Meet Veyra — a red world that's finally ready to fly to.
Veyra is 440 km across, pulls a friendly 0.7 g, spins once every 11.3 hours, and leans 24.5 degrees on its axis, so it gets proper seasons. The air holds 81 kPa down at sea level and thins out gradually up to 45 km. That's a lovely combination: wings and jets work beautifully low down, and there's a long, gentle climb before you reach space.
The best part is the sky. Veyra's atmosphere inverts Kerbin's Rayleigh scattering, so red is the colour that scatters least here. That gives a rust-red sky at noon — and then at sunset, when the light has to cross far more air, the short wavelengths take over near the horizon and the whole sky goes blue-green. Exactly backwards from Earth. None of it is painted on; it falls straight out of the physics, and flying into a blue Veyran dusk is a genuine treat.
After dark, the poles light up. Volumetric auroras hang over both of them: thin cyan curtains with a sharp lower edge from 25 to 41 km, and a soft magenta veil glowing above them up to 60 km. Fly a spaceplane underneath them at night, or watch them ring the poles from orbit.
Down below there's a wine-dark sea with a real depth gradient — pale in the shallows off the black sand beaches, nearly ink over the deep basins. The land comes in bands: algae in the flooded lowlands, red forests with dead standing trees through the middle, bare rock above 2.8 km, and scree clinging to the steep ground. Fly low over the dunes at the right time of day and you'll catch cloud shadows sliding across them.
And it has rings! Saturn's real ring geometry, rescaled to fit: the faint C veil hugging the planet, the big bright B ring, the Cassini Division, the A ring fading outward, and a thin little F ringlet off on its own at the edge. The Maxwell, Encke and Keeler gaps are all exactly where they should be. From the ground they arch clean across the sky, and at dusk you see them from the unlit side — translucent, with the red sky glowing through them. They're tipped a couple of degrees off Veyra's equator, just enough to give them some character.
The weather is volumetric and comes in three decks. A convective base layer from 3.1 to 7.6 km that builds towers 4.5 km tall. Thin cirrus filaments up at 8 to 9.8 km, rarer than the base deck. And then, way up at 21 to 24 km with eleven kilometres of empty air beneath them, silver-blue noctilucent clouds — the only cold colour in Veyra's daytime sky, and a wonderful thing to go chase with a spaceplane. The cloud maps are built from real satellite imagery, and the two lower decks are separated by cloud shape rather than brightness, so they genuinely carry different weather instead of the same pattern printed twice.
Then there's Selyn, Veyra's moon. It's a dark basalt world 130 km across, dusted with ash and rust-coloured soil and streaked with pale rose-grey rays from its young craters. It is tidally locked, so from the near side Veyra hangs in the sky and never moves. Gravity is just 0.05 g: every step is a slow, floating hop, and getting back to orbit takes very little fuel. Selyn's orbit is close enough to give Veyra total solar eclipses, and with Scatterer you can watch its shadow cross the planet. Its surface has its own rocks, boulders and slabs, so landing there feels nothing like landing on Veyra.
There's plenty to actually do on both worlds: full stock science results written for every situation, SCANsat scan texts, and Breaking Ground ROCs and surface features unique to each one. On Selyn you can find chunks of Veyra itself, blasted off the planet long ago, and it's the place in the system where the ionograph works.
If you don't like the rings, go to GameData/Veyra/Veyra/Visuals and delete the folder called "Rings".
UPDATING FROM AN OLDER VERSION: delete your old GameData/Veyra folder before installing. The folder layout changed, and copying over the old one will load the planet twice.
So go land on it, fly a plane through the canyons, hop across Selyn, or just park on a dune and watch the rings come up. Enjoy!
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