Circumnavigating Moho Instead of Vall in a Comically Oversized Rover

[Zacspace]

So I built a pretty sweet rover recently and ended up needing to drive it over a significant fraction of Duna's equator to rendezvous with a lander, this was pretty painless and made me think it might not be completely unreasonable to drive the whole way around. Even more recently than that I've noticed Elacno Challenge missions being a thing around here so I decided to try it out in my cool rover. Why am I making a thread about it? Sunk cost fallacy. It's already happening. Hopefully it makes for an interesting read.

I chose Vall because it's gravitational situation is pretty similar to Duna, where I know that this rover is capable of high speed long haul driving, It's got mountains that I'm pretty sure my rover can absolutely humiliate with it's climbing power, and it has an easter egg that I've never actually seen in game before. Basically I wanted to know what I was getting myself into, but not so well that there would be no surprises. Except, surprise! I overestimated my vehicle, my computer and my patience quite severely.

I fixed a bunch of things with my rover and my PC and decided to move the whole operation to Moho for another try, I start setting up for this almost immediately upon reaching Vall, but actually start moving stuff in Update #4 and the mission on Moho begins in Update #6. Moho's gravity is even more similar to Duna and as far as I knew while planning this move, it's terrain was a little more reasonable.

 

The Journey to Vall:

Spoiler

Here's the star of the show, the Exoloper Mobile Colony. It's a 200 ton monster with a landing pad and a garage for storing a smaller rover inside. About as big a steakhouse and flies like a bistro. I've previously flown this rig to Duna, so I know it can make orbit and all that, but the launcher for it is an absolute lagbomb. Getting this thing  efficiently to orbit is a colossal pain in the ass, and I had to do it multiple times. Eventually I redesigned the launcher with Mammoth engines instead of Vectors in order to reduce the amount of fuel delivery calculations, I'm not sure how much that helped frame rates, but I was able to get to orbit more efficiently with the better TWR.

Here's my SP-9 Poleaxe with  my SL3 lander tucked inside alongside some extra fueltanks. This SSTO has enough range to bring the lander to low Vall orbit. The lander is pretty overkill, it's designed to do a landing and liftoff again without refueling and it's only going to be landing for this mission.

On my first attempt to get all of this to Vall, after finally getting Exoloper into orbit with a comfortable amount of Fuel left in its transfer stage, I used the mod Transfer Window Planner to predict where my ejection angle would be and did some periapsis burns to get both vehicles efficiently just below the mun well ahead of the actual transfer window to cut down on the number of times I'd have to switch between vessels between burns. Unfortunately TWP does not predict your phase angle at the time of the chosen transfer window but rather what it would be if you were to depart right now, so upon timewarping to the transfer window I found both my ships ready to escape kerbin in the wrong direction. I scrubbed the whole save and started again.

The second attempt failed because I tried out a mod that gives you higher levels of timewarp and accidentally warped way past the window. Of course this was after I launched everything again. Upon reflection I guess I could have kept warping to the next window, but it was pretty late at this point and I'm just a generally unintelligent person to begin with, so I deleted that save too and started again the next day

Third attempt I resolved to fly one vehicle at a time. this is also when I re-tooled the Exoloper launcher for higher trust and lower(?) lag. The first flight went pretty much without a hitch, there's even pictures to prove it:

Spoiler

Exoloper with new high-efficiency transfer stage ready to leave Kerbin behind

Gravity braking into Jool, but also into a Vall encounter. Pretty clean.

finally ditching the transfer stage. The circularization was completed using the lander stage, but the lander can handle it no problem.

See? There's enough fuel left to return this to orbit if i wanted to.

I use vernors on the tips of each rocket to tip the whole thing over, then Vectors inside the service bays soften the landing. There's just enough fuel left on the rover for it to refuel itself which is what it's doing now. I could have used the fuel from the landing stage if I weren't such a colossal goon. After refueling overnight we leave the Exoloper to await it's crew.

