Sp1f

Threaded the needle on Eeloo.

Let us slow down or even (dare I say it?) reverse time. For those awesome stunts that just needed a little tweak to pull off.

Oh come on, you can’t tease us like this and not share the video. Give us the link!

In no particular order… 1. More visually helpful map mode. Was doing an intercept last night - orbital stats for the target ship were not always visible. There was also a confusing set of ascending/descending nodes (for the Mun itself perhaps?) that was actually more visible than those for the craft I was trying to intercept. Clean it up. 2. Improved rover wheel performance. We need wheel options that go fast and climb hills. 3. Rover testing track at the KSC with slopes, rollers, jumps, obstacles, etc. 4. VAB workspaces. After 70 hours I still don’t have a clue how these work. The system is so unintuitive. I just want to save my builds in progress regularly with just 1 click. Make it so. 5. Add a cool discoverable to the Bop crater and only tell me, specifically me, that it will be there about a week before you add it, so I can find it first. 6. Lights don’t seem to work anymore. I swear they did before the recent update. Fix em so I can see my spaceships. 7. Give us reasons to feel invested in individual kerbals. This could be a recruitment and skill progression system like KSP1, or better - let us customize them. 8. More discoverables like the Mun arch that can be flown through. I do love flying things through things. 9. Make the Mun great again. KSP1 Mun was a roller-coaster ride. Every inch of it was cratered. Lots of stuff to jump a rover off of. KSP2 Mun is flat and boring. 10. A vanilla overlay that does what the Trajectories mod does in KSP1. Being able to more easily do precision landings is a game changer.

woohoo Jeb!

Boo! Kerbin is the most beautiful and highly developed planet in KSP1, with the most easter eggs too. Kerbin is awesome. I’m not saying they should force you to spend time on Kerbin. I don’t want a linear exploration mode where you must do every mission in a specific order. I want to see a variety of optional missions that provide options to explore Kerbin or space, especially in the early game. But if you choose to focus on space instead, the game should be smart enough to pivot to wherever you are at in your space exploration. I also think it should be smart enough that if you skip right past the early LKO or moon missions and start sending kerbals to Jool or something with early tech (always a favorite challenge in KSP1), the missions should also skip to that kind of content. Progression should not be strictly linear, as it appears to be now.

While at work, I quietly debated going straight to sandbox mode and then directly to Bop to complete my mission. But I really wanted to give exploration mode a try, and all my KSP1 circumnavigations have been in Career Mode. So I uninstalled the game and did a clean reinstall. This solved so many issues for me. I think I have really been playing hardmode and not realizing it. Anyway, cool game now, I like it. DId some Kerbin orbits and stuff.

The flight report has buttons to link to the training center and KSC. Why not mission control too? If I complete a mission, recover the vessel and get the nice flight report popup, it would be nice to just 1 click straight to Mission Control to submit my report. Specific rover testing track at KSC. Is that an UI thing? Probly not, but I suggest it anyway. People have always tested rovers around KSC on runways and the grasslands ang hills in the area. Why not a dedicated track with slopes, obstacles, jumps, etc. People would do races and challenges on it too. Make it happen devs, I have believed in you from the start.

First impressions! I’ve only played for about an hour and a half so I’m sure there’s a lot that I haven’t seen. I have done 2 suborbital launches and 1 orbital w/return. Very simple crafts but my launches went smoothly, no sign of wobbliness or crashing into invisible walls, so great improvement there. My understanding was that there was supposed to be re-entry heating. No sign of it so far. Yet I see some people have commented on it. Hmmm…maybe I’ll try a clean reinstall and see if I can get it too. Or maybe the parameters for when it kicks in are different than KSP1 and my crafts just haven’t qualified. Dunno. First mission- launch first rocket. I go up to 110km and return safely. Second mission- get to space. Briefing says that so-and-so doesn’t believe KSP can get to space. Got to get there to prove them wrong. Er…didn’t we just get back from space? In KSP1 career mode if you completed a “worlds first milestone” out of order, you would get credit for it and mission control would direct you to the next thing. KSP2 isn’t that smart yet I guess. 3rd mission- go to orbit. Yep, yep. I noticed you can’t refuse missions like you could in KSP1. Not a big deal but when you combine that with not recognizing milestones already completed, I worry that the exploration mode progression is currently too linear. You should be able to skip missions or complete a number of milestones in a single launch without having to go back and forth to mission control. 4th mission-go to Mun. The pacing of this seems excessively fast. This is like 45 minutes in at most. Right now exploration mode seems to be career mode, but with only the ‘worlds first milestone’ missions, none of the commercial missions. I feel like it needs more meat on the bone. Give us some reasons to explore kerbin for a few hours before turning our attention to the Mun. Or if I choose to go to Minmus first instead, or Duna or Bop or something, pick that plotline up and adapt without a hitch, Science collection- It’s a little unclear when I’m actually collecting science. Most of the time when I try to, it tells me I’m in an invalid location or something. But then after the mission I’ve got some science so I guess it is doing something right after all. Other thoughts- KSP2 kerbals still seem to have no sense of personality. I feel like individual skill progression for Kerbals in KSP1, as well as cost to hire them, results in a greater sense of investment in them, whereas in KSP2 your crew choice is like pulling names out of a hat. It’s very unsatisfying. I want to have favorite kerbals, or kerbals who are better suited to particular missions. Hopefully this will come.

