The Polar Mission - Setting up a base on the South Pole

[Squiggsy]

PART ONE: Making our exit:

Today 16 intrepid kerbalnauts set off on the longest journey of their lives, not longest in terms of distance, but in terms of real life time for the man in the sky who controls them.

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As they set out on their journey, Valentina is the one to notice our first big mistake of the journey, WE LEFT JEB BEHIND! (and somewhere Bill starts to feel slightly depressed and he doesn't know why, he can't shake the feeling he's being forgotten about)

Yes I have failed to bring along Jeb and Bill, they were left in a test craft just off the shore from the KSC wondering why no one has come to pick them up yet.

after realizing their first mistake, as the sun starts to set they quickly realize their second, they have left just as the sun is setting and have to experience their first night at sea rather sooner than they had hoped.

thankfully the seas are calm on Kerbin and the night passes without much hassle, although they do notice that the ship is leaning rather a bit more forward in the water than they would like, and all attempts to shuffle fuel around the tanks fail to change this.

and as the sun beats down on them in the middle of their first full day, the fuel runs low, and they all decide it is time to stop, get up on deck and radio for a fuel resupply.

Having seen the tests (and in some cases having participated in them) of the resupply vessle, some of the kerbinauts on board feel a sense of impending dred as they have flashbacks to chunks of aeroplane falling towards them out of the sky....

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Ok some some background, my plan is to do a polar route around kerbin, by land and sea, I am taking 18 kerbals along on this mission, because i felt like they would get lonely otherwise. I plan to drop two off during my first resupply at sea, to participate in The Rescue Splashed Kerbals Challenge, I think I will take this opportunity to replace them with Bill and Jeb, from there we will go to the South Pole, where I will drop 3-4 kerbals off and send supplies to set up a permanent polar base, and from there... who knows (I have yet to decide)

I am in the process of drawing up a map to plot my path, I only know up to the south pole at the moment because that is one long stretch across water. I might tie in dropping bill and jeb off with doing a polar circumnavigation by plane, but with the movement of the planet doing a precise polar circumnaviagation by air and winding up passing over the point I'd need to drop them might prove to be too much hassle, so we shall have to wait and see.

I will document the whole thing and update as and when I can, I believe this is the biggest task I have undertaken in KSP to date and it looks to be an interesting journey ( for the most part, and at points difficult , and probably at points downright boring during the long hauls) .

PART TWO: The First Refueling and Saying Goodbye:

It is time to introduce my favorite thing, The Hummingbird refueler drone:

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this thing is great fun, designed to fly overhead and then experience a Rapid Planned Disassembly , before floating down to rendevous with the Polar Explorer, unfortunately I experience more glitches than you can shake a stick at, the first being that if I flew into rendering range of the Polar Explorer it would suddenly cease to exist, it would disappear from the map and even if I went back to the KSC it would just no longer exist, so I had to settle for flying past it overhead, disassembling and then floating down about 6km away, luckily out Kerbinauts were clever and saved a little bit of fuel for such an eventuality, after all, anything can happen when you start exploding aeroplanes on purpose...

So we refuel, and then Kenfred Kerman doesn't get back on the Polar Explorer, turns out he and Catzie have been selected to take part in another mission and while radioing the KSC were informed that they were to stay behind at the Hummingbird Wreckage and await evac, although they were a bit concerned when they heard what sounded like someone s......ing about a "stone age rescue mission" in the background (more on this later)

The polar explorer rides off, down to 16 crew, and their journey continues, they are still only about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way to the south pole, who knows what lies in wait for them in the meantime?

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ok so really honestly I have never experienced so many glitches in one short space of time, this thing is not happy about being in the water. While I was refueling there was a bug where sometimes as I switched between a kerbal the the vessle, suddenly everything would find itself to be around 850m underwater, where it would accelerate towards the surface and then disassemble once it reached it, the screenshots of the refueling were pieced together from 3 different attempts, I think I'm going to develop a different refueling method entirely for next time, exploding planes are fun and all but it's just not practical!

This was going to be my Elcano Challenge, but the craft is too buggy, too slow, and uses too much fuel, so instead I am just taking it to the south pole to set up a base as originally planned, but going no further, instead it will be deconstructed using KIS and KAS to become the first hab module and comms relay for the base.

I am entering the Banzai! into the Elcano Challenge instead, and will post a link to that when I have created the mission long

Edited May 26, 2015 by Squiggsy

[Geschosskopf]

Good luck with it. And it's good to have Jeb as a reserve in case you need a rescue mission .

How are you moving in the water and how fast can you go?

[Squiggsy]

Good luck with it. And it's good to have Jeb as a reserve in case you need a rescue mission .

How are you moving in the water and how fast can you go?

This is true, I always feel more comfortable when Jeb (or Val) is the one flying the plane, their happy faces help to reassure me.

and there are wings pieces and intakes on the underside making a kind of hydrofoil, and two jet engines on the back, i was tempted to use infernal robotics to fold the wheels up when i got into the water but I wanted to keep mod usage to a minimum so I'm dealing with the extra drag.

the thing moves at a whopping 10m/s, which would be fine if it didn't still rinse through the fuel, at least it doesn't take that long to travel some decent distance with 4x time acceleration, i'm already quite a way away from KSC, but some of my graphics mods are conflicting so I can't see the map properly to see just how far I have come, I am currently trying to get that sorted, might have to loose the clouds I wanted to make it look nice for the screenshots and to give me something to look at during the long periods on land