herbal space program

I guess I understand the bugs argument, but the rest of what you said I'm not so sure about. Just being able to make hydrogen fuel and oxidizer in-situ by utilizing water (the obvious first resource) would actually be pretty cool! Hydrogen is obviously a fuel in itself, and oxidizer is so much heavier than methane per impulse generated that being able to just take just the methane with you and generate the oxidizer in situ would give new life to methalox as a propellant later in the game. And wouldn't it be nifty if your orbital survey experiments earlier in the game actually yielded a map that shows water deposits? As to all that requiring colony parts, I don't really see it that way. All you'd really need is a resource scanner part, a water extraction part, a water tank, and a hydrolyzer part, which are things that (in principle) already existed in KSP1. And of course once there is some kind of colony habitation module, oxygen would be its most obvious continual need if there's going to be anything like life support in the game, and again you get that from water. Anyway, I'm not complaining about it, but it does seem to me that you could get a whole lot of gameplay mileage relative to where we are now just by adding water to the game with a handful of parts. A fair point, but apropos of that I feel compelled to point out that keeping us interested in finding and reporting those bugs requires that the game be fun to play, and what I outlined above seems like a pretty easy-to-implement way to maximize that element. But we'll see I guess.

Thank you for that @The Space Peacock! There's a great deal of food for thought here. One thing that does kind of have me scratching my helmet over all this is why they're choosing to implement colonies before they put any kind of resource system in place. To me, the most natural game progression would seem to be the other way around. That is, you start by exploring the other bodies in the Kerbolar system in general terms, then as your science capabilities advance you start doing orbital surveys to find deposits of key resources required for fuel generation, life support, etc., and then you start building outposts where those resources are found. Ultimately, as science progresses further this system leads to colonies focused on extracting/producing various types of unobtainium that are required to make/power an interstellar vessel that must be built in some big orbital factory. Having colony outposts before that progression is laid down therefore seems kind of backwards to me, but I guess time will tell why they're doing it this way instead.

I want to say thank you @Dakota for restoring the deleted content from the other thread. I understand the discussion was off topic, and for my part I promise that in the spirit of good community membership I will be more judicious in the future about where I post comments like that. Still, it felt quite harsh to just see it all yanked out of existence, as I did put a significant amount of thought into what I said, and for that reason seeing it restored makes me feel a whole lot better about my participation here. I hope others who were affected will see this significant and important gesture in the same way.

It's hard for me to believe that Dakota really wanted all that content deleted , considering he said in that very thread that it was important for us to keep telling them what we want, which is what I feel I was doing, without being rude or disrespectful, even though it was not on-topic for that thread. I've spent over 400 hours playing KSP2 now, in spite of all the frustrating problems, and I was really just trying to explain what the truly pressing issues are that cause innocent but fluffy posts like the Dev blog in question to get met with groans rather than cheers. I even stood up for the blog post's author, because this is clearly not their fault. Anyway, if they don't want my insights because these issues have been "talked to death", then I will spend my precious free time doing something that feels less pointless. Hopefully when I come back after taking a break for a few months, it will be to a different kind of party.

I feel you. That heavy-handed bloodbath by the moderators on the Dev blog thread has pretty much taken all the wind out of my sails, and I won't be seen here again for quite a while.

They each have their own specialties, so they can't really all work on these problems at the same time, but your point about the small things is very well-taken. The current behavior of the UI in map mode is a perfect example of that. How hard could it possibly be for them to fix the way that various informational pop-up windows always obscure the info you really want to see in such a manner that you can't close them, rearrange them, or rotate the view to get them out of the way? How does a simple but incredibly annoying bug like that survive even a few hours of play testing? It's hard not to get the idea sometimes that they actually hate us and are deliberately taunting us with things like this.

What I was talking about with my Eve 10 stack was definitely this and not any inherent lack of rigidity causing my rockets to self-disassemble on the launchpad. With a few struts placed in the obvious places, I haven't had any problems at launch with any of my craft since the most recent update. What I was talking about happens when the craft is in orbit, with no non-uniform forces acting on it, and although having SAS on seems to make it happen more often, it happens sometimes with SAS off as well. It also only seems to happen when I have a craft made from two or more assemblies that were docked together in orbit. And it always starts very small and gets steadily more violent until the craft flies apart, which very much supports your model of incorrectly implemented dampening of small motions causing feedback loops in certain cases. FWIW, it also seems to happen a whole lot less now than it did before, so they seemed to have fixed it in most cases, but it still does happen occasionally.

Indeed, if you're going to land 300 bleepin' tons of something on Duna, it should actually be something that will ultimately be useful in some way! Nothing we have in our current parts inventory looks very likely to me in that regard. Even my Eve 10 lander, which at least serves the purpose of getting ten Kerbals to the surface and back, only weighs ~175t with its landing legs and brakes/chutes still attached, so 300 tons of what?

For Eve I consider it an interesting challenge, especially since I don't have the magic inflatable heat shield yet. Landing a 300t ship on Duna however just seems like a boring, pointless grind to me: easy, but also very time-consuming without proving anything.

