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damerell

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Everything posted by damerell

  1. damerell
    I certainly found Moho varied enormously. At times I was doing under 10 m/s (at least Moho has enough gravity that something happens when you put on the brakes); at other times I could run the rover at 30 m/s or more in nice smooth terrain.
  2. damerell
    I'm around Pol: screenshots and a rather terse writeup here: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/146923-elcano-iv-circumnavigate-all-the-things/&do=findComment&comment=4226039 Not much to say about Pol, really. Pretty easy going if you keep the speed reasonable.
  3. damerell
    Pol continued to behave itself. I decided the Highlands weren't appreciably smoother, I'd just hit a smooth patch. My first glimpse of Kerbol. 20 degrees east and here the Highlands are lumpy. Clearly now in the daylight. A first glimpse of Jool. Jool now clearly in view. 60 and 80 degrees West; easier roving in the daylight. Shortly after sighting the Hangarmoth. I'd diverted to the North to come around a vast cliff, hence the odd looking BTDT track. And home! Another world off the list, and only one very low-g world left to do.
  4. damerell
    I restarted Pol, repeating the landing all the way from orbit. So far - I'm about halfway round - the terrain has not misbehaved. I've kept the speed down to around 16 m/s but also resurrected the low gravity jump control kOS script from Gilly; if we're 10m above the ground and moving upwards in terms of both sea level and terrain altitude, we switch on the top engines until those conditions aren't all true. (There's also a check that the top engines are actually pointed approximately up in case of some kind of crazy spin). There's masses of fuel for this - the engines are small, and the fuel tanks sized to supply the fuel cells on a high-gravity world where the reactor might not be able to keep up - and it helps to keep the wheels on the ground where they belong. I still think the rover design - tested on Kerbin - isn't great on these very low gravity worlds; it's too easy to punt yourself up into the sky and slam down hard on your wheels, and it doesn't have a lot of ground clearance with the suspension bottomed out. As ever, the rover designer wants a low centre of gravity and a wide wheelbase to avoid flipping over but high ground clearance to avoid ground strikes, and combining the two is tricky. If I were doing this again, a phrase I write a lot, I would just mount KF skids on the underbelly. Getting dark already, having landed somewhat further West. Pol has been tricky - low gravity like Minmus, but not even remotely flat. I spend half my time almost as a passenger in the air, wondering which way to steer during the next brief interlude of traction. This crack in the ground was just as alarming to rove into as it is on the top-right monitor. Finally getting smoother. I was starting to feel that the Highlands biome was at least less bumpy, and here I've switched the top-right monitor to biome mode and am just trying to stick to the Highlands while that is at all compatible with staying near the equator.
  5. damerell
    We spoke about this on Twitch last night. You're right - the Hooligan Labs inflatable envelope isn't forbidden - but maybe it should be? It essentially removes the challenge part of the challenge because you don't now have to be able to lift a stupidly huge object off the surface of Kerbin, it just becomes stupidly huge on arrival. A dropbox link ending "dl=0" can be immediately and obviously improved by making it read "dl=1". :-)
  6. damerell
    I wrote elsewhere I've hit a bit of a wrinkle on Pol; sometimes the ground isn't sure where it is. My wheels sink into it until the bottom of the suspension arm hits it (so why's it solid to one bit of the part and not another?), situation flickers between In Space Low and Landed, "cannot save when about to crash", and I get almost no traction and can't go anywhere. Just going back a bit and landing on Pol again hasn't helped. I've tried going in a few different directions but hit "soft" terrain each time. Not really sure what I can do about this.
  7. damerell
    I've hit a bit of a wrinkle on Pol; sometimes the ground isn't sure where it is. My wheels sink into it until the bottom of the suspension arm hits it (so why's it solid to one bit of the part and not another?), situation flickers between In Space Low and Landed, "cannot save when about to crash", and I get almost no traction and can't go anywhere. Anyone seen anything like this? I suspect I'll start investigating by loading an older save and landing afresh. I'm not a long way into Pol at all.
  8. damerell
    Landed on Pol at last! It soon got dark, and with Pol's very slow "speed of dawn" there was no choice but to press on. Initially it got fairly unpleasant, but Pol is not a big world and I realised if I kept speed down to 15 m/s or so it wouldn't take a prohibitive time to get around and at that speed the roving is easy so far. To 150 degrees East already. Not sure where Jool is (or how big it appears from here), but I'm keeping an eye out for Joolrise.
  9. damerell
    I think this is still relevant.
  10. damerell
    Met the first rover delivery. I have no idea why I didn't just put docking ports on these for the LFO transfer, but after a prolonged struggle in EVA (and realising that even if you don't have a docking port, DPAI will let you cuddle up to one on the target vessel), Dancan Kerman has attached a KIS/KAS connector, the rover has undocked, she's got into it, and here she is flying it into the hangar. I have executed the maneuvers and have a Pol encounter coming up.
  11. damerell
    A certain amount of confusion with planned manoeuvers - it is just as well Orion affords me a bit more spare delta-V than I might otherwise have - but the tiny green dot in the centre here is my first sight of Jool from a kerballed vessel. My life support supplies are holding up much better than I planned for. Can't complain, but I'm not sure what went wrong in the pre-mission calculations.
