Mike S

I am not sure if it is even possible to do what I have in mind...but in the real world, if we did radially mounted engines onto smaller tanks, only the outside shell of the tanks themselves would be there...the rest of the tank that was there, cut away to be a part of the larger center tank. Reduction of the total mass an obvious result. The game does not take this into account and regardless of how it is mounted, total mass of all the tanks are still counted, including volume of liquid inside. TWR results no longer true to real world results. Every object in the game suffers from this single problem. It would be awesome if there was a plan or method to "re-render the ship" when we send to the launch pad...everything that is attached to one side of a coupler is a single entity, instead of several individual parts. A fuel tank that is comprised of 3 parts, plus nose cone and engine...now all 1 part instead. Attach that radially around another tank and offet...when re-rendered, all the internal bits are removed to simplify the model and presumably reduce the mass of what wouln't be there in a real world example. Fewer things to process and keep tack of. GTA V has a building feature to it that was simple, but used this concept of removing vertices and such to simplify the object when rendered in game. Though to be honest, that game's toybox was pretty limited in what you had to work with. Despite, performance didn't take a hit with a more complex looking ride. Which is kind of the idea there. Could they do this with KSP 2?

Sorry for the late reply. Yeah, I've done this. The trouble however, is the complexity is itself the achilles here. One engine plate and 8 engines radially around a center engine. Versus several more tanks and cones to pretty it up and aerodynamic stuff. The performance hit is insane. I have this one craft that rivals Starship...12.5 meters wide, it sports an S4 tank with eight S3 tanks and cones radially and offset accordingly, with an additional bunch of FL-T800s and engines to fit a 33 engine count...TWR is sort of OK...all that extra tank mass isn't helping and also contributes to the problem. More parts, severe performance hit. https://imgur.com/a/3m9p5DQ

meant to be asked in an established thread

As stated, I am NOT disabling SEVERAL MODS I LIKE to try this mod out. I like KESA, and community fixes and resources and....as stated, it isn't going to happen. Updating the code might help, but disabling some of the mods I have would break the game for me. Solid no. I'm pretty sure I am not alone in this.

As much as I would like to "try" this mod out, I continually run into a compatibility issue with Patch Manager. Given the number of other mods that rely on Patch Manager being the most recent version, and of course, KSP no longer being compatible with 0.91 and all that...well...ya know....

I would like to think that there would be a way to weld the parts as "one" when going to the launch pad...an engine and fuel tank with a decoupler are now a single object rather than three separate. Probably way easier said than done. That said, a lot of the parts I use are mainly for reaching orbit for the very heavy craft I am trying to push out and the most powerful engine doesn't have a nice way to couple 2 or more engines on without it looking stupid. Limited functionality in the engine plates doesn't help, and the largest one available is too small for the largest tanks. It's more an OCD thing really, so I end up using multiple lesser engines to match the output power, but they end up increasing the mass and negating any benefit to TWR. And the complexity of the engines with gimbles doesn't help, the performance suffers with the additional animation and associated "physics" for every engine added. This is where I am sure most of my issues lay. If I launch the payload portion of the ship without the launch vehicle, I do not suffer the severe performance penalties, and this despite a great deal of the 400 parts in this portion of the entire craft when I was using "cheat" to test some things as I developed the ship. Even on the pad with engines off on the launcher, the performance is horrible. At some point the devs will hopefully increase the tool box to include bi/tri/quad and penta mounts in the 5 meter space for the larger engines....I am hoping the mod community also addresses this and provide engine options for huge craft with multiple engines not unlike what SpaceX is doing with their heavy lifters. a bit like KSP 1, but hopefully not without the Kraken. If I can simplify the launch vehicle, that would make a significant difference in performance.

On a lark, decided to fire up KCD while I wait for KSP to get my ship into orbit. Over 72FPS in THAT game while KSP 2 renders at 3 FPS to orbit...lol

