cubinator

The phase angle calculation is not too hard given the orbital elements. Also, the trick I use is that when the planet is rising at the right time to leave in that direction, it's in the right place for a transfer. That probably doesn't make too much sense in text, but just watch where the planet is rising when you're doing a successful transfer and you might just notice a pattern.

I've found the music as I was landing on Minmus and Duna quite striking, and I think they really fit the excitement of landing there. Of course, there are a million things to do in KSP that can never be predicted by its makers, so I'm sure the music will eventually find some scenario it doesn't fit in, but so far it's been great. I am excited to learn to play them on the organ, and my next musical destinations are Eve and Jool.

More notes from today: -A positive thing: The game loading into whatever scenario you were last in was very helpful the time I had to quit the game in the middle of a Minmus landing. -The solar panel notifying me every five seconds when it goes out of sunlight was annoying and unhelpful. I was driving a rover while the sun angle was low, and I knew very well that the solar panel was going to be out of sunlight here and there. Also, the notification is only based on the angle and occurs even if the craft was in a terrain shadow anyway. I think such a thing might be useful in the case where you have a probe that's about to go on a long coast, but not as I'm actively rotating a vehicle. -"EC" and the lightning symbol for electricity are redundant in the resource menu. Pick one, preferrably the text one - As we see in Blender, replacing too many real words with glyphs can make for an unintelligible UI.

I had trouble with the external seat as well, my rover has back seats that cannot EVA, I think because the front seats are a little too close (although visually it looks like there is a reasonable amount of space).

Having visited both Mun and Minmus with capable vessels, I was ready to go interplanetary for the first time in KSP2. The goal is to reach the monument on Duna. Because precise landings in an atmosphere are tricky, I opted to add a rover to make the final crawl there, and thus came up with a horizontal lander design around that rover, containing it in a cargo bay. That rocket alone didn't have quite enough 'oomph' to get there and back, so I simply made a tanker stage that was about the same size as a second launch that would dock to the lander. Time for launch! I had to add a nose cone on top of the tanker to prevent various sensitive parts from burning off during ascent, even though I did my best to jump out of the atmosphere quickly. Goodbye nosecone! The mountains on Kerbin below are quite spectacular. With both the ship and tanker in orbit, it was time to dock. Both of their main boosters had a decent amount of fuel left, so I kept those attached to use later, which made docking a big challenge. Two large ships lined up perfectly. And with that it's off to Duna! I had to stop the burn as the boosters ran out to separate them and flip the ship over. Not conventional, but not ineffective at getting me to Duna. The part manager was no help in telling me how much fuel was left in each stage, and I was a little worried that it would start draining the wrong fuel tanks. Nothing's gone horribly wrong yet, though. Goodbye, Kerbin! It already feels so small. There's no feeling like launching yourself so far away from home that you lose your planet in the sea of stars. 280 days later, Duna appears from the sky! Duna and Ike looming. The first Kerbals have arrived at another planet. The next day, it's time to attempt the landing. What's this? Stowaways! Well, they'll soon learn a great deal about the safety of the cargo bay's interior during EDL. Time to go down. Ike is dark like charcoal. Parachutes seem more tolerant of high speeds in this thin atmosphere. I still had to load a save once to land safely, but the ship performed with excellence! Drogues deploying! Vehicle has righted itself into the horizontal position, time to switch to the landing engines! I had the luck of landing on a hillside, the shifting sand had my ship sliding down gently into a safe ditch a few meters down. The landing legs couldn't extend fully, so in order to let the rover out the ship had to do a short hop, which luckily went without damage. Not sure how the rover pirates escaped with their hearing due to their proximity to the rocket engines, but they seem to be unscathed. More than 50 km of driving lies ahead, but Duna surely has many wonders to show along the way. It's not like they need to hurry home.

Reported Version: v0.2.0 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes OS: Windows 10 | CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1055T Processor 2.80 GHz | GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER | RAM: 24.0 GB While I was orbiting Kerbin today, I noticed that the Sun was turning black and disappearing, along with some of the planets' orbit lines, when I zoomed in close to my ship in map view. 1. Far away, the sun and orbits are all there: 2. This is the distance at which the sun first turned black. Jool's, and I think Eeloo's orbit lines have disappeared: 3. Even closer in, all the planets' orbit lines are gone: Included Attachments: .ipsImage { width: 900px !important; }

Reported Version: v0.2.0 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes OS: Windows 10 | CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1055T Processor 2.80 GHz | GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER | RAM: 24.0 GB When launching a rocket toward orbit, I sometimes see KSC disappear and the skybox flip over when my rocket reaches about 19-20 km in altitude. I've noticed the skybox flipping in a few other situations too, like during a Mun mission, although I don't remember the exact scenario then. The flip at launch is pretty consistently around 20 km, although it doesn't always happen. I notice it a lot during night launches. I've included a screenshot from right after it happened on a typical launch. Included Attachments:

Reported Version: v0.2.0 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes OS: Windows 10 | CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1055T Processor 2.80 GHz | GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER | RAM: 24.0 GB The amount of monopropellant in the vehicle seems to be rounded in the Vessel Resources window to the nearest ton. When monopropellant is stored in small quantities, the number displayed doesn't show how much is there very well. For instance, a full 0.52 ton tank will display "1/0.52t" until it is about halfway depleted, then it will display "0/0.52t" instead. Both numbers should be displayed to the nearest 0.01 ton. Included Attachments: .ipsImage { width: 900px !important; }

Reported Version: v0.2.0 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes OS: Windows 10 | CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1055T Processor 2.80 GHz | GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER | RAM: 24.0 GB 1. Center of mass marker turned on for a rocket stage. 2. Drain/change fuel values for that stage using the part manager. The center of mass marker doesn't move to the proper location on its own as you do that. 3. To get the center of mass to take on its proper location again, you have to click its button twice to make it disappear and reappear in the new location. Included Attachments:

I spent some time as I was playing today to write down things I noticed bothering me. Here are the relevant ones: VAB stuff: Middle clicking on a part in the VAB to focus on it doesn't go well, especially when 'middle click + drag' is supposed to be the way you scroll up and down the vehicle. I often have my camera transported to some unhelpful place while tediously trying to move to some part of the vehicle because I accidentally middle clicked somewhere I shouldn't have - it doesn't even seem to have to be on a part! On that note: Middle click + drag is an awful way to have to move up and down the rocket. I'd rather the scroll wheel just be used for scrolling up and down, maybe with a modifier key to zoom in/out when that's needed. I think changing scale as you're working on something is going to be useful less often than changing position, so the position controls should be more convenient than they are now. Having the part manager as one big window with all the parts sorted by type isn't actually useful for what the part info is usually being used for. For instance, if you're clicking on wings you typically are trying to focus on aerodynamics, trim, control surface deflections, etc. You don't need electrical charge or reaction wheels in the same menu. If you're clicking on fuel tanks, you want to organize them by stage, not by the ID of the parts. The menus in KSP1 were intuitive by pointing info to all respective parts with little lines...Having all the parts nebulously pop up into a single generic window off to the side is unintuitive. Everything 'jumping' or 'teleporting' around when you click stuff is unintuitive as to what you're doing. In KSP1 things like the stages in the staging bar would glide along with your mouse as you dragged them along. In KSP2 it's hard to tell where something is going to end up when you try to drag it, and you only find out after you've moved it there. It's hard to move individual parts around in the staging menu, for instance trying to set up asparagus staging with 4x symmetric boosters. The menu is really strange about letting me split up those engines. Placing fuel lines and struts is really weird, for some reason I find the fuel lines much harder to place than in KSP1. The struts and fuel lines are also kind of hard to delete/'throw away' sometimes. As I was moving a set of parachutes to a different stage, the set 'collapsed' in the staging menu to show 'X number of parachutes' together in a single box. I needed to click on it again each time to show the individual parachutes before I could move another one, and that slowed me down. The TWR on the staging menu is too small a font, it doesn't give itself enough pixels on my screen to show itself well and I really have to squint at it to figure out what it says. Flight things: Map view kind of goes nuts if you look down from the north pole, I have to watch out for that when looking at phase angles The map view scrolls really slowly for some reason when you look up from the south, and doesn't let you get all the way to the south pole with the camera. I don't see a need to prevent us from going there. Ascending and descending nodes not showing up if they're underground/behind me on a suborbital trajectory is unhelpful, because I still want to manipulate and keep track of them during flight. The parts manager lists all the fuel tanks but doesn't seem to be able to show how much fuel is in them. I'm not sure if this is a bug or if I've just missed some other way to get that information. I haven't been able to tell which fuel tanks are being drained on a complex vessel. If it's not a bug, then why have the fuel tanks listed there, taking up space? The targeted object's orbit line should be highlighted like in KSP1. I have a lot of things in low equatorial orbit and it's hard to pick out the line I'm trying to match. The targeted vessel should show its relative distance at all times when clicked/highlighted in map view. Otherwise I don't get that information quantitatively until it's within 50 km. It's difficult to change the order of stages in the staging menu. Again, weird teleporty elements needing to be brought to unclear locations on the screen. Scenes like the map view and flight view don't remember how far zoomed in or out they were, or what direction they were facing. This leads to a lot of unwanted scrolling while doing things that require switching in and out of map view frequently, like landing on a planet. When I click on an 'intercept' for a targeted vessel and hover over it, the first digit of the distance value tends to be covered up by my mouse. A couple of random things I'd like: There should be a display for the phase angle between planets somewhere in the map view/tracking station. Even if the game doesn't reveal what the ideal phase angle is for transfers, or dates when transfer windows occur, displaying the phase angle would finally free me from having to literally hold up a protractor to my screen to go to other planets in stock KSP. When I was working on my Duna transfer today, I had the idea that the maneuver creation tool could get some more 'smarts' to it. Instead of blindly inputting a maneuver vector, you could simply tell it to set up a Hohmann transfer from Kerbin to Duna based on your current orbit around Kerbin, and it could line up the timing based on your thrust and whether you want to transfer on the next orbit or at the most optimal time, or someplace in between.

