damerell

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.

Another mountain looms. I'll pass to the right of it. Going past it. This vast (horizontally, not vertically, although it's pretty big vertically too) range appeared. I went southwest down the edge of it for a while but then checked the ScanSAT maps; it would be a huge detour, so I resolved to cross it. Here I am crossing the mountains. After that, that mottled patch in the centre of the map at bottom left is very easy terrain. Not much to write about that, but these moons appeared - it's Laythe close by, and Tylo a long way off, coincidentally in apparent proximity. The end is in sight! Home on Vall.

Heading up to another pass. Another mountain being roved around, not into. This one I will not rove around so well. I regret I didn't capture what happened next, but I found myself heading down the mountain too fast to brake and also on too much of a slant to steer upslope. I could easily have come a serious cropper but by luck and the aid of MechJeb Stability control, I ended up down on my wheels. More hills ahead. Here I am up close to them. Is this a long way off, or absolutely huge? It is huge! And here I am passing it to one side. Vall remains a pleasure to rove on. There are these vast mountains, but they're all visible from a distance; and you can rove slightly faster than the dawn, so you can always rove in daylight.

Inevitably, the mention of the Dukes of Hazzard led to this incident. One nice thing about playing with headphones on is if one set of wheels lifts - or both - it's immediately obvious. Mountains in the distance again. One thing I'm really liking about Vall is how the rough terrain seems so often visible from a great distance. I plan to rove straight up this ridge. Again, a very clear view of the pass through the mountains. Crossing the date line. Finally, I plan to steer for this cleft in the distance.

I found out the maximum physics time per frame setting was set to its minimum. I don't know how that happened, but increasing it cured the yellow clock entirely. What a relief! After some time on Vall I saw this. As always, I wondered if it was close, or far off and absolutely huge? But I knew from other reports that there is a mountain at 90W, so I expected it was huge. Yep, it's huge. And why does the landscape have stretch marks? Looking at the peak out the side of the cab, I am really glad I did not feel the need to attempt it. Here I hit a chunk of very bland landscape - so little local detail I had almost no sensation of motion, which is awkward in terms of assessing if one is going too fast. And here, I confess, after going 1/6 of the way around Vall wondering why performance uphill was so bad, I remembered this rover might have been left in a lower gear. Now, however, with the ability to go full speed uphill, Vall's low gravity, and running at 100% of real time, it all feels a bit like the Dukes of Hazzard, only with a less unfortunate paint job.

In orbit around Vall, waiting to drift far enough from the QA to use the Orion engines. With tanks so very nearly full, the "mast" can be left with the QA - all the empty LFO/monoprop space that might be filled by ISRU fits into the Hangarmoth alone. Not much else to say about this, but it's a nice shot of Jool and Laythe. Our kerbals waited nearly five Kerbal years at Tylo for resupply, but they knew this was a long mission; more important is that twelve kerbals arrived at Tylo and twelve left it alive. Drilling away on Vall. The time to full tanks looks very encouraging, but that is mostly because what's been landed has less capacity and most of that started full. I went only a short distance on Vall, but was presented with Joolrise - spectacular, since I came over a ridge and there it was. Vall seems nice and flat so far, although I'm about to review other circumnavigators' accounts. More worrying is that my computer seems slower even though it is the exact same computer; where previously I was getting a near-steady green clock while roving I'm now running about 80% real-time, and performance with more parts is similarly reduced (making running the QA-Hangarmoth-Resupply combo _agonising_). If I can't find an easy fix I guess I'll reinstall Better Time Warp to let me use tiny increments of physwarp when roving, and just suck it up when in space.

I unwisely decided to send the resupply mission to Tylo with chemical rocketry. This was tricky since the payload is the best part of a kilotonne. As such, I ended up launching the most ridiculous object I have ever put on the launchpad; 5m payload with 7.5m and 10m stages, and a bottom stage of 32 Space-Y "Freya" boosters - by comparison, the Hangarmoth was got off the ground by six of those. I've been away for a while because this resupply mission was the most amazing mix of errors on my part and KSP bugs. I reached a stage where every time my planned vector went over Laythe the game would crash; since this came at the end of half-hour burns, I got very frustrated. I had weird bugs that just make the dV for a planned maneuver walk upwards for no reason. But I made it to the point where I was aerobraking at Laythe: Approaching docking. I'm not as short of dV as this looks, because the forward 5m tank is just resource locked. And docked up. I'll dock one monoprop can on each side of the Hangarmoth, to let me use monoprop to balance my mass fore-aft.

Well, the poles are cursed. Be careful.

