Brotoro

I'd show you some of mine, but they occasionally do weird things that I don't understand, like begin to spin near staging, or be strangely uncontrollable during the start of gravity turn, all for no discernible reason. And I say "for no discernible reason" because I can't get the weirdness to repeat reliably. On many flights the behavior is minor or nonexistent...and on other flights the exact same rocket will deviate into weirdness. It makes my brain hurt.

I 've built space stations to be pretty before, with all sorts of solar panels and escape pods and whatnot. But my working station is shown below. I just need: 1) A place to refuel 2) A place to transfer or temporarily hold kerbals 3) A place to temporarily store some vehicle hardware on orbit. The station itself consists of the tank farm of Big Orange Tanks and RCS fuel tanks. There are two kerbal containers. The docking ports are mounted far out to give me plenty of clearance when docking. The station originally had no lights (to save on part count), but when 0.19 came out I added the small lighting rig that is on the end of the far Big Orange Tank (so that at least half of the station is lit up and docking can be done at night if I'm in a hurry). Still connected to the lighting rig is the Mini Tug that moves things around using RCS power. The docking port on the middle left has Clamp-o-tron Junior ports (which I don't intend to use too much anymore) and port adapters that can be grabbed by the Mini Tug or other ships so that their full-size docking ports could be used to dock to Juniors if needed. Three RTGs supply the station's power needs (which are very minimal). There are two ships docked there that aren't part of the station proper. On top is the 7-kerbal Crew Carrier SSTO that transfers crew up and down from Kerbin. On the right is a standard Nuclear Tug that currently has a crew module attached to the front (and is used to transfer kerbels six at a time to the Mün or Minmus where they can transfer to landers or such). Reusable Refueler ships would typically dock at the underside port to resupply the station.

I wasn't intending to take time hunting easter eggs. It was just an endurance test of the equipment that I wanted to finish as fast as possible. A lot of the time I wasn't even paying much attention to the scenery as the rover was driving along (I was reading a book or doing other things)... I could have driven right past several easter eggs and not noticed them.

The Maneuver Node Improvement mod (mentioned above) and the Haystack mod (which helps you select the ship you WANT as your target) have saved me from lots of frustration.

I'm sure it will be fixed eventually (it needs to be), but in the meantime to prevent you from pulling out all your hair, I highly recommend the Maneuver Node Improvement mod. I've seen a couple people mention this mod in YouTube videos, but they seem to have missed one of its most important features: Pressing the "o" key will open a maneuver node back up after it just collapsed. And, I love the ease with which you can switch conic draw modes on the fly with this mod.

A disadvantage of the aerospike is that it is not a thrust-vectoring motor.

You mean little rocket engines? Sure, that could do it.

Yes. In general you get better handling at higher gravity. I originally designed this particular rover for use on Eve (so that I could move a kerbal from the lakeshore lowlands to a highland area for lander ascent), and it works great there. The rover tends to spin its wheels a lot on Minmus and get poor traction, but some downward-thrusting RCS was very helpful in getting the rover to go uphill on Minmus by providing improved traction...but that's not a great solution because the RCS fuel is a limited consumable. A full set of RCS thrusters was also very helpful to me on Minmus when this rover really got airborne once... But the thrusters are pretty much useless by the time gravity gets as strong as Duna's.

Oh... I removed the MechJeb parts from those ship files so they would be stock... but I always use MechJeb to target those ships in for a landing at KSC, which would be a real pain otherwise. I have not figured out a way to get MechJeb to fly those ships on boost. It keeps wanting to fire all the motors all the time.

Here is the link to the craft file for the Single Kerbal version. But it is the version that has probe body control...since it's safer to try learning how to fly it without kerbals on board. And here is the craft file for the 3-kerbal Crew Carrier. Again, this is the probe body controlled version. I'm mostly a vanilla sort of guy, using few mod parts (except to try out cool features that wouldn't otherwise be possible, like using the Damed Robotics hinges for my folding rover). The little bit of extra oxidizer that ends up in these SSTOs is more of a nuisance than a real problem.

Fairing Factory A couple people (such as ThatBum above) have suggested that I try out Fairing Factory to make an aerodynamic shroud to cover my Folding Fido... so I gave it a try. The interface of the Web page for making the fairings was pretty straightforward, but it took me a couple iterations to get the fairing the correct size (and even then it wasn't perfect because I had to mount it a little lower than I intended, since the base piece had to go BELOW the coupler for the second stage...otherwise it produces no thrust; I found this out the embarrassing hard way). Also, the fairing is a bit larger than necessary (and covers the heat shield that is also a bit larger than necessary... but that was lucky since everything was able to still fit after I needed to position the fairing a bit lower. There weren't any instructions available (since the instructions were just a link to a KSP Forum thread that had evaporated in the recent Great Forum Wipeout). I dropped the .dll file and parts folders for the fairing in the appropriate KSP folders and the parts showed up in my Structural tab... but couldn't figure out how to mount the fairings on the rocket. After several stumbles, I finally noticed the 2-meter base piece that was also now in with the Structural parts, and I was able to connect everything. Below is the rocket on the launch pad as it first appears. You'll notice that the Fido's wheels (which have not been folded yet) stick out through the thankfully insubstantial fairing. I used the 7 and 9 keys to fold up the wheels. I could zoom in a get a clipped view inside the fairing to see that the wheels were folded in the correct position. Below is a picture of the liftoff. The rocket looks a lot like a Rocket Propelled Grenade...but it DOES look more aerodynamic. I guess I should have added nose cones to the tops of the boosters instead of leaving them embarrassingly flat. Of course, the fairing is there for aesthetic reasons only; it does not reduce drag in the current version of the program (and it does add weight). But it's there to be pretty. Admire it. Go ahead and complement it on its looks; fairings like to have their self confidence bolstered, too, you know. The rocket I'm using is my Reusable Rocket that has all of its parts recovered at the KSC. Below we see the side boosters dropping off at 18,000 meters, and then the sustainer can start a belated gravity turn. This is not an efficient trajectory, but fuel is cheap compared to rocket hardware. (Yes, I know those boosters will despawn before they land, but if you were to follow them down they do indeed land safely on KSC property). Once the initial turnover was complete and the rocket was above most of the atmosphere (at around 45,000 meters), I jettisoned the fairing. As you can see in the image sequence below, the separation leaves a bit to be desired. The fairing halves don't blow away far enough, and they go scraping down the side of the rocket. Luckily the interaction with these ghostly parts has no negative effect on the rocket (other than maybe sending a chill down its spine). The departure of the fairing also reveals the upper stage that will boost the Fido to the Mün, which was covered by the lower part of the fairing. Below, the rocket has achieved a stable 120-km orbit and the sustainer separates. (The sustainer will go on to retro fire and return to a landing at the KSC; this mission has left plenty of fuel in the sustainer's tanks that it will be able to do a landing on its rocket flame and not need its parachutes.) Meanwhile, the Poodle engine of the upper stage will push the Fido off to the Mün. Here we see the upper stage firing again to put the Fido into Münar orbit ("Münar orbit insertion? Moi?"). I did the burn somewhat early just for the photo op of having Kerbin in the background. I presume NASA does not necessarily time their orbital burns specifically to allow for good pictures. Because the far side of the Mün was illuminated, I decided to land near the mouth of the big canyon that juts off the large Mare on that side. The upper stage engine was fired one last time to do the initial deorbit burn (so that it would crash), and then the Fido and sky crane separated. Below we see the Fido coming in along the canyon. The heat shield (useless over the airless Mün) has been jettisoned and can be seen heading off for its own impact. The next picture shows the Fido just after touchdown as the separated sky crane heads back up under very low thrust. And the Fido is off to explore the canyon! Driving is certainly easier on the Mün than on Minmus. I was surprised at how hilly the terrain was outside the entrance of the canyon (I couldn't even see the mouth of the canyon from the landing site because of intervening ridges). Note that this version of the Folding Fido has two single-kerbal capsules, but this was an unkerballed mission. After I was driving along for a few minutes, I heard the (rather obnoxious) noise of the little 24-77 engines of the sky crane. Uh oh...it was coming back in for impact, and was close enough to hear (not that you should be able to hear it on the airless Mün... but there's no uses screaming about that, since nobody will hear that in Space either). I zoomed out and panned around, and I was able to snap the picture below of the sky crane impacting over half a kilometer away. The Fido is the little thing in the center of the picture. I was generally driving along at about 22 m/s... slower uphill, faster downhill. I jacked up the chassis a little so that I could safely use 2x time warp while driving. Note that you aren't offered the option of using physical time warp on the Mün as you are on Kerbin or Eve, but you can force physical time warp by pressing the Alt and > keys. After several minutes of driving, I topped the last ridge and got a clear view of the canyon. I was a bit disappointed that I didn't see Scott Manley's Mün truck coming along hauling his moonbase structures to their new location...but you can't have everything. Brotoro's KSP Web Pages.