Thus far, everything that I can determine points directly to the game engine itself and not the graphics rendering. I've played games in the past where I had a huge number of polygons going on and it would impact frame rate performance...Homeworld 1 and 2 their remastered updates for example. Early in the game, ships were simple and limited in numbers. This by design, you had to learn how to walk before running. Regardless, frame rates were good. As I got deeper into the game and the ships became more complex and numerous, and LARGE...performance greatly dropped. The CPU was doing its best to keep up with the math going on...the GPU however, really struggled to keep up. It failed. Dialing back the eye candy and resolution helped, but there was a limit. And watching the hardware monitor keep tabs on the CPU load, what cores were being heavily used, GPU load also being measured in the same ways. If you needed an upgrade, it was obvious in those benchmarks....a CPU/GPU in the load ranges of over 90% were good indicators that some upgrades were needed. It was an easy thing to understand for most. There were work arounds. Disable the eye candy, dial back the resolution....slap more RAM in, go bigger RAM in the GPU and on it went. My last rig (used as a "TV" now) sports 24GB DDR3 with an Athlon FX8350 and an AMD 770 6GB DDR4 GPU with SSD for boot drives. It is old, but still can play many of my games with ease. Some, like Homeworld remastered...not so much. KSP 1 it does "ok"...not great, but workable. Modded? lol...noooooooooo... Enter this rig. Not high end, but way more than a match for pretty much every game EXCEPT KSP 2! AMD Ryzen 5600 with 32GB DDR4 (3200) and a 6650 with 8GB DDR 5, with a 120MHz monitor to take advantage of some high frame rates. Memory is running dual channel at rated clock. Games like Homeworld are no problem...at all. I've cranked all the eye candy up and get over 60FPS late game....Fallout 4 used to have issues with frame drops and regular and weird "pauses" if I cranked up the eye candy. Not anymore. Fallout 76 was the same. Not anymore. Starfield (crap game tbh), I was sporting 120FPS....same can be said of Star Wars Jedi series, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, GTA V and more...those games pose no challenge to this hardware. At all. Which is great for me. And as I said, not a high end rig. Horizon: Zero Dawn...I crank up all the eye candy that game has to offer and still maintain 120FPS without breaking a sweat. This game? KSP 2? It matters not what graphics settings I have set. I could go lowest settings or highest settings and the results would be mostly identical. When I first ran the most recent update in December, no mods and a clean install...frame rates were great. I was looking at 120FPS in the load screen and saw modest drops as I began a new game. Progression was fine, but frame rates steadily began to drop as I went through the different missions. My ships gradually became more and more complex. And with that, my frame rates dropped to dismal levels. While watching this happen, second monitor had all the hardware stats going on, giving me real time info on what was going on. Reality is this. True frame rates were not being displayed. At least, not in the sense of what my GPU was capable of showing me. Pause the game and instantly the frame rates climb into the 50s for example...I can move around the ship and zoom in/out and all the other fun stuff with the mouse/KB and see no lag, no frame drops of any kind...related to vertices and the like...this is the same behaviour I would expect of other games like Homeworld. But unlike Homeworld, the moment I unpause the game, I have an immediate drop to 5 FPS or less...on a ship with about 450 parts at launch. 20 minutes later, the boosters were dumped at about 35KM, knocking off about 20 parts and giving me a 2 FPS boost when those fell out of visual range. In the time it took me to tap out the above, my ship finally made orbit at 100km...I am not a slow typer, I use all the fingers and thumbs, but it still took me a bit....lol But really. The The CPU barely registers over 15% on any single core...the GPU even less on average. KSP 1 had a similar problem, but that one had more to do with the part library itself being too large, rather than a very complex ship causing poor performance. At least, in my experience. KSP 2 however, behaves like a hungover mule. There is lag going on, but it doesn't look obvious where the problem actually is. As though the rendered information from the CPU takes a jaunt to the "Mun" and returns back to the GPU to render the first frame before sending the handshake, taking the same route back. I honestly don't know what to make of it...all the other games I mentioned above? I see heavy GPU/CPU/Memory activity...KSP 2? Memory sure does get hogged up in a hurry, but never crests 20GB...it's like trying to move a bunch of files from one hard disk to another...a single 20 GB video will transfer from one SSD to another far faster than 20GB of 30kb text files ever will. I wonder if that is what is at issue with the performance? Would the game benefit from some kind of post "re-render" of the ship when going to the launch pad? Instead of a capsule and parachutes being separate as in the vab, they are now one object on the launch pad...hidden vertices removed. Not sure if that is even possible. But something isn't working as expected. It is taking a LOT of the joy of this game away, and that is a shame.

No. I never said the mod "fixes" it. Someone else implied this via community fix. It had no effect. And I am currently in another scenario with this problem on Moho. This time with the Croissant mission. I had no issues with the entire mission straight on up to the landing. All navigation lines remained intact, including landing trajectories. I was able to do the science, an EVA to get samples and then I turn around and set to launch back into orbit. Not one thing of the mission to this point was awry and I managed to do the entire thing without any need to reload any of the saves I made along the way. Then I launched to return. And lo and behold and all that fun stuff, the lines were gone. A quick load back to before I launched and it was fixed. That alone never worked with the previous mission to Moho. Gotta chalk it up to "this game is methed up"....

