Look at me, I'm Reinold Messner! Wal equatorial circumnavigation

[king of nowhere]

After I had a lot of fun circumnavigating Slate's rugged terrain on an oversized rover, I decided to ramp it up by circumnavigating an even more rugged terrain: Wal.

This moon of Urlum is surrounded on the equator by a massive mountain range; the plan is to make a full Elcano traveling over mountaintops, hence the title. Full title actually would be The starry heavens above me, a sturdy rover enclosing me 2: Look at me, I'm Reinold Messner!, but it was too long to fit.

The circumnavigation was indeed very challenging, but it was also a lot less fun that I was hoping, due to Wal ugly and unvaried terrain.

But let's go with order. Half my resons to pick up challenges is to design vehicles to tackle them and check if they are really up to it, so I must start with the rover.

Part 1: designing Leaping Mantis

To travel mountains in moderate gravity, I need something with a lot of traction and a lot of survivability.

For traction, I have 16 ruggedized wheels; with 10.8 tons of rover mass and 0.37 g, this setup allows climbing up to 40° easily, and up to 55° with difficulty, before I have to resort to switchbacking. Which I still had to do a couple of times, because Wal is hard.

For protection, I have the active system in the form of three reaction wheels; this rover can turn midair really fast, which is important when you are in a place full of bumps, with a gravity strong enough to pull you down fast, but not strong enough to keep you glued to the ground. Leaping Mantis almost always lands on its wheels. For those times when it doesn't land on its wheels, it has a minimalistic, but effective, roll cage made by the plane wheels on top and the landing struts behind. The main limitation is that if I capsize the rover while going downhill, it may survive the first hit, but it will keep falling and accelerating until eventually the roll cage is overcome.

The reaction wheels are not strong enough to turn around the rover if it lands capsized, so I included a robotic arm to help with the task. I wonder why I didn't just add a couple more reaction wheels.

The most important protection system, though, is the couple of plane wheels in front - which I call the mantis claws, giving Leaping Mantis its name. When I was circumanvigating Slate, the main reason for rover damage was taking bumps in the ground at high speed. If the terrain makes an angle in front of the rover, the front wheels are practically hitting a wall. To protect in this scenario, which is extremely common when climbing mountains, I devised the mantis claws. The plane wheels are in front of the others, they are a lot more resistant, and they cushion the impact.

I started driving straight on against rock walls just for the novelty of being able to

Finally, I always want my rovers to have a good view from the driving place, and this one is no exception.

However, in this case it turned out not very useful. This kind of visual was very effective on Slate to detect hard bumps in the terrain. Here it was pointless, because the mantis claws protect effectively from those. Furthermore, Wal color palette has a lot less contrast, making it a lot harder to see where you are going. What I found really useful instead was seeing if there is a ravine over the next crest or not; and for this I need the outside perspective, to watch the rover from a elevated perspective and see more of the terrain. So, first person driving perspective wasn't used much.

Edited November 24, 2022 by king of nowhere

[king of nowhere]

Part 2: launch and cruise

Leaping Mantis was delivered on Wal by a relatively minimalistic sky crane.

Leaping Mantis ready on the launchpad

Spoiler

Leaping Mantis has a large area, presenting exceptional aerodinamic challenges.

For Tamarromobile, I used a huge aerodinamic fairing, which was more massive than the rover itself. In this case, it would have been way too heavy to justify its mass. So I launched the rover unprotected, trusting in extra thrust and deltaV to compensate. I put the rover at the bottom of the stack so it won't cause aerodinamic instability.

Jettisoning the boosters

Once the atmosphere is cleared, the rhinos are used

In space, the nose cones are removed for mass reduction

Urlum is far, I'll use a Jool gravity assist to get there.

Leaping Mantis plans a Jool gravity assist

Jettisoning the last stage of the launcher

Now that the launcher is removed, the cruise stage is a couple of large tanks with nuclear engines. There are a couple of relay satellites embedded in the stack. For return, I will use a small ion-powered pod like I did for Tamarromobile.

I decided to simplify a bit the architecture from the previous mission by not having a dedicated vehicle to leave Wal; instead, the sky crane has some extra fuel and will double as Wal ascent vehicle.

