The Adventures of Tex Kerman

[Tex]

Howdy, everybody!

In this fancy little mission report, which, as of April 23, 2017 has undergone severe renovations, I'm going to document what I've been up to on Kerbin and beyond. My older reports on this thread have been about me flying around Kerbin to see different features that strike my fancy, and, while I don't plan on ending that anytime soon, I'm expanding the scope of this little mission report in order to focus on craft projects and other exploits as well.

Without further ado, welcome to

 

Here's a handy Table of Contents, for organizationally-minded people.

Table of Contents

Episode 1: See "Old OP" below.
Episode 2: Crash Mountain + Mini Update: Crash Forest
Episode 3: The Unnamed River 
Episode 4: Butterfly Lake
Episode 5: Ginormous Crater
Episode 6: Sunrise Cliffs
Episode 7: Right-Angle River
Episode 8: Dman Beach
Episode 9: The North Pole
Episode 10: Building the Motor-Cicle

 

Old OP:

Spoiler

Howdy, everybody. My name is Maximus97, as I've been known here on the forums getting on for two years now, but in this mission report here, I am going to be going by my alias and Kerbal alter ego: Tex Kerman!

In this mission report, I'm going to be flying around Kerbin and exploring any place that tickles my fancy, taking pictures, and showing what I find here. For each of my discoveries, I'll show a couple of photos and give a brief description of the area and its approximate location so you can fly there yourself, possibly!

As one last note, if you have any specific place you'd like me to go, just post to this thread with the coordinates or an image from map view so I can know where it is, and I'll investigate it for you with any information you'd like.

I hope you all enjoy my adventures and pictures!

 

Places I've Been

Duck Lake

Crash Mountain
(+ Crash Forest)

The Unnamed River

Butterfly Lake

Ginormous Crater
(+ Runway Island, Control Island, and the Terminal Mountains)

Sunrise Cliffs
(+ Piper's Peak)

Right-Angle River
(+ Slice Range?)

Dman Beach

The North Pole

- - - - - - - - - - - 

So my first discovery comes from when I was testing my bird, the "Seagull." Back then, it was known simply as the Ka-197X, and didn't have quite the same action group functionality the full version has. I decided a good test of the plane would be to fly to the southernmost tip of the continental region the KSC was located on, round-trip. While on the way there, I flew past a lake that, at first, I thought looked like Yoshi from the Super Mario franchise. Looking at it from the air, I then thought it to be some sort of Koopa, but then I looked at it in a different way: From south of the lake, looking to the north:

Doesn't that look like a cartoon duck flying somewhere? I sure thought so, so I have dubbed the feature "Duck Lake." I know. I'm kind of an expert at naming things. The area Duck Lake is in is sort of a lake-ridden part of the continental region, by the sea. I say "continental region" instead of just "continent" because, in case you haven't seen, Kerbin's landmass is actually a supercontinent. Regardless of whether or not "continental region" is an actual term or not, that's what I'm calling it because it's stuck in my head now.

Anyway, here's a picture of the area from the sky.

As you can see, Duck lake is visible, as is the KSC far north to it. I believe it's more North-Northwest. I didn't take any scientific readings of the area because it was mostly a test flight, but yeah. There's my first real discovery!

 

[Dman979]

Huh.

it took me a while to see the duck, but now it looks like a duck.

Nice name!

[Tex]

Part Two: Crash Mountain

In the second part of the Tex Kerman Adventures, I take you now to a magical place I am now going to call Crash Mountain. If you can't see why I'm calling it this, then you haven't played enough KSP.

I was puttering along in my jet and heading along to a river system not far from the Kerbal Space Center and its continental region, and, just as I was about to get there to investigate the river (I could see the river when I was flying), I noticed that the mountain peak I was flying around looked quite picturesque. I snapped a photo of the mountain, the first in the below collection of pictures, and it was when I was flying down the mountain that I had some weird occurrence happen. It was a mechanical failure, the likes of which I am completely unaware of the natur- I might have stalled the plane. Take a look at the result in the second image.

In the third image, which has some pretty colors on it, I've outlined a few details. In green is the Kerbal Space Center. In red was my intended destination. In blue is the pretty mountain I was taking pictures of. And in yellow, the approximate area of the crash site.

