coyotesfrontier

Galaxies Unbound is probably the best one, but it only adds one system. SLIPPIST-1 is another great pack, but it requires Interstellar Consortium in order to not replace the stock system. Other_Worlds is kind of good, but the planets suffer the problem of being super samey and boring. Do be aware that adding any sort of interstellar pack pushes KSP's engine/codebase to its limit, so expect a lot of FPS drops and general weirdness after installing.

It would be nice if we got super long range comms for intersteller distances, but that might be FFT's domain.

I think half-scale is more logical then the 66% that a lot of others use, so I'd go with 1.875m. Squad seems to be going with 66% scale/2.5m to fit with the twin-boar, but that makes the boosters almost as big as the 3.75 SLS parts they're intended to be attached to.

A habitable, two-leveled world, with tall, continent-sized plateus sticking out above a sea of clouds. Below the cloud-sea, humid and dark lowlands exist around a water sea. Pressure at the top of the plateaus is 0.5atm, while pressure in the lowlands is 2atm. This is actually doable in KSP1 if you have kopernicus and EVE, but so far I've seen nobody do anything like it.

Rust Spear, now renamed to Red-Rusted Reign, is nearing completion, but the mission is going to miss the Duna transfer window by a few days. The delta-v losses will be low, but still notable. Instead of taking 5 launches (transfer, science+tug, life support, hab, crew shuttle) as I expected, RRR will end up taking 15 (5 + 5 refueling, 4 solar repairs, and 1 maintenence), many more then I had hoped for. I was able to find out the cause of the solar panels freaking out, and it was due to the truss they were mounted on not being sturdy enough. Replacing the truss with a long, empty 1.25 fuel tank seemed to ward off the kraken, but I had to send a crewed mission to attach new ports, along with the panel array itself. This totals 4 panel-related missions, as these two were a repeat of my last attempt to fix them, which didn't work. After that, I have to send up 5 fueling missions. I originally intended to send up the transfer stage fully fueled, but that ended up way too massive to launch, so I decided to do 4 missions to fuel it in orbit. After I docked the first one onto RRR, I discovered that the upper stage of its laucher drained out much of the fueling craft's oxidiser (thankfully not the LH2, as the upper stage used LFO). So now I have to send yet another mission to bring a small amount of oxidiser to RRR.

Rant: The next time I hear "Unity is Bad", I will lose my mind. Threads and comments exactly like this one have been posted dozens of times since KSP2 was announced. I might as well make a generic responce that I can post whenever someone asks this question. Anyway, rant over. KSP's bad performance is not due to it's engine, but rather a horrible codebase that needed to be rewritten. You know what was also made using Unity? Subnautica, Rimworld, Cuphead... and countless other good games. The reason Unity gets a bad rep is because it is free and easy to use, which also is the reason why modding KSP is so popular. tl;dr: codebase bad, Unity not.

Someone made an experimental mod that did this a while ago, the big issue they ran into was with oceans "filling in" the holes. It worked fine on bodies like Duna though. I'm sure with enough dedication someone could make a reliable deformable terrain mod for KSP1, if not KSP2.

More issues with Rust Spear, I'm beginning to think that this to-be-interplanetary craft is cursed. After attaching two new solar arrays after the old ones had a kraken attack, I go to bring up the Hab Module, only to discover that the new solar arrays, which were difficult to launch due to a COM issue, were also kraken-possessed. So it turns out that the issue was not with robotics, but with clustering too many panels nearby? I can't simply attach less panels, because I need a ton to prevent the LH2 fuel of the craft from boiling off. To top things off, MKS made it that the inflatable modules on the ship require 3600 material kits to inflate, meaning I have to send up yet another mission to do so. And this is all before we've even left for Duna!

Got the Propulsion, Science, and Life Support Modules of Rust Spear into LKO, but when rendezvousing the Habitation Module, I discovered that the solar panel arrays on the LS Module were somehow spinning extremely fast, as if they were mounted on a motor set to maximum speed. I had to abort the docking due to spinning-caused ghost forces moving the craft, and decided to see if I could somehow get rid of the kraken-possessed arrays. Fortunately, the spinning reached a point where the arrays each ejected themselves from Rust Spear, though that was only after I had reverted the Hab Module flight. As there was only a single docking port open on RS (for connecting the LS module to the Hab), I sent up 2 kerbals on a mission to attach two new ports for new solar arrays, using KIS. I currently have to send up the hab module, 4 refueling missions, and the crew shuttle, and after that Rust Spear will depart on its 3 year mission to Duna orbit and back. Despite playing since 0.90, this is the first time I've stuck with a science save long enough for interplanetary missions, so I'm super excited to get this done.

I don't have any pictures, but I tried to send the first module of Rust Spear I (A Hermes-like Duna ship) into LKO, but ran into an entire afternoon of trouble. As I haven't unlocked nuclear or electric engines yet, the most practical propulsion type is cryogenics, which for the 4000 or so delta V to get to duna and back, requires utterly massive tanks. And so was born the Rust Spear Propulsion Segment (RSPM), a huge module consisting of six 2.5m asparagus-staged drop tanks around a core. Despite ironically having the same mass as a half-length rockomax tank when unfueled, the fact that this mass is spread out across a massive volume makes putting the stage on top of a rocket highly unstable. I mistakenly believed that this instability was due to aerodynamics (I didn't have fairings big enough for the stage), because why else would something with as little mass as a fueled rockomax tank be unstable? My failure to take the more spread-out mass of the stage into account cost me my afternoon, unfortunately. I finally solved the instability by creating a skycrane-like (you know the type) rocket, with the payload inside the boosters instead of being on top. Still, I wasn't able to get it into orbit tonight, due to unexpected nullref spam tanking my framerate.

Juno is still highly useful due to it's 0.625 form factor, no other jet is that small. Whiplash has a lower mass, cost, and higher fuel efficiency then the Rapier, and is good for atmospheric, non-spaceplane vehicles when high thrust or max speed is needed. The only useless part I can think of is the not-rockomax micronode, which is almost always outclassed by 4 octostruts attached around a single one, but that's a single part in a sea of useful ones.

I feel like only certain people would want 3.125, the difference between 2.5 and 3.75 is so minor that it isn't worth it putting in a whole new size class for it. IMO, an Ares I replica would be better off with a 1.875 SRB, 2.5 upper stage, and a 2.5 capsule, but since SQUAD seems to be going for a 2.5 shuttle SRB (which doesn't really line up with the 3.75 SLS parts, but whatever), maybe a 2.5 SRB, 3.75 upper stage, and 3.75 capsule would be better. We've gone on long enough discussing this, and we're not getting anywhere, so let's just talk about the bigger sizes.

I wince everytime I hear that "KSP is bad because Unity". It's not, most of kerbal's bad performance and the like comes from a bad codebase, not the engine. KSP2 is not a DLC, the entire game is different from the ground up. All of the models have been created from scratch, using the old ones only as a reference.

One of the philosophies of KSP is that no part is better then another. Even the flea, known for being extremely early game, is good as a side booster for small launchers, a vacuum final stage for cheap rockets, a seperation motor for massive boosters... Point is, every part in KSP has it's use, even in sandbox mode. Having upgradable engines would either make them useless when not upgraded, overpowered when fully upgraded, or both.

Sorry for the broken math, I don't know what was up with me last night, but a 1.5 increase doesn't make sense. Bartybum is correct, size increases by double, with a part size in between. I still think 7.5 and 10 make sense though.