damerell

Little to write about these, but I am plugging on. I'm glad to have the BTDT track again.

Finally off on Dres. With the Scansat BTDT once again able to track our progress, and with a rover I can dismount from to plant flags without the ladders exploding, I think I can cut down on the sheer tide of screenshots just to document progress. I was clearly lucky in my choice of landing spot because by 102W flat terrain had been largely replaced by awkward ridges. One or two spins, but the anti-roll beam and Rover Stability Control are doing a good job keeping us right way up. Here's a flag at 120W. I was clearly roving into the sunset (and can move faster than the circa 25 m/s it moves at on Dres), so shut down for a day to set off once dawn had caught up. I overshot this a bit and it's now pretty dark a lot of the time, but I'll gradually get back under Kerbol. 150W:

Another session full of pushing probes around (and discovering the Jool probes have no battery, which apparently means the electrical equipment on them can't run off the RTG; a fresh set launched), but now almost all probe work is done. Here we are circularising at Dres; I presume to some degree the belly of the Hangarmoth must also be coated in steel and ablative oil. And down on Dres - at sunrise, good timing, and in a spot with at least some Ore, MetallicOre, and uranium ore. Almost perfectly sunrise - the "mast" is in sunlight but not the main hull. This crew have only done Gilly so far, so I'm sure they are eager to rove around somewhere they can have their wheels on the ground.

The Eeloo rover delivery mission just doesn't exist. One thing (maybe fixed later) I dislike about Kerbal Alarm Clock is deleting a vessel doesn't delete the alarms for its maneuvers, so you think it still exists. I bet NASA doesn't just lose probes down the back of the sofa. I launched a replacement. The Laythe vehicles, having dropped the big tank and engine, settle in for a long LV-N burn to Jool. The Hangarmoth embarks on a short and probably extremely noisy burn to Dres. A big Hangar full of Jool probes circularising. The probes out. They lack a RemoteTech connection - this is because (at least with the 1.9 mod versions I am using) there is no way I can find to launch a vessel from a Hangar with an antenna active, to run a kOS script immediately, to have a Smart Part trigger (which would then toggle an action group to activate an antenna), etc. I am going to shamelessly edit the save file to turn the antennae on, since this just seems like a bug. The first of the Jool rover delivery vehicles has circularised around Jool, a welcome development. I have only one rover with me now so it is good to know there is at least one more waiting - and some more LFO and MP to loot.

Another thing I've learned is to think about the conversion rates - I want big refined metal tanks, not metallic ore, and big enriched uranium tanks. I suspect by the time I'm done here I'll know everything about a thing I'll never do in KSP again.

IRL I have not been in a motor car for 15 years, and I've never had a driving licence, so... not as such, no. In vexing news the Dres rover delivery lacks, even remotely, the dV to stop at Dres. I have one rover on the Hangarmoth, and more rovers coming to Jool, so perhaps I am not yet in unavoidable trouble; but I think I must reconsider matters.

The cursed rover had a last gasp of cursedness when, as engineer Arald was roving it away from the Hangarmoth after having docked and undocked it to recover its supplies, it spontaneously flew into several pieces. Kind of moot since we're about to blast it with two nuclear devices, but Arald was still a bit taken aback. (What really happened is I'd put the suspension all the way down in an effort to jiggle it into the Hangar's vehicle acceptance zone and then the batteries bottomed out on the landing legs, but it sure came as a surprise). Liftoff was uneventful: The QA in sight: took us a few days to get here because we had left it in a very high orbit around Duna: And docked - a very undramatic docking thanks, I hope, to me getting better at it and not just blind luck. With the transfer window a year and a half away, I hope the kerbals will enjoy looking at Duna - and I have more to do (including getting the Dres rover delivery into orbit, which isn't vital but I would certainly like to steal its leftover MP and LFO) before the window.

100W: 110W: 120W, but somewhere here the game slowed to a crawl (about 50% realtime), resulting in an agonising slog to the Hangarmoth. First sight of the Hangarmoth. And we're back. Ike took a while for so small a world.

I am home on Ike; screenshots to follow, but I am home. ETA: screenies up, and en route to Dres.

