Ixamus

Traveling long distances, visiting multiple biomes or anomalies on atmospheric worlds can be problematic. Covering large distances by rover takes excessively long time, and rocket powered vehicles are inconvenient for many reasons. Therefore I believe that atmospheric flight is the best option. I would like to see your crafts that are made for fling in atmospheric world other than Kerbin. I'm interested in any designs, be it stock or modded, new or old KSP version. They can be planes, helicopters, airships or any other crafts that are made to operate in non-kerbin atmospheres. Especially I would like to see designs that fly on Eve and the solutions for very thick atmosphere. This topic is for discussing solutions for varying atmosphere thicknesses, flying in non-oxygenated environments, dealing with terrain issues, how to deliver the crafts to other celestial bodies and other issues around the topic. So far I have flown only on Duna. I have made two planes for my career save. Both planes rely on electric propellers from Firespitter mod for propulsion that doesn't need free-range oxygen. This is Dunaplane. It's my first fully developed plane for non-Kerbin flight. It uses single electric propeller which is powered by two fuel-cell-arrays. The plane is designed for science gathering and carries full set of science equipment. The thin atmosphere of Duna is overcome with quite large wings, so flying it is reasonably similar than flying planes on Kerbin. Duna's atmosphere in general is not a huge issue for planes. Instead the biggest issue is landing. Most planes on Duna have quite high stall speed and low gravity makes wheelbraking very slow, so horizontal landings are difficult. I have made a few horizontal landings with this plane, but mostly I use parachutes and downward thrusters to land safely. This plane can fly at very high altitudes. For some reason the thin air seems to provide enough lift up to at least until 20km and propellers wont lose any efficiency (which I believe is unrealistic) instead flying higher makes the plane significantly faster. Flying low the plane flies 230m/s but after height of 13km the speed increases rapidly to 500m/s. The only limiting factor for height and therefore speed seems to be heat control. The engines create heat, which cant dissipate in super thin atmosphere so it starts to build up and makes the plane explode if flown too high for too long time. The Dunaplane has three small radiator panels to allow it to fly slightly higher than otherwise. The other one is The Red Eagle. It's significantly bigger and made for crew transfer around Duna and from surface to the low orbit. I can carry 18 kerbals but needs only two to operate. A pilot to fly the plane and an engineer to repack the chutes. This one is in theory easier to land horizontally but even so I have just strapped more parachutes and downwards thrusters to it for landings. It has four electric propellers which are powered by six fuel-cell-arrays. To get to the orbit it also has four aerospikes. The electric engines are used to get it to the highest possible altitude and speed before switching to the aerospikes. Unfortunately four electric engines generate awful amounts of heat so the plane has in total 16 small radiator panels to help with thermal control. These are my planes. Now I would like to see your crafts for alien skies. :-) Edit: This thread is a thread of the month for May

I have spent lot of time rovering around Mun and Duna so I think that there are things I can say about it. Successful rover mission (while I'm driving) rely on lots of f5 and f9. I recommend you to do so, since even the best vehicles can sometimes flip and blow up. What I do not recommend is to limit yourself to driving only 10 or 15 m/s since that is boring and getting anywhere takes forever. All rover missions are quite lengthy but I see no reason for them to be excessively so. In addition to saves and load I believe that the key is wide wheelbase and ability switch reaction wheels on and off with command group. While you are using your wheels to accelerate or turn you should have your reaction wheels off, but otherwise they should be used to keep your rover straight and not flipping. Personally I use excessive amounts of sas units to overcome other forces and force my rover not flip, should there be close call. I also think that bigger rovers are better at this. You can drive lot faster "safely" since they are very hard to flip. I embedded an image of my latest rover/mobile base design below. I can drive relatively "safe" on hilly terrain 50 m/s. I do admit that it's somewhat difficult and resource intensive to deliver anywhere. Driving rovers in KSP is also skill to learn. I have managed to reduce my crashes and quick loads quite a lot simply by becoming a better driver and learning to find the safest path across the terrain.

First of all it's Duna's icecap. I have also changed the lighting setting significantly darker to see the ground features. Otherwise the scenery would often be just pure white. I believe that made the purple color more visible.

Question of weight is complicated one. I do believe that in theory you can fly very heavy crafts in Duna atmosphere simply by adding more wings and thrust. The requirement of thrust is still relatively low in comparison to what would be needed in Kerbin. My own bigger dunaplane is relatively heavy. It uses three pairs of aeroplane main wings and to pairs of large delta wings to gain lift. It can get to orbit with aerospikes. The main problem I have experienced with planes being too heavy is the Kraken. If I load my plane full with fuel and try to use physics warp the plane starts to wobble violently and disassembles itself. I have not yet figured out if there is universal weight limit for Duna aeroplanes and physics warp, or if the problem is my design or the autopilot mod I use.

I have never done spaceplanes, but I fly modded aircrafts in Duna all the time. I land them like this. Note that I have thrusters pointing downward since parachutes alone are not enough for safe landing. It's possible to land horizontally to Duna but it's difficult and often requires some kind of retrothrust to slow down. Having sensible stall speeds requires enormous wing area which makes flying at Kerbin very difficult. My is extremely slow at Kerbin. Landing at Duna will be easiest in areas of low elevation. The midland sea is probably the best choice for horizontal landing and takeoff. It's also relatively flat. But keep in mind that landing to Duna can often result this:

Looking forwards to see your actual mission.

