MythicalHeFF

April 12

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.

April 9

10 hours ago, Kimera Industries said:

Today, I missed a solar eclipse for the third time in a row. It feels as if they've all come at the absolute worst times for me to be able to view them. And this xkcd is right, nothing beats totality.

On the plus side, the cloud cover meant I could look at it with my bare eyes.

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

March 19

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.

March 19

I gave Eve rings.

March 15

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

March 15

On 2/13/2024 at 1:46 PM, king of nowhere said:

I saw someone else trying, but failing.

man

March 8

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!

March 1

March 1

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)

Spoiler

On the way to Kcalbeloh, about to overtake a previous reconnaissance probe I launched

V O I D

Arriving at Kcalbeloh (performing a 10 km/s insertion burn was fun. After ejecting from Kerbol, I had about 17 km/s of delta-V remaining)

Hundreds of years and a hell of a lot of astronautics (including a STELLAR GRAVITY ASSIST) later, I managed to get an intercept with Anetha and its moon Efil, which is a Kerbin-like object that I planned to land on... and wow this mod is beautiful

During a previous iteration of the trajectory, I whizzed through the Anetha system at something like 20 kilometers per second, and tried to land on Efil at that velocity just for fun.. yeah I instantly burned up.

The stellar gravity assist in question, a pass by the A-type star Aralc-A to correct our inclination around Kcalbeloh for another intercept hundreds of years later

During the actual landing attempt, Efil became eclipsed, and we ended up landing in the dark.

A rather cool (and eerie) sight of only Aralc-B (the red dwarf) being visible

Everything in this mod is gorgeous.. definitely want to try a career playthrough here at some point (with mods this time to preserve my sanity)

Hey look, a new desktop background!

February 26

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.

February 25

Usually only 2-3 hours before I get bored, but I’ve had a few times where I’ve played for 7-8 hours straight to complete a mission I was working on.

February 9

26 minutes ago, Kimera Industries said:

I got the impression that the planet in question is tidally locked to the sun. Am I wrong? If I'm not, you could do an Elcano on a polar path, around the edge of the terminator. If I am wrong, then you could do one, just with lots of time warp.

Yes, it’s tidally locked, but the heat on the day side isn’t a problem as long as I don’t EVA; the Cerberus has enough radiators to survive there. If I break a wheel or crash, I can just load my last save. The problem is more so that the terrain around the terminator line looks like this:

So yeah, not exactly conducive to roving.. during a test it took me a while to even get over one of those mountains, and they go on for hundreds of km before eventually smoothing out on the day and night sides. An Elcano would probably take several weeks at the very least just because of this.

February 7

February 7

6466

February 7

I have finally done it. I've landed on Ernus and returned safely, something that, to my knowledge, has only ever been done once before. One thing that I'm almost sure of, though, is that I'm the first to do this mission with no ion engines, thanks to a plethora of gravity assists from the ever-so-generous Moh and the aforementioned refueling at Moho. I'm also the first to land with multiple kerbals and the first to bring a rover, at least as far as I can tell.

Valentina, Bill, and Tatiana Kerman emerge from the Sisyphus lander after safely touching down on Ernus's night side (on the day side, it's so hot that Kerbals will pretty much instantly die, so landing here was my only real option). To my own surprise, I actually pulled off this landing on my first attempt, which is quite a feat considering Ernus has a surface gravity of 1.65G, over twice that of Tylo.

After the flag had been planted, the rover, Cerberus, was then undocked from the Sisyphus lander, with a neat IVA view to boot. I don't know why I don't drive rovers in IVA view more often; it's way more fun and immersive than in third-person.

Rover Expedition:

Spoiler

For this mission (at least for right now), I decided to take the Cerberus to the top of a nearby mountain peak and back, which I've called Mt.Erebus, thanks to the fact that it's permanently dark here on the night side of Ernus, a place that has never known the light of Kerbol.

Climbing was pretty difficult in a few places, with me having to do multiple swithcbacks to get up some of the steeper sections. You may also notice the radiators are still glowing red-hot even here, and that's because the game doesn't accurately simulate the temperature on the night side; instead of being extremely cold like it would be in real life, in KSP the night side temperature is still about 600 Kelvin (326 Celsius, 620 Fahrenheit). I'll take that over the 1,400K on the day side any day of the week, though.

This would be a grade-A-certified amazing view if it weren't so dark..

Bill and Tatiana planting the flag on the summit of Mt.Erebus, at around 3,700m elevation

Making our way back down the mountain to the lander. It's very easy to gain a huge amount of speed really quickly downhill here, the high gravity accelerates you so fast you barely have time to react.

