Casellina X

What was your altitude? I didn't notice the repeating texture on my flight, but I probably never got higher than 3 or 4km.

Ugly orbital station for the Mun. Yes loyal followers, I continue to dance around a proper Duna mission. I don't know if I'm overcomplicating things or what, but getting there a third time is really beating me down. 25km orbit which passes almost directly over one of my previous missions. This was supposed to be an uncrewed mission. It wasn't until after I took the previous picture and turned the HUD back on that I realized Tim C. had stowed away... The solar panel placement is not EVA friendly so when I did EVA, he kept colliding with the craft. After getting free, somehow that turned my almost perfect 25km (25,119/25,096) orbit into a 29km AP/24km PE. I shudder to calculate the eccentricity of that.

If they're running Scaled Agile with multiple release trains, it's entirely possible. Maybe not 10 exact working days worth of planning (and not for everybody), but extremely close to it. I've been in several such sessions. It's not enjoyable for the people that are in the trenches and (at least for me) rarely brought any value other than a vague understanding of what other teams are delivering and who depends upon who. They often feel like they're only held to make the nontechnical people/project managers feel like they're doing something. I'm not going to cast that accusation at Intercept Games, but I'll definitely throw it at the higher ups - those above Nate.

I made a Minmus science hopper. I wanted to unlock the next node on the launcher portion of the tech tree. Around about 3200 dV to help me get around. This was after a few hops yesterday. I did a couple of biomes and it seemed as if that was about it. However one more hop showed the difference between Sheet Ice and Arctic Ice. I did take a trip towards the south pole but it didn't look like the biome was going to be anything other than Snowdrifts or maybe Craters, so I got back into a high orbit and went on home. Somehow the burn put me in a near polar orbit so I decided to aim for the cap. For whatever reason I turned the force on the decoupler down to 5Nm. Sure it decoupled, but it didn't create any separation. I had to go through all manner of wiggling to get free. I was coming in H-O-T, HOT. The detached portion of the craft lasted maybe 10 seconds? I was concerned that I wouldn't slow up enough for the parachute to deploy. But fortunately I was able to get down. Banked somewhere over 1400 science from the trip. Returning those samples is critical. Unlocked the first LG parts and put this together. It was the sustainer and not the launcher, which was a little disappointing, but I can still put it to use. It wasn't until I was firmly in atmosphere that I realized... you didn't put a decoupler dummy. No worries though, I had about 1k dV and enough TWR to save things. Well not really. This thing bled no speed through aero losses, so I was ~20km and above 2k m/s velocity. A couple of burns did help, but the larger issue was the rising temperatures. I thought I had it under control. I did not have it under control. The gauge dropped as low as 30%, and then crept its way up to critical, then poof. I then had an ICBM en route.

Bearing in mind I've been skimming between about 6 hours of meetings today; I feel like colonies don't need resource extraction, but they both give each other an enhanced purpose. The way I see it, resources in a basic form has been covered by KSP 1 - just go drill somewhere and come back with something. But it was just for the sake of processing it into fuel. For those of us who don't touch mods colonies is entirely new. So the novelty (at least for me) will be dropping colonies all over the place, providing new launch locations. You all have seen me post in the "What did you do today" thread, anything larger than a command pod I struggle to get into a good orbit, let alone beyond the Kerbin SOI. So placing a colony on the Mun or Minmus will drastically make things easier to traverse the system. I wouldn't want to have to wait until resources are implemented before getting to experience colonies. But I think once colonies and resources are implemented and integrated into exploration mode, there's going to be some very compelling gameplay to come out of it. As far as development goes, it probable makes more sense to build out colonies and their capabilities because resources should be a natural extension of that. Ploppable parts, linking extractors to storage, configuring routes to and from locations.

git push origin master --force ought to fix it.

Things like this give me an appreciation of the complexity other forms of software development entail. Once upon a time I wanted to be a game developer, but when Physics and Calc intervened, I thought better of it. I'm looking forward to how this takes shape, and also wouldn't mind some times/locations where we can look out for an eclipse on Kerbin.

