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Honestly, this is my expectation too. In the absence of KSP2, what we actually have with the final KSP version is a solid, stable base that modders can reliably work with and know they won't need to update because things in the game's code have changed. All those times Steam pulled an update and broke your game for 2 weeks? Never again! Whether the player base maintains steady interest is another matter. I would suggest looking at modded Minecraft as a nearest comparison; sure, the base game gets occasional updates, but the modded crowd are still split between the latest, and a version from 3 years ago because that is where all the best mods live. Minecraft did not need to keep updating for those folks to continue playing it. I'm sure there's a very valid argument that new sales of MC are almost entirely looking for the newest and might fizzle if there's a cessation of development, but in this case, we have KSP2 to look forward to! There's no shame in buying KSP now knowing that the next update will be the sequel. If anything, that's really common!

I... I really want to see some pictures of this particular science experiment

When trying to go to space... Your natural instinct for a stable structure is that majority of it's weight should be at the bottom. This is a good instinct for 99.9% of applications in real life. It's one reason why the Eiffel tower is shaped like that. Now throw that instinct away and build a dart. Throw a dart hard enough and it will go to space on ballistics alone. The Eiffel tower would flip out and experience fiery RUD. Which would be a glorious thing to behold and ideally put on youtube, but isn't really very productive if you want to go to space. Also, what happens on Eve, stays on Eve. Literally.

Landing anything interesting on Eve. All the good stuff burns up in the atmosphere... Always compromises between what can survive vs what I want to send. Or just getting to Moho. Little blighter is on a rotten inclination and has a tiny SoI, and you'll think you're on course and then suddenly you aren't

You'll end up in a highly elliptical orbit around the wrong game Of course it's a little sad to see KSP 2 get delayed, however... Rather have it late and polished to a diamond sparkle, than early and glistening like a turd Hopefully our amazing modders will feel no need to park their projects any time soon, expanding the potentials of 1.x.x and helping the player base get even more value for money Everyone who partakes of modded games now knows they have loads of time to try several different setups and they won't become irrelevant OTOH, this won't be the first software company (or even games company) to use c19 as cover for things that were going to be late anyway. At this point, gamers expect delays, and probably most of us are fine with it. See point 1 to 3 above

Mine still do. Every single career

You're very much not wrong and it does indeed solve the problem - at least, if your original Mun vessel has oodles of range and can be refuelled to let you keep doing this. On the other hand... it's a solution to a weird problem that doesn't really feel like it needs to exist at all. Rendezvous is not exploring. Docking is not exploring. Crew transfers are not exploring. They don't involve going to new places and thus don't belong in the "exploration" contracts list. By all means have world's first rewards, and have separate contracts because maybe I like to put a station around every planet, and maybe I could do this as a dual launch if there was incentive. But maybe I just want to go and come home. And I have a strong hunch that the majority of players are in the latter camp, at least some of the time. All my 2p, obviously, but that's what the suggestions forum is for Also your new forum name totally threw me until I saw your signature

I mean, it's all a really good idea ...but I wonder how many players want to go to that bother? Just a hunch, but I suspect that most people would prefer to just launch one big rocket at a time rather than track two simultaneous missions around the system.

You mean... siriusly?

Great tip, thank you! Maybe I can look to write a little patch for the dust later

Share and enjoy! (I might be mixing Sirius Corporation with Sirius Cybernetics Corporation...)

Yaaaasss! Thank you to everyone who has been involved! ...the question now is whether I p-p-p-pick up a planet pack and play a new career, or learn how to give Tylo an atmosphere and some dust storms... I feel like a lot of stock bodies would benefit from a hint of sky.

My observation is that the Squad of modern times hesitates to engage in anything that might require them to do maths... How long did we wait for delta-v calculations? Which is not to say I lack love and respect for the devs, I just kind of notice they prefer making new parts to altering existing code

Thing is, it's easy to find satellite, science, or tourist contracts for places you've already been. Making money from previously explored bodies isn't hard. Being given an up-front bonus to go to Eeloo however... I don't know how to achieve that without visiting every other body in the system and doing every 'exploration' activity at each of them. On the whole, I just wish the Exploration contract was a bit less conservative. It should be suggesting Duna the moment I've landed on Mun, and Moho/Dres/Jool as soon as I've done Duna. I'm fine with it sometimes suggesting previously-visited bodies, but my biggest gripe is that it never suggests things that haven't been visited unless all the rest are 100% complete. Fortunately I'm usually cash-rich once I've gotten back from Duna, so I just go out and rely on world's first money to make it worthwhile when I get there. (The Strategia mod is helpful, to those who may share my feelings. It'll give you a cool half million for cracking open a new SoI as long as you call the shot before you launch. Which is great, but I do feel stock KSP is very lacking in nudging you to go to new places.)

