king of nowhere

Part 6: moar mountaineering! It's all this mission is about, after all I made it to halfway!

ah, that's it. you are not making use of oberth effect. Oberth effect means that making a prograde burn close to a planet is cheaper. making such a burn in solar orbit is a lot more expensive. you spent 2800 m/s to go from kerbin orbit to jool in solar orbit. that's already a lot more than it should be. from low kerbin orbit, you can spend 2000 m/s and reach jool. it's much cheaper, even though you have to spend 900 m/s just to get out of kerbin's gravity. from minmus you are already almost out of it, and you can spend less than 1300 m/s; the best way is from minmus to fall down on kerbin and make the ejection burn close to it, as shown in this picture 160 m/s to go from minmus to low kerbin orbit, then it's only 1150 m/s to jool. and the same applies to jool, except you are potentially losing eve more there. I already showed you a pic where you could have returned from pol with 1 km/s, because jool is very big and has a lot of oberth effect. making the burn around bop would also add a tiny bit of oberth from the moon. by getting out of jool, then lowering periapsis in solar orbit, you spent a fortune leaving the gas giant and you also lost your oberth effect. frankly, i am surprised that you got to the point where you can make a spaceplane that can ssto from kerbin with enough fuel left to reach minmus (while carrying a lot of payload in the form of heavy passenger cabin and mining equipment) but you don't know about oberth effect and efficient interplanetary transfers. it's like finding a civilization that has discovered electricity but never invented the wheel.

A rare double passage of Umbriel and Ariel over Uranus, seen from Titania

Landed on Titania to refuel my A'twin mothership, caught a rare double passage of Ariel and Umbriel over Uranus I only regret that Uranus was not aligned to be seen from my cupola, so I didn't have any internal views

From a purely energy perspective, it takes the same energy to get from kerbin to jool than it takes to make the reverse trip. that's because of energy conservation. however, there are many differences in the ways you can save energy. one is gravity assist. to get to jool, you don't have to pay for an insertion burn because you can use a gravity assist from tylo or laythe. another is oberth effect; haing a massive body helps you in prograde burns. Jool is very massive, but at bop you are also pretty far from it. another is aerobraking; on kerbin, if you have a plane with enough heat resistance, you don't have to pay for insertion either. that said, your experience is very surprising. because if you sent a spaceplane from kerbin to jool you had to spend 2 km/s to get to jool from kerbin orbit, plus whatever you had to spend to reach kerbin orbit in the first place, plus whatever you have to spend to orbit and land on bop from jool orbit - which is generally at least another km/s. while from bop you can get a kerbin intercept for 1 km/s. plus 200 m/s to orbit the small moon. you can easily reach kerbin with less than half the deltaV it took you to get there. and without even counting what you spent to reach kerbin orbit. are you sure it took more fuel to return? in that case, you must surely have made some major mistake, but without knowing your trajectory i can't guess it. actually, i can't even imagine what you could have done to spend more than 3 km/s getting a kerbin intercept from bop. so I'm more likely to put it down to you misreading or misremembering fuel cost.

besides clicking on the building, there is an icon in the lower left of the screen that lets you access the various buildings. i have a similar bug popping up sometimes, where clicking on the vab does nothing, but clicking on the icon in the bottom left corner works

I used the deltaV map when i was less experienced, but now i find it of little use. for anything further away than mars or venus i'd use gravity assists, and the injection values are often not meaningful. for example, if I wanted to visit europa i wouldn't inject into a low jupiter orbit, circularize, and then go to europa. I'd inject directly into europa, or else I'd find some compromise between haviing enough oberth effect from jupiter but reducing intercept speed. even for a normal mission, what you actually have to pay for inclination can be very different.

