North pole navigation.

[boriz]

I challenged myself to build a crewed super sonic VTOL that can take off vertically, fly supersonic*, land vertically at the North pole, plant a flag, then return and land vertically at the KSC.

 

I managed to get the flag planted, and I have used about three quarters of my fuel. I'm not expecting to get all the way back to the KSC with this mission, but my problem is this: Which direction do I head?

 

At the north pole, everywhere is south. Where's the closest airfield, and which direction is it?

 

https://ibb.co/zPN9Qzh (*About Mach 2.7)

https://ibb.co/zPpL49t

https://ibb.co/yF1RjMM

 

[jimmymcgoochie]

If you're willing to expand "runway" to include "any launch site where the plane can be recovered with some vaguely flat ground around it to land on" then you have two options:

In KSP 1.12, the nearest launch site is Glacier Lake- it's one of the new sites added in 1.12 and so you won't see it on the map unless you find it first.

If you have the Making History DLC, there's also Woomerang launch site which is quite a bit further south in the same direction:

In both cases, fly directly away from the KSC and you're going in roughly the right direction. Glacier Lake can be found pretty easily if you look for the lake that's touching the ice caps (hence the name) while Woomerang has a ridge of mountains running east-west to its south.

2D map of Kerbin with Glacier Lake and Woomerang marked:

The next nearest launch site is probably the (hidden) Cove launchpad, but that's practically on the KSC's doorstep and probably out of range.

[boriz]

Very helpful. Thank you.

[Snark]

Moving to Gameplay Questions.

[boriz]

Made it with fuel to spare. Thank you. The second plane is my fast recon, used to find and mark the site so my VTOL could head straight there. Now to refuel and fly back to KSC.

 

Is there a complete list of these discoverable sites?