MythicalHeFF

We are SO back

I like this! The New Horizons pack has always been one of my favorites, even if it’s a little dated compared to a lot of other planet packs out today. I also agree with the use of a rotor-powered craft… leaving Titanus on rocket propulsion alone sounds next to impossible. If I recall correctly, there is oxygen in its atmosphere, which allows for the use of jet engines. I remember trying to make some sort of stratolaunch contraption years ago with it, but never managed to successfully get it to the surface without burning up. Best of luck!

For a small asteroid (class A) that actually sounds kind of fun.

6989

I visited Gilly in the modified Eve system I posted about a while back.. quite picturesque, even without Scatterer this time! Speaking of this Eve, I FINALLY managed to return from it after previously, despite my best efforts, failing and having my entire motivation to play the game killed for over a month and a half. For a quick refresher, I modified Eve using Kopernicus to have rings (obviously), as well as to be MUCH more difficult... we're talking twice the radius (1400 km), gravity (3.4 G), and atmospheric pressure (10 atm), and a temperature of 687 K (which means that regular parachutes just get destroyed near the surface). So yeah, I'm pretty elated at the moment, as this literally took both several dozen hours and attempts to complete, with me having to almost entirely redo the mission from the start after it became apparent that my first lander simply wasn't good enough. Original lander... The SEL-1 "Steamer", the lander used to escape from this Eve. Notice the fairings on the boosters; this vehicle makes extensive use of the fairing-engine plate drag exploit to reduce its required delta-V substantially, but, even then, I still needed around 9,000 m/s to reach orbit from an altitude of 17 km. Now that this absurd challenge has finally been overcome, I feel my motivation to play the game coming back.. as well as my motivation to actually edit together good videos again(this basically stalled my channel for nearly 2 months). I think I'm done with these absurdly difficult challenges, though. They're just not enjoyable at all until I've actually completed them, and, when it gets to the point of degrading my quality of life like this one did, I think that's too far. This is my crowning achievement, my magnum opus.. Never Give Up!

A bit late to this now, but I did get to see the total eclipse the other day. Unfortunately, due to me forgetting to take the lens filter off of my telescope, I didn't get a picture of totality through it, but, hey, those are some pretty nice pictures of the sun. We then left Pittsburg, New Hampshire at about 4 PM, and it took us... 12 HOURS to get home, thanks to a huge bottleneck on I-93 in a place called Franconia Notch, where it narrows down to just one lane either side. During that phase, we'd be lucky if we traveled a single mile in an hour. Like, it was genuinely exciting if we ever exceeded 5 miles per hour. I remember joking with the friend I was going with that it would take us until 9PM to get home after we left.. then we joked about midnight.. how innocent we were. In total, we did over 15 hours of driving that day. I remember getting home, looking in the mirror, and seeing that my eyes were bloodshot from how long I'd spent staring at the road, hardly blinking. The fact that I hadn't slept much the previous night didn't help either; I think, at that point, I'd been awake for more than 40 hours. I'd still do it all over again to see the eclipse, though.

I got to see the total eclipse; the cost of which was getting stuck in bumper to bumper traffic for TEN HOURS

I finally learned how to actually use Kopernicus correctly after several years of trying to do it on and off again... so I gave Eve three new moons and a ring system. Oh yeah, and I also doubled its radius, gravity, and atmospheric pressure, because taking off from it wasn't difficult enough already. I also increased the atmosphere's temperature at the surface to 687 K (414°C), which means that parachutes are destroyed by the heat. Heff's Eve Expansion: Ah, the ring system. Amazing how a 1 pixel height texture can make something so majestic. The innermost moon, Zoozve. Its name is based off of a real-life asteroid (524522 Zoozve) that is a quasi-satellite of Venus, much like how Cruithne is a quasi-satellite of Earth. I gave it an oblate shape to reflect that its surface is being stretched by tidal forces due to its proximity to Eve. In addition, I added "volcanic vents" (they aren't actually filled with lava because of how oceans work), which I plan to give a Hazardous Body config later on. Next moon out, Keith. Its name is a Kerbalized version of Neith, which was a hypothetical moon of Venus that astronomers were convinced existed because of several "observations" that had been made of it (they actually turned out to just be stars). View of Eve from the surface of Keith The third moon out is Gilly, which I haven't changed at all, so we'll move out to the final and most intriguing moon, Widor.. which is supposed to be a chunk of a white dwarf star that was blasted off into space when a planet collided with it at tremendous speed, scattering ultra-dense fragments across the cosmos. This particular fragment eventually found its way to the Kerbol system and into orbit around Eve. As a result of it being composed of degenerate matter, its density is extremely high, giving it a surface gravity of 21.5 G, despite its tiny radius of 6 kilometers. I don't know if a chunk of white dwarf like this could actually exist in real life, but I just thought it'd be funny to give such a tiny object a stupidly high surface gravity. It's also supposed to be a lump of nearly pure carbon, essentially making it a 12-kilometer-wide diamond. Good luck trying to land on that... I might lower it to 16 G's or something like that to put it on the very bleeding edge of possible.

