Kerbal Space Program 2

Definitely more of a challenge there. Some of the progression missions require flag-planting, but most just need some science collection. You can do a round-trip later after you’ve unlocked some more parts :slight_smile: .

I’m finding rover physics to be somewhat wonky. I put a little rover on my Duna probe because I doubted my ability to land close enough to the monument - a warranted doubt, as it turned out. Had to drive 1.7km to the monument, and that little rover wanted desperately to be upside down. Got there, though, albeit with a little save scumming. On to Jool and Eve!

Disable the reaction wheels when you’re driving and it won’t do that.

Rovemate doesn’t have a reaction wheel. I extended the wheelbase a bit with a couple XS trusses, but apparently should have made it somewhat longer yet.

Hmm, so it doesn’t. I added a reaction wheel to mine since it also served as a landing system, too. But the reaction wheel kept trying to flip it over when accelerating. It did have a super long/wide wheelbase, though. Drove it around Eeloo with no trouble.

I think the thing to do is make it a 6-wheeler and disable the motors on the back pair so it can’t wheelie.

Here’s my 4-wheel design that worked fine on Eeloo:

I toggle the reaction wheels online if I get enough airtime so I can land it properly :slight_smile: .

Yeah, that’s a lot longer and wider than mine. Also wouldn’t fit into a fairing on a 2.5m stack. Though, to be fair, I didn’t need the width, just the length, and the length wouldn’t be an issue in a 2.5m fairing. Still, wonky physics. An actual rover like mine traveling at walking speed wouldn’t constantly wheelie at the drop of a hat.

The parachute didn’t work at all. In spite of the fact that the COG of the rover was below the chute attachment point, it spun endlessly and landed upside down. I reloaded a quicksave and used the excessive delta-V of my penultimate stage to soft-land the entire contraption and tipped the rover onto its wheels at the last moment. Beats waiting for the next Duna transfer window to use a modified design.

IIRC, I squeezed that rover in a 1.25m fairing. You can make them reeeeeeeeally wide with no problem. But I agree, the tippiness is kinda silly. MechJeb had some rover acceleration control that helped. I had a “hat” on my rover with a pair of rocket engines for soft-landing. Eeloo required it due to the lack of atmosphere, but I think it would work on Duna, too.

Super wide fairings violate my aesthetic principles, which is even worse than breaking KSP physics.

I thought I’d use a chute, because hey, atmosphere! But when that didn’t work it was a matter of how can I salvage the mission on a reload rather than reverting to launch. Especially because I launched without checking where I was relative to transfer windows, and ended up doing a couple side missions after launching my Duna probe into LKO and prior to my Duna transfer burn.

Anyways, the main takeaway is that I’m enjoying the game, which I didn’t at the initial launch. There were so many game-breaking bugs intially. Orbital trajectories changing when you move between spheres of influence, orbits decaying when below certain altitudes around bodies with no atmosphere, vessels spontaneously destroying themselves when undocking, and the list went on. I haven’t encountered anything like that in the current iteration.

Next up on the itinerary is entering Eve’s SOI (side mission), have a probe waiting for the transfer window in LKO with enough delta-V to grab science from Eve orbit and Gilly (should be able to land on Gilly in spite of having no landing gear). And the primary mission is to put a probe in Jool orbit, but that transfer window is further out. Could use the same probe design for this, or could do up a new design with deployable sub-probes to drop into the orbits of various Joolian moons, because after the Eve mission I should have nuclear propulsion and some 3.75m parts.

The ground collision detection seems really wonky which probably isn’t helping things with rovers at all. Also landing legs seem super bouncy, I had to play with the spring and dampening , and also be a little more careful on the landing to avoid bouncing way back up again or sitting there jiggling for a while.
Also nice looking rovers.

