The Circumnavigation of Mercury

Drive assist off and you have direct pedal controll over speed, nice in really frustrating terrain. Good racing wheel also makes precise controll easy.
Thanks for that, I'll look into it - when I do the polar circumnavigation! As to steering, I spend a lot of time in the 'air' where yaw is not possible, unless you have perfected the technique of rolling to the side and pumping the vertical thrust. I always run out of juice when I try that.
 
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Increasing amount of shadow across the terrain. I have night vision on the same POV switch as vertical thrust so I can easily turn it on and off in mid-flight.

shadows.png
 
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I wish there was a way to generate a Location event in the journal without logging to the main menu and back in. Each time I login I have to: zoom out the sensors to the max; set the right panel to SRV repair (handy in a crisis); check the target longtitude is set etc. I need the Location events to track my progress by exporting them from EDSM.

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Thanks for that, I'll look into it - when I do the polar circumnavigation! As to steering, I spend a lot of time in the 'air' where yaw is not possible, unless you have perfected the technique of rolling to the side and pumping the vertical thrust. I always run out of juice when I try that.
Funnily enough when we drove together you mentioned me giving you some tips and my main one was going to be to practice the technique of using pitch and roll in the air to twist yourself back around so you're facing forwards again for the next bounce and can thus keep on going (conserving all that lovely momentum and rythmn you build up over time). I observed that when you got twisted around by a bad bounce you tended to resign yourself to landing sideways. So yeah, if you want one tip it's to practice that technique. As I originally tried to describe it in the Sagittarius Eye article (issue #17) ...

"Yaw, or rather the lack of it, will now be your single biggest challenge. As you bound across the landscape you’ll inevitably get twisted sideways and you need to correct that before the next bounce. To do this you have to perform a rolling motion in the air, which is key to mastering the SRV. To illustrate this, hold your hand out flat in front of you. Now roll your hand slightly to the right, then pitch it up a bit at the wrist, then roll it left again and lastly pitch back down. Voila! You have successfully yawed to the right. You can perform this action in a variety of different ways (e.g. pitch down, roll right, pitch up and roll left) and, with practice, can use it to twist the SRV back through any angle in order to correct particularly bad bounces (or simply to show off by landing backwards). More subtly, you should be using this technique all the time to make micro adjustments to your attitude in order to hit each bounce as square as possible to the direction of travel"
 
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I wish there was a way to generate a Location event in the journal without logging to the main menu and back in. Each time I login I have to: zoom out the sensors to the max; set the right panel to SRV repair (handy in a crisis); check the target latitude is set etc. I need the Location events to track my progress by exporting them from EDSM.

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Wow - on that planet with those lighting conditions that paintob is like Predator camouflage!
 
Thanks, yes, I'm averaging 7.8 degrees per day but reckon this will slow down dramatically after I enter the shade.

When I did my circumnavigation I remember the dark stretches vividly. I'm not familiar with the landscape of Mercury but Ariel had some really nasty canyons and many crept up on me during the dark stretches :eek: 😂 😂 ... I tried to gauge the distance to the next canyon from the planetary map but I tend to sort of "trance away" while driving in the dark and involuntary ended up in some pretty steep canyons. Good times!
 
Funnily enough when we drove together you mentioned me giving you some tips and my main one was going to be to practice the technique of using pitch and roll in the air to twist yourself back around so you're facing forwards again for the next bounce and can thus keep on going (conserving all that lovely momentum and rythmn you build up over time). I observed that when you got twisted around by a bad bounce you tended to resign yourself to landing sideways. So yeah, if you want one tip it's to practice that technique. As I originally tried to describe it in the Sagittarius Eye article (issue #17) ...

"Yaw, or rather the lack of it, will now be your single biggest challenge. As you bound across the landscape you’ll inevitably get twisted sideways and you need to correct that before the next bounce. To do this you have to perform a rolling motion in the air, which is key to mastering the SRV. To illustrate this, hold your hand out flat in front of you. Now roll your hand slightly to the right, then pitch it up a bit at the wrist, then roll it left again and lastly pitch back down. Voila! You have successfully yawed to the right. You can perform this action in a variety of different ways (e.g. pitch down, roll right, pitch up and roll left) and, with practice, can use it to twist the SRV back through any angle in order to correct particularly bad bounces (or simply to show off by landing backwards). More subtly, you should be using this technique all the time to make micro adjustments to your attitude in order to hit each bounce as square as possible to the direction of travel"

LOL, things I should have read BEFORE setting off. Thanks, I'll practice this. I think perhaps I've been too ambitious in the angle I've tried to swing through and end up running out of thrust and tumbling on the ground before I can level out.
 
