Ianwubby

It's from https://ksp.deringenieur.net/! You can view maps of all the celestial bodies; I just zoomed out on the Minmus map and took a screenshot and cropped out the UI stuff, and then manually drew in the path in Paint- Ooh, that certainly does look like it could get around the issues I was having. I imagine it would still fall afoul of the rules, but I might do an unofficial underground run using that anyway just for the fun of it. Thanks for bringing it up! Thank you!

The clobbering wouldn't have been that bad if I'd thought ahead to put an SAS module on the lander - I've never really used that landing cabin before and didn't realize it doesn't have any in-built SAS, which is why I ended up using so much RCS fuel and opted out of a normal rendezvous-and-docking at the end of the mission. And yeah it probably would have been a better experience waiting until dawn, but I wanted to try for relatively fast times as well, and waiting hours for the sun to rise would have made that metric a lot worse lol. Sorry yeah I forgot to mention it, all of them are stock. No worries, perfectly understandable.

I've got one more for ya: Also I think probably scratch what I mentioned about my Eve ideas; I was wondering if I could glitch a propeller boat underground using bendy-tech timewarp shenanigans, and do a completely aquatic eve circumnavigation instead of doing part of the trip on land. I made a boat design that could hit like 70m/s, so we'd be talking about like <18 hours for the circumnavigation potentially. But for some reason, propellers stay in place and don't stay connected to the ship when it straightens itself out when activating time warp??? So I just can't find a way to get propellers underground, which makes the whole plan kinda not work at all. My only other thought is trying to construct the propellers on the boat in EVA after getting underground, which already sounds super janky and hard to keep balanced, but the kerbals also just explode when they get out of the crew cabin underground. Idk, I'll probably look into it some more but I'm not feeling optimistic at this point. And it might be for the best anyway, 'cause it feels like it might run aground of the "breaking the spirit of the challenge" rule-

Minmus elcano complete as well Final time is a lovely 3 hours 51 minutes. I'll be getting a timelapse of this up as well pretty soon, I know this isn't a lot of pictures to go off of. Flag path (kinda hard to make out): Approximate route (traveling from east to west; each flag is represented by a little circle, and signifies ~30 minutes of driving): I'm not sure what I might wanna go for next; I've got potentially controversial ideas for Eve, and Gilly could be nice to tackle along with that, but maybe Duna/Ike would be a nicer pair for me to start with.

Thank you! Also, the Muncano timelapse is up; it's thankfully relatively watchable, except for the nighttime portion of the drive, which you can barely make out anything on. (Don't worry, Padorf was later retrieved from the Mun and brought safely back to Kerbin) Eyeing Minmus right now, with an upgraded rover design. I imagine I can get that over and done with very quickly.

Muncano complete! Final time is 13 hours 46 minutes. Ended up driving about half of the distance with a broken front-right tire because Padorf apparently couldn't fix it, so I need to figure that out for the future. I also recorded this for a timelapse, I'm not sure how well it'll turn out though because this drive involved a lot more zooming in and out and turning the camera and such which might end up looking real bad sped up, so I guess we'll just have to see. Path around the Mun: And a view of the Kerbin elcano path in the distance-

Muncano update, just over 5 hours in now. Started off pretty cautious with the driving speed, going at like 15-20 m/s, but now I'm hitting 30-35 fairly comfortably. Going much more quickly than the Kerbin circumnavigation Neither Padorf nor I are fans of driving in the dark-

Also, I have started a new circumnavigation - this time of the Mun! Nothing wacky about this one, just a normal drive. Just over 2 hours into it thus far. Also question, do flag mods disqualify a run from being considered "Stock"? It's totally fine if they do, just wanna check before I slap a custom flag into something in the future.

I got the timelapse done for my undersea Elcano Just after an uhhhhhh, 8 month break- Most of the timelapse is played back at 50x speed (the max that Shotcut would allow), with some of the more "interesting" sections slowed down slightly - mainly the beginning of the journey, crossing the land bridge, visiting Kerbin's deepest point, and the end of the journey. I did my best to edit out any quick loads, of which there were several, just to make the journey and the viewing experience feel more continuous. I do still have the raw footage with all quick loads included if that's necessary though. The video is also quite low resolution - which wasn't on purpose, my OBS just hadn't been set up correctly, but it's probably for the best, as even at 640x400 all of the footage is still taking up 127 GB. In any case, category should be Stock; I think it was judged that this would likely qualify as a sea-based circumnavigation, but that was also in the last iteration of the challenge, so maybe it'll get judged differently now. Final run time is 68 hours and 40 minutes (70 hours and 10 minutes of footage).

