damerell

Slightly more even than that - Minmus, Mun, and Kerbin were threads of their own, and Minmus was May 2015, so it's been just under eight years. But ofc there was a long period after 2016 when I wasn't really doing anything beyond looking at the save and fiddling around in the VAB. I picked it all up again in early 2022 - by the time I was posting in June, I'd already been doing some vehicle design and sending out ScanSATs. The impetus was the pandemic, but it wouldn't have been possible in anything like the current form without @Starwastermaking Kerbal Foundries parts work again and @SuicidalInsanitycoming up with a functional Project Orion mod.

With no use for more rovers, all I had to do was drop the slightly battered Mk VII I brought from Jool out of the hangar and let it roll down the hill, then cuddle up the Mk VIII to the Hangarmoth so an engineer could attach a KAS pipe, suck it clean of MP, LFO, etc, and let it roll too? Simple, as we see from Arald Kerman strolling away. One unusual thing was that a little after doing this, the Mk VII exploded - from the F3 log, as if most or all of it had suddenly reached 2500K. I didn't worry too much about that - a bit, but not too much - until I couldn't lift Carol Kerman off the ground with RCS in Eeloo's gravity, and also she seemed quite unable to manage the ladders on the Hangarmoth. I was a bit concerned then; I could recover her by walking to the Mk VIII, roving back up the hill, and docking it with the Hangarmoth... but it was a long way away, it too might explode for no reason, and frankly the Hangar docking all expedition has not been ideal. I did not pay close attention to the Hangar docs telling me about the vehicle insertion plane, but also since Hangars won't accept anything moving too fast the whole scheme of slapping the rover into the bay by lifting up the door - a thing I had no control over the speed of - was not ideal. If I did this again, the bay would have KAS winches to load the rover in at a precisely controlled speed. However, on examing her inventory it turned out she was carrying about 750kg mass, having scooped up a few ground mounting points worlds ago and not noticed. Eeloo's gravity is low, but even so! I dropped the heaviest stuff. Docking up with the QA for the last time. Farewell to Eeloo, and on a course for Kerbin. The end is in sight for my bold kerbonauts, who will have spent well over an Earth decade on this expedition.

CKAN. But the previous poster is right that this is not where to start (but if you really want to, mouse over CKAN and you should get enough search information to sort you out...)

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/146923-elcano-iv-circumnavigate-all-the-things/&do=findComment&comment=4280712 I have circumnavigated all the things.

Kerbol was low in the sky, so I stopped for the KSP night. After this I went into the Highlands, some of the most interesting roving on Eeloo - but it remained a pleasure, the terrain was less even but it was never difficult. This was quite an alarming jump - my shadow is far below me - but in low gravity with a solid rover design, it was not a problem. Here I hit more "soft ground", like on Pol. Exasperating, so close to the finish. I found that quicksaving and then reloading would cure it for a bit, and I struggled on for about 2 degrees of longitude, but then the ground was firm again. However, the cure did tend to ping me up into the air, and once I landed upside down. I could have quickloaded again - no objection to doing that in response to KSP bugs - but I took the opportunity to test the self-righting mechanism on the Mk VIII. It performed well, getting me on my side so I could then rotate around the anti-roll arm to put me back on my wheels. I turned south, partly to try and get into the canyons but also to explore what turned out to be the Craters biome. I'd been guided by the biome map for some time, but it turned out the cleft in the landscape I was planning to rove down was outside the biome on the map. I steered straight downwards, trusting the terrain. I'd been seeing an object on the horizon, and it turned out it was, thanks (I think) to Distant Object Enhancement, the Queen Agaster VI. At this point I'd given up on the unreliable biome map and was just following the topography scan - but now they coincided, and I was in the Ice Canyons. Turning the corner of the apparent T-junction in the canyons. I circled around here, as you can see in the top right MFD, because I'd found a spot below "sea" level on a dry world. I didn't know that could happen. And finally, up the slope out of the ice canyon and home. I shall bring the kerbals home, but at this point their mission was accomplished.

