Second time around

Rustnsawdust

R
It's coming up on a year since I finished my last circumnavigation, so I figured it was time for another turn. When I did the last one - a rocky moon - I had thoughts of trying an iceworld this time, and I've been keeping an eye open for likely candidates. In the last few weeks I just couldn't find one - seemed like every ice world I saw had an atmosphere. But returning to Colonia last week, I came across a candidate just a few jumps out.


There's my starting point - right on the equator and at 110° east. Since I did east-west last time I'd planned to go west-east for this one but just as I was landing I saw a ship signal on the radar to the west so I'm doing east-west again. Here's the bogey:
DZ7NfNl.png

Turns out there's a ton of junk on this snowball - in a couple of hours I found another ship, a Python, and several cargo cannister dumps defended by skimmers. Since I don't want cargo on my unarmed AspX all were left alone.

A minor disappointment so far is that the terrain looks very similar to the rocky moon last time: similar mountain ranges, craters, high plains followed by stretches of bone-shaking lumps and bumps. But on the plus-side, the glow of ice-sheets in the glancing sunlight is impressive:
hMOaug5.png


Major excitement so far has been dead-ending in a steep-sided canyon that required a good deal of backsliding - and falling down - to navigate my way out. One hull repair already required:
UHZZwph.png
 

Mengy

Mengy
That looks like a fairly large ice world, whats the radius?


Good luck, and have fun! I need to do another circumnavigation sometime soon too.
 

Rustnsawdust

R
The orbital lines do, indeed, appear to be bling. Zooming out and in shows nothing that might account for them.
Mengy said:
That looks like a fairly large ice world, whats the radius?
Click to expand...
Not very large - 560km radius. So a straight-line journey of about 3,520km. Which gives a hair under 10km/degree of longitude. And after nearly five hours so far, I've covered precisely 13°. The problem is that I've probably spent more time going up, down and sideways than moving forward - the terrain is incredibly tough, much tougher than my first time around the rocky moon.

Gravity is a measly 0.03g, so there isn't a lot of traction. And much of the terrain is icesheet, so even less traction. Smooth terrain is hard to find - most of it is like a frozen sea, and the waves/ridges always seem to be across my path. When you superimpose those ridges on macro features like mountain slopes, a steep climb suddenly goes vertical. Much rolling and tumbling follows.

This might give an idea:
UdLlBYO.png


Another irritation is that those loose boulder fields appear to be far more common and extensive on this moon. And the bigger rocks always seem to lurk in blind spots. Thanks to the lack of traction, avoiding them is difficult. I've done three SRV repairs so far and another won't be long in following. Thankfully, I have enough mats for 150-ish repairs and have been finding plenty of surface mats to boost stocks.

Points of interest today:
eq4UmNA.png

pOIDevL.png


A bad commander meets his end: an occupied escape pod, and cargo of narcotics and personal weapons. I left them to their fate.
 

Rustnsawdust

R
Day 3
Put in a couple of hours this morning. Have now completed 25° from my start point - around 250km. Still slow going, atlhough I've found some easier terrain that allowed me to pick up the pace a bit. Mostly crossing a series of deep valleys that wind back and forth across my route, so it's a sequence of traversing the north slope, emerging on to a flat top, and then finding myself on the south slope of the next valley.

Much of it looks like this:
qrhiU80.png

The way the game displays makes it look like flattish terrain until you look at the radar display. The reality looks like this:
CNXpeHV.png


Can't pick up speed here because if you bounce off a small ridge you start falling sideways, skid out on contact and bounce all the way to the bottom. Ask me how I know :rolleyes:

When I thought about ice worlds, I imagined a relatively smooth surface like a snowball. How wrong I was. The scary part is that looking at the orbital image, the terrain I've crossed so far is barely visible. I'm rather nervous about some of the pronounced features that lie in wait.

