Conquering Whirligig (Chapter 20 - Interplanetary Ballooning)

[Ultimate Steve]

Okay, so for continuity's sake I'm maintaining that Kerbmun is barely Kerbal Habitable, despite the fact that Kerbmun's surface is now 150 degrees F at sea level.

@GregroxMun Was this intentional, or just an unintended result of atmosphere standardization?

[Whirligig Girl]

14 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

Okay, so for continuity's sake I'm maintaining that Kerbmun is barely Kerbal Habitable, despite the fact that Kerbmun's surface is now 150 degrees F at sea level.

@GregroxMun Was this intentional, or just an unintended result of atmosphere standardization?

150 fahrenheit at sea level at the equator, sure. Kerbmun does receive more insolation from the Sun, after all. It is perhaps a little higher than I'd like, but it's not that bad--and it's not dry either. The equator would be a rainforested band if there were any trees, instead there's just the rain.

If it's 150 F at higher latitudes then there's a problem that I need to address. :v

 

EDIT: Also unless you did something weird on purpose, Kerbmun's atmosphere should still behave, unrealistically, as if it had as much oxygen as Kerbin has--limiting oxygen is a planned feature for a future update.

Edited November 6, 2018 by GregroxMun

[Ultimate Steve]

9 minutes ago, GregroxMun said:

150 fahrenheit at sea level at the equator, sure. Kerbmun does receive more insolation from the Sun, after all. It is perhaps a little higher than I'd like, but it's not that bad--and it's not dry either. The equator would be a rainforested band if there were any trees, instead there's just the rain.

If it's 150 F at higher latitudes then there's a problem that I need to address. :v

 

EDIT: Also unless you did something weird on purpose, Kerbmun's atmosphere should still behave, unrealistically, as if it had as much oxygen as Kerbin has--limiting oxygen is a planned feature for a future update.

1. Yeah, temp varies with lattitude, and although I thought I made my base high lattitude enough, I guess not, daytime temperature peaks at 172... Just under freezing at the poles. And imagine the humidity... Maybe if I get that zeppelin up there I can move the base, but for now it's spacesuit only... Oh, well, that's the joy of playing an in-development pack!

2. Yeah, I think that was just bad spaceplane design on my part... But once I post Ch. 14 you'll see I found a solution... But once limited oxygen is a thing then it probably won't work any more!

 

[Whirligig Girl]

9 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

1. Yeah, temp varies with lattitude, and although I thought I made my base high lattitude enough, I guess not, daytime temperature peaks at 172... Just under freezing at the poles. And imagine the humidity... Maybe if I get that zeppelin up there I can move the base, but for now it's spacesuit only... Oh, well, that's the joy of playing an in-development pack!

2. Yeah, I think that was just bad spaceplane design on my part... But once I post Ch. 14 you'll see I found a solution... But once limited oxygen is a thing then it probably won't work any more!

 

The limited oxygen thing will be a general patch for all planet mods, and will be optional but highly recommended.

I'll have to re-evaluate Kerbmun's atmosphere, and try to get something a little less toasty for 0.7. In-universe, you can attribute the changes to uh... solar variability or something idk.

[Whirligig Girl]

Kerbmun is now around 10 kelvins cooler or so in the prerelease version.

[Ultimate Steve]

13 hours ago, GregroxMun said:

Kerbmun is now around 10 kelvins cooler or so in the prerelease version.

Alright, thank you for considering my feedback! I don't think I've ever heard of many other planet pack authors doing this! Hopefully I chose the right new base location factoring in future temperature change (in the chapter) even though it doesn't really matter that much.

The following is a very Kerbmun focused chapter. I will do other stuff after the Kerbmun situation is stable. I would very much like to get back to planetary exploration and maybe manned missions before too much longer.

 

Chapter 14 - Rise of the Zeppelins

Spoiler

I wrote a lot but accidentally deleted it (curse you, browser back buttons on the mouse) so here's the short abridged version:

The second drop pod was dropped, containing parts to hopefully fix the Accelerando. It also carried a tiny rover and IKEA-2.

After some work, the Accelerando had been updated. Unfortunately one of the IKEA-2 fuel tanks had accidentally been destroyed.

After some refueling, the Accelerando now worked perfectly, except for flipping on ascent, which made the fuel margins very tight.

The two remaining Kerbals on orbit went over to the plane, and the landing was successful.

We'll need to add wheels to the new pods, they are a strike hazard.

Next, the Kerbmun Exploration Plane visited two old crashed probes.

Now, we've updated Whirligig, and I didn't notice until recently that the atmosphere standardization has drastically raised the temperature on Kerbmun. Sorry, but Fahrenheit is my native unit, unfortunately, so to put it in terms that I understand... For the base, a reasonable daily high was 93, which is really high. But now it's 173, which is not survivable for long at all. I'm told that it will drop to around 153 after the next update, but it looks like I need to relocate the colony further north or south.

I debated on the best way to do this... A cargo plane, a crane rover... I never considered boats but that would be interesting... But I eventually settled on... Well, you've read the title of the chapter, haven't you?

The design was originally one rigid zeppelin part with stuff attached, but with all the equipment and fuel it could barely take off at sea level, much less carry the base. So I got a bit... Kerbal.