Back at the lander. That's all the roving I'm going to do for now, maybe in a bit I'll come back to this quicksave and start a longer expedition (or maybe an Elcano, but that sounds like a terrible idea given the terrain at the terminator line)

Launching back to Orbit:

Spoiler

Once everyone had gotten back on board the Sisyphus through some magical crew transfers, it was time for...Liftoff!

Nearly in orbit, Kerbol rises once more

Once in orbit, I went to make my rendezvous.. except I couldn't turn to start the burn, as I had no more electricity... well this is a predicament. No electricity also means no radiator cooling, which, this close to the sun, will be lethal. Luckily, I was still able to turn into the correct attitude by shutting down one of the engines and using the other's gimbal to turn, but it still made me very nervous nonetheless.

And, speaking of nervous, the crew had to rendezvous by EVA, which got them to something like 99% of their max heat tolerance thanks to them touching the hot exterior of the command module.

The Journey Home:

Spoiler

As with the trip to Ernus, the trip back to Kerbin also entailed a few gravity assists from our friendly neighborhood gas giant, Moh. But first, we had to eject to an eccentric Ernus orbit, as our TWR is too low to do the burn in one shot.

18 minutes of burn time... that's a whole lot better than the 2-HOUR BURN to get here!

Plane change to meet Moh, visible in the background

First Moh assist

Second Moh assist

Eve assist sets us up for a third and final Moh assist

Final Moh gravity assist propels us back up to the orbit of Sonnah, the gas giant that Kerbin orbits in this planet pack

I totally didn't neglect to check what my Moh periapsis was the first time and end up crashing into the planet, no, that'd be silly. What kind of idiot would do that?

Approaching Kerbin

Re-entry (at 4.5 km/s, without any ablator because we were so close to the sun that it all burned away. Another nail-biting moment, to say the least).

Home at last

February 6

I finished my ridiculous chain of Moho landings with a total of 17 landings to refuel my mothership, the Icarus, to full for the trip to Ernus.

Landing 16: ended up in this horribly craggy area after overshooting a nice flat plain just to the east of it, which I called the "Promise Lands". Despite my best efforts and my (usually) up to scratch piloting skills, I'll still make a silly mistake like this from time to time. Or I'll just hit a mountain on the way back up, as happened on one of the landings (I believe it was landing 8).

Luckily though, we made it to the Promise Lands on the next landing with no issues. (barring Valentina almost overheating again)

After all 17 landings had been completed, and the Icarus had been fully refueled, Bill and Bob decided to make an expedition to a place few Kerbals dare to even mention: the Mohole.

Bob grinning maniacally over the rim of the Mohole

After leaving the Mohole after an "unfortunate" incident, (official sources state that he absolutely did NOT shove Bob into the Mohole to prevent him from taking over the world) Bill made a refueling stop along the way back to Moho's equator, and, well, that's quite a sight to behold!

Once the Moho Mole had been reunited with the Icarus and then promptly left behind in Moho orbit (o7 we salute you for your great service), the journey down to Ernus began... I'm not scared.. haha.. No way!

Beginning the burn over half an hour in advance, because actually starting the burn at half the burn time remaining with such a low TWR would result in us just flying straight past Ernus. Also, you can still see Moh from here, as it's big enough and close enough, at only 1 million km or so away!

11:40 PM, Ernus orbit reached. I've been playing since 3:40, I think I'm done for the day...

February 6

"How many times do you want to land on Moho?"

"Yes."

February 5

I landed on Moho 10 times. Why?

Well, I'm currently refueling the Icarus, my mothership of choice for a mission to Ernus in the New Horizons planet pack. In order to get there, we need a truly astronomical sum of delta-V, and, as such, I've decided to stop off at Moho to refuel, in order to not need to bring the 12 km/s or so required to get to Ernus in one shot (at least that is what I found in my reconnaissance missions. I'm also not using any ion engines, and have 3 crew members, as well as a decently sized rover, on which one of the wheels exploded for literally no reason). Of course, though, in order to actually land the whole ship on Moho, I'd need a bunch of big heavy engines, which would greatly reduce my overall delta-V, and hence I decided to use a smaller "miner" vessel instead, that goes down to the surface, refines some fuel, returns to the ship, and repeats this process, over and over again. And, on top of that, it also means that I can just leave it around Moho once the refueling is done, instead of carrying all of the equipment that would be dead weight with me afterwards.