Of course my screenshot process would break down immediately after being thread of the month (although I really think the main Elcano Challenge thread is much more worthy). I've sought to redeem myself somewhat with a shot of me setting off replacing one of the lost ones. Kerbol is high overhead so we have half a roving day or so left. You would think after roving around 95% of the system, I would remember to run the kOS script to run the fuelcells, prevent overspeed, etc - or have arranged for kOS to boot it automagically; I think I did the latter on the Mk VII, but this is a Mk VIII. You'd be wrong; the wheels broke down this slope, and so while I don't generally plant flags (ScanSat does such a good job), engineer Arald could not resist the urge while out to fix them all. Eeloo remains a pleasure to rove on - enough gravity to let you accelerate and brake sensibly, and to actually turn corners, but not so much that hills are a chore, not so little that every bump means two minutes off the ground. This is about the biggest jump I have done this session, and sure, it's big, but not worrying. Crossing an ice canyon that runs north-south. I'm going to cross this area of high ground on the Equator, not try and follow these ice canyons.

As usual, I've roved diagonally towards the Equator, which I'll mostly aim to follow; but I think I'll try and track down the big ice canyon running southwest from the Equator down towards the landing site - from the looks of things, I landed with it in sight. 120 degrees west, and it's getting dark. Eeloo has been extremely easy to rove on, gentle ridges which just provide enough variety to be more interesting than Tylo. It doesn't make for much in the way of screenshots, though, I'm afraid. Clearly being outpaced by the sunset, so I shut down here overnight. At 150W at dawn. Here I'm afraid my screenshot-transferring broke down and screenshots to 120E are lost. Not the end of the world, since the BTDT is doing a superb job of mapping progress and that patch of Eeloo is an endless series of Midlands - the terrain was so easy I switched the righthand MFD to biome mode, giving me a plain sheet of Midlands - with the lost screenshots just being ridges with no good view of the terrain ahead, but still a pity. However, I think that puts me just short of halfway through, since I set off from 77W.

I dunno, having Project Orion to shove my rovers around the system doesn't hurt. I'm not the rules kerbal, but in your spaceboots I would write a kOS script that immediately shuts off the propellors if I leave the ground. That would tend to make you be doing jumps, not powered flights.

When designing the Hangarmoth I fitted these Super Dibamus OMS parts (on either side of the auxiliary LFO engines); as well as ordinary RCS, there's a throttle-controlled port on one side of them. This is the first time I've fired them up, which is odd because they're ideal for this sort of job of pushing off from the Queen Agaster after undocking. However, if I were doing this again I'd just make the auxiliary engines DockRotate, making them useful for slowing down and large fore-aft translation as well as fine control of forward thrust. Particularly, one of the weak spots of the landing script is trying to control horizontal velocity while keeping the ship basically belly-down before it hits the ground; if the auxiliary engines could rotate to do that, it would really help. Indeed, the landing script did not cover itself in glory, slapping the nose down into the ground and breaking off one of the extendable radiators (which are stowed for landing). However, I probably don't need all three, especially given we're at the coldest place in the Kerbol system - and, perhaps more importantly, installing a fixed radiator onto the reactor directly has fixed most of the cooling woes (if things heat up overall, reactor power output drops, and if it drops far enough the radiators can't get power, you've got to turn the whole ship off and start again; giving it a dedicated radiator makes this impossible). Also, it redeemed itself by, through sheer luck, picking one of the few biomes on Eeloo with all three of Ore, MetallicOre, and Uraninite to mine. Supplies are not short, especially since I have nowhere else to go but home, but this certainly won't hurt. The new Mk VIII design which met us in Eeloo orbit (no screenshot of that, oops); compared to the Mk VII, the rollcage comes further forward protecting the spotlights, it has a second reaction wheel for stability control, and there are rotatable beams added at the sides which - in theory - can be used to re-right the rover if it turns turtle.

