Znath

Considering the distance from the star it'd depend on factors with Jool and the internals of the planet too. Some moons around gas giants are subjected to tidal and gravity forces that kind of crush the moon as it orbits which does generate heat. So life could possibly feed off that energy since the sun provides likely very little. Then there's also the possibility of radiation from Jool feeding energy to the moon which can be a factor. If life relied entirely on the star's energy, it'd have to be very low energy life to survive. Maybe some simple organisms at the ocean surface and other sorts of simple life on the islands. If your goal was to terraform the planet to support life, you'd need some monster reactors to heat those oceans. Something's keeping em from freezing, but at the same time they're going to be colder than...

I did an imitation Parker solar probe I named Iris which was a summon from Golden sun One series of vehicles I've called "Enerstar" as in Energy since it mines its fuel as it explores. If I change a chassis I add like mkII, E2, or something that one's up to like Enerstar S IIb from Enerstar A2E2, and from E2 to E6. The S model has a split hull, the II was for adding wing sections for the landing struts that support it while it roves the land. the b was something like adding cargo containers for spare parts. Accompanying the Enerstar is the "Magellan" series drone which has gone from I through IIIC-N on one save and finally to IIIF-N on another. the IIIF is the VTOL version, N signifies the nuclear battery. In that case the numeral is the chassis edition, A-F are the version of that chassis, then any modifiers.

Probably the nature of the prize is my thought. Since they're flying somebody to their facility and probably tours and so on. So this can require special insurance and legal issues. I always kind of err on the side of the most polite explanation so it's probably stuff like that rather than something nefarious.

Back at it again for those who saw the previous trip. I hadn't posted much on my other one but I've completed Duna, Mun, Minmus and Kerbin once But now. I've produced a new version of the Enerstar the model S Why? Because I felt I missed out on a lot of the planet my last time around. Whole continents i never explored, mountaintops un-flagged. That's why Enerstar S has 6 engines. In stress tests the engines were powerful enough to nearly lift the whole thing straight up when at full rev + boost I haven't gotten it to a "max speed" because I tend to run out of room by the time I reach 190m/s.. but the 'safe' cruising speed is more like 30-50m/s faster than my last one due to being wider and less prone to flip. Model S has 289 parts total 6 rear engines with afterburner mode for steep climbs 2 reverse engines (which are also.. reversible..) 1 cockpit, 2 crew modules, 2 large ore tanks, 2 ore processors sensors, heat, gravity, pressure, air sensors, ore scanners, and 1 top area scanner Dry weight no fuel 50 tons Full mass (ore and fuel), 100 tons https://imgur.com/a/QOzMfKv gallery location Front view Back And from the top before my first watercrossing into Sandoland Mountain climbing Top/side for a nice look at it And lastly a topdown comparison of my oldest model when I met up with where I left it More to come as I get going

That's why my Enerstars are soo big, the big converter is the only one worth using. Whenever I tried to slim it down with alternate designs, I basically just came to the same conclusion. The only change for the most part was a lower suspension for stability. Sadly my Mun mission had the old model so it was fairly top heavy. That's the worst part is the gravity is low enough to let you go flying, but high enough that you'll still break stuff unlike minimus. I used saves to at least maintain progress. Sending a bunch of 55 ton bases each time an unlucky bounce happened would drive me nuts but it seems you're doing some hardcore kind of thing.

Well the Mun is FINALLY finished! The biggest motivator was getting to the Duna mission! Lots of hazards. Lots of crashing and loading. I'm glad to be done with it. I've given sooome thought to "is it possible to bring back the Enerstars from Mun and Minimus but I don't think I'm quite willing to tackle that right now. At the moment it would take a lot. They have coupling points, which means theoretically I can attach heat shields and fly them back... but this would be really really really hard to do. And testing would also be fairly insane since I'd have to put an enerstar in orbit just to attach shields to. Possible but... how possible? Anyway, some of the final images from the gallery. Reaching the first arch was kind of exciting since it's one of the reasons I left west was to have these to look forward to early Did some close inspections Everyone had to look around, can't blame em too much after all that travel And of course the armstrong memorial. Lanica tried climbing this one too but it didn't work. And finally done! I have the full gallery here but.... it's buggy I don't know what happened but some sort of... anyway some of the images repeat. Super annoying and I tried deleting em and got sick of it and just left it alone. The next step will be the Duna mission.