I gave Eve rings.

They call it the “Space” center for a reason!

man

I didn't exactly have life smack me between the eyes, but rather I had my own indecision and stubborness smack me between the eyes. Through middle school and high school, I'd always thought that I wanted to be an engineer of some sort; naturally, as a KSP player, I always leaned more towards the mechanical/aeronautical side of engineering. That was, until, during my junior year of high school in 2019, I took a higher-level engineering class (I had taken an introductory course the previous year and throroughly enjoyed it), and got completely whacked by the workload. This was hugely shocking to me, as I'd always done pretty well in school up until that point, always receiving A's and B's, minus a couple of C's in algebra classes. There were a few projects that I did in that class that, it seemed, no matter how much time I spent working on them, I could never finish the whole thing before the deadline, which really wasn't helped by me only having one partner instead of the two I was supposed to have. Coupled with a few other things that were going on at that point in my life, the stress from that class gave me a pretty nasty case of depression. I don't know if I just got unlucky, but the experience really turned me away from the STEM direction for the next year or so, and I dropped the class in early December, the day before a scheduled exam on thermodynamics that I hadn't even started studying for, because I had been too busy trying to finish the latest project. Literally the day after I dropped that engineering class, my symptoms of depression practically vanished, and I went on to have one of the happiest times in my life until COVID hit. About a year later, though, when I was applying to colleges, I decided I'd give STEM another go, and secured a schlolarship at Seton Hall University for a 5-year program (3 years at Seton Hall as a physics major, and another 2 years of engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology). I'll just cut to the chase, though, pretty much the same exact thing happened, which, honestly I didn't really know what else I expected. My first semester there, I pulled something like a 2.1 GPA, and I decided to take different classes to sort of find out what I actually wanted to study. Except, there was a catch: I had no idea, and I wasted another year just taking generic business and core curriculum classes, although doing so did increase my GPA, with me getting a 2.7 and a 3.8 in my second and third semesters. Wanting to just get out of there, I then transferred to the University of New Hampshire, where I spent a single semester, more or less still running around like a chicken with its head cut off. And, since then, I've just been living at home working part-time (full time for a few months too). During that time, though, I got a YouTube channel going, and I finally figured out what I want to do... a career in aviation. More specifically, aviation maintenance, as, while I have a little bit of experience flying planes, I'm not sure I can actually get a medical certificate to become a commercial pilot... and with how slow things are in the FAA, I may not know for over a year. So, in the meantime, I've decided to try and get my Airframe and Powerplant license to become an aircraft mechanic, as a viable alternative. I'm currently one month away from starting a training program to get my Airframe and Powerplant license, so, while I'm not technically in a trade school yet, I might as well fall under the category of being enrolled in one. I'm always a little disheartened when I see people say that they're studying or they want to study aerospace engineering because of KSP just because of how I failed to get there myself, but good on them!

I went interstellar to the Kcalbeloh system... with stock parts... and no wormholes. It took.. a considerable length of time. In order to have any chance of actually getting there in less than ten thousand years, I used an ion craft with a bunch of different stages, which gave it a total of more than 70,000 m/s of delta-V, by far the most I've ever had on any craft I've made (even modded ones). Next, I launched into an extremely distant orbit around Kerbol, which took almost 50 years to complete. At first, I wasn't yet using the Better Time Warp mod, as I was afraid it would break/crash my game, as I'm pretty sure it's what caused my save to become unplayable on my Whirligig World grand tour mission a couple of years ago. So that took a loooong time.. I then changed the plane of my orbit to align with Kcalbeloh's location, and began warping towards an extremely low Kerbol periapsis... which thankfully I'll be able to survive thanks to the Persistent Thrust mod and a weird quirk with heating during time warp that basically makes craft immune to heat if you're warping between 5X and 100X. Performing the 4-day-long burn at Kerbol periapsis to accelerate off into space using the Oberth effect. I ended up achieving a maximum velocity of 104.5 km/s, and an outbound velocity into interstellar space of 80 km/s. Aligning the trajectory in just the right way took quite a few attempts to get right; I'd often end up going too high or too low, or my inclination would be slightly off, which, over interstellar distances, would put me billions of kilometers off course. More screenshots (don't wanna take up the whole page lmao) Hey look, a new desktop background!

My loneliest moment was probably during the transfer from Urlum to Neidon in my OPM grand tour mission a few years ago... just years of endless void behind us, and years more to go... As for the creepiest... ever turned down the brightness to -100%? Or maybe visiting the Mun arch after 1.12.5 came out, after having previously been there in the exact same savegame.