This little moon continues to throw up an incredible amount of junk. Today's count includes a crashed nav beacon, at least three skimmer-protected cargo dumps, and another spaceship, a System Force AspX. I don't which system that would be - this one is completely uninhabited. In fact, it was undiscovered until I found it last week so I've no idea where it's all coming from. And this is all directly in my path, I don't go looking for it.

In better news, the moon is providing tons of raw mats, including the necessary stuff for refuel and repair synthesis.
 

Rustnsawdust

R
Day 3 continued
Put in another couple of hours (pretty sure I've recommended retirement before :p) and hit the worst run of terrain so far. A sequence of high mountain walls separated by deep canyons with a heaping mess of misery in the bottom. Most of it looked like this:
BSyi4sl.png

To make matters worse, I've been in darkness for the whole day. Night vision helps, but makes it harder to read the landscape because it flattens everything out.

The space junk keeps coming. Don't know what this is, but the data point gave me something encoded:
CWDwRqV.png

And then these guys turned up:
JUboJkt.png

Vipers in a squad of three - just hung there pointing noses at nothing (I looked). That's five different ship types I've seen so far... wonder if I can get a full set before I'm done!
 

Rustnsawdust

R
Day 4
A mixed bag, featuring much frustration, some good progress, then more frustration.

It started badly when I managed to work my way into a mountain range and then had tremendous difficulty getting out of it. Lots of narrow crevasses where the varmint got wedged in - expended a lot of fuel to boost-jump may way out. Eventually I worked my way to the south side and, after a full hull repair, threw myself off. Many bounces later I landed on a lower slope with 45% hull integrity remaining. From there it was easy enough to get down into the valley which, happily, was heading west.

The next couple of hours were some of the most enjoyable so far, picking up quite a bit of speed and covering a fair bit of ground. I think I'm about 70-some degrees east, so about a tenth of the way around. Progress map (S marks the start):
VSkrQTN.png


After a while, the valley was heading more south than I liked so I attempted to get over the north wall. Made it up to a wide plateau but after that it went a lot steeper and I had to give up that plan. Instead, I returned to the valley floor hoping for an opportunity to escape further on. Here's the prospect looking due west from the plateau:
Rjs24is.png


And here's the view looking back. That near mountainous range is not the one that gave me trouble - I skirted around on the valley floor to the right. My base jump was off a peak behind that dark shadowed lump in the upper-middle at the end of the valley..
RUvpnRl.png


The problem now is that shoulder of ice that comes down from the upper-left in the second pic above. It extends all the way across the valley and so far it has proved to be impassable. The front face is near vertical and while it looks pretty smooth in the pic, it's actually criss-crossed by those SRV-sized crevasses. In fact, I've left the SRV jammed in one after 30 minutes of backsliding and tumbling.

I'll give it another go later tonight. If I can extricate the critter I'll see if I can take a running jump at that wall. I'm not the best fliver in the galaxy - reaction time and hand-eye coordination not what they were - but it might be my best bet. The only alternative I can think of is to backtrack up the valley and see if there's a possible escape route.

More later...
 

Rustnsawdust

R
Day 4 continued
I got back into it for an hour or so and have made some progress. Managed to get the varmint out of its hole and then - more by luck than judgment, I think - reached the top of the obstructive wall. I pointed due north, and then boost-jumped pretty much straight up but with a slight westwards lean on the SRV. The result was that I followed the ice face until I had enough altitude to drop down on the flatter surface at the top. A good technique, I think, and I'm sure I'll opportunities to practise it again.

Two pics from the top. First looking back to the plateau featured in the last post. Plateau in the left-middle distance and the barrier wall dropping from the right:
XPX5D3j.png


Second, the view ahead:
sCvx5PK.png


That vertical cliff ahead looked daunting, but I managed to avoid it by following a route around the left side of the valley. Current position is roughly dead in the middle of the pic.

