The Elcano Challenge: Ground-Based Circumnavigation (4th)

[OJT]

12 minutes ago, 18Watt said:

Welcome to the asylum @OJT!  You picked a great CB to start the madness at.

Don't get too gassed about it. I'm doing the Duna run and then I peace out . I'll leave the Grand Master badges to other crazy lot

[18Watt]

4 minutes ago, OJT said:

I'm doing the Duna run and then I peace out . I'll leave the Grand Master badges to other crazy lot

Now where have I heard that before?  Oh yeah, out of my own mouth!

Seriously, I don't think the intention was ever to encourage anyone to do the whole solar system, there's just a few nuts like me who accidentally ended up doing that.  I think the real intention was to encourage players to explore the surface of one or two CBs.  That's something a lot of players never really do, with good reason due to the frustrations of trying to make rovers work in KSP.

[damerell]

10 hours ago, 18Watt said:

Seriously, I don't think the intention was ever to encourage anyone to do the whole solar system, there's just a few nuts like me who accidentally ended up doing that.

Fengist, the first organiser, didn't have an all-worlds badge, but Claw, the second, did - and had done the grand tour themself. So I'm afraid the idea of doing a clean sweep did emerge fairly early. :-)

[damerell]

I'm not as yet seriously considering this, but before I do a honking great download, does anyone know if RSS models the Earth in sufficient detail that the Panama and Suez Canals exist and are navigable?

[OJT]

Progress update: covered 60km today. I crossed the mountainous region and descended to Midlands. Landscape still has a lot of hills, but the transitions are smoother, which allows to carry more speed. Crashed once when I went over a hill too fast and a rock formation emerged, but I didn't lose much progress, so I reloaded and tried again

Screenshots are dimmer than previous ones: switched the TUFX profile

Spoiler

 

10 hours ago, damerell said:

RSS

Oh hell nah

Edited December 10, 2022 by OJT

[damerell]

8 hours ago, OJT said:

Oh hell nah

That was my first thought, but some earlier versions of the challenge said "no mod planets except RSS Earth", and... while RSS Earth would take a long _time_ by sea, it wouldn't take a long time at the keyboard - more a matter of looking in every half-hour to see if the course needs adjusted. I think.

[18Watt]

12 minutes ago, damerell said:

but some earlier versions of the challenge said "no mod planets except RSS Earth"

I did start tracking circumnavigations of mod planets.  So far I’m lumping them into a single mod planet leaderboard.  RSS planets and moons would certainly qualify.  However, I have to agree with @OJT, doing an Elcano on RSS Earth would be brutal.  If you can indeed cut through Suez and Panama, that would help, but would still take a very long time.

[OJT]

28 minutes ago, 18Watt said:

I did start tracking circumnavigations of mod planets.  So far I’m lumping them into a single mod planet leaderboard.  RSS planets and moons would certainly qualify.  However, I have to agree with @OJT, doing an Elcano on RSS Earth would be brutal.  If you can indeed cut through Suez and Panama, that would help, but would still take a very long time.

Assuming this challenge continues into KSP2, I can imagine how brutal circumnavigation of Ovin is going to be. Noticeably bigger than Kerbin and 4 g gravity. From reading some of the submissions here, Eve Elcano is already a pain in the bottom
Earth by comparison is essentially a supersized Kerbin. With a fast boat and no Scatterer (so that oceans have no wave physics), it could probably be done within a month. It is more a matter of patience than matter of pain

[damerell]

7 hours ago, 18Watt said:

I did start tracking circumnavigations of mod planets.  So far I’m lumping them into a single mod planet leaderboard.  RSS planets and moons would certainly qualify.  However, I have to agree with @OJT, doing an Elcano on RSS Earth would be brutal.  If you can indeed cut through Suez and Panama, that would help, but would still take a very long time.

The Suez and Panama canals don't seem to be modelled, alas.

[18Watt]

56 minutes ago, damerell said:

The Suez and Panama canals don't seem to be modelled, alas.

No clue how many miles or km are involved in the Suez crossing, but I think the Panama crossing is well over 10 miles, maybe more.  

Can't recall if you've done Laythe or not yet, for some reason I'm thinking Laythe is a CB you are setting up for, but haven't done yet.  Anyway, as you know, Laythe is all water.  If anything, there is an issue if you need to refuel during a Laythe circumnavigation, because there are very long distances between chinks of land.  Electric propellers solve some of those problems, but back in the days before (stock) propellers I recall that being a challenge.