This is KZ-1 "The Bomb." It was named that because the original one body version closely resembled one. Hopefully it won't explode. Despite its bulky appearance, the whole zeppelin only weighs about 20-25 tons. It has a payload bay, two winches, landing gear (I want a mooring tower but that's a bit complex and I'd need more than one if I wanted to land anywhere else) the part's built in engine (using monoprop to simulate an actual engine), six fins, seats for 13, and not much else.

Now you're probably thinking, "Steve, how are you getting that through re-entry?" Well, due to some interesting coding choices, this thing has very good heat tolerance, except for the gondola. So we're braking into an orbit and just going for it.

And it worked, somehow! Here you can get a closer look at the craft.

The Bomb was briefly landed while Bill braved the heat to attach ports to one of the base modules.

Meanwhile, the Kerbmun exploration plane tried to find a region with a reasonable temperature, factoring in the 10K drop planned for 0.7. It found a fabulous mountain overlooking lakes, river-like formations, islands, and the ocean, all int eh direction of sunset. Unfortunately it was still too hot. The one man survey team settled for a cooler (though still warm) but much less epic overlook.

I forget exactly what the temperature was here, but it should get below 60 at night and should mostly stay below 90 during the day... After the update, at least. I think. I may be misremembering, this was hours ago. But I trust that past me chose a place with reasonable temperatures.

The temperature gets warmer closer to the water, however, so if it's off by a few degrees from comfortable we can move the base uphill.

Unfortunately, it's a bit far away...

Holding up here, I did some math, and using 1930s estimates for zeppelin range and efficiency, I should be able to carry the load (not in real life, HL balloons are waaay OP in lift) or at least fly that whole distance and back without fuel problems. Unfortunately I'll run out halfway there, despite carrying several tons of fuel. So I'm drawing a line between fun and cheating, and saying that if guys in the 1930s could do it several times more efficient than the game lets me, then, well, I think infinite fuel is justified. I don't want to spend the time sending two or three refueling posts.

Bill prepares one of the base buildings for transport.

It was originally going to be carried on the outside like that, suspended from two wires, but we found out that something that small could just be fit in the cargo bay, so we did that.

And off it went! We lost a fin at some point but it was barely noticeable. The thing is piloted using trim and flies very straight as long as you come back every few minutes to adjust the yaw.

You can levitate at about 2km ASL with full tanks and that payload. But if you pitch up you can use the airship as a lifting surface and go higher, leading to less drag, leading to more speed, leading to a bit more lift... It tapers off after a while, though. With empty tanks and the pitch trick, we managed to cruise at 85m/s at above 6km. That's with the payload.

Anyways, after an eternity of time warping, and the use of infinite fuel (sorry!) the landing site was in sight.

Since we had launched quickly and suddenly and almost by accident, we did not have Bill. We did, however, have an engineer in the three colonists who had managed to sneak aboard - I mean, err, were trained rigorously to pilot zeppelins on alien worlds. We now have 23 colonists... Which means that the Arpeggio can't carry all of them.

We also have to move Grace Station into a near polar orbit to be able to reach it... Ahh more headaches!

Anyway, as I was saying... I thought an engineer was necessary to decouple the ropes. It turned out one wasn't. There's a release button. But I sent her out, and it was fun!

The first parachute jump of the program!

The base module was put in position, and unplugged from The Bomb.

The ropes were coiled up, and The Bomb was landed nearby, ready for another trip!

 

...I just sent a zeppelin to an alien moon. I'm still trying to absorb the ridiculousness of the whole thing!

 

Step 14 complete!

 

 

 

 

 

[Kerbalstar]

Sometimes, you just have to a little Kerbal... Great work @Ultimate Steve!

[RealKerbal3x]

Oh hey! Zeppelins! I love zeppelins! @Ultimate Steve strikes again!

[Ultimate Steve]

 

Chapter 15 - Moar Planets!

Spoiler

So, if this wasn't obvious already, I'm severely time limited and will limited. I'll be upfront with you, I did not fly the zeppelin for several trips, as a round trip takes like 2 hours in real life. I flew it with the first base module, as seen in the previous chapter, I flew it back, and I flew it halfway there with the heaviest chunk. That leaves 2 base modules, 2 drop pods, the rover, and a launch pad that I did not take legitimately, so 3 trips, about 7 hours worth of monotony spent on something important in real life.

You can forgive me for that, right?

Now, partially to explore the idea of cheaper launch vehicles (an Accent and a transfer stage is over 100k) and partially to break the boredom I threw together two tiny rockets and put them on tall launch clamps to try to get to orbit cheaply and efficiently, delta-v wise.

The first one broke due to acceleration, but the second one worked.

Next, The Bomb was flown back to the main base. It can get pretty high and fast if you use the right angle of attack.

The base core was attached using a pipe instead of two winches this time for rigidity.

It barely rose, as it was pretty heavy. Also a second fin broke off, but we still have 4 good ones. It went inland, before discovering that it couldn't cross the mountains. It used the angle of attack method to generate lift to rise about another kilometer or so, before topping out, and having to turn back and use the ocean route because of the buoyancy problem.

