NXDIAZ

Looking back on it, I probably should've clarified that floating Venus colonies were something I hadn't really done too much research on. Anyway, this is all some pretty interesting information you've provided. It's not as if I haven't discounted the idea of a floating Venetian colony. It's just always seemed as something that would be an extreme design challenge like nothing humanity has not seen in it's entire existence, even compared to a Mars colony. I mainly bring this up because this is one of those situations where it's a concept that has never been done before. Call me uncreative, but it just seems hard to imagine people living inside a Venetian fleet of zeppelins, surviving in the upper atmosphere without much maintenance in a realistic way. Then again, we did say similar things about reusable rockets in the past, and now Falcon 9s are landing so often they might as well be air liners, and two fully reusable rockets are on the way in the US alone, so who really knows.

May I remind you that Venus is still not a good option? Most of the reasons why happen to do with the atmosphere. Venus, because of it's enormous levels of greenhouse gasses, is incredibly hot, meaning that anything that lands on the surface of Venus will have to be built to not only be strong against the atmospheric pressure, but temperature resistant against a day time that can melt lead. The planet's day is longer than its year, making it so that such a material would have to sustain a constant stream of heat. Inflatable habitats would probably not be able to sustain humans; I'm not a scientist, but if you even want a chance of properly inflating a habitat module capable of withstanding 92 bar without crushing the hapless astronauts involved, you'll probably want to use a lot of Helium, since it is the second least dense gasses in the universe. Hydrogen is a horrible idea because it is reactive to oxygen, but regardless of whether it's helium or not, you'll still have to make sure a large chunk of your air is breathable, otherwise the hapless astronauts are either gonna be short of breath, constantly tired and gasping, or very, very dead. But you can't use an earthlike atmospheric make up for something that's supposed to be inflated unless it's at a high pressure that would otherwise crush the astronauts. Like I said, I'm not a scientist, so there could be a way for an inflatable habitat to work on Venus, but it really does not seem like there's a way that's possible with practical science. I haven't even gotten into the fact that the data we have on Venus suggests that sulfuric acid rain is a common occurrence on the planet. I don't need to explain why that's bad. But okay, lets just assume that we somehow manage to overcome all of those challenges and land on Venus with the first supplies for a proper base. How do you plan on getting the rocket back? How are you going to make continuous and repeated supply missions to Venus cost effective and sustainable? Any other KSP player whose done an interplanetary mission can tell you that atmospheric rocket launches back to Eve orbit are some of the most difficult things anyone can do in the game. Now Venus has a little less than half of Earth's gravity, but that is not the problem. 92 bar atmospheric pressure would make it that even an F-1 engine strapped to a small fuel tank couldn't fly there. The only way you could possibly get a craft to rise from Venus's atmosphere would be using propellers, and that would be impractical, or at the very least difficult to design around with a rocket that needs to enter the atmosphere in the first place. But you also have to put into perspective that we use multi-stage rockets to get to Earth orbit just with our own atmosphere. Fully reusable rockets are an impossibility for a Venus colonization mission, even if it was possible, and that makes such a venture infinitely more expensive. Now I can raise the counterpoint that there have been proposals to create floating colonies on Venus that would sustain themselves above the Venetian sulfuric cloud layer. This is actually a somewhat good idea on paper, solving most of the problems caused by the atmosphere, and could possibly be done in practicality, but designing for that type of colony would be grueling and resource expensive on a scale humanity might not be ready to handle for it's first colony beyond the Earth-moon system. In your post you question what the point is in colonizing mars when the ground is toxic, the sun blasts ionizing radiation on it, and the gravity will make keeping humans healthy an issue, and then point to a planet with conditions up to 40 times worse than Mars that would make colonization significantly harder, maybe impossible without terraforming or floating platforms, both of which we can't do to the level needed for a colonization mission with the technology we have now. If we were talking about the moon this would be a completely different situation, as it would be significantly easier to establish a human colony on the moon than on mars, and would be more rewarding from an Earth-centric point of view, despite that coming with its own challenges. But that would be just what it would be - Earth-centric. Colonizing Mars to many people is not about the practicalities of creating a self-sustaining colony on Mars, it's about expanding humanities' horizons beyond the sphere of Earth by creating it, practicalities be damned. It's about taking the first steps to bringing humanity into a truly extraplanetary future for the first time ever. As mentioned before, to some, it even could relevant to the survival of the human species itself. You talk about the US government wanting to colonize Mars for petty reasons, but the US government largely doesn't want to go to Mars, at least not until the current Artemis program plans are finished. Support for a colony on mars in the US is largely coming from the people (and by "the people" I don't mean rich billionaires like Elon). People fantasize about it, romanticize it, sometimes to a distracting degree. But they do it because they genuinely see it as the next giant leap for mankind, the natural next answer to the question "where will we go next?", perilous dangers and life threatening conditions be damned. Not many people outside theoretical scientists and sci-fi artists can say that they feel the same way about Venus. The gas giants are too far, the asteroid belt too low gravity, and Mercury too small and irradiated to be used for much more than distant-future dyson-sphere materials. Really the only two places we can go right now are Mars and the moon. In the role of the dice that caused our solar system to be made this way, our two closest next door homes are a cold, toxic rock that gets bathed in solar radiation, and a close, lifeless rock that at one point in it's orbit gets absolutely blasted by solar radiation for a few days straight. This is the hand we've been dealt and a lot of people are willing to role with it if it means that a human can step foot and stay on another world.