The innermost planets of the New Horizons planet pack, Ernus and Moh (of which Moho is a moon)

The Moho Mole, the mining module I'm using to (slowly) refuel the Icarus for the trip to Ernus

Moho Mole taking off for the seventh (or eighth?[ninth?]) time. The views of Moh and Kerbol from here are quite something to behold (and very dynamic, because for some reason Moho isn't tidally locked to Moh).

Icarus arriving at Moho with a 40-minute-long insertion burn

February 1

I discovered why playing old versions can be a bad idea... bro WHAT

More seriously, I'm working on a new mission that uses the New Horizons planet pack, which, as far as I know, only works up to KSP 1.3. I'm not a huge fan of 1.3 due to the constant stuttering that my game would seem to experience while playing it, and, as such, I'm using 1.2.2, which sort of held a special place in my heart as 1.2 is the first major update to come out after I started playing; I remember being so intrigued by the UI improvements, the addition of CommNet, and, of course, the faster loading times.

Well, it's not quite as good as I remembered it, that's for sure.

In this mod, I'm trying to get to Ernus and back, which, as far as I know, has only been done once before, in this video from 2015. Which definitely won't be easy, as Ernus is located just 1 million km from Kerbal (almost 5 times closer than Moho in stock KSP), and has temperatures reaching over 1,000°C. I remember sending a probe there back in 2017, and just doing so took something like 10 km/s of delta-V to reach its orbit, even with several gravity assists from Moh (the next planet out).

And, of course, me being me, I want to send a rover as well, the Cerberus, shown here in a HyperEdit test.

Driving here is going to be almost impossible in some areas- this endless ridge terrain straddles the entire terminator line

Now, obviously, we need a pretty powerful lander, as Ernus has 1.65G of gravity and a 400 km radius, resulting in you needing about 3 km/s to land, and 3 more to return to orbit. For this, I have developed the Sisyphus lander, which is chock-full of radiators to keep the science parts from overheating. I might actually have to land on the night side in order for this mission to be possible- in testing, on the day side, kerbals would die the second they went EVA.

Oh yeah, and I also still have DLC parts, as it turns out they still work even with versions from before they came out.

In order to get this 96-ton lander to its destination, though, we need a powerful transfer vehicle, the Icarus, which I plan to use to get to Moho for refueling (Moho in this mod orbits the aforementioned Moh, a Hot-Jupiter type planet and the second from Kerbol). After leaving Moho, it'll take the lander and crew to Ernus, and, after the surface mission is complete, the center core will detach and take the crew back to Kerbin. On one nuclear engine. Yay 0.03 TWR.

And, finally, the Moho mining module, which will have to make something like ten Moho landings to refuel the Icarus. Fun. I'm getting reminded of @king of nowhere's refueling process in his Whirligig World mission with this one.

January 9

6367

January 5

1 hour ago, kurgut said:

Today,
I had fun around with the ASET ext command seat IVA, doing a Kerbal version of the LESS (Lunar Escape Systems)... A wild Nasa proposal to say the least, as you may know ^^
What we like : an astronaut in his space suit, strapped to a fuel tank, an engine (possible without RCS, and without gimbal, you control your attitude with your own weight only, while moving around (YES! )), no fancy speed or altimeter displays, you navigate with a clock and visual landmarks of the Moon, and you've got only 4 hours to rendez-vous with the CSM, because otherwize you'll run out of oxygen.

Is this Kerbal enough ?

Cheers

That thing sounds like it would be almost impossible to control.. I love it!

January 5

I killed two kerbals by teleporting them 4,000km below the surface of Jool.. apparently they died so hard that they died a second time...? (for legal reasons I cannot show the name of the vessel)

December 27, 2023

I've been playing some Lethal Company recently (because it seems like everyone and their mother has), and I couldn't resist...

(also please don't tell me I have a monopoly on KSP memes, now!)

December 22, 2023

December 10, 2023

Neat to see this thread pop up again 3 years later.. I’m now at 2,499.9 hours according to Steam. I guess I’ll compare my current stats to the stats I had at the time of my last post on this thread, 3 years ago.

According to my last post from 2020, I had 1,630 hours logged in KSP. Since then, I’ve added 870 hours to that total, over the course of 1,210 days (the last post was made on August 17, 2020). Put another way, that means that, between now and then, I’ve spent an average of 0.72 hours per day playing KSP, or roughly 43 minutes per day, which is definitely a significant decrease from the average of over 1 hour per day that I had then.

The story is the same when you account for my total play time, which is 2,500 hours over the course of 2,744 days, or about 54 minutes per day.

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