SirJodelstein

this is exiting and nerve-wracking at the same time. I have no idea how fast (if ever) i will receive an answer. I have to keep an eye on the Sojourner wheels all the time so that i don't miss a thing. It's just been two hours since i put up the new sign, but the wait is already killing me. three hours. I've moved into Duna Rover 1 to conserve valuable spacesuit CO2 filters, observing the site through the window. four hours. There! -.-. - / -.-. - / -.-. - / .... .. / .--. .... .. .-.. ..-. .-. . -.. / - .... .. ... / .. ... / -.- ... -.-. .-.-.- / - .-. .- -.-. -.- .. -. --. / -.-- --- ..- / ... .. -. -.-. . / ... --- .-.. / ..--- ..... .-.-.- / .-- . / .- .-. . / ... ..- .--. .-. .. ... . -.. / -... ..- - / .... .- .--. .--. -.-- / - --- / ... . . / -.-- --- ..- / .- .-.. .. ...- . .-.-.- / .-- .... .- - ... / -.-- --- ..- .-. / ... - .- - ..- ... / -....- / .... . .- .-.. - .... / ... ..- .--. .--. .-.. .. . ... / . --.- ..- .. .--. -- . -. - ..--.. / -. -..- - / -- ... --. / .- - / ... --- .-.. / ..... ....- / .---- / .... --- ..- .-. / .- ..-. - . .-. / ... ..- -. .-. .. ... . .-.-.- / .-. . .--. . .- - .. -. --. / -.-. - / -.-. - / -.-. - / .... .. / .--. .... .. .-.. ..-. .-. . -.. / - .... .. ... / .. ... / -.- ... -.-. .-.-.- / - .-. .- -.-. -.- .. -. --. / -.-- --- ..- / ... .. -. -.-. . / ... --- .-.. / ..--- ..... .-.-.- / .-- . / .- .-. . / ... ..- .--. .-. .. ... . -.. / -... ..- - / .... .- .--. .--. -.-- / - --- / ... . . / -.-- --- ..- / .- .-.. .. ...- . .-.-.- / .-- .... .- - ... / -.-- --- ..- .-. / ... - .- - ..- ... / -....- / .... . .- .-.. - .... / ... ..- .--. .--. .-.. .. . ... / . --.- ..- .. .--. -- . -. - ..--.. / -. -..- - / -- ... --. / .- - / ... --- .-.. / ..... ....- / .---- / .... --- ..- .-. / .- ..-. - . .-. / ... ..- -. .-. .. ... . .-.-.- / ... -.- Well, that could have been much worse for a first contact considering what I've done. I better go and set up my reply on a flag. See you tomorrow.

LOG ENTRY, SOL 52 Oh what a beautiful sight! Took a look out of the northern hab windown first thing this morning and guess what - the pathfinder camera has moved! It points straight at the "Yes" flag. I can't describe how happy I am right now. Finally I am able to communicate with other Kerbals again. ... Well, in theory at least. I have re-established a communication link, but KSC can only send binary answers to my short questions. Plus, there is this whole signal delay matter. At the speed of light, the signal round trip time is about 40 minutes, and I am not quite sure about the bandwidth of the Pathfinder to Kerbin link. Time for some tinkering! And double rations for me today :-) LOG ENTRY, SOL 53 Ok, let's see if that works.

Have you tried the "Switch active vessel" mod?: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/78183 Lists all nearby vessels in a small window, with optional filter buttons. Hover over button to highlight, click to switch. Great little plugin for crowded bases!