Today I assembled a two-launch spacecraft to travel to Duna, consisting of a lander containing a rover in a cargo bay, and a tank to give it the extra 'oomph' it needed to get there and back. Hopefully. It's definitely gotten there. I'll try for the landing tomorrow. As I was playing, I took note of all the bugs and other things in the game I took issue with. Duna is beautiful, but it's not a short list.

I know the "story" aspect of the game is in its utmost infancy, and I'm sure what's in the game now is a barebones version of what we might have in, say, ten years. That said, I think the whole aspect of finding these giant monoliths moves a bit too quickly as it is right now. Once you've made your first timid steps toward the Mun, you're basically immediately presented with the reveal of the giant exposed arch. And once you're there, the game leads you right to the monument on Minmus, then to Duna without delay. I hope that in the future these signals require more effort to locate, uncover, and decipher. For instance, the site on Minmus looks ripe to actually require excavation. Imagine if that crater was filled in with dirt and the signal was detectable just below by rovers. The Mun arch could be something that requires uncovering at first too. And I hope that the deciphering of the "Welcome, younger sibling" message can require some actual effort by the player someday as well. In short, I hope that it's possible to play the game for a longer time without knowing if there are other advanced civilizations in space, then without knowing for sure the source of the mystery signals. In real life, we've spent a long time exploring space without knowing whether we'll find life there. We go out of hope, and wonder of what we DO find. Pushing the reveal too early like this might take away from players discovering those reasons to travel to space.

I noticed that the Mun arch monument debrief shows only four dots around the green orb, representing four moons of Jool instead of five, which is inconsistent with that monument as well.

I played the update a bit last night and found it quite a bit less painful than the initial versions. I had fun launching a few missions in Exploration mode and getting the first part of a two-launch Mun landing mission underway. The layout of the science tree is interesting and I'm curious to see how it'll play out compared to the original. There are still some things that bug me. To name a few: Click+drag to move up and down the rocket in the VAB is still worse than scrolling. I need the convenience of the scroll wheel for traveling up and down the length of the rocket to check on different parts, not for changing the scale of zoom (which I'll do less frequently). The parts manager is too tall and big for what I want to use it for. The old "click on a part" method from KSP1 was more intuitive as to which parts you're managing at a time, and more convenient to move windows around. Overall, I think the interface is not very efficient at conveying information - there's often a lot of style to elements but I find myself having to study the UI to learn where things are, which is problematic when there is a lot of information I need to keep track of moment-to-moment in flight. Maybe I'll learn how to read it better over time. I'm a big fan of Kerbal Engineer where I can choose a subset of information screens depending on what I'm doing and arrange them in my own preferred configuration. A few buggy things, like the camera switching directions occasionally, the skybox flipping over when I surpass 20 km altitude, or my spacecraft mysteriously speeding up slightly in the upper atmosphere. And a few things that I find weird or convoluted. For instance, the first Mun mission 'contract' requires that the spacecraft orbit higher than 60 km. I like to send my spacecraft to 20 km, so I did that instead. I performed two Mun orbit rendezvous sandwiching a full landing mission, flag and boots and all, and when that was done I raised the periapsis to 60 km to fulfill the silly requirement. Of course, the next milestones were to land and plant a flag in the same geome I'd just been to, but weren't considered complete. Performing a "first exploration" of the Mun should be more open to interpretation, it could be a flyby, landing, or totally intentional ballistic impact.

Isn't it already more economical to launch 24 Falcon 9s for a single lunar mission than one SLS?

The only thing that would make a difference is if your cylinder has different properties along the length.

I saw an aurora last night.

I think the papery stuff could still have been on the outside, as the ocean 'washed' but didn't scrub. Probably bits of ablative material that got sucked back onto the nose end of the spacecraft and toasted as the air has to follow the vehicle to fill the gap left behind it. This window is on the front facing up toward the nose, and on the inside of the spacecraft things should have been getting pulled toward the other side, away from the window and behind the camera by the g's.

I watched the whole thing lamenting that there wasn't any audio included, and then realized my computer speakers were muted. Time to enjoy again!

He's stated on multiple occasions that the video was low in quality, which might be one of the main reasons. If someone's selling a still of it online for $500, though, it must be possible to find it somewhere. Typically this NASA stuff is free to the public, etc.

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/in-this-image-from-a-nasa-video-a-plasma-like-substance-news-photo/1773668 Here's a still frame from the video.

The first shot in the "Landing" section at the very end of this (48:30) might be a small part of it, I can't tell for sure though. It's just a shot of the atmosphere, apparently rotating about a bit as the Shuttle maneuvered.

Indeed...though it technically is the correct term for what happened to the steel after the FTS went off.

The velocity they were reporting was 6700 m/s, how close is that to the final velocity?

It looked like something maybe happened right at shutdown of the second stage.