Another lesson: don't, waiting at Jool for a maneuver far in the future, wait in an orbit that crosses that of any of the Joolian moons. Obvious in retrospect, but isn't everything? I adjusted the orbit after this alarming but non-fatal intercept. The resupply mission docked up. With a smaller payload and a better ascent profile than the last resupply mission, those three tanks have enough LFO left to fill up the Hangarmoth - a welcome bonus since I had burned up almost 3/4 of the supply on board in order to reduce the demand for pulse units on the transfer to Eeloo. Stopping here for the night IRL, but in a low Eeloo orbit. The last planet awaits.

Thanks. If other people want a go at the Elcano challenge they'll want a link to the rules and leaderboard, run by @18Watt, so here it is: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/202743-the-elcano-challenge-ground-based-circumnavigation-4th/ I think no-one has done RSS Earth yet. :-)

More problems. First of all, it turned out in the flight across Laythe, the jet engine was draining LF from one of the LFO tanks in the main body, as well as the two LF-only drop tanks. This meant I had considerably less fuel than I expected; the plan to get as high and fast as I possibly could in airbreathing mode then switch the RAPIERs to rocket mode simply was not going to work. The second was that the decoupler between the plane body and the rocket body is the wrong way around - if it's allowed to fire it puts the rocket body into an uncontrollable spin, and if it decouples without firing it's a huge chunk of offcentre mass on the rocket body, meaning that can thrust no harder than can be offset with RCS. I did have plenty of monoprop, but what I lacked was time - with a very limited ability to get out of atmosphere on the RAPIERS, I wanted to be able to make my circularisation burn as fast as possible. I removed as much unnecessary mass as I could - antenna, ladders, the monoprop in the Mk2 Clamp-o-tron - and then fiddled very carefully with ascent profile. Here I am going up in airbreathing mode (the middle engine is much higher efficiency, so was used for crossing Laythe; it gets dropped here when I get above its useful operating height). Rockets burning - and a careful eye on the fuel supply; as soon as the apoapsis will give me enough time (around 55km) I'll stop the RAPIERS, pump it all back into the 1200-FTP tank, and ditch the plane body. This is a slightly lower periapsis than I might like, to put it mildly, but it's enough. However, the orbital inclination is about 80 degrees from that of the Hangarmoth, and there isn't enough LFO left for this craft to adjust its plane. (In retrospect, I should have run it dry to improve matters as much as possible). Rendezvous. However, the circa 2 km/sec maneuver to match planes means the Hangarmoth is now very short of pulse units. It's not impossible I'll have to send another resupply mission to Jool - or to Eeloo to give me enough juice to get home. ETA: I've got enough dV to go to Eeloo and circularise inside its SOI. I'll have a resupply mission meet me there.

Thanks. I did not imagine, when I set out to rove around Minmus eight years ago, the sheer scope of the challenge.

I am around Laythe, which starts at https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/146923-elcano-iv-circumnavigate-all-the-things/&do=findComment&comment=4275537 Just Eeloo left, and perhaps the great white whale of RSS Earth.

Mmm. I think it's very clear I should have paid much more attention to the speed of the Laytheboat; although it wasn't too bad at 4x time acceleration. Coming through the Eastern islands. I'd found the boat veered badly to starboard at 4x physwarp - not some Coriolis effect, it does it in both hemispheres, and it veered (less badly) to port with no physwarp. I experimented with using MechJeb as a very fine trim control, a job it did quite adequately. By here, I'd hit on the idea of picking the exact position of waypoints out of the zoom map and feeding them back into the kOS script that recommends a course to steer, letting me shave the headlands more closely. It's getting dark, but there's a vast sea expanse ahead and the zoom map will stop me running into anything. I had no waypoint near this island - with limited ability to visualise great circle routes in my head, I had no idea which side of it I should aim to pass - but it turned out a route straight to the target would miss it anyway. What luck! Also, with the target in view on the HUD, I had less need of the kOS navigation assistance - but I kept it running, the distance still being useful to know. Close to the island I'd landed on; the jet was on the other side and I certainly had no wish to try and sail around the island in the dark. Instead I could stop here and bring the Hangarmoth down into a low Laythe orbit; I very much doubt the Laythejet has the dV to make the rendezvous, the Hangarmoth will have to come to it, but I may as well load the dice in my favour as much as I can. With no ladders or brake on the boat, I had no better plan than to rub it on the beach and let the kerbonauts bail out and swim ashore, with the last out turning off the engine (the radiator panels were heating up badly with no airflow, and why not leave an intact boat on Laythe if I can) and making a run for it as the boat slides back into the sea. The jet is some way away, but the first in can take the brakes off and roll it backwards a bit. And ready for takeoff! But I am done with Laythe, and need to reinstall FAR.

