What did you do in KSP2 today?

[Casellina X]

I did my usual post-patch trip to orbit on a clean save. I made the mistake of putting a Reliant instead of a Swivel on my first liquid stage. Luckily I was able to lean it over just enough to stay on a stable trajectory until I cut the stage loose. All in all one of my better gravity turns having not played in a little while.

I'll leave Jeb... Bill? Someone - in orbit ~250km for a little while and see how they fare. I'm eager for the science update as the mission structure generally gives me the push to do more. In KSP1 I got the mission to capture an asteroid and it forced me to get a bit creative on circularizing an orbit when way off kilter. I never quite got the hang of making a more stable asteroid tug, but I'm sure when they hit KSP2 I'll figure it out.

[Socraticat]

I enjoyed my not so short test today. These graphics are just stunning. Editing gives me some extra time to appreciate each frame and I absolutely do. As far as gameplay is concerned, I definitely have time to plan my maneuvers...

I think there's a clear improvement in frames, especially since 0.1.2 (my last comparable test). I'm really excited for parallel processing in "For Science!".

EVERYONE TO THE HYPE TRAIN!

1.0 LET'S GO!

(Sorry to the folks that didn't get a benefit from 0.1.5; it'll get there!)

[The Aziz]

Testing aerodynamics (they're still wonky), accidentally crash landed in a lovely place during sunset

Also, tested the clouds and OH. MY. GODS.

This is absolutely incredible.

Edited October 26, 2023 by The Aziz

[Periple]

I saw my blue Duna sunset! 

The game is much better than when I last played it in the summer. I was able to do this mission although not entirely without problems.

I built this plane, then a refueling launch, docked, and fueled in orbit, then flew to Duna. 

Things that worked well:

• Performance -- everything super smooth
• Construction -- nice and easy and intuitive, everything worked well
• Visuals -- it looks great! Clouds, atmospheres, antialiasing, coastlines viewed from space... just overall a much more polished look to things.
• Flight -- it was fun and easy and very controllable, both when getting into orbit from Kerbin and aerocapturing + landing on Duna. 
• Nothing broke!

Things that didn't work so well:

• On my first attempt, switching from the craft to the tracking station and back caused a phantom acceleration, the orbit going all over the place, and the craft was slung into interstellar space, also orbit lines disappeared when zooming out
• Navball info when docking just seemed wrong, it reported a relative velocity that clearly didn't match what was actually happening. Also there was no smoothing to the velocity, with SAS on in the target craft, every little wobble caused the velocity to jump all over the place
• On both attempts, the remaining fuel on my plane just mysteriously disappeared while I was focused elsewhere. There wasn't much but there was some, and my tanks were totally dry when I got back to the plane.
• And yeah the fuel launch was a bit too noodly and the control surfaces waggled way too much with SAS on my plane, but we already know that.

Things that are partly lack of familiarity, partly maybe just things not as usable as in KSP1?

• Can't "next orbit" maneuver nodes. This made planning RV and ejection burn unnecessarily fiddly.
• I screwed up my first attempt at fuel transfer, for some reason I omitted some of the tanks. Me? Confusing UI? I don't know. I also didn't remember where to find the resource manager until I looked it up, I kept clicking on the tanks and wondering what's up. 
• I couldn't make sense of the intersect indicators as well as the KSP1 arrowheads. The little dots just aren't as visually obvious and I also couldn't easily see the distance and relative velocity there.
• I couldn't figure out how to nudge the maneuver nodes with the mouse wheel, just kept zooming in and out instead. I really liked the precise control they gave.

Overall... I think it's getting there, nudging closer to my break-even point for frustration vs fun. I'm really looking forward to 0.2.0 which will give a whole different impetus to this. I hope some of the QoL frustrations will also have been addressed by then. It's really too bad the game wasn't released to EA in this state -- now it really feels like something you can build on!

Edited October 26, 2023 by Periple

[Stoup]

I agree about the frustration with right clicking fuel tanks. Right now it doesn't even show you ANY info about the tank in the PAM. It would make more sense to me if the PAM could show the individual fuel tank level, and then also link to the resource management panel so you can use the system as they intend. 

[Scarecrow71]

21 hours ago, Socraticat said:

I've definitely encountered this as well, and It does seem to be a calculation error. I do have a documented vid of burning for an interplanetary transfer and only getting 1/2 of the DV that was originally calculated. I had 2 Swerv engines mounted radially with XL tanks.

