LameLefty

Yeah, I don’t care for the animated rings at all - I can never tell at first glance which animation direction (expanding or contracting) is supposed to denote entry and exit from the SOI. Different colors would definitely help keep them visually distinct, though it might cause accessibility issues for color blind gamers (my adult son has issues like this).

Multiple-simultaneous docking ports like that have always been problematic at best in KSP. That’s why Squad eventually created 2.5m “Senior” docking ports, and parts modders made even bigger ones as the game developed. Not at all surprised it causes issues in KSP2 at this point, though ideally it shouldn’t crash the game.

Exactly, all of the above but especially the last two sentences. While we wait for the next patch. I’m going to visit Moho at some point this week or weekend, and probably work on a Tylo lander. Even with thousands of hours in KSP1, I have only managed a Tylo lander once, I think. In the meantime, there are plenty of great games. At the recommendation of a friend, I grabbed The Planet Crafter last week on sale for $15 (it’s only $20 at full price anyway) and am happily enjoying a small, indie EA title while trying to terraform my planet from a barren wasteland to a functional, life-supporting ecosystem. Fun game, limited scope, very chill vibe with a nice art style and excellent music and sound. I also have literally dozens of airplanes to fly in MS Flight Simulator ranging from a Cessna 152 up to and including sophisticated, deeply simulated transport aircraft like the PMDG 737NG series, the Airbus A310 fro iniBuilds, and over a hundred others in between. I might just load up the Hughes H-4 Hercules in a water runway off NYC and fly across the Atlantic in the largest flying boat ever built. If I get tired of that, I’ve always got No Man’s Sky. Even with over 800 hours in the game, there’s still something new and different every time I go back. We are so spoiled as gamers. KSP2 will get there if we’re willing to be patient and just let the devs work, give feedback where warranted and keep things in perspective. But while we wait, there’s always another game worth our time and attention.

You should read more outside this specific forum: There have been updates posted every week since release. I expect we’ll get another one late this week.

Yep, and this the downside to the stock tech tree Science career in KSP1. The Community Tech tree, along with resource-expansion mods from folks like RoverDude, and advanced part mods from Nertea (now heavily involved in KSP2 development) soften the blow here somewhat, as both give you more to DO once you get into your late game. You have a reason to build fuel and resource depot stations, and a whole lot more parts to unlock as you work your way through the tech tree to customize your space program with parts, missions and technology that you want to emphasize). Some of those Community Tech Tree mods add entire tiers to the end of the tree, at ever higher Science costs. This again simply gives you more to actually do to run your program once you work up to it. Hopefully, as KSP2 gets built out, a lot of those concepts will come into play with building and maintaining our colonies, sending out our expeditions and missions with a purpose and goals. The definite downside to a pure sandbox experience is, once you've gone everywhere and seen most of the coolest sites, why do it again? I mean sure you can simply play KSP like a game of digital Lego (which is what I am doing, basically), but for a real "program" with more than one thing going on at a time, it eventually becomes, "What now?" In KSP1, my late-game saves usually had dozens of satellites around many planets and moons, refinery/prop depot stations around the Mun, Minmus, Ike, and Vall, mining vessels on the ground or docked to all those stations, flights en route to and/or from Eve, Duna, Jool and Eeloo, and VERY busy set of Kerbal Alarm Clock alarms for transfer windows, SOI transitions, etc. In other words, a real "program" with lots going on to manage and do. Right now, the state of KSP2 does not allow that but I am looking forward to when it does.

I have played KSP1 extensively in all three aspects. Remember, when KSP started out and even until well past its Steam release, there was no science, no funds, no tech tree or progression of any kind. I played it a ton back then, and as those aspects were added in I played them all too. But let me tell you - I hated and I mean HATED the funds aspect of it. Even so, with each major new release up through 1.2 or so, I played a full new career save up to the point of completing the tech tree. After that, I finally said, “Nope,” and started doing Science-only career play through with a clean new save for each update. I found that much more interesting and satisfying. I know some people hate Science grinding, but I loved having a good reason to build a station somewhere, land in different biomes and bring back data and samples to process in the Lab, the bonuses from having Scientists in the crew, the specific uses of Engineers to build and repair stuff, etc. I hope we eventually at least get that in KSP2, but until then, for me at least, there’s still lots to do and explore while the game develops.

Nope. Visited Eeloo last night and today, landed on it for the first time in KSP2. Then after returning home intentionally did not fine tune inclination inside Kerbin's SOI and my entry trajectory took me over Kerbin's South Pole and landed on the antarctic ice cap. At some point this next week or so, I'll start messing about with spaceplanes again and go explore Kerbin, build a small orbital station for the spaceplane to visit, etc. If I get REAL motivated, I'll build a Tylo lander and send a probe to visit the big new anomaly there (the only new one yet discovered that I haven't seen in person yet).

Visited Eeloo today for the first time in KSP2.

Better shown with an example. This button should illuminate (change color) or act as a toggle or SOMETHING so that when I look at the part detail, I can tell at a glance that the part is serving as the control point for the vessel. Right now, you can click on a pod, probe core, docking port, whatever and all the button does is flash green as you click. But after the click, there's no way to tell which part in the UI widget is the control point. Changing the button color or making the button into a toggle switch instead would indicate clearly and instantly that the part is the control point for the current vessel.

Sent another mission to Duna per the current Weekly Challenge. Also, testing out my "standard" compact lander for Duna - needs some tweaks but it works.

I have that mod but haven't used it yet. Before I started using my massively-overpowered SWERV transfer stage design, I did have to resort to the Infinite Propellant toggle in Settings to have enough dV to correct the SOI transition error when returning from Jool to Kerbin. But I shouldn't have to. I've been playing KSP for literally more than 10 years as of this week (v0.19 on Steam March 21, 2013 per my Steam purchase page). I know how to do a Jool (or Duna, or Mun/Minmus ...) return burn. And my trajectory is utterly perfect before the SOI transition but completely wrong afterwards, I know there's a mathematical error going on in the game.

