damerell

I mean the way the wheels overlap.

The clipped wheels and drag shenanigans are pleasantly cheesy. I think you will find it very hard to use the same rover on every world. If I were suddenly made aware of a bunch of worlds I missed, I'd be much more keen to design a rover based on what I knew about gravity and terrain there and what I now know about roving under various conditions. Even though I used much the same design for everything beyond Minmus, it evolved over time but also the Eve variant was intentionally different in view of the conditions on Eve. Good luck.

While I'm reasonably sure I was over that on Eve (at 40 m/s it would take over 30 hours, and I was not running at top speed any time I was going uphill), I think at that point I would consider a bit more time in the VAB might pay off. I've a rules question, or rather, a request for an exemption. RSS Earth is really big. If I could sail directly around the Equator at the 155 m/s of the water speed record IRL, it would take over 70 hours. In view of that, I'd like to ask if it is permissible to use an autopilot that can only hold a steady course ("steer 275 degrees, limit speed to 150 m/s"), with no ability for the autopilot to adjust that figure or stop the boat - any change to planned heading, maximum speed, or maximum throttle setting would have to be done by human intervention. I'd write the autopilot myself in kOS, no use of MechJeb (not even the stabilisation at sea used on Laythe). It's fine if the answer is "no".

You also want to look at "maxSpeed = 23.5", which determines the speed above which the wheels will fail. To increase these other values without increasing that won't get you very far.