So there we have it- another discovery found, crashed into, and then named.

[Just Jim]

Oh my.... beautiful!  My name is Tex, I just crashed into a mountain, and to celebrate the occasion, I'm naming it Crash Mountain!

This is such a wonderfully KSP attitude!  

I look forward to more.

[Tex]

Just now, Just Jim said:

Oh my.... beautiful!  My name is Tex, I just crashed into a mountain, and to celebrate the occasion, I'm naming it Crash Mountain!

This is such a wonderfully KSP attitude!  

I look forward to more.

Thanks a bunch! Literally as I write I am flying now to Crash Mountain again to possibly take some better photos, maybe not crash, and then investigate the river I was originally gonna look at. And yeah, I'm using a computer while flying a plane. It's what Tex would do.

[Galileo]

This is looks like fun!  Nice terrain textures btw looks really nice. I will definitely follow this story

[Tex]

Part Three: The River (Unnamed)

Welcome back to Tex's Adventures! This time, I finally completed my journey to the river I was trying to reach before, and actually spent a good deal of time studying it. I also took a better look at Crash Mountain, which I'll get out of the way first.

http://imgur.com/a/bUFo8

The link I posted above is to the Imgur album of the mountain, with various images and descriptions of what's going on. To summarize: It looks like I misplaced the location of Crash Mountain in one of my previous photos. It seems to be connected and yet quite distinct from the nearby mountain range, which is shown in the very last picture of the album. I'll post it here because I think it looks cool.

So now we're on to what I was actually looking for: The river! (By the way, I couldn't figure out what to name it, so I'm open for suggestions. Maybe I'll try for a poll or something, but I haven't come up with just one name I can decide on.) (Also, Imgur is being mean to me, so I'll show these images one by one.)

The first thing you'll notice is that it's a pretty short river. There are a couple shorter rivers on Kerbin (which only has 7 rivers total, I counted), but it doesn't seem to be any massive thing. Here's a picture from space.

Spoiler

 

Okay, now here's a photo of the river from space.

 

Spoiler

 

Other than it being a good river, from there there's not much to say about it. I mean, c'mon, it's a river. I could probably tell you more if I was a river scientist, but oh well. At the very least I did get in closer and take some more pictures.

 

Spoiler

 

This picture shows something that sort of surprised me when I was flying over it- the river is actually pretty darn wide. Concievably its about 100m wide at spots, but I'm not sure yet. I think this is the perfect opportunity to design a river-width-testing probe to help figure it out. Maybe with a rocket on it... Yeah.

So the next thing I was looking at, whilst I was following this river, was what appeared to be some sort of silt deposit in the middle of the river that blocked the river from flowing. Just some sand built up in the middle of the river, from what sort of geological event I'm not sure. What I do know is that it formed a pond in the shape of a hot-air balloon. Lookie.

 

Spoiler

 

There's a similar feature further upstream, but I think I can actually make a reasonable guess and say that they're the result of some landslide that occured within a few hundred years. Short enough that the water hasn't had a chance to erode it, but long enough that rocks can be seen and grass has covered the deposits.

 

Spoiler

 

In order for landslides to happen, though, the walls of the river canyon thingy would have to be pretty steep, and they are. They're really darn steep.

 

Spoiler

 

To be fair, that is the section of the river that begins to cut into the mountains, from which I assume the river was fed once upon a time. The river cuts pretty deep into the mountains, leaving an enormous canyon with very steep cliffs, and, for some reason, weird lake holes.

 

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

So I think that concludes my expedition of the river! It was very entertaining to study this river and see how it cut into the mountains like it did, but most importantly of all it allowed me to test the performance and behavior of the Seagull aircraft in long flights, that I would have to take to longer targets and fly around more. Also, I enjoyed coming up with the phrase "lake holes."

 

 

 

Oh yeah, Tex also found a rock.

[Dman979]

Hmm.

It still has water in it, so I don't think that it's the result of a ages-ago landslide.

Maybe it's a seasonal river, fed from the mountains? In the spring, it gets really large, and for the rest of the year it may or may not run. Either way, it's probably not a good idea to land a plane there- I'd be worried about flash floods.

[Tex]

9 hours ago, Dman979 said:

Either way, it's probably not a good idea to land a plane there

Flashfloodwhat?