I had a major infrastructure building mission in Duna system (the rover base I showed yesterday was part of this). I consisted of four launches and seven vehicles in total in one transfer window. Despite several days of vehicle design and testing I made several major mistakes that have caused trouble today. This craft was supposed to get my crew from low Duna orbit to Ike, refuel and bring them back. For reasons you might be able to see, it didn't work out. Also I had forgotten to add antenna to my unmanned Ike refueling vessel. It came with the same launch as two other vessels and I forgot to add antennas to each of the vessels. I cheated and disabled the comnet to land it on Ike.

Many great ideas here! Mun might indeed be an interesting choice. Every day the poor prisoners could look at Kerbin and wonder if they ever get back, while contemplating their crimes. Although I don't think that escaping the Mun would be entirely impossible, considering the large amount of abandoned spacecrafts that I have there. An asteroid on a solar escape trajectory might make it extremely laborius task to send new convicts in and therefore be too inconvenient arrangement. Being escape proof is not the only desired quality in a perfect location. While it is important, most places are safe enough since jetpacks are after all very limited in their ability to assist escapees. In addition to safety concerns it would be great if the place felt like a place for a penal colony. (Which also applies to most places in the stock system.) Bop, Tylo and Dres especially are great places for this. Often forgotten Dres might be just the place for the convicts to be forgotten. And while I have never been to Tylo, many people in the forum describe it to be a very unpleasant place to be.

The Kerbal Space Program board has discovered that there are some rotten apples among the space program crew. A few kerbonauts are found to worship the Kraken and therefore declared to be heretics. Jebediah and Valentina have conspired against our great leader Wernher von Kerman. The board has decided to send these traitors to a penal colony somewhere in the stock Kerbol system. The only problem is that they don't know where this penal colony should be placed. So where would you construct a planetary surface base to serve as a penal colony? Eve would of course be escape proof but otherwise too nice place in my opinion. Maybe Eeloo would make a decent Siberia analog? Where should the penal colony be constructed?

I sent a rover/mobile base to Duna. This is my largest rover so far. It has ISRU capability, mobile science lab, full science kit and it hold up to eight kerbals. Can achieve speeds of 50m/s by exploiting the way how the large rover wheels turn. It uses mods Airplane plus and Kerbal Planetary Base system. I call it Napakarhu (Polar Bear in English) and I made it to explore the southern icecap of Duna and serve as refueling base for my atmospheric planes. (Thaut I will show here one day) Landings are always the most difficult thing with these huge rovers. It took a lot of testing and fine tuning to make it work. Here you can see this "little buggy" speeding downhill at the Duna south pole. These large wheels have fantastic crash tolerance of 150m/s so it can take very rough landings after jumping from the hills of Duna. Many people seem to favor quite small rovers. They are of course easier to transport to the intended location, but I find them less satisfying and less useful. This kind of huge rover can have lot of utilities, the large wheels are by far the fastest wheels there is, they can take heaviest landings and with enormous reaction wheel power it's also relatively safe to drive very fast. Driving small rover 30 m/s while trying not to go flying is more boring, than driving this beast 50 m/s and simply taking the rough landings after inevitable jumps. This is probably the biggest size rover can have while still being somewhat rational game vise. But I would still like to make a bigger rover. It could have a greenhouse from the Kerbal planetary bases mod (I don't use life-support mods but it looks cool) or perhaps habitats from the same mod. Perhaps other science lab for faster processing? Maybe two ISRU units for faster refuel?

Thank you! After brief fiddling around, I have successfully installed the mod. It works remarkably well. Stock Visual Enchancements had the habbit of crashing KSP every few hours and this looks mostly just as good, but does not crash. There was some talk about how thick cloud coverage future versions should be, and I vote for relatively thin coverage. I find it important to be able to see what is down there.

I have tried to download this to my 1.3.1 version of KSP, but for whatever reason I have not been successful. EVE does download, but it says that there is no configs. Otherwise I cant see any difference so I assume it didn't download. Is there anything I should know about installing, to manage to install this? So far I have only used CKAN so I have no prior experience of installing mods manually. I have tried simply putting the file to my "Gamedata" folder. Is there more to this?

Instead of thinking the crew stranded, I prefer to talk about long term deployment. :-) Usually I send a separate return vehicle to get my crews back, since my initial launches carry lot of hardware like rovers or bases.

This thread has been a major inspiration to me. Eagerly waiting for your interplanetary airship adventures. I have been thinking about sending an airship to Eve, because it would be the coolest imaginable way to explore the purple planet. I have not yet attempted this or even played with the mod, but I'm highly interested to know whether or not it is plausible to send an large airship to space and make it to re-enter Eve's atmosphere without making a firework show.

This is my new (and first) refueling rover for Duna. It might not be the most sophisticated or optimized design but it works. The great surprise is that the wheels (RoveMax XL3) seem to be a great choice. The KSP wiki and a couple of youtubers gave me an impression that they would be somehow lacking in quality. To me they seem to be very robust and capable of very high speed if I exploit the way they turn. By tapping A and D keys while wanting to go forwards this craft can easily achieve +60m/s speeds and thus outrun all the other rover wheels.

I do a lot of long rover missions across large distances. During those journeys I plant a flag to the most significant land formations I can find, but at least once every 100km. I usually try to come up with an original and descriptive names for those places. All my names are in Finnish language so I don't think they are transferable to common usage in the fandom, but I do use them in my own thinking and it makes the places much more real to me.

If I download this mod from the links you provided, will it work with KSP 1.3.1? I did not update my game when 1.4. came out, because I didn't want to cause issues on my career save.