I don't really use any mods at all, but I am a little surprised that Suez and Panama are not modeled in RSS Earth.  I suspect the community of 'rover enthusiasts' is a fairly small community in the KSP world.  I have high hopes that planetary surface exploration will be more practical in KSP2.

Meanwhile, y'all are part of an elite group!  Also, pretty stoked that @OJT has come over to the dark side with us.

[damerell]

The Suez Canal is about 200km; Panama 80 IIRC.

The reason they aren't modelled, I find, is that RSS Earth gets its heightmap from NASA topographic data and, if I understand correctly, there's only a datapoint every 2.5km or so. (Of course, higher resolution topographic data of the Earth exists, but RSS have to ship the resulting file and even at that resolution it's going on 2Gb). An 80m wide canal doesn't show up at that resolution (and neither do natural rivers &c).

However, this also means that RSS Earth is very smooth, with no locally rough terrain. It may be more practical to drive across the location of the canals than it would be on a normal KSP body.

I've also enquired in the RSS thread. It might be possible to nobble the heightmap to carve a channel across the approximate location of the canals - the resulting channel would be far wider than in reality, but would serve.

The Laytheboat is powered by a nuclear-thermal jet. Performance isn't amazing, but endurance is less of an issue. You're right that I'm working up to it; I thought I'd take a break after Dres and look at some of the oddball cases like sea Kerbin and actually-surface Gilly.

Edited December 11, 2022 by damerell

[Akagi]

@18Watt Being a boat kinda person, could I do a stock no-DLC Kerbin circumnavigation using a jet-powered boat?

[Akagi]

Read the rules and set out.

[18Watt]

4 hours ago, Akagi said:

Being a boat kinda person, could I do a stock no-DLC Kerbin circumnavigation using a jet-powered boat?

Absolutely.   Jet engines work great on Kerbin and Laythe.

On Eve you’ll need to take a different approach.  The DLC propellers work well on Eve.  Rocket engines would work, but would be very inefficient.  There may be mods which offer other means of water propulsion for Eve as well.

Good luck, looking forward to seeing your entry as it progresses!

[AtomicTech]

1 hour ago, 18Watt said:

Absolutely.   Jet engines work great on Kerbin and Laythe.

On Eve you’ll need to take a different approach.  The DLC propellers work well on Eve.  Rocket engines would work, but would be very inefficient.  There may be mods which offer other means of water propulsion for Eve as well.

Good luck, looking forward to seeing your entry as it progresses!

Ditto!

[Akagi]

11 hours ago, 18Watt said:

Absolutely.   Jet engines work great on Kerbin and Laythe.

On Eve you’ll need to take a different approach.  The DLC propellers work well on Eve.  Rocket engines would work, but would be very inefficient.  There may be mods which offer other means of water propulsion for Eve as well.

Good luck, looking forward to seeing your entry as it progresses!

Thanks! I discovered how slippery water physics are in unmodded KSP, that might help.

[MythicalHeFF]

32 minutes ago, Akagi said:

Thanks! I discovered how slippery water physics are in unmodded KSP, that might help.

I feel like adding rudder(s) to a boat might also help with the sliding around, but it would likely come at a cost to your vessel’s top speed on water because of the way KSP’s aerodynamics work.

Edited December 16, 2022 by Jack Joseph Kerman

[OJT]

20 minutes ago, Akagi said:

Thanks! I discovered how slippery water physics are in unmodded KSP, that might help.

Water in stock KSP is basically flat: you can go really nuts with boat designs. I've seen some videos of people hitting over 200 m/s with a boat (basically the cruise speed of some small airliners). Although most of there boats usually took off or got obliterated shortly after achieving those speeds, you can still reliably cruise at 150 m/s if you build the boat right and pack enough fuel.

Scatterer adds waves, which makes boat design significantly harder in terms of pure achievable speed, so if you just want to be done with it quickly, I recommend doing the naval Elcano without Scatterer

[damerell]

1 hour ago, OJT said:

Water in stock KSP is basically flat: you can go really nuts with boat designs. I've seen some videos of people hitting over 200 m/s with a boat (basically the cruise speed of some small airliners).

I think in this very thread you can see people going over that with Breaking Ground propellor-driven boats (which didn't take off or get obliterated), and my own jet-powered Kerbian Sea Monster did over 200 m/s when almost dry of fuel.