I am still using a version with kerbalism installed; I deactivated some of the harshest realities of kerbalism, but I still have to provide food; I loaded enough for 30 years, which makes quite a large pile of snacks.

The cruise stage leaves on nuclear engines

The cheapest path to Urlum

The fast path to Urlum

From the Jool flyby, I could find - with the help of a couple correction maneuvers - a path with a very clean injection at Urlum. However, it would leave me only three years worth of food. Since I have some extra fuel, I opted for a faster trajectory, spending a bit more on deltaV to shorten the trip by several years.

Planned arrival at Urlum

For arrival at Urlum, I use direct intercept at Wal; this way I can use the large moon's Oberth effect and orbital speed to reduce the injection cost, resulting in a cheap capture despite a less than ideal trajectory.

Arrival at Urlum with 10 years left of food. Water estimate is wrong because it's not accounting for water recycler

Capture burn. And first glimpse of Wal

Releasing the two relays in high orbit

Jettisoning some empty tanks

The second stage of the cruise stage takes care of circularizing

Sky crane separation

Descent

Landing is potentially difficult, because of the terrain. I'm trying to aim for a large flattish area next to the mountain range, as a place that's less likely to have 45 degrees slopes.

After a bit of trial and error, I managed to find a bit of flat ground to land safely

And now the real challenge begins.

[king of nowhere]

Part 3: mountaineering galore, part 1

Leaping Mantis travels across the mountain range.

Spoiler

Leaping Mantis landed at the base of the mountans. Now it has to climb some 10 km to reach the summit.

Leaping Mantis path is crossed by those wave-shaped formations

Up to a 50 degrees slope, Leaping Mantis keeps pushing forward

Finally, the summit

Actually, now that I'm on top, it looks even a bit flatter than the rest of the planet. Not that it is a high bar to clear.

From this, Leaping Mantis starts its real voyage.

Unfortunately, as I said, Wal is a lot less fun that Slate. Slate had an interesting geography; it had valleys and canyons, and it had different biomes with different characteristics. Here on Wal, there is no such variety. The mountains are not dug by ancient water, they are just a jumbled mess of chaotic terrain. The big equatorial mountain range is split into three different biomes, but they all look similar.

So, instead of providing a narrative like I did in the previous circumnavigation, I'll just post a photo gallery. Mostly without much comments, unless there is something specific to comment on.

Here I was desperately trying to save a rover capsized at high speed by landing on the rooftop wheels and going backwards. As I started in march, I don't remember if I was successful or not

Here I found a bit of flattish terrain, and I took the chance to run faster for a while

I named that place the football field plateau

Here the mountain range is interrupted by a crater, only a thin crest remains

Navigating the aforementioned crest

Because driving on Wal was a lot more boring than on Slate - and still very dangerous, despite all of Leaping Mantis safety measures - this mission went slowly. Some days I'd drive 100 km, some days I'd drive 20, and sometimes I would go full weeks without even touching it. As a result, I started in march and today 20 october I still miss a couple hundred kilometers.

The most difficult features to cross are ravines to be cut diagonally. Here the smallest mistake may lead to the rover jumping laterally and falling for hundreds of meters before rejoining the ground the hard way

This is why, while a low baricenter helps stability, you still want the main body of the rover to be high above the ground

And that's it for part 1. In retrospect, I should have snapped pictures with more references on progress made, because I'm not sure how much road I've done to that point.

Anyway, I'll keep updating later.

[king of nowhere]

Part 4: Mountaineering galore, part 2

Yes, more traveling across the mountain range. Leaping Mantis changes biome, but the mountains are the same. I miss the variety of Slate.

yeah, though I walk in the valley of really bumpy terrain, I will fear no wheel breakage: for the mantis claws are with me

Spoiler

Actually, even the mantis claws can't always protect my wheels. I still need to reload quite often, even though after the first hundred kilometers or so I learned to drive better. To counteract that, I brough as many repair kits as I could (do notice the additional storage space for repair kits on the wheels trusses). To avoid depleting them too fast, I only repair a wheel if it's been more than 5 km since the last time I saved - else I reload the game. I plant a flag every 20 km, and I always save there; plus, I generally save a couple of times between flags. So, there's really a short time interval where breaking a wheel would result in using a repair kit. Even then, at the time of this writing I miss 150 km and I'm down to the last kit.

