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!

Regrettably, I didn't get any screenshots or video from the first half of my descent into Big Crater. I only started recording after I started believing that I would survive. I had to keep giving it a little gas to keep the wheels on the ground. Catching a little vacuum as things start to level out. Stopping on the first real ledge, still rolling backwards Group photo. Big mistake. Had to F9. It's dangerous to leave the ship. Strange things happen down here. Seeing some odd looking rocks on the crater bottom. Doing some flips near a cool mini-crater Camp 2. About halfway from Big Cliff to the impact site. Bop is fun to drive on when you get the hang of it! Quite challenging too.

Progress! After my last update, I got a little distracted by everything else in life and didn’t play KSP for a few months. Last night, I finally got around to loading up my save and checking whether Rover 4 was still functioning in the current build. It was right where I left it, on the rim of Big Crater. I had pretty much decided that descending into the crater in one piece was unlikely to work, but decided to give it another shot just for fun. To my surprise, I was successful. I started out riding the brakes, but before long I was accelerating out of control. After launching off a bump I was more or less in flight, so I spun around and used my nuclear engine to decelerate until I got the wheels back on the ground. In this manner I was able to roll backwards down the 26km near-vertical cliff face into the crater without exploding. Next objective is to find the lowest point and commune with the kraken there. Then, hopefully, drive back out in one piece and complete my circumnavigation. More updates (and pictures) coming soon!

Chapter 4 - Back to Bop after the first patch Patch 1 has been out for a little while and the reports seem good. I was thinking I would wait for another patch before my next run on Bop, but then I saw that NaughtyMonster had completed the first recorded KSP2 rover circumnavigation of an orbital body by driving around Minmus. Congrats to @NaughtyMonster. Anyway, this convinced me that my mission is probably feasible now. I hopped to the VAB and created Rover 14. The design is similar to Rover 11, as you can see. With great difficulty, after many attempts, I managed to get Rover 14 into orbit. I kept losing control and flipping around uncontrollably or just spontaneously exploding on the way up. It was very frustrating, because I have no real idea what was going on, or if it was due to bugs or features. Anyway, I finally got up there and headed off to Bop. I didn't take any screenshots of the launch, unfortunately. But here's Jeb making his transfer burn. And getting a Jool orbit. The transfer went very smoothly and I did not encounter any bugs up to this point. Although my retractable solar panels wouldn't open for some reason. They said they were blocked. I had some RTGs too, so no worries. And I've heard a rumor that electric use isn't even in the game yet anyway. Matching Bop's inclination. I had a bug here where I could not see the ascending and descending nodes. I had to reboot the game to fix this. Getting an encounter. There she is again. Decelerating into orbit. Mirkwood Crater (yes I named it) looms off to the side. Apparently, parts of the surface are holograms. The sun shines right through them. Evidence of little green men? Surely. But what does it mean? I circularized in a high orbit. One annoying thing about Bop is that you can only time warp to 4x unless you are quite high up. 50km, I believe. Also, when I dropped out of time warp at a low altitude, my wheels spontaneously fell off, and I had to go back to an earlier save. So I set a 115km orbit to be as safe as possible and to be able to timewarp at a reasonable pace. After timewarping until I got a little sunlight on that side of the moon, I went in for a landing on the rim of Mirkwood Crater. At this point, I realized my sky crane was missing. I designed this rover with a sky crane for a nice horizontal landing. At some point though, it disappeared. Whether I accidentally removed it in the VAB without realizing, or whether something happened to it during the mission, I do not know. Anyway, I still had plenty of delta vee in my transfer stage, and Bop is pretty forgiving. I was just afraid to timewarp on the way down, because I didn't want my wheels to fall off again, so I had to do the whole thing in 1x. I don't know why my command module is highlighted, It just did that on its own, and there didn't seem to be any way to turn it off. Anyway, the landing went well. Here's a video of the landing for anyone who wants to see it. The scenery was nice on the way down. Of course, Jeb immediately had to send it into Mirkwood Crater. Oh no! Mirkwood Crater has many hidden dangers, it seems. Perhaps, it would be wiser to go around. Anyway, my next step is to press F9. Will my wheels immediately fall off, ending the mission? Or will I drive onwards to victory? Tune in for the next chapter to find out!

I actually like the square flowers that visibly sprout from the ground as you approach them. They are cute.

2. Otherworldly Connections. First real look at Duna. Very pretty! Proofs:

Destination Duna (0.1.0.0) Challenge Completion Pictures- Nice challenge!