  12. damerell
    I had a bit of a break, but I'm back in KSP again. The second batch of Jool scan satellites is up, and this time the design isn't a mess. The picture here is of one of them en route to a moon, and all five of them are successfully in place and scanning away. I also designed a Mk VIII rover and set it off to Eeloo. Next is the long wait for the Hangarmoth to arrive at Jool.
  13. damerell
    It might have been easier to scroll up; at the top of this page is the close of my discussion of the same issue, with the remedy posted on page 94.
  14. damerell
    I suspect you'll find speed picks up as you exhaust the fuel supply.
  15. damerell
    I think in this very thread you can see people going over that with Breaking Ground propellor-driven boats (which didn't take off or get obliterated), and my own jet-powered Kerbian Sea Monster did over 200 m/s when almost dry of fuel.
  16. damerell
    The netkan file contains a download link, suggest you consult that. There's also valuable metadata there to indicate what else to install - texture packs, optional mods to go with it, and so forth. If you are feeling keen you could write a program that processes that data and does the installs automatically.
  17. damerell
    The Suez Canal is about 200km; Panama 80 IIRC. The reason they aren't modelled, I find, is that RSS Earth gets its heightmap from NASA topographic data and, if I understand correctly, there's only a datapoint every 2.5km or so. (Of course, higher resolution topographic data of the Earth exists, but RSS have to ship the resulting file and even at that resolution it's going on 2Gb). An 80m wide canal doesn't show up at that resolution (and neither do natural rivers &c). However, this also means that RSS Earth is very smooth, with no locally rough terrain. It may be more practical to drive across the location of the canals than it would be on a normal KSP body. I've also enquired in the RSS thread. It might be possible to nobble the heightmap to carve a channel across the approximate location of the canals - the resulting channel would be far wider than in reality, but would serve. The Laytheboat is powered by a nuclear-thermal jet. Performance isn't amazing, but endurance is less of an issue. You're right that I'm working up to it; I thought I'd take a break after Dres and look at some of the oddball cases like sea Kerbin and actually-surface Gilly.
  18. damerell
    I was considering a sea circumnavigation of Earth: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/202743-the-elcano-challenge-ground-based-circumnavigation-4th/page/14/#comment-4207214 However, the Suez and Panama Canals don't exist, which poses a bit of a problem. Looking back through the thread it seems one can use Kerbal Konstructs (but surely not for a 200km canal), or presumably I could meddle with the input data to TopoConv (although it's not immediately obvious to me what that input data _is_). I appreciate even at 16k the resolution on the heightmaps is not huge; I don't want to make a gorgeous model, just to carve a channel along the approximate route of the canals so I can sail a boat through it.
  19. damerell
    The Suez and Panama canals don't seem to be modelled, alas.
  20. damerell
    That was my first thought, but some earlier versions of the challenge said "no mod planets except RSS Earth", and... while RSS Earth would take a long _time_ by sea, it wouldn't take a long time at the keyboard - more a matter of looking in every half-hour to see if the course needs adjusted. I think.
  21. damerell
    I'm not as yet seriously considering this, but before I do a honking great download, does anyone know if RSS models the Earth in sufficient detail that the Panama and Suez Canals exist and are navigable?
  22. damerell
    Fengist, the first organiser, didn't have an all-worlds badge, but Claw, the second, did - and had done the grand tour themself. So I'm afraid the idea of doing a clean sweep did emerge fairly early. :-)
  23. damerell
    I'm not so much thinking of rocks (which I have not got) as landing after the sort of jump which is difficult to avoid doing at all on low-g worlds (unless, I guess, if you chug around at 3-4 m/s like the Apollo rover, rather than zoom about like us leadfooted Elcano maniacs, but then the IRL astronauts weren't trying to circumnavigate the Moon). I'm pretty sure that's been my problem a lot of the time. Mind you, perhaps all the Parallax rocks will discourage you from pedal-to-the-metal stuff. :-) Good luck, anyway, it's an interesting looking design.
  24. damerell
    If I were going to play with Parallax colliders I'd probably go back to the old rover Marks and use tracks rather than wheels (still Kerbal Foundries; I've been using the Kerbal Foundries parts since before the KSPWheel physics). I've gone down the wide base, low centre of mass route to avoid rolling. I find it then becomes very easy to bottom out the rover on the ground. If I were designing a new rover (and I'm considering sending myself a new design to Eeloo just for a change) I'd put KF skids or similar along the centreline to avoid that. I certainly have seen no previous attempt with the new colliders.
  25. damerell
    @Flatliner: you could provide specific reproduction steps, logs, etc, rather than this rambling series of sentence fragments. The phrase "engine audio" appears only in your post in this thread, so I'm unclear as to why you write "OP seems to completely deny the mod is the cause", let alone where you suggested it might be and what LGG's response was. https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html is worth a read. Unsurprisingly, Tatham does not recommend your approach. (I admit I had a brief moment of "huh, maybe?" here - I do get engine audio cutouts - until I looked to find right now I _don't have this mod installed_.)
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