LOG ENTRY, SOL 51 Time to do something other than rover driving! After carefully unloading the Pathfinder lander from the rover, I set it down close to the hab. This decade-old piece technology is my last hope of communicating with Kerbin. I hope it will boot up and connect to KSC when attached to a power supply, as it does not have an "on/off" switch. I guess nobody considered "in-situ reactivation, years after mission end" as a realistic scenario. Well, fingers crossed. ... Alright , time to find out wether the excursion was a huge waste of time or not. I'm about to connect the extension cord from the hab to the lander mainboard. KSC operates all systems on the same voltage, so in theory, this should work. I have also prepared some makeshift flags from hab canvas and set them up near the lander's camera. Woot. Blinking links and computer beebs! Alright, Pathfinder! Im counting on you. And on some clever computer geeks back at Kerbin. I hope someone still knows how to operate this thing. Shoutout to xEvilReeperx and his FlagRotate plugin! Thanks for keeping old versions of your plugin available. (I'm still on 1.0.2)

Well, its been quite a while. But man, i wish the terrain in KSP would be a little more interesting. Imagine KSP with terrain from No Mans Sky. Anyway, I'm back from several months of KSP hiatus. Lets see how Philfred has been doing :-) LOG ENTRY, SOL 50 Woohooo! Home sweet home! I have finally reached the base camp again, with all my precious cargo intact. There's quite some dust on the solar panels, but everything seems to be intact, and the snacks have been growing nicely. I'll just hook up the solar panel from the rover to the grid, clear the dust off the other panels, and then I'll take a really long nap. The habitat suddenly seems really large and comfortable compared to the cramped confines of the rover. Tomorrow I'll try to reactivate the Pathfinder probe.

@Foxster: Nice challenge!. If you create a scenario for the challenge (or just share an otherwise empty persistence file with the setup), you save everyone else some preparation effort. Anyone else could just download the sfs file and start the rescue attempt. I think I'll give this challenge a go. How many internet cookies is a solution with neither Claw nor KIS/KAS worth? :-)

LOG ENTRY, Sol 44 The mountain range is up ahead. This time, I'm going to stay clear of them, taking a route heading north-west instead of straight north towards the hab. Reconfigured the rover once again to achieve better balance.

LOG ENTRY, Sol 42 I made it! I found the Pathfinder lander! Clearly visible against the midday sun, the site was visible from far away. After a few hours of dirt-moving (Yeah, finally something else to do other than driving!), the lander now looks almost like new. Some frozen components, some ripped cables, but nothing that I can't fix when I get this thing back to the Ares site. I have disassembled the landing gear and loaded the remaining structure with all the interesting parts (camera, antenna, computer module) onto my rover. I also scavenged some of the solar panels to replace the larger ones i lost. Hurray for standardization, hooking up the electrics to the rover was no problem at all I also picked up the tiny Sojourner rover. It still stood right in front of that rock 'Yogi' that marked the end of Sojourners mission. Not so sure what i will do with it, but it might be useful later on. And if it is not, i still can make a remote-controlled toy out of it. Whooohooo! Tomorrow i will start the return trip. Note to self: drive extra carefully! This vehicle has now a severely offset center of mass.

Hello everyone, I am back. Its been a while, and I have recharged my storytelling batteries (Still on KSP 1.0.2 btw). Where was I? Oh, yes.... (+rep for anyone who gets that reference) LOG ENTRY, Sol 41 Pased 6100m yesterday. Its all downhill from here. Literally. The Pathfinder site is in the flatlands just south of these mountains, just 50 km ahead. And figuratively. Crashed again on a steep slope two hours ago, and broke one of my two remaining solar panels. Lets see: I have supplies till Sol 59. Batteries are at 20% now. Driving downhill and on flat terrain does not draw as much power as driving up mountains. I should be able to reach the Pathfinder site tomorrow, and I'll probably need at least one day at the site itself. That would leave me with 17 days of snacks for the return trip.The direct route through the mountains took 11 days, and I need to drive extra carefully on the way back, and I will need longer charging pauses. Oh boy.

LOG ENTRY, SOL 38 Short break at midday to celebrate an two important milestones. I've driven 15 more kilometers since last morning, so only 100 km more to go. Also, I have just passed 4000 meters of altitude, and there are still higher peaks in the distance. Onward! LOG ENTRY, SOL 39 Recharge time. 87 km to go. Parked the rover in a safe place and took a hike up the highest peak around. 5912 meters! Now I really feel like the king of this world. Time for a majestic snack when i get back to my trusty rover.