Chapter 3: Rover Testing I'm still waiting for a few bugs to be patched before I make another run at Bop, but I'm still working on this project by trying to build better rovers. One idea that I played around with for awhile was that since the rover wheels are all so bad, maybe I should make a rover without wheels. Look at this magnificent beast. Elegant in it's simplicity, no? This thing could go 30 m/s no problem and climb hills as if they weren't even there. In many respects it was my best performing rover yet. The one thing that it could not do, unfortunately, is steer. So I went back to the drawing board and made Rover 11. This is my first nuclear rover. She could handle nicely at speeds up to 40 m/s on Kerbin. Here I let her rip on the runway. Sadly, she couldn't handle the steep slopes near the KSC even under full throttle. Sorry, it was dark and Rover 11 was wearing her camo paintjob. I was ok with that, though. This rover was intended for Bop and I figured it would perform much better in low gravity. So I headed off to Minmus to try it in a lower gravity environment. The landing went pretty well. The only bug I experienced on the way over was the thing where the trajectory disappears from the next SOI. My sky crane didn't jettison successfully either, but that was my own bad design. I was able to shake it off. Rover 11 performed quite well on Minmus. She could climb fairly steep slopes decently even without the engine. The extra acceleration was really nice though. Even just twitching the throttle gave a nice boost. And it could do flips! First controlled rover flips in KSP2! This was the first rover design that I have really been pleased with in KSP2. I expect to take some variation of it to Bop after we get some bug fixes. After making decent time for 10km or so, I realized that I hadn't EVA'ed anyone to plant a flag. So I put her in park and Bill climbed out the hatch. He descended the ladder to the surface...then through the surface, to a different plane of existence. It was dark and Bill was scared. He was slowly falling through layers of unbeing, expecting to be consumed by the Kraken at any moment. But that didn't happen, and after awhile he got the idea to turn on his jetpack. He was able to climb back up into normal space, but when he got there, he saw Rover 11 being thrown up from the surface by some unknown force. Well, this situation clearly called for a quick load, right? Bill thought so too. Big mistake, as it turns out. The wheels fell off Rover 11. Every save going way back to orbit did the same. So, long story short - I'm really pleased about Rover 11, and I think I'm starting to understand some of the principles of rover building in KSP1. Little rovers and little wheels are meant for noodling around the landing site a bit. They are probably meant to be slow and useless. Expedition style rovers need to be big, use the new truck wheels, and have a source of propulsion adequate to the situation in which they are expected to be used. Fly dangerously my friends.

Yeah, I respectfully disagree. I enjoyed the fact that the easter eggs in KSP1 don’t have explanations, because that allowed the community to come up with their own explanations. There are fan made full length feature films (like a dozen of them) made from cinematic KSP1 footage, all revolving around the stories people made up to explain the anomalies. Also hilarious graphic novels. If the devs spell these things out for us then it just stifles our creativity. It’s way more fun for everyone if they just give us weird things to find, then sit back and laugh at what we do with it.

A little more on Rover 7 and the troubles she had. And her ultimate fate. Rover 7's wheels were fine, if slow, in testing on the launch pad. But during the flight they jittered around annoyingly all the way from the launch pad to Bop. I assumed they would stop when we landed, but that didn't happen. See the video below for the example. After landing, it tumbled slowly down the hill like this for about 2km. I couldn't control it at all - which I think I have figured out. The RoveMate probe core may not have a reaction wheel in KSP2. I thought that it did in KSP1. I'll definitely need a reaction wheel for Bop. Valentina, after exploring a bit, followed Rover 7 down the mountainside, attempting bravely to stop it's roll so she could at least try to drive it a bit. Then when I hit > to try to speed up the process, the rover just vanished. RIP Rover 7. Valentina looks at the spot where Rover 7 used to be as she contemplates what it will be like to spend the rest of her life on Bop with only a third of a tank of EVA propellant left. On a positive note, I will say that I do find the surface beautiful. The bigger rocks look cool, the landscape looks interesting. And EVAing around in a jetpack in low gravity feels so much smoother and more intuitive, even though the controls are the same.

Chapter 3 - 1st Rover Landing on Bop As of my last entry, I had been ready to give up on getting a rover into orbit, due to the devastating 21.5km bug. I was planning on just sending a minimalistic. rocket there just to at least take a look at the moon. I changed my mind, though, and decided to try one more rover design. Rover 7 I guess. This time I took a different approach, trying to minimize my part count, rather than trying to build a nice rover. If I could get any rover to Bop, I figured that would be progress. My final launch vehicle was 42 parts (or something like that). This time, the 21.5km kraken attack did not happen, although the rocket was oddly unstable between 8-20km or so. Not sure why, and think it may be due to a bug as well, as the build was straightforward. After several attempts, i managed to get to orbit, where things got easier (for awhile). Getting a Jool encounter was easy peasy. I even had a trajectory on the map after the SOI (huzzah!). This made me briefly consider attempting a gravity assist off Laythe or Tylo, but in the end I decided not to tempt the kraken. Ditching the ascent stage and burning for Jool. Jool is really something else in KSP2. Mind blown. More KSP2 porn. Love that new large nuclear engine. One of several maneuver nodes I created to make the transfer to Bop. Here is where bugs started making things difficult. As long as I did not load a save, things behaved as they should, but when loading saves my inclination would change, making it difficult to get an intercept. Unfortunately, I had to reload several times before I managed it, making repeated plane changes, It wasn't a mission ending bug, but a frustrating one. Burning for Bop And getting an orbit. After ditching the transfer stage, peering into the giant crater. No sign of any little green men yet. Circularizing. Unfortunately was a waste of fuel, as my orbital stats began wildly and apparently randomly began changing every time I loaded a save or came out of timewarp. The game also would randomly decide I was in a landed state and cause my trajectory to disappear. I intended to land in the big crater with some precision, but I realized quickly that that would be unfeasible. Surface detail on Bop. Very pretty. Valentina was pleased to be there. Setting her down nice and easy. After landing and jettisoning the sky crane, my rover began tumbling end over end down the slope. The controls were completely unresponsive, and the roll could not be stopped. If I had had the patience, maybe I could have circumnavigated the moon like that. At least p.a.i.g.e. acknowledges it as a successful landing. #KSP2WeeklyChallenge complete! This was my first landing anywhere btw (other than Kerbin). I observed this weird phenomenon on Bop. These little puffs of gas would appear, poof for a minute or so, then disappear. Valentina is off to investigate. Related to the alien doomsday weapon? Perhaps... Location of the first landing for reference. So I think this will be the last update before we get a patch or two. Just getting a rover to Bop was very challenging due to the bugs, and the surface seemed pretty unstable in general. Also I don't know why I couldn't control my rover on the ground. I expected my first effort to fail, so no biggie. Later, when the game is in a little better state, I'll give it another shot and continue to update this post. Until then, fly safe everyone!