Elcano Challenge: All Planets/Moons Complete

[Claw]

Oh...My...Gilly!

 

I will fully admit, I looked upon Gilly as a mere speed bump on my way to Eve. Given it’s roughly 13km radius, I expected it to take virtually no time to get around. However, I’ve also not land on Gilly, so turns out I was in for quite a surprise.

The Gilly encounter was relatively uneventful, except that it was in slow motion. This should have been the crew’s first clue, but they forged ahead. The landing was pretty easy, but when Julella stepped out for EVA, things began to go awry. At some point during the rover release sequence, Obemy made contact with one of the wheels and nearly went into orbit. Fortunately (after striking the ground again) he regained his senses and was able to jetpack back to the rover, which was sliding downhill...

 

The darn drive...The short story is that I knew Gilly had a low gravity, but I failed to realize just how important a “down-thrust” system really is here. The drive had to be completed at a slow pace (on the order of 1.5m/s) to keep the rover on the ground. The direction of travel ended up being a polar route, and was pretty much dictated by the direction of slide after I released the rover from the Tin Poppy. After nearly an hour of game time, the crew was only about 5km from the landing site. Ultimately, the drive on Gilly took nearly as long as the Moho drive.

The terrain is okay and there are some neat shots of Eve and the Sun. But what should have been a quick trip was an agonizing test of patience. It was like watching a car chase scene in slow motion. If you want to do Gilly, I recommend taking some cleats with you. I normally add a map with the route on it, but quite frankly I couldn't tell on the map where I had landed. The map surface is rather nondescript.

[Geschosskopf]

6 hours ago, Claw said:

The terrain is okay and there are some neat shots of Eve and the Sun. But what should have been a quick trip was an agonizing test of patience.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of Gilly just with rockets, so roving it has never entered my mind   My Gilly landers all have upwards-facing RCS ports so they can get down in a reasonable time and EVA is all done with jetpacks, not walking.  I can imagine the agony you experienced trying to drive there.  Congrats.

[Claw]

8 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

I can imagine the agony you experienced trying to drive there.

Even at 4x time warp, it's just...slow. Like those dreams where you are running in mud.

[damerell]

How inconvenient. I'll bear these difficulties in mind. :-)

[Claw]

14 minutes ago, damerell said:

How inconvenient

Excellent, someone payed attention.

[Claw]

Eve: Day 1 Activities

 

So here it is, at last...Eve! I've finished the drive, but it's going to take a couple days to get the pics together. So instead of killing myself tonight, I figured I'd post the most interesting piece (the beginning) tonight, with the remainder to follow tomorrow.

 

I’ve been looking forward to this drive for a while now. I saved Eve for last for a variety of reasons, even though I probably shouldn’t have. I haven’t been to Eve much, and I’m actually looking forward to the long drive to check out the sights. And it’s been a bit frustrating because I’ve been doing this drive while trying to post the other mission reports. Now that people are interested in Elcano again, I was sort of wanting to post up some of Eve as I was doing it. The big struggle being that I’m a bit busy with work, making up mission reports, doing the actual driving, and I’ve been promising to update StockBugFixes.

 

Also, there’s some bit of me that wants to thank @Thalamask out there for taunting me with an unbidden race with Tylo.  Hopefully you won't be far behind me to Eve (and the rest of Elcano)!

 

In the end, I’m pushing to publish my Eve trip as I go along because I’m nearing the end of a much longer mission than I ever thought I’d do. I sort of thought, way back, that I might try to circumnavigate all of the planets/moons. Now that it’s here, I’m a bit excited about it.

 

 

On a One Way Trip

 

So this crew, Julella and Obemy, have been the same crew that’s done all of my Elcano missions. I’ve not made a big production of building that fact up, but it’s the same crew that has been around all of the planets and moons. But this trip to Eve is a bit different, because they’re being sent without a recovery planned. In fact, I’ve never legitimately returned a Kerbal from the surface of Eve. So they’re essentially on a one way mission this time. But the mission marches on, and they’re more than happy to do the deed.

 

 

 

 

Julella and Obemy EVA from the Tin Poppy over to the Eve rover. It turns out that the main mission seats are too far from the aeroshell to reach during EVA, so they end up having to ride along in the emergency evac sets. The engineers are glad, once again, that the seats are still there.

 

Because of the awkward (not aligned to the flightpath) seating, and a couple quickloads, the kerbals become dislodged slightly from their seats in the exact same way as when approaching Tylo. I’m still not sure why this happens, but I only recall it happening in orbit around Tylo and Eve. Perhaps because these are two locations where I had to F5/F9 a couple times.

 

 

 

 

Julella and Obemy hold their breath as they take the big plunge. Because of the awkward seating, the flight controls were a bit squirrelly when trying to hold the heat shield prograde. After a bit of fiddling, discovering that rolling goes left, pitching does roll, and yawing does pitch (or some weird middle combination that I’m not sure of), Julella is able to hold the craft true and bring it down onto Eve.

 

 

 

 

 

The descent/landing itself was quite spectacular, and went even better than the engineer’s expectations. The thick atmosphere slows down the whole aeroshell to a reasonable speed before the fairing is jettisoned. The heat shield and fairing base are retained until the rover is under parachute to prevent them from flipping back up and striking the crew. After full deployment, the shield and base are released, flipping and tumbling in a somewhat graceful way down to the surface.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After two or three attempts, they find themselves landed in more-or-less the intended area, and just short of a large-ish pond. While the landing sight looked favorable from space, after landing, the spot seemed less than ideal for a starting spot. However, it’s the spot that was chosen so I stuck with it.