LOG ENTRY, SOL 37 Time for another recharge. 115 kilometers to go. The landscape is changing. I'm almost continually driving upwards a slight incline, and have passed 1900 meters of altitude accourding to amospheric pressure. I can make out a mountain range up ahead, which might or might not be traversible. Getting annoyed about doing nothing else but driving slowly across desolate terrain and living in a very confined space. I miss the luxury of my hab. The recharge stops are even worse, because i've got nothing to do other than watching the Sun making it's way across the sky. Made some slight modifications to the rover, so i can charge the batteries while driving. That should cut down on the recharge duration time. Philfred out.

LOG ENTRY, SOL 35 Drove another 25km until noon, then the batteries went dry. The hills in this region are a little higher and steeper than before. Nothing problematic yet, but still I have to take some extra while navigating the terrain. Noticed a problem with my calculations from yesterday: With only two solar panels remaining, recharging takes longer. This evening, the battery gauge showed 50%. So I'll have to camp here at least another 4-5 sunlight hours. Which means I need to drive a little faster tomorrow to keep my shedule.

Uprighting a crashed rover with KAS winches, just moments before an eclipse on Duna.

LOG ENTRY, SOL 34 Note to self: Don't do dangerous maneuvers so far away from the hab. I hit a bump too hard and too fast, and the rover toppled over. I came to a grinding stop 50 meters further downhill and destroyed four of the six solar panels in the process. Everything else is fine though. I only took some minor bruises, and with the winch from the container I was able to put my trusty (and now also dusty) rover back onto it's feet. I need to drive more carefully from now on. The Pathfinder Site is only 175km away, and the gentle hills around here really make me want to drive fast, but I'm going to take it slow from here on. I cannot risk crashing again. I have enough supplies for another 25 Sols inside. Even if i only do 50 km in two Sols, I have a theoretical range of about 600km. 50% more than the remaining 400km for the trip to Pathfinder and back. I should be fine.

Hey everyone, thank you so much for all the kind words. Just checking in briefly to say that I definitely do want to continue this story. It's just that those little episodes do take time to prepare, shoot and write. I've started this project when i was recovering from a knee surgery - which meant a lot of forced indoor time. Well, the recovery phase is over, it's holiday season and we have a really great summer in Europe (or at least in Germany). So at the moment, I'm not spending as much time indoors as before, and I am quite happy about it. Also, i was kind of surprised to find out that with 12 hours of driving about 20m/s, Philfred could cover half of Duna's circumfence in just 2 sols. So the tinyness of Duna screws up the maths behind the epicness of the journeys from the book, and i'm not sure how to resolve this. I might have to come up with an event that severely slows Philfred down *mysterious plot foreshadowing* On the plus side, i have finally decided on a Pathfinder design, and have built and setup the lander + micro rover site. TL,DR: Yes, this is going to continue. At a noticably slower pace than before, but I'm not done here Cheers, SirJodelstein Still on 1.0.2

Nope, the panels are scaled-up versions of the OX-Stat created with cfg-editing.

LOG ENTRY, SOL 32 I'm on the move! On Sol 31, I prepared Rover 2 for an extended trip. I brought plenty of snacks and CO2 filters inside, and installed a small additional oxygen tank. Then, i stacked six solar panels on the rover, and mounted a container full of potentially useful stuff. I also brought a part of the RTG array inside, so that I can switch off the heating system. This way, almost all electrical power from the batteries can be used for actual driving. This has doubled the available operation time to 12 hours. Since a day on Duna has 18 hours and I'm not driving during the night, I need to stop every second Sol at noon for a recharge. Thats were the solar panels come in handy. Setting up the panels and waiting for the batteries to recharge takes the rest of the day. I'm going straight south to recover a probe that has landed on this planet a decade ago called Pathfinder. I hope that I can reactivate or repair it's camera system and communication antenna. If I can make it there without crashing the rover, that is. And If I can find it. It's not like its sending out a navigation beacon or something. The probe has gone silent years ago after its solar panels got covered by dust. I have entered the landing coordinates into the rovers board computer and hope that the lander is somewhere nearby. For all we know about Pathfinder, it might be completely covered in dust by now. Or maybe a dust storm has picked it up and dropped it somewhere else, possibly miles away. Jump to next Log Entry

1. Is there a mod that disables the onscreen-messages when all the other GUI elements are hidden as well (F2 toggle)? Messages and displays like "time-warp: 1x" and "Grab" keep ruining my screenshots 2. Is there a way to disable the green part overlay in flight mode? Same reason as above, would make it easier to create videos/screenshots.

