king of nowhere

high speed makes boncing more likely, but in your case it seems the original issue could be some microclipping into the ground. I don't know how it can be fixed, but I'd ascribe it to the peculiar shape of your rover. actually, i find it more amazing that your wheels do not explode

I can't, because kerbnet does not work in the whirligig world planetary pack Regardless, i could just take a screenshot in map view with highlighted the rover, its "landed" status, and its coordinates. Still, i prefer planting flags

Part 4: A sky full of two stars Boundless plunges into the very inner system. Plunges as close as possible to Kaywell and Limnel without burning up, comes close to Shol and lands on Wolda. Finally it leaves for Tannor, moon of Tyepolbynar, for refueling. The structure of the inner Kaywell system. Notice the very close distances from the sun, and compare the orbit of Tyepolbynar here and in chapter 3 4.1) Inward! 4.2) To Limnel and/or Wolda 4.3) Weird, yet beautiful 4.4) A convoluted return 4.5) Multi-step aerocapture

it is, yes. but I found out that I have enough time to plant a flag and move on. my main issue is that I want to plant a flag every 5 km, and that requires stopping the rover. and stopping the rover in such low gravity is extremely complex, especially when i'm on an incline. so to avoid having to stop the rover, I send out the kerbal in eva to plant a flag, then return on the rover with a jetpack. and for that, I sometimes have no time. well, wolda has an elongated shape. which, from the purpose of navigating it, it's akin to having two extremely tall mountains on opposite sides of the asteroid. So I spend half the time going uphill, and half the time going downhill. for the uphill part, the rover moves slow enough that I can plant a flag and return with no problems before getting cooked. for the downhill part, the rover picks up speed (as much as 10 m/s for a fall of several km). well, next time I go downhill maybe I'll just won't plant flags. Or maybe I'll learn to be faster. on the plus side, I discovered that I can time warp even near the surface, and that when time warping I can save the game even if close to the surface. This means I can save the game before getting out and planting a flag. So I can try it again if it fails. problem solved.

Part 19: Homecoming While an Elcano challenge does not require returning the kerbals home, I did it anyway. Rather, I returned to Minmus. From there it's just a matter of sending up some shuttle to carry back the crew And that's the end of Dancing Porcupine. My dear old rover. I ended up driving it more than I imagined. It's slow and sluggish compared to other rovers, carrying around that giant fuel tank does have drawbacks. But having a single rover than can take off and go on another world is very cool. Not to mention the crash survivability. Who knows, maybe in another year or two I will bring it out of retirement again.

Meanwhile, after stalling it for a long time, i finally ended the tal circumnavigation Planet: Tal (moon of Wal, moon of Urlum) planetary pack: Outer planets mod

Part 18: The rest of Tal The circumnavigation of Tal is completed. The circle of flags as Dancing Porcupine is about to leave

question: I am trying a circumnavigation of a small world very close to its star. so close, in fact, that kerbals outside of a habitat will quickly die of overheating. maybe 30 seconds, maybe one minute. I have time to plant a flag if i'm quick. can I activate the "ignore maximum temperature" cheat for practicality?

1) press B while in map view 2) no idea

kml editor has a function to fix stuck docking ports. it's by far the best option. if that does not work, I dare suggest launching a new ship (with all the docked parts already docked), cheating it in the same position of the old one, transferring the crew, and deleting the old ship may be faster than manually editing a save file