I'm loading up .5 now- going to test some frames with an old high part vessel, then maybe I'll try to get some data for this new mystery of "missing DV".

I fired up KSP1 and used Sandbox to create a vessel to go to Moho.  And while the dV calculation in KSP2 may not be accurate, I can say with 95% confidence that the issue here is the nuclear and/or hydrogen engines.  They simply don't have enough thrust to burn efficiently and with enough power to do anything at all.  The craft I used in KSP1 had 8 radially mounted and 4 centrally mounted NERV engines, asparagus-staged, with something like 5500 m/s of dV, with the lifter stage still having like 800 m/s of dV with 5 Mammoths.  The burn from LKO to Moho (at an orbital distance of 100km, ending with a Pe at Moho of ~90km) was supposed to take a total of 2400 m/s of dV.  After the burn, which took more than 4 minutes thanks to the NERV engines, I still didn't have a proper encounter with Moho; closest approach was still 190,000km away.  I had to do a correction burn, which cost another 400 m/s of dV (like 420ish, but I'm rounding down).  After that burn, I had a great encounter with a Pe of 65km.

I get into Moho's SOI, and I craft a circularized burn at Pe.  I'm traveling at an orbital speed of like 4000 m/s, but I'm coming in against the planet's rotation, so I should get some help from gravity here.  Nope.  5000 m/s of dV to circularize.  Ok, let's just get an orbit.  Nope; 4000 m/s of dV.  And the last burn was 10 minutes.  10 FREAKING MINUTES.

I am convinced now that, while there may be dV calculation errors in KSP2 that should at some point be addressed, the problem truly lies in the use of the hydrogen and/or nuclear engines.  They simply aren't powerful enough to be efficient enough to go interplanetary.  It makes me wonder why they are even in the game at all.  I will be going back to the drawing board in KSP2 and recreating my Moho craft without hydrogen (although, I am still going to experience issues with transferring to another planet, but that's a different ball of snacks).

[ConsoleCoder]

Not today, but a few weeks ago I docked in orbit for the first time. My first apollo-style Mun mission.

[Socraticat]

8 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

I am convinced now that, while there may be dV calculation errors in KSP2 that should at some point be addressed, the problem truly lies in the use of the hydrogen and/or nuclear engines.  They simply aren't powerful enough to be efficient enough to go interplanetary. 

I concur with this statement. I almost always get errors on complex builds- guaranteed with hydrogen. I thought maybe since my twr was so low, maybe I should reevaluate my expectations for these engines... then realized, "shouldn't that be reflected in the DV calculation anyway?"

Having said that, I'm getting a solid 60fps in many situations around KSC with less than 100 parts. Super duper!

[Dakitess]

Well I actually find that it's a good thing to balance high-ISP / high efficiency system with low thrust. Ion always were way too powerful and Nuke were something like 30% too powerful as well, you would go the nuke way all the time, ignoring all the various other engine that might suit the situation better.

It's cool to have this compromise separating ISP and Thrust, to me. It'll make high efficiency system more exclusive to specific situation.

[Periple]

I flew my Duna plane back. That went without a hitch, even found a nice little clearing free of rocks and trees to land on -- I didn't get close to KSC but that's fine. I'm not sure it would have worked with re-entry heating though as I came in pretty hot for aerocapture on Kerbin. Although maybe?

Yeah I think this game is getting there!

Edited October 27, 2023 by Periple

[Periple]

Okay so suddenly I'm having fun, go figure

I'm want to do a beach holiday on Laythe. Here's my ride!

So far it's been pretty smooth sailing, the only hitch I've had is that when I was messing with the plane, it suddenly started to fly asymmetrically, rolling towards the right. No idea what caused it, and disassembling/reassembling it paying extra care to symmetry didn't help. I rebuilt it from scratch (a little bit improved) and it flew straight again.

This feels more or less equally fussy as with KSP1, except that I'm not used to these bugs.

I also built this plane with separate control surfaces for pitch and roll and it made the SAS jiggling a lot better, it practically went away when I tuned control authority on them a bit.

Edited October 27, 2023 by Periple

[Casellina X]

Loosely inspired by Periple's craft, and once again bored on a drawn out meeting, I decided to put together a mission to Mun and back with a little bit of docking action. Unfortunately no captures of the full craft, it didn't dawn on me to start documenting until I was on my 3rd attempt at orbit with some remaining dV to get to the Mun.

