Ok! Diving in, because yay KSP! Happy to come back to the new and improved old and familiar! =)
Figured I'd whip up a design I've done so many times before that I could resurrect it from memory after a couple years off. Asparagus launch vehicle, Apollo style lander, airbrake return plan. Easy peasy?
Took a little doing to get the graphic settings turned down so that the game wasn't stuttering continuously. With that mostly settled, I was still having some right-click camera move issues where I would try to move the camera and it would start and stop immediately or not register the click at all (I think this may be related to Windowed mode, as I alt-tabbed out and when I went back in it worked more smoothly).
During construction, the VAB kept forgetting kerbonaut configurations, it omitted fuel from the lander bagettes on one reload, erased stages on one launch, and erased some fuel lines on launch a couple times; these seem to be related to saving, closing, and reloading later).
Once I had loaded the workspace, checked every stage, made sure everyone was loaded in the right place, etc. I finally launched! Much merriment at the spiffy new command center.
The asparagus fuel lines didn't behave as I was used to in KSP 1, it seemed to be burning them all down more evenly, so I was lugging more weight for longer, but it worked out alright anyway. Maybe the fuel lines have a max flowrate now?
Maneuver nodes are nice (particularly the "advanced" option of giving proper burn start times, instead of doing the half-math), BUT it's a little awkward that I can't adjust the node *and* see the projected AP/PE altitudes while doing it. There's also something hinky happening that I haven't figured out yet, because I did a circularizing burn at the Mun (calculated while still in Kerbin SoI), and when I performed the burn it resulted in very wrong results. Maybe transfering SoI gummed up the node-pilot communication.
When I finally managed a basic Mun orbit, I couldn't do a crew transfer to the lander, so I had to EVA Valentina over to the lander. I separated the return craft and the lander, and the return craft (previously the control center for the flight thus far) started spinning wildly despite having a second pilot still on board. I had to switch back to it and toggle the SAS on and off and toggle the stability mode on and off to get it to sit still. Once it had settled down, I switched to the lander and touched down on the Mun! Yay!
When I was settled, I popped Val out for an EVA to plant a flag and the lander did a side-flip and landed on its head. =( I was ready to be frustrated, but apparently the reaction wheel was strong enough to flip the craft upright before it even touched the ground and I was able to put the gear back out and get it standing. Now we just needed to target the return craft to meet it in orbit. No problem.
Only, the return craft which had a comfortable 35 km circular orbit when we left it, now had a 100+ km AP and was slated to crash a quarter of the Mun's circumference later. Somehow. Without burning at all, unless it was doing it while I was on the other vehicle (maybe the second craft was duplicating the controls of the lander?). I also couldn't target it.
I swapped to the return craft to recircularize and drop its altitude to make the rendezvous easier, planned the maneuver node, and in map mode started the burn... but it suddenly went wonky on the projected new trajectory. I switched to see the craft and realized that the engine had spontaneously detached (without force, but it was ever so slightly misaligned to key that they had separated where there was no separator). So of course now the engine wouldn't respond and the whole mission was a bust.
There are a lot of little buggies here that aren't just engine updates, that much I know. I've shared it all and am happy to field any questions which will help with the debugging. My next mission will be a little simpler in design to try to reproduce some of these.
As a separate piece of purely aesthetic feedback... I *love* the new flight control widgets, a lot of useful information indicated in an intuitive fashion. Some of the operations requiring the big part manager to open is a little awkward and a little extra-slow on a pre-separated/complex build. Not having it tie visually to the part makes it a little less intuitive and a little less clear. Also, while I like the dot-matrix style UI in theory, I'm finding that it usually just starts looking like everything is unattractively grainy/low-res when I'm not inspecting it directly. Where KSP's UI felt like it had sharp lines, this feels like it's gone backwards in quality because of the indirect attention when you're doing other things. This conflicts with the beautiful art/resolution of the rocket parts (even though I've had to turn the graphics settings down a lot so that it runs smoothly).
I know it's Early Access and I'm here for it! Ready to help get this polished up. Seems like we've got quite a road ahead of us still, though, eh?
