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I actually like the square flowers that visibly sprout from the ground as you approach them. They are cute.

2. Otherworldly Connections. First real look at Duna. Very pretty! Proofs:

Destination Duna (0.1.0.0) Challenge Completion Pictures- Nice challenge!

Chapter 3: Rover Testing I'm still waiting for a few bugs to be patched before I make another run at Bop, but I'm still working on this project by trying to build better rovers. One idea that I played around with for awhile was that since the rover wheels are all so bad, maybe I should make a rover without wheels. Look at this magnificent beast. Elegant in it's simplicity, no? This thing could go 30 m/s no problem and climb hills as if they weren't even there. In many respects it was my best performing rover yet. The one thing that it could not do, unfortunately, is steer. So I went back to the drawing board and made Rover 11. This is my first nuclear rover. She could handle nicely at speeds up to 40 m/s on Kerbin. Here I let her rip on the runway. Sadly, she couldn't handle the steep slopes near the KSC even under full throttle. Sorry, it was dark and Rover 11 was wearing her camo paintjob. I was ok with that, though. This rover was intended for Bop and I figured it would perform much better in low gravity. So I headed off to Minmus to try it in a lower gravity environment. The landing went pretty well. The only bug I experienced on the way over was the thing where the trajectory disappears from the next SOI. My sky crane didn't jettison successfully either, but that was my own bad design. I was able to shake it off. Rover 11 performed quite well on Minmus. She could climb fairly steep slopes decently even without the engine. The extra acceleration was really nice though. Even just twitching the throttle gave a nice boost. And it could do flips! First controlled rover flips in KSP2! This was the first rover design that I have really been pleased with in KSP2. I expect to take some variation of it to Bop after we get some bug fixes. After making decent time for 10km or so, I realized that I hadn't EVA'ed anyone to plant a flag. So I put her in park and Bill climbed out the hatch. He descended the ladder to the surface...then through the surface, to a different plane of existence. It was dark and Bill was scared. He was slowly falling through layers of unbeing, expecting to be consumed by the Kraken at any moment. But that didn't happen, and after awhile he got the idea to turn on his jetpack. He was able to climb back up into normal space, but when he got there, he saw Rover 11 being thrown up from the surface by some unknown force. Well, this situation clearly called for a quick load, right? Bill thought so too. Big mistake, as it turns out. The wheels fell off Rover 11. Every save going way back to orbit did the same. So, long story short - I'm really pleased about Rover 11, and I think I'm starting to understand some of the principles of rover building in KSP1. Little rovers and little wheels are meant for noodling around the landing site a bit. They are probably meant to be slow and useless. Expedition style rovers need to be big, use the new truck wheels, and have a source of propulsion adequate to the situation in which they are expected to be used. Fly dangerously my friends.

Yeah, I respectfully disagree. I enjoyed the fact that the easter eggs in KSP1 don’t have explanations, because that allowed the community to come up with their own explanations. There are fan made full length feature films (like a dozen of them) made from cinematic KSP1 footage, all revolving around the stories people made up to explain the anomalies. Also hilarious graphic novels. If the devs spell these things out for us then it just stifles our creativity. It’s way more fun for everyone if they just give us weird things to find, then sit back and laugh at what we do with it.

A little more on Rover 7 and the troubles she had. And her ultimate fate. Rover 7's wheels were fine, if slow, in testing on the launch pad. But during the flight they jittered around annoyingly all the way from the launch pad to Bop. I assumed they would stop when we landed, but that didn't happen. See the video below for the example. After landing, it tumbled slowly down the hill like this for about 2km. I couldn't control it at all - which I think I have figured out. The RoveMate probe core may not have a reaction wheel in KSP2. I thought that it did in KSP1. I'll definitely need a reaction wheel for Bop. Valentina, after exploring a bit, followed Rover 7 down the mountainside, attempting bravely to stop it's roll so she could at least try to drive it a bit. Then when I hit > to try to speed up the process, the rover just vanished. RIP Rover 7. Valentina looks at the spot where Rover 7 used to be as she contemplates what it will be like to spend the rest of her life on Bop with only a third of a tank of EVA propellant left. On a positive note, I will say that I do find the surface beautiful. The bigger rocks look cool, the landscape looks interesting. And EVAing around in a jetpack in low gravity feels so much smoother and more intuitive, even though the controls are the same.