 

The second flight... well, you'll see. It starts off fine. The Poleaxe makes orbit no problem with a pretty comfortable delta V margin. The transfer gets a little hairy when my periapsis dips into the upper atmosphere of Kerbin, and due to my wonky burn I ended up with a much more aggressive Jool encounter than I bargained for. While plotting my course correction I realized that I would have too much velocity to Tylo-assist into a Jool capture, and since the Poleaxe absolutely does not have enough dV to do it the old-fashioned way I decided to try using Laythe's upper atmosphere. You're looking at the trajectory I plotted for that now. What you're noticing, and what I missed until it was too late, is that I'm encountering Laythe here in retrograde. I didn't have enough dV left to significantly change my course by the time I realized and I had already quicksaved. I decided to go for it and see if I might be able to get away with it. I encountered Laythe's upper atmosphere at just over 8km/s and was suddenly gone. Reduced to atoms.

For the third flight I decided to go full ham and use a larger, longer range SSTO. The SP-38 Starwhale can easily complete this mission, and will be better able execute the return plan I hatched in the middle of my last failed attempt. I flew almost the exact same flight plan as with Exoloper, only difference being that this time I took the time to get my Vall encounter right at my Jool periapsis and due to that was able to shave 200m/s off the Vall capture burn.

Spoiler

See ya later boi

Suuuper clean encounters. Very efficient flight all over.

Stopping by Tylo's for a minute. Huge respect to Tylo.

Some sci-fi stuff going  down out here

Percision landing near the rover. Mildly surprised Exoloper didn't do a backflip when it loaded in. I'm sure it at least thought about it.

Actually had some difficulty loading the lander up on top. Turns out that it the main fuel tank of the lander is set to autostrut when Exoloper's gantry makes it's connection the rover will spontaneously violate the Geneva convention by cluster bombing everything for miles around. Once I solved that, the main gantry hinges locked up, apparently due to more autostrut nonsense. Solved that too. Now I have more problems that I'll solve tomorrow.

 

The First Day: I regret everything

Spoiler

So the first day was today, the same day I made the thread. After landing everything and getting it all set up, how could I not drive it a little bit? I ran into some early problems, no total showstoppers, but I'll almost certainly be sending a new rover at some point to deal with them.

The first thing was weird lag spikes. I had to fight a bit with the robotic gantry to get it to play nice with my lander and after that my game would become a slideshow whenever the rover was in motion. Keeping my mouse over the debug window brought my frame rate back to normal, but I can't control the rover like that. This is the problem that made me step away from the computer earlier in the day and it seems to be fixed by restarting the game. Unfortunately, reloading the scene causes the robotics to get all weird again, and occasionally brings back the lag. I decided to ditch the lander for now as a workaround. I might have to periodically fly the lander back to myself to keep it in comnet range until a new and improved Exoloper arrives. Pictured: me ditching my lifeboat, notice the mangled servos hanging on to it.

Another problem I had that's hard to screenshot is that the rover jumps and jitters while driving in low gravity. I've never noticed before and while it doesn't actually seem to matter that much in practice it sure gives me the willies. I'm trying to isolate the cause so I can fix it, but I'm presently completely stumped. Even so, I can maintain between 25-35m/s pretty reliably

Good news though. Exoloper is even better at mountain climbing than I expected. I can just drive up whatever I want so far. This is a 25+ degree slope and I'm picking up speed.

Vall's terrain makes it hard to come to a complete stop and lay down a quicksave. I placed a flag here, but immediately after found myself scaling a mountain range. It was nearly another 20km before I could stop again. The other pictures were all taken after this one.

In summary, I have been humbled by lumpy space rock, but this isn't over. I'll improve my sick gigarover and... drive. A really really long way.

The Second Log: They're logs now, not days.

Spoiler

This is fine.

But actually. I spent a fair amount of time tracking down all my issues and ended up not needing to send a new rover. Let me break it down real fast

The jumping and jittering at speed was a result of the wheel springs being bad. Overriding them resolved it and the Exoloper now cruises butter smooth like it's supposed to. I also cranked up the drive limiter, so I got all my top speed back.