Okay so I was closer to the end than I realized, just took another 5 and a half hours of driving, and I've finished my first Elcano! Completed in 68 hours and 40 minutes. Now to make the timelapse-

Did nearly 13 hours of driving today. I wanted to take a small detour to visit the deepest point on Kerbin and I figured I could get there today if I pushed it, so that's what I did Here stands Padorf, 1390 meters below the surface, in the eye of the great seafloor smiley face. We're in the home stretch, though I'll probably split the rest of the drive up across 2 more days instead of doing another crazy long session.

Aight so I've been doing WAY too much driving in the last few days. I ended up improving the propeller-driven design to be way faster than the old jet engine design (average ~16.4 m/s on the seafloor versus ~7 m/s for the old design). So between the higher top speed and never needing to refuel the thing, I've managed to complete the entire journey up to the old vehicle in just 38 hours, when the old one took 132 hours to get this far. The only downside about this version is that the propellers basically break instantly if you even go to 2x time warp, so I've had to do everything in real time instead of driving at 3x speed, but that's an acceptable sacrifice in my eyes. I've just been recording the trip this time, so I'm gonna piece everything into a timelapse once the circumnavigation is over, which hopefully won't take too much longer. Also uhhh, the seafloor texture is different now? I even did a clean install of the game to make sure no graphics mods were messing with things, and it's still like this, so idk what's going on with that-

So I definitely lost motivation to finish my undersea Elcano attempt from a few months back, partially cause pausing every 2 hours or whatever to fly more fuel out was so tedious But now I'm considering starting a new attempt, this time incorporating some electric propellers so I can coast without worrying about fuel most of the way It unfortunately has a lower top speed than the old design, and still needs the liquid fuel engine to get up to speed and to climb steep slopes, but it'll hopefully be less tedious to drive (though no less monotonous, I'm sure)

No mods! It's what @Nazalassa said; I have that inclined "ramp" of sorts above the hatch to prevent Jeb from rising to the surface. Swimming against the bottom of the incline makes him enter a walking state, where I can then "walk" down the ramp onto the seafloor. And once he's touching the seafloor, he can plant the flag

Been a while since the last post, but I'm still chugging along, though admittedly at a slower pace than before.

Been fairly busy this past week, so I haven't gotten a ton of driving done - but the driving I have completed has been much more exciting than usual, as I finally reached the necessary land crossing! New refueling setup + trip to the land crossing: Lake-hopping adventures, part 1: Lake-hopping adventures, part 2: Lake-hopping adventures, part 3: Also EDIT: Rules question - would it be allowed to drop off a probe or something further along the route to use as a target, just to help get a more direct path? I figure it'd probably be fine, but I'd rather be paranoid and ask than accidentally kill the run 78 hours in.

The seafloor Elcano continues... Also, quick rules clarification, would I be allowed to launch refueling missions from the alternative launch sites? I would assume the answer is 'yes', but the rules only refer to "the launchpad or runway", and not "a launchpad or runway", so I'd just like to confirm before I accidentally invalidate my run in trying to be slightly faster about refueling.

Thank you! Glad to be here Was a little busy over the weekend, but I still got some good driving in.

Ah yeah, that's my bad, just a misunderstanding on my part. Something like an "abnormal stunt" recognition could definitely work - I was just trying to think how this would fit into the current leaderboard setup without making any changes to the rules. In any case, it doesn't matter too much to me how it gets ruled, I'm just curious about the outcome

Did a lot more driving! It's very dark at the bottom of the sea... New refueling setup: A lot of excitement on leg 4, depending on your definition of "excitement": There's a lot less to say about the later checkpoints (and I feel like this will hold true for the vast majority of checkpoints from here on out): I'm curious how this would count with regards to the Master Mariner achievement - if it does count, then that means it's possible to get Master Mariner without ever actually sailing, and if it doesn't count, then that means it's possible to circumnavigate Laythe without qualifying for Master Mariner

Realistically they shouldn't, but they do work underwater! Also there are already some screenshots, in the spoilers.

Having my first go at one of these, starting with Kerbin! Still have a long way to go... Setup: So yeah, I'm gonna be trying to do an ocean-floor Elcano! Which, as it turns out, poses quite a few logistical problems. The most obvious issue is keeping the craft submerged, which I solved by just slapping a bunch of ore tanks all over the rover. The actual big problem is propulsion, because these wheels are absolutely horrible underwater. So I slapped a jet engine on top to provide a boost! This poses additional problems, such as "where are you going to get all of the necessary fuel from?". Well, my first idea was to utilize ISRU for everything - but this turned out to be an enormous pain, for quite a few reasons, and I ended up calling that attempt off after completing the first leg of the journey. In fact, the target I have highlighted in these pics is from that first attempt! My new solution to the fuel problem was to just drop refueling stations to the sea floor whenever I needed them - that's what the docking port on the front of the rover is for. Regardless, more pics from leg 1 of the journey: Everything had gone smoothly up to this point, and the second leg would go quite smoothly as well... Up until the refueling process, anyway.