Laythe is, I think, the least interesting world I have done. Sea, sea, and more sea; and the few bits of land I have seen have hardly been distinctive. I didn't fit a ScanSAT BTDT to the Laytheboat because I thought it didn't work on the ocean (it used not to); otherwise, I might hardly have made screenshots at all, other than a small map with a BTDT track. Here I am enjoying the all too brief period of making nearly 50 m/s. All too brief because when I reloaded the next day, Scatterer was painting the sea with horrible triangles. I uninstalled it and plugged along at 28 m/s. Joolrise, and you can see Tylo near Kerbol. I expected things to get dark as Kerbol went behind Jool. They didn't. Apparently Jool is less opaque than one might expect. (Now I think back on it, I seem to remember something similar on Mun and Minmus; only the SOI body blocks sunlight). So here's Kerbol about to set for real. Crater Island, which I wanted to see. It is a grey rock, exactly like every other bit of land on Laythe. The waypoints for the kOS script that recommends a heading were not very precisely selected, and I'm rounding this headland as closely as I can rather than follow the recommended course. It is also a grey rock. Normally I do all my circumnavigations in real time. I kind of feel things should take as long as they take - and on land, 43 m/s is quite fast enough to be steering a rover at. However, I cracked on Laythe and am using physwarp for the second half of the journey. Another headland being trimmed, and now up to 4x physwarp; this posed a bit of difficulty in that even tapping the yaw key with fine control on produced a huge slew, but a joystick with a very small dead zone can give very fine yaw control. The end is in sight, but this has not been my favourite trip.

Interesting to read, although I don't expect to be in KSP2 any time soon. I rather liked Minmus's flat flats, as if those bits of the planet had been liquid then frozen solid.

It turned out some idiot had forgotten to build a ladder onto the Laytheboat. Ooops. It's also very hard to bring boat and jet together because the boat, having only skids, can't brake on land; it can only stop somewhere dead flat or by turning at a right angle to a slope, and it steers like a cow. After a bit of thought I hit on this: Kerbals can climb things really quite well. The jet doesn't have to stay with wheels in the drink; when the Hangarmoth is overhead I can get a control connection and get it back on the beach. Bit of a comedy of errors to get here but the Laytheboat is ready to go sailing.

This screenshot looks pretty, but it was not the right place to drop out of orbit; I ended up flying about 1/3 of the way around Laythe at the end of the glide, and using up about 1/3 of the LF in the drop tanks... but I'm pretty sure there's plenty of that to spare. And landed. I don't think you can actually land an aircraft on a sand dune by flying level into it and hoping, but that's KSP for you. (I guess if I wanted to do it less absurdly, I'd install parachutes to pop on the final approach so it would come down more or less vertically). Next will be to uninstall FAR (again) and sail the Laytheboat to the beach; then pick waypoints - the kOS script I wrote for Kerbin by sea will come in handy again.

Well, I don't have a problem but I certainly am confused. I was just trying with FAR, having ended up trying things out of order. Uninstall FAR; the boat will do about 30 m/s. Stick in Scatterer, turn the waves down a bit... 45 m/s. I don't really understand this, save that sometimes a boat seems to be a bit "stuck" to the water, can only get away with maximum thrust, sometimes it unsticks later.