My condolences.

Brought them home! ...which wasn't all that hard, since most things went to plan. What had been forgotten was to actually put a decent antenna on the Dunaworrybehappy's crew section, with the result that as soon as it left Dunan orbit, all signal with home was lost until it entered Kerbin's SoI. This meant that instead of spending 250+ days processing and transmitting data from the lab, it instead arrived in LKO with over 5000 raw data points. While the initial descent plan involved discarding the empty lab and letting it burn up, mission control really didn't want to say goodbye to all that data... but nor did they want to leave Sakura and Lilly up there to crew it for another year, since the press were already asking if there's a technical problem in bringing the crew to ground. Instead, we had engineering quickly cobble together the Deorbinatrix - a one-purpose probe that first attached a control module to the lab so's we won't lose it amongst the other junk up there, and then provided the means for the Dunaworrybehappy's un-engined command pod to begin the descent. With this done, we are now free to send up additional crew to the Dunaworrybehappy's lab at any point if we wish to tap into that un-tapped data reserve. Also, we made a cool new spaceplane with three engines and reversed wings... but forgot to give Val and Astra a camera when they flew it to return the crew of the Pielab to ground. Nonetheless, it was a successful flight and not a single wheel exploded upon landing. Definitely not. With all active crew back in the kerbonaut quarters at KSC, thoughts turn, inevitably, to further goals. Questions are being asked about Moho but... it's kind of small and round and boring. There are legends of a planet called Dres but... we haven't been able to verify them. No. Jool, we think, is the right target. That shining, healthy-green jewel of the night sky that has called to astronomers and scienticians since Kalileo first turned his telescope upon it. Soon Jool. Soon, we will come for you. Prepare your bodies.

Subject as per title... Example mission: Launch a multi-part vessel Relay/fuel tank stays in orbit at the destination, lander descends Lander may include rover and contact multiple biomes Lander returns to orbital relay, picks up more fuel, returns home By all reasonable thinking, this body is done with, explored, and I'd like to move on, yet the next exploration contract insists I return to the same body to perform a crew transfer, or a docking (because they were the same vessel). What a boring, tedious, mundane thing to put under the heading of 'Exploration'. Exploration can be reasonably considered to be: flyby, orbit, landing, flag planting. If those four things are done, the contract system should suggest a new destination. Exploration is about... exploring new places. Not about technical operations at destinations you already went to. Please. This is so simple, and I think, so logical. I'm really tired of editing my save files to get past these make-busy contracts, and I wonder how many players just sit with "crew transfer around Mun" forever and ignore the exploration contracts because of it.

Having recently tested and rejected a concept for a solar-powered Eve drone, mission control locks up the snack machine in the engineering department and instructs the team to try harder if they want to see it again. This seems to spur many brilliant ideas, and a new, more efficient design is put forward, using an alternative type of electric propulsion (as provided by the Thor Tech mod, which is far more powerful than stock propellers, and doesn't fall apart in timewarp, but also costs a lot more electrical power to run). At this altitude, Evodrone's solar panels are functioning far better than on Kerbin, and the drone can open up the throttle and head for its destination at a comfortable 150m/s (and 4x timewarp). As we dip lower however, either due to increasing temperatures or a layer of thick cloud above, the energy income begins to suffer, and Evodrone has to restrict itself to ~60% throttle for sustainable cruise. Fortunately, that's quite enough to keep it airborne. Almost anything will fly on Eve, and it's surprisingly hard to crash. The lack of satellite signal at the landing point was a gaffe, but happily not a fatal one, since it turns out there are some functions that can still be controlled even after the main link has been lost, and combined with the low falling speed, Evodrone manages to touchdown with no damage. And apparently landed in a very feature-rich environment, finding three different things to scan within a few minutes. While we didn't test Evodrone for its aquatic capabilities, it turns out it is indeed capable of landing on Eve's ocean... and taking off again. 1000 units of electricity turn out to be sufficient to allow Evodrone to make a full-throttle burn up to the cloud layer again, at which point it returns to full operating power and is able to recharge on the longer hops between biomes. Other than the looks, there is one design flaw: when flying with the sun on one side, the scanning arm will cast a shadow over 50% of the solar panels. While it is possible to enter a sustainable cruise, it does mean the fastest speeds are only reachable when travelling east-west. This is basically fine, because the original goal was to check out some surface features and land in 3 biomes, which has happened

Toying with the possibility of an electric drone for Eve... Now, it does work. Needs a few more solar panels, but it does fundamentally do what you'd want, i.e. flies in the direction you point it, turns, lands, takes off again, etc. However... the BG propellers do not handle so much as 2x timewarp, and this thing only flies at about 90-110m/s, and it can't be driven by Bon Voyage autopilot. And Eve is a big planet. An extended expedition with this thing will be... painful beyond belief. Also it doesn't have any real ability to manoeuvre while on the ground, so putting a scanning arm on it doesn't really help with anything. Fun experiment, but the available parts do not really make such a mission very practical vs other options so... probably leaving this here and calling it quits on the idea.

