This is a prototype that wasn't intended for the Keverest run. It was supposed to get upgrades like an RTG and better balance before the real expedition. After it toppled over in a dark snowy valley, Bill was forced to wait for dawn to power the probe core. Then he ordered the SAS via the probe core to very... carefully... orient itself pointing uphill instead of downhill without breaking anything off. Then he rolled it with the seat upright and climbed aboard. Next he retracted the two "lower" legs (the upper leg is jammed deployed) and used SAS to tip it up onto its engine, then deployed the legs to stand on them. This picture was snapped in the second between deploying the legs and mashing the throttle to lift off before it could topple over again.

[Betttris13]

Flew there, landed, screamed a lot on landing thinking i was going to fast (this was my test flight with the new aerodynamics and wished id brought a parachute), walked to the top, was about to plant a flag then BOOM I died. :-(:-(:-( would have had enough fuel to make it home to:-(

might try again tomorrow...

[Candlelight]

Congratulations, Torquimedes! A good story worth reading, and nice gallery and good pictures.Sorry i haven't put you on the leaderboard yet.I haven't been checking this thread in a while.

You will be up in a minute.

As for you, Bettris13, i need a video or photo proof of it.Look at Torquimedes for example .

Edited May 1, 2015 by Candlelight

[MunGazer]

Alrighty, I did the excursion to Mt. Keverest in my particular style, which involved a mid sized cargo plane I made called the C-27 Kerpa that can deploy and recover a specially made land rover. The toughest part of the trip was some bugs I encountered once on the summit. One of them caused me to not have any brakes for the rover (which made it insanely difficult to dismount the rover without it rolling away - I ended up locking the steering for all the wheels pointing odd directions to prevent movement). A second one would make my rover vibrate really badly on some parts of the terrain, which would cause me to lose control of the rover sometimes. The bug induced rover crashes forced me to use quick saves and quick loads for what otherwise would have been a good, clean mission - so the final F3 results will show a lower ground distance than what one would expect, but the overall mission time should be accurate. And the third bug was there was indeed a mysterious force pulling my rover in one horizontal direction - often times even uphill unless I applied reverse throttle to slow it. Anyway, other than that it was an awesome trip, and the scenery and sense of scale you get while on or near the summit is really cool. Not to mention the sense of accomplishment.

And here's the full album slide show on imgur:

http://imgur.com/a/jbye3

Also, here's the craft file - anyone can use it for anything:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ltqlw62cf4jfa55/C-27%20Kerpa.craft?dl=0

Edited May 11, 2015 by MunGazer

[Mr Tiddles]

Congrats!

I may make the trek soon as well, I am trying to make a good car/rover, and plane to make most of the trip.

[MunGazer]

Congrats!

I may make the trek soon as well, I am trying to make a good car/rover, and plane to make most of the trip.

Thanks! Here's a few quick pointers that may help ease the more painful parts of the trip:

1. A good plane will often be able to fly at 4x time warp with the right pitch trim setting while being manually controlled. There's SAS too, but it has its own issues. If only slight control deflection is needed (the pitch trim should hold it close to level if done right), it's actually easy to fly at 4x speed, which can mean staring at an 8,500 meter altitude flight for 30 minutes instead of 2 hours, depending on your airspeed. And another thing to note - the air up there at Keverest is thinner, meaning you'll have a higher stall speed, less lift, less intake air, and less thrust.

2. The rover drives just fine on a lot of terrain, but sometimes it hits these patches where it starts vibrating wildly even at 3 m/s on terrain that visually looks completely flat, and it can ultimately cause you to lose control and your rover to flip over or crash; it's terrible. It's mainly a problem when you're going down hill, and because of the vibration, you can't slow down. My solution was to go down hill at like 1 m/s. Even then it may not work if the grade is too steep. Also, this can limit your ascent grade as well. However, ascent is much more easy to keep under control because you don't get a run-away situation with the rover unless it gets too steep. These bugs are part of the reason I had to choose a much more risky landing location close to the summit - to circumvent dealing with the rover+terrain bugs as much as possible. Also, there seems to be some kind of horizontal force up there that can pull you toward ledges, even pull your rover up - hill!

3. There is some kind of bug with using action groups that are mixed with standard functions like the brakes. I had the brakes on a special action group for my joystick trigger. I used both the default brake controls and my joystick trigger to activate them - but then once I detached the rover from my plane, I was shocked and disappointed to find that the brakes for the rover wouldn't work no matter what key I pressed, or if the brake indicator light was on. The brakes were also set to full torque and simply wouldn't work. My recommendation is to leave the brakes in the stock "Brake" action group and don't touch them when it comes to other action groups, if at all possible.