A slight progress update. Other things have kind of superceded my progress but part of the problem is... the moon is SUPER boring. Sure there's craters... but there's not as much to do as far as "AHA PASSED A RIVER" or "OCEAN CROSSING" etc it's a lot of "progress progress... yep... progress" Either way here's my progress. Canyon on the back side Out of one crater into another... Hopefully I can finish this thing and get to my Duna mission! Full gallery of part 2 http://imgur.com/gallery/N5ftb

After fixing and upgrading the Enerstar to the new E7 model, it wasn't that much more work... well it was a lot of work. To get it to the next level. The main gallery. http://imgur.com/gallery/O283G Getting into orbit wasn't as bad as I thought. Of course, I was also lacking a lot of fuel to actually GET to Duna. I had to refuel the thing, That refueler was pretty rough but necessary.

I figured out why my ship was exploding at 2600m, so I decided to redesign my main ship and this is the result. I still get slippage occasionally, but I'm slamming the ground at high speed and not getting any more exploding or wheel failure. Sooooo maybe it's cured?

WOW! Uh I take back everything I said about this update! I was forced to redesign my jet vehicle and nwo it's like... 100x more reliable. Occasionally at 80-100m/s I'm encountering part failure but it's not that bad! At first I made a rocket version for the trip to mars, then I figured "Well that worked good. Lets put ramjets on it" THEN HOLY HELL ITS AMAZING! I totally THRASHED This thing! I had it blasting cross country over hills and bouncing and ramming the ground and it TOOK IT. Well except for... that one last time. But That was a long drop. And well the ejection seat isn't that quick. But aside from that, The initial prototype is a resounding success. I may do another trip around the world and go for a speed record this time!

OH boy... yea that sounds fun. That sounds about right. I made a really quick 'icbm' type rocket just to test and it seemed to work fine. So I'd bet the problem is with the main cargo itself since it's the only thing in common.

Seems any time I make a rocket, the game decides to more than rapidly explode my rocket at around 2500-2600m. Basically, I'll get close, the game will get jittery. Then the rocket goes and splits apart at insane velocities. I've seen it sometime explode so badly that parts burned up in the atmosphere. I've tested this with a few different rocket designs and looked at the post mission report and basically it shows catastrophic failure of dozens of components within less than a second. This kinda leads me to believe it's some kind of game engine _ clownery and not my design. The fact it also happens at 2600m almost all the time is telling. I did a debug with unbreakable parts and it STILL does it. I did a debug with no gravity and was able to gently hover past the 2600m mark at around 100m/s? It happens in both the 64bit version and the not-64 version. ship design doesn't seem to be a factor, but speed and/or gravity might? Note also in previous versions! This rocket worked! Now I can't get one past 2600? I don't know what's goin on.

I'm still having some weird issue where the game freezes when I reach 2600m.. At first I thought it was a ship design issue so I massively simplified the whole thing. And it just explodes. Within the course of one second everything is destroyed instantly. So I don't think it's a normal failure due to a design flaw. It's some weird rendering clownery. I did manage to get beyond this distance by turning gravity off and basically drifting past that point. So I don't know what the deal is, but any normal launch just explodes at that point. I'm using the 64bit version so maybe that's the problem? Nope. 64bit isn't the problem either. Same freezing and hyper-exploding. The parts even blast apart at like mach3.

On a near consistent basis I CANT GET ABOVE 2600m! When I reach 2600m the game farts out and my ship explodes. This is the same rocket I've gotten to minimus and the mun. I've tried lowering weight, I've tried rearranging the rocket, more bracing, less bracing?!? I've closed programs, stayed only in the game window. It just seems to always get to some point then the physics stroke out and the whole ship goes to pieces! I'm afraid to even touch my other ongoing missions because of this. I'm using the 64 bit... is that just ruined? Can we go back to 1.0 now?

Well, exciting news. For me at least. I have internet now, and the past 2 weeks of mind numbing boredom has resulted in me actually FINISHING THE TRIP AROUND THE WORLD http://imgur.com/gallery/Qnx6M main gallery Coming into view of Bigkorea Within range of KSC Magellan III makes it back. Enerstar E6 and the same crew that left in the E3 finally make it around the whole world. From KSC to the northpole through the badlands... to the south pole... and then back to KSC mostly by land with a few water crossings. The Enerstar E6 did probably 90% of the lifting. Summary E3 was the original. Lacked the (largely unnecessary) air brakes and the ability to refuel...... The E4 solved this and was delivered by air and was then refueled by ore drops. The E5 was a mistake (and didn't really adhere to the elcano guidelines... but i didn't know that at the time) it was an attempt at a faster one, but its Achilles heal was the small ore converter sucks. The E6 used some lessons learned in this like angling wheels out and lowering the center of gravity. It worked great until 1.1.. I had gotten about 90% around the world when that happened and crippled my progress. Between reloading the game and the lower speed, it took forever. Then the low speed ruined my desire to continue... I did also start 2 more missions. Mun and Minimus. The lower gravity is more forgiving of the wheel bug due to less pressure. When I finish mun and minimus, I'll begin the process of failures to reach an Enerstar to Duna.