I dunno, the game does seem to be pushing us in that direction with FS missions like Eve 10 and Big n' Husky, which to me portends even bigger stuff on the horizon. Still, I'm up to around 450 parts on my most complex launches now and I'm not having any wobble problems yet using only a KSP1-typical number of struts, so I'm not too worried about it. The framerate at that part count however is another matter.

I've built some pretty big stuff recently, and although it still requires the judicious placement of some struts manually, it's way, way better than it was before. My docked together Eve 10 stack on LKO must be like 200 meters long, and although the framerate on it is terrible and it occasionally develops phantom motions and shakes itself to bits apropos of nothing, it doesn't exhibit any wet noodle behavior that I've seen. As to the solution being "duct tape", i.e. autostruts, are you sure there is actually a better solution than that using this physics engine? If you call those "tack welds" rather than autostruts, it seems like a llegit solution to me. There are definitely much worse problems currently they should be focusing on before they try to improve their wobbly rockets solution, unless of course that solution is in fact what is tanking the frame rate.

In the heyday of KSP1, I'm not sure if there was any computer game-based forum anywhere on this planet that had more really smart people participating in it. It was inspirational.

Hey, at least they're making an effort to show us something. I do feel bad for the dev team member who posted this, because he's just showing us what he's working on in his own lane and almost certainly has no involvement in or control over the issues that are causing all these rotten tomatoes to be lobbed in response to his post. Like you said, there's nothing at all wrong with what he posted, even if it's of no great consequence, and clearly it took some work to do and it's not his fault that other aspects of dev team communication about the much less sexy subjects of performance and bugs are lacking. To that end, I think they need some kind of a pinned "What did you do to make KSP2 more playable today" thread for the dev team, in which they skip all the window dressing and just give us fairly frequent but succinct little tidbits about what they're doing to deal with all the nuts and bolts issues, day in, day out. Maybe they shouldn't even allow comments from the peanut gallery in that thread, only upvotes. That way, they'll have an organic way of knowing which identified bugs/performance issues have the highest community priority and we'll have more frequent reassurance that they're actually taking these issues seriously. Moving K.E.R.B. to monthly was definitely a step in the wrong direction in that regard. Instead, they should have made their updates on these matters less comprehensive but much more frequent.

I don't think you're being overly critical with this part. As I've been sending more and more missions around the Kerbolar system in my current science playthrough, the problems with the current maneuver system are pulling even with or even surpassing the painfully low framerate for me. I had to scrap one of my saved builds that took hours yesterday, because I discovered only on attempting to take it to Dres that the VAB had corrupted it so that it completely broke the maneuver system for that ship. Crazy behavior, with the yellow progress bar surging back and forth randomly and my maneuver heading jumping around every time I staged off a pair of boosters, not only messing up my maneuver but also knocking the other boosters off as the ship abruptly turned. Multiple reverts to the VAB did nothing to fix it, and it took me a couple of hours of total boredom as I waited for my ship to make one glacially slow flight to orbit after another before I realized the problem was baked into the vessel and gave up. I did finally manage to work around it and get to an encounter trajectory on like the fifth try, but it would have been easier ultimately if I had just dispensed with the maneuver node entirely and seat-of-the-pantsed it from the get-go. They really need to clean this stuff up ASAP, because basically nobody will want to play the game if it's like that, EA or not.

Sorry, I had no intention whatsoever of minimizing the significance of what you accomplished there. It's actually quite impressive, especially considering how few hours of gameplay you had under your belt at the time. I don't think I could ever have done such a thing so early in my KSP1 career! As to the Laythe plane, I look forward to seeing it. I posted my own KSP2 Jool5 here a while back in the "What did you do today" thread, and you can see there that I used a plane for my Laythe segment: In KSP1 it's actually not so hard to build a plane that can make it all the way to Laythe and back on its own in a single stage, using only 1.25m parts. In KSP2, I'm finding I need to move up to Mk3 to do the same thing, because the hydrogen tanks are total drag monsters compared to the LF tanks you could use for the nukes in KSP1.

Yes, it did, but then that's another point you have to continuously calculate line of sight for, so it moves the overall system toward just having the whole ComNet. My overall point was just that you either have to accommodate multiple signal sources or you have to ignore all that. There is no tenable middle ground really for basic gameplay reasons. Not sure how you define "active vessel" here, but I have noticed that having more missions ongoing, even if they are more or less on rails outside of the current vessel's physics range, seems to degrade performance significantly. Whatever they're doing wrt to calculating those vessels, they need to pare it down substantially, or things like ComNet will never, ever work.