Here I'm slamming against a wall at 46 m/s. I don't know what happened next. That's a borderline speed, in that at that speed sometimes Leaping Mantis hits the ground and survives (yeah, it's really sturdy), but it's far from guaranteed.

This lump of terrain doesn't look like much, but it's the tallest elevation on Wal. I called it mount Lump

The sky is also very pretty, at least from the part of Wal where Urlum is visible

Speaking of sky and visibility, I'm using pretty strong light amplification here. Unfortunatly, the color of Wal is really bad for contrast, and it's very hard to understad the terrain in natural light. Even with artificial light enhancement, during the night visibility is poor. At two distinct points during the trip I stopped the rover and waited for the new day.

A section where a crater chipped away a major chunk of mountan, resulting in a pass with much lower elevation. The mountain profile forms almost a perfect arc, only broken by the reverse uvula - so called because the profile of this mountain section looks like a troath with an uvula, only flipped vertically.

Wal is a place of extreme elevations. In a few kilometers the altitude dropped from 18 km to 13, up to 15 again at the reverse uvula, down to 11 in the lowest point of the pass, and up again to 16. 11 km altitude has been a record low in the last 500 km, though it's going to get lower at the biome change.

The biome change, aerial view

This is the place where the Gault mountains end and the Boreth mountains begin. The Boreth mountains are on average one km lower than the Gault - I don't remember ever crossing 20 km again - but aside from that they are identical. This goal marks roughly one quarter of the voyage; Leaping Mantis landed at 150° W, and it's now at 55° W. Leaping Mantis has run around 700 km; it probably becomes a higher number if we account for all the ups and downs.

I went down, really far. You may notice something unique here: rocks! Yeah, they are just normal rocks, authomatically generated by terrain scatter, what's so special with them? Well, do you see any in the previous images? Nope! They stop appearing somewhere between 10 and 11 km altitude. You can say that Wal mountains are so high, not even rocks grow on them!

I should have stayed over the crest, but I took a slight detour to collect a sample from another biome

A few km later, I'm again high enough that rocks disappeared

Climbing a 55° slope. Leaping Mantis has a vey hard time, but it's actually making it

I tried to turn the lights blue to see if it looked better. I eventually swapped them back to white

This last place I named mount Stegosaurus, because from the profile it looks like a stegosaurus back - something that cannot be fully appreciated from this image. But it does give a stunning view of the plains 15 km below.

That's close to one third across the planet. Time for another stop.

Edited October 22, 2022 by king of nowhere

[king of nowhere]

Part 5: two giant holes

Leaping Mantis encounters the very most difficult passages of the whole voyage, in the form of two huge holes in the ground with very sheer sides.

It's hard to appreciate with the game perspective, luckily I managed to get some orbital pictures of the location

Spoiler

After mount Stegosaurus there is this thin rock ledge I dubbed the knife edge

This section has been the slowest progress, taking three months to advance maybe 10% of the way. The problem is, on one hand I already did one fourth of the circumnavigation, which is plenty of time to get tired. On the other hand, I'm nowhere near close to the end, so I can't summon the "just one last bit of effort and then I'm done" motivation. Furthermore, I was beginning my rss kerbalism grand tour, my biggest grand tour so far - which, given that I already have a tendency for extremely ambitious missions, is quite the achievement - and I was super excited about it. I resumed steady progress somewhere along the summer.

mount Cratertop, a mountain with a crater on top. It has two twin peaks at almost the same altitude. It probably would have been the tallest mountain on Wal, if an asteroid hadn't intervened

here the ravine is steep enough that you can see all the way down to the plains 15 km below

In fact, the ravine is so steep that a bit of carelessness when planting the flag led to Bill slipping and falling down to his doom. That ravine was so steep, he could not stop. Dead for planting a flag. What an undignified way to go.