well, clearly I don't know what to look for. My doubt about that is that the shuttle put hubble into orbit, and hubble is a lot higher than the iss. 300 m/s are not enough to raise its orbit to 500x500, especially not if you also have to pay for reentry. unless that the external tank had enough of an extra fuel to support the shuttle entering a 500x50 orbit before being dropped? so it means in regular missions it was dropped with some fuel still in it? in my own rss experience, that small inclination still costed nearly 1000 m/s to correct. it's not a small amount by any mean. I myself used a slower trajectory, launching from earth when earth was passing through a planar node; then I waited a couple orbits in that parking orbit until I intersected Mars. This way I saved those 1000 m/s - I needed a few hundred m/s to syncronize my orbit for a Mars encounter, but still a large saving. But this two-times trajectory is never used in reality. what sparked my interest was exactly that I was surprised by how expensive that plane change was. And that none of the Mars missions ever mentioned that some transfer windows are cheaper than others, even though I know that if the window happens on a planar node you don't need the plane change and you can save a lot of deltaV. Generally speaking, in all my interplanetary transfers I went through great hassles to avoid paying for plane changes, because the cost was measured in km/s. and none of the planets are nicely aligned. I even named a subchapter in my mission report "there is no such thing as a simple hohmann transfer in rss" because of that. Speaking of atmospheric capture, even though the game is a lot more forgiving than reality in regard to thermal control, I found Mars too fast for aerocapture. Ok, I could perform the injection burn in the high atmosphere and save perhaps 100 m/s, but that's it. I could then slowly lower apoapsis with multiple passages, but I had to pay the cost of injection with rockets. A mars lander has a thermal shield to protect it, but I don't expect a mars satellyte to be able to aerocapture. On the other hand, Titan was extremely convenient for aerocapture. being much smaller, I got much slower at periapsis and I could aerobrake without burning. But then, I was coming in from Jupiter, or at most Ceres, so my intercept speed was a lot smaller than it would have been coming from earth; so I don't expect our real probes to be able to aerobrake at titan. so little? Once more, this is a lot less than my own rss experience. When going to any target in solar orbit, even with the best hohmann transfers, intercept speed is going to be high. ok, its perihelion is close to earth, so with the right gravity assist you can eject into a very similar orbit, with the same aphelion, you only have to slightly raise periapsis. and I suppose they picked the comet specifically because it was in the right orbit. but still, it's impressively low. starting from phobos because my mothership was refueling there, I took an earth flyby (1500 m/s) to get into a venus intercept. From venus I took a couple more flybys to lower my orbit. there I faced a conundrum; the cheapest mercury injection is by meeting mercury at perihelion, so that you have less of an aphelion lowering to pay for. But on the other hand, the cheapest injection is also on a planar node, because you can use venus gravity to pay the plane change. But the planar nodes are shifted by almost 90° from the aphelion-perihelion axis, so I had to pick one. In the end I decided to meet the innermost planet at perihelion, and I had to pay almost 3 km/s for a plane change in solar orbit. and there were still over 2 km/s of intercept speed, for a total cost of roughly 7 km/s from phobos to mercury orbit. Keeping the mothership in solar orbit and using one of its subships as an impromptu additonal stage I managed to land on mercury and return to phobos, but I was left with the feeling that I could have been more efficient in the approach. that's why I was specifically interested in that part. real mercury orbiters used ion engines, so it's going to have a different profile, but they still save as much as they can by gravity assists, and there I wanted to see if they could do it better than I did.

ever since I started playing this game and I got some skills at navigation, I started wondering about exact trajectories of actual space missions. How much remaining deltaV did the space shuttle have once in orbit? how do they deal with inclination on a mars mission? did the cassini mission use a gravity assist from titan for capture around saturn? and if not, why not? how much did it cost for the rosetta mission to rendez-vous with its target? do they use an approach more efficient than mine to approach mercury? and all those things are never, ever discussed anywhere. too technical, i guess. but even sites where they do give quite technical details on the machinery and instruments are not technical on the issue of maneuvers. if you're lucky you can see a trajectory, but you never see any kind of discussion like "here we made a burn 450 m/s prograde, 30 m/s antinormal". anyone knows if/where I can find sources on the topic?