The robotics I guess aren't really resolved, but I came up with a new mission abort strategy that doesn't need it, you'll see some enablement ops for that later. I redesigned the crane/gantry and made a bunch of general improvements to the Exoloper, but those are staying in the SPH for now

I still don't know what exactly caused my lag problems, but I know I fixed it by switching to the windows version of KSP running under proton. My guess was (and still is) a graphics mod, and I figured whichever one it was probably works better with directx which proton emulates.

As for the actual journey, it starts out with Valentina and Elvis loading up Rover Mini S and heading back to the landing site. Seen here doing a sick wheelie.

This small rover handles incredibly well in low gravity conditions due to it's strong reaction wheels. Even so, I managed to land funny after a jump and well... Good news is we still have some car left. Good thing we didn't have anything important in the frunk/bonnet, so no need to stop and check the damage.

Fun fact: this whole drive, including the part where I break 220km/h, required no quickloads. This rover's a total GOAT. Maybe I should have just done the challenge in this.

Our destination is the lander hulk left behind by Exoloper. I mentioned that it still had a lot of fuel left earlier, right? Well it does, and it also has almost everything it needs to haul all that fuel into low orbit. It just needs a command seat, few things re-arranged, and a pilot, which is where Valentina comes in.

The lander has thrusters to soften the landing on Exoloper when it flops over for deployment, I can use those to stand it back up for liftoff. For some reason the game can't calculate the deltaV for this rig, maneuver nodes are not a thing and it lags like crazy whenever the engines are active. This complicates things, but I guess using the Starwhale to preform the intercept is more efficient anyway.

The Starwhale, however has no remote control so we'll need to get a pilot to it somehow, or at least a probe core. Fortunately, on our way back to the LZ we passed SL3, the lander Exoloper was supposed to carry on it's back. Elvis drives back, again completely without incident, and boards the lander.

SL3 is remote operated only, and our only point of control out here is the Exoloper, so we only have a short window of control in which to rendezvous with starwhale, but once we do, Elvis is able to man the helm of the plane and use SL3's probe core for assistance.

Due entirely to me forgetting to remove them, the Starwhale just happens to have an airlock and a docking port jr stored in it's cockpit. If it didn't I would have stolen the claw from Exoloper's broken crane. Either way, the fuel from the lander is transferred into Starwale. We also take the time to strip the Vernors off the the lander before leaving it adrift in orbit. The rendezvous occurred at night, so I used Jool to silhouette the connection. Hopefully any viewer's screens are able to show enough contrast to make out the rest.

Meanwhile on Vall, the mission continues. I set up some science experiments on the top of a mountain, got sick of mountains and drove down the side effectively backtracking several kilometers, and then drove a pretty long distance south. Here's a Vall-cano:

Second marker. I'd like to speak the the manager of space please.

You remember that fake selfie of the guy at the world trade center with a plane in the background? Same energy.

Here our timelines converge. The hulk didn't have quite as much fuel left in it as I'd hoped. Easily enough to land, but I expected to be able to top up again in orbit after refueling on the surface. In any case Starwhale is now ready to pack everyone up and take off to another, better planet to complete this challenge on if need be. We also transfer the stolen vernor thrusters to Exoloper where we're going to try and use them to improve stability while driving..

Third marker. Not as far as I'd like from the last one, but I needed to do the landing before I got too far from the equator, and it seemed like a natural stopping point.

Conclusion: We're moving now boys! I don't know if anyone's keeping up with this but thanks for reading if you are.

Third log

Spoiler

Things get a little less interesting here since I've already refueled Starwhale, and there's not really much else to do with it apart from takeoff. So after this log until I reach Vallhenge, it's going to be all driving the Exoloper. Probably.

Since I'm running the windows build now and dx11, I can use TUFX, so these screenshots look a little different. I'm trying to dial in a config. Sunlit surfaces are looking much brighter than usual, while the shadows are deeper. Planetshine is providing a good amount of fill lighting in these pics though, so the shadows aren't as extreme as maybe they should be. It's a work in progress.

