What planet packs should I get?

[Lukun7Rocket]

What are your favorite planet packs that I shoiuld download

[MechBFP]

Galileo’s planet pack is pretty good. Has some very challenging planets and some nifty things I won’t spoil. 

[coyotesfrontier]

Most people are going to say Galileo's, but I find its planets to be samey and boring. If you want to play the game like normal, try out the Outer Planets Mod, or if you want a total revamp, try Alternis Kerbol Rekerjiggered.

Personally, my favorite pack is the little-known Uncharted Lands. All bodies are procedurally generated, and are beautiful and stockalike at the same time.

[Geschosskopf]

I have tried:  OPM, New Horizons, Alternis Kerbol, and Beyond Home.  All are quite good and are tributes to their makers, whom I profusely thank for giving me something new to see.

All have their drawbacks, however, which you need to think about prior to committing to a doing a serious game in them.  None of these are game-breaking, it's just that you have to work around them.

For OPM, it's the huge travel times to the new planets.  If you don't have warp drive (which has its own complications), you literally have to warp ahead years at a time or you'll never get out there.  This means that once you make a serious commitment to an expedition to an outer planet, you pretty much have to stop all activity from Jool inwards as your long-distance ships will make no noticeable progress even at 1000x warp, let alone realtime.

For New Horizons and Alternis Kerbol, Kerbin is the moon of a gas giant.  Which is fun in a career game as it gives what is effectively small-scale interplanetary missions with low tech.  HOWEVER, last time time I tried either mod (around 1.3), orbits at Kerbin and the other moons of the gas giants weren't stable if you warped at more than moderate level..  The moons would move but the ship orbits wouldn't move the same amount, so you'd end up crashing.  I don't know if this was an issue with the mods or Kopernicus, or whether this is still an issue these days.  But the upshot was anything you wanted to last indefinitely (stations, commsats, interplanetary ships waiting on a transfer window, etc.) needed to be orbiting the gas giant far enough out not to get snagged by a moon.

Beyond Home's "issue", if you want to call it that, is that the solar system and its bodies are mostly on the small side, even compared to the stock system.  So, dV budgets are small, trips are short, and you can get pretty much anywhere with relatively low tech.  Thus, OT1H, you can call this an "easy" system.  But OTOH, this also means you actually have a chance to explore everything before the next game-breaking update comes along, and it's all beautiful, different, and highly worth seeing.  And also, you can go REALLY BIG, making epic monstrosities that can only exist in such a setting.  Thus, it's a very fun and rewarding system, even if it lacks extreme, highly challenging planets.  All the planets are quite interesting and unique, however.  I'm currently really enjoying my game there.

Edited August 2, 2019 by Geschosskopf

[SwissSpace93]

3 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

For OPM, it's the huge travel times to the new planets.  If you don't have warp drive (which has its own complications), you literally have to warp ahead years at a time or you'll never get out there.  This means that once you make a serious commitment to an expedition to an outer planet, you pretty much have to stop all activity from Jool inwards as your long-distance ships will make no noticeable progress even at 1000x warp, let alone realtime.

I use OPM too and think the long travel times are not very bad, i use the Kerbal Alarm Clock mod to stop time warps when a other Mission needs me (fly a maneuver ..). I can do other missions at the same time i only send probes out there now the next will be some Kerballed Missions to Sarnus.

When you use the Alarmclock-Mod:

You can fly to Eve while the Plock-Crew is on their way, and you set a Alarm for the point where the Plock ship is going into Plocks SOI. So you cannot forget the Plock Encounter or prevent the Eve-Mission to burn in Eves atmosphere while warping for the Plock Mission.

[Geschosskopf]

2 hours ago, SwissSpace93 said:

I use OPM too and think the long travel times are not very bad, i use the Kerbal Alarm Clock mod to stop time warps when a other Mission needs me (fly a maneuver ..). I can do other missions at the same time i only send probes out there now the next will be some Kerballed Missions to Sarnus.

When you use the Alarmclock-Mod:

You can fly to Eve while the Plock-Crew is on their way, and you set a Alarm for the point where the Plock ship is going into Plocks SOI. So you cannot forget the Plock Encounter or prevent the Eve-Mission to burn in Eves atmosphere while warping for the Plock Mission.

Oh, of course I use KAC  .  You misunderstand.  It's not a question of missing nodes or encounters for the outer planets, it's having time advance far enough for these alarms ever to go off.

You install OPM because you want to see those new planets.  So you plan a mission to one of them and discover the trip will take 10 years (and that's just for the closer ones).  So you launch this mission.  Now 10 years of game time have to elapse before you get a chance to play with the OPM mission, which is the whole reason you installed the mod.  You have a choice of how to spend that in-game time.  You can either warp it away or play with other missions.

