Grand Tour of the Kerbol System

[avi]

Note: I originally wrote this post for another forum for people who may not have played KSP, so it might seem a bit patronizing at points.

In the latest patch, you can plant flags on planets. So of course, I reacted to this by launching a Grand Space Tour, in which I sent a rocket to every body with a solid surface in the Kerbol system and planted a flag on it. Only a few days after the release of the patch, I finished my task. If you want you can skip the writing and look at the pretty pictures, but you'll be missing out on interesting facts and maybe even a bit of humour.

Here's the rocket I used. Because the images are very large (1920 x 1080), I'll be linking to them rather than posting them within the thread.

I'll go over the places I visited from the sun out.

First up is Moho. I planted the flag in a crater. I named the crater "Avi Crater". I name a lot of the locations after me because it's a name that comes to mind. Here's the flag I planted. You can see the broken off legs of the lander I used to get there. My landing was a bit rough. The plaque on the flag reads "This crater was named after Avi. It was not made by him."

Next out is Eve. I planted the flag on a triangular landmass that I named Avi Triangle. The plaque reads "'That's a stupid name for a landmass.' -- Bill Kerman". Bill Kerman was the astronaut I sent to Eve. He didn't approve of my naming decisions. He also didn't approve of my decision to strand him on Eve. Eve doesn't look very interesting during the daytime. But during the nighttime, the sky is transparent, so you have a great view of space. And right at sunset, the edges of the sky glow an alien green.

Eve has a very very tiny trapped asteroid moon called Gilly. The gravity on Gilly is so low that a Kerbal can jump over 100m high. It's analogous to Mars' moons of Deimos and Phobos, which are tiny trapped asteroids that have such low gravity you can reach escape velocity on a bicycle. I planted the flag on a slope because basically the entirety of Gilly is a slope. I named the location Mt. Avi. The plaque reads "To the ladies: the name of this location can be interpreted both as a label and an instruction." So far, showing women my accomplishments in Kerbal Space Program has yet to lead to intercourse, but 247th time's the charm!

Now it's time for the moons of Kerbin itself. For those who haven't played the game, Kerbin is the Earth analog planet. It's the location from which you launch all your ships.

First I landed on Kerbin's largest moon, Mun. I landed in a crater on the far side of Mun. Like with our moon, Mun is tidally locked with Kerbin, meaning the far side of it never faces Kerbin. I named the location the Apollo Landing Site. The plaque reads "Dedicated to the many version of Jebediah Kerman, who died while the mission controller was distracted by the television." In my defense, they were playing old Simpsons reruns.

The second and smallest moon of Kerbin is Minmus. I landed on a flat area on Minmus and named it Lake Avi. The plaque reads "That was easy", because Minmus is by far the easiest body to get to and back from. The only bodies from which I was able to bring my astronaut back home were Mun, Minmus, and Gilly.

The next planet out from Kerbin is Duna, which is an analog to Mars. I placed a flag on the border between the ice caps and the rest of the planet. I named the location the Alert Landing Site, after the northernmost continuously inhabited city on Earth: Alert, Canada. I forget what the plaque reads, but I'm sure it was both humorous and insightful.

Duna has a moon, Ike. Ike is tidally locked with Duna, but this time at least I had the good sense to place the flag in a location facing Duna so you could get a nice view. I named the location The 5 Freeway, and the plaque reads "I like Ike". Each of those are a reference to our former president Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower, who managed to get congress to raise the debt ceiling so that we could have our interstate highway system.

The next planet out is Dres. Dres is an analog to Ceres, a particularly large body in our own Asteroid belt, that was thought to be a planet once. But then we reclassified it as an asteroid because we found a large number of very similar bodies in the same area. Interestingly, this is the same thing that recently happened to Pluto, except it's part of a different family of objects in the Kuiper Belt. Anyways, I managed to land on a small ice peak on Dres, isolated from the rest of the icy areas. I named this peak The Lonely Mountain, after the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit, where Smaug resides. Keeping in that spirit, the plaque reads "Here there be dragons."

Next we get to Jool's moons! We can't land on Jool because it's a gas giant and has no proper surface, but we can land on its moons.

The closest moon to Jool is Laythe. Laythe is the only moon in the entire Kerbol system to have an atmosphere. I planted the flag on a small island on Laythe that I named Avi Island. The plaque below the flag reads "Meh, Kauai is better." I rather like the Earth island of Kauai. All of the moons of Jool are tidally locked, and I happened to plant the flag on a side where you could see Jool. Because Jool is massive and Laythe is the closest moon to Jool, Jool is extremely prominent in the sky, and looks particularly stunning when it's night on Laythe and you're looking at the light side of Jool.

The next moon out is Vall. Vall is an ice covered moon, analogous to Jupiter's moon of Europa. I wasn't really sure what to name the flag location, so I just named it the Vall Landing Site. The plaque reads "Ceci n'est pas une landing site." Though not quite as close as Laythe, Vall is still reasonably close to Jool, which means you can get an excellent view of Jool from Vall.

Further out from Vall is Tylo. Tylo is, by far, the hardest body to land on, because it has high gravity but no atmosphere, meaning that aerobraking is impossible. I only managed to land after building a modified lander and trying several times. I had no fuel to spare and actually landed so hard my fuel tanks exploded, though luckily my command module remained intact. Tylo itself is somewhat barren and really just looks like a larger version of Mun. I named the landing site on it Shipwreck and wrote on the plaque "'They said it was a suicide mission. They were right' -- Bob Kerman", referencing the fact that my astronaut, Bob Kerman, died in several failed attempts to land on Tylo. Tylo's sky has a nice view of Jool, but you can also see some of the other moons in Tylo's sky. Here is an image of both Jool and Laythe as seen from Tylo. Lathe is just to the bottom right of Jool, along the galaxy band.

Jool has two trapped asteroid moons, Bop and Pol. The closer one is Bop. Bop has a very mountainous surface, and I placed my flag in an indentation in the surface and named that location Avi Basin. The plaque reads "It's not ironic that a depression was named after Avi. It's arguably coincidental." This references both the fact that I've been diagnosed with depression (I'm largely better now) and that I'm a stickler about proper use of the term "ironic" (that aspect of me hasn't changed). You can get a decent view of Jool from Bop's surface. This image, taken from Bop's surface, contains not only Jool, but Jool's three inner moons.

The outermost of Jool's moons is the trapped asteroid Pol, not named after Pol Pot, but apparently after the fact that it looks like a grain of pollen. I named this landing site Avi Ridge. I forget what the plaque reads, but unlike the Alert Landing Site plaque (whose text I also forgot), this plaque's text was probably pretty stupid. I also forgot to land on a side facing Jool, but Pol is far enough away that the pictures wouldn't have been that great anyways.

Lastly we come to the ice planet of Eeloo. Eeloo is analogous to Pluto in that it's small, distant, and its elliptical orbit intersects with a closer planet (Neptune and Jool, respectively). Eeloo is an ice planet, so I named the landing site Hoth Memorial Landing Site. The plaque reads something along the lines of "Dedicated to the rebel soldiers who bravely and pointlessly sacrificed their lives in a failed attempt to repel the Empire from the ice planet Hoth. May their shameful defeat be quickly forgotten."

And that's all of the Kerbol system you can land on! Now you don't have to buy the game, though I strongly recommend you do regardless.