Here the mountain crest followed a sort of S shape. I followed it. Maybe going straight would have been even more challenging?

I much prefer those narrow ridges with steep walls. For large stretches of the road, the top of the chain was large enough that you wouldn't really appreciate being on top of a mountain. Here you can get a good view. Or at least you could get a good view, if Wal wasn't ugly.

It was amid one such stretches of large, flattish mountain tops that I found the first big hole - which I dubbed the Trench.

The Trench, seen from the ledge. Between perspective and poor light, you don't really appreciate that there is a 4 km deep hole in front of you

The bottom of the Trench is at 13 km altitude. The ledge descends from a 19.8 km tall mountain, but it's already dropped to somewhere short of 17 before the final cliff. So we can call it a 4 km deep hole, keeping in mind that measuring holes is not an exact science.

It's been an interesting stretch; mount Cratertop, the thin curving ledge and the Trench are all within 100 km of each other. Afterwards, there isn't much worth noting, and nearly 400 km pass by with barely any screenshot taken.

I could have avoided the Trench, going around it. It certainly would have been faster and easier. But then, I could have avoided this whole mission if I was just looking for fast and easy.

Moving down the ravine into the Trench. The slope is 60° steep. Those slopes are very dangerous; a small bounce would mean falling tens of meters before touching land again. And then upon landing you'd bounce again, falling more, and gaining more speed every time. Until no amount of roll cages can protect the rover. Easy, you may think; just avoid bouncing. Except the brakes themselves make the rover bump. I learned to always save before descending somewhere like that.

By contrast, going uphill is easy.

Going out of the Trench, it's significantly less steep. The cosmic alignment is also right for a nice view of Tal

Well past the Trench, just another random location with a steep slope

Leaping Mantis braving a 60° slope upwards

And finally, in front of me opened the 8-km hole. Yes, that's its name. If that's not impressive enough, I don't know what is. It's a nearly cylindrical hole 8 km deep.

Though as always, you can't really appreciate the scale

Carefully inching down the steep walls of the 8-km hole

The hole is so deep, it's got rocks at the bottom! Seems quite a stupid thing to say, but check the previous chapter for the significance of rocks in this voyage

Going up, I did something I haven't done anywhere else on this planet: switchbacking!

The most impressive feature of the 8-km hole is its eastern cliff, though (which I named the western wall because it looks west, or maybe just because I got confused). It's not strictly the steepest inclination on the planet, as a few ravines are roughly as steep (most impressively mount Thor, which will be shown in a later chapter). But it is the most steep east-west ravine, and the longest, with over 7 km of near vertical climb. To the point that despite Leaping Mantis extreme climbing skills, I actually had to stop going forward in some points, and start switchbacking. Even when I could go forward, the ravine is long enough that I run out of battery many times, and had to stop and recharge. Something else I never needed anywhere else.

It took nearly one hour of game time to cross this handful of kilometers.

Those two pics show the highest limit of vertical climb Leaping Mantis achieved. The slope is seen on the navisphere as 62 or 63°. The time on the top right shows the second image was taken 3 seconds after the first, and the speed gauge shows increased speed, showing that the rover could accelerate while going upwards a 62° slope. That's its utter limit; accurate use of SAS is necessary to get grip. And those 3.8 m/s are pretty much its top speed in this condition. Battery will lasts maybe two minutes.

It's also quite complicated to rest and recharge the battery; even with brakes, the rover tend to slip.

I keep complaining that you can't appreciate perspective, so I reloaded back and took some better pictures from the eastern ledge, after climbing the worst part of the west wall (yeah, it's really a confusing name, but it does sound cool)

The rover is the white dot in the center of the image

The 8-km hole is less than 100 km before the halfway point of the circumnavigation. Biome is still the Boreth mountains, this range encompasses half of the planet while the other two are shorter.

Edited November 3, 2022 by king of nowhere

[king of nowhere]

Part 6: moar mountaineering!

It's all this mission is about, after all

I made it to halfway!