So far, so good then. Very slow going - I'm actually only at 77° east, so not quite as far as I thought/hoped - but any forward progress is good progress. A minor worry for now is the rate at which I'm getting through phosphorus for fuel synths. It's on this moon and I've found some but I'm going to need a lot more, I think.

Oh, and thank you all for following this little adventure (y)
 

Rustnsawdust

R
Day 5
Didn't get much time over the weekend, but an hour late last night and two hours today have seen some progress, although not much. Two of those three hours were spent covering about 5km. I managed to crest a ridge and then skidded uncontrollably into a deep basin and it took me an age to escape. Repeated attempts to scale all four walls wasted a lot of time (and fuel, and repairs) before I managed to reverse up the northern slope and found myself on a wide plateau.

The next 30 minutes or so were some of the best on the journey so far, allowing me to crank the speed up to a massive 25m/s. Alas, I could see the end in the distance as the plateau fell away steeply on three sides. After that it was back to bouncing around on those small transverse ridges that have been the bane of the last three days. And having painfully crawled up some of the steep slopes, having to give up those gains and drop into another deep valley is... disheartening.

I'm now trying to claw my way up another western slope in the dark. Here's what it looks like:
HkGPIDG.png

And this one just to show current location, a hair north of the equator and just under 73° east:
Xa5VGHE.png


I guess I've averaged about three hours a day for five days. If my 'rithmetic is right, that's 15 hours to cover 37°, which is equal to around 370km, for an average speed of just 24.7km/hr. I may be some time :D.

This little moon is also getting mean with mats. Plenty of outcrops but mostly bronzite chordites and few mesosiderites, and the last four of the latter have yielded no phosphorus. I'm now using premium refuels for the 200% fuel efficiency, which helps, but I've only got the mats for about 15 of those.
 

Alec Turner

Alec Turner
Rustnsawdust said:
Day 5
Didn't get much time over the weekend, but an hour late last night and two hours today have seen some progress, although not much. Two of those three hours were spent covering about 5km. I managed to crest a ridge and then skidded uncontrollably into a deep basin and it took me an age to escape. Repeated attempts to scale all four walls wasted a lot of time (and fuel, and repairs) before I managed to reverse up the northern slope and found myself on a wide plateau.

The next 30 minutes or so were some of the best on the journey so far, allowing me to crank the speed up to a massive 25m/s. Alas, I could see the end in the distance as the plateau fell away steeply on three sides. After that it was back to bouncing around on those small transverse ridges that have been the bane of the last three days. And having painfully crawled up some of the steep slopes, having to give up those gains and drop into another deep valley is... disheartening.

I'm now trying to claw my way up another western slope in the dark. Here's what it looks like:
HkGPIDG.png

And this one just to show current location, a hair north of the equator and just under 73° east:
Xa5VGHE.png


I guess I've averaged about three hours a day for five days. If my 'rithmetic is right, that's 15 hours to cover 37°, which is equal to around 370km, for an average speed of just 24.7km/hr. I may be some time :D.

This little moon is also getting mean with mats. Plenty of outcrops but mostly bronzite chordites and few mesosiderites, and the last four of the latter have yielded no phosphorus. I'm now using premium refuels for the 200% fuel efficiency, which helps, but I've only got the mats for about 15 of those.
Click to expand...

😬 eek - it sounds as if you've chosen a fairly brutal and unforgiving world to circumnavigate - I wish you the best of luck!
 

Rustnsawdust

R
Alec Turner said:
😬 eek - it sounds as if you've chosen a fairly brutal and unforgiving world to circumnavigate
Click to expand...
Yup. I was hoping for one of those moons with large flat expanses with some pretty challenging obstacles if necessary - a rough mountain range, a deep chasm every now and again. But this one is pretty unrelenting. And weirdly for a computer game, it's mentally exhausting - you somehow feel all those bone-jarring smashes when you spin out of control, and the straining of the engines as you try to crest a ridgeline.

I'll be back at it tomorrow, and hoping for a spell of daylight!
 
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