Right before the transfer burn and after I had undocked, realized I added MP to the lander... but no RCS thrusters . Fortunately I had some on the main craft but didn't really need them. After a quick flip and thrust docking was complete. Funny enough, the easiest docking procedure I've ever had.

As you can see, still laden with part of my main stage. Even after the insertion burn, and eventual orbit shrink burn, I still had dV left over.

Down to an altitude of ~50km.

And we break free and begin rendezvous with a new Mun crater...

As you can see, a nice clean landing area right under us.

After a bit of panic burning and realizing that the ALT was not set to GROUND, I accepted that we produced a failure of a landing mission, but a successful bunker buster mission.

Practice most certainly leads to perfection. Make sure you have RCS on every craft that needs it. Make sure you're set to GROUND before you begin descent. Make sure you begin your burn with enough time to actually stop. And probably make use of quicksaves, something I never actually do.

[TwoCalories]

I booted up KSP2 for the first time in a while, and I flew a rocket I had built prior to the patch. It flew... weirdly. It refused to yaw left, and just kind of tipped over. I reverted flight to try out a different vessel, and the vessels were all... gone. It's weird, really. I started up my main save and I got the opening cinematic again, which was odd, because I had the save for months. Then the rocket I flew, which was presumably just autosaved, was waiting in the VAB.

I don't have enough info to make a Bug Report unfortunately. I don't want to open up my other save to try and reproduce it, though, because my first Mun landing is in that save and I kind of want to save it to look back on. Has anyone else encountered this?

[Mikki]

I landed my 0.1.4.2 shuttle at KSC 0.1.5... Clouds are awesome, blackrack for the win!

[ArmchairGravy]

I almost had a good day. The mission plan was to send the boys to The Mun, have Valentina bring a Crusher, swap the boys into the Crusher and then bring Valentina home.

I got the boys to The Mun

Had Valentina bring a Crusher

But then a lander leg fell off at some point while I was driving the Crusher over because KSP2.

I've been trying this mission every update since launch. There has yet to be a successful mission because of bugs affecting landed craft. This is the closest I've come at the highest frames, so There Has Been Improvement.

 

[PicoSpace]

Some bug hunting (basically seeing if 0.1.4 bugs still happened in 0.1.5).

[LunarMetis]

I forgot to write a post about this yesterday (lol), but I made a successful Duna landing. Safe to say, I ended up making the smoothest landing. It didn't topple over or anything, not a single part broken.

I would've also posted a cute line-up of all the Kerbals I brought on this lander if I remembered to add a ladder, but c'est la vie.

[Casellina X]

A couple of adventures today. First was supposed to be a northward hop towards the pole. Well, I pushed the wrong button and began a southward top towards the pole.

An overpowered craft meant we vastly overshot our target.

But within 25ish minutes, Val was able to experience both the Kerbin sunrise and sunset.

The next was an overly ambitious mission. I wanted to build a multi-part craft that could be assembled in orbit, with the subsequent launches attaching the engines. Began design and quickly moved to launch. I've never really tried a "large" launch before, at least not with intentions for success, so I was just seeing if I could get out of the atmosphere. This quickly turned into, "oh, maybe I can orbit," which rapidly evolved into an unplanned orbit.

You can see the general idea, except those are supposed to be hydrogen tanks and a SWERV. Once out there, a problem appeared:

As you can see, no orbit line. The one that's there is the initial Jeb mission. But no matter, I know enough KSP and orbital mechanics to circularize around 500km with little issue.

Next I repurposed the booster from above to get my engine module off the ground. The first stage was dV deficient, but I didn't mind burning some hydrogen to get to docking. Only there was another problem:

Neither craft had an orbit line. Although I could eventually circularize, when I tried to match inclinations, the node markers would disappear.

So all my efforts were amounting to nothing. This sucked, until I remembered something about changing Landed to Orbit in the save file. A couple edits got the orbit line back for this craft, but it didn't quite work on the other. A few more edits? Game crash. Next I said well, let's move over the craft positioning information and see what happens. Naturally two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, so I made edits to the end of the float, figuring small changes in the number mean big changes in space. I load in again and the engine module immediately explodes. Progress.

I made a larger change to the x coordinate and lo and behold, both craft within 100m of each other. I began hooting and hollering much to the amusement of my girlfriend. I quickly decoupled the initial stages from my craft, got the docking ports targeted on either craft, and gave the engine a quick burn. Docked at 4.7 m/s!

I finally ejected the extraneous bits and pieces.