For a bit of a change of pace, I'm at least thinking about RSS Earth (by sea, I'm not completely mad). It seems at least fairly feasible to cross the routes of the Suez and Panama canals by land; the terrain is flat apart from the occasional inexplicable pinging-up into the air, but in a brief test those haven't been destructive, just alarming - and I'm definitely willing to use quicksaves to work around random invisible lumps in the ground when on real-Earth I'd be _in a canal_. The Earth's circumference is more or less 40 thousand km. The Kerbian Sea Monster will do 100 m/s full, 130 m/s half-empty, and 200 m/s dry. This suggests maybe its overall average speed is 140 m/s or so; the ten Goliaths guzzle a total of 5.8 LF/sec, the four big tanks and assorted smaller ones hold 76,200 LF (16000 per big tank), allowing us to go 1,840 km on a full tank. This is a bit odd since this would not have got me around Kerbin, and the real KSM topped out at 206 m/s, but it will do for a thumb-in-air estimate. This would mean a bit over 20 refuellings. Each tank would burn for a bit under 4 hours, making for an 80-hour journey - assuming, for the sake of argument, that refuelling took no time at all. Endurance obviously could be increased by adding more tanks or removing some engines, at the cost of making the trip still longer. I tried both ideas. Nine big tanks gives 156,200 LF; almost exactly 7 1/2 hours to burn a tank. This will do circa 80 m/s full, 110 m/s half-full, and 155 m/s dry. 115 m/s average, 3,000 km on a full tank, or circa 13 refuellings in a 100-hour trip. Four engines gives 60 m/s full, 90 m/s half-full, and 145 m/s dry. 98 m/s average, 9 hours a tank, 3,200 km a tank, again circa 13 refuellings but now we are looking at 112 hours. With some hydrodynamic adjustments and 16 big tanks - and the addition of one slightly cheeky nuclear thermal jet - I get 72 m/s full, 96 m/s half-full, and 165 m/s dry. 111 m/s average, so still a 100-hour trip, but at over 12 hours a tank there would be "only" around 8 refuellings - and on the NTJ alone I can limp along at maybe 30 m/s, I can't be stranded. The roughly 5,000km range this represents would let me cross the Atlantic from Saint Vincent to Cape Verde, and let me stop at suitable islands in the Pacific - assuming I find I have to land to refuel. If at all possible, I'll come up with a way to refuel at sea.

Tragedy averted! It looked bad for the four kerbonauts on Tylo, but two ideas came to mind. First of all, the "auxiliary" LFO engines are normally only used to smooth out landings and for fine manuever control, but there's no law against using them for a takeoff, and with full tanks they represent about 700 m/s dV, enough to make up the shortfall. Secondly, the rovers in the hangar can be raided for Supplies - extending the time we can stay on the surface doing ISRU (this doesn't help much because when both engineers' habitation timers are exhausted, the rate of drilling drops dramatically, but it's better than nothing) - and for their LFO, which gets us close to those full tanks; and since there's another rover waiting for us at Eeloo, one of them is another 50-odd tonnes to ditch. It doesn't matter that the hab timers are exhausted; the remote guidance unit and 8 kerbals on the QA let us control the Hangarmoth remotely without the 200 second lightspeed delay from Kerbin. I'm not sure I understand USILS hab timers. Everyone's were exhausted on the surface - I'm sure of this because of the ISRU effects - and yet when we get into orbit one of the engineers (the one who remained on the Hangarmoth) is happy again? Docking up with the QA. Not a lot of LFO dV left, and I'm down to my last 150-odd pulse units, but it was enough to get me home. What a relief! It would have been maddening to lose these kerbals, since there are about 200 more pulse units on the QA - the blithe assumption that I don't need to drag down all that mass just wasn't safe with a world as big as Tylo. It might just about be possible to do Vall and Eeloo with what's left, but I'm not even considering chancing it. Now everyone's back safely on the QA, the thing to do is send a resupply mission - circa 24k LFO and 22k monoprop would fill my tanks, and 800-odd pulse units will be ample. (People who use USILS may be saying, hang on, USILS doesn't kill kerbals; but I regard a kerbal who runs out of Supplies (including the 15-day grace timer) as dead.) Thanks, although much of the time I feel I'm just flailing at the keyboard to pass the time. There's a limit to how much one can write about, say, roving up one grey hill and down another. I almost found myself missing slugging over horrible cliffs on Moho in the dark.

Tragedy, however; there are not the atomic pulse units to lift the Hangarmoth off Tylo. Even if I wait until the kerbals are almost out of supplies, and dump all excess weight, there is no way they can return to the QA. The Elcano program has four more dead. Supplies on the QA will keep the 8 survivors alive. A followup mission must be planned.

I've been through this Mara biome. What, I ask myself, is Mara, other than inconveniently dark? I stopped for a couple of hours - why rove in insufficient light when I'm days from takeoff? Some less-flat terrain to liven up the roving. The end is in sight! And home at last. What a slug Tylo was.

I am around Tylo; the last of the screenshots to follow. ETA: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/146923-elcano-iv-circumnavigate-all-the-things/&do=findComment&comment=4239493 is the start of Tylo, and it now goes through to the end.

I'm plugging on; this is just where I shut down for the night (IRL). I think I have now had Enough of Tylo. The Hangarmoth is landed about 2 degrees south of the Equator, but I intend to touch the Equator again before making a beeline for it. I'm outroving Kerbol, but I don't yet think I'm outroving it enough to be in dark before I get home.

I'm very glad I only had to refuel the Kerbian Sea Monster once in my sea circumnavigation. RSS Earth is still lingering in the back of my mind...

Some jagged hills coming up. Indeed, in them I had a spin - which I regret I did not capture on a screenshot - and knocked off more of the rollcage. Mountains ahead. But mostly from there easy roving, albeit with one or two steep climbs, to cross the 180 degree mark. The Hangarmoth is at 116 degrees East, so I am past 3/4 distance, but what a slog it has been.

I'm up to the Mk VIII (en route to Eeloo), I know what I'd change on a potential Mk IX (if only there were some planets left), and at that, that is rolling the iterations of the Minmus and Mun rovers into one Mark each. I know the feeling.

Spotting what proved to be the rim of Gagarin a long way off. Out of Gagarin, in the relatively small gap between craters. Not so dramatic a climb out as Grissom. Into Tycho. Could this be the far rim? It's lighter coloured, but there's no sense of distance under these conditions. I think it was, but I'm honestly not sure. Out of Tycho. Now to head North back to the equator. Past halfway round, and no more craters, just a steady slog back to the Hangarmoth.