I'm not sure how I want to smoothly segue into the picture spam, so here's pictures:

Yep we lost a wheel. It's actually the second one we lost so far, fortunately I brought repair kits. Unfortunately I didn't realize fixing one of these wheels consumed 4 repair kits. I thought it was a 1 kit = 1 repair type deal. I understand why it's not, but I wish I would have known beforehand. What I thought was going to be enough kits to repair all 16 wheels 4 times will only get me 1 per wheel. despite that, I still think we're on track resource-wise.

After the sixth marker I decided to take a detour into some lowlands to save my self some mountaineering. Exoloper is great at climbing mountains, but descending them gets a little perilous. In the picture below I'm at my 8th marker. I think one is hidden underneath a ? icon.

I actually forgot to transfer the vernor thrusters from Starwhale's cargo holds into Exoloper's before departing, and as you can see I've covered a lot of ground since then. This worked out to my favour though, because I actually needed them to take off. I might still bring them to Exoloper in the lander at some point. For now The rover's stable enough without them.

It's true! I have blasphemed against the PC gaming overlords. Fortunately, I'm on Vall which is technically international waters according to The Martian, so I'm not expecting to face an inquisition any time soon.

Of course nobody ever does.

The gamepad is kind of huge though. It gives me much finer control over throttle (and, more importantly, the brakes) and steering. It lets be sit back and chill on the couch while driving too, which means I can go longer at a stretch. Elcano 6 and Elcano 7 are 40km apart.

Conclusion time again! This is looking almost as doable as I thought it was when I first stared this mission, all those days ago.

 

Report 4: A change of venue

Our kerbals make final preparations to leave Vall ahead of schedule as preparations are made elsewhere for their arrival.

Spoiler

I stopped playing KSP for a bit because I was frustrated with bugs and performance issues. I fixed some of them for my last update and thought I'd be able to deal with what remained, but nah. Also pokemon came out so i played that instead of a minute. I never played the gen 4 games when they were out so BDSP was my first time with it and so as someone with no nostalgia attached to it, I gotta say the singleplayer's way better than the more modern pokemon games.

Anyway, the bugs were all caused by proton and the windows version of KSP and the performance issues were caused by kopernicus. I'm back on the linux native build, a few mods lighter with green clocks for days and ready to undertake a gargantuan, monotonous task for no reason or benefit of any kind. Buckle up.

Ever since landing on Vall and realizing that Exoloper was going to have a harder time there than I expected I've been halfway crunching the numbers on some backup plans and preparing in case I get completely fed up and decide to enact one of them. My first choice involved sending a new-improved Exoloper to Duna where I already know it drives perfectly fine, but I noticed another user on here gearing up for their own Duna circumnavigation and I'm not trying to take anyone's thunder. It was about that time I realized that, due to the strange construction of Exoloper's launcher and the efficiency improvements I made to it leading up to the initial posting of this thread, it can make orbit without dropping any stages. This absolute unit is in actual fact the largest SSTO I've ever built by an incredible margin, and what's more is that it has enough dV in low Kerbin orbit to land itself on Minmus. I hope you see where I'm going with this.

Proof

Spoiler

It cost me nothing to not launch at night, and yet here I am

After reaching orbit, here's the final burn of my Minmus encounter. This rocket likes to start its gravity turn late due to the giant unprotected rover on top of it. This flight plan, though requires a decent run up to circularization due to the fact that you'll be completing it with the (relatively) low TWR interplanetary transfer stage. Took me a few tries to get it just right. Fortunately, now that I have a decent framerate the experience was downright tolerable.

Intercept trajectory. Sloppy, but I have the margins to deal with it.

Either before the landing burn or before circularization. They'd be the same picture anyway.

After landing Exoloper along with its entire launch vehicle on Minmus, I set to work coming up with a way to refuel  it. Exoloper itself could probably do the job, but that would require activating all its fuel cells and radiators and potentially using all my dV to feed the probe core during transfer (there's no easy way to disable the fuel cells on Exoloper), So I decided to send another vehicle to do the job.  I have a few rovers that can handle it, but I didn't really have anything well suited to serious re-fueling at places like Minmus. A pretty huge oversight. I decided to build a new lander for the task.

A new rocket stack based on the outer boosters of Exoloper's LV. Completely overkill. Wondeful.