The accelerando also flew over, manually piloted.

The scrap heap was left behind, but if we need it we can go get it.

After 0.7 the temperature should be livable, but for now it's still hot, but doable. If need be we can move the base again but that shouldn't be necessary. Going up and down hill will work for small changes...

Anyway, to reduce lag, we had three different areas, outside of physics range of each other.

This is the main base area, consisting of the core, the three houses, and currently the rover.

This is the airport, which is on a flat-ish (but not as flat as I'd like) piece of land near the water. It has three vehicles, The Bomb, the Kerbmun Exploration Plane, and the Accelerando.

And this is Kerbmun Space Center 2, which has all the same stuff as 1, just north quite a bit. The two supply drops were also put here for ease of access. The small rover and IKEA-2 have not been built yet.

So, we've done lots of Kerbmun recently, so let's go elsewhere!

Interprobes 4 and 5 were launched, IIRC Interprobe 4 was launched to Egad and 5 was launched to Tyepolbynar/Typoball.

They were both copies of the Interprobe 3 design, which went to Valyr. The only difference, I think, was the lifter, it used the new Staccato series of lifters rather than the Accent series. They were cheaper, but currently have control issues.

IP 5 made it to Typoball first, and noticed the redone clouds.

Speaking of Typoball...

Well, I'm canon now!

The first thing we did was to enter an elliptical orbit and encounter Tyepolbynar's innermost moon, Jifgif, which has a disputed pronunciation. It turned out to be a peanut shaped world.

Unfortunately the probe did not have the fuel budget to stop here, it would have taken like 3km/s. So as a result we were only in the SOI for about 11 seconds, most of which was spamming science experiments for low and high space, so we didn't get too many good pictures.

Next up, we wanted to go to Aerious, Typoball's outermost moon.

In order to save on fuel, we flew by Imterril to adjust our plane and boost our orbit.

It turned out to be a mostly boring rock, unfortunately. But, its north pole had a rather impressive spike, the most impressive I've ever seen in a pole.

After we got the science, we re-entered Typoball orbit and flew by Etrograd. We did not have enough fuel to orbit or land, because this was a light probe with only 2 radial xenon tanks and one small xenon tank.

It had some fairly interesting surface patterns, but we're thinking that's it. Its difficulty, my attention span, and its apparent dullness means that I will probably never send a manned mission. Nothing against the mod, it's a great mod, but I can only do so much.

Tannor is still shiny. We wanted to land, but its gravity is just high enough that I would rather not try. And we were running low on fuel.

Next up we gently skimmed the atmosphere if Imterril to see what it was made of.

Plenty of water, it's just really, really hot. And there's not really any free oxygen. Not the best world to live on... We're still unsure if it has any land, but we're thinking no.

That flyby of Imterril also put us on a lower orbit which gets close-ish to Typoball. One more gravity assist and the rest of our fuel (due to time constraints I unfortunately cheated this bit again) put us on an atmospheric trajectory. On the way down, we got science from low space. Very interesting science.

The sensor detects. The sensor detects what? Pizza? Pineapples? Pasta? Pastors? Passports? People? Places? Pancakes? Peanuts? Anything that doesn't start with P?

Upon atmospheric contact we read the atmosphere, which was hydrogen-helium. Not really useful to know, but I thought I'd check.

The probe, now out of fuel, burned up in the atmosphere except for this bit, which is still in an elliptical atmosphere grazing orbit. If I bothered to focus on it it would descend but I didn't have the time at the time.

We launched interprobe 6 to Reander. It has a lot of moons, according to telescopes, so we beefed up the probe.

At about this time, Interprobe 4 arrived at Egad.

We landed on Yeerbor, it's small, elliptically orbiting moon.

Its strange tidal locking was observed.

Unfortunately we couldn't do any more, and out signal was down to 1%... Even though we had boatloads of fuel left we decided to attempt an Egad landing.

Not the most friendly atmosphere. If we engineered plants that could grow in these conditions, we could turn the carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon, and make it breathable, but unfortunately the atmosphere would still be toxic due to the chlorine. Most likely a dead end, but worth another visit.

We fired the engine, but its TWR dropped below 1 due to the atmosphere, to around 0.99 or 0.98. As a result, we hit the surface at about 30 meters per second.

And it looks like we've got a corrosive atmosphere as well, also not good. We accidentally nuked a planet, but we landed on another planet! Unless you count disintegrating in Typoball or landing on Derbin (binary with Mesbin) this is our first time landing on another planet!

And no, unfortunately the green is the chlorine, and not life.

Step 15 complete!

 

Next up, exploring the Gememma system. It might take a while, but we're only weeks away from its SOI... But at insanely low signal. We're going to have to launch a mega-relay.

 

 

 

 

[Kerbalstar]

MOAR planets! This is going great @Ultimate Steve! Also, you made it into the mod, congrats! I've never done that!

[RealKerbal3x]

I feel like doing a planet pack fairly soon - still deciding between GPP and Whirligig.

MOAR!

[lunardog15]

10/10  typoball best ball 

but realy this is good

[Whirligig Girl]

Oops.