Perhaps you saw the base of the Neil Armstrong monument?

FRANK is one bad-ass robot. I like the original video where he gets revealed a little at a time.

I have considered this. What I WANT is a rear heat shield part that can protect the rear end of a rocket. This thread here discusses the desired part in detail, but the image below gives you a quick idea of what I want: BUT, If all I could have was an inflatable heat shield like the ones that I've already seen, it could potentially be accommodated on my intermediate SSTO rocket design that has two rocket engines and four jet engines. If those engines (including the rocket engines) are mounted radially around the 2.25-meter tank, the bottom of the tank would be left free for mounting a "standard" inflatable heat shield. But I would prefer that Squad make a toroidal heat shield design.

I tried using the TurboJet engine instead of the regular jet engine early on, but the result I got was almost the same (even a little worse) with the TurboJet. I think this may be because the jet engines on this rocket spend most of their time working at low altitudes while the slow-moving rocket is gaining altitude, and the regular jet engine is more efficient at those altitudes and speeds. The passes through the higher altitude range of the jet-powered flight relatively quickly (since it's moving faster by then...although not all that fast). So, unlike a spaceplane SSTO, this ship does not spend a lot of time in the high altitude, high-speed region where a TurboJet would excel. I don't use jet fuel tanks because there is no jet fuel tank small enough to be of use for this rocket. This jet engines in these designs use very little fuel during the flight. For the single-kerbal version, the jet engines are only used for about 3 minutes 20 seconds. In that time they use up only 40 liters of fuel. As a result, I spend the rest of the flight carrying around the 32.7 liters of unused oxidizer. If I used jet fuel tanks on the rocket, I'd have a much larger amount of unused jet fuel to carry around because all the jet fuel tanks available have way more than 40 liters of fuel. What I would like, of course, is to be able to just leave 33 liters of oxidizer out of the tanks prior to liftoff.

