Jump to content

Kerbin Ground Based Circumnavigation (Elcano Challenge)


wafflemoder

Recommended Posts

I recently decided to try my hand at one of the challenges on the forums. I decided to do the Elcano Challenge, which involves ground and sea based circumnavigations of planets and moons. I've set my sites on kerbin, the mun, and minmus. My goal is to circumnavigate all of them. I will be using quicksaves/quickloads for these trips. I'm going to quicksave every 5 minutes.

I'll be updating this thread as I go.

Mission 1: Kerbin

I'm starting with kerbin for no particular reason. However, I'm putting a little twist on things. I'm not starting at the KSC. Okay, not much of a twist. I plan to fly my vehicle in a plane and air drop it a decent way away from the KSC. Here is my target drop zone and planned route.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Mission Stats (Kerbin)

-Tires Broken: 24

-Flags Planted: 5

-Vehicle Crashes: 15

-Game Crashes: 7

-Refuels: 0

Kerbin Day 1: "Final" Design and Beginning of Journey

It wasn't a good first day, but it was something. After flying my vehicle, the Badger, over to the drop zone, it immediately began rolling down a hill. It kept going even after I turned the brakes on and crashed. Because it was moving, I was unable to quicksave and have to repeat the flight again. I thought I'd be smart and slapped some landing legs on the Badger. Turns out they were upside down. Fortunately, the badger was able to come to a stop this time and I was able to quicksave.

To add to the chaos of the initial landing, they area I landed was incredibly hilly. I was unable to time warp or turn on the propeller without crashing, making progress slow. I was still crashing frequently, turning a slow journey into a painful one. Eventually I made it to some flatter ground and was able to go at a faster pace. After my first game session (I'm not sure how long exactly) I made it 22 km. Let's hope things get better.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Kerbin Day 1.5: Preparations and Wasted Effort

Why day 1.5? Well, today I didn't actually do any driving, I merely tried to set up a target to aim for. The key word here is "Tried". I read Fengist's circumnavigation of Eve, and really liked the idea of setting up a target to aim for. My plan was eventually to visit the second space center, so I figured I'd send a small probe there. I put it in a plane and sent it off. The plane was pretty slow and took about half an hour real time to get there. I took pictures per usual, but upon jettisoning the probe, the game crashed. I was quite flustered and because of time constraints, had to call it a day.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Kerbin Day 2: A Rather Uneventful Journey

Today I decided to give up on the target drone and continue driving. Nothing to horrible happened today, the ground was flat and I made good distance. Although I did notice some strange things. For one, I noticed a strange bright spot on the ground when I loaded a quicksave. Not really sure what caused it, but I suspect it is similar in nature to the bright spots encountered on Fengist's Eve circumnavigation, linked above. The second odd thing I noticed was a circle of missing trees. When I zoomed out I noticed It created almost a cresent shape, when combined with the load distance. Other than that nothing much happened.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

Kerbin Day 3: Now with 60% more Mountains

I'm sorry I'm not able to upload these as often as I would like. School is a thing. Today I went started my path through the mountainous interior of the starting continent. It allowed for some interesting night driving, before I finally decided that kerbals do indeed need to sleep. Some odd things did occur on the way. First off, game crashes. I installed a couple additional mods between sessions and noticed the game was almost unplayable. After some hard work (deleting some folders), the problem was fixed. Another thing is that there were more bright spots. They seemed to happen at 6 km intervals, similar to Fengist's obsevations of the eve bright spots. But it does make me wonder what exactly is coming out of the exhaust of this thing.

While driving I experienced some slight issues with the craft, none of them important though. When I began for today, I realized that the propeller was producing almost no thrust at all. I figured I'd make another rover and airdrop it in, after upgrading the design and testing it, I found the source of the problem. The engine was throttled down. With that embarrassment out of the way, I continued driving the original badger, which is actually already the second iteration. Another 'problem' that developed was that whithout my knowledge, the two front landing legs and underside light broke. There are multiple other lights and the landing legs were upside down, so this shouldn't be a problem.

Javascript is disabled. View full album
Edited by wafflemoder
Update
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Your bright spots, as I have been told, is a result of fixing something known as the Kraken's Bane. As I understand it, the entire universe gets reset periodically and those are the result.

Now, if you read my circumnavigation of Eve, you'll find my crew considered them evil creatures determined to eat the rover.

One curiosity, I started flagging them, they occur about every 6 km.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This thread is quite old. Please consider starting a new thread rather than reviving this one.

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...