If you decide to play with other missions, the only viable choice is really to launch a mission to another OPM planet as they don't interfere with each other's progress.  Launching a mission to an inner planet (which includes Jool), however, will greatly slow the progress of your OPM missions.  By that I mean how many real hours of gameplay you have to sit through before the OPM missions arrive.

Say, for example, you decide on a mission to Eve after you launch the 10-year (1-way--it'll be more years coming home with at least 1 year in the system) OPM mission.  And you go complex with it, landing and returning multiple Kerbals from the surface, exploring most of the planet with rover and/or plane, the works.  This means you'll spend several entire multi-hour play sessions just designing and testing the hardware, most of which will be in the VAB/SPH where the in-game time does not advance, and any in-flight time during tests (only at 1:1 time) will be reverted anyway.  Then this complex mission will take at least several more play-sessions to complete, all of it at low warp or even real-time (especially the roving/flying around parts).

Thus, depending on how much free time you have to play KSP, this mission to Eve will consume anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months of your real life.  And when it returns to Kerbin, less than 1 year will have passed on the in-game calendar.  Which means your OPM mission still has over 90% of its trip to go.  Despite all the time you spent playing KSP,  you've made no significant progress towards seeing the new OPM planets you installed the mod to visit.  If you do many more such missions to the inner planets, a game-breaking update will happen long before your OPM missions ever get there.

This is why I say, if you install OPM, then commit yourself to doing ONLY OPM missions once you feel you have the tech for them.  You have to start with the inner planets, of course, but don't develop them at all.   You simply can't afford the time required to frequently tend to complicated infrastructure and colonies at them.  Just go there quick, grab the necessary Science!, and leave nothing but relay satellites behind to help you talk out to the OPM planets later.  Once you have the tech and the relays, completely ignore ALL the stock planets, including Jool.  Otherwise, you'll never get to do anything at the OPM planets.

Edited August 2, 2019 by Geschosskopf

[Snark]

Moving to Add-on Discussions.

 

On 8/1/2019 at 8:35 PM, Lukun7Rocket said:

What are your favorite planet packs that I shoiuld download

Planet packs that I have used and enjoyed:

• Outer Planets (a.k.a. OPM):  Adds a bunch of new planets to the outer fringes of the solar system, leaving the stock system untouched (other than moving Eeloo to becoming a moon of one of the new planets.  Beautifully done in a stockalike art style that meshes well with the stock system.
• New Horizons:  Completely rearranges the solar system.  All the stock bodies are still there, but rearranged (e.g. Kerbin becomes a moon of a gas giant), and lots of new planets/moons with some interesting gameplay properties.
• Galileo's Planet Pack:  Completely replaces all stock bodies and has some interesting designs.
• Snarkiverse:  This is my own.    Pretty minimalist-- doesn't actually add any new bodies to the system at all, but rearranges them to add new gameplay challenges.  Since it adds no new artwork, it has minimal memory footprint and may be useful if you're playing on a lower-end system. (Compatible with OPM and Kerbol Origins, if you're also running those.)
• JNSQ:  Still under development, but playable (it's what I'm trying out on my current KSP career).  From the same folks who brought you Galileo's Planet Pack.  Keeps all the stock bodies, but scales them up 2.7x and replaces their artwork completely, and sizes / distances are adjusted, and adds new planets/moons as well.

It's also worth giving a shout-out to Alien Space Programs, which isn't really a "planet pack" per se (it doesn't add any new planets or move anything around), but it does switch the home planet (i.e. KSC) to be something other than Kerbin, with a variety of options to choose from.  So, for example, you can play with Duna or Laythe or other places as the home world, which gives KSP quite a different feel, particularly in career mode. 

 

[madindehead]

I'm playing with OPM until I get used to the stock game scale. I also added Grannus Expansion Pack (GEP) - it can be added as a second system instead of placing Kerbin etc and plays nicely with OPM.

I've not explored OPM properly but I had a peak at the planets via the trackign station and they look incredible. Especially Sarnus! So cool to have a real Saturn analog  Once I've mastered the stock scale (no never ) I will be playing with JNSQ. The scale will destroy me but it looks amazing. 

Apparently OPM and GEP both play nicely with GPP but I've not installed that. 

Edited August 7, 2019 by madindehead

[GRS]

Currently making a Planet Pack, it has some Challenge elements from some other Planet Packs, but strapped in a way where the new worlds don't alter the Stock ones, can't say, but hopefully it's a good one if its done.

[kspnerd122]

I would say get OPM it is challenging and beautiful when you suceed