herbal space program

0.14 is hanging up in the same spot every time for me while loading, while it says "loading localizations from addressables". I tried uninstalling and re-installing and it still crashes in the same spot every time. ....Wow, after like 15 minutes I finally got the top menu screen. I sure hope it's not that slow every time. Anyway, at least I can play it now!

Under some circumstances, often related to the orbital decay bug, they produce wild, frequently craft-destroying phantom forces upon docking or undocking. Once a craft's internal momentum numbers get corrupted, even if the initial signs of it are subtle, you can never dock or undock it again without something very bad happening. It generally doesn't occur if all you're doing is docking stuff in Kerbin orbit, but if you try it in other places with different bug behavior, it happens all the time. I'm pretty sad it apparently didn't get fixed, because nearly all of my missions involve repeated docking and undocking around bodies other than Kerbin. ...There was also a bug where struts didn't break as they are supposed to upon undocking if they were connecting two docked parts . Not sure if they fixed that one yet either.

Do ships still explode and/or or fly off at absurd velocities when docking/undocking? I didn't see that on the list, and that's probably the biggest game-breaker for me. It's also definitely related to at least some modes of the orbital decay bug swarm based on my experiments.

I finally got around to finishing all my Jool 5 landings with my big interplanetary space station, seen here inbound at the beginning of the mission: First up was Laythe, the only landing destination for the big Mk3 space plane: Next up was Tylo, with a beefy, SWERV-based 2-stage lander: The upper stage did the better part of the ascent back to orbit, docked to the mothership, refueled, and served as a single stage lander for the other 3 bodies: Vall: Pol: Bop: After Bop, I re-docked the space plane to the mothership in a Jool orbit between Tylo and Bop, and then jettisoned the now empty center stage behind the truss structure. The remainder has something like 4 km/sec total dV if I exhaust all the methalox in the mothership and then dump it to go home with just the two landers docked together: That's probably enough juice to make a side trip to Duna or Dres on the way home, but I haven't decided about that yet.

I think I mentioned this before, but I determined on my lengthy Jool 5 mission that bugs #2, 3, and 13 all appear to be related. That is, whenever a ship starts to show signs of orbital decay, you can count on it to also have problems when docking/undocking, and moreover to exhibit various phantom motions, sometimes violent, whenever you exit timewarp inside of the decay-inducing altitude for a particular body. For that reason, I suspect that definitively fixing any of these bugs will actually fix all of them.

AlI can say is that if the game we ultimately get deals with all those issues in a consistent, rational manner that both requires attention to it by users and supports fun gameplay, I will be very pleased! In reality however, we are unfortunately still a long way from talking about stuff like that in a meaningful way.

One observation I feel I should add here is that if the orbital decay bug gets set off on any docked-together assembly, subsequent attempts to undock from or dock to the affected craft will unleash massive phantom forces that often destroy one or both craft. So the docking bug and the orbital decay bug seem to be causally linked.

I spent a fair bit of time analyzing this bug around Vall a couple of days ago, and what I concluded was that it will happen anytime you let a ship with two docked-together modules get closer than a certain distance, which varies from body to body, as @AstroClef documented early on. IOW, I'm not sure you'd actually get the decay bug if you staged everything off before you ever reached that critical radius around Mun. When I kept my Jool5 mothership at a safe distance from Vall, the lander (which is just one assembly) seemed to have no trouble going to the surface and coming back to that safe distance. Once you've got it though, your whole craft will remain affected permanently, and you can only get rid of it by going back to a pre-bug save file. The decay per se may actually go away if you leave the SOI where it happened, but whenever it happens it also corrupts your craft so that it will forever afterwards be plagued by phantom forces. These will become evident any time you go away from it and return or timewarp and then return to full physics. My Jool5 mothership would practically shake itself apart. I think it actually has something to do with aberrantly creating big pent-up forces in docking interfaces, because the orbital decay bug is also perfectly correlated in my experience with the docking disaster one, i.e. once the big ship started to drift in its orbit, any subsequent attempt to undock the lander would make something really bad happen.