Last but not least, a list of the mods I used which made a significant difference in the trip, and/or which I used heavily.: ABookCase Orbital Reference System. Mouse over your orbit for contextual details. I've been using it so long I forget stock doesn't do it. Action Group Manager Renewed. Manage action groups in flight. Great for this kind of mission where you might dock something, undock something else, find some entirely new mode of operation you didn't even dream of when setting out... Alternate Resource Panel. The mode that displays time to full/empty is very useful for projecting ISRU outputs, and unlike the stock panel you can mouse over it without every part on the ship with ElectricCharge getting highlighted at once. Astrogator. MechJeb's transfer window planning is sometimes a bit erratic; it was useful to have something else. Atmosphere Autopilot. I flew halfway around both Kerbin and Laythe - and with this, given the aircraft design was sensible, I could plot the course and leave it to it. B9 Procedural Wings. Generally, I'm a fan of building ships out of blocks that maybe aren't quite the right size - I don't use procedural tanks, say, or TweakScale in arbitary increments - but particularly in a FAR world it's pretty hard to get satisfactory wings; the stock modular wing parts are very fiddly to get a useful wing out of. My own Campaign for Real Electric Charge. A make-your-life-difficult mod; rovers had to carry nuclear power (or perhaps huge LFO tanks and fuel cells), there is no chucking a 55 tonne EV around by sticking three solar panels on the roof. Connected Living Space. Another make-your-life-difficult mod, important on this trip where the QA and Hangarmoth's crew spaces were nowhere near each other. Dated QuickSaves. I was quite willing to quicksave and load outside of the actual roving, and this makes it enormously easier to work out which quicksave you want. Dock Rotate. There are other options - Infernal Robotics and the new stock Breaking Ground parts - with a wider range of functions, but Dock Rotate did everything I wanted here for vessels that change shape - the Hangarmoth swapping to belly-sitter mode, the anti-roll arm on the rovers, the self-righting mechanism on the Mk VIII - but it's also just very useful for its original purpose, to line up everything nice and square after docking. Dock a drill module, point the drills at the ground? Easy. Get the Fertiliser tanks precisely fore and aft to aid with balancing mass? Also easy. And if I'd thought of it, rotatable auxiliary engines would have been a huge boon. Docking Cam. Camera view out the docking port itself, and some stats on relative positions and speeds. A tremendous aid and one that makes a lot of sense. Docking Port Alignment Indicator. Valuable once you know how it works, but if I had to give up one of these and Docking Cam, it would be this. EasyBoard. Press 'B' to want to board, 'F' to want to grab a ladder. The kerbal does it when in range. Sounds trivial, but it makes life so much nicer. Editor Extensions Redux. Vastly better control of part symmetry and positioning. Indeed, now I look at it, it does a bunch more stuff I've been doing by hand with Precise Editor. FAR. Important for more plausible flight physics, especially for the Eve ascent. Fuel Tanks Plus and other mods by NecroBones (Lithobrake, Modular Rocket Systems, Space-Y, Space-Y Extended). A generous corpus of extra rocket parts, many of which are useful for building excessively huge rockets. Hangar. Hides craft from the game (turns them into lumps of mass in the part they docked in), then pops them out on demand. I could maybe have got one rover into the bay on the Hangarmoth, docked it up, and suffered the results of adding that part count to the Hangarmoth/QA package. Two? Never (although there is space). Hangar made this mission vastly easier, but not in an unrealistic way, just by offering a lot more effective part count - and, at that, even though my use of it could have been much better arranged. Hangar Extender. Nothing to do with Hangar, it lets you go outside the VAB/SPH to assemble huge craft. I may have employed one or two huge craft on this trip. Hooligan Labs Airships provided the inflatable envelope to get off Eve. Inline Ballutes are the big doughnut-shaped balloon/parachute things that got me down on Eve and Laythe. Kerbal Alarm Clock. Warns you of upcoming maneuvers and SOI changes for unfocused craft. Vital in the early stages with ScanSAT probes en route to the entire Kerbol system. Kerbal Attachment System / Kerbal Inventory System. I gather stock has an inventory system now, but I'm used to this. Mainly used for sucking the fuel out of rover delivery probes that some idiot didn't put a docking port on... and yes, there is a better answer to that, but the ability to carry spare radiators in case some were damaged then decide just to fit them anyway was valuable, too. Kerbal Engineer Redux. There are other mods to plaster the screen with information about vessel and flight, but this one is the one I used. Kerbal Foundries / KSPWheel. Without this wheel physics mod and the accompanying parts I think this journey would have been vastly more frustrating. KerboKatz PhysicalTimeRatioViewer. Sure, the clock is yellow, your computer can't keep up - but by how much? This tells you. Useful early with a slower computer and a mod for fine control of physwarp to adjust physwarp to play in more-or-less real time, and also useful later when the physics time per frame setting was wrong; it told me immediately something was up, and by how much. kOS. A programming language inside KSP. Landed the Hangarmoth, balanced the fuel, ran the fuel cells on the rover, controlled overspeed by turning the brakes on, stopped me flipping downhill by turning the brakes off if the rear wheels weren't on the ground, tapered off pulse size during maneuvers. ManeuverNodeSplitter. I wish I'd known about this ages ago. Where you've got a maneuver (like one of those week-long LV-N transfer burns) that's long enough to give a significant cosine loss in dV, you can split off some smaller chunks and do one of those each time round your orbit when correctly aligned. MechJeb. Besides the obvious maneuver planning and execution functions, its Rover Stability Control does its very best to keep your wheels facing the ground. (However, https://github.com/MuMech/MechJeb2/issues/1572 was an unfortunate interaction I had to patch out myself). Mk2 Stockalike Expansion. I really like these Mk2 parts - most unusually, an early prototype of the Eve lander was a plane with a rocket piggyback, as for Laythe, but the higher fuel needs gave it three Mk2 hulls side by side, done with this mod's T and X pieces. Mk IV Spaceplane System. Bits of it got used in the Hangarmoth, but the main thing is that the Kerbian Sea Monster is a Mk IV hull upside down. NavHud. Puts the navball's lines and markers on the main display, so they're not so teeny-tiny. Near Future Construction. A wide selection of mostly-structural parts. A huge chunk of the Hangarmoth, and bits of the rovers, are made from its Octo-Girder struts. Part Commander Continued. Use part right-click menus without finding the part and right-clicking it. Pretty handy when a bunch of converters and whatnot are buried deep inside some monster vessel. Precise Editor. Set parts' position and angle with great precision while editing. I used it for all sort of fine adjustments, but most obviously it was necessary to make the engines rotating around on the Hangarmoth come into the correct position relative to their new docking ports. QuickExit, for those times when KSP's jankiness or my own bad decisions demanded an immediate halt to proceedings. Just quits the game without going through half a dozen menus. RasterPropMonitor (along with the DE IVA Extension and various IVA prop sets). Makes the in-cockpit MFDs functional, which if you want to do all your roving with a kerbal's-eye view, is very useful. Recoupler. Connects together stack-attach parts that meet, so you can make circular stations. Connects up the Hangarmoth's living space and the rovers' rollcages. RemoteTech. Light-speed delay communications with remote probes, which need appropriate antennae. Another make-life-hard mod; one I quite enjoyed given that you can control probes from a ship with sufficient crew, which gave another reason to bring 12 kerbals not the boring-but-optimal two (one to drive the rover, one to run the ISRU). SCANsat. Altimetry and biome maps were nice, and I've not even tried the stock scanning facility, but for this trip a big benefit was the Been There Done That part - once I had it working, you don't need a stack of flags to see where I've been, the path is just there on the map. A great pity I didn't have it working for Eve, which was by far the most complex route. Ship Manifest, mostly because it gives a handy way to move crew around which respects Connected Living Space restrictions. Station Keeping. Expend a bit of RCS in the Tracking Station to make a very fine adjustment to an orbit. I can't think of any other way to have communications satellite clusters that stay correctly spaced. Stockalike Station Parts Expansion Redux. Provided the centrifuge habitats on the QA and a certain amount of other crew movement space. Given the USI Life Support requirements, the alternative would have been a huge bus of USI Tundra modules, much less interesting to look at. Stockish Project Orion. Otherwise I'd have to get around the system burning LFO like some sort of caveman. Structural Tubing Restructured. The rollcages on the rovers. TAC Fuel Balancer. Not so much for balancing per se, but a handy interface for pumping the stuff around after docking or before undocking, or just for monitoring one specific resource. Targetron Adopted. I find it very hard sometimes to target stuff from the map. This lets me just pick out the ship I want. Tracking Lights. The smaller spotlight in this was the big headlights on the rovers, far more effective than the ones they came with, and with exact control of facing. (Indeed, they can be configured to ludicrous levels, but I just wanted something more like a high-power headlight for roving off-road in the dark than leaning out the window with a flashlight). TweakableEverything. Adds a few useful part tweaks... indeed, I'm kind of wondering if this configured the brightness/range on the Tracking Lights? The USI mod constellation, mostly for the Life Support mod which provides a more complex system than "if one kerbal-day needs x grams of supplies, 12000000 kerbal-days needs 12000000x grams of supplies", but its Tundra parts provided the metal and uranium manufacturing for pulse unit manufacture.