And what was left looks like this. Although Bill is in the lander can, it's all remotely controllable. Now I just need to get the other two engines in place, then figure out what the hell to do with the thing. Thinking back, the original intent was to make something out of Starfield, but that would have taken much more effort and I would have given up before even getting started.

[cocoscacao]

Batmobile!!! It's a battery and it's mobile.

[Periple]

I tried to continue my Laythe beach holiday trip but... well, it bugged out. My plane was docked to my interplanetary transfer vessel, but when I started the burn, the plane phased through the transfer vessel and fell behind; strangely when I shut down the engine their relative distance didn't change.

Oh well, back to the old drawing board...

[Mikki]

My PC crackled while launching this station:

Spoiler

And it went up, in fact a bit to high... its more than 2000 tons in orbit. Fully fueled. And i have have used a s***load of struts and launchclamps. Don`t ask me about the partcount, i don`t care any more.

...soon you can read some hilarious comments in my missionreport about what happend. My Kerbals have lost their sanity. I need help.

Edited October 30, 2023 by Mikki

[The Aziz]

I landed... somewhere. With the least maneuverable plane I've ever seen.

[Scarecrow71]

I continue to try and build a craft to get to Moho...and I continue to run into bugs and issues with struts.  Please, @Intercept Games, fix the struts bug issues.  Please.  I beg you.

[Casellina X]

Attached the second engine today.

Sun setting on the KSC.

Probably more dV than I needed but things got a little funny trying to leave the atmosphere. Tried to minimize hydrogen usage on the way to the craft.

Orbiting and ready to transfer.

Target in sight.

A little bit of juggling to help with alignment.

And a first try dock success. I'll probably get the third one up within a couple of days, then maybe put together a couple of landers that should suffice for a low gravity trip. I'm more or less set to go interplanetary, I just need the guts to do it. Past missions have shown I can make it to Duna SOI, so why not elsewhere? Although I should really throw something into a low Sol orbit before heating makes its way in. I've got the ability and my window of opportunity is fast closing.

[Periple]

I'm attempting a Laythe mission. I am having real difficulty setting up the gravity maneuvers around Jool. My main issue is that I just find the trajectory planner really hard to read, I can't see where the encounters are going to happen and how to get them to line up properly. A secondary issue is that there are plain errors in the projections especially if I pass through more than one SoI. 

I really think the team should go back to KSP1 to look for inspiration on how encounters planning works, the UI there is just much clearer. 

• I find the concentric rings indicating SoI entry and exit distracting and they sometimes obscure significant information. I would prefer to just get rid of them altogether.
• I would like to get the clear and color-coded arrowheads for first and second encounters back.
• I would like to be able to see the relevant information -- Pe with altitude, relative velocity -- at a glance, without having to hover on things. 
• When focusing on a body so I only see the orbit line within the body's SoI, I would like to see which one is the SoI entry and which one is the exit.

I would encourage the UI designer for maneuver planning to replicate my story: 

1. Exit Kerbin to Jool
2. Mid-course correction to get an encounter with Tylo for gravity braking, objective is to get a highly elliptical orbit with a Pe that touches Laythe's orbit
3. Correction burn on that orbit to get an encounter with Laythe
4. Aerocapture on Laythe

I found this quite easy to do with the KSP1 controls, but very hard and fiddly with the KSP2 ones. 

Additionally, the way the orbit lines are brighter ahead of the body rather than behind the body feels intuitively wrong, I'm continuously planning my maneuvers retrograde as a result which is... not optimal.

Edit: Yeah OK, I'm going to put this down for a while again. Reloading and re-planning my encounter worked, but half my craft disappeared while I was doing it. 

Edit 2: All right, I made it, but it wasn't easy. I think next time will be easier as I'll know what to watch out for. I left some suggestions about improving the map view as it really did get in the way and made me feel I was poking around in the dark.

Edit 3: Laythe is really pretty! I like it how they made it a bit more like Titan by making the atmosphere that much more murky.

Edit 4: Returned to Laythe orbit. I have enough dV to bring both craft back to Kerbin...

Edit 5: Tim C Kerman is back on Kerbin. Jeb has to wait in orbit for recovery because the plane only has room for one.

Edit 6: Sent another plane to pick up Jeb. Hit another new (for me) bug: when I re-entered, my RAPIER refused to work in airbreathing mode. It read as starved of oxygen, although my intake was open and it had worked fine on the way up. NBD because I could glide home anyway, but still weird.

Edited October 31, 2023 by Periple