damerell

I guess it's no coincidence that Nara's 40 atmospheres of pressure is the crush depth of most parts. (Kerbal engineering really is excellent, given they are designed for use in space). Does anyone know if significant portions of Nara are _below_ nominal sea level? I met some small below-sea-level areas on Elcano missions.

That was in June.

At what point do we conclude that @18Watthas been claimed by the curse of the Elcano Challenge, and have a new thread?

I really think you'd be better off with a Scansat BTDT. Paints a neat trail on the map; no stopping, no overheating.

How did you install it?

@18Watt seems to be away; I am not the ruleskerbal, but my answer would be to track progress by screenshots or something like the SCANsat BTDT, not by flags - but also that it's fine to use the cheat for the sole purpose of flag planting.

No, I'd not seen that until now. The Behemoth III (and the single-engined predecessor) evolved fairly naturally - big roughly aircraft-shaped aircraft, some way to get the cargo out (the predecessor had a LLL cargo bay with a droppable floor, which I used on the craft eventually used for my Elcano missions), where can the engine or engines live? I haven't realised yet that multiple-Orion designs are not really practical - kerbal engineering is perfect, but IRL you have to be prepared for a failed detonation - with one engine you restart it, but with two you are now spinning horribly.

I hope you have a plan to get onto the polar icecaps; that's been an issue for many circumnavigators.

Sunset, but there is nothing to collide with between me and home. Back in the east half of the map, crossing the dateline. I got a little confused here, forgetting both that my waypoint might not be absolutely spot on and that Omelek Island doesn't appear on the biome or altimetry maps (and barely on the visual map), but I spotted the VAB in the distance and headed for that. And, finally, home again.

I am home on RSS Earth. Details to follow, but what a journey it was. https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/146923-elcano-iv-circumnavigate-all-the-things/?do=findComment&comment=4286574 - RSS Earth starts here.

Halfway home from the Panama crossing. The Pacific hasn't changed much; Hawaii has turned up on the zoom map, mostly because it is zoomed out a very long way, and what I think must be the Line Islands to the South.

I'm still amazed at how little trouble I had on the route of the Panama Canal. Admittedly, I did get pinged up a few times, and I guess without the anti-roll modifications I might well have flipped the boat. 9,000 km was, alas, an underestimate - waypoints not set up properly. The distance is well over 10,000km. Dunno how many screenshots I can get out of this, but I'm 2,000 km past that point; 8,000 left.

I'd landed some way inland, so I set off in the boat to meet the resupply mission. Was it too far? Roving in the cockpit on a very flat surface, but still, I was not very alert for this to be the point where I realised the aircraft was there. Docked, and transferring fuel. I can honestly say this bit of the mission worked like a dream. After my difficulties at Suez I was worried about the terrain ahead - and the Panama Canal was made through much rougher terrain than Suez - but I plugged on and to my complete surprise landed in the Pacific. I ... just ... have a 9000km sea leg to go.

The resupply aircraft in flight. It's a funny shape; the Mk2 tail has an extensible docking port mounted on the base which can be lowered onto the boat by adjustment of the undercarriage spring strengths. There's a Wheesley on each wingtip - the thrust reversers make it very easy to maneuver on the ground - and a Mk2 Expansion "Mule" at the back which provides about as much thrust again. (If it had to go a very long way, it will do about 0.85Ma with the Wheesleys alone, and since they have considerably higher fuel efficiency than the Mule, the Mule could be throttled down in cruise flight). It's not a lot faster than the boat, so a 2,000 km flight from Cape Canaveral took a couple of hours. I suspected the lakes on the route of the Panama Canal might not exist, given KSP1 can't have water above sea level; I hoped that might make them dead flat patches of blue-ish ground. My hopes were rewarded; I had a relatively easy landing here. Now I just have to not flip the boat on the way. (Boring and optimally, it would have been easier to just set off, probably flip the boat somewhere in the Panama Canal, and fly out a new one with a full fuel load - but I wanted to demonstrate I could do the mid-trip resupply operation. Likewise, this is why the resupply aircraft has enough fuel to fill the boat up from empty.)