Jettison first stage, I think this is the trans-Minmus burn. The rocket is ridiculous.

Jettison of the final stage mid-descent. The large docking ports bookending the lander also fall away as the lander orients itself and prepares for landing.

It's an early version of what ended up being called the L-49 Laboriosa on Kerbalx. It packs half the mining equipment Exoloper does and has about 1000m/s dV with enough thrust to fly around easily even on Duna. It takes is a few days to make Exoloper ready to launch again.

Here I'm finally dropping the first stage about 95% of the way through my interplanetary transfer. The engines on these boosters were deactivated prior to this burn so that the more efficient core stage would make up a greater share of the vehicle's thrust.

Second stage away as we approach our target. It's friggin Moho. I've never properly been here before. Long ago I sent a mission here in my career save and ended up flying straight past due to the sheer length of the burn required to brake into orbit. And then my NERVs blew up because it was 1.0 I think. Anyway, it's been a while. In an alternate timeline, I naively started this burn when the countdown by the navball told me to and ended up flying right past. In the picture I only started burning about 10 minutes too early.

the stage you saw me activating above has, if I recall, ~1700m/s of delta V, and the lander stage you see here has just over 2000. More than enough. I don't know what I was so worried about. Moho's easy guys, give me a real planet next time .

Exoloper 2.0, ready to rock. a lot of small things were tweaked or redesigned based on what I've learned on Vall, but the most important part is probably the reaction wheels I've added. Before I was relying on the sheer mass and inertia of the rover to keep it pointed true, and while that works pretty well, it's clear to me now that relying on that alone in low gravity isn't going to be enough. The lander-carrying crane was also redesigned. I'm interested to see how well this part holds up since the last one just didn't.

Meanwhile on Vall...

SLIII makes a descent to Exoloper carrying the extra tank from Starwhale's cargo hold. Before I had the 5head idea to just land the whole plane and refuel it directly, this was my plan for Kerbin return after the mission's conclusion. I'm glad I never went through with it because this is a colossal pain and doesn't even end up bringing that much fuel.

Good thing the fuel probe still works. It broke immediately after this though. I was kind of hoping 1.12.3 would take care of that bug where robotics stop moving the parts attached to them after an undock.

Ready to go to Moho. Easily doable on paper, but I'm not sure exactly how I want to go about it. A direct Jool-Moho transfer would be utter nonsense, Stopping off at Gilly or Minmus is more reasonable. I'm concerned about delta V, trying to go from Minmus-Moho, but after flying Exoloper there, maybe I don't need to be.

Five: A new beginning

Our crew makes their way to Moho via the absolute safest path because Moho is scary. Guest appearances by Minmus and Gilly.

Spoiler

An explanation for 4 months of not continuing to do this: I didn't feel like it. More specifically though, I spent a few hours over the course of these months trying to gravity assist Starwhale out of the Jool system and into an Eve intercept trajectory for only a few 100m/s. I've done something like that before, but it was a total fluke and I wanted to flex my giant space brain by doing it intentionally. I got pretty frustrated by it and ended up just not playing for a while. I seriously hope KSP2 has a better way for us to plot complicated maneuvers.

I ultimately decided to just throw efficiency out the window and go to Minmus. I guess I didn't screenshot this part of the mission extensively, but it's okay. You've seen Minmus before. One novel thing about this leg of the journey is that I thew efficiency out the window a little too hard and ended up just barely in orbit with about 12m/s remaining, and that's after getting lucky with a Kerbin aerocapture that left me on a direct Minmus encounter.

I reused the prototype Laboriosa from part 4, which has apparently had kerbals inside this whole time. Whoops, sorry guys. Laboriosa isn't designed to do orbital rescue missions, but the airlock and docking port I packed just in case comes in clutch yet again.

I didn't take any pictures of Starwhale refueling on the surface, but I do have one of some chunks of the terrain deciding to be night time during the day while a rogue vernor engine insists that it's part of the UI. These were the least of all the bugs that plagued the Minmus-arc of this saga.