Single-Stage Stuff A while back I decided to make a Single-Stage-To-Orbit spaceship, since I had never made one before. At first I fiddled with some spaceplanes. This was the first time I'd ever visited the Spaceplane Hanger. I managed to kill more kerbals in 20 minutes than I've killed in years of game-time flying rockets, so I concluded that spaceplanes were not for me. So I went back to the VAB, and tried slapping some jet engines on a rocket to see if I could make that work. The image below shows the family of test vehicles I made in the process of finding out how high jets engines can operate before they flame out and start the ship tumbling around (since the two engines never seem to flame out at the same time), and what kind of flight profile is needed to get into orbit. The jet engines didn't seem to do much in the way of gaining a lot of speed (which I gather is what they do with a spaceplane SSTO), but they serve to get you above the thickest part of the atmosphere and give you a little upward and sideways velocity. Unless I'm doing this wrong. But it wasn't too hard to get my first ship into orbit, and to bring it back down intact under parachutes for a landing on its legs. Then I tried a bit more fuel...but ran up against the limit that the two jet engines could lift. I briefly tried four jet engines, which accelerated upward smartly, but had the embarrassing result that the ship broke apart under its parachutes (pilot Dilger Kerman was fine...but the KSC administrators did not appreciate getting bombed by the lower section of his rocket). I tried a little "air-hogging" by giving each engine two ram-air intakes, but did not carry this to unreasonably extremes that I gather some people have tried. And after getting a design that could reach orbit well, I tried to see how big of a payload I could deliver to orbit with the ship...first with a small science package satellite, and then with some fuel tanks. So here is the SSTO Test Version 1g, with optional payload attached. Three FL-T800 fuel/oxidizer tanks, and one FL-T400 fuel/oxidizer tank (important: the side tanks feed into the central tank). Two basic jet engines, each with two ram air intakes (since this looked reasonable). The ram air intakes were attached with the magic of cubic struts. One LV-T45 rocket engine, a standard sized ASAS unit, a single-kerbal capsule (which can separate and return under its two parachutes if necessary), two more parachutes mounted on the central main tank, one docking port, four heavy-duty landing legs, and three ladders in case the kerbal actually wants to get out after landing. Action groups were set up to toggle the two jet engines on/off, and the central rocket engine on/off. And a Jeb 9000 control interface was added to handle the precision targeting of the landing location. The first part of the flight is handled mainly by the jet engines. These need to be activated on the pad and allowed to spool up to speed before the launch clamps are released. These engines tend to run quite hot... the overheat warning is your constant companion during the boost. My first surprise came when I added more fuel tanks and the rocket got too heavy...then the jet engines struggled to the point where they exploded. Needless to say, this was also an unexpected surprise for Dilger, but he landed the ship handily on its rocket flame. The speed of the rocket needs to be kept above 80 m/s or so once the engines get hot...otherwise they will explode. It would be nice if I could give a little push with the rocket motor to help them along, but there is no separate throttle control for the jet engines and rocket engine, so it's a matter of briefly toggling the rocket engine on to speed up the ship and prevent the jet engines from overheating. Several intermittent bursts of the rocket engine can keep the jet engines sitting near the red line until the speed increases sufficiently that the rocket engine is no longer needed for this. I generally use an initial blast from the rocket engines just after I release the launch clamps to push the ship up to around 50 m/s... and then it can usually get to 80 m/s before the jet engines overheat and explode. With the two ram air intakes on each jet engine, the engines will operate to a little over 20,000 meters (this assumes the ship is moving more or less into the airstream, and not at too high of an angle of attack). You can watch the Air Intake resource to see when it drops down to 0.09, after which flameout will soon happen. I start the ship in a slight gravity turn starting at about 7,000 meters (about 10 degrees), and increase the tip over to 15 degrees at around 15,000 meters. The jet engines use fuel from the tanks, but not oxidizer...so you end up with an excess of oxidizer. But, the amount of fuel used by the jet engines is quite small. Still, it would be nice if I could choose to have less oxidizer or more fuel to begin with, since that excess oxidizer is just dead weight. At 20,000 meters, I use the action group keys to toggle on the rocket engine and toggle off the jet engines. I then start increasing the gravity turn to 45 degrees and beyond, keeping the apoapsis point safely ahead of the ship in the Map view. The jet engines are dead weight for the rest of the flight, but they apparently have helped enough to make this worth it. Alternately, I have had good results using a little more turn-over prior to 20,000 meters...but you can't turn over too much (since the jet thrust is holding the rocket up, unlike a spaceplane SSTO that has wings to provide lift). At the higher angles, I give occasional bursts from the rocket engines for a few seconds to keep the upward momentum going. At 18,000 meters, I turn on the rockets engines and keep them on after that. This more-angled trajectory allows the jet engines to operate longer, so it gives better efficiency. I have tried the Turbojet engines instead of the regular jet engines, but I do not get as good of results with the Turbojets. First of all, they are heavier. Secondly, the ship spends most of its time on the jet engines at lower altitudes (again, unlike a spaceplane SSTO) where the regular jet engines are more efficient -- it flies through the high-altitude region of the jet engine operation rather quickly. Here are two views of the SSTO ship in orbit at 105 km. The ship can reach a circular orbit of 500 km altitude and still have enough fuel to deorbit. But that would use up almost all of the fuel onboard, and your only landing option at that point would be to use the parachutes. From a low orbit, the ship has enough fuel that it can return and land on its legs using rocket power. I let MechJeb target the ship into KSC, and then either MechJeb or I can land it on its flame. Dilger can easily handle the ladders, which is good since a fall from that distance might be deadly. This particular landing was from a 105 km orbit, and the ship still had 86 units of fuel left after landing. It typically takes about 35 units of fuel to deorbit the ship and target it for the KSC. If the ship goes out to a 500 km orbit, or if it carries a substantial payload into orbit, then landing on rocket power is not an option. In the picture below, the SSTO is lifting a small refueling pod into orbit. The refueling pod is made up of a FL-T200 tank, a FL-R25 RCS tank, a QBE probe core, two small solar panels and a battery pack to power the probe core, RCS thrusters for maneuvers, and docking ports on each end. The SSTO ship can put this refueling pod into a 125 km orbit and have enough fuel left over to return for a parachute landing. When making a parachute landing, the two chutes that are mounted at the top end of the main fuel tank are deployed first. The timing of this deployment depends on whether the targeting for the landing location appears to be going a little long (deploy early) or short (deploy late). Do NOT deploy the two parachutes on the capsule yet. If you deploy all four chutes high up, the force of full-deployment at 500 meters can pull the ship apart. The pilot will survive on the two capsule chutes, and the lower part of the ship can probably also survive on its two chutes, but it looks embarrassing on the Kerbal Nightly News. When the ship reaches 500 meters AGL, the chutes will fully open. Then the two chutes on the capsule can also be deployed to help slow the descent. And now would be a good time to lower the landing gear. If you have some fuel left, you can use the rocket engine to brake to a gentle landing. But be careful not to slow to a stop in the air, or your chutes will vanish... and then you better hope you have enough fuel to complete the landing on the engine flame. I've cleverly had to do this few times. And while precision in landing is a great thing, you CAN get a little too close to the launch pad. In the flight shown below, the ship came down near the edge of the launch pad structure... ...and barely managed to not tip over. This was the closest Dilger came to getting blown up in this series of test flights. Later Update Below is the slightly modified 1he version. It has a probe body attached so that the ship can take a kerbal to orbit and then return empty (or vice versa). The option of separating the capsule has been eliminated (I now trust this design...and the abort mode for a problem during launch is just to cut engines and deploy the chutes in sequence as needed, then land on the legs with a little rocket assist because the ship will be heavy with fuel). RCS quads have been positioned so they don't try to cause rotations while doing translations (which save on RCS fuel) for space station docking. I have been able to get this version into a 120 km circular orbit with just over 500 m/s of delta-V remaining. This was accomplished by flying the more-angled trajectory described earlier. 