Sure it's not just Advanced Tweakables?

To 40 and 30 East: A little jump at 20E, getting alarming as it gets darker, but the terrain had been easy and I'd kept going: I'd seen one more glimpse of Duna on a big jump before this, but this is the first time I hit F1 - I was distracted the last time by it being too big a jump, which bottomed out the suspension and destroyed the ventral KIS locker. (Don't put them on the bottom of your rover.) Duna rises, or possibly we rove under it: Duna from the top-deck seats in the cab, which do exist! Around here I'd thought, no, it's just getting stupidly dark, so I shut down for a few hours while Kerbol returned. Almost the first thing that happened when roving in the light was a huge prang, knocking off a chunk of the rollcage, both the MTS headlights (still, I plan to finish before sunset), and a solar panel. I found on Kerbin I seemed to be a worse driver when I could see where I was going, and the same thing has happened on Ike. Odd. I'd skirt this huge elevated area on the left to rove along flatter ground. Here the terrain flattens out again: Here I am allegedly in the Central Mountain Range, but it's not very mountainous: Finally I've turned towards the Hangarmoth, whose target marker is now on the HUD. 80 West, and then "not far" at 90W, alhough looking back I still have 30 degrees longitude to cover.

130 East. These mountains would rapidly become quite unpleasant terrain. At 120 East I am mostly done with them, but this slope down got pretty unpleasant. The topographical map looks very odd here (top right monitor). Easier full-speed roving here, even as we get into the Western Mountain Ridge, but it's getting dark - we are outroving the dawn. I stopped here having done a full 90 degrees longitude and wondering if I should rove into the night or shut down. I discovered if you extract from a Hangar a rover with a Scansat BTDT running, you need to turn the BTDT off and on again - hence the rather short BTDT track on the map here, but at least that'll provide a bit more documentation of the expedition.

170 East: 160 East: A strangely pointy mountain: More ugly Z-fighting at 150E: 140E: Easy roving this time, but not much to write about it.

More Laythe problems: the Laythe jet balances out but the Laytheboat is just too unbalanced for the long transfer burn. Still, I've got time in hand since the Queen Agaster will have to visit Dres before it gets anywhere near Jool so can terminate, redesign, take the next transfer window in 72 days. It struck me that if the problem is that the jet is a heavy winged object that wants to hang off one side of its rocket, and the Laytheboat is a similar-weight wing-shaped object that wants to hang off one side of its rocket, sending them off separately was entirely pointless, and so this monstrosity was born: A kOS script written for the Laytheboat balances everything out; it doesn't touch LFO tanks, and the jet is slightly heavier than the boat and full of LF where the boat's pontoons are empty LF tanks, so it can do its job right from launch. After dropping the boosters and the first main stage we have this even more absurd contraption: Seriously, it's like a plane with the world's most ridiculous undercarriage. Eventually the nose and central engine will pop off when dry, leaving the two Laythe vehicles docked to the giant RCS tank which also has those four quad-LVNs and tanks on booms. This will also make for a bit of excitement when we get to Laythe since we'll have to lower Pe to dip into atmosphere, cut the Laytheboat loose, raise Pe again, see where the Laytheboat comes down (having an approximate idea of how much longitude it covers so it drops somewhere near land), and then lower Pe again to try and drop the jet somewhere nearby, making sure to get all the LF where it's needed after each part of the operation. Meanwhile, Ike, which started by... both ladders exploding unexpectedly when kerbals boarded: What the kerb? I'm planning to ditch this rover here since I have a replacement coming to Dres, but I guess I won't be dropping flags on Ike. I could suit-RCS out in Ike's gravity, but I'm lazy. 140 degrees West: 150 degrees West: 160 degrees West. Not much to write about these; the terrain is easy and Ike is small. 180 degrees West (what happened to 170? I don't know): And a shot of the rover, where I also have strange stuff going on with one of the crew portraits. Perhaps this rover is cursed and it's just as well I'm leaving it behind.