I hope I didn't give you the impression I was having issues with accuracy here in respect to any maneuver being planned. It has a bit more to do with the tool switching to "return from moon" mode automatically (as your screen caps have shown) without giving me the option to do anything but that. If I were orbiting Eve, I would have the other maneuver options available. The behaviour isn't limited to Eve/Gilly...any planet with a moon will do the same thing and deny the ability to do anything but "return from moon" if I am orbiting a moon. Which isn't what I want to do and not necessarily just the host planet orbit either. In the case of Eve/Gilly, I stopped at the moon first to drop off a probe before going on to Eve to place a second probe and learn a bit about it (I consider myself a year long "newbie"). The tool would not give me the option to create a plan from Gilly to Eve. As I said, it was an easy maneuver for me to manually create a path to Eve without the tool. I was hoping it is a simple matter of a toggle to enable the other options on demand. Eve to Gilly, the tool allows a maneuver to be planned, but not return back to Eve using those same tools...on a multi-moon system for example, I cannot use it to go to the other moons as is. I can return to the host planet and THEN the tool will allow a maneuver to be created to another moon. (Kerbin and Minmus/Mun) As you no doubt know, this is an aweful waste of fuel. Unless I missed something important, it seems restricted. I never got far enough in KSP1 (severely buggy when modded), but I think Mechjeb had something like that...maybe others who know that tool and have used it to plan maneuvers from moon to moon...I never got far enough in that game to try it, so I don't know how it works from experience. Anyway, still love the tool regardless.

As stated, save game unmodded or save game modded, both yielded same result. Usually that's all that is needed.

Encountered another bug with a transport ship delivering two craft to Eve, one to land on Gilly and the other on Eve. I would set the orbit around 8K and start looking at trying to do the maneuver to land on Gilly at the impact site. Set the maneuver, and attempt to do the landing, and discover the node planner decided on its own to burn in advance of what I wanted. A quick load later and the 8K orbit I did have is now a crash. I think it extends from another issue with the payload bay and delivering the landers...the lander will no longer remember the orbit after a reload. And I also experience that no fuel bug, which prevents creating a maneuver node. Usually I can just create a new stage, move the engines to it and delete the old stage and it recovers. For some reason, this trick didn't want to work on the Eve mission....ended up having to cheat it to complete the mission. Hopefully the developers fix the issues with the payload bay and provide something a bit more friendly like KSP 1 had. The ability to create interstage nodes was nice to have, not sure why it is missing completely here. lol I have that...it didn't do a thing unfortunately.

I am enjoying this very useful mod. However, I am running into an issue in regards to using the tool to change SOI from Gilly back to Eve, as I chose to drop off a lander on Gilly first before dropping the second onto Eve. The tool refuses to give me the option and forces a return to Kerbin as the only thing I can do with it. While it isn't really that hard to do this manually in this instance, I thought it might be worth while bringing this up as something to allow the user to decide which planet it should focus on, or allow to toggle it off when not needed perhaps.

I am using a Ryzen 5600G and an AMD 6650 8GB dedicated GPU with 32GB DDR4@1600. Initial game release was very poor performance. Granted, everyone's experience wasn't great, the game wasn't really playable regardless of the visual. The December update gave me a huge boost up to 120FPS. But this only lasted for small ship designs. As I progressed through the game and had to use multiple engine design to compensate for the weaker engines in early science mode. Lots of parts equals lots lof frame rates lost. 200-300 part ships became a nightmare to fly due to less than 10FPS on average. Changing GPU settings had little effect on performance. This most recent update helped a bit with the performance.

I tried that, but it didn't work as expected. Sometimes the QS/QL works for moments when I lose input control to the ship, but that wasn't it either. Could be worse I suppose. Could be whatever I encountered that caused the crew thumbnail display to completely vanish...but only after I separated the lander from the return ship and created a QS...if I do a QL at any time going forward, the thumbnail display will vanish, leaving me unable to select any crewmember to EVA. They are still on the lander, can see them in the Kerbal Manager even. I can reload the save I did right after the first undock when the tool was displayed. The saved game thumbnail itself will even show the rectangle that holds the crew thumbnails...but they will not return to view. Closing the game completely and restart will not correct the problem. The only way to fix it is to revert to the save where both ships were still docked and go throught the entire undock and landing process without doing any QS/QL. I became very proficient at dropping the lander almost straight down into the hole from orbit, enough so that I was actually able to accomplish the "hole in one" as it were and be able to complete that mission with the EVA on the surface. That's where the visual glitch I mentioned above appeared...it was landed, just didn't look like it was. The return to orbit, the crew icon display did not vanish after QS/QL. Weird is ...yeah...why? Some kind of game penalty for doing a QL for a descent challenge HIO? lol With the exception of the docking port being reversed, the rest of the mission went ok. At least it IS playable, despite these weird glitches.