3-Kerbal Crew Carrier My original version of the SSTO ship used a single-kerbal capsule and two jet engines, so the upscaled Crew Carrier was built using a 3-kerbal capsule and six jet engines. As before, each jet engine has two ram air intakes (since it fits and seems physically reasonable). The original used one LV-T45 vectoring rocket engine, so the Crew Carrier uses three LV-T45 engines. It has RCS for orbital rendezvous and docking. It has parachutes and landing legs and MechJeb targeting for landing back at KSC. The test flights for the ship were conducted by Commander Nedmy Kerman, Pilot Merfred Kerman, and Flight Attendant Rodgan Kerman. Just kidding, Rodgan! Oh, how the guys had such fun picking on Co-pilot Rodgan. While the ship is still safely secured in the launch clamps, the throttle is pushed to maximum and the jet engines are activated by pressing a switch with a big "2" on it. After the jet turbines spool up to full speed, the launch clamps are released at the same time the rocket engines are fired by pressing the button with the big "1" on it. The rocket engines are only on for a short while as the ship clears the tower and speeds up to 50 m/s, when the "1" is pressed again to switch off the rockets. Then it's up to the fuel-sipping jet engines to very slowly accelerate the ship, and, more importantly, lift it above the lower, dense layers of Kerbin's atmosphere. At 10,000 meters, a 10-degree turn is initiated. At 18,000 meters, the rocket engines are turned on and kept on by pressing the "1" button. At 20,000 meters the "2" button is pressed to shutdown the jet engines before they flame out. Then the gravity turn begins in earnest. Depending how how good the pilots are that day, the ship could have anything from 300 to 500 units of fuel left after circularizing a 120 km orbit. At least this was true of the pilots used to test-fly this ship. Below we see the Crew Carrier 1 about to dock with the ancient Tanker Station 1 in a 200-km orbit. Depending on how much fuel the Crew Carrier made it to orbit with, it can reach an altitude of 400-500 km or so. Just be sure you keep enough fuel to deorbit (it takes about 130 units of fuel to deorbit from a 120 km orbit). The other ship that is docked to the Tanker Station is a "Fat Man" crew transfer vehicle that was launched long ago on an expendable launch vehicle. On board are Kelby Kerman, Dunsel Kerman, and Lembart Kerman, who got assigned to this mission when they kept coming up in the rotation instead of the crew I wanted. I suppose I should let them out of purgatory soon. There is no crew in the tanker's capsule, since they were extracted years ago when the second tank docked (and had a landing capsule for them). After retro fire a clever MechJeb-assisted distance away from the KSC, the Crew Carrier drops backwards onto KSC property. If you have sufficient fuel and the skills of Jebadiah Kerman (or his software equivalent), you can land the Crew Carrier on its rocket engines. But that's more excitement than I typically care for...and we've carried along all these darn parachutes, so we might as well use them. The chutes anchored the the top of the lower main tank are deployed first so that structural component can take the main deployment stress when the chutes fully open at 500 meters. Then the other two sets of chutes at the top of the upper tank and on the capsule are deployed to slow the descent. (I have two chutes on the capsule because the abort procedure for this ship is to simply shutdown all engines and deploy chutes in a judicious manner...and I wanted to be sure there were at least a couple on the capsule in case things come apart.) Although the ship can land safely under the chutes, it's polite to return it bent as little as possible (otherwise the ground crew gets all snotty and is less likely to share their Beemans with you), so any fuel left in the tank should be used to cushion the touchdown. The ladder is a bit circuitous, but even if the kerbal is clumsy and manages to exit the capsule without holding on to the ladder (we're looking at YOU, Rodgan), their fall is cushioned by the apparently-soft ram air intakes, so they can survive. A second varient of the Crew Carrier was also tested. It incorporates a 4-kerbal hitchhiker container in case the need arises to move seven kerbals at once. This varient can make it to 120 km orbit and return (parachute landing only, of course...there will not be fuel for a rocket flame landing), and it should only be sent to retrieve kerbals from higher altitudes if there is also some fuel there that it can have for the return. Both versions of the Crew Carrier were also constructed in probe-controlled variants so that the ship can be launched empty to retrieve kerbals from orbit. Laythe SSTO Most recently, I've been testing a version of the SSTO for my upcoming long-term mission to set up a base on Laythe. I originally planned to send one of the 3-kerbal Crew Carriers there to shuttle kerbals down and up from the surface as needed, but the 3-kerbal SSTO is a fairly heavy ship, and I wanted something lighter (just to make it easier to ship it to Laythe). I considered using my 1-kerbal version of the SSTO, and make multiple trips (it turns out that three trips with the 1-kerbal version uses a bit less fuel than one trip of the 3-kerbal version)... but more trips is more tedious flying for me, and more chance of accidents. So I considered stacking extra single-kerbal capsules on top of the original SSTO... at 0.8 tons each, that would be an additional 1.6 tons, which the vehicle should be able to just barely handle. But then I thought, why use a total of 2.4 tons of capsules (three of the single capsules), when I could use a 2.5-ton Hitchhiker Container and carry FOUR kerbals? So I tried it out: The version above can BARELY make it into a 90-km Kerbin orbit ...and Laythe is a bit easier, so it should be able to make the trip down and up starting with a full load of fuel. But it looks too non-aerodynamic to suit my tastes (and adding tapering transitions makes it too heavy to reach orbit. So I built an intermediate version of the SSTO with four jet engines and two rocket engines and a Hitchhiker Container: The intermediate version above can make it into Kerbin orbit just fine. There is a bit of a problem with flying these Hitchhiker versions compared to the capsule versions: the ship no longer has capsule torque to help you steer it. As a result, the Hitchhiker versions must be flown using RCS control. The ship above has four RCS tanks down underneath by the two rocket engines (to decrease the frontal area and decrease drag...once the program actually cares about such things. But I'm trying to be more aerodynamic here). But it's flyable with RCS. When I have a successful SSTO, I always try LESS FUEL to see how it works. The version below can barely make it into a 90-km Kerbin orbit (although the return might be iffy because there is not a lot of fuel left to target your reentry). But computer simulations indicate it can handle the Laythe run down from orbit and back up to orbit with some fuel to spare. It weighs in at 30.72 tons fully fueled, and only 14.72 tones empty... which my Interplanetary Tug should be able to handle nicely for a delivery to Laythe. Note that when using this as a Laythe shuttle, it leaves the Laythe orbital space station fully fueled, and then uses some fuel to deorbit and target the landing. With all eight chutes deployed, it comes down at just over 10 m/s with all that fuel on board, so some additional fuel must be used in a short braking burn just before touchdown. But at that point the ship still has enough fuel to return to an 80-km orbit around Laythe with fuel to spare. Brotoro's KSP Web pages.