After a Depression-and-Simple-Rockets-2-Fueled hiatus, I'm back to Whirligig World. Just so you know, 0.7's release is coming soon. And I think I've decided to move the planets, possibly fairly significantly and almost certainly enough to disrupt any transfer orbits. Kerbmun should cool down more as a result.

[Ultimate Steve]

Chapter 16 - Hot Stuff

Spoiler

So. Interprobe 2 is on its way to Gememma. It's about to cross into its SOI. Unfortunately I misjudged the SOI size... It's been travelling for about 2 years, and still has about 2 years to go.

And we just lost contact with it due to inadequate antenna range, despite a T3 tracking station and the biggest relay on the probe.

It turns out, Gememma has an apoapsis of about 590Gm. Mesbin also orbits, so you get something well above 600Gm. The stock antenna has a range of 100Gm and the Tier 3 tracking station 250Gm, giving that setup a range of 158Gm.

A whole lot of math later, I found out that if I send like 30 or so antennas into a near Mesbin solar orbit and 7 antennas to Gememma I can get a signal...

But that was too much work. Realistically, the Kerbals would design something better for this situation. So I installed a mod.

I very narrowly missed Faith Station during the departure burn. I wasn't paying attention at the time, but I swear, it popped into view on the screen for at least a frame. Either just outside physics range or just inside. Either way, this is the closest I've ever come to having an unintentional orbital collision.

I also "narrowly" missed Statmun... That's two in the space of a few minutes! What are the odds?

Anyway, the mod adds three new antenna. A massive 1000g one, and two 300g ones in two different form factors, way better than the 100g of the stock game... If you set a 1000g one just off the runway it would be 4x better than the T3 tracking station.

On this satellite, named Uberrelay (after several redesigns) I have clipped 2 1000g antennae inside each other for aesthetics.

Now doing the math, that gives us a range of... 401 Gm. Dang it. It will suffice for when Gememma is close, but I might have to Klaw two more relays onto the satellite, or send a reciever relay to Gememma.

 

Anyway, it made it to this orbit.

 

@GregroxMun I highly recommend putting this mod under the recommended list. Unmanned expeditions to Gememma are very impractical without something larger than the stock antennas.

Okay, so we're good for now. What's next?

A few weeks later, Interprobe 2 finally encountered Gememma. It is almost exactly halfway to its gravity assist now, time wise. Unfortunately the signal is at 42%. Better than zero. More waiting....

So lets do another one shot interplanetary mission to speed things up! Let's see, where have we not been that we're not already going... We haven't been to Fophie, Rik, Wolda, and Shol. One is a comet that won't be back for decades, two are probably boring asteroids, and one is a hot gas giant right next to Kaywell. Let's go there!

This is Interprobe 7, a pretty standard design.

Quite some time later, it was half melting as it screamed towards Shol at a relative velocity over 40 kilometers per second. I couldn't time warp over 100x or the thing would explode due to overheating. I also couldn't turn the thing towards the sun for more than a few seconds. I actually lost one of the solar panels to overheating. Luckily, the batteries and hibernation mode lasted most of the high-heat portion, and I could get the solar panel out for a second or two without it melting.

Interprobe 7 passed behind Shol and got the rare chance to do some interesting observations of Kaywell.

Is that a solar flare on the right?

Also, I think it would be interesting to give Shol a small moon that is mostly lava... I know one planet pack, I forget which, had functional lava oceans on a few moons that would melt your ship if you got too close.

There were only a few seconds spent in the upper 250 meters of Shol's atmosphere due to the concern that even the thinnest of atmospheres probably meant certain death at these velocities. Fortunately the probe did not explode. It was found that Shol had a hydrogen and helium atmosphere.

The second half of the mission began. To escape the solar system as fast as possible. This was mostly on purpose, Shol gave us an extremely huge gravity assist. It could have been somewhat bigger but I wanted to skim the atmosphere. We're still going really fast... We had about 12km/s of fuel left (!) so we burned it all a few days after leaving Shol.

This makes Interprobe 7 the fastest Kerbal-made object launched from Mesbin in this system.

Back to the Kerbmun colony. Much valuable science has been done. Farming has been attempted, with some success. Some mining has been undertaken, although this has just started. A metal plate has been cast using local resources. Attempts have been made to converse with the grass. Nobody has looked at the oceans, yet, due to more pressing matters, like waiting for Mesbin to send a boat/sub. In the meantime, Bill finally got around to playing around with the second supply drop.

Ikea 2 (slightly shorter than the first one because I accidentally blew up one of the fuel tanks) stood on the relocated launch pad, and Bill drove around the third ever rover on Kerbmun, one that could actually be considered a personal vehicle. He envisioned taking a hot chick on a date to see the latest movie in that car, but then he realized that he needed:

1. A movie theater. Mesbin didn't even have a dedicated movie theater, just a room where people met to watch some centuries old films produced on Kerbin.

2. A "latest movie." Preoccupied with survival, the Kerbals (at least for a few light years in each direction) had not restarted their movie industry.

3. A hot chick. Good luck with that one, Bill. This is probably the most impossible item on the list.

 

IKEA-2 was launched, which would still be a tech demonstrator, but with a much cooler destination.