Chapter 3 - 1st Rover Landing on Bop As of my last entry, I had been ready to give up on getting a rover into orbit, due to the devastating 21.5km bug. I was planning on just sending a minimalistic. rocket there just to at least take a look at the moon. I changed my mind, though, and decided to try one more rover design. Rover 7 I guess. This time I took a different approach, trying to minimize my part count, rather than trying to build a nice rover. If I could get any rover to Bop, I figured that would be progress. My final launch vehicle was 42 parts (or something like that). This time, the 21.5km kraken attack did not happen, although the rocket was oddly unstable between 8-20km or so. Not sure why, and think it may be due to a bug as well, as the build was straightforward. After several attempts, i managed to get to orbit, where things got easier (for awhile). Getting a Jool encounter was easy peasy. I even had a trajectory on the map after the SOI (huzzah!). This made me briefly consider attempting a gravity assist off Laythe or Tylo, but in the end I decided not to tempt the kraken. Ditching the ascent stage and burning for Jool. Jool is really something else in KSP2. Mind blown. More KSP2 porn. Love that new large nuclear engine. One of several maneuver nodes I created to make the transfer to Bop. Here is where bugs started making things difficult. As long as I did not load a save, things behaved as they should, but when loading saves my inclination would change, making it difficult to get an intercept. Unfortunately, I had to reload several times before I managed it, making repeated plane changes, It wasn't a mission ending bug, but a frustrating one. Burning for Bop And getting an orbit. After ditching the transfer stage, peering into the giant crater. No sign of any little green men yet. Circularizing. Unfortunately was a waste of fuel, as my orbital stats began wildly and apparently randomly began changing every time I loaded a save or came out of timewarp. The game also would randomly decide I was in a landed state and cause my trajectory to disappear. I intended to land in the big crater with some precision, but I realized quickly that that would be unfeasible. Surface detail on Bop. Very pretty. Valentina was pleased to be there. Setting her down nice and easy. After landing and jettisoning the sky crane, my rover began tumbling end over end down the slope. The controls were completely unresponsive, and the roll could not be stopped. If I had had the patience, maybe I could have circumnavigated the moon like that. At least p.a.i.g.e. acknowledges it as a successful landing. #KSP2WeeklyChallenge complete! This was my first landing anywhere btw (other than Kerbin). I observed this weird phenomenon on Bop. These little puffs of gas would appear, poof for a minute or so, then disappear. Valentina is off to investigate. Related to the alien doomsday weapon? Perhaps... Location of the first landing for reference. So I think this will be the last update before we get a patch or two. Just getting a rover to Bop was very challenging due to the bugs, and the surface seemed pretty unstable in general. Also I don't know why I couldn't control my rover on the ground. I expected my first effort to fail, so no biggie. Later, when the game is in a little better state, I'll give it another shot and continue to update this post. Until then, fly safe everyone!