I feel your pain. I'm finding with my Jool 5 mission that I'm having to repeat just about every major mission phase 4-5 times, because something always bugs out. The worst thing IMO is that some of the bugs have a prolonged latency, so you don't realize that you're snake-bit until much later when you try to undock or re-dock your lander and everything explodes. Lather, rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Still, I've managed to do Laythe, Tylo, and Vall now, and surprisingly of the three Vall, which I finished this morning was the most maddeningly difficult. It was ridiculously hard for me to get a good encounter coming from Tylo, but worse, it seems like in the Vall SOI the orbital decay bug happens every time you take two things that are docked together to less than 20km from the surface. It took me quite a while to figure it out, but I also determined in the process that the orbital decay bug and the docking insanity are somehow tightly linked. Every time the combined ship would start to drift in its orbital path, any future attempt to dock or undock my lander would prove disastrous. Any attempt to focus elsewhere and come back, or f5-f9 from that situation, would also have the ship come back like some tremendous jolt had gone through it, with everything flailing around. These three things seem to all be inexorably linked together, and AFAICT once that happens to a craft, the only remedy is to go back to a save from before the point where the drift bug first appeared.

No worries, pedantry is a baked-in feature of this whole forum community . And yes, I have a whole lot of learned behaviors to shake wrt KSP1 maneuver nodes. I've played around 4,000 hours of KSP1 total, and a whole lot of that time was spent plotting complicated multi-gravity assist ways of getting from here to there by twiddling maneuver nodes.

Sorry, I misspoke there. What actually I meant was the "maneuver" marker all along. That's what I was talking about. So you place the node, dragging the handles in whatever direction you want to go, and then boost on that maneuver marker. Obviously in KSP, the " target" marker literally means something else. I am just carelessly mangling the terminology.

Fair enough, but I only actually invoked the term secant because somebody else did first. I could qualify what I said more to make that representation more accurate terminologically, but the simple way of explaining it is that in the old system, your target marker always closely approximated the same absolute spatial direction as the one you defined where you placed your node. In the new system, it doesn't work like that anymore, which is going to take some getting used to for me since I have spent thousands of hours doing it the old way.

Not actually talking about the trigonometric function. In basic geometry, a secant is any line that intersects a circle or ellipse in two spots, dividing it into two separate areas. In this context, I was saying that if you have a prograde maneuver node placed in KSP1, the vector defined by boosting on your target marker anyplace other than exactly at the node will be a secant of your orbit that is parallel to the (tangent) vector that would be defined by boosting exactly at the node. It actually works the same way for boosting in any direction in the prograde/radial plane, except that both vectors would be secants if the node is in any direction other than pure prograde or retrograde. Anyway, in the KSP1 system, that means that boosting on your target vector a short time before and after the node does a pretty good job of maintaining the optimal attitude to actually achieve the trajectory you want. I'm not quite sure how that idea translates to the KSP2 system, since if you are boosting prograde at the spot you placed your node, you won't be boosting prograde anymore at the midpoint of your burn.

Wow, I was totally unaware that such things were available in that interface. I will take another look at it. The nice thing in KSP1 is that if you set the node at the spot that would give you the most efficient trajectory change as an instantaneous impulse, aligning to that target marker automatically points you along the secant parallel to your optimal burn vector wherever you are in your orbit. I am certain that there are even more efficient ways to calculate your optimal start time and attitude through the burn, but that was really pretty good, at least in short burns that involved small changes in heading. I don't really understand how to do that in the KSP2 representation yet, so it seems worse to me, but maybe once I figure it out it will be as good.

Maybe it will just take some getting used to on my part, since I'm so familiar with the old system. It would certainly help me a lot if they had an indicator for the midpoint of the burn, so I could line that up with my PE. I don't actually recall seeing two different versions of my PE when did this before, but maybe they were right on top of each other. Actual numbers instead of that clunky bar indicator would also be quite helpful, as would some provision for serial periapsis kicks, but of course KSP1 didn't have that either.

If that's really the way they tried to design it, then it's pretty dumb, because if you're trying to do a series of periapsis kicks, you have to estimate for yourself where to place the node so the burn is symmetrical around your periapsis. It would be much better they let you place the node as if it was an instantaneous impulse at a given point, and then spread it out before and after that point, maybe even trying to correct for the additional dV, and giving you some kind of warning if your cosine losses are going to be excessive. This system is actually significantly harder than what KSP1 had for no good reason I can see. Well then they way they've defined them is dumb, as I said above.

That's not how it works period. If you place a maneuver node, your burn needs to be symmetrically timed around it for maximum efficiency regardless of the game version. Putting it all on one side of the node is never the best. That's just orbital mechanics, not the game.

I have to believe that this feature is just not properly implemented yet in KSP2. It tells you to start right where you placed your node, and we all know that's not how it works. It would also be great if like in KSP1, the dV countdown showed you what is actually left on the burn rather than just statically what the initial dV was. But I guess we'll have to wait for that.