Passing Puerto Rico. I've throttled down here for a maneuver. The arc traced on the map from Gibraltar is rather pleasing. The Sun is setting as we cruise down the coast of Colombia. Near-disaster - I had not accounted for this headland in the North of Panama, and I trusted my waypoints enough not to slow down for the hill on the left, only getting alarmed as land reared up dead ahead. At that, I thought for a few seconds it must be beyond Limon Bay, but then I thought again about the scale and slapped the thrust reverser and full throttle. This quickly got the boat down to a speed where it could steer clear of the headland. The visual map is fuzzy, the biome map not much help ("Shores" covers both shallows and beach), and it's dark. I decided to stop here and wait for enough light to pick my way into Limon bay.

In the open ocean, the biome map is more useful - I don't want to go anywhere near the pink of Shores. Very roughly halfway across the Atlantic, I plotted more waypoints; I aim to pass east of Puerto Rico. For this kind of thing I plot a great circle route between (say) Gibraltar and the Panama Canal, then look at where that hits the land to find where I need intermediate waypoints. This keeps the course corrections minimal - there would be no way I could guess where I'd hit the Caribbean islands without doing that plot. Here I stopped for the night IRL. There's a fair way to go beyond Puerto Rico, so the 1,913 km displayed is misleading, but very roughly I estimate I'll reach the Canal before in-game night. I won't be short of fuel, but it's an ideal time to fly out a tanker of some kind - not least because writing off boats shouldn't really let me dodge the need to refuel altogether.

Cyprus: Sicily: Passing the north coast of Africa quite close, but I trusted my own waypoints. It turned out the Straits of Gibraltar are quite small. Who knew? But I was through, the waypoints still being good. After this I laid in a course for Panama - 7,000 km away, my longest sea leg yet - but when I get closer I'll lay a course through the Caribbean islands.

I know the feeling; I had scanner satellite missions en route to everywhere before I started putting kerbals into space. ETA: I mean, for the Elcano, not in general.

I didn't do a redesign, thinking rather perhaps it was a one-off but also that laying down a lot of waypoints (and tweaking the kOS script a bit) to enable me to follow the route of the canal more closely might help find the flattest terrain. Flying out, I got a good view of the lakes in the Suez Canal - working out exactly where the shores were from ScanSAT imagery was not ideal, but I was able to do well enough to avoid either barreling off a cliff into the water or slamming into the shore. This parachute-based rover dropping is surprisingly precise. Meldun and Lopont Kerman, who are going to have a busy day, land within easy sight of the failed rover. And here they have made their second delivery of the day. I plugged on from here, discovering that the lakeshores have surprisingly steep and awkward terrain... and knocking off a tail wing. This didn't really interfere with my ability to rove or to sail around lakes at moderate speed, so I just put up with it, because there seemed to be a possibility that I'd flip this rover, too. Which I did. At least unlike the completely disintegrated one near Sri Lanka the hull here is not a complete writeoff, but as mentioned it's a busy day for the recovery kerbals - and I'm going through engines at a fair old rate. When I started out I naively worried about refuelling, but it turns out I've yet to manage to run a tank dry without first destroying the vessel. At this point I did make a design change. A good view of the Nile delta from another replacement shipment. Their second delivery of the day completed; this version of the vessel has an anti-roll arm. It remains to be seen how badly that'll affect sea performance, but I don't really expect it to be a very serious issue. IVA view while roving - I would say it doesn't help that the view of the ground ahead is so poor, but the bits of terrain that ping me up are Krakenish abnormalities, not visible lumps. And finally into the Mediterranean. This was a struggle - I think if I had known when I started both how good the sea fuel consumption was and how troublesome the canals were going to be, I would have gone around the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. Now I'm here, however, I'll make for the Panama Canal - it's shorter, more of it is lakes, and I have a better idea of the problems that might arise.

I decided to wait for dawn, but proceed on the assumption that the route of the Suez Canal would be basically flat on RSS Earth, and as such I could plug along it at 40 m/s (at which speed it should take 1-2 hours) guided by the altimetry map without taking more special precautions. This did not entirely prove correct. The ground is full of little imperfections to ping you up into the air. I must design what I am now going to call the Mk III FARboat (incorporating some of the anti-roll lessons learned earlier) and fly one to this site.

