Casellina X

After 15+ minutes of trying to dock this fuel module (first iteration, it all went belly up on circularization): I learned the answer to my question the hard way You most certainly cannot dock mismatched port sizes. Either that, or I'm an utter failure at docking. I had enough of a time trying to align after a fairly solid rendezvous. RCS on this thing was not efficient so it was a fight the whole way. I expected the magnetism to take over but it just never really kicked in. Radial dock, nose dock, nothing. This is the last, and most aligned attempt of the day. So as is, this is a failure of a station beginning. I have to send up a module that has a LG and some MD and SM ports before I can attach the canister. I'm leaving it in orbit as a testament to failure. I should scrap it so that it doesn't affect the station, but at this point I'm over it.

In the last couple days I've put together a few more basic planes and dealt with the Kraken. Once on a revert to launch post lithobrake induced RUD. And another while trying to play with an ill fated Xenon powered probe. 4 large solar panels is not enough to power 3 engines on the dark side of Kerbin. Today I decided to just hang out around the Mun with Tim C. Kerman, seeing if I could spot any points of interest from ~35km. This is probably the first time I've sat and just watched an orbit happen. Tim was in awe. I think - think - that I was able to capture Duna in shot, right above the arrow on the helmet. I don't know if it'll translate in picture. One last Kerbinrise before leaving Tim to his own devices. At this point I shifted thoughts to building a space station. In my mind, I wanted a station orbiting Kerbin, Mun, and Minmus, acting as shuttle terminals to/from the respective surfaces, and among each other. I think when orbital VABs are introduced it'll be a game changer for me personally, since I won't have to fuss with gravitational constraints as much. Launching heavy (what I consider heavy) is a struggle: I put together a habitation module built with LG parts. I knew flex would be a factor; I almost welcomed it. But you can see the first proper launch attempt in action here (insert your favorite joke here). I thought that maybe strutting each part to the one above/below it would heavily mitigate things. While it may have had some affect, it wasn't the right direction, however that major flex point is between stages. I also noticed that launch supports don't seem to work quite right on runway vs on launchpad. On runway the rocket slid off them immediately, launch pad they held as expected. Surprisingly the second proper launch attempt was a success. You'll notice that this time I strutted that stage joint. While still flexing, it did enough of a job to get me through the atmosphere with little issue. At this point I cut loose the nose cone and oriented to circularize. Panels extended, on our way to an AP of 1Mm to raise the PE as well. And finally parked in the target orbit. Next step is to get some Kerbals on board, think up a good fuel delivery system, and then maybe some good shuttles and landers. Does anyone know off hand: can a smaller docking port mate with a larger one (insert your second favorite joke here)?

I got back up to my old tricks, simple rocket. Touched down on a strange planet And Val worked through some issues. I left her there for maybe a rover mission recovery, possibly a plane if I could figure out how to do it. Speaking of which: I put together my first plane in KSP2. This is with a little fiddling with the procedural parameters and trying repeatedly to get the landing gear positioned to where the damn thing wouldn't topple forward. A trip to the Island Airfield proved problematic. More parameter tweaks to get the Center of Pressure closer to CoM - previously the widget was around the engine connection when it needed to be around the dark part of the intakes. A better design but a similar fate. I had to keep adjusting control surface settings to make sure the correct surfaces were set to pitch/yaw/roll. A final go of tweaks yielded this - precisely the same as the last one, but with engine gimballing disabled. Much more stable in SAS, while entirely controllable without it. It behaved so well, I said let's shoot for the edge of space. Naturally, lack of air killed the engine, however this is hands down the most successful flying contraption I've put together. After a longer flight than anticipated I headed back towards KSC with intent to land. Unfortunately, I ran out of fuel long before this picture. It was all I could do to line KSC up and get within visual distance of the Island Airfield and KSC shores. I'm sure you know what comes next... The magnificently planned conversion to Methawater submarine. As you can see, diving to depths of 360 meters with ease. I enjoyed playing with procedural wings. It's infinitely easier for me to put together something airworthy compared to KSP. A minor pain point was having to close the procedural settings window to get the Center of Pressure widget to recalculate position. It might be a useful addition to the engineer report to warn builders if their craft isn't likely to fly.