I haven't tried this version of the rover as extensively as the non-folding version that I used to drive around Duna (see this thread). The non-folding version cruises over flat ground at between 20 and 30 m/s... but it can reach speeds over 60 m/s going downhill (which I believe is the blowout speed for those wheels). The folding version is basically the same configuration, so I would expect similar speeds. BUT you must be more careful with the folding version because if you hit bumpy ground, it will flex more than the non-folding version, so you could bottom out and cause damage. Leaving the sides partially folded helps prevent this. Also, the non-folding version of the rover can be used a 4x physical time warp over sufficiently level ground. But the (I presume bug) that causes rovers to apparently weigh more at time warps will press the more-flexible folding frame downward much more, and can result in damage when it bottoms out. Again, only partially deploying the sides can help, but 4x time warp is too much for this rover even then. So while it may be able to do about the same speeds as the non-folding version, you do not have the option of running it at the highest time warp (so your drive will be longer).

Designing Planets BROTORO: Tonight on Kerbal Space Program Forum I'd like to welcome our special guest, Mr. Slartibartfast, who has consented to talk to us this evening about solar system design and construction. Thank you very much for being with us today! SLARTIBARTFAST: Well, I don't normally do interviews, but when a very important client asked for a representative from the Commercial Council of Magrathea, it happened that I was the only one who'd ever talked to an Earthman, so I got the job. It's all a bit of a bother, really. BROTORO: A very important client? Who would this very important client be? SLARTIBARTFAST: I'm sorry, but we do not disclose information about our clients. They are all very wealthy and powerful beings, and I'm sure you'll understand that they enjoy their anonymity. But I will say that you'd never have gotten this interview if the Mice were not very big fans of space travel. BROTORO: Mice are big fans of space travel? SLARTIBARTFAST: Certainly. Why else would they have arranged to be some of the first passengers ever flown in a rocket? But I've said more than enough on that subject already. BROTORO: Ah. OK, let's get right to tonight's topic. Is there any truth to the rumor that Magratheans did the design and construction work for Squad on the Kerbol planetary system? SLARTIBARTFAST: I've already told you, we don't discuss our clients. BROTORO: Well then, hypothetically speaking, could you tell us if it's possible to design a solar system with these specifications? (BROTORO hands Slartibartfast a sheet of paper. Slartibartfast glances over it briefly.) SLARTIBARTFAST: Ah, yes... Miniature planets are adorable, aren't they? They were all the rage with a certain portion of our clientele. BROTORO: So it's possible to construct a solar system matching those specifications? SLARTIBARTFAST: Certainly. We Magratheans pride ourselves on being able to build any kind of planet. BROTORO: But look at the densities of those planets. Most of them have densities greater than any known element. SLARTIBARTFAST: That's not a problem. We use black holes. BROTORO: Black holes? But wouldn't a black hole inside a planet just swallow it? SLARTIBARTFAST: No, no. We use spherical force field bubbles centered around small black holes. We can adjust the mass of the black hole and radius of the force shell to get any planet density desired, then cover it with the mantle and crust material of the client's choice. It's a very flexible system. BROTORO: So you're saying that Kerbin is mostly hollow inside, with some old rocky material thrown on top? SLARTIBARTFAST: No. More like the inner one third is hollow. And I assure you we use only the finest ingredients when building our planets. BROTORO: Wouldn't these force field bubbles require energy to maintain their structure? SLARTIBARTFAST: Certainly they require energy. We just allow a small amount of matter from the lower mantle to trickle through openings in the sphere. As the matter falls into the gravity well of the black hole, the energy equivalent to a sizable fraction of its rest mass is released as radiation before it crosses the event horizon. That radiated energy is captured and used by the force field bubble, which also acts as a Dyson sphere. BROTORO: Dyson sphere? So do Magratheans know about Freeman Dyson? SLARTIBARTFAST: Who? You misunderstood me. I used the Magrathean term for "spherical mega-structure that captures all radiated energy from a central power source," and that little fish I put in your ear translated the concept into a term you are familiar with. I've never heard of a freemandyson. BROTORO: Ah, so that's what the fish was for. I thought it was a quaint Magrathean greeting or something. SLARTIBARTFAST: You're sitting there wearing a digital watch, and you think my people are quaint? BROTORO: But wait... If Kerbin has no liquid iron core inside, how could it have a magnetic field? SLARTIBARTFAST: Does Kerbin have a magnetic field? BROTORO: Um... well, I'm not sure. The developers haven't given us any magnetometers yet, but I just assumed it did. SLARTIBARTFAST: And it well might. Magnetic fields are easy. We would just need to orbit a ring of charged matter around the black hole inside the force sphere. Adjusting the charge on the matter can give the client any magnetic field desired, and the inclination of the ring can offset the magnetic pole from the rotational axis if desired. Any field strength can be tailored for the client, although it's easier for us if they want a simple dipole. Haven't you wondered why Jool has such a weak magnetic field for a jovian planet? BROTORO: It does? SLARTIBARTFAST: Of course. If it didn't, the planet would have powerful radiation belts, and any kerbal you sent in there for aerobraking would be late. BROTORO: Late? SLARTIBARTFAST: Yes. As in, "The late Jebediah Kerman." Ah hum. BROTORO: . . . SLARTIBARTFAST: I don't understand why Earthmen always stare at me blankly when I use that line. BROTORO: I'm just wondering how you know about Jebediah Kerman. SLARTIBARTFAST: It's the Babelfish again. I just used the Magrathean word for "bad-ass space pilot," and the fish did the rest in conjunction with your primitive brain. BROTORO: Well. What about Kerbol, the sun of the system? How could something with that low of a mass possibly support thermonuclear fusion? SLARTIBARTFAST: I'm not part of our stellar division... I work on the planets, and I specialize in doing coastlines... but there are two different ways we handle miniature stars. BROTORO: One way involves black holes? SLARTIBARTFAST: Both ways do. In one method, we simply make the force sphere around the black hole small enough that the density and pressure in the overlying hydrogen-rich material is sufficient to maintain thermonuclear reactions at the rate needed for the desired luminosity. The second way involves simply letting sufficient matter flow through the force sphere and into the black hole to provide the desired luminosity. BROTORO: Which method did you use for Kerbol? SLARTIBARTFAST: I didn't say we made Kerbol. I was speaking hypothetically. Why don't you just measure the neutrino flux coming out of Kerbol... then you could tell if there are fusion reactions going on inside of it. BROTORO: Well... again... we don't have any neutrino detectors as yet. SLARTIBARTFAST: You really do need to take more interest in your greater environment. If you're not paying attention to things outside your planet, terrible things could happen to it. BROTORO: Yes, thank you. But what about Minmus? SLARTIBARTFAST: What about it? BROTORO: The developers tell us that it's made of ice, but that can't possibly be the case given its distance from the sun, can it? SLARTIBARTFAST: Kerbin, like your own planet Earth, is located at a distance from the sun where the equilibrium temperature is below the freezing point of water. If not for their natural greenhouse effects, the oceans on both bodies would be frozen over. The temperature is even lower when you are dealing with a surface that has a very high albedo, like ice, since that reflects away most of the incoming energy. BROTORO: Yes, yes, I know all that. But Minmus has no atmosphere. Its surface is in vacuum. And water ice would sublime directly into a gas and escape into space at the equilibrium temperature of Minmus. Minmus should be a gigantic comet! SLARTIBARTFAST: Ah, I see. Young Hargledertfirst of our small moon department solved that problem. BROTORO: Did he? SLARTIBARTFAST: She. She engineered a microorganism that was active in the small moon's water during its early warm phases. The organism excretes a clear polymer as a waste product...kind of like a resin. All of the ice on the small moon contains a small percentage of this polymer. When the ice is exposed to vacuum, the water will indeed sublime away, but the polymer is left behind and forms a barrier to further sublimation. And any future impacts or landing rocket flame scars on the surface are self-healing once the vapor clears. BROTORO: Really? And that's what you did for Minmus? SLARTIBARTFAST: I was speaking hypothetically. BROTORO: And I suppose you'll tell me that Eve is purple because of a little food coloring. SLARTIBARTFAST: Indeed. It takes a very small percentage of certain chemical compounds to give a planetary surface or atmosphere a desired color. You'd be surprised how many clients are upset if they don't get just the right shade of purple or some other color in their skies. We are very good at this, and all the chemical stains and particulates are USDA approved. BROTORO: You know about the USDA? Oh, wait...it's the Babelfish again, isn't it. SLARTIBARTFAST: Indeed. BROTORO: So... if you had to do it all over again, are their any changes you'd make to the Kerbol system? SLARTIBARTFAST: Well, yes, now that you've asked. I think Kerbin would look much better with more fjords on the coastlines. I always try to put a lot of fjords on a planet, but the managers always say it's too much. A lot of my work got erased. I was quite incensed about that. BROTORO: Hypothetically speaking, you mean. SLARTIBARTFAST: Um. Yes. Of course. BROTORO: Well, our time is up. We really appreciate you coming here today. So long, and thanks for the fish. SLARTIBARTFAST: No, I'm afraid I must take the Babelfish back with me. BROTORO: Oh, please? I think it would be very useful *arrgh* Hey! SLARTIBARTFAST: Flerti slark tilligert sibilas fer torrn. Ser fasto gerhs. BROTORO: Yeah. Whatever.

