damerell

Something I forgot to write about last update; in the last on-land screenshot, I am about to realise it's much easier to steer the rover without MechJeb trying to hold you to the at-sea heading with the reaction wheels. :-/ Land ho! Well, land bonk, since I arrived on land in the dark (surprise) and didn't notice. I turn off the tracks at sea, because otherwise they burn electric charge to no good end, but that also means the rover just gently nuzzles against the beach until I deign to pay attention. Not much to see in this next one, but this is the start of the last (albeit a long) land leg in the route. When this is done, it's a straight sail back to the KSC.

As I read the above, it does this to stop empty tanks from exploding. This seems redundant with KKS on the scene to bend them into funny shapes, and I don't think it's a bug in KKS that if another mod makes a part's crash tolerance very hard it is then very hard to damage. That is exactly the behaviour I would expect.

I observed this with legs down. I'm afraid it was some time ago when Karibou was still very new and I didn't report it at the time.

Well done! You seem to have taken quite a circuitous route in places...

I don't know that this will work, but what if you empty all the Supplies tanks on the design and then try to build it?

I got there in the end, as you know, but a clear description of how one varies the mass-dimension ratio for a part would be a welcome addition to the documentation.

Especially since the only treads I know of, the Kerbal Foundries treads, use a non-stock module which lets them go over bumps with less fuss. :-)

And I'm back with another exciting update. Well, in all candour, an update. My first thought was that I would drive around the north side of this enormous gulf. I gradually came to realise both that I'd already got diverted onto a peninsula and that sea travel is, in fact, enormously easier than land travel - slower, but given the mission's hefty provisioning, this is hardly an issue. For once it is daylight. Land ho! Having realised a mariner's life is easiest, I plan to cross a thin neck of land here and sail across the vast lake beyond. Perhaps (since it is light) the terrain will not be too challenging. And it wasn't, the entire expanse of the neck was easy going. And in the next lake; lay in the course, check occasionally. I've nearly got out of this one, but it looks much the same on the other side.

This has been an odd leg. I updated my kOS script to run the electric propellers only if electric charge was between 95% and 100% (with a proportionate throttle setting, to find an equilibrium point), layed the course into MechJeb, and went to bed. When I woke up I adjusted the course slightly and went to work. Finally I find myself ashore again. Sure, much KSP success is in pre-mission preparation, but this 800km leg is a particularly extreme example. Because the craft was right, I've barely touched the controls in circa 20 realtime hours of the mission.

The number of mods matters much less than how big they are. B9 Aerospace has more memory footprint than every partless mod out there put together. [1] I would start at full resolution and use GCmonitor to see if memory usage gets into the danger zone. [1] This assertion made without testing, but it seems likely.

Seriously, why does everything interesting happen in the dark? I drove over most of a mountain range at night; here I am veering north to avoid the last (huge-looking) peaks. But you can't see much, because it's dark. Here I am having just crossed the Kerbinternational Date Line. It's still dark. And here I am having reached the shore and plotted in the course for a very lengthy sea leg over the large eastern ocean. Guess what? Now the scenery will be entirely flat and blue, the sun's come up. At least I can run the electric propellors.

This western continent is not the most interesting place on Kerbin. This is basically the first terrain feature I've seen that wasn't gently rolling Grasslands, and from the Scansat coverage I infer I'm pretty well to the Western shore. This update's mostly here so you know I haven't given up.

Move the fairing up the staging order?

Tried with FAR? It knows what shape things are...

Don't be daft. @srl - the Karibou parts end up in their own category in the VAB, at the bottom. This is not immediately obvious.

Curious. How did you measure it?

It serves little purpose on 64-bit, since the address space is more than large enough for any mod set. It's basically writing your own swap algorithm which is rarely a good idea.

Odd. Tried fiddling the cockpit transparency?

"TACLS is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until Jebadiah is dead." - The Terminator

Assembling such a list would be prohibitively hard, and we're largely on the honour system for this challenge anyway. I tend to feel, Elcano's a challenge you do in order to have done it. Part of it is building a launch vehicle, but it's up to you to decide what you think is acceptable there. I intend to use RoverDude's Orion drive for my next Elcano mission (if I ever get around Kerbin hem-hem). It's pretty well a super-engine - also eminently plausible in reality. Am I cheating? Indeed, there's plenty of modded rover parts that are implausibly good. I quadrupled the EC consumption on the Kerbal Foundries tracks because it seemed excessively easy otherwise (and out the box, all the KF parts are pretty well indestructible).

I did notice some states (will produce craft and input settings if useful) where it chugs upwards on 1/2ish throttle until the nose dips below the horizon at circa 20km altitude. It then goes to full throttle without pitching up and fiery comedy ensues. With slightly different input settings, it flies a beautiful ascent for the same craft.

Quite. Second-best entry in the ascent profile challenge, and without a great deal of fiddling.

On the other hand, if it was impossible to have a kerbal in a deflated module of this sort, that would be beneficial anyway (because it's Silly).

I thought I would try the newly released Gravity Turn mod. I had to experiment a bit, but results were very satisfactory: Here we are at launch. I have set the SRBs to 100% (I'm sorry about the default value on the challenge craft; I think I must have botched the takeoff TWR calculation somehow) and restacked it. I've also adjusted some of the Gravity Turn defaults and hit Best Guess. And here we are in orbit. I did have to stage manually (Gravity Turn inputs a MechJeb circularisation if possible, but MechJeb manuevers don't autostage) and apply a small squirt of throttle to get Pe just above 180km. 164 LF is not the best result we've seen, but it does suggest this is a good automated tool.

Finally driving during the day! You get some good shadows at sunrise, although the rover is a long way off not needing to run the fuel cell; when the sun gets more overhead the solar panels and the RTG can make headway on the power drain. I've driven through this sort of beige terrain. Sometimes it's deserts, sometimes it's mountains, now it's grasslands. I don't see much difference myself - the mountains had some slightly bumpy bits, but nothing like the mountains west of KSC. The mission continues.