Finding that hinge movements could be coupled to wheel steering input was unexpected but amazing. It makes articulated vehicles just work - and much better than trying to drag an unlocked hinge

Tasked with collecting data from a number of biomes across Duna's surface, Bill and Sakura Kerman set their autopilot to full speed and watch the red rocks whizz past for quite a few hours before a strange sight begins to creep up in the landscape ahead... Whether this is evidence of an ancient civilisation or a curious but random rock feature, they aren't sure, but it's certain to give the boffins a lot to think about when they get home. A number of days elapse while Dunamite ambles across the red ground (thank you Bon Voyage for not making me pilot all that distance!), and in the end we have samples from the Northeast Basin, Poles, Polar Highlands, Lowlands, Midlands and Western Canyon. But frankly it looks a bit same-y after a while and I didn't want to make loads of identical posts so let's put that on fast foward. Somewhere around the edge of the polar ice, mission control ponders whether they have ever sent anything to Ike (we have not) and whether we should in future (jury's out). It's not that we don't like Ike, but there's a good chance the crackpots will start claiming that we're just taking photos from Mun and airbrushing Duna into the sky, and we're not sure we can be bothered with the social media storm that will follow. Also, outtake for the lulz... Something in the trailer hitch is the weakest link of Dunamite, and if driven too aggressively for too long, it will split in half, sometimes with comedy consequences. Whether I should have lived with this stupidity is something I'm still pondering. I had about half my data and it would have been a reason to build another rover and extend the mission...

Definitely agree... I mostly don't do tourist contracts at all because it's rare to find one where they all have compatible destinations.

With the Dunamite's six wheels all working, Bill and Lilly begin an initial assessment of the Midlands Sea in which they landed as a suitable place to bring down the Dunaworrybehappy. (Technical note: the Dunamite's trailer hinge is wired to the steering controls, giving it a lot of directional control during testing on Kerbin - however the surface friction on Duna turns out to be rather low, and with SAS on, the rover still doesn't want to change direction quickly. It's not a major problem, and on the whole the unconventional design handles pretty well, although it is possible to knock the rear docking port off if you're clumsy with hills.) Within a scant 5 kilometres, they find at least four unique and interesting surface features for the scanner to wrap its optics around. Satisfied that there is good science here, the team identifies the flattest area and radios up to Jeb and Sakura to begin their descent. Which, as are most Dunan descents, is a bit dull. Drogue chutes quickly trip the worst of the vessel's speed, and a full spread brings the final drop to a manageable 30m/s. Credit to Jeb, he sets the Dunaworrybehappy down within 5km of the target, which isn't a bad effort coming from orbit through an atmosphere. After setting up a suite of science packages, the team settle in for a night on the chilli-red planet before Sakura and Bill rise with the dawn to begin the main expedition. (There was also an impacter probe that was supposed to get science for the Grand Slam... but it failed to deliver anything worthwhile. 4 tons @ 500m/s is apparently far below what this experiment needs, even when coming down within physics range. I'm not going to bother logging that because it's boring.) (Edit: guess I've used the name Dunamite for multiple vehicles now. Oh well.)

Kerbal Foundries

First day in a while I've had time for KSP and of course it's christmas morning Anyhoo, a couple of mundane satellite deployments and a Munar impacter happen, but after the success of the Wren spaceplane, the public seems to consider Kerbin and its moons to be conquered and less interesting, and pressure mounts to set our sights on further away. Keen to oblige (and secure further funding), mission control greenlights the Duna program. Engineering acknowledges that it would have been possible to launch the Dunaworrybehappy's multiple segments separately, but that requires maths and might involve some long division and stuff, so they didn't do that and instead built a big dumb rocket. Either way, the whole kaboodle reaches Duna without incident, and the onboard science lab quickly starts working on the data gathered during the approach. With 3 primary surface features scheduled for investigation, the mission's rover, Dunamite, will be deployed first in order to locate the optimal landing zone for the main lab and habitat. Bill and Lilly prep for descent. There is some concern as the wheels suffer an unexpected failure, but Dunamite is surprisingly lightweight and it's rate of descent is barely 8m/s, so Bill is able to make an emergency EVA just a kilometre above the ground and fix the problem before touchdown. With the crew and rover safely situated just 10km from the intended LZ, they take some samples, then begin scouting for a nice flat spot to bring the lab down.