Interesting note. Even with KIS, you can't reuse decouplers, which I tried to do. Luckily, or maybe unluckily, thrust goes right through them now. They are actually hollow.

Despite missing one first stage fuel tank and having to carry around the extra mass of the decoupler...

IKEA-2 made it into a highly inclined and eccentric Derbin orbit.

And burned up in the atmosphere. I focused on the nose cone and followed it through aerobraking for like an hour in hopes that it would survive and do something interesting, but it burned up on the pass it was going to land on.

RIP my time.

 

Now, I know what you're thinking... "Steve! When are you going to do something besides probes and Kerbmun?" Well, I have the answer, in the form of quite possibly the ugliest interplanetary spaceship you have ever seen:

The KSS Punk Rockerr!

Riding on the first Staccato 150, the Punk Rockerr is a nuclear powered spaceship with full ISRU capability, a full suite of science experiments, and hopefully everything necessary that will fit into the mass budget. Fully fueled it has about 7500 meters per second of Delta-V IIRC. If you fill the ore tanks (which I did) you can get a bit more out of it.

Its first mission will carry a veteran crew from Faith Station to Wers and Vizea as the first manned interplanetary mission conducted in the Kaywell system. This was certainly a giant step. We still don't know how many Kerbals will be on this mission.

The ship, unfortunately, is under very heavy Delta-V requirements, having to carry full ISRU and have a high amount of Delta-V. There was, unfortunately, no room in the mass budget for aesthetics. Technically there are two lights onboard for landing, but those are the only two remotely aesthetic things onboard.

The Punk Rockerr is also designed to be fully reusable, although we're admittedly not sure if there are any other worlds in range where we could send it... Maybe Typoball. Maybe we could add another fuel tank. Or start full in Kerbmun orbit, mostly out of Mesbin's deep gravity well.

Here is the Punk Rockerr docked to Faith Station. Also, Faith Station is out of liquid fuel. I want to try to get an asteroid here sometime to aid in refueling operations... I usually don't bother with a refueling station in stock, but in Whirligig it makes a bit more sense. Maybe I could send one to Kerbmun as well, but that would take more time than just adding moar boosters, although it would be cooler. Unfortunately free time is a rare commodity these days.

And that's it for now! A probe got really hot, Bill wishes he was hot, and the Punk Rockerr is the hot topic. All in all, a productive chapter!

 

Step 16 of getting off of Mesbin complete!

 

 

[Whirligig Girl]

The next update will include two new celestial-body asteroid moons to make interplanetary missions from Mesbin quite a lot easier. One is at the 3:1 orbital resonance and is about halfway between low orbit and kerbmun delta-v wise. The other is a trojan of Kerbmun, making it extremely easy to get fuel from it to Kerbmun.

I added them because you're not guaranteed to be able to find a good asteroid, and while sending probes out to sample a bunch of asteroids until you find the right one is in theory realistic, it feels like it's just lazy grind in the case of cb Asteroids. Also KSP is honestly pretty buggy with klaws and asteroids sometimes. But since Statmun has no ore (it does in the current public version but don't get too used to it), mining low-orbit asteroids is the only way to ISRU in low orbit. That said, just sending up fuel tankers into low orbit is actually not very difficult.

Setting up infrastructure is heavily rewarded in Whirligig World more so than in any other planet pack I know of. I'd say even more so than RSS, except that I can guarantee you infrastructure would be a lot more reasonable if the Earth had all of the raw materials in orbit that Mesbin does! I already have my own conjectural infrastructure setup, but I figure I'll let the player figure out the best way to do it on their own.

It'd be really cool if there was a mod that was sort of a midway between Extraplanetary Launchpads and KAS/KIS rocket building. Instead of shipping rocket parts to Kerbmun, it'd be cool if you could 3D-print rocket parts from "ore" mining. Just the small ones that KAS/KIS lets engineers play with. Shame I haven't the faintest clue about plugin modding!

[lunardog15]

um posting to watch as no other post on this topic I made is doing that 

also sounds cool 

[Kerbalstar]

A very hot chapter @Ultimate Steve!

[Ultimate Steve]

Chapter 17 - Reander and Company

Spoiler

After a selection of 6 Crew Members, the KSS Punk Rockerr departs over the course of many periapsis kicks for the Wers/Vizea system. They don't think they will find anything worthwhile (except to planetary formation science), but they will test interplanetary travel in the Kaywell system, which should go smoothly.

Now, Interprobe 6 has encountered Reander!

It has several decently sized moons. The Kerbals hoped to find at least one habitable-ish one among them.

IIRC That moon is called Yokane. During this flyby we didn't find much, as it was a far away pass set up mostly by chance. We did, however, find stuff that is most likely lava, interesting considering I just talked about how cool a lava moon around Shol would be.

^^^ A sudden volcanic eruption on Yalthe

The second mostly chance flyby was around Yalthe. We set up the initial trajectory just to have a periapsis near Reander, but a slightly less optimal path gave us these flybys, so we took it.

Next, after braking into orbit and waiting one orbit, we flew by Lito, the innermost, and largest moon of Reander. This was done as a gravity assist, and if we had gotten too close it would have sent us into Reander instead of gently lowering our orbit, so we didn't find much out.