 

 

A polar route is forced by Eve’s gigantic ocean, since the Rover is incapable of traversing the thick liquid. So Julella sets off northwest bound to head out of the water-ringed landing site. Not long after setting out, the crew hits the first stumbling block. The rover seems incapable of climbing up even a moderate hill. Obemy made several continuous adjustments to both the traction control and the friction control to very little effect. The rover had to take huge zig-zags up the low-grade slope to make any progress (the yellow arrow). In all the adjustments, I was even able to get the motor limiter to overdrive at 170 percent (I somehow glitched it out), and that still wasn’t strong enough to get going uphill.

 

It took a good while of fiddling with things to actually figure out what was going on and, in the end, it was actually that the rover ran completely out of electrical power. This was the first time I’ve run into the issue at all, and it’s primarily due to the changes in 1.0. Before the wheel update, the rover would not ever run out of power. In fact, it could lose two RTGs and would still have enough electrical production to keep going with almost no impact. But after the wheel update, I had noticed that the RTGs didn’t quite keep up with the demands anymore. For the most part, it wasn’t a problem because the rover would do quite well at coasting. However, on Eve, the gravity was forcing a heavy drain when the motors were pushing. The rover wasn’t really capable of coasting, so the motors had to run nearly all the time.

 

 

 

 

After figuring all this out, Obemy deactivated the rear axle and set the front motor limiters to 85%. At that rate, the rover drew about the same amount of power it produced while under “normal” driving. Later, the front limiters were lowered a bit more to 75% to allow for some recharge capacity. During uphill climbs, the wheels would sometimes bog down and draw higher than usual EC to keep up. Obemy also kept up the rear-wheel drive panel to toggle the rear wheels on/off as required to climb up steeper hills. Ultimately the 75% limit meant the rover was running a bit slower top speed, but the crew had nearly eliminated the power issues.

 

Also, it turns out the wheels don’t like more than about 2x warp on Eve, even when standing still. (At least not in this configuration.) So the Eve drive might take a bit longer than originally anticipated, but the mission is still a go. The crew forges on, and continues up out of the landing site. They finally settle into a rhythm and set the rover on cruise control. After a bit, Julella apparently falls asleep at the wheel and the crew finds themselves wedged into the shallow end of the ocean shore (meant to be the red arrow, but was actually quite a bit further on).

 

 

 

 

This ended up being a huge problem, because it turns out the kerbals don’t have enough swim power to push things in Eve’s ocean. So try as he might, Obemy just couldn’t get the rover to move pushing it from behind. In his desperation, he sacrificed himself by doing what all the scientists had told him not to do. (Good thing Marissa isn’t here.) He’d been warned of the dangers of letting Kerbals and the antimatter core of the wheels come into contact. He wished Julella good luck and flung himself onto a rear tire.

 

The resulting collision sent Obemy’s limp body flying out into the ocean, and lurched the rover forward. After a bit, Obemy came to his senses and found himself adrift, but still in sight of the rover. He swam over and, much to his dismay, the rover was still sunk in too far. Not to risk a second encounter, this time he climbed on the hood of the rover and weighed down the front axle. Julella then proceeded to rock the rover and gun it, eventually making contact with the ocean floor and pulling the rover out to the shore.

 

Fortunately, for the next major leg of the journey, the crew had an uneventful time and was even able to enjoy the beautiful green sunset as they continued toward the North Pole.

 

 

 

 

 

That's the end of the first day's activities. I'm dropping the album here so I have the reference (there are a couple more pics not shown above, if you're interested). Thanks for reading!  

 

 

Day 2 Album

 

 

[Geschosskopf]

7 hours ago, Claw said:

He’d been warned of the dangers of letting Kerbals and the antimatter core of the wheels come into contact. He wished Julella good luck and flung himself onto a rear tire.

Hehehe, desperate times call for desperate measures.  Brave, brave, Sir Obeny.

[Claw]

49 minutes ago, Geschosskopf said:

Hehehe, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Indeed...I wasn't sure if I was going to have to reload or not. Fortunately the torque wheels and Obemy's weight were enough to get it out. It was a bit of a juggling act  

[Ultimate Steve]

Wait... So, now you've circumnavigated every body in stock KSP? I think you are the first person to ever do that. Hats off to you!

What next? OPM? Modding in Jool's Surface? Circumnavigaring a class E asteroid?

[Claw]

3 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

So, now you've circumnavigated every body in stock KSP? I think you are the first person to ever do that. Hats off to you!

Yes, Yes, and Thanks!

3 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

What next? OPM? Modding in Jool's Surface? Circumnavigaring a class E asteroid?

Modded planets and asteroids aren't allowed for this particular challenge. Though I might have a plan. Muahahahaha 

[damerell]

On 16/07/2016 at 7:11 PM, Ultimate Steve said:

Wait... So, now you've circumnavigated every body in stock KSP? I think you are the first person to ever do that. Hats off to you!

Bravo, indeed. Although as and when Kerbal Foundries gets working in 1.1, watch out - I am coming for you. :-)

[HoloYolo]

Nice job, Claw. Jealous.