Plant flag on Jool. How to?

[AFF]

Hi 2 all. I've got a contract to plant flag om Jool surface. Doeas any-body know how to land on it? All of my ships was destroyed at zero altitude..

Edited July 17, 2015 by AFF

[mhoram]

Dont bother with that one.

It is impossible.

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Jool

[rofltehcat]

It is a gas giant. You can't land on it. This must be a glitch in the quest generator.

[AFF]

I know that it is a gas planet, but maybe there is a island of thr frozen pressured gas, or anything else with solid surface? There is possible in real..

[HoloYolo]

I know that it is a gas planet, but maybe there is a island of the frozen pressured gas, or anything else with solid surface? There is possible in real..

It gets hotter as you go down, so no way in hell is there frozen gas or water. It is not possible in real life due to the pressure and heat. It's like hell down there

[Xannari Ferrows]

You have to be insane to take this, but it is technically not impossible. Just really • 10^(10^100) hard.

[pincushionman]

You see that big red "X" in the upper-right-hand corner? That is how you do this one.

[smjjames]

Technically there is solid ground, you just have to dive to great (and I mean planet size great) depths, through the metallic hydrogen sea, to get there. It's the primal rocky core of the gas giant.

[CalculusWarrior]

There is a 'surface' of Jool in KSP, but any ship will phase right through that and start entering negative altitude numbers, until they explode somewhere around -100 metres, making flag planting impossible. The contract code will sometimes give impossible-to-complete contracts, such as that one, 'test launch clamps on the Mun', etc.

[Sharpy]

Heh... if there's a zero altitude...

keep a kerbal on EVA, in some strut cage... get down to that zero... "plant flag"...

I'm fairly sure it wouldn't work.

[FlyingPete]

Theoretically there's experiment results coded into the game for Jool's surface. I guess there has to be in case the game ever looks for it, so presumably you can get the occasional nonsensical contract come up. The only thing to beat that one though would be "Plant a flag on the Sun"

[Sharpy]

to prevent burns, it must be done at night.

[Edax]

Lol, Gene thinks your overqualified for landing on Jool...

[Javascap]

Sharpy: the mission you were given is a bug, a mistake. It is impossible to fulfil that contract because you can't land on Jool because Jool, being a gas giant, has no surface to plant a flag on. Even if you went EVA at zero altitude, there is no surface to plant the flag on, you will just keep falling to -100 meters, at which point your ship explodes. There is no mechanic in the game by which you can plant a flag because there is nothing to plant the flag on.

[Andem]

I'm sorry this happened to you. I would suggest writing down the amount of rep you have, quitting the contract, and restoring your tep in the persist file.

[Snark]

Yah, you've got an impossible one.  It's not just that it's programmed to kill you, there's no actual surface.  As in, the programmers didn't put one in.  There is no "there" there.

It's a bug that the game even offered you the contract-- I'd suggest reporting it.

[eddiew]

Prestige: trivial

[Arsonide]

On 7/17/2015 at 4:06 PM, CalculusWarrior said:

There is a 'surface' of Jool in KSP, but any ship will phase right through that and start entering negative altitude numbers, until they explode somewhere around -100 metres, making flag planting impossible. The contract code will sometimes give impossible-to-complete contracts, such as that one, 'test launch clamps on the Mun', etc.

Launch clamps on the Mun were fixed over a year ago, along with jet engines in vacuum, and other oddities. Flag plant contracts have never considered bodies with no surface, such as Jool. In fact, in 1.0.5 they were tightened up a bit - not only do they only consider bodies with a surface, but trivial ones only consider bodies that you have already landed on with manned missions, which would make a Jool flag plant contract doubly impossible to generate.

My first guess is that the original poster had a celestial body mod, as a lot of them use Jool as a template...and that mod either gave Jool a surface, or created a new planet with a surface, and did not change the name from Jool.

I would be able to check if there was a save uploaded here, but there wasn't. Seeing as the original post was in July 2015, I don't think we'll be getting one either.

[Loren Pechtel]

15 hours ago, Arsonide said:

Launch clamps on the Mun were fixed over a year ago, along with jet engines in vacuum, and other oddities. Flag plant contracts have never considered bodies with no surface, such as Jool. In fact, in 1.0.5 they were tightened up a bit - not only do they only consider bodies with a surface, but trivial ones only consider bodies that you have already landed on with manned missions, which would make a Jool flag plant contract doubly impossible to generate.

I disagree--I currently have a contract to plant a flag on the Mun--but I have never landed there.  Perhaps the fact that I have landed on Minmus lets this happen but I haven't gotten any tourist contracts to land on Mun--but plenty for Minmus.

[FullMetalMachinist]

11 minutes ago, Loren Pechtel said:

I disagree--I currently have a contract to plant a flag on the Mun--but I have never landed there.  Perhaps the fact that I have landed on Minmus lets this happen but I haven't gotten any tourist contracts to land on Mun--but plenty for Minmus.

Here's the part you might have missed (emphasis mine):

15 hours ago, Arsonide said:

not only do they only consider bodies with a surface, but trivial ones only consider bodies that you have already landed on with manned missions

He was explaining how the contract system won't give contracts that say "Prestige:Trivial" in the contract details, not that it won't give you any contracts to plant a flag on a new body. I'd bet that the current contract you have has a higher Prestige. 

[Arsonide]

6 hours ago, FullMetalMachinist said:

He was explaining how the contract system won't give contracts that say "Prestige:Trivial" in the contract details, not that it won't give you any contracts to plant a flag on a new body. I'd bet that the current contract you have has a higher Prestige. 

Correct. Significant prestige flag plant contracts will only appear on planets you have reached but not landed on with manned missions, after you do land, they drop down to trivial.

[Nich]

Does ignore max temp allow you to plant a flag on Jool? or do you sill explode and -100m?

[Snark]

54 minutes ago, Nich said:

Does ignore max temp allow you to plant a flag on Jool? or do you sill explode and -100m?

I don't think that'll help you.  The problem is that there's no surface.  By which I don't mean "gas giants don't have surface, because science!"  Rather what I mean is that there's actually, literally no surface, as in "this is a computer program, not some alternate reality, and the programmers didn't actually put a surface there, there's literally nothing, i.e. "there is no 'there' there".  You can't plant a flag unless somebody added a surface for you to stand on.

So, yeah, no happy landings on Jool.

[Plusck]

On 16/03/2016 at 2:25 AM, Andem said:

I'm sorry this happened to you. I would suggest writing down the amount of rep you have, quitting the contract, and restoring your tep in the persist file.

In case nobody but @Arsonide noticed, this is a necro bump from July 2015.

 

That said, the answers are all valid - and the question of whether a gas giant actually has a "surface" is an interesting one of definitions...