I decided that my first full mission in KSP2 would be to land on Eve, which is something that I had never done. My goal was to land an unmanned probe safely on the surface of Eve. However, the Kraken had some other ideas.
I started in the VAB, as all missions go, and finally found the perfect vessel after three failed attempts. Everything was going perfectly! I got to low Kerbin orbit, I injected for an Eve encounter, and went on my way. I made a distant flyby of the Mun, which served for a little Delta-V savings AND some beautiful pictures.
When I eventually made it to Eve, I burned retrograde to get into a near 2,000km orbit. After some more pictures, I decided to deorbit the craft and separate it from the previous stage.
Entry went smoothly, no flipping, no insane G-force, and it was overall just perfect. As the probe broke the cloud layer, the parachutes were deployed, and shortly thereafter, opened up to slow the craft down. It was still about 2500m up when I noticed that we were gonna land in the water. This is where things started going wrong.
I thought to myself; "Oh, it'll be fine. The heat shield will keep above the water anyways!" I would slap my past self for being so foolish. As the craft descended, I cancelled out the time-warp, running at real time. Once I hit the surface of the water, I thought I was done. But, the probe sunk into Eve's ocean. I was panicking, trying everything I could to stop it, but it wouldn't work.
So, that's my tale of a curious probe who ended up being 500m below sea level on Eve.
On my Eve lander mission that somehow ended up underwater, I had trouble deciding where I wanted to land. I couldn't see what was terrain and what was ocean. I also saw Matt Lowne having the same issue on his massive Eve Rover video. So, I was hoping if there could be some sort of toggle in the tracking station/map view that allows us to hide the atmosphere, or set it to a certain opacity if possible. Or, add a little icon next to the "impact imminent" indicator on your trajectory on the map view, that shows whether you are headed for a splashdown or a landing. Has anyone else considered this?
