Search the Community

Planet Jam 2: the Ilio-Pyri System A huge community-built 101-world planet mod. It is a common story across Kerbal history: an interstellar colonization mission is almost guaranteed to go wrong. Typically, the interstellar spacecraft will crash on a habitable world, society will collapse to the lowest tech level that is survivable, and it will be hundreds of years before anyone builds up the technology to launch rockets again. Amusingly, this didn't stop happening, even after those dozens of colonies banded together (alongside plenty of alien species) to form an Interstellar Federation of Planets. Almost a hundred years ago--and that's counting by Pyrian years, which are very long--an interstellar ship of exploration crashed, and now that multispecies society of Kerbals and Kerbaloid aliens are finally ready to reach to the skies again. Welcome to Armstrong Radius: 950,000m (1.5 Kerbin Radii) Surface Gravity: 1.75G Atmospheric Pressure: 0.068atm Orbital parent: Pyri, a red dwarf star. Orbital and rotation period: 6 hours. Armstrong is difficult to launch from, and even more difficult to land on--the atmosphere is so thin that it barely slows you down, but it's so thick and you travel so fast that aerodynamic heating is a major concern. Armstrong's atmosphere is inspired by the Seven Minutes of Hell entry descent and landing sequences of real Mars missions, and by a planet mod I helped maintain years ago, Little Green Men From Mars. That is--the atmosphere is thick enough that entry heating is a serious concern, but thin enough that it won't really slow you down much. Landing on Armstrong is challenging, but it is rewarding to get it right and make it reliable. The InlineBallutes mod and Trajectories come in handy. This produces some brand new engineering constraints, and necessitates infrastructure building. Armstrong's two moons, position within an asteroid belt, and proximity to two gas giants for easy gravity assists, makes it easier to deal with. The skies above Armstrong are littered with bright visible objects. Several planets and even a few asteroids can be resolved with the unaided eye even during the day. Ilio, a double-Sun, shines on Armstrong's far side during the day, keeping it illuminated and giving its inhabitants a recognizable 6-hour day/night cycle. Four bright planets are visible to astronomers around Ilio, and three more planets and several dwarf planets are found orbiting Ilio beyond Pyri. System Layout: The Ilio System is a large and complex system. Counting stars, planets, moons, and asteroids, there's a total of 101 objects. The Ilio System is divided into an Inner System, with four gas giant planets, the Pyri System with its planets and trojans, and an Outer System, with three gas giants on two orbits with associated coorbitals, and a distant dwarf planet. List of all planets in order: A Note on Spoilers: Planet Jam 2 has some excellent planets, including some of the most creative planets in any planet mod. I highly encourage you to avoid spoiling yourself on the planets. Don't go and tab through the planets in the tracking station, or if you do just to read their non-spoiler descriptions, keep yourself zoomed out. If you're sharing images or reports in the mod, be sure to spoiler tag them! Spoiler-lite Astrophotos: Simulated astro-images of the various planetary systems as if taken through telescopes. This gives a rough idea for what to expect, and what your space program should be expected to know of each planet before you send missions to them. These are spoilers for anyone who wants to go into the mod completely blind, but if you want a teaser, take a look: SPOILER ALERT: In-game screenshots. Career Integration: PJ2 includes balanced science multipliers for the Pyri system. Most planets have biome maps, many of them quite complex. The mod will reward many landings at Lu, for example, with its roughly 20 biomes. Lots of objects have science reports, though this functionality is still a work-in-progress for probably most of the system. Eventually we'd also like to support BDB and DMOS science experiments. The tech tree has also been altered to support Armstrong. You get more parachutes earlier on, larger rocket tanks earlier, and a few better structural parts earlier. Most importantly, the low-grade ISRU technology has been moved to the Space Exploration node. Career mode balancing is still somewhat experimental right now--feel free to play around with the in-game career settings if you feel you're not getting enough science to