Chapter 1 - Testing Rovers (and being thwarted by the Kraken) So I've been having a great time playing around with rovers on Kerbin. It's been fun, but also definitely frustrating. The first thing that needs to be said is that, unfortunately, the rover wheels all perform much worse in KSP2 than the same wheels did in KSP1. They are all extremely slow. As with many things, I'm not sure if it is intended for the sake of realism, or simply that they haven't been fully developed. I have heard some folks on the forums praising the slow wheels with the realism argument. for my two cents, a lot of people who play KSP and other sims are looking for realistic gameplay, and I respect that. But a lot of us just want to use rovers to have races in multiplayer, or do stunts, or scale mountains or crater walls. We want wheels that go fast and have good traction and suspension. There's room for both options in KSP2. So wheels could use some work. Fortunately, in Bop gravity I am not looking to go super fast, or I end up doing spectacular jumps and crashing spectacular crashes off every bump in the landscape. The only wheel that seems halfway worth using without a method of propulsion is the new RoveMax TR-4 Truck wheel. I was able to get to speeds around 30mps on flat ground with these wheels. They are super wide, which is nice. They look cool. But they, too, could barely handle even slight slopes on Kerbin with the traction level cranked up. My first semi-viable seeming rover was Rover 5. This was a fun bug where the ground painted over me for awhile. I ignored it until it went away. Rover 5 could also pop wheelies. A trippy effect happened while driving around the KSC where flowers would pop out of the ground and grow in front of me, everywhere I went. I built a skycrane, thinking I would take it to Minmus to see how it would handle in lower gravity before sending it on to Bop. I launched it on a lovely evening from the KSC. And then, at 21500m above sea level, disaster struck. At that altitude, regardless of ascent profile or speed, every launch attempt was either destroyed outright or the ship broke in half. It was like hitting a wall. I tried over and over again, to strut the joints that were failing, to approach that altitude differently, to change various things about my build that I thought might be causing it. Finally I managed to not be destroyed, but a jolt still ran through my ship, and I lost all steering control, and the camera could no longer focus on my ship. So, disappointing, to say the least. I launched a simple rocket and confirmed this doesn't happen necessarily with other stuff, just with Rover 5. So I decided to build a completely different rover from scratch. This is rover 6. The ruggedized wheels, as I said, only can get up to about 10 m/s on Kerbin, their acceleration is abominable, and they are completely incapable of climbing even the slightest slope. Which is a let down, because they were probably the nicest wheels in KSP1. But I figured I'm going to be going slow on Bop anyway, and added an Ion engine in hopes that it would help with acceleration up hills. Its also a more compact design, a bit lower part count, and easier to get to orbit. The launch vehicle was much more streamlined than Rover 5's. A beautiful night launch. Rover 6 was much more stable in the ascent. She banked into a nice gravity turn with geometric precision, and then, at 21.5km... So as of my first report, no luck whatsoever even getting a rover into orbit. My next plan is to send a rover up in 3 separate launches, One for the rover, one for the sky crane, and a third for the transfer stage. Then dock them in orbit. And I won't be screwing around on Minmus testing either. If I can get a rover in space, it's heading straight to Bop for the first attempt. I'm going to take a step back from beating my head against this wall for a bit though. In the next chapter I will send a minimalistic ship to get eyes on Bop and hopefully spot some anomalies from low orbit. Got to keep an eye out for those evil space aliens while we work through the problem of how to get a rover there.

Hello there, I've had great success getting fairly simple rockets into space, but lately I've been attempting an interplanetary rover mission. The crafts I've been designing are a little more complex, like 60-70 parts. I've built a couple of designs from scratch for this purpose and had the same issue with both, as well as all the variations of both crafts I tried in an attempt to overcome this. A jarring event happens at 21500m of altitude. Ascent profile and speed do not effect it. It happens every single time at the same altitude. Various structural linkages instantly fail and the ship is destroyed. I have attempted to overcome this by strutting all the linkages that fail. This does prevent the ship from being destroyed, but the visible jarring effect happens, and even if the ship survives intact, I lose steering control and the camera becomes unable to focus on my ship, instead focusing on a point in space. It seems to be a flight ending event regardless whether the craft is damaged.

