Robin Patenall

Emerald Star 2 Introducing the Emerald Star 2. This is a recreation of my Emerald Star mission to the moons of Jool in KSP1 but in KSP2. Over the last couple of weeks I have been spending time designing the mission, building the Emerald Star's separate modules and assembling them together in orbit. Currently the Emerald Star is in a 125km orbit of Kerbin, masses 457 tonnes (wet mass) and with it's 196 tonnes of hydrogen remass has a main drive deltaV of 7970m/s. The mission plan is: Eject from Kerbin and capture into an elliptical equatorial orbit of Tylo, either using the main drive or by doing a gravity assisted capture. Detach a drive core, the Starlab module, the Tylo descent stage and the lander and bring it into low equatorial orbit of Tylo Land with the Tylo descent stage and then boost the lander back into orbit to rejoin with the drive core and Starlab module Refuel the drive core (including extra Methalox) and lander and send this off to Pol Arrive at polar Pol orbit and land the lander several times then onto Bop Arrive at polar Bop orbit and land the lander several times then onto Vall Arrive at Vall orbit and land the lander once (expanding all the Methalox) then onto Laythe The main ship and SSTO transfers from Tylo to elliptical equatorial orbit Laythe Reassemble the ship and refuel Detach a drive core, the Starlab module, SSTO adapter and SSTO and change inclination to polar orbit Land the SSTO on Laythe, re-orbit and re-dock to the drive core If possible, refuel and land again. Possibly, this could be done on the equator so the SSTO could be returned to the main ship. Detach the SSTO and reassemble in elliptical Laythe orbit Assemble a drive core and habitat module to return to Kerbin. There is a crew of six kerbals, with five of them being trained as mission specialists for the individual moons where they will collect as much science as possible for return to Kerbin.

Science from distant shores I touched down on Eeloo with an autonomous rover to collect science from the most distant planet. Data and samples were collected from three biomes over the course of a few days (not all four as I'm not a masochist and the Kerbals apparently used kraken bone in the constructions of the wheels, thus I spend far too long with the rover upside down). All data has been transmitted and the rover was re-docked with the lander module to carry the samples back to orbit where they were transferred to the return probe which has (as Eeloo was still near the Kerbin AN) launched for a very slow trip home.

Welcome to Dres Station: Over the long weekend, I managed to get the three parts of Dres station into orbit of Dres and all docked together in orbit so the three plucky kerbonauts can begin sucking it dry of all the tasty science. All three nuclear boosters are still attached, but the two docked to the forward node have been emptied of hydrogen and are being used as storage for excess methalox until the lander has travelled to the surface a couple of times and used it up. Once that happens a dash of H2 will be returned to them and they'll be deorbited. Hopefully once that is done and the rover is on the surface my frame rate will improve.

In KSP 1 where manoeuvres were modelled as a single impulse, it sort of made sense to allow them to have any deltaV the player wanted, but with the KSP2 model where the manoeuvre is correctly modelled over time there's going to be issues if you exceed your real deltaV. With the new planning model the predicted acceleration of the vessel needs to change over the manoeuvre as the mass of the vessel decreases / the TWR increases and if you can exceed your vessel's deltaV then you'd either: have to special case what happens when you run out of fuel (i.e. how much does the acceleration change over time when you're burning non-existent propellant) run into the point when you have so much negative mass of propellant that your vessel has zero mass and infinite acceleration Neither of these cases make for good manoeuvre predictions. But I do understand that some sort of planning mode where you can model future missions to determine the amount of dV needed before designing the vessel would be useful.

I used to use a mod in KSP1 called Tac Self Destruct which was basically this. The part could be staged or manually triggered, have a configured countdown and then destroy itself, destroy itself and it's parent part (turns anything into a decoupler) or destroy the whole vessel. It was very helpful for dealing with spent stages and empty fuel tanks in deep space or for those annoying parts that you couldn't do EVA construction with.

I think I've already been sent to Kerbal Heck (like Kerbal Hell but for minor offences) as I'm currently driving across Moho's Degraded Crater (KSP2) without any altitude maps. I keep running into very long >100 meter high cliffs and have to backtrack which, along with the "spin out every km" and "timewarp (non-physics) causes rovers to fall through the ground" bugs, is beginning to get very tiresome. In KSP1, I did circumnavigate Moho in a rover (going to all biomes) and I now remember why I said "never again".

Reported Version: v0.2.1 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes OS: Windows 11 (64 bit) | CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor | GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 | RAM: 65450 Mb Description: I believe (99.9%) that I caught the Starlab producing samples / data for the wrong biome during time warp. I had a Starlab in a low polar orbit of Kerbin (about 113km) I had done the experiment for Water, Ice and Desert biomes successfully I was doing the experiment for the Moutains biome ("Running requires Mountains") I was at 10x time warp The experiment timer reached zero when I was in a region where the biome changed rapidly Instead of getting data / samples for the Mountains biome I got data / samples for the Highlands biome I had not been running the experiment for the Highlands biome. I was able to repeat the experiment for the Mountains biome and complete it successfully. I suspect that there may be an issue with the Starlab producing data / samples for the biome that the vessel is currently over when the timer reaches zero, rather than the biome that it was running the experiment for and my vessel changed biome at the very last instant, giving me the erroneous science. This is likely to be very difficult to replicate, so I am submitting this in hope that a dev may have a quick inspection to see if there is anything obvious and if anybody else notices the issue they can add to this post.