Spoiler

Halfway point was only a few tens of kilometers after the 8-km hole, so this section starts here. I planted a flag every 20 km, often very precisely, and while I occasionally broke the pattern for a significant landmark, there weren't many of those. So it's safe to say that I made at least 1300 km. Considering that the distance between flags is determined as the bird flies, while Leaping Mantis keeps on going up and down, it's probably safe to estimate even as high as 1500 km. It should have been 1200 km on a perfectly linear equatorial navigation.

Took me 19 hours of game time to travel that much, which is a very good time - an average of 75-80 km/h, in that kind of terrain, is amazing.

Of course, real life time was a lot longer, with all the times I had to reload.

Once there, I decided to take a long stop and wait for a new day. Visibility is very bad, I'd like to have shadows again. Due to Wal's slow rotation, I had to wait over 10 days.

Like this, much better!

And this, some 400 km later, is the divide between the Boreth mountains and the Pandro mountains, the last biome. The pass goes down to 10900 m. I called that mountain with the nice round crater on top Crater peak; not very original, no. I mostly stopped naming features because I run out of such names.

Higher than some lower elevation points I reached, but stll low enough to have boulders

This was a particularly good stretch of road because it's on the right place to have Urlum low on the horizon. The sky is just better.

My rythm has picked up now that I feel the end coming close, and I'm making some progress on this mission most days - even though with the end of the summer I have less free time.

This was a particularly harsh stretch of road, where I had to cut through a very steep ravine

All the celestial bodies visible from Wal: Urlum and Tal are obvious; Polta is just under Urlum. Priax is a lot smaller, can be seen from up close nearly halfway between Urlum and Tal

No Priax here, but a much better view on the others

Another low pass, this one falling below 9900 m

Mount Thor!

Thus named after the real world mount Thor, look it up on google maps (Mount Thor, Nunavut, Canada) it's quite impressive. This one has a similar shape, with a huge cliff on a side. Here I decided to stop and try to go down the cliff. After saving, of course.

Down mount Thor, it's got 70° inclines. They are the steepest of the whole planet

I tried a few times, don't remember if I ever successfully made it to the bottom without exploding. Either way, I then reloaded and went on with the circumnavigation.

By now I'm only missing a few hundred km. Next it will be the arrival.

[king of nowhere]

Part 7: full circumnavigation

After 8 months and 2800 km, Leaping Mantis makes it back to its sky crane

Spoiler

I wish I could find more descriptive text to put in this report, but really; it was 2800 km of going up and down mountains. It gets monotonous after a while.

The sky still making a good show

Date is now 22:338 as I spent another night in place waiting for the sun to get to a better spot. The rover has oxigen for 70 days

The mantis claws show their worth hitting a wall at high speed and turning the crash into a climb without damage

A big crater on top of a big mountain. At 19 km on the top, I wondered if this was the tallest crater on the planet; I forgot about mount Cratertop by this time

Going down said crater. Steep wall, must drive carefully

I see the end within the 100 km range!

Finally I arrived to the point where I can see the first flag.

Now I faced a conundrum. Should I go for that flag directly? Or should I stick to the mountain tops until I reach the point where I first climbed up, so that I can say I circumnavigated the whole mountain chain? The sky crane landed slightly to the south of the mountains, if I deviate for it I will miss 100 km of them.

Well, who cares, 2700 km of mountains are enough for anyone. Plus, have you seen the terrain down there? It's not like it's much easier than this. Wal is really the hardest place I ever saw for driving a rover. Strongly recommended to any rover driver who likes a challenge. Strongly recommended to anyone else to stay the hell away from here.

I start gradually going down

Look down there the terrain on the "plains". Would it have been any easier to drive down there?

Climbing down, cutting through this patch, there's quite some hard terrain

Finally down in the "plains". There's even a canyon to cross

The canyon. After the Trench and the 8-km hole, this is nothing

Yes, I have to conclude that driving down there is indeed a lot easier than driving up on the mountains. It's still quite a hard drive, at least as hard as one of the hard parts of Slate. But Leaping Mantis is a very good rover, and I just got an extensive training on ground much harder than this.