LOG ENTRY, SOL 29 The snack plants are recovering and the hydrogen venting seems to work. Finally, I've got some time for some recreational engineering. So I built something with the parts from the RTG burial site. The rover is still quite fast eventhough I had to sacrifice one engine for the chimney. Man, it's such a shame that I cannot share this with the team and all the KSC staff. I wonder If they are angry at me about this whole thing. I wish I could talk to them. I'm sure if I could share my story with them they would understand why excitement is important for space exploration. Maybe they would change future missions to be a little more adventurous. By now, all five satellites around Duna are probably peeking at my residence whenever they pass overhead. I wonder if they have seen the explosion, or if the image resolution was good enough to see the hole in the hab. The more I think about home, the more resolved I am: My next big project will be to re-establish communication with Kerbin. I wish KSP would really run so fast. With all the parts at the site, the game actually runs at half that speed, and the video was sped up.

Awesome story, great presentation! Enjoy your vacation, but please promise to continue when you're back.

LOG ENTRY, SOL 28 Well, the hab is still standing. Its really warm inside now, the heat emissions from the RTGs produce more energy than is lost through at the surface. Since the RTGs have no "off" switch, I have moved my new heating system into one of the airlocks. Tadah! Now i have a rudimentary heat regulation option. On to the next problem: Hydrogen gas in the hab. My solution exploits the fact that hydrogen is lighter than air. If i deactivate the air ventilation system, the hydrogen will move upwards. I have poked a small hole into the conical rooftop and installed a mini-vent from KAS Incorporated. By opening the vent, the hydrogen will evade before the air. But since I'd like to keep the air inside, I needed an indicator to see when no more hydrogen comes out. So, i added a small fuel tank plus engine to the setup. I deprived the tank of hydrogen, so now it only holds liquid oxydizer - all the rocket fuel (this time in gaseous form) comes from the hab itself. As soon as the exhaust flames stop, I close the vent to keep as much air inside as possible. A test run was successful, and I am restarting plant production. This time, I'm adding a "stop the ventilation for the night, then burn hydrogen at next morning" step to my schedule.

I have an idea how to solve the hydrogen problem, but I am somewhat reluctant to execute it because it involves deliberately poking new holes into the hab surface. However, this has to wait, because another urgent problem became apparent this morning. The temperature in the hab does not increase. I checked the electrical heaters - they are damaged beyond repair. Probably from the little accident i had two days ago. So today, I made a small excursion with Rover II to add another kind of dangerous piece of equipment to my little residence. I retrieved the RTG array from the burial site. I'm not sure if adding radioactive material into a building that might explode again, but thats the only reliable heat source I could think of right now. You see, this thing not only provides electrical energy. In addition, it radiates an immense amount of heat. I've put it on one of the tables on the hab. I'll sleep in one of the rovers tonight. Again. Parked at a safe distance. I really miss my comfy sleeping cabin in the hab. If the hab survives the night without melting or blowing up, I'll do more damage to it tomorrow. Oh boy, this is turning out to be a little more exciting than I wanted it to be. I ate a triple snack ration today to calm my nerves.