The real Apollo Lunar Rover was folded up and stored inside one of the wedge-shaped segments of the octagonal structure of the Lunar Module's descent stage. I wanted a little two-kerbal moon rover for my LM, so I attached it to the side close to to location where the real one was stored. The kerbals climb onto the rover and hold onto ladder segments to ride it. I have my rover control keys remapped to ijkl, and I find that the kerbals tend to slide up the ladder segments when I turn the rover left or right with the j & l keys... but if I turn the rover using the q & e keys (which still rotate the rover around its vertical axis), the kerbals do NOT slide up the ladder segments. Below, the rover being ejected off the side of the LM:

Replacing some vanished threads: My engineering report about the capabilities of the new rover parts. Driving Duna I wanted to give the new stock rover parts a real workout, so I decided it would be fun to drive all the way around a celestial body. At first I thought Minmus might be nice, because it's small, so I wouldn't have to go a long distance... but then I rejected that idea, because it's small, so it wouldn't be that big of a challenge. I wanted to circumnavigate a WHOLE PLANET. So I chose to drive around Duna. I would use the same Fido KE rover that I designed for Desdin to use on Eve, since it's meant to be fast and safe. I decided to do the mission un-kerballed even though having one of those wheel-fixing accessories on board would be handy, I didn't want to have to go through the bother of sending a ship to bring the kerbal back home to Kerbin. No, I wasn't doing this to explore, or search for kethane, or hunt down anomalies... this was just an endurance test. I made the trip for the same reason Roald Amundsen went to the South Pole, and Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeagar flew non-stop around the world without refueling, and Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed to the summit of Mount Everest... just because I could. I wanted to see cool Dunan terrain, and see how long the trip would take. Assuming I could make it at all. Below we see liftoff of the Fido KED ("D" for Duna) on top of a standard Mark Twain launcher. This is more power than needed, but the nuclear transfer stage would be left in Duna orbit with lots of fuel as a general purpose space tug for any future missions. The launch got a little squirrly a while before separation of the side boosters when the rocket wanted to wobble and cone... but things settled down nicely after the side boosters separated. The Fido and interplanetary transfer stage are placed in 115 km orbit with plenty of fuel to spare in the sustainer stage so that it could be deorbited under probe control. I actually had a bother of a time laying out the trajectory to Duna. The Mün was sitting right in the the way of my perfect trajectory. I stared at it for many orbits, trying to catch its eye so that it would move out of the way, but it was just ignoring me and hogging the lane. After a couple days it did move on, and I settled for less-than-optimal transfer orbit. The trans-Duna-injection burn took a little over 10 minutes. Happily, the program let me click on the ship's interplanetary transfer orbit this time, so I was able to do midcourse burns... but I was getting weird results at Duna, with the encounter flickering in and out of existence several times a second. When I got in close, it turned out that Ike was sitting squarely in my inbound lane, so it may have been the cause of the weird flickering. Anyway, a couple burns were used to skirt Ike and target my Duna periapsis to 13.3 km, ready for aerobraking. The aerobraking itself was a bit of a disappointment (see below), since I got no visible entry-effect flames even streaking through Duna's atmosphere at interplanetary speeds. Come on, Duna... show some effort here! But the braking was successful in capturing the ship into an orbit with an apoapsis of 973 km. On the way out to apoapsis, I separated the transfer stage from the Fido, and then separated the decoupler from the transfer stage to reveal its front docking port (which it would use in its future life as a general purpose tug). Just as with the Eve flight, the separated transfer stage (which henceforward shall be referred to as the "Duna Tug") started rotating for no good reason, reaching a rate of over 5 rpm. Time warp would freeze the rotation, but it would start up again later. With RCS and ASAS, I could control the Duna Tug well enough to do a prograde burn at apoapsis and put it into a 980 km equatorial parking orbit. After bringing the Fido to Duna and circularizing its orbit, the tug still had 15% of the fuel left in its rear drop tank, and all other tanks full, so it has plenty of fuel for its life as a tug. Later experimentation in Kerbin orbit showed that the phantom force causing the spin somehow resulted from the way the OKTO probe body, two RTGs, and forward docking port were put together (the program probably just did not like the way the parts were clipping, even though the VAB was happy to let me attach them that way). By attaching the RTGs further down on the ASAS unit, the phantom torque disappeared. Since this Weird Physics is no fault of mine, I'll use persistence file editing later to replace the Eve and Duna tugs with versions that don't suffer from this bug. But the werid rotation is why the tug is flipped 180 degrees away from the Fido in the picture below. Anyway, back to the other parts. The decoupler and the Fido were left in the long elliptical orbit to head back down for more aerobraking. The coupler would just be allowed to decay and crash onto Duna (since it would do this anyway, I just ended its existence). The Fido used two more aerobraking passes and a short burn to put it into low orbit over Duna's equator. Then I picked a cool-looking landing site and sent it on down. Below is the retro burn. Again, there were no exciting entry flames visible. This was a great disappointment to the heat shield, which felt it made a long trip for nothing. Below, the ship is descending into a valley with cool hills. The Fido and its lander stage have many parachutes (for the design's intended use of landing on Eve), but the only ones I used over Duna were the two drogue chutes of the lander stage, show deployed below. The disappointed heat shield was separated and allowed to free fall away. The two drogue chutes deployed fully at 2,500 meters, and then I entended the landing legs. The heat shield continued on it way to its ultimate lithobraking demise. The drouge chutes are not enough to land the ship in Duna's thin atmosphere, of course, but they are very helpful in getting the ship descending straight down. The engines were used to slow the ship for a soft touchdown. The docking port holding the Fido to the lander stage was decoupled, and the Fido was ready for action on the red planet. So we begin the Epic Drive. The map below shows the first leg of the journey, along the valley Fido landed in, then northeast along another canyon toward the polar cap. That other rover icon is an earlier RCS-powered/landing-gear-wheeled Fido from an earlier mission. The valley floor is Easy Mode driving, and the Fido cruised along at 20-30 m/sec (45 to 57 miles per hour). Below, the ridge separating Landing Valley fro Northeast Canyon was also no trouble. I did most of my driving at 3x or 4x physical time warp. There are some important things to know about driving in time warp, and one is: At time warp, your rover structure will be pressed downward and deformed as if it weighed several times its normal weight. Seems like a bug to me. But it's important to keep this in mind when traversing irregular terrain, since the Fido's central body is low-slung to begin with for a low center of gravity and better stability. So under time warp, the ground clearance decreases. I did a lot of test-driving of this Fido at KSC and surrounding hills, and the part of this Fido that is most susceptible to damage is the rear section of the central body (the ASAS unit and RCS tanks), which can get knocked off if the vehicle gets bonked on the bottom (my apologies to anyone who comes from a part of Earth or Kerbin where "bonked on the bottom" is an obscene phrase, as it occurs to me it might be). I do have a short I-beam on the underside to make things more impact resistant (I-beams have great impact tolerance), but it's important to drop down the time warp if very bumpy terrain is coming up. Note that the most dangerous terrain for the Fido KED is a sharp upward bend in the slope of the land, such as at the bottom of a "V" gultch or (as Aldner found out on Minmus) where a steep slope suddenly meets a flat area. Approach these with caution! I have the ground scatter in KSP set fairly low (20%), and at first I steered around the big rocks... but that lost its entertainment value pretty quickly, so I just started ghosting through them. The Fido KED has an ASAS unit to lock the Fido on its heading, but the steering controls can be used while ASAS is on to deflect the Fido from objects ahead... and it will then return to its original heading when released. I have the rover steering controls remapped to the IJKL keys since this separates them from the roll controls, and I never did like the Docking Mode Thingie. The egress from Northeast Canyon was not steep, so was easily managed. Out on the bumpier terrain I generally drove at 3X physical time warp to give the Fido more bottom clearance. Below we see the Fido approaching Duna's northern polar cap. I had never landed on Duna's polar caps, so I was looking forward to this. I would be crossing onto the cap inside a large crater, which also looked cool. My first sphincter-tightening moment of the drive came when I was driving into the crater (going a bit too fast) and suddenly found the Fido airborne and dropping. Yeow! But the ASAS unit was active and used the cockpit's torque to hold the Fido level and it touched down and sped down the slope. Now don't get the impression that everybody thinks ASAS is a good thing on a rover. There was a guy on the Kerbal Forums who is convinced that ASAS is "a very very bad thing" to have on a rover, and he was convinced that I couldn't have driven this thing halfway around the world unless: a) I wasn't driving fast (sometimes the Fido hit 58 m/s [130 mph] on this trip), or I was driving only easy terrain (well, sure, I don't deliberately drive off cliffs), or c) I really had an SAS unit on there instead of an ASAS unit (I'm pretty sure I know my ASAS from a hole in the ground). You'd think the floor of an ice crater would be nice a smooth, but this one had some pronounced bumps. After coming down the rim wall, the Fido sped out across the crater floor at a pretty good speed. Below, we see it after hitting a bump and catching quite a bit of "air" (thin as Duna air is). But the ASAS kept it level and it landed smoothly. The suspension on the stock rover wheels seems to work very well to help even out bumpy rides. Note that the torque of the cockpit pod is not enough to rotate the Fido up off of its