[Leganeski]

12 hours ago, OJT said:

Scatterer adds waves, which makes boat design significantly harder in terms of pure achievable speed, so if you just want to be done with it quickly, I recommend doing the naval Elcano without Scatterer

The wave physics can be disabled in the Scatterer menu, in case you want to keep the graphics (although you should probably make a note of it so that others won't confused by what appear to be waves).

[Pouicpouic]

Hello and Merry Christmas to all the brave circumnavigators!

A short video that summarises my last kerbin ground circumnavigation (with a new rover optimised like never before) --> my old graphics card doesn't support the maximum parallax quality and to make matters worse youtube degrades the overall quality... sad

And for those who remember, I said I would come back on Tylo to break 150m/s (without propulsion other than wheels and without damage): done, 162.5+, new PB   (175 displayed on the F3 info) on the 2nd attempt

Spoiler

why so much difference in quality between a screenshot and the youtube video...??

See you soon, happy end of year celebrations !

Edited December 23, 2022 by Pouicpouic

[Nazalassa]

On 12/23/2022 at 10:37 PM, Pouicpouic said:

Hello and Merry Christmas to all the brave circumnavigators!

A short video that summarises my last kerbin ground circumnavigation (with a new rover optimised like never before) --> my old graphics card doesn't support the maximum parallax quality and to make matters worse youtube degrades the overall quality... sad

And for those who remember, I said I would come back on Tylo to break 150m/s (without propulsion other than wheels and without damage): done, 162.5+, new PB   (175 displayed on the F3 info) on the 2nd attempt

  Hide contents

why so much difference in quality between a screenshot and the youtube video...??

See you soon, happy end of year celebrations !

Just a question: How did you manage to get 162+ m/s with wheels that can only go up to 57 m/s?

[Pouicpouic]

4 hours ago, Nazalassa said:

Just a question: How did you manage to get 162+ m/s with wheels that can only go up to 57 m/s?

more than 3000meters downhill : it helps a lot

I haven't recorded a video on tylo yet, but it's similar to the 85m/s run on eeloo :

Spoiler

--> It is not necessarily difficult to reach high speeds: but the rover must remain in one piece...

Spoiler

all the tips I use to improve robustness:
- autostruts on the main parts
- COM as low as possible
- 4 different wheel settings (per axle) - only the front axle is directional - specific settings for each axle for traction, friction and braking (depending on the CB)
- wheels are all removed from the symmetry

Edited December 28, 2022 by Pouicpouic

[Icky]

On 12/23/2022 at 4:37 PM, Pouicpouic said:

Hello and Merry Christmas to all the brave circumnavigators!

A short video that summarises my last kerbin ground circumnavigation (with a new rover optimised like never before) --> my old graphics card doesn't support the maximum parallax quality and to make matters worse youtube degrades the overall quality... sad

And for those who remember, I said I would come back on Tylo to break 150m/s (without propulsion other than wheels and without damage): done, 162.5+, new PB   (175 displayed on the F3 info) on the 2nd attempt

  Reveal hidden contents

why so much difference in quality between a screenshot and the youtube video...??

See you soon, happy end of year celebrations !

thats impressive. those wheels (and all rover wheels) were so fragile for me i couldnt do much with them. the smallest jumps and they were failing. what kind of speeds were you cruising at on kerbin? also i LOVE the flipping over for water crossings lol

[Pouicpouic]

7 hours ago, Icky said:

what kind of speeds were you cruising at on kerbin?

Hi,

In the meadows my cruising speed is above 90m/s without taking any risks. If it's really flat, It cap at 160m/s near the KSC and 135m/s at the poles. (Here we are talking about speeds reached with the propellers).

For the jumps, the most important thing is the relative vertical speed, but it's hard to give precise values here, it's mostly up to experience. The wheels or the rover are destroyed when the relative vertical speed of the impact exceeds 18-20m/s in general. For my PB at 162+ on tylo, I'm at more than 50m/s of vertical velocity but the slope is very steep, so compared to the ground my relative vertical velocity is not necessarily destructive --> you can see a force of "only" 6.2G maximum on the F3 box after the attempt. These wheels can withstand impacts up to 7G in most cases.

Spoiler

Look at my first memorable jump recorded on the mun almost 3 years ago: my vertical impact speed is about 50m/s (i think) but no wheels are broken (the explosions are only small structural parts and the headlights)

Since this rover, I think I must have improved the robustness of my crafts by 10% with the tips given in my previous comment.