king of nowhere

I spend a few more words on it in the dedicated mission report, part 14 and i don't have much to add. I lace the struts, then i go to the tracking station, i come back, and the struts are deleted. they are still there, but they are not connecting anything; see pictures in the mission report, it's a lot easier than describing it. however, as long as i don't leave physical range, those struts are holding, so i could place them and launch the mission immediately. i am playing caveman in that save, so i cannot send astronauts in eva; bill was launched from the surface inside a cargo bay, and once i send him back into the ship, i can't get him out again. but in a normal career you can always send your engineer out to place the struts again.

all those antennas are weak ones, incapable of connecting from duna. can't say if your relay satellite is adequate without seeing it

After one month of building the ship, finally launched my caveman Jool 5 It... doesn't look too good. Putting 20 fuel tanks in a line with the weak small docking ports - and autostruts for some reason not working - will have that effect. At least they will not interfere with engine exhaust. Those manual struts I placed will get deleted by the kraken on reloading the ship, so once I started placing them, I can't stop until I am in jool's orbit It was horribly expensive; the ship has too low thrust, and without manuever nodes I was forced to eject into solar orbit without raising the apoapsis enough to reach Jool - and then raise apoapsis from solar orbit. I left behind a trail of discarded tanks Then there's eyeballing the plane change And I missed Jool by a few million km. Which is not a bad result for burning blindly, but it still fails to accomplish its intended objective. A bit of mathematics let me know I'd hit Jool in the next orbit, though And so there I was, 11 years later, with a Jool intercept Of course, forget gravity capture, I can't use manuever nodes. I must capture with rockets from a high periapsis, and it's going to cost another fortune. In the end I got this orbit around Jool. By fuel spent, I burned up some 4000 m/s to get there. which leaves me with enough fuel that I may reasonably hope to complete the planned Jool 5 if there are no more accidents, but not enough fuel to feel confident in that.

Part 16: the day of the truth After over one month assemblying this monstruous ship, I'm about to discover whether it actually works. Turns out, Navis Sideralis Neanderthalensis works well enough to reach Jool, but poorly enough to eat through all the safety contingencies I planned, and then some.

Part 15: Navis Sideralis Neanderthalensis, ready to launch Navis Sideralis Neanderthalensis is finally completed and ready to start its mission!

oh. ok, it's bugged. i have no idea what it could be, but you could try to reinstall the game (make sure to backup your saves first)

Part 5: Thoushaltnot Pass, elevation 9200 m The next stretch of road is shorter, but even more difficult. Tamarromobile must cross the Yahel mountains.

the puff is indeed useless in the core game, excepting challenge purposes. It finds a niche use in kerbalism, though, because it's the only engine - including rcs systems - with no failure chance whatsoever. a puff is guaranteed to never, ever break and leave your ship stranded. granted, it's still crappy enough you generally prefer to carry a few redundant engines to save 1 ton of weight. my dancing porcupine rover had 2 tiny drills and one tiny convert-o-tron and it could refuel in 50 days, and still keep 3300 m/s of deltaV and the capacity to move nimbly on the ground in mid-gravity planets. it wouldn't have been possible with large drills and large convert-o-trons.

Part 4: Tygoo Valley The first part of this trip entails going south following Tygoo Valley, coasting the Yahel mountains to the east. Then the Yahel mountains turn from southward to westward, barring my way, and Tamarromobile will cross them in a deep valley

if you press caps lock, you'll see the gauges on the lower left window become blue. that makes them a lot less sensitive. I use that setting to drive rovers at high speed, where the normally responsive controls would flip them. it could help you with too responsive controls too

do you have monopropellant on board? people often drain monopropellant from their pods for reduced mass, but some mod use that for rcs, so you'd be out of fuel. I see you have lots of mods, so it's likely one of them is responsible

not sure about any of that, except 2) (no, it does not use electricity). but i can say that relay data speed is not particularly important, and you don't need to put much effort into it

Part 3: Landing, ready to commence circumnavigation Designing an asymmetric sky crane for Tamarromobile wasn't easy, but this one flies true. It adds close to 120 tons, constituting most of the mass I had to send in orbit, but it provides a very comfortable margin of 2900 m/s, a good 600 m/s more than needed. Would have probably been a good idea to pack some less fuel, actually.

way too little information to draw any conclusion. is there eva propellant available? do the kerbal have a jetpack? are you using the correct keys? does it happen always, or only in a specific case?

either the antenna on top or the seismic detector on the right could be responsible

not really. both are unstable, but we must distinguish between what we call kinetic and thermodinamic stability. thermodynamics study what is the most stable condition, what will eventually happen in an infinite time. both oxygen and chlorine, in time, will react with almost everything, so both are thermodinamically unstable. kinetics refers to the speed at which stuff happens. and while oxygen will eventually react, by a peculiar quantomechanical sheanigan of the oxygen molecule it does so very, very slowly. so oxygen is kinetically stable. If oxygen is formed, it will persist a very long time before being consumed. the same is not true for chlorine; chlorine reacts a lot faster, so it's a lot harder to accumulate. Even more important, oxygen is the third most abundant element in the galaxy, at about 1% molar fraction. I'm having trouble finding exact data for chlorine, but it's between 100 and 1000 times more rare. So having a layer of chlorine is a lot more unlikely

it's not a problem with weight. some parts are coded to not be movable in eva construction. go in the VAB, read a part description, it will say if it can be stored in an inventory, moved in eva construction, or neither. my solution for moving those parts is to give them docking ports and use a small probe with a claw on it to grab the part and move it around. if you lack the docking ports, you can add them with eva construction. but of course, you can't remove one such part that's attached normally with this way. you must plan decouplers and docking ports in advance.

Part 2: Launch and cruise Tamarromobile doesn't have to be encumbered by rockets, but I still needed to land it on Slate, hence it needed a sky crane of some sort. This brought up the weight to about 80 tons. Then it needed a way for the crew to leave Slate. Then it needed a way to return to Kerbin. And all that stuff would need to be sent to Slate in the first place. And that transfer vehicle, in turn, would need to be launched from Kerbin. So, all in all, it was still a big launch; not as big as the DREAM BIG or A'Tuin, but not much smaller. Tamarromobile also requires an oversized fairing. It weights 50 tons alone