wheels (as it can easily do in the low gravity of Minmus), but if the Fido flies clear of the surface, the torque can quickly level it. I reset the ASAS every five or ten minutes while the rover is passing over level ground to make sure it is set for the current level as it roves around the planet. After that hair-raising trip across the crater floor, I slowed down quite a bit. Driving up the far wall of the crater was going to be done at slow speed anyway. The Fido can't take the slope of the crater heading straight on, but it can handle it if it attacks the slope at an angle. It's still slow going. And here's another important thing to know about driving at time warp: the Fido will slide downward along the slope at 4x warp, so you won't make any progress. Also, a slope that will stop the Fido dead in its tracks under time warp can be handled at 1x warp (or sometimes at 2x or 3x). So I downshift the time warp as needed if I begin to lose too much speed on a up-slope. Another thing the Fido tries to do (if ASAS is off) is tend to slowly turn toward up-slope over time... but when the ASAS is on, it can hold its heading. Out of the crater and onward over the ice cap. I presume the ice cap is predominantly water ice at these lower elevations, but it probably also has frozen carbon dioxide (or carbonium dioxium if they prefer) at higher latitudes where the temperature should be lower. But my Fido had no chemical analysis instrumentation, so I can't say for sure. You can get kind of snow-blind when the lighting is right (or wrong) on the polar cap, but stay vigilant for rough terrain and downshift time warp as you approach it. Here's the path I took across the polar cap. I was trying to eyeball a great circle route around the planet. I drove about 4.15 hours on that first leg of the trip (that was in-game time...and most of it was a 3x and 4x time warp, so it was considerably shorter in real life). That may not seem like much, but remember that Duna's rotation rate is about 18.2 hours, so daylight would typically last 9.1 hours. Generally I didn't drive when Kerbol was low in the sky (for reasons of solar cell power and visibility), so that knocks off about an hour at dawn and dusk. And, since I'm driving eastward around the planet, that shortens the length of daylight (I'm driving toward the approaching Kerbol-set line) by roughly a couple hours per day. My average "driving day" was about 4.35 daylight hours. This wasn't a road rally, so I wasn't trying for a speed record. The Fido spent two nighttimes snoozing on the polar cap (good doggie...have a rest! *woof*). The picture below is the dawn of the third driving day. Below, Fido has driven off of the polar cap and is back on the oxidized regolith. The map below shows the next segment of the drive. Somewhat bumpy terrain. I avoided going down into big craters because I wanted to avoid the slow and tedious climb back out of the crater. It was along this stretch of the trip that I saw Ike rise above the eastern horizon. I watched it for a while as I drove, thinking that it was rising kind of slowly... when it occurred to me, of course, that Ike and Duna are both tidally locked in 1:1 synchronous orbits, always keeping the same face toward each other, and always staying in the same place in the sky (discounting the small wobble due to Ike's non-circular orbit). So what was making Ike rise was...the Fido driving eastward! Ooooo... I control the moon! Oh...and here we see Fido getting a bit too fast again. You have to watch that speed downhill and not get distracted by moons and such. I found many of the "landscape anomalies" where the land does not fit together perfectly, but none of them were as wide or destructive as the one I found on Eve. The Fido drove over them with no sign of distress, even at high time warps. Part way through this leg of the journey, I had to take a break (in real life) and saved the game. When I returned the next day to continue the drive, I started up the game, selected the Fido KED from the tracking station, watched as it was loaded onto the surface of Duna........and then watched it explode into a shower of fragments and secondary explosions. What. The. Hell. Well, damn, I was hoping to get all the way through this drive without having to resort to using the F9 key (although I had been doing regular F5 quick saves...my momma didn't raise no dummies). So I sighed, and pressed F9 to bring the rover back to some previous point..... ...and the Fido exploded violently again. Ah... I had done a quick save before quitting, so there was no earlier point. Well. Bugger all. I exploded the Fido several more times just to make sure the game was dead set on doing this to me. It was. The report said that the linear RCS port was colliding with the ground (and then the rest of the explosive merriment followed), which was odd because the Fido was just sitting still there, and not rubbing it's linear RCS ports on the ground or anything disgusting like that. So...I edited the .sfs file of the quicksave to move the Fido 1 meter higher than the program had it located, and restarted the game. The fido appeared 1 meter above the ground....and dropped onto its wheels happy as can be,and didn't explode at all. Good doggie! *woof* So the drive was on! Take that, nasty space bugs! During the fourth day of driving, the Fido reached the antipode, the point directly opposite on the sphere of Duna from its starting point. In the map image below, I lined up the icon of the Fido with the icon of its lander stage (seen through the planet with our marvelous map x-ray vision), and they line up right in the middle. I was using MechJeb's Surface Information panel, so I knew I was exactly at the right spot. It was nice that it worked out being in a nice smooth area instead of on a cliff face or something. OK! So I've driven exactly halfway around Duna. That would be enough to make my point, right? But, you can see that the blue line continues to the east, so I obvious continued the drive. But notice how the path is a lot straighter after the antipode point? That's because I'd gotten a bit tired of driving, so for the next legs of the trip I just pointed the Fido, engaged the ASAS, took one of my dice and placed it on the "I" key, then propped my rather heavy calculator on the die to press the key down, and then wandered off to do other things around the house. This was possible because the stretch of Duna to the east of the antipode point was mostly flat maria-like terrain. I set the time warp for 3x, and let that puppy roll. I checked on it every ten or fifteen minutes and reset its ASAS (the longest gap was when I watched a whole half-hour TV show). Sometimes it was cruising smoothly along. Sometimes it was bumpity-bumping over some low roughness. But it did well on its own. Because the terrain was fairly level, the speed generally stayed in the reasonable 20-30 m/s range. If there had been any substantial downslopes, there would have been problems (since the Fido could have exceeded the 60 m/s limit of the wheels...or at least I believe that's their limit). There were times when I was driving the Fido on downslopes where its speed got up as high as 58 m/s before I caught it and applied the brakes. You have to be vigilant when driving at high time warps because the speed can get away from you. The Fido has a low center of gravity and a wide wheel base, so brakes can be applied at high speeds without flipping it (at least on Duna with the ASAS on). I did have to route the Fido around some highlands that were straight east, which is why you see the kink in the path. Somewhere during this part of the trip I happened to notice that the Fido's batteries were draining rapidly, which was odd since this was daytime. So I checked and found out that Ike was eclipsing Kerbol, so the light was cut off. And an Ike eclipse of Kerbol lasts a fairly long time. Below is a GIF showing the moment Kerbol came back out from behind Ike. Below is the map showing more of the eastward route where Fido was running more or less autonomously, controlled only by my programable calculator (which sounds cool if you haven't read about the control method outlined above). Sometimes I'd sit and read while it was doing this, just resetting the ASAS every once in a while. One time I returned to find the Fido rolling backwards at a fairly high speed. Ah! It had reached the steep wall at the eastern edge of the big flat areas, and it had tried to tackle the slope straight on at high time warp...which resulted in it coming to a stop and rolling back down hill. OK... The rest of the journey was going to require my manual control. See the map below for the final legs of the trip. To get up the rather substantial wall on the east edge of the large flat area, I had to point the rover at an angle across the slope and use 1x or 2x time warp (it would side-slip at higher warps). It's vertical velocity was as low as 1 m/s on much of the slope. I also got to watch Ike setting as I crawlwed up the slope. But not very fast. The next stretch of terrain was back to typical Duna bumpiness, so I had to be a little more patient. Below we see where I was not so patient, and the Fido got more air time as it passed over several ridges. But the ASAS kept it steady in flight, and when it did land on the downslopes, the torque of the cockpit kept it from slamming its front wheels down quite as hard as it would have without the pull-up torque. It was fun watching the wheels jitter at high speed as the suspension worked to take up the shock on individual wheels as I sped across the surface (I wonder it physics of the suspension is really in there, or if it's just a visual effect for moving the wheels? I prefer to think the former). The yellow dots on the previous map show the final partial day of driving (only 1.75 hours long). This part of the trip included the descent back into picturesque Landing Valley. The descent into the valley was very steep, and I had to ride the brakes all the way down. After some final driving through the scenic valley, the Fido returned to its lander stage. Good doggie! *woof* The time from start to finish of the trip (including driving time and sleeping at night time), was 3.87 days. There were seven Duna daylight driving sessions in this journey, the longest being 5.03 hours, and the shortest (not counting the partial last day) being 3.6 hours, with an average full driving period of 4.35 hours. The total actual driving time was about 27.88 hours.Because this was a true circumnavigation to the antipode and back, we know that the Fido drove at least 2,010,619 meters (the circumference of Duna), but it certainly drove somewhat more than than because I was not following perfect great circle routes. This works out to an average driving speed of 20 meters/second (assuming I using the Fido's makeshift throttle control properly to calculate all this), so my actual average speed was somewhat higher. I did this drive over three real-life days, using a few hours each of those days. I think I've seen enough red dirt to last me for a while. Still... Good dog! *woof* Brotoro's KSP Web pages.