I had a laugh, that's what I did. Put together an orbiter and tried out one of those fancy new engines. Performance took a nice step forward although I've an overpowered machine. Shot of Kerbin with the new engine. Val in awe of today's accomplishment. Stage separation and ready for splashdown. I'll never agree with those who don't think the game looks good. Back in the sunlight and enjoying the mountains. At about this point the laughs began. I realized... I wasn't quite on the reentry path I expected. Skimming along Kerbin ~23km high and no signs of sinking below that. Fortunately, a parachute deploy did drop my PE, but not by that much. I caught glimpse of the Mun as I skipped out of atmosphere again. Silver lining, I was able to capture another glory shot as I revolved around to the day side of Kerbin yet again. This time the PE dropped to something to assure touchdown. Val lined up a near KSC trajectory. Meanwhile I foolishly cut, repacked, and tried to redeploy my chute... maybe get better drag? Well the chute decided it was no longer robust enough for the journey. So it continued to rip itself away from the craft. Naturally, that meant a full on lithobrake... Until suddenly I found myself making a U-Turn back up into space. This caught me by surprise because I was definitely looking for a nice fireball for everyone to enjoy. Up, up, up we went... until gravity did its thing and sent us back down. A fateful picture just tenths of a second before splashdown. Thus the conclusion of an entertaining journey. What did we learn? Hang onto that stage until the last possible moment - something I usually do but the bugs bit today.

I decided to retry the last journey but with much more dV, and ditching the unnecessary NERVs. Took a few tries to get into orbit, an efficient gravity turn was all but impossible with how top heavy the craft was. Pitch too soon or too much and it tipped over like a lawn dart. By the time I got to the Kerbol SOI, I decided to switch things up and aim for Duna instead of Eve. While it took a while to get into the right window for a transfer, I plotted the maneuver correctly and was well on my way... at least until I got too greedy with warping to a point on the orbit. This may very well be a bug - seems like every time I try to warp to a point inside another body's SOI, the game will fail to cancel the warp on entry, then continue the warp well past its conclusion and try to orbit back around to that point. My work around is to warp just before the point and then manually time accelerate to where I need to be. Ultimately it was a good mission. Twice in as many days have I thrown space junk at another planet and more or less got there. This time I was even able to capture two bodies. I mean, that's basically a Jool 5 right there. Maybe the biggest breakthrough of these missions was not being concerned with in-game time. Part of the reason I never did much beyond Mun and Minmus was some psychological hang up about letting months, years pass while waiting for a transfer window. Maybe because I was playing using contracts as a carrot. But since the Kerbal is a durable creature, time simply doesn't matter. As you'll see in one of the screenshots, I'm 11 years into this save - 7 of them tied up in those Eve shenanigans. Bill ought to get comfortable watching Eve slip from view, and Bob should too when I work up the motivation to set down on Ike. Oriented to burn out of Kerbin's SOI. And away we go. What's that strange dot? I'm not sure I can adequately explain the sheer terror I experienced while panning the camera around trying to find Duna, then stumbling upon a black void. I was 100% convinced that Kerbol had condensed itself into a black hole and was out for blood. Fortunately rather than Kerbol seeing red, it was in fact me seeing red. I didn't trust the TWR in my final stage to comfortably land on Duna, so I plotted a capture with Ike. And now Bob awaits his first class ticket to a new crater on Ike.

