KerikBalm

And what are you scouting for? Nearby Breaking Ground surface features? A flat spot to land? A high altitude spot to land so that ascent is easier (is it a lander that will return something to orbit? If not, why not make the airplane/helicopter the lander?) A spot at the intersection of multiple Biomes? A pretty view? More details are needed for proper advice

Pics of an eve 2 stage that I tested. The docking port between the orbiter and carrier would need to be changed for a shielded docking port, but then I couldn't build it as a single ship, and having to dock them together (while landed on the ground) each time I test would be annoying. Probably could still be improved a lot, it was just proof of concept. I rarely play on stock eve, or even stock scale

Practical for what purpose? Eve's thick atmosphere makes helos work very well. Quite practical for biome hopping. I would use tilt rotors though, for faster horizontal speed, while still being able to stop and hover to get where you want for science collection (like finding a BG surface feature) Landing spot for what? Eve's thick atmosphere makes it quite easy to land even large craft (if you can get them to the lower atmosphere without being destroyed by heat and dynamic pressure) Are you looking for a flat spot at high altitude for easier ascent? Intersection of multiple biomes for science? Long flat spot for landing a larger aircraft? Two more comments: Those service bays are draggy when open, and will degrade it's prop flight performance. I don't know how that trades with the drag from higher altitudes but also higher speed when you switch to rockets for a spaceplane design. If going with my suggestion to just feather the props to 90 and lock the rotors, it's best to have "pusher" props, as then the blades act like fins, and having fins on you nose is bad for stability (but good if they're at the back) I don't much care for dart engines on eve, though I may use them on the core stage of a cross feeding rocket only design. Eve has a thick atmosphere, reducing drag is very important. Dart TWR is not great, but another spec few people talk about is thrust to cross section ratio. The dart's is terrible, the vector's is amazing. High ratios for this mean you can have long thin stacks with sufficient thrust, and thus minimize drag. I'm not sure how important this is if you climb first with props into thinner atmosphere, but it's very important for rocket only designs: vectors FTW. Lastly, I don't think I ever got an Eve SSTO working, with or without Breaking Ground. - But I did get a reusable 2 stage space plane working with a cargobay (the rear ramp section, and 2nd longest cargobay part) with >16 tons to orbit capacity. The first stage has the props, plus rockets: goes suborbital- undocks 2nd stage, which gets to orbit, then I have to quickly change back to the suborbital 1st stage before it falls back in the atmosphere and gets deleted, and fly it back to refuel from a surface base. After deployment of the payload, the orbital stage glides back to the fueling base, and then docks with the 1st stage, then the fueling base (wheeled) fills them up, ready to go again

Meh, I just put their pitch to 90, and lock the rotation to reduce drag I use a combo of those and batteries and small solar panels, so that I can recharge and fly around if I run out of fuel on eve's surface and need to fly back to the fuel station Not sure, I tried this, I think the angle is important, but even keeping gigantors horizontal to their airflow didn't get me anywhere close to fast enough Depends on your wingloading and power to weight ratio for the props. Obviously I can make something that flies higher on props if I don't have to lug a bunch of rocket fuel and engines up (ie, something like a U2) For my orbital designs, I think I was getting to about 10 or 11k

Wut? How would that add challenge? I add asteroid belts there (proc generated rounds co-orbital with dres, and a few other "on rails" celestial bodies as vesta, and Pallas analogues), their gravity is so tiny the odds of them affecting affecting your transfer trajectory is miniscule, and easily managed if they do

Did this include the breaking ground surface experiments? Anyway, science is basically unlimited through use of the mobile labs

+1 So, just more science to grind? Pass In what way? Why? This is a no for me +1 Agreed, it's what I do Vulcan?! An analogue for something that doesn't exist? Hamuea and Eris may be a bit redundant, perhaps Sedna too. No to lava oceans, not sure about the croissant, don't have ksp2 Not tidally locked, spin it so slow that the sun goes "backwards". No moons at all (I moved Gilly to Duna) No There are more, they have to be "discovered" to use them. No Yes to visible cities, not sure about rep hits No, patched conics ate terrible at handling binary systems, it gets worse the closer they are in size Might address the rest later, no time now

Well, I play on a scaled up system, and use 2 stage reusable spaceplanes. The first stage goes suborbital, the 2nd stage achieve LS orbit in time for me to switch back to the first stage before it gets deleted. Sometimes, I am quite far downrange, and used too much liquid fuel on the way up: so I have a mining and refueling base on the tip of that peninsula to the west of KSC. I land the first stage there, fuel it up, and head back to KSC. Putting in some oxidizer let's it go faster and get higher, out of the atmo even. It can actually save play time, rather than cruising back at ~30km altitude using 4x timewarp and a hard limit of ~1700 m/s or thereabouts... Across a 4x larger Kerbin. I've had limited but non-zero success with offshore mining rigs that extend a drill all the way to the seafloor (need to mod it so ore can be found there, normally it's not in ocean biomes), but haven't tried a floating base for servicing spaceplanes- on Kerbin. There are some shallow areas of laythe where I set up floating mining bases, but that's another topic. Also, on science/career mode, if you have excess scientists, you may as well stick them in a lab on Kerbin to generate a little extra science, but these don't need to go far from KSC. Also, mountain top relays can be helpful if you have stricter signal occlusion settings. You can also play with additional ground stations disabled, then you can build your own ground network (but honestly, a good space-based relay network is better and less time consuming)

Refueling station for airplanes Massive antenna array that outshines the KSC's DSN, etc. I build them but they serve purposes

The stock system is way too small and needs to be scaled up. I just can't go back to 1x and stand to see how small planets look from low orbit

If your computer can handle it, the visual mods, in particular, Parrallax: Also, Scatterer, and Kopernicus (if for nothing else, than a rescale using Sigma Dimensions Rescale, to go to at least 2.25x)

There's more to life than photosynthesizers. They already gave Laythe Geysers So I wouldn't be opposed to finding stuff like this: Or, you can do as I did, and put it around another star, problem solved. I never found Duna's atmosphere to be a problem with heat, primarly due to Duna being small with low gravity ,so you don't come in that fast. Note that the "fuel for decelerating into a Mars Orbit" (Duna?) will be less than fuel needed to land with less atmosphere. Whatever the density your craft can sustain without overheating, you aim for that for the aerocapture. Thicker or thinner atmosphere just changes this to a higher or lower entry corridor. It doesn't change the fuel requirements, and you can still do a direct descent. A thicker atmosphere then saves you on thrust and fuel needed for touchdown. On top of the mass savings, it also slows down the landing, and if thick enough can make it entirely passive, making it easier in terms of piloting skills. It just plain makes landing easier.

More atmosphere makes it easier to land, not harder. On my custom system, I increased its surface gravity 25%, and cut it's atmospheric density/pressure by a factor of 3 : making it a much better Mars analogue. Landing became much harder SSTO spaceplanes are still viable at 3x and 4x scale. I routinely was making ones that take >100 tons to orbit, although payload fraction was much worse than stock where it can be around 50%, the larger scales it drops down to like 10-15% Trees? No sunlight is way to weak there. That's why I moved laythe to another star entirely in my custom system.

Fair enough, I'm doing more searches now, and there does seem to be quite some variety in the scope responsibility of that job title, so there is some ambiguity. If Nate wasn't the boss of KSP2 like I thought he was, ie the person directly between the team and their T2 overlords, the. His responsibility is much lower. If there was a separate technical director that kept promising him capability X that would serve the creative goals, but he kept failing to deliver, then it seems Nate would be in the position escalating the issue up the hierarchy, or reducing the scope and such to align with the (crappy) capacity being delivered by the technical director

Who hired the coders? Who lead the team? Who didn't ensure that steps were taken to fix the code? That's like saying that the captain of the Titanic wasn't responsible for the sinking because he wasn't the helmsman, nor the lookout, nor the radio operator. The "creative director" does more than just set the aesthetic style. He was supposed to oversee the whole development of the game to ensure his creative vision came to fruition. This encompasses not just the art and graphics, but the game engine and its performance. If he didn't recognize the poor performance of the engine, and take steps to rectify it, that's his fault If he did recognize the poor performance of the engine, but didn't know which steps to take to rectify it, that is his fault too. If he did recognize the poor performance of the engine, and did know which steps to take to rectify it, then he clearly failed to actually implement those steps, because the game engine as not fixed, so that's his fault too. No way out of it. He led the team, for years, and it ended in disaster. He is the person most responsible for its success or failure, as it failed, that's on him. My claim was that the code was an unsalvageable mess. I am referring not to aesthetics, but to function. The problem is at the very core of the code. While it may be neatly formatted and look neat now, it would be a mess to try and fix, by that I mean a very arduous and complex task. I maintain that the code is unsalvageable. It was built on a bad foundation. As the years went on, building on the bad foundation, the situation only got worse and worse as it would get harder and harder to fix the foundation without tearing down everything built on top of it. Had he acted properly, early on he would have refocused what resources he had into fixing the problem with the game engine. Instead, it seems he focused most of his resources on graphics and aesthetics. KSP2 could have succeeded at a much lower scale if it just provided a solid game engine, especially considering the modding community for KSP. All he needed to provide was a "platform", and people would have bought it. Instead, he provieed a rotten foundation, but tried to put a nice coat of paint on it. Yes it is, he was responsible for the coding team It's a fact that Nate led the team, whether or not he wrote a single line of code, he had authority over the coding team, and the means to see that the code was resulting in a very buggy and poorly optimized game engine. He failed to have the code fixed (by making the team fix it, or firing them and hiring those who could). It is his fault. He was responsible for the scope and vision, he was the creative director. His fault lay not in failng to stick to a previous scope or vision, but failing to adequately adjust his vision and manage his team and resources to a point that what his team was producing and his vision aligned. It seems like he just viewed himself as the idea guy, and completely failed on the management of his team and resources.