Gravitometer scans made it apparent that this world was mostly ice... Interesting. 

Then we flew by Dakkonme.

Pretty close, actually. It's *probably* made of ice, which would be great, maybe there's an underwater ocean. But there is no atmosphere, so it's probably a no-go for Kerbal colonization. Although, they survived on Mesbin, how much harder can this be...

Next, we went to the smallest body in the system, a small moon called Mally sharing an orbit with Totooa, which has some dots over it somewhere in its name.

It boasted a massive polar spike, made even more apparent by Mally's small size. We then proceeded to land, and hop over to the other biome.

At that point, the nuclear stage was either out of fuel or really close, so we left it behind and made for Totooa.

Surprisingly, Totooa had an atmosphere! Not a huge one, but still an atmosphere! Mostly nitrogen, so not insanely excited. We did, however, aerobrake into orbit and stay a while.

Our next target was Reander's outermost moon, Yawer, which was known to have one light side, one dark side, and rotated very fast.

It was originally guessed that we wouldn't be able to land, as orbital velocity was around 200 meters per second, and the most the probe could do was 150m/s before the batteries had to recharge.

However, as Yawer spun so fast, like Mesbin, it was pretty easy to land.

Except I forgot a picture of me on the surface.

*WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH*

Whirligig is now 0.7!

* Re-redone atmospheres, which were all too hot because I had set Kaywell's "1 au" distance too high. Kerbmun should no longer be uninhabitable.

* Add Thresomin, a minor Mesbin moon halfway between Kerbmun and Low Mesbin Orbit in terms of Delta-v, chocked full of ore.

* Add Troymin, a minor Mesbin moon in the Kerbmun Trojan point. Also ore-rich. They also have biomes, science definitions, and mod support.

* Tweaked the asteroid generator configs to generate new structures in Mesbin's "rings" and the asteroid belts around Kaywell.

* Revamped Derbin's terrain and clouds.

* Revamped Derbin's biome map.

* Revamped Jifgif, Fophie, Plaph, and Didd. They're now detailed enough to actually warrant giving them a visit!

* Added biome maps for all remaining bodies except Wolda (oops). They are still very basic, but they are at least there.

* Tweaked a few science definitions. Tyepolbynar had an incomplete definition which was fixed. Atmospheric Analysis now only shows you full composition information when flying low. You get only a basic scan when flying high.

* More detailed Kerbmun biome map.

* Remake Yawer, since the color map did not agree with the craters. It's not a perfect recreation in terms of accuracy, but it is just as good.

* Added a VacuumEngines patch in WhirligigWorld/Parts, which adds stock engine clones with their stats changed to have larger engine bells. The actual models are not updated yet, so I've disabled it. To enable this patch you will have to change the filetype from .txt to .cfg. You may be surprised how much of a difference a few percent extra thrust and specific impulse makes.

* Added a few new flags.

 

Now, a lot of this is important, like the addition of two new Mesbin system bodies. Changes to Derbin are also worth looking at that. Kerbmun's biomes are great, and the temperature changes will hopefully make Kerbmun more habitable!

Well, it's more habitable. But it's now always just under freezing at the colony site... Let's move again! But not right now. We have Reander, the Punk Rockerr, and in time Gememma to deal with.

 

But the important thing is that Yawer was remade.

Shown here is me cheating to get the probe out of the ground without it blowing up or losing its solar panels.

It has indeed been remade, but we're not sticking around, unfortunately. Next stop, Yalthe.

Yalthe glows, like Yokane. We orbited to study the lava up close. Very close.

Unfortunately it's not actual lava, it's just really close. Yokane must be more active than Yalthe, enough to actually have lava. We were going to try landing here, but because of the aforementioned "150m/s at a time" thing, we couldn't. So we moved on to investigate the lava on Yokane.

Unfortunately, well, we were running a tad low on fuel at this point... Actually we still had enough but it was reserved for exploring Lito and Reander's atmosphere. There was no left for an orbit of Yokane, so our observations were limited to one very close flyby.

And given our luck, we didn't get close to a lava ocean, only close to a mountain range.

Too close.

The probe, somehow, clipped right through the mountain it was about to collide with and shot right out the other size! Fortunately, we were able to confirm that it was a lava ocean due to the way KSP does oceans, a second layer of sorts, which we saw here.

A Lito gravity assist was used to get the probe near Reander, near enough to confirm that it was mostly hydrogen and helium.

Then, we went back to Lito.

We had a bit more fuel left over than anticipated, but not enough to do anything useful, since we were in a deep gravity well. The decision was made to attempt a crash landing on Lito.

The atmosphere was interesting, but not useful for colonization. It did, however, get up to about 0.45atm near the surface.

Transmitting the atmospheric data took most of the electricity on board, and the solar panels were broken early on. Even if the probe made it to the surface intact, it would not be able to transmit anything.

And this was the last we saw of Interprobe 6, which was massively successful.

The only bodies not surveyed up close by Kerbal probes are now Wolda and Rik (Asteroids), Fophie (a Comet), those two new moonlets of Mesbin that I don't know the names of yet, and anything orbiting Gememma. It's looking like Kerbmun may be the best place for colonization in the entire system...