[Dman979]

I do hope you're not putting those glasses on every picture individually. There's got to be a better way!

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

Take his helmet off!

[Tex]

Please, please, this a nature documentary, not a burlesque show! 

 

That, and I don't use mods at all. If there was a way to remove his helmet stock, I would enjoy that very much, actually.

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

45 minutes ago, Maximus97 said:

Please, please, this a nature documentary, not a burlesque show! 

 

That, and I don't use mods at all. If there was a way to remove his helmet stock, I would enjoy that very much, actually.

Texture Replacer, but fine, if you insist on stock. What's wrong with a harmless mod? it doesn't even add any parts!

[Kerbinchaser]

KIS also lets you take helmets off.

[Tex]

Meh. I've always preferred stock. I don't mean to derail myself, but I find that stock gives plenty of challenge to work around and find solutions to where mods would take the easy way out. It's not that I don't like having it easy, just finding my own way is even more fun and rewarding. That, and if anyone wants to share designs, it's not complicated in the slightest.

[Mjp1050]

22 hours ago, Maximus97 said:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Looks a bit like a bust of George Washington to me, and if you rotate Duck Lake 90 degrees counterclockwise, it looks like a sitting dog.

This is an inkblot test waiting to happen...

[Tex]

The Kerb-schach test 

And you know, the funny thing is that I also thought it looked like a bust as I was passing by it, but I eventually decided on a hot-air balloon. Unfortunately I don't think it's an actual pond or lake because it's in the middle of the river, so it probably won't have a good name.

[Tex]

Mini Update 1 - Crash Forest

Breaking news from the surface of Kerbin!

So as I type I am currently flying Tex Kerman back from the still-unnamed river (i'm open for suggestions, people!) and I of course wanted one last look at all the mountains near the geographical feature because they look darn pretty. I noticed now for the first time that Crash Mountain seems to have a very dense forest on it's South-eastern side (well, dense by Kerbin standards).

Looking at all the screenshots from my first encounter with Crash Mountain, I didn't appear to have recorded any of the trees, but that was because the crash happened on the Western slope of the mountain, where the forest wasn't visible. So here's an image of the newly-designated Crash Forest.

I'm always gonna be looking for names for things, so don't hesitate to throw alternate names out or names for features I've already discovered and published! Also also also, I'm always open for requests of specific locations to visit on Kerbin's surface, so tell me what you wanna see and I'll be sure to fly there!

[SpaceplaneAddict]

Hey @Maximus97, ya wouldn't happen ta be Texan, wouldja?

Edited August 27, 2016 by SpaceplaneAddict

[Tex]

Nope. I'm an Idahoan that has lived in Wyoming for the past 13 years. As such, I'm a certified potato connoisseur.

[SpaceplaneAddict]

1 hour ago, Maximus97 said:

Nope. I'm an Idahoan that has lived in Wyoming for the past 13 years. As such, I'm a certified potato connoisseur.

Plot Twist!

[Tex]

Part Four: Butterfly Lake

Howdy, everybody! This time on the Adventures of Tex Kerman we're on a grand journey across two continental regions en route to a massive crater feature half a world a way from the KSC. However, while flying there, I happened across a new feature.

Everybody, meet Butterfly Lake!

It's a small lake feature similar to Duck Lake, because I noticed it at a glance as I was flying by. At first it actually looked like some sort of retro game controller viewed from an angle, but it also looked sort of like a very rotund and tall rabbit. Here's the feature from a few more perspectives so you can all form your own opinions:

Spoiler

Spoiler

I didn't get a very good look at its precise location on Kerbin because I wasn't paying attention so the best I have is a rough estimate. It's somewhere in this area:

So there we go! One more feature cataloged.

 

Be sure to suggest new places I can check out, I can't come up with absolutely everything on my own 

[Andem]

I like "Rabbit Lake." sounds like a camping spot.

[Dman979]

There's a lake on almost the exact opposite of Kerbin from the KSC. Can you find it?

[Tex]

So @Dman979, as far as I can tell, this is the rough area of your alleged lake, correct?

 

Because if so, there are quite a few lake systems that I see, unless you mean those giant ones right there. Are you proposing a scavenger hunt? Because regardless of whether or not you are, I accept your terms unconditionally and will start the hunt as soon as I can!