When I did my circumnavigation I remember the dark stretches vividly. I'm not familiar with the landscape of Mercury but Ariel had some really nasty canyons and many crept up on me during the dark stretches :eek: 😂 😂 ... I tried to gauge the distance to the next canyon from the planetary map but I tend to sort of "trance away" while driving in the dark and involuntary ended up in some pretty steep canyons. Good times!
Mercury doesn't have so many canyons such as you see elsewhere, rather it has immense craters that are very rugged - I guess objects pulled in by Sol's gravity are intercepted by Mercury some of the time. With respect to the planetary map I find always want to zoom in that little bit more to see what's really happening up ahead.
 
Here's a little demo of an SRV correctional yaw ... it's just grabbed from a video I had at hand. What I might do is go out and take some footage specifically to demonstrate this yaw technique a bit better.

 
Here's a little demo of an SRV correctional yaw ... it's just grabbed from a video I had at hand. What I might do is go out and take some footage specifically to demonstrate this yaw technique a bit better.

Yes please to another video demonstrating this technique. 👍 I'd love to get up to 10 degrees per day.
 
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I wish there was a way to generate a Location event in the journal without logging to the main menu and back in. Each time I login I have to: zoom out the sensors to the max; set the right panel to SRV repair (handy in a crisis); check the target longtitude is set etc. I need the Location events to track my progress by exporting them from EDSM.

Every time you take a screen shot when in your SRV the Latitude, Longitude and Heading is saved to the Journal:

{ "timestamp":"2020-08-11T09:16:43Z", "event":"Screenshot", "Filename":"\\ED_Pictures\\Screenshot_7255.bmp", "Width":1920, "Height":1080, "System":"Pla Aick MA-A d8", "Body":"Pla Aick MA-A d8 3 a", "Latitude":14.770576, "Longitude":-172.699890, "Heading":336 }
 
Take a look at this sequence of Sol observations:

Sol elevations.png


Notice how the longitude of the SRV plus the altitude of Sol is constant at between 55 and 56 degrees. I think the spin-orbit of Mercury is not modelled correctly and seems to behave as though the planet is tidally locked and always presenting the same face to the star.

Previously, I thought I had measured the terminator moving westwards at 1.1 degrees per day and made various predictions about where it would be. I think this is now wrong, in fact to paraphrase Nixon: "(EXPLETIVE DELETED), all previous statements regarding the position of the terminator are inoperative."

If you approximate the orbit of Mercury to take 90 days (88) then if Mercury didn't spin the terminator would move eastwards at 4 degrees per day.

If you approximate the rotation period of Mercury to be 60 days (58.6), then if Mercury somehow didn't orbit Sol but simply rotated then the terminator would move westwards at 6 degrees per day.

Combining these values, the terminator should be moving westwards at about 2 degrees per day. The first observation above, the one at longitude 39 was taken 2 days ago so there should be a 4 degree difference in altitude of Sol due to this spin-orbit combination. That hasn't happened.

Yesterday, I did a 6 hour experiment in which I parked the SRV looking at a shadow to see if it moved at all.

Shadow experiment.png


In a quarter of a day, Sol's altitude should have changed by half a degree, but the shadow hasn't lengthened by any noticeable amount.
 
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Every time you take a screen shot when in your SRV the Latitude, Longitude and Heading is saved to the Journal:

{ "timestamp":"2020-08-11T09:16:43Z", "event":"Screenshot", "Filename":"\\ED_Pictures\\Screenshot_7255.bmp", "Width":1920, "Height":1080, "System":"Pla Aick MA-A d8", "Body":"Pla Aick MA-A d8 3 a", "Latitude":14.770576, "Longitude":-172.699890, "Heading":336 }
That's brilliant, Nick, thank you! (y) I can export the Screenshot journal entries to Google sheets just as easily as the Location events; that makes my life a lot easier. I'm going to be smiling all day long. :)
 
Every time you take a screen shot when in your SRV the Latitude, Longitude and Heading is saved to the Journal:

{ "timestamp":"2020-08-11T09:16:43Z", "event":"Screenshot", "Filename":"\\ED_Pictures\\Screenshot_7255.bmp", "Width":1920, "Height":1080, "System":"Pla Aick MA-A d8", "Body":"Pla Aick MA-A d8 3 a", "Latitude":14.770576, "Longitude":-172.699890, "Heading":336 }
Screenshot location recording is working a treat. (y)
 
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