For the Beer Towel and Peanuts 2 the launches will be

Torque core plus tug
Command / accommodation plus tug
Science bay and spars that connect the H tanks to the core
Lander plus assorted lander bases
5 launches of the double fuel spherical tanks ,the second gets dropped from the central engine after topping off the others.
2 launches of methalox tanks for refill of the lander

That’s eleven. Could probably consolidate further but they get pretty long and flippy. I may just for grins see if I can put some big boosters on the side docking ports and launch the whole thing. That would need a right angle launch profile for sure.
I also seem to be having issues with couplers not decoupling when mounted radially and still getting random docking on undocking explosions.

Obviously doing all this in sandbox mode.

Mod wise I am using CKAN which handles all the mod updates etc .
It has about 3 or 4 mods that are needed for the other mods to run but it manages all the updates for that nicely ( bepinex spacewarp, utility etc) so one doesn’t need to be deep in the weeds of mods to use them.

Docking Alignment Display a must have, now with log scale
Maneuver Node controller also a must have
Micro engineer which displays all the useful flight details, orbits and target distances

A UI customize mod so I can clean up the screen of some of the not needed gauges.
k2D2 which is mechjeb. It can do a lot , I use it to execute maneuver nodes ( the default time warp drives me nuts / I am just not very good ) and it had a ‘keep docking ports aligned’ feature which was helpful but it went away pending a fix. Now I actually pay a bit of attention to thruster placement and set some to fore aft up done left right only , plus practice I am not missing it so much
Flight plan, gives transfer windows etc although I am not sure it’s that accurate , eyeballing the solar system map and checking the transfer angles seems to be just as reliable.
Some parts mods ( Kesa, Kesa solar, pretty flame plumes , which is pretty, shadowinc. Not sure I actually use any of the parts other than the super large solar panels. I think some of the engines they have are a little over the top in ISP etc even for my very broad personal threshold for what’s reasonable.

Also just watching the Vids posted , have to agree the sound design is really good on this game , love the Duna music , very “The Martian” which I think I’ll have to go rewatch once this mornings sore head goes away.

There’s no ISRU yet, not even the very basic kind from KSP1?

Yeah, that was a huge problem for me, even after playing with the parameters. Had many close calls with tippy landers, plus some reloads from cases where I ended up on too much of a slope.

That too. I think it helped when I explicitly set control to the thing I’m undocking beforehand, but that might have just been random.

My Laythe mission is going reasonably well so far. Landed and launched. Ran into one near-disaster, which is that I forgot to add a decoupler for the inflatable heatshield (or rather I did, but apparently somehow dropped it when fiddling with things). It’s super floaty even when deflated, and tipped my rocket over. Fortunately, the marine lab it was attached to was decoupleable (since I didn’t want to carry it back to orbit), and once I did that, the rocket tipped back upright. Whew! I’m back in orbit now and just have to dock with the nuclear tug and head back to Kerbin.

I started using some mods as well, also using CKAN. The maneuver node controller is the most useful so far. The default map UI is infuriating at times and just being able to fine-tune the burns manually is a huge benefit. K2D2 is pretty nice but it sometimes screws things up for unknown reasons.

ISRU? resources mining and all that ? No nothing yet , I’d guess that will come with the ‘colonies’ update, not sure when that is dropping though.

Something is up with decouplers for sure, it also seems to set the focus onto the debris parts rather than the ship part.
With docking ports I have taken to reducing the clamp force to 0% on both sides then clicking undock on the part I want to end up controlling , that at least prevents an immediate redock and explosion.

Laythe mission complete. That was a toughie, but Valentina Kerman made it back to Kerbin safe and sound, and with thousands of delicious science points. A couple of bug-related problems fixed with a reload, and some annoyance with the way the game deals with slightly lopsided machines, but overall a success. Just one near-disaster that was my fault, but it ended up ok.

I have another Laythe mission I can go for, or a few other ones… haven’t decided yet. Also considering a Jool multi-mission with vehicles to go to every moon in the system and collect science. Not too many more modules to unlock, but the remaining ones are expensive (6000+ points).

