The ultimate "You gotta be KIDDIN' me!" moment!

[NorthernDevo]

OK, here's the story to this point:

Paypal hates me.

That's the only answer I have about why the blasted site has STILL not run my order for KSP through, and I'm still stuck with the demo. Ok, ok...technically it's still just 4 business days but come ON!

Ahem...anyway, I've been having to invent new things to do in the demo, and recently I've decided to go looking for all the easter eggs on the two available moons.

God's Ringbolts (er...the arches...) were easy to find; a Stayputnik probe in low (REALLY low - 10K) polar orbit found the flying saucer right on the nighttime terminator...that was nice (and a little creepy).

I made it on a direct flight to Minimus with a horribly overbuilt ship and spent a few hours cruising over the surface, looking for other features, finding nothing.

That was about the time I posted my introductory post here; in it I mentioned I was about to give up since there clearly wasn't anything there. I was quickly informed that yes, there was something there...so I kept looking. Whatever it was had to be a monolith; anything larger I'd have seen. So the past week or so I've been orbiting Minimus looking for something...anything. I've landed and explored all the dry lakes on foot (well, on MMU), looked up and down valleys. Nada.

I've recently been able to make much smaller vessels to the little moon by slingshotting around the Mun and have found some pretty neat RV solutions which involves an exciting ground-skimming periapsis of 5000m; very fun.

But I STILL haven't found the bloody munolith.

Until yesterday.

I'd come up with a launch vehicle which I'm convinced has to be the smallest vessel possible for such a journey and sent Val back out to the outer moon on yet another survey. (Remember, this is the demo - no science equipment; it's all eyeballs. Given the size of Kerbal eyeballs, this is a good thing.) I orbited for a while, then, wanting to take a break and having a ton of fuel left over in my descent stage, I decided to put her down on a handy highland - looked flat, no dry lakes nearby. I thought I'd explore the plateau in the morning.

(I wanted to eat dinner, bathe etc. And let Val sleep for a while.)

So I landed just at dusk, but forgot about the moon's rotation and wound up putting down just after night fell.

Inspired by other pics here, I decided to take a couple of shots of Val's landing site:

Quite nice. How about another shot a little later in the morning...trying to find a nice dramatic lighting.

Not bad...how about one from Minimosity's (the lander) view?

And...

Uh...

I looked at the image...and looked at it again...

and then said "YOU GOTTA BE KIDDIN' ME!!!"

Look again:

 

 

Yup - I've been bopping around this blasted mint-frosted muffin for TWO BLOODY WEEKS looking for this flippin' monolith...and then I damn near land right on top of it!

Well, at least I finally found the thing...the joy of discovery is moderated somewhat by the likelihood that the Munolith aliens were getting dizzy watching me go around and around and around, then finally rolled their celestial eyes and told Val where to put the darn ship down.

 

Cheers!

 

 

Edited April 17, 2016 by NorthernDevo
Figured out how to post pics...all over again.