But there's always a chance!

Meanwhile, the Punk Rockerr, after a nearly one year journey, reached Wers.

This moment was actually pretty emotional for me... When you've landed as many places as many times as I have, it sort of gets old. But through some combination of environment, background music, and Vizea in the sky... It was nice. Very nice.

A feature that is new to my interplanetary spacecraft that I may continue on, maybe even to other saves, is the "science chair," a scientist in an external command seat near the experiments.

We made a quick hop to a mountain to get some more science. We tipped over a bit, side effect of having a full fuel load onboard after refilling.

Next, we went to Vizea and attempted to land in a canyon.

Unfortunately, the burn was severely misjudged due to the full fuel tanks.

The ship broke into two main parts, separated by the explosion of the ISRU unit.

Part one fell onto its side and slid down a hill, losing the docking port and a few other important things before turning around and firing its engines to bring it to a stop. The head engineer and the head scientist were onboard this section.

The other section contained the other 4 crew members, and had no control authority. It bounced and rolled, losing components along the way, before somehow landing upright about 3.5 kilometers away.

Well, uh, not good, to say the least.

 

 

Step 17, complete.

 

 

 

 

[BlkBltChemie]

Really enjoying this!  Thanks for the introduction and inspiration to give Whirligig a try!

On 11/15/2018 at 10:31 AM, GregroxMun said:

It'd be really cool if there was a mod that was sort of a midway between Extraplanetary Launchpads and KAS/KIS rocket building. Instead of shipping rocket parts to Kerbmun, it'd be cool if you could 3D-print rocket parts from "ore" mining. Just the small ones that KAS/KIS lets engineers play with. Shame I haven't the faintest clue about plugin modding!

I haven't tried it myself, but does OSE Workshop do what you are thinking?  It is a KIS extension that uses material kits (produced from ore) to build rocket parts.

[RealKerbal3x]

Interprobe 6 did a good job, for sure! But now the Punk Rockerr needs a rescue mission.....

Edited November 18, 2018 by RealKerbal3x

[Ultimate Steve]

Chapter 18 - Discovery

Spoiler

At first, it looked like a rescue mission was necessary for the Punk Rockerr. However, after the crew calmed down, it was realized that everything they needed to get home was still intact. Engines, fuel, crew compartments, one of the small backup solar panels... The ISRU was gone, but it was not really needed as the tanks were mostly full.

The only problem was that the ship was in two pieces.

And the second part was too heavy to attach to the first piece. The docking port had exploded, but that wouldn't have been useful as there was only one of them. The ship carried 2 fuel pipe ports, but one of them had exploded.

They had 6 Kerbals, they needed to get the mass of the crew compartment down to 6 tons.

Shelhat Kerman went around the module detaching everything he could find. The one surviving drill, the ore tank, landing beams, radiators, RCS ports, ladders, lights... It all went. The solar panels weighed 0.3 tons each but were broken and didn't have a collision mesh. So I worked around that by repairing them and then detaching them, slightly cheaty, but in reality they would be able to detach the solar panel stubs just fine.

But there was a problem. The crew module was, by itself, 6.5 tons, 500kg more than could be carried.

So the crew ripped out the seats, the supplies, the cargo. When that wasn't enough, the modular power and life support systems were carefully extracted. They managed to extract 500kg of stuff from the module and were able to successfully attach it to the propulsion section.

E.G. I cheated a bit, but it's still within the realm of what Kerbals would actually be able to do.

There was much rejoicing among the crew. They replaced the systems, cargo, and seats while Shelhat re-mounted the RCS and lights.

It was calculated that the ship had enough Delta-V to return to Mesbin. The fuel tanks were not full, but because the ship didn't have the ISRU equipment any more it would be able to make the trip.

The slightly disappointed crew continued their mission as planned, evaluating systems and doing science. They then left.

Unfortunately on liftoff the Punk Rockerr hit a mountain, destroying the one surviving radiator and an RCS port. Nothing critical, but it was annoying. Vizea has dealt two blows.

Sayonara, Vizea! We won't miss you! We'll come back with a fleet of battleships to destroy you!

Interprobe 2 is *FINALLY* nearing its encounter with Mandrake, one of two binary gas giants orbiting Gememma. It's close enough to be bathed in orange light and generate decent amounts of power.

Unfortunately, it is yet again out of communications range because we miscalculated - our current relay setup gets us to 410GM. The closest possible distance is like 360-390GM IIRC assuming Gememma is at perigee and the planets are aligned. This is now not the case.

This new system will have a range of 619GM, which doesn't cover everything, but will once we get a 1000g relay out to Gememma, if we ever need to do that.

The Uberrelay has failed us.

Behold:

THE HYPERRELAY!!!

Boasting SIX 1000g antennas, the Hyperrelay will be put into an inclined medium Mesbin orbit between Kerbmun and Derbin, which will hopefully fix the issues that its predecessor had with Mesbin blocking the signal.

In order to save fuel, the Hyperrelay flew by Kerbmun to gain velocity and inclination. After it was successfully placed into orbit, the next thing to come up was Interprobe 2's flyby of Mandrake.