Another successful failure? Or failed success? I built a plane to go to Kapy Rock in order to complete the mission. My strategy was to fly south across the pole. For those of you familiar with the mission, you can probably already see my normal fatal mistake. "Sunrise" over the pole was a welcome change over the pitch black moments-from-disaster cruise prior to this. That pesky highlighted part bug messed up some spectacular images. Make sure you're careful flying over the south pole. there are some mountains that are a little taller than you might think. Case in point, the ice shelf as we exited the cap. On to the fun part, ignoring the poorly designed plane, Kapy Rock is in sight and I have no plan to get this thing on the ground. I throttle down, bleed airspeed, and try to get close to stall speed. Well, Houston we had a problem. I clipped the ridge and put myself into an unrecoverable situation. But on the bright side, that darn fuel tank that was preventing EVA was no longer an issue. So if you've reached this point thinking that the EVA blockage was an issue and the failure was the landing? Nope. Read the mission specs kids. Even if I had managed a successful landing, I didn't bring along the part required to do the crew observation to pass the mission. I'll leave Jeb and the wreckage there for another handy target for next time.

Break out the champagne, I completed my first crewed Duna landing this afternoon. This was the craft that done it. It's not winning any beauty contests or efficiency awards. This was the "final" design after a couple of launch tests which showed the potential to be able to complete the mission, but also exposed the lack of EC as soon as I got to 50KM AGL. After adding batteries and panels, with another quick flight test, I wasn't pleased with the SAS oscillations on the pad so I added launch clamps. Originally I was only going to use the minimum height needed, but why not get your money's worth? What you see is just about max height with the nose touching the roof of the VAB. We can put together some rather tall craft if need be. I put this image in to show the difference in dV calculations by just moving the clamps to stage 2. There was even more variation but the two images suffice. Setting up your craft to link fuel to the center tank makes it hard to understand what your dV will be so keep an eye on that. Heading to the pad I was greeted with this vantage point. Zoomed out to give an idea of the height possibility. I know people have made tall things before, but typically they launch from the runway. This was another look at the dV calculation swings. I believe I got much more out of that first stage than 1442. At any rate I pushed out to 1Mm, waited a long time for a launch window, then set up a node for a Duna encounter. This particular stage I'll have to redesign. I was forcing NERV usage and ultimately I only got a little over 1000 dV out of them. Just enough to finish circularization and complete a portion of my Duna maneuver. For the second time, by design, Duna and Ike come into view. Unfortunately this was the start of the part highlight bug which would upset the composition of my images. Circularization burn in a reverse orbit. Now right before we got to about this point we realized a fatal mistake - a distinct lack of parachutes. Add this with, well you see the dV number, and I knew this mission was too fargone. But since we came this far, might as well attempt an actual landing near the monument to get some practice in. I did expect the touchdown point and the monument location to close in distance... but it really didn't. I remember going through hell trying to get lined up with the Minmus monument. With this one I was seemingly at the same latitude, but just too far ahead. But you don't know what you don't know until you know it. Now I knew I was parachute deficient at this point so I had intended to use what was left in the tank to touch down. But then I (think I) remembered why I only had the three parachutes. I was going to use them and repack them on the way back up. So I adjusted the altitude to 5km and hoped for the best. I staged the chutes and.... nothing. I had to fumble around in the Parts Manager to get a deployment. Somehow the chutes weren't armed? So I toggled the arming switch and hit deploy and fortunately you see the result. Moments before this I was pretty upset that I wasn't even close enough to get the marker to appear in flight view. But I had 2 wins: 1) the parachutes slowed me to less than 30m/s and 2) I was just close enough to be within range. Unfortunately I had a big loss upcoming. My landing area was not particularly flat. I also was ambitious on throttle. I touched down, bounced, throttled, panicked, then had to try to touch down in a slightly flatter area, panicked again, and then destroyed the engine and tipped the rest of the craft in the process. BUT if you put all that to the side - I successfully and safely made it to Duna! Planted a flag, took a sample, but this was only be going through the motions because I planned to revert to VAB. I took a moment to ponder where it all went wrong.

I took a brief look at how the game handles deletion and it's a direct file deletion, so unfortunately it's unrecoverable. There may be an outside chance that your computer has a System Restore point prior to deletion, but my experience with modern versions of Windows is that restore points are few and far between.

This is the common sense part that was escaping me. I didn't plan to land any other way - evident by the 2 parachutes in stage 11, but was trying to account for the landing dV anyway due to the trip planner.

I've wasted some time off and on over the past few days putting together this monstrosity, only to discover... not enough dV. Back to the drawing board.

A few minutes of downtime between, ahem, meetings, I decided to send a fuel tank into orbit to satisfy the side mission. I'm beating around the bush on sending a crewed mission to Duna because I fear it will be one way. I don't think I'll ever actually use it but you never know.

I dunno man... I look at this and I can't help but take any of this as Dakota is working on it, so it's coming soon.