Ever since I decided, early in my first career, that the best way to fulfill two survey contracts would be to drive a rover 600 km on Mun, I discovered that I like driving rovers, in an odd way. There is a sense of peace in cruising across the vast expanse towards your destination. And there is the sightseeing. And the sense of accomplishment in a work well done, when your capable rover performs well. Several of my missions then included long stretches of driving, whether from trying to reach every biome on the moons of Jool, or from looking for the green monoliths on every planet. A few months ago I was deep into my A'Tuin mission, an extended OPM grand tour. A wonderful mission, but very long and very taxing. I was four months into it, and still needing more months to complete, and I wanted a pause. So I stumbled on @Jack Joseph Kerman's excellent Tylo circumnavigation mission, and it hit all my major appeals: large, overengineered rovers, magnificent visuals, adventure. I decided to do a similar mission on my own. It's been my secondary mission for the last three months, I've been engaging it occasionally whenever I needed a rest from my main missions. As a target, I picked Slate, from the OPM package. Slate is a moon of Sarnus, the kerbalized version of Saturn, and it struck me when I visited it in my A'Tuin mission a month earlier; here was a moon with valleys, mountains, canyons, it was a super duper interesting place. And Sarnus in the sky, magnificent. It also had high gravity and very irregular topography, though. The rover I was using at the time, the Horseshoe, needed to be able to land and take off on its own; as a result, wheel power was sacrificed, and it was unable to move around much on the bumpy moon. I would have liked to spend more time on Slate, but I had to leave - and let's not forget the kerbalism-added radiation belts, and the fact that my rover had broken life support and could not stay on its own for more than ten hours. I decided, this time I'd do it justice Part 1: Rover and mission The most important part of such a mission is always to design a good rover. Technically, anything capable of moving will do. But in practice, you want something that's fun to drive. This generally means good performance and good looks. This time I didn't need a rover that could land and take off on its own power. I didn't need to make a light craft to carry around with a mothership. And I was inspired by @Jack Joseph Kerman's rover, which was anything but practical. So I wondered what would be fun to bring on a rover. And so Tamarromobile was born. Sightseeing was a major part of the mission, so I took multiple command pods with good IVA views, I wondered "which one of those should I use?", and the obvious answer was "all of them". I mounted the cupola on top of a rotating servo, to provide a mobile panoramic platform. Including an action key to rotate; there are some high towers around the world with rotating panoramic decks, I wanted to reproduce the idea. I also used 18 illuminators for night driving, and multiple lights around the rover to make it look good. The name Tamarromobile, roughly translatable as Pimpmobile, comes from the garish look of those lights. Of course, since I am set to driving this on a very difficult planet, I also needed to make it functional. And I learned that to drive on a bumpy place, you need wheel power, to propel you uphill. So I took some trusses moving away from the rover, to have a high stability, and I fit 36 wheels onto the frame - I'd have used more, but I ran out of space. The resulting rover is one of the most fun I ever made. It has exceptional stability (it can cut across steep cliffs, and the only times I did capsize it has been falling into craters), good acceleration, and it can climb reasonably steep slopes. 10 degrees are easy, it can go up 15 degrees with difficulty, for higher slopes it needs to start switchbacking. Well, when you want to carry a full observation deck and a Mk3 passenger bay for no other reason that it looks cool, of course peformance isn't going to be the same. For power, I used 16 advanced RTGs from near future electrics (equivalent to 64 stock RTGs) and 14k electrical charge capacity. As a testament to how difficult Slate can be, Tamarromobile still managed to run out of electricity during some particularly hard mountain passages. Tamarromobile has 130 parts and weights 47 tons. An Elcano challenge doesn't have any special requirements on how to get there - if I recall correctly, you can even alt-f12 your rover there, as long as you then perform the circumnavigation. But I decided to do a real mission, with a launch from Kerbin. Since that was too easy, I also decided I'd do a single launch, and I wouldn't use nuclear engines. I didn't want to create a new KSP folder to change the mods, so I resolved to leave kerbalism there; but I set 0% chance of critical malfunctions (so that nothing could broke that an engineer could not fix) and 100% shielding efficiency, so that radiations wouldn't bother me. At this point, the only concessions I had to make to the harsh mod was to add a couple tons in radiation shielding and some food containers.

Part 14: tanks and struts A new design of fuel tanks is implemented. It is confirmed that struts are bugged, but it should not be an insurmontable problem.

dlc robotics are pretty bugged. trying to grab a rocket in flight... i don't think it's possible, sorry

yes, that was part of what left me confused. what's the split between knowledge gained in other games that's allowed, and knowledge gained in other games that's not allowed. btw, in case you didn't notice, i answered your previous post as edit in my previous post - because i wasn't expecting a reply so soon

that rule about more information specifically mentioned mods - and I was kinda puzzled about the meaning of it in the first place. In fact, I went and asked about it (there's some posts about it in page 22). You may also notice, in this post, how I was extremely surprised by the notion that simulating may be against the challenge, as it's something I always consider implicitly to be the proper way to go. And the answers I got mentioned mods, which led me to think that only the use of mods was the problem. I disagree. Getting funds early game was boring, but not hard. Some contracts to test parts on the launchpad, some to run surveys on the ground. As soon as I launched the first orbital rocket, world first got me enough money to last for a while, and then science from X and more ground surveys did the trick**. Nothing i ever did there required testing. The major difficulty to me was the first unmanned landing on mun, which I achieved with a probe with no attitude control. And going for that was actually unnecessary. And I posted that part on december30, before having any inkling that the rules may be interpreted different from what I thought. Had I lost too many probes on Mun, worst case scenario I could have fulfilled the terrier test contract, gained some more money by easy surveys, and then take another test terrier contract to launch more probes. So, I'd say I didn't get any undue advantage. ** In my first try, I did try to get a more difficult contract for more money, and it resulted in jeb killed. I was still one hour into the career, two at most, so I just restarted it from scratch, and I learned to avoid those kind of contracts. it's mentioned in the mission report. I already said I can agree in principle; I am merely arguing that it is not unreasonable to think otherwise based solely on the rules.

