Sit around the fire ladies, gentlemen, and germs. I have a story to tell about a brave group of Kerbal test subjects.
Once upon a time, the Kerbal space agency built a magnificent interplanetary starship to bring Kerbalkind to Duna and back. It was assembled in orbit out of 5 separate launches: In one launch, a central hub with the interplanetary NERV engines and hydrogen tanks arranged hexagonally around a central spine with 4 docking ports and a reentry vehicle for up to 7 Kerbals for return to Kerbin. In two launches, small landing crafts for Ike that were not atmosphere capable. In the final two launches, landing and return craft for Duna itself with additional fuel tanks to top everything off.
Many trials and tribulations were overcome to assemble the 5 in orbit, but eventually Kerbalkind prevailed in their most ambitious construction to date.
The day arrived when their great journey was to begin when disaster struck, and struck, and struck. The NERV engines designed to take the craft to Duna’s orbit burned through 2700 dV on a 950 dV maneuver using more than half of the NERV’s dV just to reach a Munar intercept and attempt a gravity assist.
Realizing their great journey would have no return should they use all their fuel, Jebediah decided to circularize orbit around the Mun to search for other POI’s. Disappointed by their engineering failure, the brave Kerbals persevered on their new mission.
Tim C. Kerman landed upon the Mun in one of the landing craft designed for Ike. He explored, he did science, he ate snacks, and he took his lander back to orbit, and ran out of fuel before docking (Okay, this one was my fault.)
No problem, Valentina could take one of the Duna landers down to dock with Tim and return him to the mothership. Except, upon undocking Valentina’s lander suffered technical difficulties and could no longer maneuver with reaction wheels or rcs. Thrusters did nothing, and no orbit could be found in the tracking station. Valentina had fallen into some kind of alien anomaly.
And here do things stand for our brave heroes at the conclusion of today’s episode.
Some notes:
-I don’t know if it was something wrong with the NERV engines, something about mounting them radially, something about having multiple fuel types on the same stage, or something else; but dV calcs were very, very wrong. Not a marginal 5-10% wrong, but around 300% wrong.
-Using maneuver nodes feels very clunky. Trying to get a specific Ap or Pe often requires exiting the node to mouse over a tab that may or may not cooperate, then going back to the node and fiddling with it iteratively until you get what you want. Trying to plot an intercept is even worse. Also, there’s some weirdness going on when you transfer to a different orbit. I find that I need to really pay attention to what my orbit lines are doing because the planned maneuver may be completely different from why actually happens after a change in SOI. For a lot of these things, I find myself abandoning maneuver nodes to free hand things. At least then I can keep a mouse on whichever tab shows the numbers I need.
-Trying to find and land at POI’s without any sort of scanning, map, or placeable waypoints feels broken. I found myself using the cheat menu to teleport a drone core around until I could find the POI I spotted from orbit just so I could mark the location. Not that spotting them from orbit is easy. Also, I miss having a reason to do polar orbits. Between lack of scanners and lack of com net, there just isn’t as much reason to do some of the more esoteric orbits.
-I didn’t have any issues with docking, but undocking gets pretty buggy sometimes. I had unplanned kinetic disassembly and I had crafts quit working entirely.
-Oh, and if you have multiple capsules of the same type, there isn’t an easy way to see which specific one the kerbals are in. Other than that, the Kerbal manager is nice.
-The resource manager is great, but after doing a fuel transfer, I couldn’t reset the manager. It just left my fuel tanks on the right even when I hit the X button.
And that’s everything that comes to mind. Overall, I’m really enjoying For Science!, but there are definitely still mission breaking bugs and missing/incomplete features that impact player experience.
And if you read all this, sorry for being long winded.