I've seen that a couple of times but haven't used it just yet. I'm "letting" KSP 2 deliver on the promise of an improved new player experience and part of that would be explaining to the player things like transfer windows. To its credit it has delivered, at least for Duna. And actually for this mission the window itself wasn't so much the issue, it was just having the craft in the right spot and the maneuver node in the right spot. Burning out of the Kerbin SOI directly to Duna was a new experience for me. Also signal blocking wasn't a consideration, just range. I've put some ill fated probes into orbit around Kerbol that I couldn't control because they got out a little too far from me. At least I think... I could be misremembering.

I took this: And headed to Duna. The original plan was a satellite + rover combo, but I said I should prove I can get there with one thing first. I'd been there once before in KSP 1 using the transfer tool and once in KSP 2 through happenstance. This time I went with intent. I parked this thing right on the edge of Kerbin's SOI and just waited. Nailed down a good transfer burn to set up for a near zero inclination orbit. Duna and Ike came into view. What I should have done is tried to set up the burn so that the nuclear stage would burn up in atmosphere, but I didn't want to get too cute before the job was done. In position to burn to a ~100KM PE. It was cool watching Ike orbit around Duna through the time warp. Had to circularize on the night side of Duna. Luckily this time I arrived with a plan, so no feelings of sheer terror trying to pan the camera around and seeing a black void in the midst of... a black void. The pictures in that post show the leaps and bounds KSP 2 has made graphically since the early days. The atmosphere is noticeable on direct viewing, rather than just seeing it in the curvature of the horizon. A brief word on the design - two semi-adequate solar panels, the most powerful communication dish we have (thus far), a small monoprop tank, and two Puff monoprop engines. This thing alone had enough TWR to launch itself on Kerbin, and nearly enough dV to put itself into orbit. Hopefully the range on the antenna is enough so that I don't randomly lose signal if/when I get a rover down there and Kerbin and Duna are on opposite sides of Kerbol.

I don't see how people can call their craft ugly when I have semi regular postings in this thread

I put a rover on the Mun today. Only one picture because I didn't actually plan on doing it. I was testing the rover design and also wanted to see how the payload fairing behaved in flight. One thing led to another and here we are. I'll give it an A for effort but it's abysmal. It flew about as stable as a lopsided three armed duck. I did touch down softly with only 100ish dV remaining so that was moderately efficient of me. However it's incredibly floaty on the Mun, not responsive at all. It has the turning radius of a '73 Cadillac Fleetwood. On the back there's some extendable solar panels - if I extend them then the weight distribution causes the thing to tip onto the back wheels and render itself inoperable. It'll be back to the drawing board on this one. As with aircraft, it's not something I do often. Hopefully I can nail down a good design and then launch a rover/satellite combo to Duna in preparation for a crewed mission capable of making it down to the surface and back.

Sounds like a successful DART-style mission.

Minmus Monument mission complete. Pulling off the polar orbit was actually easier than I expected. I did have to match inclination before setting up that maneuver, which I was going to try and cheekily avoid, but it was like any old thing I'd done before. I decided to keep the orbit nice and tight to make it easier to get down to the monument. The frustrating thing was that my initial trajectory was leading me straight to it, but having to get into a stable orbit, the time it took pushed the monument out of my window. But I said screw it and went for it anyway. Minmus easy enough to conquer so I set a new course very nearly on top of the thing. Victory more or less in sight. Would I whiff the landing like I've done so many times with the Mun? Well yeah, I very nearly did. I assume due to the location of the monument, but trying to set down upright was probably the hardest fight I've had. That tip you see? That's back in the upward direction on my recovery. My RCS thrusters were almost touching the surface. After settling and saving, I decided to hop just a touch closer, as I wasn't technically in the monument location. To show proper disrespect to the Builders, I planted my flag right at the top of the monument - some 4700m tall if I remember correctly. But that can't be correct. At any rate, that's Kerbin and satellites conquered by way of the mission system. Next stop Duna. That's right Tom - you called me out and now I'm coming. I did come across a potentially useful albeit exploitative bug. Jeb was recoverable without needing to return to Kerbin so I was able to bring him and another 500ish science back home. Unfortunately that meant leaving behind the lander, however that works out if I decide I want to return to the monument later, I have a handy marker. I do appreciate that the mission brief for the Duna mission tells me exactly what I need to know: transfer window is 45 degree angle with Duna ahead. Atmosphere starts at 50km. Aerobreaking is encouraged. Make use of the Trip Planner. I still would like to see that numerical information somewhere else more accessible. I've been to Duna once in KSP2 through dumb luck, and once in KSP1 because I stumbled upon its trip planning mechanic very late into my time with the game.