while it's very difficult stuff, it's not as difficult as it may seem. first target is eve. from eve you take a trajectory for kerbin; the key is, it must not be an hohmann transfer - in fact, you don't want a hohmann transfer, you want to speed up compared to kerbin. And if you really can't find the trajectory you want? easy enough: nobody forces you to meet kerbin immediately. you can do another orbit and make a flyby later. To look for one such trajectory, create a maneuver node, leave it at 0 m/s, and right click on it to select next orbit. so you'll find intercepts on the next orbit. click again next orbit, you'll find intercepts two orbits in the future. eventually, you're bound to find a close approach that's close enough you can adjust your trajectory to take it. the kerbin-kerbin flyby is even easier: the key for a kerbin-kerbin passage is to eject into an orbit that lasts an exact number of years. if you eject into a orbit lasting 3 years, you are guaranteed that in 3 years your ship will come back in the same spot, kerbin will be in the same spot, so you'll have another encounter. you can measure the time of a planned orbit by making a maneuver node in that orbit and selecting it, it will be displayed in the lower left corner. this same trick is used to pass twice on any planet, you need an orbital time multiple of that of the target planet. or perhaps you can take a fractional resonance; for example you eject into a orbit lasting one year and a half exactly, so in 3 years your ship will have completed 2 orbits and kerbin will have completed 3 orbits and you will be in the same spot. As for jool, same thing as I said for the first kerbin flyby. if jool is close enough when you pass near apoapsis, you can make a slight correction in your gravity assist to get an encounter. otherwise, you will have to complete an orbit, and possibly more orbits, until jool will be close enough that a small correction will get you there. if you don't have issues with time, then you are guaranteed to find encounters. As a general rule, I found that the key to chaining multiple gravity assists is to not plan them in advance. you cannot plan them in advance, because the game is not accurate after a while. you take the first flyby, then you wait a few orbits if necessary. and if you can find real spacecraft trajectories, you may notice actual orbital engineers also use this tactic. rosetta didn't meet its comet at its first apoapsis. parker solar probe is not meeting venus at every orbit. also, getting immediate multiple assists, like the voyager probes did, requires some very special planetary alignments. making multiple passages delayed by multiple orbits does not require any timing at all. I don't even bother checking transfer windows when using those trajectories. even when time is a factor, it's generally not a problem. most of my missions use life support. but the thing is, when you are close to the sun maneuvers are expensive, but orbits are short, so you can afford to wait many orbits to find that moho intercept. when you are far from the sun, you may need to burn extra fuel to speed up an encounter, but maneuvers are cheap so you can afford the extra fuel. so I suggest, first thing go to eve. try to get a trajectory that intersects kerbin's orbit, and worry about meeting kerbin afterwards. it's good practice

what does it say about me that I prefer to run that calculation rather than installing another mod? wait a minute, though: the formula works with distance from the center. ksp gives distance from the surface, so I will have to add the radius of the sun to r. not that it makes a huge difference

Though I'd find it a lot more amazing if the spaceplane with a flat front flying without drag or the basic fins surviving an exposed descent into laythe's atmosphere didn't scream "aerodinamic bug exploiting". Mind you, it still requires a huge skill to build those kind of contraptions - not to mention all the other parts about optimizing trajectories - but I think those designs that exploit ways to make parts frictionless should go into another category, or should at least come with an asteric attached.

Part 3: If Laythe was 12 times more massive, it would be Valyr Boundless sets to explore the Valyr system, and refuels on Oshan. The position of Valyr in the Kaywell system, and the moons of Valyr. Not shown is Didd, the diminutive submoon of Manonam 3.1) No gravity assist needed 3.2) The last flight of the Phoenix 3.3) Small moons 3.4) Manonam and Didd 3.5) Oshan to explore and Oshan to drill

Mothership Boundless approaching Imterril, moon of the gas giant Tyepolbinar, with a comet in background. If you look closely, you can also see the planet Shol near the twin suns of the kaywell system (not to be confused with the flange from the eva experiment seen in the last picture. planetary pack is whirligig world

I'm facing a very unusual problem: I can't find how to determine the duration of a year on a planet. The game give me a window of information on the planet and that contains a lot of informations, almost all of them useless. but it does not tell me the time of revolution of the planet. this has never been a problem before, because i used to play with the stock system, or the outer planet mod, or the real solar system, and in all those cases you can find the year lenght by a quick internet search. here i'm using another mod, i would like to know how long is a year on certain planets for the purpose of planning orbits, and I can't find this information. I suppose, worst case scenario, I could alt-f12 a ship on a similar orbit, and this would give me at least an approximate result. I was hoping there would be a better way.

