Elcano II: Destination Mun

[damerell]

Yeah, I really come to hate rovering on Mun since it got procedural terrain, and the lighting rarely if ever helps. These days, I only use rovers like to drive from 1 side of a base to another and have great respect for those who take trips of any distance. Mun is littered with abandoned rovers bulit by countless folks who didn't know what they were getting into .

Well, I ain't beat yet - Jebediah's prospects look bad, but I think the main body with Svetlana and Sally is pretty foolproof.

[B-STRK]

Well, I remembered a post in the rover megathread from back in the 0.90 days, that was designed to be rolled.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/24599-Post-your-Rover-MEGATHREAD?p=1712686&viewfull=1#post1712686

(Though, I see the rationale behind the design. Every contact point when that rover rolls is covered by a KF track. So if it rolls onto its side, it lands on a KF track. And those will take the beating and keep on ticking. Yeah, that sounds a bit OP. But it might help for Elcano III?)

Edited June 25, 2015 by B-STRK

[damerell]

I think designing a rover with tracks all round would be a bit contrived. :-/

I've driven to 66 degrees East, but this update is kind of short on screenshots because I was driving in the dark - without any roll-related disasters, so either I've got better, luckier, the terrain was smoother, or I've knocked everything fragile off and lowered the centre of gravity enough.

I did launch a probe with SCANsat instruments to fill in the map, which is in transit; and I realised I can set a waypoint and both visit one of the anomalies and drive around what looks like a jolly big crater.

[Geschosskopf]

Keep on truckin'!

My 1st Mun rover was my 1st Mun lander, which had wheels mounted on Damned Robotics (an older version of Infernal Robotics) rototrons. This enabled them to be moved from the bottom to the top of the vehicle, so it could keep moving even if it flipped over. It worked OK, especially because back in those days Mun didn't yet have jagged procedural terrain, but that meant once you'd driven a couple clicks on Mun, you'd seen it all. So I got bored and left .

[damerell]

I've experimented with IR parts, but found them rather floppy.

I did end up in the great big crater, and the Mun seems rather confused about where its poles are. (Check out the Biome readout).

I struggled out of it to find the arch, which would look more spectacular if it wasn't dark, like all of this part of the journey:

And to ninety degrees East:

These updates are getting really short - there's not much to see in the dark and I haven't been having any good disasters, so it really has been a case of putting the pedal to the metal and pointing it East. I suspect my mapping satellite will arrive just about too late to be any use.

[damerell]

I bought a set of pedals, I wrote about "putting the pedal to the metal", and last night I... broke my toe. Oh, swift and terrible irony. I'd made it to 110 degrees West, but I suspect I'll be remapping some controls before resuming the journey.

[Geschosskopf]

OUCH! Was this from being too exuberant with the new pedals or some more mundane cause? Best of luck for a full and swift recovery.

[damerell]

OUCH! Was this from being too exuberant with the new pedals or some more mundane cause? Best of luck for a full and swift recovery.

Stubbed it on the bedpost, so as mundane as it gets, but equally a broken toe is basically just a matter of sucking it up and waiting...

[B-STRK]

Stubbed it on the bedpost, so as mundane as it gets, but equally a broken toe is basically just a matter of sucking it up and waiting...

Gah! Those hurt, even with flip-flops on! (And what lousy timing, too...)

Heal well! And may it not get in the way of roving--or anything else important, for that matter.

[damerell]

Heal well! And may it not get in the way of roving--or anything else important, for that matter.

There's a three-throttle quadrant on the yoke (one of which is already KSP's main throttle, for the nose engine); I've not been roving the last couple of days, but I'll not have any trouble coming up with a hands-only control scheme.

[sober667]

Next time maby attach to it litlle drone with cammera to scan realy hard terrain visualy?

and great idea with that voiage

maby i will do something simmilar in my career to visit every biome on mun for Science ofc

and finaly if u wana modded lith Bahamuto Dynamicks has beatiful spotlite wich follow cursor so riding in FP u can lith up what u like see better

Edited July 5, 2015 by sober667

[damerell]

To 125 degrees East, notwithstanding Jeb hurting his foot kicking a Snacks can around:

Terrain on this leg seemed mostly to be ridges across the line of travel. It's still tricky to see what the far-off terrain is in the dark, of course, but I hope Kerbol-rise is coming soon.

