Elcano Challenge - Bill & Jeb's Most Excellent Bipolar Adventure - Highlights [Pic Heavy]

[Van Disaster]

Another Elcano Challenge response - this time Bill & Jeb will be circumnavigating Kerbin via both poles. I won't be posting every shot of the progress because I take an awful lot of them, but they will end up in the trip album.

Trip Album @ Flickr

The vehicle:

Mod list:

• B9 provided the engines, compressed air RCS, one set of lights.
  
• B9 pWings provided all the aero surfaces. FAR provided the actual aero.
  
• TT multiwheels provided the wheels.
  
• Procedural tanks gave one of the tanks and the conical caps.
  
• Firespitter gave the floats
  
• IR rework gave the hinges
  
• Ven's stock revamp makes some of the stock parts look a little different.
  
• QuantumStrutsContinued gave the strut guns - they're the grey bars which stop the front floats banging into everything.
  
• SCANSat gave BTDT to track progress on the little map, and general mapping facilities.
  
• Telemachus was meant to give me a moving marker on a map, but I broke that already by getting it confused...
  
• Pilot Assistant gives SSAS. Sundry other quality of life mods like KJR help in little ways.
  

Why so fast?

• I like speed! cross-country speed is a technical challenge in keeping the vehicle in one piece, and something of a driving challenge in reading the terrain. And a fairly hair-raising gamble at times
  
• I've gone fast cross-country before, in fact faster than I'll probably be going on this trip ( other than at the poles ) - years ago there was a challenge to drive to KSC2 as fast as possible. No surprise how alike the vehicles look.
  
• I also went exploring Kerbin a couple of years ago, so while there's new things to see because I'm running Kerbinside, it's not all new. That particular album doesn't cover anything like everywhere I ended up.
  

Why go via the poles?

• It's different! generally people seem to go round the equator, and that's at least 50% water. The craft isn't terribly fast in water - unlike it's predecessor - so I'm avoiding water when I can.
  

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Legs 1 & 2. - Green and cyan.

The start/finish point is on the beach at the end of the KSC runway -

The guys took a quick boat trip across the bay to avoid a bunch of those hills & shakedown the aquatic side -

Soon blowing their way across the flat country - Jeb is enjoying himself, I suspect Bill is either paranoid or trying not to regurgitate...

Leg 1 ended after around 1:45 having covered nearly 245km, and a successful shakedown of the craft.

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The target for Leg 2 was the North Polar Biodome ( from Kerbinside ), which is on the ice flat but a way off from the pole itself.

The sun was going down pretty fast, driving crosscountry got considerably harder because the shadows made it difficult to see how steep slopes were. Still, Jeb is either brainless or fearless.

Nearly a disaster when an ice-cliff appeared suddenly, but luckily there was sufficient paranoia to deal with it -

The ice-flat gave a chance to really open up -

And another 228km done.

At the end of Leg 2, they're at the cyan dot.

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Leg 3 - Green on the ice.

Quick blast to the North Pole - caused it's usual merriment ( shots in the album ). Bill has a habit of trying to climb inside the planet.

Rather than blow on down the route, while they were up here they thought they'd investigate some of the anomalies SCANSat threw up -

Off to the second one, was at the back of some rather fun swoopy ice -

Whoever thought it was a good idea to build a launchpad here? it seems to have been buried under ice. How old is it? is it even Kerbal-related? some sort of archaeological find? who was on this planet before? ( as mentioned in the shot caption my inner narrator turned into Scott Manley at this point ).

Unfortunately the game crashed somewhere after I made my way back to the ice flat so it wiped the leg's progress stats up to that point, but I went a bit further west & then started south again - and at that point noticed Telemachus was really confused & thought I had negative longditude. So here's where I've stopped them currently while I poke around for a solution.

The actual route didn't really match the planned one much!

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Leg 4 - Yellow

Southbound again - the encroaching darkness meant I couldn't see much ( and concentrating gave me a headache ) so a slightly shorter leg. The guys got a bit bored of blowing across a dark plain too, but there were some hairy moments in the more broken country.

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Leg 5 - Pink

Back to the equator! quite a long leg time-wise this time, making up for the shorter last leg. Interesting mix of countryside and some close calls, used the water capability a bit more. Waited until dawn to start, so added a little more to the overall journey time.

Annotations to come later.

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I will shift to imgur when I'm up to re-captioning 50+ shots because this thread is going to get out of hand otherwise, but until then fill in the gaps with flickr.

Edited April 20, 2015 by Van Disaster

[Slam_Jones]

Nice vehicle! Hope you make it without too much trouble!

[Van Disaster]

Leg 3 highlights up ( which is where the vehicle is currently parked ), haven't come near breaking anything yet so should be ok! except telemachus, but that's just a nice thing to have rather than an essential. Will probably not post more until I get it together to move to imgur albums, that's going to be enough of a pain.

[Van Disaster]

Leg 4 is up - a blast south first over the remains of the ice, then some really broken hilly countryside, a burn across open plains and then finally to take a bath by a lake and probably to sleep until daylight. A little shorter than usual but a good place to stop.

If someone knows the tags to link inside posts, please let me know how.

[Van Disaster]

Leg 5 raw images up - I'll annotate them & embed an imgur album at some point, until then they're in the flickr album. Nice going over some quite variable countryside and a couple of lake trips to get back to the equator. Technically halfway I guess, but not on the route plan...

Edit: leg 5 imgur album up, will annotate it later.

Edited April 20, 2015 by Van Disaster

[Van Disaster]

Well, been a long time - because the save file ate itself and I gave up on trying to fix it. Recently I did manage to fix it, and found the plucky pair stuck in the middle of nowhere - and I had no idea how they got there. Looking at the screenshots Leg 6 ended here:

There was a canyon that disappointingly wasn't a mad river run all the way:

And a lot of green countryside. Today/since then there was a lot more green in the dark, a flag planting on the southernmost island with the ice in the background:

and a long sea crossing to yet another remarkably preserved relic of the deserted planet's past; the guys are wondering where the builders all disappeared to.

This is where they're at:

Leg 6: Light Green

Leg 7: Yellow

Leg 8: Green ( this is where the restart begins )

Imgur is currently completely sucking so I'm not quite sure what to do about neat albums or the first post at the moment, but everything is up on the flickr album.

Edited October 27, 2015 by Van Disaster

[Van Disaster]

After a mammoth final leg ( yes that was all in one go ) they've finally made it back.

I'll attempt to write a report when my hands allow, the album will have to do until then.

[SpaceplaneAddict]

Gratz! I'm only 400/300 km into Tylo, this must have taken a LONG time...

-SPAddict

YAY GRATZ!