pg17

A couple of weeks ago I built a plane with a drop pod to explore and get ground sample in specific Kerbin areas without having to land the plane (I would like to say because of rough terrains, but truth is, I'm a much better rocket pilot than plane pilot). When trying to drop the pod, it disappeared (with Valentina inside) when my airplane was around 2.2 - 2.3 km from the pod. And when I said "disappeared", I mean "vanished into the void", it was not visible when I turned back or in the control station, not a debris, nothing... I guess Valentina ended up giving company to the kraken. I tried to submit a bug report but apparently this is a known limitation that already existed in KSP1 (I never tried anything like this in the first game, so it was new to me ^^). Of course, you can either drop from a very low altitude to avoid this, or manage to circle around the drop pod until it touches ground while being careful to avoid going over the threshold (which, in my opinion, would be a lot more difficult with a bigger aircraft). I would suggest two things : Find a way to communicate / alert the player that this limitation exists (at least through an in game alert) so you understand what happened and how to avoid it. Increase the range, if possible, so that you have more leeway both in drop altitude and in circling range (to allow for bigger drops and bigger planes) ; and maybe make it a slider in the game options if it is too compute intensive on lower end configurations. Note that it would probably not be needed as much in multiplayer as I imagine each player could occupy one of the two vehicles and then each would have is own physic "bubble".

I imagine this is more of a "not yet implemented" case than anything else. Especially considering the devs have improved buoyancy, added underwater science experiment and are planning to add more planets with body of liquids in the other star systems. But I agree this would be really nice to have. If I can had a suggestion, it seems to me that doing an "underwater update" would be a good opportunity to add a "pressure" model like the heating / temperature one we have now for parts, and it could even be reused outside of bodies of liquid like on the surface of Eve, or deeper Jool layers. This would add a lot of opportunities for interesting engineering challenges and missions.

Happened to me too both on the Mun and Minmus (though I admit, Minmus very low gravity is more suited for a hopper than a rover). The most frustrating thing is that even if you quicksave a lot, there is a good chance that when loading back the rover will lose speed during the loading time and your rover will start to go "over heels" when you get back control (as is the case when you press the brake button at full speed). Sure it can be mitigated with a better rover design and by slowing down before quicksaving but it can be really painful and frustrating.

There is another use case where the actual behavior is problematic. The other day I activated the "infinite fuel" option because I ended up with a lot less fuel than what the DeltaV calculator told me I would get on my return stage from Duna (I'm pretty confident a bug was involved). I suffered the same limitations on maneuver nodes. Despite having infinite fuel, it only took into account what fuel was left in the tank and I had to eventually kind of guess / eyeball my Kerbin intercept. I think this would be a good implementation. And for those who don't want this behavior, it could be implemented as a game option.