4. Timing. If you go to the space center, and advance time and watch the location of Mt. Keverest, take a quick note of the UT or Universal Time that it is facing toward the sun, preferably in the morning local Mt. Keverest time. For me, that was about 3h 0m UT. Then, you can figure if you take 2 hours to get there, you can leave at 1h 0m UT and you'll arrive at an ideal time in the morning on Mt. Keverest and have ideal visibility conditions for ease of operations and better photography.

5. Navigation. I'd recommend using terrain association for navigation - just head the general direction of Keverest and keep checking your position on the map. I tried to plan what my heading would be, but it was seemingly largely affected by the Coriolis effect, or, what I call the "Koriolis effect" lol. You'll notice that your orbital prograde differs quite a bit from your surface prograde and I'm totally unsure of how to account for this mathematically in order to determine a constant heading (if there even is one) to make a B line straight for Keverest.

Edited May 11, 2015 by MunGazer

[Mr Tiddles]

Thanks! I'll keep that in mind.

[Candlelight]

Alrighty, I did the excursion to Mt. Keverest in my particular style, which involved a mid sized cargo plane I made called the C-27 Kerpa that can deploy and recover a specially made land rover. The toughest part of the trip was some bugs I encountered once on the summit. One of them caused me to not have any brakes for the rover (which made it insanely difficult to dismount the rover without it rolling away - I ended up locking the steering for all the wheels pointing odd directions to prevent movement). A second one would make my rover vibrate really badly on some parts of the terrain, which would cause me to lose control of the rover sometimes. The bug induced rover crashes forced me to use quick saves and quick loads for what otherwise would have been a good, clean mission - so the final F3 results will show a lower ground distance than what one would expect, but the overall mission time should be accurate. And the third bug was there was indeed a mysterious force pulling my rover in one horizontal direction - often times even uphill unless I applied reverse throttle to slow it. Anyway, other than that it was an awesome trip, and the scenery and sense of scale you get while on or near the summit is really cool. Not to mention the sense of accomplishment.

http://i.imgur.com/L5cL52f.png

And here's the full album slide show on imgur:

http://imgur.com/a/jbye3

Also, here's the craft file - anyone can use it for anything:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ltqlw62cf4jfa55/C-27%20Kerpa.craft?dl=0

Very nice MunGazer! This is one of the best so far .

You can now add the badge if you'd like.I hope you had fun!

[Admiral-Helwyr]

Here is my entry...

Javascript is disabled. View full album

The tiny white speck in the second to last pic that is next to the island is there escape yacht with chopper \

So this was originally a mission to the pole but the mountain was on the way.

Bob was later found by search and rescue...

[Candlelight]

Here is my entry...

http://imgur.com/a/9N5ky

The tiny white speck in the second to last pic that is next to the island is there escape yacht with chopper \

So this was originally a mission to the pole but the mountain was on the way.

Bob was later found by search and rescue...

Outstanding!

Though i feel your pain, it's a buttload of pain climbing up the slopes.Love the Kerbal Tower BTW!

You can now add the badge to your signatures.In case you don't know how, read the mini-tutorial at the bottom.

Thanks for participating!

[Prof. Endwalker]

Im gonna make note of this challenge. Should I fly this in my Spirit of St. Louis replica? Its the only plane I acctually got to fly in 1.0 :I

[Candlelight]

Im gonna make note of this challenge. Should I fly this in my Spirit of St. Louis replica? Its the only plane I acctually got to fly in 1.0 :I

Well, i guess so.I haven't seen the plane yet, so i can't tell if it qualifies.So yeah, make an imgur album or a video for your entry and describe it a little and i will see.Just make sure you and your craft stick to the rules and everything will be fine.

[Squiggsy]

I completed the challange in my JebBoard Rove Edition:

Javascript is disabled. View full album

I reckon this should be the in style category, but thats up to you

this was great fun to make, and worked amazingly well, unfortunately the funniest bit of the trip wasn't documented because I was too busy laughing, basically i climbed a lot of the hill in the rover by using the reaction wheel and cartwheeling up, until eventually losing control and going flying far further than that rover should have flown!

Although KER is there I barely used it really, and FMRS was going to be used to land the probe jet unit at the peak but i kept crashing so i just abandoned that idea in the end (it really didn't fly well without the rover attached)

I also used the Stock Fuel Switch to allow the tanks to only have liquid fuel, if you think this is cheaty then fair enough but I just think it is something that should really be stock, and I can't understand why it isn't an option (especially with NERVs using only liquid fuel now)

I want to say thank you for making this challenge and for encouraging people do do weird and wonderful things to achieve it, was great fun getting creative and coming up with this craft, though it pales in comparison to some of the other entries! (though i think it is probably one of the smallest to make it there)

[Candlelight]

I completed the challange in my JebBoard Rove Edition:

http://imgur.com/a/pSiEm

I reckon this should be the in style category, but thats up to you

this was great fun to make, and worked amazingly well, unfortunately the funniest bit of the trip wasn't documented because I was too busy laughing, basically i climbed a lot of the hill in the rover by using the reaction wheel and cartwheeling up, until eventually losing control and going flying far further than that rover should have flown!