Down is always the same direction when you are eva*. you can turn right and left, but not up and down. go ahead and try. take your kerbal eva, press space, see how it orients. move around the camera, press space again, see how it reorients. you can rotate him left and right, but UP AND DOWN WILL ALWAYS BE THE SAME DIRECTION FOR HIM. i suggest you always use space and let your kerbal reorient before giving other commands. I also suggest moving your camera so you're looking at your kerbal's back. this way you will share your kerbal's frame of reference, and it may be more intuitive for you to control. but in any case, i suggest first you make some experiments until you understand the up/down thing * exception/problem: when you are in orbit, your head point northward. when you are on the ground, your head points up. when you are transitioning from orbital to suborbital, the kerbal may rearrange himself spontaneously to change orientation. this only happens at a very specific speed, though, and you'd have to be very unlucky to stumble onto that problem.

go on map view. you should see the waypoint on ike. you can select it as target. now you will always see the waypoint on your navball, showing its direction. you may face additoonal problems if you don't have your rover driving properly set. if you are normally standing on the ground and you see the navisphere is pointing up, then it's not properly set up; click on the probe core and you should find an option for control pointing forward. so that when you move, navisphere is pointing prograde. then just point towards your target

maybe your problem is one of perspective? eva kerbals are always standing straight from ground or orbital perspective. also, they will always default to your camera orientation. you can press space to align the kerbal to your actual orientation, which I suggest you do. at this point you shouldn't have any problem using the wasd commands

Part 5: two giant holes Leaping Mantis encounters the very most difficult passages of the whole voyage, in the form of two huge holes in the ground with very sheer sides. It's hard to appreciate with the game perspective, luckily I managed to get some orbital pictures of the location

Part 4: Mountaineering galore, part 2 Yes, more traveling across the mountain range. Leaping Mantis changes biome, but the mountains are the same. I miss the variety of Slate. yeah, though I walk in the valley of really bumpy terrain, I will fear no wheel breakage: for the mantis claws are with me

so you are talking about far future engines. as far as i'm aware, kerbalism is not made with those in mind. as i said, there is a formula, and as far as I am aware (note, I am not in the dev team or anything, just a long time user) the equation is used for engines that the mod doesn't recognize. kerbalism is not even supposed to be strictly compatible with the far future stuff (while it is supposed to be compatible with near future)

i think there is a formula for allowed duration and ignitions that takes into account thrust, Isp(vacuum) and Isp(sea level). basically, the more powerful an engine is, the more it is atmospheric-optimized, the less burn time and ignitions it has. until it hits a minimum, and can't go lower

saturn, titan and a bunch of docking

Part 3: mountaineering galore, part 1 Leaping Mantis travels across the mountain range.

Part 2: launch and cruise Leaping Mantis was delivered on Wal by a relatively minimalistic sky crane. Leaping Mantis ready on the launchpad