Please ignore the parts about the crashes, after further testing, that is definitively not a parallax issue. It seems Eve is much more of a hellscape than I thought...

So, I don't know if this is a parallax issue, or if I did something wrong in the design process, but when trying to land my super light eve probe going no faster than 3 meters per second, it instantly crashes at an absurd speed for eve in atmosphere for some reason. Also, there seems to be a glitch with parallaxes where the terrain disappears. This is the newest version, and collisions are off. Here is the log leading up to the crash and during the crash. EDIT: Also, this is not happening on Kerbin. I'm gonna check if this is an issue with some other mod.

Hollow Planets are not possible, or at least in the way you're describing with planet-wide cave systems and what not. It would have to be a Gilly or Minmus sized moon for this to even theoretically make any sense.

There seems to be a compatibility issue of some sort between KSP when Restock is installed vs when its uninstalled concerning the base game RCS thrusters, because the game seems to be automatically removing any craft or debris with RCS thrusters between when I install the mod vs when the mod isn't installed. Sorry for not elaborating earlier.

So I tested it, and other than making the rotating docking parts inaccessible and changing the RCS so that the variants are each their own seperate part (which seems to be an issue from the last version), the mod seems to work fine in 1.12. BTW, that RCS issue is a big one, I lost multiple probes w/ RCS due to loading in with the mod installed after having them be vanilla.

@NerteaWhile your working on updating the mod, would it be possible for us to disable the docking port replacements through the mod config files as a temporary fix for 1.12?

Good news! I was able to find out why the mod was conflicting with KSP 1.11 and causing it to hang on the loading screen whenever certain mods were installed. When starting up the game, module manager immediately throws an exception upon reading the Soundtrack Editor Forked mod folder. I don't know much more outside of that, but from the looks of it, it seems as though each time the game starts up, module manager misidentifies the mod as being a module manager dependent mod, and because this mod was not made with module manager in mind, it causes module manager to throw an exception. Until the OP updates the mod for KSP 1.11, I don't think this issue will be fixed, but I think if there's some way to make it so that module manager doesn't read the Soundtrack Editor Forked mod folder, that should stop module manager from trying to load the mod. I'll post the module manager exeption line here in case that helps: EDIT: Nevermind, I just forgot one of the dependencies. Sorry for the inconvenience