No reload is one thing. No simulators is an entirely different thing. No simulators except what you could conceivably do in the game is yet something different. No reload means that you have to accept what happens. you made a blunder and killed your astronaut? too bad, you have to hire another. your mun lander exploded during atmospheric reentry? you have to start back from the launchpad. you can't point your ship towards minmus and ignite and hope to get there - well, you can, but you've got to have a B plan in case you miss. you can't find the proper periapsis for aerobraking by trial and error. No reload forces a different style of gaming. You can't launch contrived contraptions that explode 9 times out of 10. you can't make suicide burns at the last second to save fuel. you have to keep more safety margins. more fuel for every manuever. no daredevil ideas. Always a contingency plan, always an eye for safety. I'm dealing with all that, so passing "simulating" as "reloading" is a false equivalence. Then there's "no simulators". I am making a Mun lander and want to see how it performs, i have to go to mun. Build the whole ship, go there. Do notice that there's no such thing as "no simulation", because every time you launch a probe and it explodes, or every time you launch a manned rocket and it flips and you eject the manned module with the parachute to save the crew, that's basically a simulation. you were trying to launch, but you instead got a failure that taught you how to improve the design, which is basically what a simulation is. However, every time one of your rockets explodes, you have to pay the cost for it. And if you try a mun landing, you must send your rocket to mun every time. And if it's your first Mun landing, well, you can't really simulate it; if you simulate successfully, then you've landed. The effect on gameplay is that it encourages the use of reliable, time-tested designs over more experimental ones. No simulators except what you could conceivably do in the game is a special subset of simulation. It starts from the fact that you can, indeed, test your stuff - as long as you are willing to let your rocket explode every time. So, you can test your Mun lander probe. You just have to launch the rocket, go to Mun, release the lander, see it explode; then you pick up a few more "science from X" and "survey" contracts to make easy money, you build a new rocket, you send it to Mun again, release the new improved lander, see if it works. No risk involved, only time. So running a simulation of that does not give you any unfair advantage you'd have in a no simulation challenge. It merely saves time of farming money and building a new rocket every time. By that metric, you can't do any test that would endanger a kerbal, and you can't do testing in places you've not reached already. I am playing under this concept, and I'm facing a lot of additional limitations. I can't test my tylo and laythe landers on their target bodies, and as a result I have no idea how my laythe rocket will perform under laythe aerodinamics. I've been forced to make a design twice as heavy, with 4 km/s deltaV to stay safe - and I'm still not 100% sure it will work. I can't test what would be the ideal altitude to start the suicide burn on tylo, and as a result I had to make - again - a heavier design to add a lot of extra deltaV. I am taking a lot of extra problems and limitations because I'm only running unmanned tests around kerbin, so, again, it's a false equivalence to treat all simulations equally. Mind you, I am not saying you are wrong on the "spirit of the challenge". You say that part of being a caveman is not having simulators, I can accept that. But you can't say that reloading and simulating are the same thing, because they are completely different mechanisms that have very different consequences in how you approach the game. And I must point out that the rules of the challenge don't say "no simulations". Therefore it is perfectly reasonable, for someone looking for a hard challenge, to read the first post, think "ok, here it says I have to play with this difficulty settings, which include no reloading. But simulating is something else, and of course it would be allowed". A lot of those rules are kinda vague, and could use some clarifications. Is it so rare for others who took the caveman challenge to draw this conclusion? Personally, I do believe that the purpose of a challenge - any challenge - is to push the player to get creative, while forbidding simulations pushes to only use stuff you already know, it pushes against creativity, and therefore a challenge without simulations makes little sense. Though I'm gradually coming to accept that eschewing weird experiments, when coupled with other constraints, is a challenge of its own.

asia does not resemble the real one, india is all wrong. i wonder if it's an intentional easter egg or something random. draw enough random figures, and some of them are bound to resemble other things