After I had a lot of fun circumnavigating Slate's rugged terrain on an oversized rover, I decided to ramp it up by circumnavigating an even more rugged terrain: Wal. This moon of Urlum is surrounded on the equator by a massive mountain range; the plan is to make a full Elcano traveling over mountaintops, hence the title. Full title actually would be The starry heavens above me, a sturdy rover enclosing me 2: Look at me, I'm Reinold Messner!, but it was too long to fit. The circumnavigation was indeed very challenging, but it was also a lot less fun that I was hoping, due to Wal ugly and unvaried terrain. But let's go with order. Half my resons to pick up challenges is to design vehicles to tackle them and check if they are really up to it, so I must start with the rover. Part 1: designing Leaping Mantis To travel mountains in moderate gravity, I need something with a lot of traction and a lot of survivability. For traction, I have 16 ruggedized wheels; with 10.8 tons of rover mass and 0.37 g, this setup allows climbing up to 40° easily, and up to 55° with difficulty, before I have to resort to switchbacking. Which I still had to do a couple of times, because Wal is hard. For protection, I have the active system in the form of three reaction wheels; this rover can turn midair really fast, which is important when you are in a place full of bumps, with a gravity strong enough to pull you down fast, but not strong enough to keep you glued to the ground. Leaping Mantis almost always lands on its wheels. For those times when it doesn't land on its wheels, it has a minimalistic, but effective, roll cage made by the plane wheels on top and the landing struts behind. The main limitation is that if I capsize the rover while going downhill, it may survive the first hit, but it will keep falling and accelerating until eventually the roll cage is overcome. The reaction wheels are not strong enough to turn around the rover if it lands capsized, so I included a robotic arm to help with the task. I wonder why I didn't just add a couple more reaction wheels. The most important protection system, though, is the couple of plane wheels in front - which I call the mantis claws, giving Leaping Mantis its name. When I was circumanvigating Slate, the main reason for rover damage was taking bumps in the ground at high speed. If the terrain makes an angle in front of the rover, the front wheels are practically hitting a wall. To protect in this scenario, which is extremely common when climbing mountains, I devised the mantis claws. The plane wheels are in front of the others, they are a lot more resistant, and they cushion the impact. I started driving straight on against rock walls just for the novelty of being able to Finally, I always want my rovers to have a good view from the driving place, and this one is no exception. However, in this case it turned out not very useful. This kind of visual was very effective on Slate to detect hard bumps in the terrain. Here it was pointless, because the mantis claws protect effectively from those. Furthermore, Wal color palette has a lot less contrast, making it a lot harder to see where you are going. What I found really useful instead was seeing if there is a ravine over the next crest or not; and for this I need the outside perspective, to watch the rover from a elevated perspective and see more of the terrain. So, first person driving perspective wasn't used much.

yes, it is more efficient to use the ssto to bring to orbit a ship optimized for vacuum, but some people use ssto to everywhere for the challenge.

getting from jool to dres and viceversa is not too expensive, actually; from the outer moons of Jool (Bop and Pol) you can reach Dres with 1500 m/s. The problem is, why would you? Bop and Pol are both excellent refueling places, with their low gravity. If you're around Jool, you want to refuel there. From Dres to Jool is cheaper, as little as 500 m/s, because you can use gravity assists to get captured. So if you want to use Dres as a refueling base, you need to spend 2 km/s just to get to/from there. And transfer windows between those two planets aren't exactly common, it may take a decade for a round trip. If you're coming from the other direction, at Duna wanting to reach Jool, going directly is cheaper than going to dres. A duna-dres transfer always costs over 2 km/s, because inclination results in a large intercept speed at Dres. Conversely, from Duna you can reach Jool with 1 km/s, once more using gravity assists to get captured. All this makes dres useless as a refueling base. If you want to go to jool from the inner system, it is cheaper to skip dres and go to jool directly. If you are already around Jool, it is more convenient to refuel around its outer moons. if you aim for eeloo, once more jool is a more convenient stop to refuel. And if you are around Jool/eeloo and want to return to the inner system, it is cheaper to go directly to Duna. it's an unlucky position. I'm using rss, and ceres/vesta suffer from the same problems; even though they would in theory be viable spots, in practice it is better to go elsewhere.

Part 6: EVEntually you find a way when you need it MOHOst The missions for Eve and Moho reach their intended destinations. There were a lot of unplanned difficulties, especially on Eve, but all worked out in the end. In other news, the asteroid is caught without problems. The Jool mission is in jeopardy and it got lightened of its arrays like the Eeloo mission. Eve landings rarely go as planned

the best results for a long range spaceplane are achieved with a whiplash+nerv combo. the whiplash to accelerate in atmosphere, the nerv for space.

Reaching dres is fairly challenging, and expensive. Because it is so expensive to go to dres from anywhere and back, the place is virtually useless as refueling base. Once landed, it's basically mun without craters - and a more rugged terrain. It is the hardest place to drive a rover in the stock system, according to several rover junkies, because the irregular terrain breaks wheels easily. I think those are the main reasons dres is disliked; you can't use it for much, and after all the trouble of getting there it's very anticlimatic