Apogee — Update, 21 September
This one is about the things around your vehicle — the one you are trying to catch, the stage you just dropped, the astronaut you just sent outside — and about coming down onto the ground and getting back off it again.
Rendezvous and docking work now, end to end. A plan arrives where it says it will, it can show you the best pass several orbits out rather than just this one, it will not fly you through the atmosphere to get there, the target is on screen while you close on it, it joins your flight once you are within 5 km so there is something to dock with, and the contract pays out when you do.
Landing has been rebuilt from the legs up: gear that reaches the ground and folds against the hull, a descent autopilot that lets the air do its work and flies against the real ground instead of sea level, terrain drawn where you are actually standing, and a LIFT OFF button to leave again.
And the assembly building now works out two things it used to guess at: what the climb will cost this particular vehicle, and how much heat shield the capsule that actually comes home needs.
Before you fly: things that will be different
- Warp tops out at 1,000x. The 5,000x to 50,000x rungs are gone, including on the pad. A long coast is what Jump to is for: it gets there faster than any warp, and it does not skip past the moment you wanted.
- Strap-ons stay within what they are strapped to. Neither end of a radial part can slide past the ends of its parent any more, and a part on a radial decoupler does not slide at all. A craft saved with a booster hanging off the end of its core loads with it moved back on.
- Dropped stages are solid. A separation that used to be harmless because the vehicle flew straight through what it dropped can now cost you. See Hardware.
- Heat shield figures have changed for any design whose capsule shares a stage number with the service module below it. They were sized for the whole stack and are now sized for the capsule, which is usually a much smaller number. See The assembly building.
Rendezvous and docking
- A vessel you fly up to is there to dock with. The Dock tab said "No other vessel in the focus group" even with the target ten meters away, and offered no way to change that. A tracked vessel only joined a flight when you took control of something within 5 km of it, so the flight docking is for — launch from the pad, fly up to a station already in orbit — never brought the station aboard: it stayed a marker, and a marker cannot be docked to. Any tracked vessel that comes within 5 km now joins the flight, where its marker was, and the Dock tab lists it. Until then the tab names the nearest one and how far off it is; one that cannot join, because its design is gone or uses parts you no longer have, says so.
- A rendezvous arrives where it says it will. A plan that promised a closest approach of meters could miss by kilometers. Its burn times counted from when it was solved rather than when it was queued, its burns were aimed in a frame taken from the periapsis of a near-circular orbit, and the planner stopped aiming a kilometer short. It is now re-solved at the moment it is queued, aimed at the moment of each burn, and solved to a meter. Because burns are not instantaneous, an armed rendezvous also flies small corrections on the way: one late in the coast and a final trim five minutes out, each re-aimed from where the vehicle actually is. Flown in testing, it arrives within about 35 m.
- A rendezvous plan is queued once. Queuing a plan replaces what is already in the burn queue, since every burn in it is solved from the orbit you are on now. Pressing the button again no longer adds a second copy of every burn, and the tab says when the plan on screen is the one queued.
- Armed stays armed through the queue. Arm a queued sequence once and each burn loads and arms the next one when it finishes. It stops when the queue runs out, or when anything that would disarm a single burn happens.
- Closest approach, on this orbit or a later one. The planner shows it under "range now", for the vehicle as it is flying. Arrows step through the next ten orbits, and when a later one comes closer the panel names it: "best in the next 10 orbits: 1.0 km, 3 orbits on, in 4h 54m". Two vessels on nearly the same orbit close a little each lap, so the pass worth planning around is usually a few orbits out.
- A rendezvous is not flown through the air. Catching something below you means dropping, and the planner could pick a transfer whose low point was in the atmosphere: a plan that read as a rendezvous and flew as a de-orbit. Arcs that dip below what the flight considers a stable orbit are refused, and the planner says so. The phasing orbits use that same floor, which is now the body's own rather than Earth's 140 km — that number put an ordinary 100 km lunar rendezvous below the line.
- You can see what you are chasing. Other vessels are drawn in the cockpit: the ones simulated alongside you as the machines they are, and tracked vessels out to 500 km as markers, with the one you are chasing picked out. Only your own craft was ever drawn, so the last kilometer of an approach was flown on a range readout alone.
- Rendezvous in Orbit pays out. It only counted vessels simulated alongside yours, which a satellite already in orbit never was unless you took control of something beside it. A vehicle launched from the pad and flown up to one closed to meters and got no credit. Every tracked vessel around the same body counts now. The credit is the closest you ever came, so you can go on and do something else before the flight ends.
- Stepping outside is not a rendezvous. The astronaut counted as a second vessel a meter from your ship, so pressing EVA in low orbit completed Rendezvous in Orbit on the spot.
EVA
- An EVA has its own controls. Outside, every ship panel is put away and one EVA panel takes their place. Face toward the hatch, away from it, against your drift, hold a direction or turn freely, then work the pack with a throttle slider and a Cut button. The panel also shows air, gas, the way back, samples and Climb back in. The ship's autopilot stays with the ship: it does not fly the astronaut, and climbing back in hands it back with the throttle closed.
- Only a crew can go outside. An empty capsule could send somebody out: the flight was built from the design, which says every seat is filled, rather than from the crew you assigned. Taking control of a fleet vessel never applied the count at all, and an astronaut lost outside went on being counted aboard. The same fix means life support now breathes for the people aboard rather than for the seats, on a launched flight as well as in the building.
- Nobody left at the radio, either. A capsule whose only astronaut did not come back in was still credited with a pilot who could fly it through a lost link. It is treated as the uncrewed vessel it now is.
- First or third person. A toggle at the top of the screen switches between the view from inside the helmet and the view from behind the astronaut.
- Out of the capsule, on a line. The astronaut comes out of a hatch on the side of the crew capsule, and the tether is fixed there. They used to appear two meters from the vehicle's center of mass — inside the tank, on most stacks — with the line running back to the same spot.
- The tether holds. It was drawn and did nothing: the pack flew you straight past the end of it. At 25 m it now stops you and pulls you gently back toward the hatch.
- The ship is solid. Fly into the hull and you bounce off it instead of passing through.
- The camera comes in close. You can zoom to an arm's length of the astronaut. Stepping out frames the camera at 5 m, and climbing back in pulls it back out to the ship.
Landing