Skiing Minmus

[Geschosskopf]

While waiting for all my mods to update so I can continue with the Kethane Travelling Circus, I decided to give the Interstellar mod a go, which meant doing a whole new career. It's early days so nothing high-tech is available yet and I'm grinding my way through Mun and Minmus biomes about 1/2way through the tech tree.

In my previous career games, I'd always avoided the Minmus slope biome but this time I decided to break the monotony of the career grind and go for it. I mean, it's Minmus. I've been there 1000 times. How hard could it be? And so Bill was sent there to find the steepest slope along his path and land there.

Which he did, no problem. Ladders aren't necessary on Mun or Minmus so I've never bothered researching them, and Bill just jumped out and floated lightly to the surface where, without taking a step, he grabbed a handful of rocks and planted his flag. Then he had to get back in the lander, so he turned to face it. But as soon as he lifted his foot, he started sliding down the hill.

There he went, walking forward but sliding backwards. Literally "moonwalking" in both meanings of the word . I wasn't worried and thought this was pretty cool, and was lamenting I can't record video. No biggie, I thought. I can just hit the jets to get back up to the lander. And so I didn't notice Bill was slowly accelerating, until his feet went out from under him.....

.....and then there was no stopping it. Bill began slowly rolling down the hillside. And continuing to accelerate. Soon he was bouncing high and tumbling at extremely high RPM while not moving very fast over the ground.

Periodically, Bill would touch the ground and go bouncing off rotating in a different direction at a different speed, either faster or slower. Sometimes he bounced so high I was afraid he'd get into orbit....

.....but he always came down again, usually face-first as here.

Finally, after probably a couple of minutes of real time, the ground leveled out near the edge of a "lakebed" and Bill eventually skidded to a halt. I zoomed out to get a better view of how far he'd travelled.

An appreciation for the steepness of the hill can be gained by realizing the ship landed at about 1500m elevation. Bill lost nearly all that altitude and thus moved about 2200m horizontally. Most of this was the final skid at the bottom--he travelled essentially both sides of the triangle instead of taking the hypotenuse. Yay SCIENCE!

Once his head stopped spinning, Bill dusted himself off, fired up his jetpack, and began the long trip back to the lander.

Along the way, an idea began forming in his head about exploiting this location for recreation. He could have lots of fun kicking Jeb down this mountain repeatedly .

Finally, Bill got back to the lander. And very fortunately, he stuck the landing or he'd have been off to the races again.

Naturally, the lander's hatch faced uphill. So Bill landed beside it, not daring to lift a foot while I swung the camera around so he could fly to it .

Lesson learned: never underestimate the slopes of Minmus

[meve12]

Well, now you have to do that on purpose.

[Scotius]

Well, now you have to do that on purpose.

I do that regularly in fact Saves a lot of EVA propellant and time, because sliding Kerbals are faster than walking. It works on Mun too.

[Geschosskopf]

I do that regularly in fact Saves a lot of EVA propellant and time, because sliding Kerbals are faster than walking. It works on Mun too.

I try to avoid this. I've had a number of cases on Mun where the sliding Kerbal fell through the surface. This always summons the Hell Kraken and sometimes results in the whole save being corrupted.

[Scotius]

I know what you mean - rag-doll sliding Kerbals bend and contort in weirdest ways when they hit terrain bumps. But i've never had system crash then.