Replacing some vanished threads: (For the person who requested the .craft file, that link has been added.) Folding Fido In my recently posted "Driving Duna" adventure (where I drove a rover all the way around Duna), one person commented on my photo of the Fido rover sitting on top of its rocket. He was rather displeased that Kerbal Space Program lets you get away with ignoring aerodynamics, and just slapping MOAR BOOSTERS onto something (like my rover with its big "heat shield" plate) and pushing it into space. For the record, he was not complaining about my mission in particular, just in the lack of proper aerodynamics in KSP. The offending image is shown below. My first thought was, "What must this guy think of the monstrosities used to loft those huge rovers with the giant wheels?" My second thought was, "Don't I at least get points for bothering to include a "heat shield" in anticipation of the time when we will all face the perils of deadly reentry heat?" My belated third thought was, "Well...he has a point..... so how do we go about fixing it?" I wanted the wide wheelbase for the Fido so that it would be very stable and safe for kerbals to drive at high speeds across alien landscapes (because...you KNOW they are going to). So how could I get my wide rover into a smaller living space? By folding it! NASA does this sort of thing all the time. But how to unfold a folded rover? I used the cool Damned Robotics mod. Specifically, the "door hinge" part from that mod pack. Below is my folded Fido rover with its "heat shield," sky crane lander, and token nose cone. I didn't actually make an aerodynamic shroud for the thing (you can just picture that running from the base of the nose cone to the heat shield. And you can picture the heat shield as nice and round with an ablative coating (instead of something I kludged together from plate structural parts). First lets get rid of the nose cone. A decoupler and two sepatrons take care of that. You can picture the aerodynamic shroud that you were picturing splitting in half and blowing away, too (you didn't know this thread would involve all this reader participation, did you?). One of the sepatrons is canted sideways by one tick to make sure the nose cone gets out of the way of the rest of the vehicle (it crashed about 500 meters away). The animated GIF below shows the two sides of the Fido unfolding. I have this action of the hinges controlled by the 0 key (Damned Robotics's little control panel lets you specify what keys to use for a hinge or group of hinges in the VAB). The rover actually appears on the launch pad unfolded, so I needed to fold it up before showing it off or launching it (using the 7 and 9 keys). Below, four more hinges are called into action with the 8 key to swing out the wheel mounting plates. You must press the key several times for full deployment, since the hinge can be positioned at intermediate positions. Below is the Folding Fido rover with its wheels fully deployed. The wide wheelbase of my dreams is realized from a more compact package! You may have noticed that the exhaust blast from the sky crane's engines would impinge on the rover when it is fully deployed...this is true. So the sides of the rover can only be partly deployed under the operating sky crane. Below you can see the sky crane hovering the Fido over the KSC during a test flight. Sure, you could mount the sky crane engines further out to prevent this, but I wanted a sky crane that would fit inside the imaginary aerodynamic shroud, and which would also be protected by the heat shield during reentry. So I'll live with this partial-deployment limitation. In the next picture, I've dropped the heat shield so I can set the Fido down with the sky crane. I also deployed the wheel mounting end plates fully before dropping the heat shield. After the Fido is set down in its partially-deployed condition, and the sky crane has flown off, the side pieces of the Fido can be deployed the rest of the way. Note that you do not have to deploy the sides completely: If you are going to be driving over some rough terrain, you can dial in a higher ground clearance (at the expense of a little narrower wheelbase). Below are two pictures of the fully-unfolded Folding Fido. I was worried that the hinges might not be very strong and the whole thing would just flop to the ground, but the hinges are quite sturdy. You can see them flexing a little when the rover hits bumps, but I was pleased with how well they held the rover in its shape. The Fido is very stable and corners well at speeds of 23 m/s (with its ASAS on). Hmmm...I should have deployed the ladder (it's in the nose of the capsule). And I see that I forgot to remove two of the solar panels from the center plate on the right side (where they would be susceptible to damage by the engine blast...I removed the two on the left side). The Fido has four RTGs and two of the Z-500 battery banks, so it can drive some distance even in the dark (but would need to stop and rest occasionally). The Fido has a couple strategically placed small I-beam pieces on the underside to protect the more fragile parts if the rover gets bonked on the bottom. Below we see the Folding Fido payload on top of a unnecessarily powerful booster that could probably send it most anywhere in the Kerbin solar system with its nuclear transfer stage. I've already folded up the rover so you can picture the nice aerodynamic shroud enclosing it. Go ahead. Picture it. Smooth. Nice curves. Oh yeah. For those of you who couldn't bother to play along, below is the "5,000 hours in MS Paint" version. I haven't sent the Folding Fido on a mission to another celestial body yet, but I did try out reentering it into Kerbin's atmosphere. Below is the retro burn. Here are two images of the reentry. All parts of the Fido and its sky crane lander are protected by the heat shield (as long as you keep the heat shield pointed in the retrograde direction). You don't get the blazing white-hotness of an Eve entry, but the heat shield is working well. You can imagine the smell of charred ablative material now if you are still playing along. Below: dropping the heat shield. I hope everybody at the KSC in undercover, because a toasty-warm present is coming their way. This is the point where I quickly deploy the side pieces to their partially-deployed angle, and swing the end wheel plates out all the way in preparation for landing. The animated GIF shows the successful sky crane maneuver, followed by full deployment of the Fido. I also included two parachutes on the Fido so that it could use the alternate landing sequence below on a body with a sufficiently thick atmosphere (Kerbin, Eve, Laythe... or Jool if you are nuts). In this alternate landing sequence, I separated the sky crane soon after jettisoning the heat shield... ...then popped out the two chutes and began full deployment of the wheels (in progress in the picture below). Below, the Fido is coming down at about 7 m/s. It landed undamaged...but I think maybe two more parachutes (placed on the two plates attached to the central core) would be better. Now I just need Kerbal Space Program to include the feature that lets me make any size and shape aerodynamic shroud, and I'll be all set. And a prettier heat shield, of course. Update I landed the Folding Fido on Minmus to test it out. Its sky crane is ridiculously overpowered for Minmus... when I separated it after landing the rover, the sky crane spent many minutes thrusting at low power, very slowly tumbling, and it couldn't seem to decide if it wanted to end up in a high orbit around Kerbin, or escape into Kerbol orbit. In the end, it escaped. The Fido worked fine...and I could make it hop upward quite a ways just my partially folding in its wheels. I made some modifications to the Fido to make the sky crane/heat shield/nose cone arrangement a little more compact and a bit lighter. Below is the modified version folded and unfolded. I also have the .craft file for the payload posted. It requires the Damed Robotics Door Hinge part, and that requires that the MechJeb dll file be installed. The Fido has the hinges set to use the 7 key to fold in the wheel end plates (fold these in until the wheels are close together...it will be a greater than 90 degree fold), and the 8 key to unfold the wheel end plates. The sides of the Fido are folded down with the 9 key (fold them in 90 degrees), and unfolded with the 0 key. You may not want to unfold the sides completely if you want better ground clearance (especially if you want to drive using physical time warp...the hinged Fido deforms downward MUCH more under high time warp than the unhinged Fido KE it's based on). Using 4x time warp will bottom out the Fido even if you have a lot of ground clearance set. I made the heat shield less dish-shaped. It still has the same coverage, but it lets me mount the Fido closer to the heat shield. Below is a reentry from 1000 km for better reentry effects. But the most important change was rotating the sky crane 90 degrees and repositioning the rear RTGs... Now the wheels can be fully deployed for landing under the sky crane. Folding Fido .Craft File Another Update I modified the sky crane some more, making it more compact. The Fido rover has been modified to have two capsules in a "push-me-pull-you" configuration. The sky crane has less fuel than before, but still sufficient to return the Fido from Kerbin orbit, so it can handle a landing on several other bodies. Below, the sky crane deposits the Fido near the VAB and then heads off to crash. It's definitely a good idea to fold the sides of the Fido down a couple notches before landing since this gives it more ground clearance to survive a bounce if you drop it from a little higher than you should. Here is the .craft file for the newest update. Remember that it requires the Damned Robotics Door Hinge part.

I wonder if Jebediah feels this way after every time I've killed him and he's been reborn?

Ah, but I remember what I gave you a reputation boost for before (telling me about the "struts-kill-decoupler-force" bug)...so have it again, sir!

I have returned. Zero-post n00b again.