I set off from Minmus to Eve and Gilly for a final refueling because Moho freaks me the heck out and I just don't trust starwhale's 5600-ish m/s to be able to make the trip from Minmus. I bring along my stranded kerbals from the prototype lander and send up a new Laboriosa to Gilly to re-refuel there

The Gilly refueling is a bit better documented, but boring. Here's a picture of a (scatterer?) bug near Eve during my braking burn turning Starwhale bright pink.

I really hate the timewarp rules around Gilly, it's probably the most otherworldly location in the kerbal solar system but the whole time I'm there I'm just annoyed by how long everything takes. I end up setting Starwhale pretty far from the Laboriosa because they arrived at different times and it was night time at the lander's LZ by the time Starwhale arrived. I send Val on an extended EVA to get it and fly it back to the plane for refueling.

the refueling goes smoothly. After takeoff, I circularize around Eve and wait for a Moho window. There happens to be one just as I'm taking off, but I just couldn't get a reasonable encounter off of it, so I waited for the next one. The encounter I ended up getting didn't require a lot of dV, which is nice, but it's not the cleanest encounter. My braking burn ends up taking 2600m/s. Easily doable, but it takes 40 minutes.

After the braking burn, Starwhale's engine nacelles are glowing red from the heat

SLIII detatches with the original crew from Vall, leaving the guys we picked up on Minmus on spaceplane duty. I end up landing at night pretty far from Exoloper, so I timewarped to day and took off again to fly closer after this screenshot.

I decided to leave it there for the night after moving the crew over, I'm undecided whether or not to refuel the lander and start prepping Starwhale itself for landing again. I'm having awful luck with robotics bugs lately, and I really don't want to  wreck my nice Exoloper right after all the work I've done. I'm also not sure if I want to go polar or equatorial for the actual drive.

Part VI: A New Continuation

Exoloper and her crew finally get underway on Moho

Spoiler

I decided to refuel everything while I was nearby, Made sure to quicksave before connecting up to each vehicle just in case the robotics broke, but they didn't. I'm absolutely shocked. I'll probably end up using the Exoloper's discarded lander again to refuel Starwhale for the journey home like last time, so I filled it up before leaving it and begining the journey. I also sent the lander back up to orbit to rendezvous with Starwhale, though I didn't screenshot it. it's okay though, you've seen it before.

I decided to drive the Exoloper along Starwhale's orbital trajectory. It seems that Moho turns incredibly slowly, so although Starwhale's orbit is inclined slightly I think I should be able to follow it roughly. My reasoning here is that I can always easily send the lander down to Exoloper this way. My mostly equatorial path will also bring me across what looks like an entire hemisphere of mild terrain, so that should speed things up in a big way.

The addition of reaction wheels to Exoloper has made if much more drivable in low gees. I've already been in many situations which on Vall would have caused the rover to slide and flip over, but here the torque is able to keep it pointed true (mostly). Taking jumps is a less risky proposition now too, because I can plant my wheels flat upon landing. I'm still finding that it wants to turn when I'm braking downhill, not the end of the world, but annoying. I'll try messing with the friction on my wheels to resolve it in situ, and then probably try to bake a better solution into an updated craft file.

This next screenshot is after driving about 30km from the LZ. I'm seeing some very rugged terrain ahead, so I stopped for a quicksave. My first attempt resulted in me getting stuck where two ridges meet at a steep angle, on the second attempt I just drove straight up that mill on the right. It went better than I expected

I'm finding that Moho has some very dramatic terrain, at least the part of it that I landed in. Fortunately I'm finding it much less anxiety inducing to drive through it here than on Vall. It's much prettier here, too.

Here's Exoloper accidentally taking a sick jump while I was fiddling around with the camera to get some cool shots. No kerbals were harmed. Not this time, anyway.

In a simulated timeline, Exoloper was chugging along some pretty unremarkable terrain and then suddenly exploded into the air, flinging pieces of itself all over as it tumbled end over end. I used what remained of Rover Mini S to go and check out what happened. I was expecting to see one of those little rocks from Breaking Ground, but nothing. Maybe that null reference exception refers to a rock whose model didn't load in, but the collision did? Oh well I just thought it was a funny visual.