Nice plane! I think the single thing that kept me playing KSP1 the longest was going to the challenges forum and seeing all the different solutions people could come up with to the same problem. As to the foldable wings, yeah, I definitely considered those as they would make a prop-driven SSTO at least somewhat reasonable to build, but I could never figure out how to make them both stiff enough to be usable and foldable, so I gave up on that idea pretty quickly. I suppose having an engineer do some wing-walking to change the positions of struts while airborne might have done the trick, but even just setting it up so you could stage the aero parts off all at once and turn the rest of the craft vertical for the flight back to orbit was challenging enough for me. the heavy fuselage and Mk III capsule also required quite a bit more wing area than you had, which was not evident from the pic above but can be seen in the one below. As to the choice of props, I think I used the ones I did because they gave me the best thrust in thin air on Kerbin, but of course on Eve you'll top out in considerably thicker air due to the higher gravity, so maybe it was not optimal for that situation. Still, they got me above 20km pretty reliably, which was enough for the rocket part to make orbit.

I suppose if you limit it to line of sight for the active vessel craft to Kerbin alone, it becomes a much simpler problem, but I was assuming you were talking about an actual Comnet with relays. And I should add that without the latter, having your signal get unavoidably occluded by the Mun and/or Kerbin when the tracking station is on the other side of it would represent a truly annoying impediment to gameplay IMO. So either the whole Comnet enchilada or no signal occlusion are the only good options, and the game is just not ready performance-wise to digest the whole enchilada yet.

Different, tougher problem, since light can come from only a few well-defined sources outside of your immediate physics range, and radio waves can come from any craft you may have in the Kerbolar system. Also, calculating all that continually for your active craft will slow performance even more, so I'd much rather they wait on that until they get their physics engine out of first gear.

Well, at least they seem to have the development of the KSP2 visual experience moving along nicely. That aspect represents a clear improvement over stock KSP1 IMO, and I'm glad they're continuing to work on it. But now can we have a dev blog about improving physics performance? Doubling the frame rate would really get me excited!

I'll take a look! The ship I was talking about is sadly gone, but there is still a pic of it on my Imgur account: ...So I went and took a look, and that ship is indeed a beast! It's too bad the person never figured out a plane that could land from orbit on Eve. That makes the whole thing much easier! And it didn't really seem so hard either. Other than not mounting anything too heat-sensitive on the bottom, I don't recall that I had to do anything special to make it work. The way you can use wings to dissipate speed in KSP1 by turning it into lift rather than heat seems almost like a cheat, but I was only too happy to take advantage of it. I saw also that you apparently had problems with the robotic drift bug affecting your plane. So did I! If you look closely at the pic above, you can see that my props are at an odd angle, pointing somewhat downwards instead of straight ahead. That is not how I built that plane, but that's how it ended up after I landed, and nothing my onboard engineer could do seemed to be able to correct it. In the end, I had to make most of my flight back to 20km upside down!

If this is in KSP1, and robotics are allowed, and a propeller plane isn't too much like a rover in your book, I think I built a craft at one time that could do this pretty easily. Alas that KSP1 installation went the way of the wind when I gave the associated Steam account to my son. Propellers really changed the whole game on Eve, since you could fly around with them pretty much indefinitely, and designing a craft that could fly up to 20km and then stage all the wings/props off to fly to orbit was pretty easy to do.

I went with the solution @magnemoe used for this, which was to put small heat shields as feet on the ends of 2.5m square XS trusses and attach them to the ship with small aerodynamic decouplers + struts. I haven't actually landed it on Eve yet, but testing it on Kerbin I landed a 300-ton (yes, massively overbuilt) lander on ten of those at 16 m/s and amazingly nothing broke! I don't have the jumbo landing legs yet, but even if I did I was concerned those would burn off during re-entry if I mounted them to decouplers. The heat shield feet however, if offset slightly inwards, did a great job of protecting the struts and decouplers connecting them to the ship. Heh, looks like @astrobond posted a pic of exactly what I was talking about just above and I failed to notice! Not sure to whom the original credit for that solution actually belongs, but I can now attest from experience that it works amazingly well.

Looking at the above designs, I see I really overbuilt my Eve 10 lander! It looks lot a lot like what @astrobond posted above, but it has 4 large side boosters with 7 Vectors each instead of eight with just one each. I blame the completely Borked dV readout in the VAB! I have to re-install KER and see how much dV my lander really has. My guess now is it could probably make it all the way back to LKO without even aerobraking.

I haven't done an Eve return mission in KSP2 yet, but in KSP1 I found the Vector to be hands-down the best engine for lifting larger payloads from near Eve SL. The Dart may have the most favorable ISP profile, but it has a lower TWR than the Vector (OK, perhaps just about equal at Eve SL), but more importantly, a much lower thrust per cross-sectional area than the Vector, like 4.5 times lower. When you're trying to take off through that endless soupy atmosphere, lowering your drag is a very important consideration that is not addressed by these calculations, and that requires the lowest cross-sectional area possible. Unless of course you want to shamelessly clip engines into one another to cheat the drag model, but that's not my style. ...And I should add that while these laudably rigorous calculations are great for figuring out what works best for a given payload at Eve SL, actually ascending to orbit only happens in that regime for the first few seconds. Pretty soon you're in substantially thinner air, so a lot of this stuff doesn't matter so much anymore. For that reason (h/t @magnemoe), I have a SWERV as the core stage on my Eve 10 lander. Its decent TWR and far superior ISP make it the best choice IMO for the large dV push from being high in Eve's atmo to actually being in orbit.