the general solution for all structural stability problems is autostrutting parts. activate autostruts on all the parts in the central shaft of the ship, and there will be no floppiness. P.S. that plane looks cool, but it does seem like it has too many engines

I went as close to a star as I ever did. Actually, I went close to two stars, as whirligig world features a binary system This is the planet shol, a hot super-jupiter. the star is kaywell, while the second star, limnel, is covered at the moment. A comet is passing nearby. The presence of shol and limnel causes most comets to end up getting gravity captured by of of those bodies. they then wander the inner system for a while, until they hit shol or they get ejected out of the solar sytem entirely. the game then spawns a new comet. this mechanism ensures that there's a visible comet most of the time in the kaywell system. this is as close as i managed to go to kaywell before burning up. I wanted to see if I could orbit limnel (here visible, by the way) but the answer is no. With some better management I can probably reach 500k km, and limnel is in a 300k km orbit. going there would require a more dedicated ship. in the end i settled into a safer orbit, with the objective of reaching a minor body nearby this is just to show the position of limnel and my orbit the nose cone cargo bay is red hot. I can afford a quick glance before having to close it again to protect the cupola

Part 2: That's no moon (it technically is, but it's bigger than Eve) Landers are sent to the outer moons of Mesbin; those include Kerbmun, which is slightly bigger than Kerbin, and Dermun, which is significantly bigger than Eve. The relative positions of the outer moons of Mesbin. The inset in the lower left corner shows the sub-moons of Derbin. I wonder if there would be some way to make it stable in reality 2.1) That's no Kerbin 2.2) You can have trojans in ksp 2.3) The most challenging landing 2.4) That's no monument valley (but a pretty good shot nonetheless) 2.5) Dermun and Derminmus 2.6) The most challenging ascent

hard to say, because in this game there's no real reason to have a space station. except maybe in career mode to use a lab continuously, but science is never an issue anyway. so, ask yourself what do you want your space station to do in the first place. do you want it to be a refueling depot? you need fuel tanks. do you need it for science? put laboratories in there. do you want to make it just for show? make it good-looking, and who cares about what's actually in there. what you actually need for a station is solar panels, batteries and reaction wheels, but that's not much mass. most of the station is up to you.

Part 1: Climbing out of the gravity well Orbiting Mesbin is cheap thanks to its rapid rotation, but raising orbit around Mesbin is very expensive. Boundless slowly gets out of this deep gravity well while visiting the inner moons of Mesbin. The relative positions of the inner moons. Statmun and Thresomin are smaller than Gilly, while Graymun is Mun-sized From low orbit it takes roughly 300 m/s to raise apoapsis to Statmun, an additional 1600 m/s to raise it to Thresomin, and finally 650 for Graymun 1.1) Launching Boundless 1.2) Statmun the bizarre 1.3) Tiny Thresomin 1.4) Aptly-named Greymun 1.5) Greymun is your friend: the route to Kerbmun

Part 0: Introduction and ship I was worried I'd run out of grand tour challenges to try after the real solar system, luckily the modding community is doing a good job. One year ago I found mention of the whirligig world planetary system, which I found very intriguing. Besides this unconventional starting planet, the whirligig system also includes a double star in close orbit, a hot Jupiter, sub-moons, trojan orbits, eccentric orbits. Seems a perfect next target for another grand tour, so I marked it on my to-do list for after I was done with the real solar system. Which I finished in january, so I took my time for this one. Part of the difficulty was deciding exactly what I would do. Starting from the very premise of those missions: kerbalism is not compatible with this planetary pack. Kerbalism has always been what added spice to a grand tour. With an isru ship, a grand tour is really no more difficult than a handful of individual missions. Not much of a challenge. Having your ship slowly breaking down while you're at it, that is what made things interesting. On the other hand, I gradually learned how to navigate the difficulties of kerbalism so that by the end they were mostly irrelevant - my last grand tour had no issues with reliability or life support supplies, and only once radiations really created suspence. On the plus side, lag would be a lot more manageable, so I'm not really unhappy for being unable to use kerbalism. But this means I need to find some other challenge to add. So I decided, despite the lack of kerbalism, I'm going to pretend I still have to take care of life support and hard isru. The most relevant decision is that I will only refuel on planets with an atmosphere; here I'm pretending I'm gathering CO2 from the atmosphere to make new fuel. Otherwise, whirligig world has small moonlets scattered everywhere for a cheap refueling which would make it too easy. On the other hand, I'm not trying to build redundancies; I can enjoy some more freedom in design. Initially, I also decided I wanted to try making this a fully reusable mission. However, there are two planets bigger than Eve; I spent some time trying to build a Eve ssto, and I got told that you need a bunch of exploits to make frictionless parts to make it work - which makes it bug exploiting in my book, so I basically lost interest in trying to make an Eve ssto. But even if I could make one, Derbin and Valyr have 30% more gravity and require an additional 2 km/s to orbit, so they'd be impossible to ssto anyway. So I changed the condition as "fully reusable except for the Derbin and Valyr landers". 0.1) Boundless mothership 0.2) Cigar small lander 0.3) Arrowhead (stock version), atmospheric space plane 0.4) Traveler taxi 0.5) Ice Cream Cone, refueling vehicle 0.6) Phoenix heavy landers 0.7) Redentor small probes Boundless, fully assembled Boundless, side view Boundless, using the rockets Boundless, seen from Cigar while docking near Graymun As above, a bit closer The solar array, seen by a spacewalking kerbal The objective is to perform a grand tour of the whirligig world system, while refueling only on atmospheric planets, pretending to have to care about life support (as a rule of thumb I assume 50 years for the mothership, 1 year for the taxi, 30 days for landers). I will try to land everywhere except Derbin and Valyr in a reusable manner, though I'm not sure I can tackle Ammenon and its 30 km/s round trip. In that case, I confess I brought some xenon tanks; I hope I won't have to use them, but just in case... A comprehensive map of the Kaywell system, highlighting the orbital relations and the general characteristics of the various celestial bodies

it says "reach the orbit around Minmus". You are still around kerbin. it's easier to match those orbits if you check on map view where they are

did you accidentally overwrite the profile? if you did not change the profile name, the game will overwrite it. If it happened, there's no recovery. I lost a career this way too.

nuclear reactors have the same rules of other kerbalism parts: you can inspect them, and service them if they are aging. if they break, there is a chance it can be fixed (they will be shown in yellow in that case). however, nuclear reactors have a couple additional issues. in my latest grand tour, I faced three distinct bugs related to them: 15) Actual reliability time is different from what it should be. Just check more often the parts that get broken more often And I have to point out that the nuclear reactors were the single most malfunctioning part. actually, wait. the big 3000 Ec/s reactors did break easily. the small 60 Ec/s never had any problem 18) Some fission reactors are not working, even though they are not broken. Next time I actually break a reactor, I will revert the malfunction with a reload, and drop one of the nonfunctional ones I noticed it happened with reactors that got a noncritical malfunction; they were fixed, but still they didn't work. Wasn't a big deal for me because I had 12, but it could be for you. 22) Sometimes, when the vessel is not in physical range, the nuclear reactors on Cylinder will stop for no reason. Load Cylinder into physical range and they restart This one instead happened a few times only on the small reactors. No idea of what triggered it. So, while nuclear reactors are nice, and they certainly can be used to fit your needs, I recommended bringing at least 2. Incindentally, the smaller model can be manipulated by eva construction, so if one breaks you can swap it for a good one without wasting the whole ship. and you can bring the broken one back to kerbin for recovery, you still get money back even if it's malfunctioning