After driving Rover Mini S a solid distance on Vall, i think it's going to be my backup plan in case Exoloper can't finish the mission (probably due to robotics-related part drift).

 

0111: A Continued Continuation

The crew of Exoloper further beat a dead horse while making excellent progress across the surface of Moho

Spoiler

I increased the friction on Exoloper's wheels from 0.8 to 1.4, now it's every inch the extreme machine I intended for it to be when I built it. It still slides ever so slightly when driving on steep inclines or braking heavily, but nothing SAS can't easily handle, and it's an easy tradeoff trade for the ability to slightly adjust course with SAS torque while cruising at high speed.

I made it 50km between a couple markers and have now driven nearly 200km from my LZ. I think that's farther than I ever made it on Vall. I'm nearly into what looks like the easy terrain part of Moho and I'm more than ready for it; as much as Exoloper has proven itself capable so far on Moho, the terrain is still preventing me from spending a lot of time at or even near top speed.

I've had 6 direct encounters between Exoloper and those little Moho stones. 3 resulted in quickloads, but 3 were recoverable, not even losing a wheel. I am prepared to lose every wheel 4 times on this trip though, for sure this time. Pictured above: me deciding that this near-death experience is a great research opportunity

Here I skirted along the edge of a huge crater, this involved climbing a lot of tall peaks and then driving back down them again

Exoloper nearly defeated by coming to a stop on a peak. None of the wheels made sufficient contact with the ground to move the vehicle off this peak and SAS torque was too weak to be any help. This ain't my first rodeo however, and I know that a situation like this calls for dropping the rover bay to push Exoloper over the edge. We continue on as normal.

I find myself having climbed a pretty tall (or so I thought) mountain. I decided to take Rover Mini S out for a spin up to the very peak to plant Elcano 4. I noticed that the struts on Rover Mini S were a little wonky, and the front hood parts were wrong too... I briefly considered sending a mission to replace it, but that would mess up my plan to follow along underneath Starwhale. I'll just have to do my best not to have to look at this rover again.

Exoloper is able to climb pretty steep slopes. I think it maxes out between 40 and 50 degrees on Moho, but I still try to pick paths with slopes more in the 30 degree range when I need to climb.

Finally driving into a crater. I'm showing off Exoloper's novel steering mechanism here since I guess it's not really obvious how this rover works so I'll explain it. It has 16 wheels out of symmetry and with the steering direction of all the ones on (I think) the right side reversed. This means that when I try to steer Exoloper normally, all the wheels go to 100% in the same direction and stay that way allowing it to reach high speeds and climb steep terrain with ease. The obvious drawback here is that I can't steer it normally. Instead I steer it by bending it in the middle like a front-end loader or some other piece of heavy equipment. I have the rover controls, the steering servos, and yaw/pitch/roll all bound separately so Exoloper is a little more complicated to drive than your average rover.

I had to google to figure out how to deploy surface science equipment, those pieces off to the side I dropped using an engineer, but somehow lost the ability to pick them back up again after I realized what I was doing wrong. I ended up running them over with Exoloper to feed  the seismic thing, but it didn't work! it looks like some of these things weren't close enough to the control station, or they weren't powered, or something. I was sure while packing that the solar panel would produce enough power, and if that were going to be true anywhere it would be Moho. Maybe I'll try again another time. Every inch of storage space Exoloper has that isn't filled with repair kits is jammed with deployable science stuff.

We triumphantly climb out of the crater and closer to the end of our journey.

Big progress. It looks like the terrain should start getting milder soon.

 

 

 

Edited March 12, 2022 by Zacspace
Progess update, continued unabandonment

[Vanamonde]

Fancy.  

[Zacspace]

On 11/14/2021 at 5:46 PM, Vanamonde said:

Fancy.  

Thanks!

I'm trying to keep it interesting to read

[Zacspace]

I'm still at this. I spent a few months mostly away from the game, but I've moved everything to Moho for reasons and from now on everything should go smoothly.

Perhaps not quickly, but smoothly.

[Zacspace]