Although KER is there I barely used it really, and FMRS was going to be used to land the probe jet unit at the peak but i kept crashing so i just abandoned that idea in the end (it really didn't fly well without the rover attached)

I also used the Stock Fuel Switch to allow the tanks to only have liquid fuel, if you think this is cheaty then fair enough but I just think it is something that should really be stock, and I can't understand why it isn't an option (especially with NERVs using only liquid fuel now)

I want to say thank you for making this challenge and for encouraging people do do weird and wonderful things to achieve it, was great fun getting creative and coming up with this craft, though it pales in comparison to some of the other entries! (though i think it is probably one of the smallest to make it there)

Ermm....I don't know...mods, i...*grunt from too much pressure* Fine...I will let it pass only this ONCE, altough it says stock only, no mods.

Great entry by the way, Squiggsy! Your craft i think is the smallest so far to complete this challenge.Gonna add you to the board...

For the rest of you that will try this challenge, don't think you can get away like him over here.I know i sound cheaty but...personal reasons.

- - - Updated - - -

CHALLENGE ANNOUNCEMENT!

Big question everyone.I'm planning to divide the challenge into 3 difficulties: Easy, Medium and Hard!

Give me your answers in the poll above the main page.Remember, this depends on you guys!

What does this mean?

It means that if you want an entry while this challenge is organized the way it is now, enter before the 31 May!

Edited May 24, 2015 by Candlelight

[Squiggsy]

nahhh if you won't allow anyone else to get away with it I don't feel right getting away with it, at least put a note next to my name saying "kinda cheated", I only did this for fun so I really don't mind, wouldn't be right if I can get away with doing it but no one else can, just participating was fun enough!

[MunGazer]

"Give me your answers in the poll above the main page" - I'm on my mobile right now, and I'm having trouble figuring out just how it is that I find/use this supposed polling feature. Or am I misunderstanding, and do you just want a written reply here? If so, I'll vote indifferent if possible, other than that, yeah sure why not. I think that it would raise the stakes and you'd get at least a few more entrants that would do it just for the sole reason of accomplishing the "hard" category. I suppose it may also hinge on what you define as hard, but I have a feeling that it indeed will be truly hard. I get the sense that many turn a nose up to challenges that don't allow them to exhibit their particular expertise. Not that being picky in that way is a bad thing.

Edited May 30, 2015 by MunGazer

[Candlelight]

"Give me your answers in the poll above the main page" - I'm on my mobile right now, and I'm having trouble figuring out just how it is that I find/use this supposed polling feature. Or am I misunderstanding, and do you just want a written reply here? If so, I'll vote indifferent if possible, other than that, yeah sure why not. I think that it would raise the stakes and you'd get at least a few more entrants that would do it just for the sole reason of accomplishing the "hard" category. I suppose it may also hinge on what you define as hard, but I have a feeling that it indeed will be truly hard. I get the sense that many turn a nose up to challenges that don't allow them to exhibit their particular expertise. Not that being picky in that way is a bad thing.

Sorry if i'm asking a bit too much, but why are you on mobile? Is something wrong with your PC or whatever you use?

[MunGazer]

Sorry if i'm asking a bit too much, but why are you on mobile? Is something wrong with your PC or whatever you use?

No prob. I see it now that I'm off work and on my PC, I figured that might be why I didn't see it - just doesn't seem to be available on my mobile. I do a lot of reading on here using my mobile when I've got down time at work. For all you managers out there, remember, pretending to look busy is worse than pure down time - because it's a deception

[Candlelight]

Ok people!

The poll ended today after 7 days!

Most of you said that you were cool with anything.But regarding that, most of you went for a big yes, except one that said maybe.

I will implement the 3 difficulties later today.

[Kelidoskoped]

is getting there in an 8x8 and then flying up top with a jetpack squad cool enough?

Also, does calling it the Jebinator make it better? I hope.

You steal my idea? I go get you. My horse was in the background.

[sal_vager]

This is very old @Kelidoskoped, it's probably no longer running.

[Candlelight]

 

On 02.02.2016. at 0:42 AM, sal_vager said:

This is very old @Kelidoskoped, it's probably no longer running.

It's still running, well sort of.Did a little bit of refurbishment not too long ago(a few weeks maybe).Anyone is still allowed to enter.

Edited February 12, 2016 by Candlelight