EVA Kerbal Planetscraping Challenge

[Dweeb of Kerbin]

It is time to gather your bravest and/or stupidest kerbals in order to make Felix Baumkerbal look like a sissy. The challenge:

* Get a spacecraft into orbit around any body

* Make your periapsis stupidly close to the body

* EVA your kerbal, fly him as close as possible to touching the planet/moon without getting him killed and then return him safely to his vessel.

* Post a video. (Photos ok if you absolutely can't do video but this challenge only shines with video proof)

Rules:

* This has to be an orbital or high-speed planet-pass, eva, not a landing etc.

* Your vessel can have mods, but please nothing that makes this challenge really easy or meaningless.

* Kerbal must get close enough to the surface of the planet or moon that you can clearly see his shadow on the ground.

* Kerbal must return safely to his craft once the periapsis has passed. I will allow a few exceptions to this. For example, if you have two crafts in near identical orbits, one can be set low enough to crash and the kerbal can return to the second one. Kerbal must return to the craft within 4 minutes of the periapsis passing.

* No debug menu

The people will be the judge of who has the most badass Planetscrape. But, here are some general guidelines which will surely give you bonus rep:

* Choosing a body with lots of altitude changes.

* Length of hugging the ground without flinching.

* Flying under an arch, under a cave, down a trench.

* Near misses with other landmarks or with ground structures you have set up.

* Somehow pulling this off on duna

* Insane speed

* Any other ways to make this more crazy that you can think of.

Here is my starting attempt. I'm sure this will end up being pretty pedestrian compared to what some will end up pulling off:

Edited July 6, 2013 by Dweeb of Kerbin

[DJEN]

Nice Tylo pass there!

[metaphor]

Wow that is amazing, I love the shadows moving across the ground so fast.

I haven't done this with an EVA'd kerbal, but I have this screenshot from some lithobraking challenge.

[kahlzun]

Tasty challenge! For some reason, my shadows have stopped working..

Here's an insane idea: periapsis on the NIGHT SIDE, and you use their little head torches to light up the ground.

Should give you an idea of how close.

This would be epic in first-person EVA... (EVA IVA?)

Edited July 6, 2013 by kahlzun

[Tw1]

No video, but doing this is awesome fun.

I'll be watching with interest, and may have another go later.

[Dweeb of Kerbin]

I like the idea about using lights on the dark side to expose a shadow. You could also build the lights into the ship the kerbal EVAs from, or build a little custom EVA "suit" with just lights, a seat, and RCS. Another thing that would be great, is using the mod with the buran arms with cameras - I don't currently have them installed, but in my past experience, when you get near a craft that has them, they automatically show up in your view. So you could place on on the ground where you are going to pass and get a recording from the ground of your high speed encounter.

Anyway, I took a go at passing under one of my structures on the mun. To be honest, I'm not sure if it was truly a clean pass underneath, or if the combination of the kerbal's tiny size and the ultra high speed meant that the game just didn't notice a collision - but the recording is below! The exciting stuff is about 3 minutes in.

[Superseaslug]

I hate to post anything that is not specifically an answer to the challenge, but I built a colony ship in LKO that I was going to use to land a grand total of 32 kerbals onto the surface of Tylo, but while circularizing my orbit, I brought my perigee a bit too close to the planet, blowing up only half of my ship on the side of the planet, and losing 16/32 kerbals. Needless to say, I was unable to land at this point, but I figured this story was relevant enough to post.

and in case anyone cares, the colony ship's assembly took a total of 17 launches (not including failures)

[JacobT11]

Definitely going to give this a go when I get home. Just one possibly stupid question. For some reason my shadows don't work anymore. Is there an edit to the settings.cfg to restore them?

[Coneshot]

What video software is good for this?

[Bystander]

Inspired by Dweed I thought I'd take a go at one of the Mun Arches - so I give you Threading the Eye of the Needle.

Perhaps the hardest bit is that the arches mostly face north/south meaning you need a polar orbit and have to wait till it coincides with the arch.

Was using the free Fraps and missed the getting back into the ship part - though I did do it on the first run, after that a was using a reload and not bothering.

Stock parts + Mechjeb.

[Coneshot]

Nice video Bystander, I love how you added the different camera angles as well as a "Blooper reel" at the end.. :-)

[Dweeb of Kerbin]

The calm headfirst approach is a nice touch. Very peaceful.

In reply to the question about video capture, I use fraps on pc. If on Mac, I'm not sure what is best for games. There is a good capture program called snapz pro, but I,ve never tried it while running a full screen game.

[Tw1]

Shadow. Damn. I knew I'd forgot something.

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[Jackpot_Corndog]

BYSTANDER, that was tit's out awesome.