Exploration on Minmus and beyond

[sirguinea]

I had landed two craft on Minmus right next to what I like to think of as a fissure and not so much a glitch in the patchwork of the terrain.

Approaching anomaly landing site

This ship has been modified with landing gear to travel to the fissure

You can see the fissure on the right as I approach my other landed craft. Sadly the approach made one of them explode

By the time I got to it my rover had fallen completely apart but all I had to do now was roll myself into the crack.

Into de planet coooorrrrreeeee

The best part was being ejected out the other side. Just look at that speed!

I had a ton of fun with this adventure so I hope you all enjoyed it. ;P

[Ted]

Wow! You were travelling pretty quickly in that last photo. I remember on my first rover mission around Minmus I hit one of them and it sent me flying up into the air and I exploded. :\'(

[zekes]

Me too.

Really terrible since it took so long to get there.

[samstarman5]

What you have found is the eye of Minmus, the kerbal equivalent of the eye of Iapetus, which in the novel* 2001 Commander Bowman flew into that took him beyond the stars.

You might want to be cautious taking that stargate, as it may took you to a world of brown-ish primate bipeds who drink green soda and worry about their smartphones. If you do go there, do research on digital watches, as those garnered just as much concern in the past. So I\'ve heard in myth and legend.

*Novel, not the movie

[SunJumper]

What you have is a miniature version of a SunJump, which is exactly how the Sun worked before 1.4.

[sirguinea]

What you have found is the eye of Minmus, the kerbal equivalent of the eye of Iapetus, which in the novel* 2001 Commander Bowman flew into that took him beyond the stars.

You might want to be cautious taking that stargate, as it may took you to a world of brown-ish primate bipeds who drink green soda and worry about their smartphones. If you do go there, do research on digital watches, as those garnered just as much concern in the past. So I\'ve heard in myth and legend.

*Novel, not the movie

Did you just mix two awesome sci-fi references? I think you did and it\'s awesome. What threw me off when I was younger and I read 2001 was the fact that he set the first book around Saturn and if I\'m not mistaken he wrote it after the movie. He just thought it was cooler at the time to make it Saturn but when it came time for him to write the sequel he decided to make it Jupiter again. Guess he really wanted the whole

Jupiter goes splodey and turns into a star

thing more than he wanted to keep the original setting of the first book. My copy of 2010 has a preface by the author explaining his thoughts on the matter.

What you have is a miniature version of a SunJump, which is exactly how the Sun worked before 1.4.

I did this many times trying to get to the sun in the previous versions, just wasn\'t expecting it from a moon. Makes total sense though.

[Commander Zoom]

Got that backwards. The novel came before the movie, but when it came time to make a Saturn model, the fx crew couldn\'t quite pull it off to Kubrick\'s satisfaction, so the whole thing was moved to the (much simpler, especially in those pre-Voyager days) Jupiter system. Clarke decided to stick with that for the follow-up novels and movies.

Silent Running, made some time later by many of the same technical people, was set around Saturn in part to say (in essence), 'Look, we can do this now!'

[samstarman5]

Got that backwards. The novel came before the movie, but when it came time to make a Saturn model, the fx crew couldn\'t quite pull it off to Kubrick\'s satisfaction, so the whole thing was moved to the (much simpler, especially in those pre-Voyager days) Jupiter system. Clarke decided to stick with that for the follow-up novels and movies.

Silent Running, made some time later by many of the same technical people, was set around Saturn in part to say (in essence), 'Look, we can do this now!'

What\'s really funny is the godlike technical wizard Douglas Trumbull kept trying to convince Stanley Kubrick that he could pull off Saturn for the film. After post-production was done, Trumbull came to Kubrick and showed him the finished product that he had done practically himself. Stanley either was just full of disbelief(which, knowing the big SK, I don\'t believe that), or he just really wanted to use Jupiter instead. So Doug went ahead and used that for Silent Running.

I\'m actually happy they went with Jupiter for the movie.

And actually, the book came the same time as the movie. It was more a collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke in its entirety. Preproduction was started when there was more just an outline to the book, and Clarke holed himself up to finish the book so they could do up the screenplay in time for main production. It was a weird experiment on producing movie and book simultaneously that actually worked. I have my doubts it will ever be pulled off again, but there have been times when it almost did. I think Jurassic Park: The Lost World had just hit the printers when the movie began production.

That is probably the next best example when you consider Michael Crichton had to bring Ian Malcolm and John Hammond back to life for the book.

@sirguinea: Yes, I did, smeghead.