progress (or if you're getting too much?). I'd be very curious to hear your experience. I found that a career mode using Bluedog Design Bureau was surprisingly fun. BDB's stock-balanced parts are balanced for a rescaled stock system with about 2.5x scale factor; that delta-v to orbit is close to the delta-v to orbit around Armstrong. The main difference is you need more engines to liftoff! Luckily BDB has an early-game quadruple-cluster of Redstone engines, which has a pretty ridiculous thrust for early-game! When CustomBarnKit is installed, the Tier 1 and Tier 2 VAB, SPH, Launchpad, Runway, and Tracking Station are all buffed. They have more parts allowed and they allow for larger and heavier rockets. There's also Tier 1.5 and Tier 2.5 upgrades which upgrade the buildings without rebuilding them. "Splatnik" PilotingGoo Control Unit The Greater Goo Mass--that huge volume of superintelligent sentient slime that we all owe so much to--has come up with a solution for launching and controlling rockets without going to the trouble of returning to Armstrong: a spherical vessel of goo that can pilot a vessel without any electricity. It is an entirely self contained unit, requiring no batteries. It will last about 24 hours, but when used with hibernation, that can be stretched. This was a feature I'd planned from almost the beginning, but the model for it isn't finished yet, so currently it's a Stayputnik clone. It was also intended to have a spherical solar panel, but again, I'm not a part modder, so I couldn't figure that out in time for the release either. So look forward to an improved Splatnik in the future! Alien Texture Pack: Texture Pack Download--Direct Link The texture pack should also be available in the Releases on GitHub. To represent the various alien cultures in PJ2, I made a texturepack including various aliens that is available as an optional add-on to PJ2. TextureReplacer includes its own diverse Kerbal heads, so most of your Kerbals will still be green (though we imagine they're still very multicultural, more likely to come from some colony world than Kerbin.) DEPENDENCIES: Kopernicus v141 or later (and its prerequisites). https://github.com/Kopernicus/Kopernicus/releases/ Niako's Mitchell-Netravali Filtered Heightmap: https://github.com/pkmniako/Kopernicus_VertexMitchellNetravaliHeightMap/releases Kopernicus Expansions Continued-er: https://github.com/VabienArt/KopernicusExpansion-Continueder/releases/tag/Beta9-1.11 note that due to a missing RunSharp.dll in the latest version, you should be sure to use Beta 9 - 1.11, not Beta 9 - 1.12 Scatterer: https://github.com/LGhassen/Scatterer/releases/ Environmental Visual Enhancements Redux: https://github.com/LGhassen/EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements/releases/ Yes, Scatterer and EVE are REQUIRED. They are not merely supported, they are actually required for the mod to work properly. Mod Compatibility: Custom Barn Kit: Patch available that improves capability of Tier 1 and Tier 2 buildings, adds Tier 1.5 and 2.5 upgrades. Recommended Mods: Near Future Technologies Suite, particularly electrical propulsion. Several of the playtesters made good use of NF electrical and NF propulsion. The enormous launch vehicle parts provided by NFLV also come in handy. Kerbal Atomics provides nuclear thermal rocket engines that also really come in handy. Transfer Window Planner provides a way of figuring out transfer delta-v to various planets, since we don't have a delta-v map yet. (It's also just. Better than the stock Maneuver Planner tool.) Inline Ballutes allows you to slow down much faster in the upper atmosphere of Armstrong. KSP-RO Kerbal Joint Reinforcements makes large rockets go from frustrating to possible. (The latest versions now support robotics and in-flight construction.) Better Timewarp. Though the system was intentionally kept fairly compact, travel times get really long. Distant Object Enhancement. Due to a bug with reparenting homeworlds, you can't actually see the star flares, but seeing the dark skies does look really nice. Bluedog Design Bureau, while definitely super optional and also a huge part pack to add to an already huge planet pack, plays surprisingly well with Armstrong. I think a full career mode or science mode game using BDB could turn out really interesting, since BDB sorta maps its own tech progression onto the stock nodes but goes its own direction. Downloads: Download Planet Jam 2 via Github Development: After the success of Week World Planet Jam, where 10 planet modders made