Wheehaw Kerman

Speaking of KSP visuals, SpaceX really do seem to be actually trying to validate KSP2. First IFT-1 starts tumbling, IFT-3’s reentry footage looked very reminiscent of the For Science! re-entry effects, and of course the whole hardwar-rich rapid iterative testing approach…

Late to the party, but the Horn Section’s superior ISP may become very important when we have the rest of the game in place, and resource constraints in the hinterboonies make fuel efficiency paramount.

Has nybody else changed their opinion of the re-entry effects in light of the re-entry footage from IFT-3?

Can’t really speak to the tutorials - haven’t looked at them much. Paige lacks The Right Stuff - she NEEDS to be more Deke Slayton or Molly Cobb and a lot less Annoyingly Chipper Barista. The game is about a space program. It needs more steely-eyed missile kerb vibes - more KSP1 Jeb. For a mode titled Exploration, we seem to be not doing very much exploring and science gathering. Right now “Relic Hunting” seems a bit more apt. I’d love to see a bit more variety in the science instrumentation, more regions to hit, and more missions per CB - the progression seems very rushed. The Mun deserves more than a few shots.

This probably is why I’ve only noticed the chutes not opening big once - I always stage chutes with the last stage to drop before re-entry, which I do once it’s fuel is depleted, almost always before it hits atmo.

The Big Dumb Booster was a concept back in the day - e.g. Sea Dragon. Big, high thrust, simple and cheap makes a lot of sense before reusables. So there’s precedent to “dumb boosters” as a turn of phrase.

Chonker may be disguised training for Colonies.

I think the current burn planner doohickey is a step in the right direction, but needs significant debugging and expansion - for starters, dv expended and dv remaining in burn would be useful (in addition to the currently untrustworthy progress bar). I’ve taken to subtracting dv required from dv in stage and hitting x once the dv in stage hits that figure. A planning feature would be great - I have a dv map save on my phone and use that as a planning tool, but something in the game proper would be noob-educational as well as useful.

I actually think that the barren rocks are often pretty and fun to look at, and lots of fun to get to and land on - some Breaking Ground “science” experiments and resource exploration and extraction stuff would be really great. IMHO it’s “because it’s there”, not “because there are puppies, theme parks, and all the Froot Loops we can eat”. Some new planets in the Kerbolar system would be fun, but with Interstellar coming down the pike and some really wild CBs promised, I’m not hugely fussed either way.

That’s too bad. I thought they’d fixed that. It’s surprisingly powerful - worst case that I’ve seen.

So this afternoon I launched an orbital lab/science lander mission to Eeloo. I fine tuned my periapsis to about 22km, planned and executed my orbital insertion burn, and found to my surprise at the end of the burn that I was on an impact trajectory. I burned radial out, got my apoapsis raised satisfactorily, continued running and transmitting my science experiments, and then noticed (again to my surprise), about a quarter of the way around the planet, on the night side, that I was on an impact trajectory again. I had about 137 m/s d/v left, and burned all of that raising my apoapsis again. Same thing happened. I transmitted science, separated the lander, and managed a mildly hair raising landing while the lab crashed. The lander completed its science mission. I did not observe any entry heating. Either Eeloo still suffers from the orbital decay bug, or it’s got a tenuous atmosphere now. Anybody else notice this?

I’m pretty sure there are some bugs lurking there - last night I did an Eve probe lander consisting of a fairing aeroshell behind a heatshield, dropped it on an entry trajectory, and watched it not only pick up speed throughout the descent but also not heat up at all. It would have made a nice crater. Keeping the deorbit stage on until I hit atmo and saw flames and then decoupling it resulted in normal re-entry. So maybe there’s something about the heat shields that means the atmospheres don’t notice them?

The This was the plan since EA was announced - build all the systems with MP in mind, tie it all together and get it working well, and then add MP. I’m quite looking forwards to MP (the hilarious griefing potential of nuclear fission pulse propulsion is immense, and then there’s the space piracy angle), but given my time constraints I won’t be playing a lot of it and of all the roadmap features it’s the one I can live most without.

Here’s something that works for me with my (usually more or less R7-ish quad booster builds - I like Korolev Crosses - sue me ) craft. Typically I’ll have four boosters with booster engines and the core of the first stage with a sustainer engine. I’ll stage the core after the boosters before I get fuel lines, with them after I can feed the core engine out of the booster tanks. I also tend to imitate the Soviets in having a small second stage with a vacuum engine for the circularization burn. Yes, I loved the Making History parts… After launch, I’ll turn five degrees east at 50 m/s, another five degrees at 5km and 8 km, throttling to keep any Mach effects at a minimum, push it over to 65 degrees or so at 10km, then evenly over the next 10km to 45 degrees by 20km of altitude. After that I’ll track the periapsis and turn in larger increments every 10km of altitude and try to be pointing at the horizon by the time periapsis hits 70km and burn until the first stage runs dry. Usually I’ll have sized the boosters so that they run dry when close to horizontal, above most of the atmosphere. Once the first stage is dropped I’ll coast until apoapsis burn.

Brotoro’s Long Term Laythe series made me realize just what the game was capable of, taught me all sorts of useful things, and also proved that I had nowhere near his patience. I don’t remember Graggle, though?