Advice to all cartographers and explorers: when approaching a high mountain from orbital cruise, always set your flight path to one side of it. Do not assume that you will always be able to glide to and land on the summit.
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Reason for warning: this evening I had an extremely close call on MYRIESLY EC-B c27-2407 2 B. I was doing a flyby to see where might be a good place to land to get a screenshot with the Amethyst Cloud nebula in the background when I noticed a particularly tall-looking mountain, so I set a course, thinking to measure the height. As I got closer, I saw that the summit was quite flat and so I attempted to land on it. At about 31km altitude I realised how tall it was and that I was in trouble - I was not sure if I would hit it before reaching the drop-out altitude of 25km. I had no time to turn around or pull away and hit the transition to glide at 25km with the mountain staring me in the face and pulled up as much as I could, thinking that this would be the last thing I saw before the insurance screen. My throttle was zero, with full pips in engines (I had no time to turn on the power distributor and put all power to shields) and I was pulling up as hard as I could when I dropped out of glide, still rapidly approaching the flat summit. I crashed at 162m/s, thankfully at a narrow angle, and came to a halt on the summit with 95% hull remaining. The co-ordinates of the summit are roughly -10.8 / -165.7 (I have trouble reading the numbers, see the screenshot below that I took just after the event). I went ahead and measured the height of the mountain anyway: 16.7km (+/- ~200m).
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This is the tallest mountain I have come across, so I'm submitting it here as an outstanding surface feature. MYRIESLY EC-B c27-2407 is ~5LY from the system at the centre of the Amethyst Cloud nebula, MYRIESLY HR-N e6-4354 (I'll check the exact distance next time I'm on, which might not be until later in the week, likewise for the other data on the table marked with ?).
est. 5LY LY from waypoint 10 | MYRIESLY EC-B c27-2407 | G? | 2 B (Rocky) (0.11g) ~1200Ls?) | Notes: 16.7km tall mountain at -10.8 / -165.7 |
Fly safe (and land more carefully than I did)!