a 31-planet solar system in 1 week, some of the WWPJ creators had been brainstorming how we might run a second planetjam in a similar format. We kept the things which were most fun about making WWPJ and got rid of some of the worst parts--namely the lack of collaboration, and the deadline which was just right for some but too short for others. This time we would have two weeks and up to two orbits per person, rather than one orbit per person. Cross-collaboration would be allowed. It ended up actually being quite a complicated thing to set up the allotments because this time the system layout would reward many gas giant planets and some contributors did not want to make gas giant systems, but when all was said and done we had 15 contributors and 15 orbit slots to be filled in. Most of the slots had a specific mass allotment that had to be filled exactly, but could be split up into a planet and moons, or coorbital planets, or left as a single planet. We started on Saturday, 2022-October-21, and the initial "Deadline Version" was compiled two weeks later on a red-letter date in the history of planet modding: November 5th 2022. The deadline version contained 80 planets. Over the course of the next two and a half months, 21 more objects would be added, and a lot of balancing, bugfixing, and visual polishing would be done. We're now very proud of the result. Even after spending so much time actively working on it, the size, complexity, and level of completion of PJ2 puts my own previous work to shame. (Whirligig World, built by just myself, took nearly 4-5 years to get to a similar point, though it still hasn't reached a "1.0" state.) Bugs and Known Issues: Behavior of trajectories running around barycenters is counterintuitive and unrealistic; this is a fundamental limitation of using barycenters to represent near-equal-mass binary objects. The KSC scene is always wrong, due to reparenting Kerbin. Sometimes it can startle you as other planets rush through the sky, or Pyri rises unexpectedly. Rest assured that this is a visual-only bug that only occurs in the space center scene. When in the Gerro-Sandevistan and Phyre-Wepor barycenter's sphere of influence, timewarp controls do not function. The workaround is to timewarp in the tracking station. Hopefully we can find a fix. Lighting in compact systems such as the inner Pyri system is not accurate. The entire system is lit up with the same sunlight intensity, and all objects are lit apparently from infinite distance--hence objects farther from the Sun than the camera, but next to the Sun, can appear as crescents, when in reality they would be gibbous or full. This is a fundamental limitation of KSP and Unity's lighting system, though if any modders have an idea of how to get around this I would love to hear about it. The inner and outer Ilio system lack science balancing, and some objects lack biome maps. This will be improved upon in future versions. Many objects have limited or no science definitions. Credits: Luna/Gregrox: Project coordinator. System layout planner. Ilio Phosphol, Ilio Vespol, Somna, Pyri, Dord, Armstrong, Buzz, Desmet, Weegletoss, Lu, and Zhandar. ThreeAliens loading screen art. SnailsAttack: Ollo, Soval, Fourcroy, Conscience, Fish, Raft, Quank, Ogoquo, Tobalk, Turtlestar, Hidalgo, Pi, Hadfield Cloverdove: Olu, Millie, Casy, Eron, Sinacin, Glice The Orios: Cloud textures for Kilna, Alkin, and Arterr; heightmap for Trithium Techo: Squangus, Marith, Radlun, Ulen, Ilmar, Montauk, Tritonis, Andro, Arterr, Trithus, Trithium Mh: Kilna, Drae, Arach, Radlun, Ulen, Ilmar Interplanet Janet: Gerro, Somna Marshall (Myth): Sandevistan, Montauk & Tremelo Wolf-Rayet: Smeezobbler, Solin, Floryet, Whayt, Hemantreeantbumbalo, Gerro, Tremelo, Gwargin, Phe, Ber, Deibos, Phomos, Bercue, Dord, Garner, Desmet, Naharosmank, Welkendon, Morhomlo, Schmev, Gershmerzelen, Mani, Jotunn, Oynag, Viszra, Jejunum, Acic, Atrium, Cuspid, Fundus, Cricoid, Descry, Zeppeli, Pendle, Zziezel, Xeititit, Hysnoon, help with a settings file, Pyri System loading screen art. Tholin: Haut-Oklo Caps Lock: Beddul, Dopale Sabine: Bifrost, Bil, Ljos, Heimdall, Thorr Triston: Sinacin, Rangon, Caua, Alia, Jones JoQueeb: Kialla ElectricPants: Blitzo, Nevig, Phyre, Wepor, Twilight Special thanks to Adstri for help during development, and Levana for playtesting, creating Lu's biome map, and writing D or d's description. License Please provide attribution both to Planet Jam 2, and to the modder whose work you are using. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0