Houston, we have a problem. I originally planned to sail around Laythe with Scatterer waves. However, it's hard to average more than about 15 m/s under those conditions, and that would take 60 hours. I could tolerate that for Tylo or Eve, where there's some actual scenery, but Laythe would be vast expanses of water and more water; RSS Earth (no waves) might be longer still, but the Kerbian Sea Monster is very stable; I can listen to something or even read a book, only adjusting the steering now and then. I don't want to constantly fight the steering for 60 hours with nothing to look at. However, the Laytheboat just isn't stable at the speeds it can reach with no waves; with no Mechjeb it slews uncontrollably to one side at around 20 m/s and stops, and with MechJeb KILL ROT it can get to about 100 m/s before slewing uncontrollably to one side and stopping in a number of unusable pieces. Worse yet, at any speed MechJeb is using more EC twiddling the controls than the engine alternator is producing, so I can't throttle down to 80 m/s or so. I'd have to proceed at 80 m/s for a while, crawl along at low power with the controls dead to recharge the batteries, back to 80 m/s... This calls for more design and simulation work from the KSC. We can pump ballast into the Laytheboat to affect its pitch (currently, it is well up at the bow) or simply to make it grip the water more effectively. More radically if it can limp to a beach, engineer Йеанетте can start removing parts from it, if the KSC has identified which parts to remove (eg perhaps the central hull of the trimaran isn't actually helping?)

On the third attempt things went much better; separation from the jet portion: Re-entry quite undramatic - it helps that it's mostly made of Mk2 spaceplane parts - and here I am about to splash down, not too far from land at all. I found I could not re-enter the jet immediately afterwards; it's dusk when it arrives at the island, and a rough landing when you can't really see the terrain is not a happy thing. It'll have to come down half a Laythe-day later or so, to arrive a little after sunrise.

The second time I landed smack bang in the middle of one of the bigger islands. In the dark. If I'd _tried_ to land on an island on Laythe in the dark, with no descent guidance...

To Laythe! Taking off from Vall. I'm afraid I really like these great-big-Jool screenshots, so you're going to be seeing a few of them. Here's another one, having arrived at Laythe. Once again I am cursing my blithe assumption I could balance the thrust axis with pulse units alone (and indeed I'm now doing it with other resources); you cannot balance the ship with a resource that is very full or very empty. I'm also (again) cursing the redesign of the Hangarmoth which put two big Ore tanks at the back and two big MetallicOre tanks at the front - if each resource's pair was diagonally opposite each other on the thrust axis, they'd be far more useful for balancing. It takes over a month to use a full load of MetallicOre, a few days to use a full load of Ore, so I'm constantly wanting to take off and manuever with mass all-forward. However, having realised I could DockRotate so one of the Fertilizer tanks was aft, one forward, I could sort out a lot of this; and also that I could stop converting Ore and fill up the Metal tank on the Orion spinal truss that's towards the rear. But did that help? I was consuming more pulse units by having a heavier vessel full of Ore in order not to have to jettison MetallicOre which would make a tiny number of pulse units. The Laytheboat-jet combo was in an awkward orbit and I had the Hangarmoth fly to it "to save dV". Why? The combo had to get into a low Laythe orbit anyway, and at that point if it was short on fuel (if the NERVAs have burned some of the LF for the jet) it could be topped up from the Hangarmoth. I wasn't thinking straight. Here's a decent view of the top half of the jet-boat monstrosity. There was, it turned out, enough dV anyway - albeit very little to spare; here's the combo getting down into that low orbit. The next stage in the operation is to dip periapsis to 40km or so, pump all the LF out of the Laytheboat (until now, the fuel balancer has been allowed to put it in there), decouple the Laytheboat, push periapsis on the jet-and-NERVAs left over out of atmosphere, switch back to the Laytheboat, re-enter it, it identifies a nearby island; the jet dips periapsis to 40km, grabs all remaining LF, O, and monoprop, dumps the NERVAs and their tanks, re-enters, and flies over to land on a beach. Uninstall FAR (does weird things to boats), sail boat to beach; the boat is amphibious enough on KF skids to be able to get onto the beach. What happened is that I landed the Laytheboat smack bang in the middle of the DeGrasse Sea, about as far from any island as it is possible to be on Laythe. I could not have done it with that degree of precision if I'd tried. At that point I said something rude and stopped for the day.

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/146923-elcano-iv-circumnavigate-all-the-things/&do=findComment&comment=4270542 I'm around Vall. Just Laythe and Eeloo left.