I'm very glad to see these issues getting knocked off in real time rather than having to wait for months. Now if you can get the orbital decay bug and all that crazy weird stuff about docking fixed, the game will start to become playable for real!

Good decision to issue a hotfix for that one!

The price tag doesn't bother me so much, but those bugs are a big aside. I started playing KSP1 at 0.18 (I think), and although docking, wobbliness, and SAS were still kind of a mess, there weren't nearly as many really bad core gameplay bugs at that time as there are now. I mean, with the latest patch, you can't even de-orbit a Mk1 capsule because of the no-drag-when-pointed-retrograde bug. The FPS performance wasn't nearly as bad either, and that was on machines that wouldn't even qualify as potatoes now. As a very experienced KSP1 player, I can battle my way through these things, but there still isn't a lot for me to do that's new, so I'm getting bored pretty quickly. Imagining myself as a new-to-the-franchise user, I can see that what's there constitutes a pretty good amount of gameplay, but between the awful performance and the really bad bugs, I'm not sure I'd have the patience to put up with all of that frustration while trying to ascend an already pretty challenging learning curve. So I stand by my prior statement that this is really no time for them to have an EA promotion. I think they need to get the most basic things all working properly and maybe throw the old hands a bone or two first.

I'm not about to cry foul over spending $10 more than I might have if I had waited. I bought the game as it is, for the price they were charging, with my eyes open. But I have to agree that all they are going to do by having a sale at this point is generate more unsatisfied customers, who will still complain about how slow and buggy it is even though they paid less than I did. They would be far better off IMO if they held off on having any big promotions until they have a better experience to offer those who take them up on it.

Well, I've tried to reserve my judgment until I've had time to really evaluate performance after the patch, but I've seen no improvement in frame rate AFAICT with the Jool 5 mission I'm currently trying to fly. Perhaps it's because it was a save file from before? I dunno, but for me it's still <4FPS with my 650-part mothership, and maybe 7-8 FPS with the detached ~100-part Laythe space plane. The latter also lost literally all its forward motion in Laythe orbit due to the decay bug, after I flew it out of physics range and then switched back and forth between it and the mothership. It just dropped like a stone when I came back to it, which is luckily not the worst situation you can find yourself in with a space plane, at least if you have plenty of fuel for the jet engines and reasonable aerodynamic trim. I was able to bring it in over land under good control pretty easily, but even though I landed it with only ~70m/s forward motion and maybe 2m/s vertical, on level ground, it totally exploded on contact, killing the crew. That definitely would not have happened in KSP1, and combined with all the other problems I have to say it's getting really hard for me to keep going with this the way the game is now. I only have so much patience for this stuff.

Not to mention that as it stands now, compounding the failure of craft to slow down as expected in the atmosphere with also blowing them up due to overheating would just be adding insult to injury.

I finally got my whole Jool-5 platform assembled, 562 tons, 862 parts (probably half struts), and 7.4 km of SWERV dV at a not-too-shabby 0.37 initial TWR. Framerate is about a glacial 4/s, seemingly without regard to the graphics settings, so some other calculations must be borking that: I've already shown the Laythe plane, and docking that up was surprisingly easy, but then I had to add my dual-stage vacuum lander. It has a SWRV-powered Tylo descent stage that will also serves as an orbital transfer engine on the full ship. The descent stage will land and then provide about the first 300m/s of ascent dV before the Poodle-powered upper stage completes the journey to orbit. That stage will do the landings on every body besides Laythe. If I manage to finish the Jool-5 with enough dV on the mothership, I'll probably do a side trip to Dres or Duna/Ike, both systems the smaller lander could manage: On the frowny side, successfully getting that docked up took me 7 tries (only counting good trips to orbit), including completely rebuilding the whole stack in the middle because something got irretrievably corrupted in the first version. Time and again, everything would blow up or bug out as soon as I made contact, even if it was dead-on at 0.2m/s. I was almost ready to give up in disgust, but the last time it finally worked, probably because I turned off the SAS on both vessels right before they connected. Still, both the plane and the vacuum lander were wagging back and forth like dog tails for no good reason for quite a while, but thankfully the vibrations damped out that time instead of amplifying themselves into oblivion as they had previously. Sorry, but you guys have got a long way to go before colony ships! Anyway, I just need to FF about 40 days to the Jool transfer window, and off we go!