Suggestion: Surface-based biome-specific experiments from a single celestial body should yield dimnishing returns. If I vist 4 biomes of a planet/moon, I should have learned enough about it to not really have a reaon to come back unless I have new experiments or want to be really thorough. As a starting point, I'd say about 75% of the available sciene from each body (per experiment) should be accessible from the first four biomes. Reasoning: Currently, there is no real incencitive to ever visit other planets from a science/funds balancing standpoint. I can unlock the entire tech-tree without leaving Kerbins SOI with repetetive missions to the many biomes of Mun and Minmus. If the science rewards would start to drop significantly after maybe 3-4 biomes, the player would be encouraged to actualy explore other bodies, while keeping rovers/suborbital hops/landings at biome border-type mssions attractive. Bonus effect: This prevents the boring science gains from the KSC building biomes. Notes: - I know that this is not enough to fix the entire balancing problem of career mode. This is just a step into what is i feel is the right direction. Please don't discuss science labs, the repeating "free money/science" contracts "Science data from XYZ" etc. here. - I am not suggesting increasing the value of the first experiments because I want to drain science from the system. - Increasing endgame tech science costs does not prevent the problems described. Instead, it actually drives the player towards repeating missions to be able to purchase these techs. - The biomes on Kerbin might be a problem for a seperate discussion. I want to be encouraged to visit the poles/deserts/mountains, but the "walk around KSC for science" situation is ridiculous. Let's focus this discussion on all the other non-Kerbin celestials. - This is about surface-based science. Polar orbit satellites should still be more valuable than equatorial ones.

LOG ENTRY, SOL 27 I could not finish repairs of the hab roof yesterday, so i slept another night in the confines of Rover II. It took me another three hours today to patch it all up. It's not pretty, and I will really miss the sunlight that came through the east-facing window, but it will do. The hab is repressurized now, and the atmospheric regulator readouts indicate that there is no leakage happening. I'm going to sleep one more day in the rover just to be safe. Also, it is still really cold in there. The air conditioning system was designed to fight heat dissipation through the canvas, and not really to heat up the whole place from subzero temperatures on short notice. I've spent the rest of the day with damage asessment. Most of the snack plants have turned to ashes, but the seeds in the soil look healthy enough to restart the cultivation process. That is, if I can do it without blowing myself up (again). The water and oxygen tanks still look solid, and the other supplies were stowed safely behind doors and lockers. Some chairs got thrown around the place and broke, and two light bulbs burst. So, nothing really problematic. By now, I think I know what caused the explosion. Remember when I said using rocket engines indoors was probably not a very good idea? Well, it was not, but just in a very different way I expected it. I was anxious about immediate threats like exhaust heat, fuel line leaks or something catching fire, and was kind of happy to see that all therse were manageable. But, what finally got me was a very subtle effect. You see, these high-precision thrusters are classic bipropellant combustion engines. They use liquid hydrogen with oxidizer to sustain an almost perfect combustion process. Almost. 99.5 percent of the hydrogen is ignited in the combustion chamber and leaves through the nozzle. The tiny remainder just escapes in gas form. I have been slowly but steadily filling up the whole hab with hydrogen! And since no hydrogen was ever supposed to come close to the hab, it is not equipped with sensors to detect this. Once the gas concentration crossed a certain threshold, a tiny spark or hot spot was enough to set up a large explosion. Damn, what a scary thought - I've been living in a barrel full of gunpowder for a week. I must find a way to prevent this from happening again before i activate those engines again.

LOG ENTRY, SOL 26 I am alive. Holy Kraken, I am alive. Can't believe I survided THAT. Still not sure what exactly happened. For the record: I am writing this log entry from Rover II, because the hab exploded last night. A hissing noise woke me up, and one second later the whole hab was filled with a fiery roar. The explosion ripped a huge hole into the roof, and I found myself sucked into the cold martian atmosphere. Guess the "always wear your spacesuit" policy has it's benefits, I would have died without my helmet. I landed about a hundred meters away and skidded across the ground for another twenty. Obviously, I am not seriously hurt - we astronauts do extensive ground-skidding training on the Mun as a part of our interplanetary qualification process. I guess this time I am lucky to be on a planet without oxygen in the atmosphere - the flames died almost instantly. Right now, I don't have time to think about what has caused the explosion or what else got destroyed. My first priority right now is to fix the gaping hole in the hab ceiling. I know there is some spare canvas in the storage container. I have already shut down the atmospheric regulator to prevent it from trying to re-pressurizing the hab. The regulator is able to keep up with minor leaks, but not with several square meters of missing hull. Grab your tools, Mister Engineer, another extensive EVA is about to commence.