Mutex

Personally I'd be happy if it was just a regular, consistent monthly update. First Friday of the month (for example), we get all the development news, bug fixing progress, screenshots of upcoming stuff. I know some people would prefer more frequent than that, but I think if it was regular and predictable enough people would complain about communication less, because there'd be less uncertainty about when we're going to hear anything next. I think the uncertainty and unpredictability is making the situation worse.

I think you can adjust the spring settings and increase the dampening? Shame the default settings aren't great though.

They really need to decide whether field names start with a capital letter or not.

You seem to be suggesting a mode or screen where you can freely place maneuver nodes, with whatever dV and thrust, to plan out a journey? That would be very useful. I've done missions to Jool recently and, despite being a KSP player for over a decade, been caught out by the dV requirements. A place you could freely plan your maneuvers and see the dV required would help a lot.

You'll want to do "git reset --hard <BRANCH>", or however you'd do that with the VS plugin.

That's how I do it. And then use fuel-lines to join the tanks together (don't bother trying to enable fuel-crossfeed in the decoupler, it doesn't work well).

The only workaround I've found for this issue is to manually make a new stage in your staging, move the engines to it, and then press spacebar to "re-stage" the engines. This makes the game recognise them as in-use engines, and use them to calculate dV.

You're not missing anything, it's currently extremely badly designed for interplanetary transfers. Nate said on the recent stream they're planning to resign it. EDIT: Redesign it, I meant.

That's interesting, because right now if you don't happen to know what phase angle you need for interplanetary transfer, and you don't use an online tool / mod, then this is pretty much the only way to actually go to another planet right now. I remember doing this in KSP1 when I'd just started playing it.

Imminent? Have I missed something recently? I thought that was still quite far away.

I get the vague impression the heating calculation isn't taking the altitude / atmospheric density into account. I dipped a probe into Eve's atmosphere and at 85km it was already toast. The very upper part of the atmosphere I'd expect to cause negligible heating because the air is so thin.

Personally I only care about what PE I've got with the body, and the inclination of the encounter. I make the node for the circularisation burn when I enter the SoI.

I've been thinking about this. Right now the only reason to use probes is for one-way journeys, and those missions miss out on half the science you could get from returning samples, but they're a lot easier. If you're returning the craft to Kerbin, then... probes are slightly lighter I guess? But you can't do crew observations, and need a special piece of equipment to do surface samples. If we add occlusion, the difficulty of using probes increases so much there's no point using them at all. Adding life support requirements might balance the game, along with limits/costs to hiring kerbals. As much as I'd like to see occlusion in the game, right now it wouldn't be balanced.

I think you mean 1.11 or 1.12? But yes, Precise Node was one of my literally-can't-play-the-game-without mods along with KER for a very long time, I think I still used it after they added that panel because they couldn't quite bring themselves to make it as useful and useable as Precise Node. Making manoeuvre nodes in KSP1 was bad enough that it's kinda shocking they made it worse in KSP2, when starting from scratch.

The manoeuvre node planner also needs to be a separate window, rather than attached to the orbit point, so you can adjust your manoeuvre while looking at the planet you're going to. So many times I've not been able to see both the planet I'm going to and the node adjustment controls, and if I can see them, sometimes because of the angle I can't actually select the right axis to change - I keep clicking on normal when I want prograde for example. It's so simple to just have the controls in a separate window. And anyone who has tried to fly to another planet while both have realised this problem, and the obvious solution to it. It's like... the UI person only tested going to the Mun and back. That's the only situation the tools are suitable for. I know Nate said a transfer planner is in the works to allow us to travel to planets without using online tools to look up phase angles, hopefully they're planning to make the manoeuvre node planner useable at the same time.

Dres:

There's a couple of seconds in the latest video where you get a closer look at that thing. I assume it's a geological feature of some sort. Possibly it's one of the "discoverables" where you'll be able to get lots of science. EDIT: It's real and called Devil's Tower

I think I found the site I was talking about, and it's... much more fiction-orientated than I remember it being: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engineintro.php There's some links to NASA reports in the descriptions of some of the engines, certainly no vaguely solid designs with millions of ISP and >1G acceleration though.

Well, we'll see, I'm expecting interstellar trips to be shorter than that for gameplay reasons though, timewarping for decades doesn't seem fun. I pulled NSW out of my hind-areas tbh, there's loads of other "theoretical" designs, I can't remember the name of the website that named them all... but I definitely remember designs with theoretical ISPs in the millions and high thrust, usually involving nuclear fusion.

With such engines it'd take decades or centuries to reach another star system. I don't remember where I read/heard it but I'm pretty sure they are planning to add torch drives to the game. How they'll balance them is indeed the question, but I'm sure they'll be extremely large and expensive. Also it depends what you mean by "somewhat-plausible", but there's definitely theoretical nuclear engines with very high ISP and decent (at least 1G) acceleration (nuclear salt-water engines most immediately come to mind), not that we're going to see such engines in real-life anytime soon.

That's not going to work if you're going to get to a decent fraction of c with them, you need to have a pretty high acceleration. If you have 1G acceleration, it's going to take nearly a year to reach light-speed (353 days).

Correct, in 0.2 it'll be possible to position the camera inside the vessel for a kind-of-but-not-quite IVA

I'm not sure kerbal experience is planned to be a thing in KSP2, I've not seen anything about it. Personally I wasn't a fan of it, it created lots of busy-work training up your kerbals. As for different models of probes, that's a fair point, why use a large, heavy probe core when a little one will do. Probe cores contain batteries and reaction wheels I believe, so they could have varying amounts of those things.

The latter, I'd have thought. It says it costs 80 science, so presumably that means you have to spend 80 science to unlock it.

Just a hopefully useful data-point, I'm NOT getting this issue in 0.1.5, despite having an AMD GPU. Running on Linux via Proton (perhaps causing the game to use Vulkan rather than DX?) CPU: AMD 5950X GPU: AMD 6800Xt