5 km from the target, I break a wheel. Nothing uncommon here, but those are the very last of the repair kits I started with. It gives a nice sense of closure

Back to the sky crane

Actually, the ladder wasn't all that functional. The bulge caused by the thermal shield interferes with it. I could eventually reach the crew pod, but it took a lot of trying, as the kerbal kept trying to make a 180° turn every time it came near the top. It was easier to reach the pod by jumping with the jetpack; the gravity on Wal is too high to fly with the jetpack, but low enough that you can jump really high and float for a while.

Edited November 3, 2022 by king of nowhere

[king of nowhere]

Part 8: going home

The circumnavigation is not complete without returning to Kerbin.

Spoiler

Ascent was quite hard. I did move around the docking port to ensure a balanced push when Leaping Mantis was attached to the sky crane. Unfortunately, this meant that after the rover was detached, the sky crane had an asymmetric tank. Doesn't help that I'm using dart engines, lacking a gimbal.

The second stage also has a low twr. I crashed a couple times into the mountains before I learned to compensate.

Before I docked with the return module, I decided to take one last aereal survey on the path I undertook in the past 8 months. Seeing things from a different perspective, and all that.

Top of the world terrace. Where I finally reached the top of the mountains, and felt I'm on top of the world. Literally.

Football field plateau, the first strip of flattish terrain where I could pick up some speed

Ladle cliff, so called because of the crater at its bottom. Looks as impressive as mount Thor, possibly more

Mount Stegosaurus. Form here you can see a bit better the seesaw profile. Oh, well. It was only a mild resemblance, but it was a good name

Mount cratertop, with its twin peaks. The tallest crater on the planet

The Trench. In bad lighting, as usual

The Caldera. I never mentioned this formation. Basically a giant hole in the middle of the path, had to turn around it on a very thin rock ledge.

The 8-km hole, with its dramatic west wall

The pass into Pandro mountains

Mount Thor. Even from this high you can appreciate its especially steep ravine

the last stretch of road, where I deviated out of the mountains. This area also marks the boundary between Pandro and Gault mountains, but looks like there is no major gap

Finally reunited with the return pod, jettisoning the remains of the sky crane. The decoupler was mounted backwards, but nothing a quick eva constuction couldn't fix

Finally, the return trajectory

I'm keeping my tradition of high energy trajectories on ion engines for return. This time I didn't want any risk, so I may have gone a little bit overboard; I loaded 20 km/s worth of xenon. Totally overkill. There's food for 4 years (water is inaccurate because it doesn't account for water recycling, there's actually water for over 6 years) and I picked a high energy trajectory for 3 years.

At first, I'm using what fuel is left in the old cruise module

Then it's jettisoned and the return module proper is used

5 km/s worth of xenon burn are slow. I don't trust the persistent thrust mod ever since it crashed my game and messed up my save, so I just made it with the game in background while doing something else.

Reentering atmosphere at 6 km/s. Don't worry, I tested this kind of pods up to 9 km/s and they're fine

Pulling 14 g of deceleration

Floating down on the parachute

And that's it for Wal.

I'm not sure I'll ever do more circumnavigations. I'm one who always looks for new challenges, and I don't really see much I can do with a rover after this. I started a new circumnavigation with the idea of using my dear old first rover, the Dancing Porcupine, on Polta. However, once I arrived on the place I discovered that the later update changed wheels and made them a lot more frail. The Dancing Purcupine main selling point - besides combining rover and middle-range isru-capable spaceship in a single vehicle - was its highly elaborated roll cage, making it nearly indestructible and very fun to drive as a result. Well, now it's no more; it keeps breaking wheels. I tried to start that circumnavigation, and I've run the first 10 km already a half dozen times; not once I managed to do it without breaking something. So, I may very well give up on that attempt. I'm not eve sure I want to actually take the time to circumnavigate Polta.

I may very well leave ksp in a few months. I'm nearly done with my latest grand tour (by "nearly done" I mean it would take at least another month or two, but since I started in early march, it still counts as nearly done). And I don't really know of any interesting challenge to pick up afterwards.

Perhaps it's early to make eulogies. But I want to say already that if I end up leaving this game after doing all I cared to do, then it's been a fine two years and I regret nothing.