king of nowhere

hard to say, but aerodinamics can be glitchy. maybe it's a part inside the plane that should be shielded. other times i found the aerodinamic window gives false data. a propeller plane was giving negative drag when it had the propellers shut down and locked - and no, it wasn't accelerating, it had normal drag, but it was misreported. so perhaps the plane is fine and the window is the error. by the way, you want your plane to dock, but once it docks and undocks, the docking port will be the new root part, so it will lose its dragless qualities

Part 13: The Barren hills Leaping Mantis crosses a large plain and faces a patch of relatively low hills without much trouble. It stops at the crashed Sputnik, an anomaly I didn't even knew about. Meanwhile, a boat is sent to recover Leaping Mantis and help it cross the ocean when it will get to the end of the continent.

oh, i misread. you wrote "without the use of lab or modded experiments". I inserted your entry in the board, congratulations

congratulations on your mission! i like those epic missions that go out of their way to be as thorough as possible - and the occasional design error that makes things more interesting. i have to leave now, but you'll be added to the leaderboard as soon as we can clarify a couple issues. 1) you mentioned modded experiments? for the purpose of tracking records, please do break down exactly where all your science comes from. in particular, modded science would authomatically disqualify you from jeb level - but if we can figure out exactly how much they were worth and remove them from the total, i can add that. you probably still made the record if you collected 4x samples of every experiment and the deployable science. 2) did you crash something on laythe to get a seismic report? i don't remember seeing it. it would mean there's still some science available i have to lament two things about your report, though. the first is, sometimes you put the caption of a picture over it, sometiemes under, and that complicates reading. as you go on, you seem to put them all under the pictures, so maybe it was just a quirk of the early reports, before you adopted a consistent format. the second, which I found most annoying, is your fondness for unnecessary, unexplained acronyms. starting from "new WR", it took me a bit to figure out it stands for world record, was there any reason to not spell it out? "drive to the TMA", "arrive back to the TAV", "a FRT presented itself", "locating VMA 1"... to further complicate matters, you also give acronym names to your vessels, so whenever i encounter one such acronym i wonder whether it's a craft, and have to go check back to the first post to make sure it isn't. by the way, TAV really looks like it's a vessel, but it's not included in the first page showing the crafts.

other question: i see in the jool landing that you went to "sea level", tried to ascend by helicopter, failed. then you say that "once passed [the 120 km boundary], the rocket fires up". does that mean that you ditched the return from sea level after all? EDIT: no, wait, i see you then restarted the mission so it's moot EDIT again: check with me if i got this straight: the plane was supposed to have a core pod, but you forgot it; so you had to bring an extra pilot. because of that, you didn't have room inside to bring back one of the drivers of the tardigrades. hence you strapped on the roof an external seat that you had somewhere and you went to orbit with the kerbal there? that's magnificent.

what are the parts i highlighted? i am not familiar with your mods or reskin

ok, i will review it in the next days.

Part 12: The Spearhead massif This massif is vaguely triangular, pointing downwards. Most of it is rather tame, the biggest mountain and hardest climb is actually the first one coming from north (marked by a flag), which is a bit more isolated from the rest. I wonder what I would have found had I instead opted to explore the mountain range to the west. Following ths Spearhead, there are several hundred kilometers of plains.

they look like the normal boulders on gilly, perhaps with a different light i got those, and i have no visual mods. this is just what you get when you activate ground scatter. on kerbin, it generates trees. on other planets, it generates boulders.

i belive 7 years later the original question doesn't matter anymoere

if it's a rocket in freefall, it's impossible to land it with precision, but you may still manage to land close enough. it's not like you need to actually land in the ksc, landing in the nearby ocean still nets 98% of the cost.

can't tell you the first, because all my kerbalism missions involved a single massive ship on a grand tour, but i can tell the second: you can convert the greenhouses to produce continuously. it only requires changing a few lines of code in the config file. the good news is, if you look at the config file, you can probably do it yourself. the greenhouse produces oxygen and consumes CO2, NH3 and water. Take the line of the O2 production, copy it and change it to food production, now the greenhouse produces food continuously in addition to oxygen; do some calculation for the correct amount. oh, and change the crop growth so that it takes thousands of years, it's easier than just trying to remove it outright. the bad news is, while somebody posted the actual exact code to copy-paste in the config file, that was years ago and i'm too lazy to look it up. so, you either sift through this forum looking for that code, or you open the config files and edit it yourself. both are faster than manually farming in the long term.

Part 11: The Question Mark Range The picture should make it clear why I called it the Question Mark. Ok, right now it looks more like a scyte than a question mark, but I've been calling it Question Mark for a month in my head already. This chain was particularly long to navigate because its main ridge is very long - going south, then turning northwest, then west and south again, for a total of roughly 200 km. If featured many peaks that I felt I needed to climb individually.

not that i know of. you can just accept that the experiment will take longer. or, maybe having different telescopes on different satellites may work, not sure about that

"near identical orbits" is not identical orbits. you cannot set orbits so that they are perfectly identical and there's no drift.

Those who made kerbalism were hard concerned with making the mod "realistic under current technology". We don't have the capacity to build colonies yet, so colonies are not in kerbalism. For the same reason, i was told that the difficulty was set so that a duna mission would be hard but feasible, just like a mars mission would be today, and they've never seen any successful manned jool mission. When i built a 4000 ton, 1400 parts ship and proceeded to perform a grand tour to show that it could indeed be done, the answer strongly implied that i was using the mod wrong

I don't think there's an easy way to do it. I believe it's easier abd faster to just set it manually. If you worry about forgetting it occasionally, you can easily fix things in the editor by opening the save file, looking for shielding, and set it right where you accidentally left it as zero.

you can just set shielding efficiency to 100% in the in-game options.

was time acceleration at 100000x, over several game days? then it's a different issue from what i had, and not as easily fixed. at this point, i suggest using the cheats to do something similar to your intended goal. You could bring a rocket engine of appropriate power and strap it to the back of your rover, with a tiny fuel tank. activate infinite propellant in the cheats. drive the rover around. pretend it's the wheels. sometimes, those kind of solutions are all you can get

i had the same issue with OPM. it's a bug that happens sometimes, i called it the ground contact bug because, in addition to wheels not working, mining drills also give a "no ground contact" message. by my knowledge, the problem is intermittent and disappears randomly after time warping for a few days. at least, when i was mining, the message would appear and disappear randomly. with a rover, time warp at the highest speed would often work.

i am not familiar with them. how powerful are they compared to stock? can you show me some numbers? a tank wet mass and dry mass, an engine mass, thrust and isp?

i am not familiar with that modded part. is there anything else inside the cargo bay that is clipping into the ore tank? (asking because i've seen some mixed cargo bay/fuel tank modded parts that have a cargo bay with a fixed fuel tank in the center) do the ore tanks show outside when the cargo bay is closed? if the answers are no to both, then i'd say it's some very minor clipping, and it's ok i'm wondering why you are taking great pains to hide those four ore tanks, when there are a half dozen others outside.

i used a similar route for my circumnavigation as well, except that after the easternmost crater i cut to the north to visit the cave complex too.

Part 10: The Donut massif A circular massif with a hole roughly in the middle, the name practically wrote itself.

there is a way to use kebalism without the science. i have already done it, i don't remember how but i can link you to where i asked for the same instructions; it's just a couple pages back i'm copy-pasting the whole conversation for your convenience