Gilly suborbital jump with "artificial gravity" rover

[noorm]

Reach the highest suborbital trajectory with a rover on Gilly, with no artificial ramp. Use the best hill you can find!

Rules!!!

Main propulsion is done with electric rover wheels only.

Functional parts must be stock. (Information or cosmetic mods are permitted.)

Any stock form of stability assistance, traction improvement or similar device not contributing to forward or upward velocity is permitted. (I use 2 upward facing Place-Anywhere 7 RCS port to keep me on the ground.)

Hyperedit and similar tools that facilitate rapid prototyping and testing are... strongly recommended!

Crewed or uncrewed...

Your rover can explode and any kerbal can die except Jeb! Jeb is not allowed to die, ever... especially not publicly!

Ranking will be based on the apoapsis from a screenshot of the map view. Mouse over the apoapsis to be sure the apoapsis height is displayed. If you do something heroic, we would appreciate more screenshots or videos. If you find a real nice hill, coordinates or some other way to recreate your bold feat would be nice too!

I am not a Gilly specialist but I wonder if it would be possible to get into an escape trajectory this way. If this happen, consider my challenge broken unless we can agree on some way to rank escaping trajectory (time to escape right after jump?)

And here is some kind of proof it can be done:

This was a first test starting from latlong 0,0 (according to hyperedit). I didn't really looked around for a launch site yet!

Thanks!

[Deutherius]

..I am not a Gilly specialist but I wonder if it would be possible to get into an escape trajectory this way...

Gilly's escape velocity is 35.71 m/s - out of reach of just rover wheel propulsion. (Or is it... I would love to be proven wrong on this one)

[noorm]

After some rigorous analysis of high resolution telemetry data (i.e. eyeballing a scansat map), mission control determined that our first honest try should be around the highest elevation on Gilly.

That is around 29Ëš45'0.00"S, 123Ëš45'0.00"W. Following a brief visual search, a maximum elevation of 6400m was found during an EVA by Jeb but no steep slope.

An initial jump was nevertheless attempted around that location. An apoapsis of 10992m was attained.

The following scientific findings worth of mention where discovered:

It is very hard to control a rover on gilly, even with two Place-Anywhere 7 RCS ports. Multiple attempts at reaching a relatively slow speed had to be done.

The flag marking the highest elevation was displayed floating in the air on the map view. I believe there is a discrepancy between the real terrain model and the map view model.

And now ladies and gentlemen... the pictures:

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[Mister Dilsby]

My Fling-O-Matic from the Minmus thread did manage to get poor Frodo to escape velocity, though I might have bent a rule an eensy bit.

I did not bother to run the wheels (wouldn't have mattered anyway, have no provision to maintain surface contact) Just flipped it into the air with the gyros and flung Frodo into deep spaaaaaaace.....

Do I win a coconut?

[Starwhip]

It seems that you need to go down to go up in this challenge. Need to find a large hill with a small hill at the bottom.

[noorm]

Do I win a coconut?

No, but an "Unlimited class" honorary mention!!!

[Superfluous J]

Interesting. If I had time this weekend I'd try a fuel tank with a power-generating engine facing down for both "artificial gravity" and power for the wheels, then I'd drive it up the highest hill I could find. The trick would be cutting the engine the moment you left the ground because keeping it running would actually lower your apoapsis.

The other trick would be not flipping over and crashing

[Starwhip]

Gilly's escape velocity is 35.71 m/s - out of reach of just rover wheel propulsion. (Or is it... I would love to be proven wrong on this one)

Not going downhill...

[Superfluous J]

Not going downhill...

Actually in theory, if you were going down a hill at 36m/s, and that hill curved further downward causing you to leave the ground, and beyond that hill was a valley that was wide enough that nothing was directly in your way... then yes you'd escape

[Deutherius]

Actually in theory, if you were going down a hill at 36m/s, and that hill curved further downward causing you to leave the ground, and beyond that hill was a valley that was wide enough that nothing was directly in your way... then yes you'd escape

The real question is, can you really get those speeds just by using rover wheels and/or Gilly's gravity? I haven't done any calculations, but something tells me you'd need a seriously high and seriously smooth mountain... The highest elevation difference I was able to find on Gilly is about 3 km, but the slope is pretty damn bumpy.