Casellina X

If they're running Scaled Agile with multiple release trains, it's entirely possible. Maybe not 10 exact working days worth of planning (and not for everybody), but extremely close to it. I've been in several such sessions. It's not enjoyable for the people that are in the trenches and (at least for me) rarely brought any value other than a vague understanding of what other teams are delivering and who depends upon who. They often feel like they're only held to make the nontechnical people/project managers feel like they're doing something. I'm not going to cast that accusation at Intercept Games, but I'll definitely throw it at the higher ups - those above Nate.

I made a Minmus science hopper. I wanted to unlock the next node on the launcher portion of the tech tree. Around about 3200 dV to help me get around. This was after a few hops yesterday. I did a couple of biomes and it seemed as if that was about it. However one more hop showed the difference between Sheet Ice and Arctic Ice. I did take a trip towards the south pole but it didn't look like the biome was going to be anything other than Snowdrifts or maybe Craters, so I got back into a high orbit and went on home. Somehow the burn put me in a near polar orbit so I decided to aim for the cap. For whatever reason I turned the force on the decoupler down to 5Nm. Sure it decoupled, but it didn't create any separation. I had to go through all manner of wiggling to get free. I was coming in H-O-T, HOT. The detached portion of the craft lasted maybe 10 seconds? I was concerned that I wouldn't slow up enough for the parachute to deploy. But fortunately I was able to get down. Banked somewhere over 1400 science from the trip. Returning those samples is critical. Unlocked the first LG parts and put this together. It was the sustainer and not the launcher, which was a little disappointing, but I can still put it to use. It wasn't until I was firmly in atmosphere that I realized... you didn't put a decoupler dummy. No worries though, I had about 1k dV and enough TWR to save things. Well not really. This thing bled no speed through aero losses, so I was ~20km and above 2k m/s velocity. A couple of burns did help, but the larger issue was the rising temperatures. I thought I had it under control. I did not have it under control. The gauge dropped as low as 30%, and then crept its way up to critical, then poof. I then had an ICBM en route.

Bearing in mind I've been skimming between about 6 hours of meetings today; I feel like colonies don't need resource extraction, but they both give each other an enhanced purpose. The way I see it, resources in a basic form has been covered by KSP 1 - just go drill somewhere and come back with something. But it was just for the sake of processing it into fuel. For those of us who don't touch mods colonies is entirely new. So the novelty (at least for me) will be dropping colonies all over the place, providing new launch locations. You all have seen me post in the "What did you do today" thread, anything larger than a command pod I struggle to get into a good orbit, let alone beyond the Kerbin SOI. So placing a colony on the Mun or Minmus will drastically make things easier to traverse the system. I wouldn't want to have to wait until resources are implemented before getting to experience colonies. But I think once colonies and resources are implemented and integrated into exploration mode, there's going to be some very compelling gameplay to come out of it. As far as development goes, it probable makes more sense to build out colonies and their capabilities because resources should be a natural extension of that. Ploppable parts, linking extractors to storage, configuring routes to and from locations.

git push origin master --force ought to fix it.

Things like this give me an appreciation of the complexity other forms of software development entail. Once upon a time I wanted to be a game developer, but when Physics and Calc intervened, I thought better of it. I'm looking forward to how this takes shape, and also wouldn't mind some times/locations where we can look out for an eclipse on Kerbin.

Another successful failure? Or failed success? I built a plane to go to Kapy Rock in order to complete the mission. My strategy was to fly south across the pole. For those of you familiar with the mission, you can probably already see my normal fatal mistake. "Sunrise" over the pole was a welcome change over the pitch black moments-from-disaster cruise prior to this. That pesky highlighted part bug messed up some spectacular images. Make sure you're careful flying over the south pole. there are some mountains that are a little taller than you might think. Case in point, the ice shelf as we exited the cap. On to the fun part, ignoring the poorly designed plane, Kapy Rock is in sight and I have no plan to get this thing on the ground. I throttle down, bleed airspeed, and try to get close to stall speed. Well, Houston we had a problem. I clipped the ridge and put myself into an unrecoverable situation. But on the bright side, that darn fuel tank that was preventing EVA was no longer an issue. So if you've reached this point thinking that the EVA blockage was an issue and the failure was the landing? Nope. Read the mission specs kids. Even if I had managed a successful landing, I didn't bring along the part required to do the crew observation to pass the mission. I'll leave Jeb and the wreckage there for another handy target for next time.