If you mean my Moho probe, then yes, the decouples were cross-feed enabled and I went around manually moving fuel from the outer tanks to the inner core after every burn (I wish they'd fix the bug in the resource transfer UI as I'm running unmodded at the moment). I didn't use fuel lines much in KSP1 (cross-feed and fuel priority did a lot of the work) and may not have even unlocked them when I launched it. You only really need them if you are doing things in a hurry, if you have time between burns they are unnecessary. I did have issues with dV calculations in the VAB and spent some time building it without decouples, checking the dV, reducing the fuel levels to reduce the dV to each post-burn level and removing the drop tanks to simulate decoupling. There were actually another pair of the 2.5m small tanks on the top of the side tanks that help fuel the initial orbital insertion and the first 250m/s of periapsis kick. It's on it's way back to Kerbin now, I did the initial Moho to Kerbin orbital height burn and the inclination burn at Kerbol AP to put it in Kerbin's plane but It's having to do a couple of Moho / Kerbin orbit loops to get everything aligned for the final rendezvous burn.

Ah, I realise I should have been clearer. It's my first in KSP2, so not as impressive. I had quite a station around Moho in KSP1 (ISRU and everything), but not having any mods running in KSP2 (specifically anything to make the manoeuvre plans easier to adjust) it was harder than I remember

Today I reached my first non-Kerbin celestial body ... (Editedd for clarity: in KSP2, I've done most places in KSP1) Moho! Don't judge me, I'd just unlocked nuclear engines and I was coming up on the annual reliable Moho transfer window with an age to go before any window for anywhere else (i.e. Duna). All I have on board is environmental science so I'm only going to get 540 science points, and I'm going to have to get it back for even that, but I'm pretty tapped out for Kerbin. I did include a relay satellite to support future missions. (Objects in image are closer than they appear)

The Kerbal Space Centre press department presents... "Mun Lab 1" This is a very basic space station used to support a detailed survey of the Mun and recovering science and samples from a variety of sites across the surface. This is possible as the station was placed in a polar orbit, allowing landings to be performed anywhere. It is based around a MK1-3 command pod that has been reconfigured as sleeping quarters, a MK2 lander can reconfigured as living / work space and tanks holding the Methalox fuel for the lander, which you can see is docked to the forward spinal docking port. Docked to the dorsal and ventral docking ports are two crew return modules that can return a kerbal back to Kerbin. One of these has just been brought up by the latest refuelling mission which you can see in the background. This is the first flight of the V2 refueller model which added a parachute and the ability to detach the command bay so it should be able to act as a sample return system so we don't need a kerbal to hand deliver any collected samples. With the current refuelling mission the tanks are about 75% fuel giving Mungee Kerbal, the current occupant, the capacity for about 16 landings. Mungee Kerbal was joined for a short time by Bob Kerbal to help set up all the systems and for Bob to test the lander. Bob did this by landing in an area of the Mun that was extremely boring, so boring in fact that no kerbal should ever go there again. Any data and samples he collected while on the surface, and immediately returned to Kerbin with (in the crew return module he came up in), were just as boring and, according to public records, were immediately thrown out before anybody else saw them. Since Bob left, Mungee has visited the surface four times, collecting vital scientific data from diverse regions of the Mun.

I've done a couple of docks recently and the only actual bug I noticed was that on one attempt my craft suddenly flew away from each other, which I'm not sure is a docking issue but a 'craft in close proximity' issue. I did find the markers on the navball a lot more jittery than in KSP1 which is a problem with my style of slow approach docking (<0.3m/s) and SAS target lock did send me spinning. Docking without mods (in KSP1 I used "Navball docking alignment indicator", "NavHud" and a docking camera) was a bit more difficult and took me a couple of tries, but I'm out of practice. I'm more surprised by the "teleport a meter and adjust attitude by 30 degrees" style of docking that KSP2 has over the bouncy magnets of KSP1. I do think the minimum KSP2 should have is the "parallel to docking port" marker on the navball that "Navball docking alignment indicator" generates, that makes it much easier to learn the skill.

Reported Version: v0.2.1 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes OS: Windows 11 (64 bit) | CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core Processor | GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 | RAM: 65450 Mb Low priority issue that Kerbals (or at least Bob) appear to twerk when in shallow water. What I did: Flew simple rocket West from KSC and splashed down in shallow water (in beach region) EVA'd kerbal and took crew report and surface sample (splashed down / beach) Swam to water line to repeat science on dry land (landed / beach) Kerbal stood up when water was shallow (knee to waist height) When not controlling kerbal, it would perform squats / twerk Probably cycling between "I'm in water so I need to switch to swim mode" and "The water is too shallow so I need to switch to walk mode" Walking to dry land or deeper water stopped the issue What I'd expect: The kerbal to make up it's mind whether it needs to swim or stand Or Situational music to be added that the kerbals can dance to. Included Attachments: KSP2Bug1.mp4

Perhaps for Eve there should be a couple of missions before the "Land and return 10 Kerbals" one. I'm thinking of "Land a probe on Eve and send back data" and "Retrieve surface samples from Eve" which would at least provide a few stepping stones in the difficulty levels.

I had a contract pack in KSP 1 that did something like this and I hated them. It was always "take a surface sample at this point" a few km from a Kerbal, then "take a surface sample at that point" a few km further away and so on. More than once I had to go rescue a Kerbal that didn't have enough EVA fuel to return or got annoyed that I'd started off with a rover to get to the first few spots but needed a lander to get to the last one, where it would have been better to do them all with a lander if I had known. A contract / mission really needs to be upfront about what needs to be done to be completed so the player can choose whether they want to track it.