Bop. On the morning of Friday, the 24th of February, 2023 CE (or 000y, 000d of the Kerbin calendar), an event occurred on Bop that changed everything. Nobody observed it at the time. The astronomers of the KSC tracking station were all at Valentina's KSP2 launch party. When they staggered in the next day, still reeking of Bob's bathtub hydrazine cocktails, and trained their telescopes on the moons of Jool, they were all like "OMG". Bob hypothesized that the changes to Bop's surface were the result of a large asteroid impact. He was laughed out of the room. Everybody knows that there's no such thing as asteroids. They might exist someday, but not today. However, little green men are all too real. The only reasonable explanation is... AN ALIEN DOOMSDAY WEAPON. The survival of the Kerbal species depends on learning more about the Bop Event. The bold Kerbonauts of the Kerbal Space Force have been tasked with a perilous mission - to travel to Bop, circumnavigate the moon by rover, and search for anomalies which could explain the Bop event. Hello fellow KSP fans! I'm sooo exciting to finally be playing early access KSP2. For my first significant interplanetary mission, I will be attempting a rover circumnavigation of Bop. Realistically, I do not expect this to be successful in the current build of KSP2, but what the heck, I'm going to try. And when I probably find myself thwarted by bugs or poor wheel performance or whatever, I will continue to make attempts in subsequent game builds as updates come out, until this works. Along the way I hope to identify the challenges to this sort of admittedly niche playstyle and report lots of bugs. Hopefully this is both helpful feedback for the developers and a fun series of experiments for me. Oh, and when I am ultimately successful, I hope to qualify for completion of the Elcano challenge, assuming that the challenge carries over from KSP1 with similar rules. So without further ado, let's begin this journey... Coming soon - Chapter 1 - Low gravity rover tests on Minmus...

My second session today! Last night I only had about an hour to play. I designed a simple orbiter and launched it with Jeb in the command module, just trying to get to orbit and return. I successfully got to orbit and found that I still had about 2000 dv. That was all the time that I had. Today, I decided that I should use some of that extra dv to go and orbit the Mun. I was a little confused by the changes to the navigation process. For example, after my injection burn, I had a Mun periapsis of about 50km. This number immediately began to shrink, as if I was still under a very slight acceleration. When I time warped for a short period, my trajectory stabilized, but when I came out of time warp, the effect resumed. However. after I time warped for a long period, everything stabilized. This is probably a bug, but I dunno maybe its supposed to work like that. Anyway, it was odd but manageble. Also, in map mode there was so projected trajectory in map mode after the SOI change, just markers on the entry and exit points of Mun SOI that helped to estimate trajectory. Again, not clear if this is intended or not. If so, it will definitely make precision navigation more challenging. Whether I like that or not I haven't decided. Anyway. I successfully orbited the Mun. It was amazing. The music was incredible, and I noticed the stars actually twinkle. Space is beautiful to look at even when there isn't an orbital body in clear view. However, after achieving orbit, my trajectory disappeared completely from map mode, making it impossible to visualize for the rest of the mission or to create any maneuver nodes. I was flying on instruments. Reloading did not fix the issue, so I decided to wing it, and successfully executed a beautifully efficient transfer back to Kerbin and a textbook landing. The beauty of Kerbin, coming down in some sort of grassy area with trees and flowers, with puffy clouds, was absolutely moving. An unforgettable experience. And honestly, the bugs made it more fun. This stuff is so easy for me in KSP1. The added challenge of not being able to see my trajectory was a blast.

Is it at the same location as KSP1?

How did you even try asparagus staging? There don’t seem to be any fuel lines that I have been able to find. Or can fuel just transfer across decouplers without any lines in KSP2?

I only had an hour or so to try the game last night, so I launched a simple orbiter and left Jeb with it in orbit. KSP2 doesn’t seem to have much in the way of VAB tools to estimate your dv at different altitudes, so I ended up wildly overestimating what I needed to get to orbit, so now I’m pondering whether to take my simple orbiter to Duna or something tonight. Loving the game so far. I was pleasantly surprised that it runs smoothly on my old laptop with specs well below minimum. (Haven’t tried launching anything really large yet though). Haven’t encountered any bugs yet. The UI is going to take a little getting used to. Great first session overall.

I'll second this. I know KSP1 didn't have this feature for a long time. A mod like KER was basically essential until they added it. But being able to see how different stages will perform in their intended situations is definitely essential to planning complex missions with a reasonable chance of success. Maybe I just haven't figured out where to find that function yet, but it's pretty important, so if it hasn't been added yet, I hope it will be soon.