Break out the champagne, I completed my first crewed Duna landing this afternoon. This was the craft that done it. It's not winning any beauty contests or efficiency awards. This was the "final" design after a couple of launch tests which showed the potential to be able to complete the mission, but also exposed the lack of EC as soon as I got to 50KM AGL. After adding batteries and panels, with another quick flight test, I wasn't pleased with the SAS oscillations on the pad so I added launch clamps. Originally I was only going to use the minimum height needed, but why not get your money's worth? What you see is just about max height with the nose touching the roof of the VAB. We can put together some rather tall craft if need be. I put this image in to show the difference in dV calculations by just moving the clamps to stage 2. There was even more variation but the two images suffice. Setting up your craft to link fuel to the center tank makes it hard to understand what your dV will be so keep an eye on that. Heading to the pad I was greeted with this vantage point. Zoomed out to give an idea of the height possibility. I know people have made tall things before, but typically they launch from the runway. This was another look at the dV calculation swings. I believe I got much more out of that first stage than 1442. At any rate I pushed out to 1Mm, waited a long time for a launch window, then set up a node for a Duna encounter. This particular stage I'll have to redesign. I was forcing NERV usage and ultimately I only got a little over 1000 dV out of them. Just enough to finish circularization and complete a portion of my Duna maneuver. For the second time, by design, Duna and Ike come into view. Unfortunately this was the start of the part highlight bug which would upset the composition of my images. Circularization burn in a reverse orbit. Now right before we got to about this point we realized a fatal mistake - a distinct lack of parachutes. Add this with, well you see the dV number, and I knew this mission was too fargone. But since we came this far, might as well attempt an actual landing near the monument to get some practice in. I did expect the touchdown point and the monument location to close in distance... but it really didn't. I remember going through hell trying to get lined up with the Minmus monument. With this one I was seemingly at the same latitude, but just too far ahead. But you don't know what you don't know until you know it. Now I knew I was parachute deficient at this point so I had intended to use what was left in the tank to touch down. But then I (think I) remembered why I only had the three parachutes. I was going to use them and repack them on the way back up. So I adjusted the altitude to 5km and hoped for the best. I staged the chutes and.... nothing. I had to fumble around in the Parts Manager to get a deployment. Somehow the chutes weren't armed? So I toggled the arming switch and hit deploy and fortunately you see the result. Moments before this I was pretty upset that I wasn't even close enough to get the marker to appear in flight view. But I had 2 wins: 1) the parachutes slowed me to less than 30m/s and 2) I was just close enough to be within range. Unfortunately I had a big loss upcoming. My landing area was not particularly flat. I also was ambitious on throttle. I touched down, bounced, throttled, panicked, then had to try to touch down in a slightly flatter area, panicked again, and then destroyed the engine and tipped the rest of the craft in the process. BUT if you put all that to the side - I successfully and safely made it to Duna! Planted a flag, took a sample, but this was only be going through the motions because I planned to revert to VAB. I took a moment to ponder where it all went wrong.

I took a brief look at how the game handles deletion and it's a direct file deletion, so unfortunately it's unrecoverable. There may be an outside chance that your computer has a System Restore point prior to deletion, but my experience with modern versions of Windows is that restore points are few and far between.

This is the common sense part that was escaping me. I didn't plan to land any other way - evident by the 2 parachutes in stage 11, but was trying to account for the landing dV anyway due to the trip planner.

I've wasted some time off and on over the past few days putting together this monstrosity, only to discover... not enough dV. Back to the drawing board.

A few minutes of downtime between, ahem, meetings, I decided to send a fuel tank into orbit to satisfy the side mission. I'm beating around the bush on sending a crewed mission to Duna because I fear it will be one way. I don't think I'll ever actually use it but you never know.

I dunno man... I look at this and I can't help but take any of this as Dakota is working on it, so it's coming soon.

I've seen that a couple of times but haven't used it just yet. I'm "letting" KSP 2 deliver on the promise of an improved new player experience and part of that would be explaining to the player things like transfer windows. To its credit it has delivered, at least for Duna. And actually for this mission the window itself wasn't so much the issue, it was just having the craft in the right spot and the maneuver node in the right spot. Burning out of the Kerbin SOI directly to Duna was a new experience for me. Also signal blocking wasn't a consideration, just range. I've put some ill fated probes into orbit around Kerbol that I couldn't control because they got out a little too far from me. At least I think... I could be misremembering.

I took this: And headed to Duna. The original plan was a satellite + rover combo, but I said I should prove I can get there with one thing first. I'd been there once before in KSP 1 using the transfer tool and once in KSP 2 through happenstance. This time I went with intent. I parked this thing right on the edge of Kerbin's SOI and just waited. Nailed down a good transfer burn to set up for a near zero inclination orbit. Duna and Ike came into view. What I should have done is tried to set up the burn so that the nuclear stage would burn up in atmosphere, but I didn't want to get too cute before the job was done. In position to burn to a ~100KM PE. It was cool watching Ike orbit around Duna through the time warp. Had to circularize on the night side of Duna. Luckily this time I arrived with a plan, so no feelings of sheer terror trying to pan the camera around and seeing a black void in the midst of... a black void. The pictures in that post show the leaps and bounds KSP 2 has made graphically since the early days. The atmosphere is noticeable on direct viewing, rather than just seeing it in the curvature of the horizon. A brief word on the design - two semi-adequate solar panels, the most powerful communication dish we have (thus far), a small monoprop tank, and two Puff monoprop engines. This thing alone had enough TWR to launch itself on Kerbin, and nearly enough dV to put itself into orbit. Hopefully the range on the antenna is enough so that I don't randomly lose signal if/when I get a rover down there and Kerbin and Duna are on opposite sides of Kerbol.

I don't see how people can call their craft ugly when I have semi regular postings in this thread