There's some progress. Still very slow due to wheels not being wheels. But more importantly, a new development. http://imgur.com/a/aolZH Fixed some things with the Mun mission and it's a lot more stable. Only we're not going to that moon That descent actually took a ton of work. Had to disable 4 of the engines, and transfer fuel to the Enerstar.. I had to do a ton of transfers actually... Landing successful though. Had to do a lot of mining to fuel up, but I managed to get 30km the first test run. I did a speed test for fun but ... F9 Pretty much anything over 20 is sketchy because you start to fly off the surface. So it's slow going. Which is fine because the brakes don't work anyway due to gravity/bugs. The tugs I used to get there also had about 6000 fuel in them each and only used half their fuel to get there. Kind of makes me wonder how far I could get. Considering a Duna mission... It will take a LOT of modification though. Some kind of... exo structure to slow descent... nuclear .. ki yes sllsl

My largest functional rocket I made one side of it and there was no good way to make it stop spinning aside from copy-pasting the rocket to the top of the circumnavigator. It mostly stabilly launched, but I forgot some struts so the bases of the rockets wobbled a lot til i got to a good orbit. It did successfully get my 55 ton rover/base/circumnavigator to the surface of the moon. I may also take it to minimus too.

Wheels? Wheels?? The probe network.. makes sense I guess but it's also massively irritating. All my probes in orbit are mostly ore scanners... I'll have to derp up a bunch of network ones now.

I've actually made some progress albeit insanely slow due to the problems with landing gear. Main gallery i'll start putting here http://imgur.com/a/Qnx6M Oh also I had to rebuild Magellan because a bug exploded him for no reason. This new version uses the new small liquid fuel tanks and allows it to carry over twice the fuel and over twice the range due to some aero improvements apparently. I didn't even have to space-drop or carry this one. It made it all the way to Enerstar crossing the ocean itself! Scouting the first of several sea crossings to reach an area I call Bigkorea (cause it looks like a bigger version of Korea) That's it so far, so hopefully I can make it over the next couple crossings Its Munar counterpart is also making progress. For a while I was only doing the Munerstar mission because the low gravity is more tolerant of the wheel bug.

When you're out of ideas, do something you haven't done. Maybe somebody's done it, maybe nobody's attempted it. I was bored one day and decided to imitate an old prop plane with a tiny jet engine to make a plane that flies really slowly. Sure maybe you've been to Mun or Duna... but have you taken something really big there? Circled the planet/moon by land?

For super-far missions I'd say it is. I haven't gotten that deep in to where I make hyper complicated missions. That's in part because my computer originally couldn't handle building a ship that could get out that far to begin with, so I focused on aircraft, land experiments, and near-kerbin exploration. For things like circumnavigators it can be pretty handy I've found that way you're not shackled to electricity's lack of output or ground-based traction systems.

Using the breakthrough technology of the Camel I aircraft, I decided to see what would happen if I added two more engines. It can even carry payloads for.... mail delivery. Perhaps even enough mail to expand my influence.

I decided to go the other direction entirely. Instead of making a new fastest vehicle or something wildly complicated. I made a super simplistic and REALLY SLOW aircraft. It's powered by one mini jet engine and one air intake. So far I've yet to have a crash where the pilot is killed either. Of course, maybe this is why? That's about the average cruising speed. It lifts off the ground at 39m/s but can sustain flight at as low as 25. This is due to the one engine being angled downward With just the onboard fuel, it can reach the island with about 10-15 to spare. With two liquid fuel spares it (barely sustains flight) can reach the island northeast of KSC. I particularly love flying it around the space center since it barely glides around at such a slow pace.

hopefully they can use this information to find an actual fix to the problem. I've been doing tests to try and figure things out once in a while. I've noticed that the game rapidly destabilizes with continual ground travel on kerbin. It seems I can get about 8-10km before the game CTD's on me. That's at a speed of around 20-30m/s On the flip side, I've flown for well over an hour before and at high speed warp. And I've had a lot fewer crashes in air/space.

That's what I use as all my mission flags. No justification, just is.