Edited; the last screenshot was the Red Sea. This is me picking my way through the Gulf of Suez, slowing down and zooming in the map as the end gets nearer. Very close now. I planned to come to a complete halt just off the shore, but I saw the loom of the land nearby and was going slow enough (about 20 m/s) to lower my gear, run up the slope, and brake out of the drink. The nearest space centre is Palmachim... but on reflection, I should cross the Suez Canal relatively light on fuel.

I didn't really have a clear idea of how safe it is to manuever at speed, or how big the boat's turning circle is, so here I am slowing right down with the aid of the thrust reverser having panicked rather at the apparent sight of land on the horizon. (I also have no idea what the range of vision from the IVA camera is, but it can't be enormous, it's not mounted particularly high above sea level). Threading my way up the Red Sea. Even at 220 m/s the boat is much less alarming to maneuver - and in view of the above, I wanted to find out how fast I could go in relatively close quarters before I have to sail through the Med.

I decided to keep speed down to 250 m/s, at which point I hope there will be no more alarming incidents. I crossed the Arabian Gulf, and stopped for the IRL night North of Socotra. I don't know how close to the Suez Canal I care to get during in-game night, but I certainly don't want to cross it; when I shut down there will be an opportunity to design and fly a refuelling aircraft. The new boat also has a JSI camera, so I can look at the dark from an IVA view if I like.

Ridiculous speed, really, but I'll take what I can get. I am, yeah, going westbound - the speed of dawn is faster on Earth than the boat can travel, and for long sea legs I don't really care if it's day or night, but I might as well have the extra time in the sailing day. I checked a while back, and there are no canals at Panama and Suez; this, I think, is because the topographical data used for RSS Earth isn't at a fine enough resolution to capture them. However, there are some extremely smooth flat stretches of land and I think it'll be a reasonable drive. I don't know if you count this as a sea circumnavigation because there are canals there IRL. Only if I do complete it. This rescue mission has been pretty frustrating - I thought I'd got a fresh boat delivered above, but no - it turns out popping the Hangar wrecks the boat, either by collision with the Hangar debris or by the Kraken pulling it apart. Either I got very lucky in testing, or doing it in shallow water is less dangerous somehow (not impossible - the Hangar sinks rapidly when popped and then everything bobs up). I had to go back to the old idea of bolting a wing to the top of the boat. One important improvement was ditching the wing before trying to splash down - its parachutes (seen just ahead of the wing control surfaces) deploy first and between that and leaving the engines running at about 5% throttle, when I decouple it from the boat, it soars away rather than slamming into the boat. It even splashes down undestroyed. The second was using an inline ballute for a bit more drag and, more importantly, making the main chute a RealChute, which does not autocut on ground contact. This means the stern of the boat hits the sea quite slowly and the engine is not destroyed. Falling into the sea - parachute not yet fully deployed. In the distance you can see the wing doing the same thing. Annoyingly, I forgot to switch on the BTDT at takeoff, so (when that bit of the map isn't covered in plane icon) there won't be a trail on it for the rescue mission. Much more annoyingly, on splashdown I found the boat stuck to the sea - even at full throttle it would only do about 1.3 m/s. This is an occasional FAR-hates-boats problem; I uninstalled FAR and reloaded the save. The rescue crew jump out for a nice dip, probably to sit in the cabin of the wrecked boat while they await recovery from the tracking station. The boat can move fine once again, but of course will only do about 55 m/s. This boat isn't quite identical to the first one; they both have a docking port aft of the Goliath (originally intended for refuelling if I manage to empty the tanks on a boat before destroying it, but used to attach the parachutes) but this one has a second one further forward used to attach the wing. Other than that it's the same design. Reinstall FAR, reload, fingers crossed... the sea is no longer sticky, and the voyage can continue!

I could just have sailed another boat from the nearest space centre, but there's quite a lot of land in the way so I decided to fly it over. I tried bolting a huge wing and a couple of jet engines to the top of the boat, but while this flew OK it proved impossible to splashdown without knocking off the boat's Goliath. Hangar to the rescue; ship the boat in a giant Hangar with wings, engines, parachutes, and landing gear bolted to it, producing the Bullet Bill of aeroplanes. Splashdown. An easy trip, but I'd have saved IRL time by not messing about with aircraft at all, just sailing a boat over.