The USI mod constellation includes Enriched Uranium and Depleted Uranium tanks, and even if you don't want to bring all that in, it's easy enough to swipe one or two parts from a mod. https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/192855-18x-111x-stockish-project-orion-v182-update-12292020/ includes some _great big_ ones, too. I would expect that the Uraninite->EnUr process enormously reduces the mass making bringing Uraninite horrendously mass-inefficient - as in "maybe bringing a spare reactor would be less mass-inefficient".

Nor do KSPWheel (Kerbal Foundries) wheels - and, to be fair, this is one of the few respects in which the stock wheels behave as one might realistically expect. :-)

Set off for Ike. I expected to have a tangle with the Laythe transfer windows, but Ike is really close to Duna and the whole business of taking off and getting over there could be easily accomplished in time. I did wonder if Duna's atmosphere would be a nuisance on takeoff, but I didn't try to get too fancy with ascent profile and up I went without trouble. I really needed a landing spot with Uranite if possible - the limiting factor on me producing Orion pulse units is not metallic ore, but uranium - and did a bit more work on the kOS landing script and with careful consideration of the ScanSAT map came down somewhere reasonable. The trouble with a good landing script on an airless world is, of course, you spend more of the descent thinking "oh kerb, light the engines, there's no time!". I'm even down in the daylight, so I could just set off, but I think the rover speed control script needs more work. (This is not entirely a joke about avoiding the actual roving; a problem on low-g worlds is braking when only your front wheels are touching the ground, which does tend to flip you. The script could detect if the rear wheels are off the ground and if so turn off the brakes no matter what.)

What exactly did you do? (I suspect you changed the physwarp rate then tried to activate normal time acceleration...)

With any engine at all you can only use physics warp while under acceleration. This mod does let you adjust the physics warp rates.

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html - most particularly, that the aim of bug reports is not minimalism, and "trouble getting this to work" tells us really extremely little.

I use a relatively simple kOS script to dial down the last pulse in a maneuver then activate auxiliary LFO engines.

I'm curious as to why the rover seems to be entirely made of sticky-out bits - is that constellation of landing legs intended to make it able to self-right from any position?

I'm around Duna, which starts at https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/146923-elcano-iv-circumnavigate-all-the-things/page/2/#comment-4162386 It's late here so I literally braked to a stop and quit; Ike will have to wait.

I resolved to try and rove into the "Western Canyon" biome I'd seen on the map. From the last screenshot at 75W there was some nasty Highlands terrain, and the bottom of the Midland Sea was pretty bad, but I got into it here and tried to just steer straight down it. Here I am much further down - zoomed out, the rover as a tiny blob, and showing the vast mountains the canyon is defined by. The canyon was smooth going. My track on the Scansat map is wiggly because I followed the canyon to its easternmost extent, then decided to continue to 45W before turning towards the Hangarmoth; here is that moment. Heading towards the Hangarmoth, and in smooth terrain for a change. The last flag on Duna at 30W. I'm pleased the KSC thought to supply us with this semi-infinite supply of flags. Once nice thing about the resupply mission that was necessary is that the Hangarmoth sticks up a long way because of the extra tanks being in this tower when the thing is landed. I'd seen it a bit before, but this shows it from a distance. And home! I have not checked the ISRU situation on the Hangarmoth, let alone loaded the rover up and set off for Ike - but I am done with Duna at last. Much smaller than Eve, but I've been distracted by other matters and it's taken a while. The Laythe vehicles are coming up to transfer out of Kerbin and I will have to make sure they hit those windows.

I ploughed on through the night, or rather, spent about half the time driving and half the time rewriting the anti-overspeed kOS script (which handled the case where the desired maximum was more than the maximum drive speed so it just needed braking downhill well, but not slower roving at night; it took several iterations to reach a point where it wasn't alternately letting me go full throttle then braking to waste all the input energy). Flag at 120W: Could have sworn I hit screenshot as I got past 105W, but I've got nothing, so here's a flag at 90W: This puzzled me - was it a huge grey mountain? Does Kerbol look really weird because of some odd property of the Dunanian atmosphere? Oh, wait, it's Ike. 75W, and an impressive view in the sky. With only 50 degrees longitude to go, I should be home before dark. A pity to have set out the wrong way and done an unnecessary night roving leg, but I seem to have survived it.