Been away from the game for a while after having to reinstall Windows to get off of the Windows 11 Dev Channel. Served its purpose during the 10->11 transition, but they started pushing bad updates that made life miserable. I put together a craft capable of getting stranded in space. The idea was to make it to another planet and Eve just happened to be near enough to try for. A maneuver or two in Sol's SOI got me towards an Eve trajectory. Several save reverts later due to things just... not working like I thought they should, I managed to get Bill into an Eve flyby. Didn't have enough dV to capture, and certainly not enough dV to return home. Bill finds himself fortunate that I included a docking port. Realistically, he'll be in that sad orbit forever. I'm sure the next patch will drop before I attempt a rescue. I really need back the accurate dV and TWR calculations in the VAB, as well as the calculations relative to SOI. The mission was never going to be a success, but at least I showed myself I can get to another planet on my own. I just need to build my stages properly. My nuclear stage was woefully anemic in regards to dV. 4 NERVs was always a foolish endeavor. Why you ask? Because. Within 35km. So close I could touch it. Unfortunately, the intercept node distance doesn't seem to correspond to closeness to the body. I thought 100km distance in the intercept node would mean a 100km PE. Looks like you need to get that distance as close to zero as possible to affect an SOI change.

This is some good stuff Dakota.

Performed my first docking in KSP2. I wanted an interplanetary craft and thought, well why not something in 2 launches? I also should have thought about what else I actually needed for this mission to nowhere because both crafts are severely lacking - essentially a crew module, fuel tank, and engine. Totally forgot to add batteries and solar panels on the second launch. I also didn't realize that the game didn't fully fill the crew module on the first craft, which is why the second had one as well. But at any rate I put something together. Because I don't do proper planning, I launched at probably the worst time and had to wait forever for the positioning to line up well enough for a rendezvous. Things went off without a hitch until it came time to crew transfer. For whatever reason it didn't want to happen while docked, so EVA was required. EVA in space is always an anxious time for me given that I don't do it enough to remember the controls. After a brief moment of uncontrolled spinning, I found myself thrusting away from the craft. Panic and some luck later got me back to target and on board. At this point I thought about taking an EVA picture so I sent the Kerbal back out. Well, it appears that the Kerbal's monstrous head emerging from the craft happened with such force that it very nearly ripped the craft apart at the docking ports. In the future I may include a spacer to mitigate. I'm trying to incorporate more strutting and reaction wheels in an attempt to solve my Rolling Rockets™ problem. Seems like struts have a maximum length.

The controls seemed fine to me. Rather responsive on my last attempt when I ditched into the ocean and was able to more or less splash down upright. The symmetry was really only the engines. Maybe another shot with 4 instead of 6, that could. Either that or no gimballing and take advantage of RCS - something I only ever do if I plan to dock the craft. It may just be another case of back to basics for me. I'm successful with SM, and can get away with a MD or two (at least in KSP1).

No pictures this time around, but I tried to build a decent lifter out of LG parts. A problem I continue to battle is unwanted roll when I pitch for the gravity turn. Stabilizers, reaction wheel, yet still a twist. I thought maybe the engine gimballing but killing the roll axis didn't have an affect (maybe even an adverse one). I could have had entirely too much rocket - 4 of the longest LG tank, 6 or 8 of that SM engine that's crazy powerful. Payload fairing was empty but I can't imagine it's a weight issue... Maybe aero? Who would have thought that a nice, sleek rocket would be hard to get right when you don't know what you're doing.

Multiplayer isn't particularly important to me. The handful of people I play other games with wouldn't be interested in KSP2 - not enough action or RPG-style customizability, and even though you can build rockets and stuff, they don't have the patience to learn orbital mechanics. As much as I'd enjoy bringing one or two of them along for the ride, I know there's a slim-to-none chance I'll experience it. That said, I know there's a contingent of people that are going to be all in on it. So I can appreciate that all of the systems are being built with multiplayer in mind. To add it on at the end could destabilize things even more than they are now. At work I'm extending some functionality, which began as a pretty trivial task. Unfortunately, the work I was told to build on top of, while elegantly composed, does not lend itself to changes without nuking existing functionality and having to start over. So I'm forced to hack together a sloppy fix. I'd hate to see similar happen for KSP2, which is doing things more complex than what amounts to a find and replace.

