KincaidFrankMF

They worked initially but gradually drifted out of alignment over time. It still flew, it just got jankier & jankier lol Mine was just a single-seater though, scientist + drone pilot, so it didn't need as much wing area. Lower ceiling, too. From memory, they're faster at sea level but a lot heavier - so mine topped out around 14k as a result. Just about enough with a tiny rocket carrying basically nothing but a 1k pod and an experiment case. Love the crazy wings on yours!

Funny how different your design is, given we took basically the same approach! Here's mine - I went for a seaplane with fan drives (heavy but fast). The rear cockpit allows access to the science bay, it has another one up front. As you can see, the foldable wings turned out to be a mistake given the wobbliness of hinges... Mine went even worse - the fan blades ended up rotated 90 degrees so they formed a circle rather than spokes, and gradually drifted outwards in a kind of ever-expanding giant chainsaw of doom. Which weirdly didn't affect the flight characteristics in any way The SWERV should help, but yeah the lack of tall mountains might make it impossible Thanks! Well, I have been struggling to get interest going for this one in KSP2...

Yeah, you've got it I was surprised no one posted the solution, but maybe more experienced players aren't looking for challenges as much as the newer ones. Did you see that one craft that got posted though? That is a beast.

Just saw your Eve SSTO vid @astrobond - that's incredible! Would never have thought that was possible. Wonder if you'd be interested in this? So far one brave soul's posted a brilliant, enormously complicated solution (I'm in awe), but no one's yet figured out the simpler way of doing it (Still tricky, but doable.)

Yep, definitely. Hopefully they'll get worked on soon. Ha! That's brilliant

Thanks! I found it was lighter to use extra chutes than try to convince landing legs not to snap... I just come down on the heat shields! They're tough as anything and give a reasonably wide, stable base. They handle 10m/s impacts no problem. The other thing to consider is the overall take-off weight from Kerbin, including the strategy for getting back home. Rather than bring along a heavy 10k command module, I just dock the lander to a mini "parachute stage" once it's back in orbit and refuel the swerv. There's a heat shield underneath the hitchhiker, so the lander can just decouple its engines and land a second time with the new chutes. Btw, is it just me or are fairings doing literally nothing at this point? Likewise cargo bays. Neither seem to help lifting off from Eve, where aerodynamic costs are really obvious.

I have absolutely no idea why I decided to wrap the docking port up in a faring, btw. I thiiiiiiiiink it's a leftover from an earlier design, back when I didn't realise you could still use docking ports as decouplers, and then I just liked the way it looks? But it's adding drag for no reason lol

Actually, after a bit of tweaking I can do better - 144t, made it to orbit with 600dv spare. I start the gravity turn much earlier - around 4-5k but keeping it very gentle. And all wrapped up for atmo entry... Love it. Mine seemed to separate ok without, but they often don't.

Ah, grumble seats. My guys travelled in comfort Did a bit of experimenting, and I still can't make vectors come out better than darts - even with the improved aerodynamics they're about 350dv short. Could just be a less efficient setup though - adapting a design isn't the same as building it that way from the ground up...

I haven't tried using purely vectors rather than darts (reduced part count might be another factor to throw into the mix) but can confirm the SWERV is amazing in this build. It's overkill, sure, what we really need is a mini SWERV with the same ISP but even so... it needs so little fuel that it ends up far, far lighter than a methalox alternative.

Good old-fashioned trial and error Very much the case. You need something capable of remaining perfectly stable during entry, that's nevertheless light and still stable when going the other way for blast off. I found dart-asparagus best for a one-kerbal science mission. Under Pressure is a whole other challenge - the lack of gimbal was a real problem for me, so I ended up using a vector sustainer core surrounded by dart asparagus boosters. But huge reaction wheels might have worked too (must admit I didn't try). The biggest surprise was how small you can make a craft for UP. My ten-kerbal lander was maybe three times the mass of the one-kerbal version (172t for atmospheric entry, 154t at take-off - and I'm sure it can be done lighter!)

Which is where the discussion started, with Mitokandria's excellent post. This is starting to get heated though, and it doesn't need to be. It's really, really obvious why a lot of folks are disappointed. And let's face it, even a "perfect" sequel would have split the community because we all want different things from it - again, why Mito is right to say expectations needed to be managed from the get-go with a razor sharp definition of what KSP2 was/is supposed to be. Personally, I just finished a very thorough 50% science playthrough, collecting every scrap of science in the Kerbolar system except for a couple of spots on Eve (and any discoverables I missed), and enjoyed it enormously. It's the most thorough game of KSP I've managed in ages, and the first for years that ended in achieving my goal rather than eventually getting bored and drifting off. By the standards of any other game, KSP2 has already achieved full VFM for me. For other people it is and always will be a bitter disappointment, and that's just as valid.

I'm starting to think it doesn't have off-Kerbin construction at all, just bases that look pretty but do nothing. Screw it, I'm going to try & combine them (waits for the entire install to collapse in a heap...)

Agreed, neither is realistic. Honestly don't know if it's possible to gamify a more realistic approach. Absolutely. KCT took a more realistic approach there IIRC. Redesigning launchers is fun though... It's that balance between sim & game, hard to get right at the best of times and impossible for everyone at the same time. Eep, that doesn't sound encouraging at all. I don't know a thing about the technical side of things, was hoping optimising would eventually do the trick... That sounds bad. On the plus side, KSP1 isn't going anywhere. At least there's now a single game version for modders to work with, rather than everything going out of date constantly.

That sounds AWESOME. I've just started a playthrough based on this -> https://youtu.be/UKbWx-bTOw0?si=bD_Sd9QOdEjK8ojX but haven't got far enough to see how the bases work. Wonder if it would be compatible...