Please @Nate Simpson and KSP2 Team, if you do nothing else this weekend, please read this (confusingly and inaccurately) named thread - a lot of our independent bug reports have been merged into one thread and the title hasn’t been changed to reflect that. Please, for the love of Jeb, see for yourselves: plot a return trajectory from Jool, make the burn as precisely as you can, then screenshot the trajectory BEFORE you leave Jool SOI. Then leave Jool SOI and see how that perfect trajectory is completely and utterly wrong the instant you leave the Jool SOI. Something is getting changed during the SOI transition (probably a mathematical error). In my case, for instance, I am ending up with an AP higher than Jool’s own orbit (which should be impossible for a burn retrograde to Jool’s own orbital path). Others can repeat the same or similar experiences trying to return from Duna, Dres, etc.

There’s a lot of unwarranted optimism in these polls. Maybe if KSP2 lasts as long as KSP1, in 10 years (*) PCs capable of 1,000 part ships will not be uncommon, but until/unless there’s a fundamental shift in the architecture and how physics and lighting are calculated and rendered, it’s not gonna happen. (*) it was March 21, 2013 - 10 years ago - that I bought KSP and my MacBook Pro i7 struggled with 150 part ships. My current PC (i7-11700KF) can run those same ships at 120 fps.

Yes. Most of it is GPL3, some modules may be GPL2 or MIT License. https://github.com/MuMech/MechJeb2#license The code is on Github and Sarbian’s site too, I think.

If you do enough navball-only dockings (as we had to do from the time docking ports were added until Navyfish created DPAI), then it will have clicked anyway. It's still much easier and more intuitive to use the mod, especially if you align the roll axis as suggested before starting to align the velocity vector marker with the target. THAT step alone makes the actual closure-and-dock procedure a dead simple matter of just tiny little X/Y axis RCS burns using the keyboard docking mode controls (IJKL) plus H/N as needed to increase or decrease closure rate. If you're patient, you can dock using a ridiculously low amount of monoprop.

So noted real-life rocket launch photographer extraordinaire John Kraus captured this wonderful image of last night’s Relativity Space launch of their Terra 1 mission. The second stage failed to ignite and so the mission failed to achieve orbit, but the first stage seemed to perform nominally. To the point, this is what 9 small methalox plumes actually look like at sea level.

They were eventually added in KSP1, so I imagine it’s on their detailed internal roadmap to add eventually here too. I hope. It was a fun challenge to land on the VAB or whatever from high altitude, and it made for a fun way to deal with a falling apart airplane or spaceplane other than reverting the flight entirely.

No, please for the love of the Kraken, just … no.

Agreed. We have this but I have not yet tried out the updated version: I don't mind using the existing Maneuver Node graphical widgets to rough in most burns, and this to fine tune it: But I hate running the risk of screwing it all up be my fumble-fingers or missing the start/stop cues.

Fantastic! Pretty sure I have my old copy of that one around here in a box somewhere, too.

This is one (of many) things MechJeb does really well in KPS1. You can specify the precision required of the total dV added when you you ask MJ to control the burn through the maneuver node, and the code reduces the throttle at the end to try to hit that requested precision with good accuracy.

This thread is giving me flashbacks to my own undergraduate aerospace engineering degree (mumble mumble) years ago. Good job!

I disagree - please see my photos and read my posts about this. I made my Jool return burns on nearly the “perfect” optimum phase angle and with nearly the same dV as suggested by the long-standing available KSP transfer window calculators. In every case, the results of the burn show a nearly perfect Kerbin return transfer, exactly as expected based on a decade playing KSP. As soon as I leave the Jool SOI, the trajectory morphs to something physically impossible, including an Apoapsis greater than the orbit of Jool, which indicates an mathematical error occurs when translating the relative velocity as one passes out of the planetary SOI.

I have not encountered errors great enough to notice when leaving the SOI of any planetary moons for the SOI of the parent body. By contrast, I have encountered the issue repeatedly on transfer burn from inside one planetary body to another planetary body elsewhere in the system. Interestingly, the errors seem *much* greater when burning retrograde from an out-system body moving in-system. This past weekend I transferred from Kerbin to Duna, and from Kerbin to Jool. In both cases, it required well under 100 m/s in correction/refinement burns to setup a good encounter. However, the converse was vastly different - in both cases, I needed substantial correction burns to create proper Kerbin encounters for the return, Jool requiring about 730 m/s, Duna needing closer to 300 m/s. I also disagree with the notion that the error is the display of the trajectory within the SOI rather than being associated with the change of SOI itself. In the case of my Jool return experiments, I have been returning within hours of the calculated optimal phase angle, and my plotted maneuver node burn ends up within 20-30 m/s of the optimal burn to setup the encounter back to Kerbin. After that burn, the trajectory looks absolutely perfect, a textbook KSP planetary transfer of the kind of I have been making for literally a decade. AFTER the SOI change, however, the trajectory is completely borked, including an Apoapsis higher than the orbit of the planetary body I’m leaving, which is physically impossible for a retrograde return burn. To me, that seems very much like a mathematical error occurs during the transition between SOI’s, and the magnitude of the error increases the further out-system it occurs.

Trajectories - especially escapes from Jool and other bodies headed in-system toward Kerbol, are badly broken and have been since before Patch 1. Here's an example from tonight. Here's my return from high Jool orbit (past the orbit of Pol). This is AFTER my burn but before I had departed the Jool SOI: Yet right after exiting Jool's SOI this is what I ended up with: