king of nowhere

what's a mass driver?

my circumnavigation of kerbin through mountains has found some of the most beautiful terrain ever i like driving in such terrain, which probably makes me some kind of masochist

Part 6: The Box massif A squarish mountain massif made of deep gorges provides a very challenging tower to climb.

Part 5: Mostly flatlands The next real mountain range is all the way up in the arctic, Leaping Manits has to cross a lot of relatively flat ground. In terms purely of distance traveled, this is the longest chapter so far, but it will be shorter in word count

I'm doing a circumnavigation of Kerbin trying to maximize the mountains I cross. I really like mountains, and Kerbin has some extremely challenging ones. If there's anyone else out there who likes the challenge of driving a rover up a nearly vertical rock tower, I think I've found the single best spot in the whole core system - OPM too, probably, though maybe on Slate there's something comparable.

Part 4: The Slash range I called this range the Slash because its horizontal shape on a spheric object makes me think of a scar on the cheek. Originally, I wasn't even supposed to cross it fully, as it's mostly east-west and doesn't bring me any closer to the pole. But it was just an amazing challenge, exactly the reason I started this circumnavigation. I'm not in any hurry to finish, I'm here for as much mountaineering as I can take. The range itself is only roughly 100 km long, but I planted flags on many major peaks

Part 3: The Banana ranges Continuing northeast, then northwest, Leaping Mantis stays on elevated ground most of the time. Those are smaller mountains, rarely offering big challenging near-vertical cliffs. They still are a big threat to wheels, though, and plenty of smaller mountains that are still interesting to climb.

They were more or less default. Either it takes another tech to unlock the second slot, or they changed the mod in a later version

i don't remember the exact file, but it's in gamedata and either kerbalism, or kerbalismconfig. there are a few big files with data like that

frankly, i'm not sure how it works, but i've seen reputation decrease with time. i do suspect you get a fixed negative amount of reputation slowly with time, and you can counteract that with positive reputation you earn. but you will always have a bit of negative reputation, preventing you from going 100%. unless maybe you can get such a favorable ratio, it rounds to 100%. frankly, i'd just try adding reputation with cheats to see if it's possible. if it turns out to be possible, then reload and try to gain it regularly.

if you want to hover over the target and drop a cable and grab it, i think ksp is not adequate. when you grab something with the claw or dock with a port, the game has to create a new ship. if half the new ship is moving in the air, an explosion is almost guaranteed. i believe landing and attacking something while landed is the only practical solution

Part 2: The Rocket Graveyard range I said that I wasn't going to name all mountain ranges, but I got a few good names. Here's the first mountain range crossed, directly west of the KSC. I dubbed it this way not because rockets fall there - they fall in the ocean, to the east - but because, in both my caveman missions, I sent a lot of rockets to crash in the region, in the hope of getting science from the mountain biome. It's where I lost Valentina in my first caveman run.

My last mission, a caveman run, required dropping pods all over Kerbin to collect science from biomes. Often, I would land near mountains; Kerbin is one of the few planets with real mountains. And I love mountains. So I devised a mission to climb as many of them as possible with a rover. Most people, when circumnavigating Kerbin, go around mountain chains. They miss all the fun. Part 1: Starting the mission First part of the mission is to pick a rover. Then I have to decide an itinerary. The first part of the chosen path

you were already reviewed and added to the scoreboard. sorry if i am not impressed by the size, i am used to flying significantly bigger stuff.

most of its mass is in the tail, so i'm not really surprised. i had planes with the same issue, and sometimes some atmospheres are less forgiving than others.

ok, but i meant, pictures about what goes wrong. trying to figure out what's the source of the instability

can you share pictures?

something is wrong with it, yes, but this is trying to figure out what is wrong. you say that you lose stability at low speed, and i'm saying that it may be the result of the plane getting bent out of shape, which confuses SAS to no end. just a maybe

As i said, that can happen if sas overcompensates. Sometimes reducing engine gimbaling helps. Or it could be that the plane is getting bent, this screws up sas. Else, i really have no idea. If you landed those other planes "years ago", some updates changed some things, including sas and rigidity, and may result in finely tuned planes no longer being functional.

if they can do tail landings on kerbin, then they should work. that's a much better test for landing than mun or ike. still, just because you flew other, different planes on duna, it doesn't mean those specific planes you are trying to land now will work the same. i suspect the most recent ones will be bigger, for start. regardless, i've never heard of a planet being bugged - except for the ground contact bug that occasionally comes with kerbalism. bugged vehicles, all the time, but you tried four of them. it's much, much more likely it's faulty engineering anyway. sometimes things react differently in different gravity. i once had a lander for tylo, i tested it on kerbin, it could slam the ground at 10 m/s and survive. I went to tylo, i touched the ground at 3 m/s, it exploded. i couldn't get it to not explode on tylo, no matter how softly i touched down. i tried retracting the landing legs, and then it worked perfectly. things just get this weird occasionally.

... what works on mun doesn't work on duna, and your first idea is "it's a bug" - rather than "i need better tests"? duna has over twice the gravity of mun, three times that of ike. it has an atmosphere, affecting aerodynamics. you can't just "test something on mun" and assume it's going to work on duna. the higher gravity requires different solutions. besides, regarding your concept of "land by tail, slam down with the wheels", i tried it, there's a good chance the plane is going to break apart when the wheels touch the ground. I made it to work, but it required a lot of save-scumming. i assume you are trying to play without reloading, because you sent 4 planes instead of just reloading until you manage to land the first one. if that's the case, i advise against the tail landing; too unreliable to make it work without save scumming. I absolutely advise trying it without testing in situ with alt-f12 (something you also seem opposed to doing). you are certainly not going to do it with only 4 testing iterations, which is what you actually had. "instability" may be caused by many different things; my experience is that sometimes ships are unstable during the last phases of landing if the sas overcompensates, turning tiny deviations into huge ones. it may be caused by the higher gravity forcing more thrust, by the wings creating aerodinamic forces getting in the way, or by the ship getting bent under the higher gravity /aerodinamic forces, which confuses the SAS to no end.

hard to say without knowing the details, it may just be that those planes are unsuited to duna. have you tried landing anything else? use the f12 menu to test and see if other stuff works

difficulty level influences cost too. that's all i can give

you can't replicate the mobile winglets (putting wings on robotic parts will break them eventually), but you can compensate with reaction wheels, maybe. to execute the belly flop, you need strong gimbaling; the vector engine is by far the one with the most gimbaling available. that's the most advice I can give. shouldn't be impossible to do.

you know, instead of the half dozen windows from the various mods, it would have been a lot more informative to simply open the deltaV tab on the left to show twr, starting and final mass.