This maneuver would almost capture it into a Gememma orbit, one with nearly the same plane as Mandrake, Rutherford, and Lowel. One one axis it would nearly align with the orbits of the other planets as well.

Not much was learned through this flyby. If we don't find anything interesting on the other planets, the plan is to go back to Mandrake/Rutherford and explore their four small moons.

Next up, we checked in with interprobe 7, which flew by Shol to gain a massive gravity assist shooting it out of the system at more than 50 kilometers per second.

It is now beyond the communications range of even the HyperRelay... Hopefully we'll never need to go this far with communications, or else I'll spend my whole budget (which is like 5-6 million now thanks to world firsts and general lack of large projects) on the Ultimate Relay...

Interprobe 2 reached Gememma perihelion a few weeks later and adjusted its orbit so it would fly by Lowel in a few months time.

Next up was the Punk Rockerr's return to Mesbin.

It slowly lowered its orbit to rendezvous with Faith Station. It would have a comfortable but slightly concerning margin. During its rendezvous, it noticed it was on a path that would take it near one of Mesbin's newly discovered moonlets, which I have forgotten the name of.

Don't let the looks fool you. It's only about 1km wide, with a 2.5km SOI if I remember correctly. I was flying by it at about 3km/s, so I was only in the SOI for one or two seconds. This was the best picture I got. In the time I had I only managed to trigger one science experiment.

Because the Punk Rockerr now lacked a docking port, one was pillaged from the space station.

A replacement will have to be sent up. Also, we need to send a return module for that sweet science.

 

Now, if you want to play Whirligig world through yourself and discover all the really cool worlds yourself, this next bit is not for you. Scroll up and close the spoiler. Major world spoilers ahead. You have been warned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interprobe 2 approached Lowel, which had a very large binary partner/moon named Ollym.

The operators of the probe weren't expecting to find anything of interest here. But as the probe got closer...

...Could it be?

The instruments were immediately all pointed towards Lowel, with only a quick diversion towards Ollym.

The periapsis was adjusted to barely skim the atmosphere. There was quite a substantial atmosphere, it seemed! Not near 1ATM though.

As Interprobe 2 got closer to Lowel, they noticed something even more revolutionary.

The apparent massive grasslands covering Lowel. The canal system became even more apparent, although astronomers would later conclude that they were most likely the result of violent seismic activity rather than design.

The final discovery, for now, would be the data acquired on the atmospheric pass.

It was very, very promising.

IIRC the map mode was showing 0.5ATM at the surface... 0.5ATM and 54% oxygen gives just 27% effective oxygen, ideal for Kerbal habitation. And although the temperature scans from orbit reveal low temperatures, it is currently theorized that the oceans are liquid water, meaning either the water is very salty, or the surface is above freezing...

While no cities were detected from orbit, butso little data was gathered from the one pass. Some life lives underground, maybe they lived on the side not surveyed, but one question remained. The question loomed over the planet Mesbin like Statmun did.

 

Was there intelligent life on Lowel?

 

 

Step 18 of getting Kerbals off of Mesbin complete.

 

 

 

 

 

[obney kerman]

10 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

The only problem was that the ship was in two pieces.

That about sums it up.

[RealKerbal3x]

Lowel reminds me of those images of Mars with canals.

And the name is obviously a reference to Percival Lowell, the astronomer who theorised canals on Mars. Nice, @GregroxMun!

[Whirligig Girl]

On 11/19/2018 at 12:22 PM, RealKerbal3x said:

Lowel reminds me of those images of Mars with canals.

[snip image]

And the name is obviously a reference to Percival Lowell, the astronomer who theorised canals on Mars. Nice, @GregroxMun!

Good eye  

 

EDIT: 7/22/2019: I don't know if I meant for that to be a pun at the time but hot damn that's a great pun. Lowell and Schiaparelli and others saw lines on Mars because they were projecting a view of the blood vessels in their retina onto the planet. Good eye.

Edited July 22, 2019 by GregroxMun

[Ultimate Steve]

Chapter 19 - Another Discovery

Spoiler

The only five trained planetary scientists on Mesbin were still mulling over the discovery of the habitable properties of Lowel when something else happened. It wasn't as exciting, but it was exciting nonetheless.

One or two Gememma orbits later, Interprobe 2 has adjusted its orbit so it would perform a flyby of Gannovar, another planet around Gememma. It was, however, completely off-plane from Lowel and the flyby would be made at the blistering relative velocity of 19 kilometers per second.

Interprobe 2 found an icy world with what we are assuming are liquid water oceans. The interesting thing was, it is suspected that these oceans might be temporary, as the planet's orbit was elliptical, meaning it got really hot and really cold.

In order to not melt (I was going very fast) my periapsis was only a few meters into the atmosphere. It took many tries to not explode and also trigger the spectrometer.

But that's surprising... Two reasonably habitable worlds within a reasonable distance of each other.

And to conclude this short update, Interprobe 2 also managed to fly by Ammenon, Gememma's innermost satellite.

The flyby was very fast. Not very much was learned about it, except that it is not habitable.

 

 

Part 19 complete!

 

Okay, guys, I need ideas. What should I send to the Gememma system next, and what should I do with Interprobe 2's remaining fuel?