[damerell]

It's been two weeks, and my toe is - well, not healed up, but not too stiff to drive a rover. I put in a lengthy leg (aha) at the weekend. My screenshots are still not as interesting as one might hope - albeit that that may reflect an improvement in my rover driving. Jeb has not yet been scraped off the top deck, anyhow.

At 140 degrees East there was a definite glow over the horizon, promising Kerbolrise.

At 145 and 150 degrees, Kerbol could be seen occasionally, but this was just reducing the load cycle on the fuel cell, and there was no prospect of driving without headlights.

At 160 degrees East, Kerbol was definitely overhead, but the loss of the deployable panels meant the light was coming in at too oblique an angle to help much. However, there is a nice flat bit of Mun around here, making for easy driving and allowing me to turn off the headlights without getting lost on the shadow side of slopes. Also, my Scansat probe has made it into the Mun's SOI - probably too late to be any use, but testing the design won't hurt.

By 170 degrees, Kerbol is high enough overhead that the water electrolyser can come into play to use surplus ElectricCharge - so can the purifier, but it has much less work to do.

Crossing the antimeridian, and I'm starting to wonder what's heating up - the temperature gauge top and centre shows the part closest proportionally to maxTemperature. Terrain still pleasantly flat(ish). The high-res altimetry part of the probe has got into its effective range.

By 170 degrees West, the terrain is becoming very not-flat, with a huge crater ahead on the planetary map. I also know what's overheating; solar production is letting me run the electrolyser enough that it overheats. I'm leaving it well alone for now - it may reach a steady state short of thermal failure. If it gets close to failure I can always shut it down manually. The probe has dropped the high-res altimetry module and the rest is descending to a suitable altitude for the multispectral scanner.

And finally, here I am at 165 degrees West - 100 degrees (and change) from where I landed. For the first time, I feel like the bulk of the journey is done and I'm on the final stretch.

[damerell]

Definitely into the final leg now. I'm quite glad I hit the giant crater formation from 170 degrees W in the light: I daresay I've been going over some fairly spectacular bumps in the darkness and just been blissfully oblivious, but I don't believe I've been routinely falling into this kind of hole.

The screenshot at 155W is mostly just to show I was there, but... you lose the sense of scale without the perspective cues from movement, but that far crater rim is really huge and a really long way away. I'd been sighting it over a series of smaller ridges for some time.

This shot is just as a tip to further explorers. A common problem is when you find yourself unexpectedly driving along a slope perpendicular to your direction of movement. Don't try and steer back up it onto the flat stuff at the top (unless you stop, rotate, drive straight up); steering upslope is a recipe for a roll. Go with the flow.

Where, you might ask, is the rover in this shot? It is visible as perhaps two pixels in the centre. I've taken a zoomed-out external shot to emphasise just how colossal the formation to my right is - and the chasm to the left is no trivial matter either. I'm going to try and resist the urge to go straight down the Equator, but instead drive down the canyon centre-right and see if it takes me in roughly the right direction.

The good news is that - for reasons I don't understand, since Kerbol is pretty well directly overhead so electricity production must be very high - the water electrolyser's temperature peaked at around 820K and now has been sitting below 800K. Perhaps it will refrain from exploding.

[B-STRK]

...

The good news is that - for reasons I don't understand, since Kerbol is pretty well directly overhead so electricity production must be very high - the water electrolyser's temperature peaked at around 820K and now has been sitting below 800K. Perhaps it will refrain from exploding.

Playing around with the 1.0.2-compatible US releases (testing it against both Nertea's NF Radiators and a US one Daishi drew up after some observations I made in my Mun run), to test them for long-run usage and the effectiveness of the different radiators, I found that the Elektron throttles itself when the temps hit high enough. I've seen its load drop by 33% every time it passes 700K under up to 4 ticks of rails timewarp (1000x?), for example--and the 4-Green (or 5-Green?) warp is about as fast as the game will TW while tracking US heat production. (Faster than that, and the temps default to 200-300K, but tracks heat accumulation across the time lapse, anyway, which all gets dumped straight into the part when coming out of warp.) And every time its load drops, the temps also drop until climbing once more, upon which the processor will auto-throttle lower again, until it just simply idles at ~1-5% while the part cools down--or reaches an equilibrium point.

Maybe that's what happened here.

[Claw]

Nice work. I was thinking about doing an Elcano on the Mun. Definitely helpful to read this first.

Also, I think you have so much stuff in the HUD that some of your pictures look like a first person shooter with the top of the ship coming out of the right of the screen.

Keep it up!