Over the course of a couple play sessions I got my next mission ready for Minmus. As planned I put together the MD tug as I'm expecting to botch the maneuver to get into polar orbit, so I need some breathing room. Next was launching another Mun/Minmus lander. I accidentally got going too fast in the upper atmosphere and got to see the fancy effects in action. I write code for a living, but don't think I have the brainpower to put something like this together, so kudos. Because I don't know how to properly set up a launch window for this sort of thing (and it was spur of the moment anyway) I had to wait 4 or 5 periods to get an intercept. But since I was going from ~80km to ~120km the difference in velocity was only like 26 m/s, so it was a nice and easy rendezvous. Pro tip: pay attention when you're manually decoupling. I had to reload an autosave because I foolishly decoupled the decoupler above the donut tank. Next step is plotting a maneuver and getting the job done. I actually wanted to send a rover, but I don't have the node unlocked and I don't really want to spend the science on it at the moment.

Decided to finish up the Mun Arch mission. I wasn't expecting to complete it but I was pleasantly surprised. Last time I came in too hot, at the wrong inclination, and expected to have a double digit KM trek. This time I was able to match the inclination and touch down within 1KM. When I start getting sub 1k dV I get real antsy, so this is a one way until I work up the courage to try to return. I know, It's probably enough. But I don't KNOW that. First (second) time ever seeing the arch through my own handiwork. Almost close enough to get out and touch. I didn't quite get the whole arch in frame, and Bill appears to be mid bowel movement. Poorly planned picture. And the game has forgotten my flag texture again. Next up was orbit Minmus with a probe. Same probe as I've posted in the past, just a different first stage so that I wouldn't have to fuss with the SM parts. Inclination matched and on course to circularize. Insertion burn to Minmus. Decided to capture with an orbit in reverse just because. 20KM orbit. Assuming no orbital decay it should be safe. Next step is the Minmus monument. The Mun lander should be sufficient, although I might have to launch the tug with a higher orbit. I'll play with that concept next time. I'm planning on a polar orbit just for variety.

Launched my lander and docked with the tug. Orbit lines reappeared after reopening the game. Docking went off without a hitch although there's still much to be desired with my launch planning. I thought I had a good enough positioning of the tug in orbit relative to the KSC for launch, but wound up waiting several orbits before I could get out to it. Someone mentioned probably in the UI/UX thread, but the skip orbit functionality on the maneuver planner needs to make a comeback. I think some of the parts on the tug shifted, but I didn't experience any control issues. There was a tiny bit of fuel remaining in the stage that was floating away, so for once I was nearly optimal inasmuch as I didn't have several hundred or a thousand dV left over after everything. Circularized with the Mun and was about to get set for the Arch when I came across the no fuel bug. Couldn't seem to get it to work right. Maybe I'll see some luck the next time I open the game. I did try moving around some MP from the pod to the tanks, but hit what looks like a visual glitch when trying to remove the completed entries from the right side. I did close the Resource Manager and reopen it before attempting that. But changing to the Tracking Station and then back to this craft fixed that. Alas, still no dV.

Back at it again and I took the plane out like planned. I guess I didn't save the version with parachutes but at any rate, I was able to collect from Grasslands, Highlands, Mountains, Beach, Water, Ice, and Desert. It has pretty good range. This was the longest flight I've ever taken. First time reaching the arctic, and intentionally at that. This shot reminds me of my most recent trip from West to East US coast, seeing the terrain slowly transition from greenery into snow capped mountains. I was treated to a beautiful twilight hour in the north. I circled back around for a landing and sample collection... ... and stuck the landing. All I could do is wait for the smoke to clear and hope P.A.I.G.E. wasn't waiting in the wings. But we made it through. Flag plant with the proper image this time around. I left the wreckage there for some future follow ups. Next I tackled a compact Mun lander to be used with the tug from the previous post. This was supposed to be a quick launchability test - see if there was any flipping or instability. It wasn't until I was about to set up a circularization burn that I realized all my orbit lines had disappeared. So I couldn't set up the docking phase. At any rate here was the separation from the orbital stage, and then a quick deorbit to see how it would handle heating. It should be manageable. After landing I reverted to VAB but unfortunately still no orbit lines. So I might be stuck for a bit.

I launched what ideally will be a decent transfer tug between Kerbin and its satellites. I want to launch the next series of missions as lighter weight payloads and shuttle them back and forth using this. It has 2900ish by itself, we'll see how drastically that changes when I hook something else up to it. I may just attach it to another one of itself and see how it handles that. Next mission is the arch but I may get my plane back out and run some atmospheric experiments first.