I'm in the no mod camp for KSP1 and KSP2 - there's an exception for Scarecrow's utility, but I like the "purity" of the base game. There's a slim chance I'll dive into mods post 1.0. My philosophy (which probably applies more to FO/TES style games) is that if you're buying a game based upon the modability or available mods, are you really all that interested in the original game anyway? Less applicable to KSP, but it's how I feel.

Quick trip to Minmus today. Struggled to get the maneuver correct. The burn time didn't seem to match with what the trajectory showed. I wound up overshooting, having to correct the burn, then orbiting opposite. Trying to plot a maneuver to correct that went terribly. At the orbit reversal point, the maneuver target on SAS went crazy and kept swapping. So I had to manually get the orbit going at 45km. Managed to get Tim C. Kerman to touch down within meters of Val, who I had forgotten was out there. The image is a bit of a lie. I'm ~3m away when my original landing was ~12m. A few bursts and panic burns got the craft side by side. Short of easter egg hunting or assembling space stations, that's the Kerbin system comfortably handled. One thing I've never done is send some sort of rover. I may cobble one together and commission a DART-esque lander mission. I should get used to moving payloads around because I'm liking this nice... lake? as a potential launch location to get to other bodies with less effort. I forget that really tiny moon for another planet... that would be fun to launch from as well. Launch by launch I'm overcoming my irrational dislike of leaving Kerbals somewhere out in the cosmos alone.

I believe I've finally encountered the Kraken. Another quick orbital mission and spontaneous rendezvous. As I arrive on scene... I don't recall which Kerbal is in there, but good luck to them. The recording didn't capture at the proper framerate, the spin was much more rapid than that.

That's strange behavior. I might have expected that if I touched other files, but not in this case.

I unintentionally did my first rendezvous (and almost spelled it correctly too). I overbuilt an orbiter and decided to try and get a decent enough rendezvous with the remaining dV. Although I prefer the KSP1 UI in regards to rendezvousing (got it right that time), I much prefer the granularity the readouts provide. Even though it was a fluke I was able to set up an intercept with a distance of ~400 meters. Now kith When I EVA'd it altered the orbits slightly. I'm not sure if that's correct. But what was a virtually welded set of craft began to drift apart yet again. The intersections are ~30 and ~50 meters now. I'll leave them there until... probably patch 2 when I wipe out and start afresh. After recognizing that I have a tendency to overcomplicate what should be simple, I've decided to do some intra Kerbin SOI operations with only SM parts. This craft should have made it to the Mun or Minmus without issue.

That's the culprit then.

Who's to say one of the other star systems isn't inhabited by them?

I knew getting in on Early Access would pay off!

Fixed

I noticed an issue where the .dll is not included in the "mapviewfocustargeting" folder, had to build the project and place it manually. That aside, good work! You have an outstanding pull request for a refactor.

Somewhat, but that's less of a KSP2 fault and more of a personal problem. I've been largely bored with many of the games I play lately; lacking the motivation to do things (I could be battling some minor depression, couldn't say). There are times I really want to play but can't decide what to do. I'm missing a couple of tools (crutches) from KSP1 that are delaying me from going interplanetary. Then I've also got some strange mental block about time warping for something beyond the Kerbin SOI which makes me avoid it. As if I'm neglecting something at the KSC or leaving some poor Kerbal in limbo. Funny thing is, it's not like time really matters beyond any concurrent missions. I could be still dealing with the same feelings of fear I first had when trying to orbit the Mun for the first time. The further out in space you go, the smaller you feel...

The company I work for is large, with many legacy applications and legacy mindsets. It's not a given that a particular application will even be using VCS or have people ready and willing to tell someone to test their change properly. It's the wild west if you're unlucky enough to be on one of those projects. But at least with game development, it's difficult to not playtest locally. I'm not surprised nor put off by the bugs we've seen thus far because things that seem fine in a vacuum can implode when users get their hands on it.

Oh friend, as a Software Engineer, have I got news for you... That being said, there's probably an extreme minority of people who work on a gaming project that don't actually play the game. Nate clearly isn't in that minority.

Well that settles it. I'm prepared to trust @Nate Simpson with my life .