Cheers,

~Claw

[damerell]

Also, I think you have so much stuff in the HUD that some of your pictures look like a first person shooter with the top of the ship coming out of the right of the screen.

I generally prefer to keep the UI in screenshots, to show what I see - and the Jeb's-eye view does leave you looking down the prow of the rover, rather, yes. :-)

- - - Updated - - -

Playing around with the 1.0.2-compatible US releases (testing it against both Nertea's NF Radiators and a US one Daishi drew up after some observations I made in my Mun run), to test them for long-run usage and the effectiveness of the different radiators, I found that the Elektron throttles itself when the temps hit high enough.

I see that it's implemented with a standard ModuleResourceConverter, with DefaultShutoffTemp = 0.5 - maxTemp is 1200 (and measured in Celsius not Kelvin _sigh_) so half that would be about 740 degrees Kelvin, which seems about right. It also has "FillAmount = 0.95" which I interpret as meaning that it will throttle at 95% Oxygen capacity (not Hydrogen since that resource is marked "DumpExcess = true") - I've seen it in such a throttled state before my own kOS-programmed cutoff could kick in.

[Geschosskopf]

Where, you might ask, is the rover in this shot? It is visible as perhaps two pixels in the centre. I've taken a zoomed-out external shot to emphasise just how colossal the formation to my right is - and the chasm to the left is no trivial matter either. I'm going to try and resist the urge to go straight down the Equator, but instead drive down the canyon centre-right and see if it takes me in roughly the right direction.

Glad to see you're back up and running. Hope the toe continues to heal up.

And thanks for some spectacular pics. That's a real landmark you've got there. Do you have a name for it?

[damerell]

And thanks for some spectacular pics. That's a real landmark you've got there. Do you have a name for it?

I haven't named any of the spots I've visited, I admit. If I had, it would be Mount Valentina, in memory of her tragic death on Minmus.

[BlueCanary]

Just realised, is the title of this thread a They Might Be Giants reference?

[damerell]

Just realised, is the title of this thread a They Might Be Giants reference?

No (although it may be that the TMBG song is part of a general sort of cultural soup that caused me to title it that.) If anything, I was thinking of the '87 Asimov novel "Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain".

[damerell]

I am finally finished. The toe has been rather troublesome, in a sort of "I'm mostly OK but I'm still going to hurt a bit just to annoy you" way, but I gave up eventually and plugged through it. I did start by driving down the canyon visible at centre-right last time, which proved to be an excellent idea - a long stretch of driving where the slope and good visibility allowed high speeds.

However, near the end it started to squeeze down to a rather awkward shape with a right-angled corner at the bottom, which I found myself doing my best not to fall into and scrape the side of the rover along (although essentially everything outboard of the structural panels had been scraped off anyway).

But I got out of it OK.

Then I went over a curious series of ridges which seemed very prone to flinging the rover up in the air and/or causing it to yaw or roll wildly. I don't have any screenshots of that, unfortunately, because when it happened I was too busy being alarmed. I did once end up basically nose-down to the ground moving sideways across it, shoving the throttle for the nose engine forward in a desperate attempt not to get it scraped off - successfully, for once.

Eventually it started to get dark. Curiously, after that, the terrain eased up a great deal - I don't know if this was sheer luck or if the way I drive over ridges is actively useless so I do better when I can't see them.

And finally, the flag appeared in the distance (well, the small teal circle below the horizon appeared, anyway)!

Then the engine module showed up. Odd, since I thought it had rolled further away after being detached, but it's not like I really was concerned with it.

Only 30km to go!

And here we are. Apparently the engine module rolled away about half a metre on detachment. Handy if I needed to reattach to it, if I hadn't broken the docking ports off the rover, and I had any way to get the craft vertical. (I guess with the large Mun-gravity TWR I could have dragged it to the crest of a hill with the rover then slapped the throttle and hoped...)

And a final shot showing (if it wasn't dark, sigh, but I think I'm sticking to the idea that you see what I see) the rover next to the original flag and the discarded engine module.

I awarded Jeb a Certified BadAss ribbon for driving halfway around the Mun on the outside of the rover.

[Geschosskopf]

Way to soldier on despite adversity. Congrats on completing this horrific trip.

[B-STRK]

Congrats damerell on making it around the Mun! (And seemingly without major course adjustment too, based on the BTDT and screenshots of you powering through the terrain). And hoping that toe's feeling much better now.

[damerell]

Way to soldier on despite adversity. Congrats on completing this horrific trip.

To be fair I think the adversity was largely of my own making. :-)