...cough...ahem... Uh hey devs. wouldn't it be really cool if the For Science update included a really cool easter egg for me to discover in the Big/Mirkwood Crater? Just saying...

Chapter 6 - The Last Ride of Rover 14 With a last puff of fuel, Jeb got Rover 14 rolling downhill. I was actually able to drive for a surprisingly long distance. Again, it's hard to be sure exactly how long. It would be so nice to be able to plant flags and see them on the map as placemarkers, with coordinates and stuff, like in KSP1. Anyhoo, the light was getting a little spotty as our heroes rounded the curve of the moon away from the sun. The driving was still really fun. I haven't kept up with the details of every patch, but each time I come back to this, I feel like my rover drives a little better. I honestly don't know if improvements have been made or if I'm just getting better with practice, but either way. Rover 14 handled beautifully while coasting down this long descent on zero fuel. I was able to keep speed under control , do some flips, and had a great time. I don't remember this for sure, but were there always dust plumes behind the wheels while driving? Maybe the low angle of the sun was making them more noticable. Cool feature, (tracks would be nice though) They got about to here. Then unfortunately, while I zoomed out to take this screenshot...something bad happened. Rover 14 was in small pieces. Whether she crashed into something while I zoomed out, or whether the kraken attacked, I cannot say, but the expedition had come to its end. Jeb probably could have just used his jetpack to land safely, but as mission commander, he was determined to go down adjacent to his ship. After falling in a leisurely fashion for several minutes while our heroes contemplated the inevitability of death, Rover 14 crashed into the surface and exploded. Kerbonauts Elbro and Gilgee Kerman were killed instantly in the blast. Then Jebediah too crashed into the ground and perished. RIP the crew of Rover 14. The first losses of the Bop Program... unless you count Valentina who is believed to have been transported to an alternate universe, where she remains alive, out of jetpack fuel, and extremely bored on an alternate version of Bop. Thanks for reading! I've been taking a break from KSP2 but still having fun with it. Just had to come back and wrap this expedition up before the For Science update. After that one drops I plan to make a serious effort to bring this project to its conclusion. Until then o/

Chapter...uh...let's call it 5 - Mirkwood Crater Some of this was already covered in my video, but to catch us up in this thread's original format I'm going to share some screenshots. Soo..... in our last episode, Jeb and friends descended Big Cliff and then proceeded from Camp 1 to Camp 2. They then proceeded towards the Black Spot, the apparent epicenter of the calamity. The terrain remained rugged. There was a weird green structure looking thing in the Black Spot area that looked like it might be an anomaly, so Jeb laid in a course. When the arrived, it appeared to be a strange green crevice. Elbro theorized that the green coloration might be evidence of enriched kerbonium, suggesting that the blast was caused by a kermonukular weapon of immense power. Clearly, cause for concern. Gilgee thought it was reflected light from Jool. As we have already established, Gilgee is dumber than a bag of rocks. As you can see, the Green Crevice is a notable feature of the crater. Unfortunately, after pausing there for a moment, our heroes were mysteriously assaulted by the Kraken, and Rover 14 spontaneously exploded. Good thing for the F9 key. Next, our heroes proceeded to another spot that seemed likely to have a hidden anomaly - the crater at the center of the crater at the center of Mirkwood Crater. Jeb caught some wicked vacuum on the way there. Upon arrival at the Divet, there were no apparent anomalies. The area was fairly nondescript other than a few boulders. But then something weird happened. Rover 14 fell through the ground into a weird nether space below the space-time continuum. Jeb gunned the engines to try to climb back to reality, but they had no effect. Rover 14 sank uncontrollably. Anyway, F9. I will say that other than these two situations, Bop's surface has been free of any serious bugs. It has been stable, But it is weird that the two occasions when the game broke happened exactly in the two spots that I specifically investigated because they seemed like logical locations for easter eggs. I can't even begin to speculate what that might mean but it is weird. After this I began the climb back out of the crater. There were more flips. Eventually I reached a rim of sorts, but the terrain continued to slope steeply up. Eventually I climbed over a mountain ridge to the dark side of Gilly. I have been heavily, heavily dependant on my nuclear engine for this entire journey. Rover 14's wheels have very little traction here. To accelerate, I need the engine, To brake, I need the engine most of the time. This adventure is probably not going to qualify as an Elcano Challenge because of the use of upward facing engines, but oh well, it's still fun regardless. Maybe someone more clever than me can figure out how to make a rover work on Bop without a rocket engine, but honestly I can't see any other way to do it. I do try to keep things in the spirit of a rover expedition by using my engine only when the wheels are on the ground as much as possible, but nevertheless it sometimes feels less like a rover and more like a spaceship with wheels. Point being, I'm burning fuel. Just at the point where I crested the mountain ridge, I have 5 delta-vee left, but I'm pointed downhill. Route so far: I think I'm about a 3rd of the way around Bop. In the next chapter, I'm going to see how much further I can get on gravity alone, as I'm all but out of fuel. When I need to climb again, I'm probably going to need a new rover.

Best of luck! I'm excited to see more of Ike.

I'm a novice at making videos but decided to try to put together a video of my drive so far.

Flips!