I have been practicing interplanetary transfers and had to go dig out the books and remind myself of the math of it all , things went a whole lot better delta V wise after that , plus realizing you could focus on the destination planet whilst messing with the node ( with the node editor mod) and se the impact. That really helps with fine tuning the capture .
Anyway I then started practicing aero capture and got the BT&P II out to Jool with some heat shields

( it is designed to be built in orbit but I teleported the fully assembled ship to Kerbin orbit then flew out)

Kerbol shines directly through solid parts

I tried multiple different altitudes ,I found too deep resulted in disaster , despite pushing all the fuel as far forwards . Drag upfront and weight too the back results in things going backwards.

Anyway after much trial and error and reloads I found a 170k altitude got me into a Jool orbit. I went for a few more loops each scrubbing 400dV brought about a Laythe intercept on the 3rd loop. So with a few hundred dV immediately after exiting Jools atmosphere I got a 45k aerocapture for layte

Several attempts varying the altitude from 43 ( disaster) to 46 ( nothing worthwhile) I landed on 44k PE and then a 400dV burn to get capture

Unfortunately all of the Laythe stuff took way too many reloads due to random parts flying off for no reason sudden ship shaking itself apart for no reason, refusal of SAS to lock prograde , time warp change explosions, I think it was about 10 crashes per actual attempt .
My rig may not be up to it all .

Anyway I’ll go back to more modest builds now but it was all instructive on docking, aero cap and transfers so not wasted time.
Other than the crashes and all that stuff.

Heh, I also just built a mushroom-headed ship with the inflatable heat shield. Though in my case it was to avoid the buggy aerodynamic fairings that don’t seem to really work. Unfortunately, my mission didn’t really work out. It was to be a sample return from Moho–but the stupid sampling arm broke off sometime during the trip! Ugh. It’s so hard to schedule trips there, too, due to the inclination and eccentricity. The Flight Plan mod works in simple situations, but isn’t nearly at the level of the MechJeb porkchop plots.

Anyway, cool vehicle you’ve got there. I guess the game needs a few more fixes to be stable. So far my rig has been doing ok, but I sometimes get time slowdowns of about 2x with complex enough vehicles. I do have a Laythe project (another sample return) but it needs more work. Probably a variation of the water landing approach I took previously.

I have started up a game in science mode , which is entertaining. There is a bit of lack of mission options , but I guess the tech tree and mission interactions need careful thought to balance between just farming science points on simple missions or having to grind through multiple similar missions to get the points.

Anyway made it through to the Duna monument mission and decided to do it with a rover.
First up I decided to put 3 comm sats in geostationary orbit over Duna ( yeah you can guess where this is going) I made 3 sats all stacked together on a single launcher , each had plenty of dV and got them out to Duna no problem. Started in a big elliptical orbit and detached the probes one by one and made circular with some timing and irritation with the time warp feature, then realized IKE CAN JUST FUCK THE RIGHT OFF!!!
Yeah forgot it’s also in geostationary orbit so no way to get anything also in GS orbit without getting into its SOI at some point. Anyway put two in a 1500k polar orbit and the 3rd way out in an equator orbit , which pretty much gives full coverage anyway.
I think I’ll go load up the surface survey mod, which looks very cool .

Then rovers. Tested on the ground , teleported to Duna and tested all good . Then 3-4 hours of launching, wheels fell off, adjust everything, launch, wheels fell off.
Eventually found there is a bug with the micro truss nodes and wheels and legs falling off.

I changed the design and swapped in the slightly larger truss nodes and all was good. Well sort of.
Got to Duna , but forgot about the air resistance and what it would do to my landing point and so landed about 30 degrees short. No worries I thought , I like road trips I’ll drive it.
Yeah janky surface collision detection combined with the slightly larger trusses poking out front and back (which were where my lander attached to the rover but I thought would makes excellent bumpers ) made that a nightmare. They have made driving rovers even more annoying than in Elite Dangerous , which takes some doing.
After 3 hours of the edge of a truss getting randomly stuck to the surface requiring dragging around in circles until it breaks free , interspersed with periods of smooth driving in a zen like state and a serene soundscape just long enough to fool me into ‘ I can do this ‘ feeling I am calling it and going back to redesign and maybe land a bit closer.