I think it's because applying a force at the base of the rover creates a torque about the centre of mass, just as IRL dragsters sometimes pitch up before things go horribly wrong.

Oh. Yes, on reflection I see why it can't be eligible. Pity, though. This one's going to be a bit overindulgent with screenshots, starting with the maneuver that brought us home (a bit out of order since the last screenshot above is after execution). Circularised above Kerbin. No problem there - pulse units were getting short, but there's nothing to conserve LFO dV for and no fancy docking manuevers for the Hangarmoth to carry out. I've never built an SSTO before, and thought I'd have a go at it, partly so my kerbals could land on the runway not in the drink. I don't think I'm very good at it - this one isn't carrying more payload than a passenger cabin, and gets to LKO with a mere 750m/s dV left. However, that was enough to rendezvous and dock up. Then I could refill its tanks with LF (a fortunate decision, it turned out) and do a dozen fiddly EVA transfers. Farewell to the QA - centrifuges spun down, lights off, reactors shut down, everything else turned off. The Hangarmoth might have been able to leave the QA as a space station and deorbit, but I wasn't going to try it. A pretty eclipse on the way down. A bit of fiery death, but this was as dramatic as the reentry got. What was less welcome was that, with astonishing precision, I managed to arrange that the point where I got into ordinary flight was about as far from the KSC as possible. (At least I had thought to remember to make sure it was dawn at the KSC before starting). Good job I refilled LF from the Hangarmoth; I flew around Kerbin. I'd like to tell you I landed easily on the first attempt, rather than bouncing and going around. Other lies are available. And for the first time in a very long time, Svetlana breathes the air of home... and wonders who didn't put a ladder on this thing, anyway? That's basically it for this one, modulo RSS Earth, but I plan to make at least one more post to review the mods I used for the help of other circumnavigators.

I'm sorry if this is Captain Obvious, but this sounds like you are using the default controls where W is both accelerate and pitch-down.

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.