AD-Edge

Heh, cool challenge to see pop up. Ive built one already (100% stock), had it working back in January and Im in the process right now of putting together a video of it in action. Works exactly like the reusable SpaceX-like rocket in the video does... Took a lot of work and balancing....

I had a mission yesterday where I aimed to land on Duna, got to it with plenty fuel so I landed on Ike first, did some exploring, then landed/crashed on Duna. The kerbal survived, but the lander is somewhat broken due to last minute panic and horizontal velocities.... Ive also landed on Eve, Laythe (on that volcano-ish island) and of course Minmus and the Mun. Thinking I might be up for the challenge of Moho now... But that one sounds tricky with overheating engines etc.

I would dismiss them completely! Theyre just graphical bugs, nothing more, you cant go hunting for clues in absolutely everything. And I dont see how or why they would be incorporated into the mystery, Id see the devs spending their time on trying to 'fix' up the artifacts like these which appear on the poles of planets. Im going to guess thats the pyramid-like structure where the signal was first found? Wouldnt mind visiting it myself.

Wrong section, should have been posted in Offtopic. Hopefully a mod moves it soon... Either way though, this is good news and something which really needs to happen. Its just a matter of whether these kinds of plans will go into action, and thats a whole other story. With NASA's current budget becoming less and less each year my hopes of these kinds of things diminish. At the current rate it might be a decade before we see the first major steps of such a project - it took NASA 8 years of 'saving' and development to put the 2.6 billion curiosity rover on Mars. And in terms of space, or any major project budget that is - a few billion really isnt that much.

He didnt specifically say that they will be coming with the next patch, he just said 'The SSTV is merely the first piece of a puzzle, and currently the only piece of it." It certainly sounds as if the SSTV signal is the only piece of the puzzel in the game at this time, but who knows. Wonder what all this magic boulder stuff is about... Either way, these other pyramids being found are indeed just graphical bugs which appear at the south and north poles (theyve been seen on the Mun and Kerbin as well) and are more than likely around on the other planets as well.

Edit - double post :/

Feels way too early to be talking about 0.18! I only just got into 0.17 earlier today, loving it, but there were a few interesting points made in that 8 hour livestream done the other day, where a lot of the KSP team was interviewed - (they come in around 02:30:00 I believe)Docking mentioned around 03:43:00 - implementing docking was explained as 'building a house', where the complete feature is the 3rd floor, Squad are still currently working on the 'ground floor' - so this makes it seem like docking is still a few updates away, its also described as being more than one feature, ie it sounds like docking is ultimately in the centre of several other features which also dont exist yet (like cargo, fuel transfer and other stuff we dont know about yet etc) Heat system also sounds like its a fair way off, they mentioned that he had a more hack-ish reentry/heat system working a while back, but it doesnt sound like a proper system is being worked on yet. I tried looking for a particular part when I believe I remember 0.18 being mentioned, they seemed to be learning towards at some point an update to focus a lot on optimisations, Id guess either 0.18 or 0.19 will be focusing a lot in this area (yay!)

Yeh Ive tried doing that, but they didnt match up, the scale in the config for the object was set to '1.0', so Im not sure whats going on there, was hoping it would work and be accurate. As it is, I spent a lot of time manually editing the node positions in the config file, took quite some time but I have most of the pieces together now, its just a lot of sloppy guess work at first, until you get the hang of it (and even then its still super slow, when you have a modded ship made of 10-20 custom parts - all with nodes). I did also end up removing almost all of the stock parts to get it to load quicker as well, so that helps If anyone else knows how to determine the node positions in Blender, would be great to know, Ill keep experimenting with the cursor position method, see if I can work out whats going on...

Ive been working on some pretty complex parts recently, just wondering if theres a way to view the node positions? At the moment Im having to edit the position in the config, then load game and add the part, checking the position of the node. Its been pretty inefficient so far! And its the main thing thats slowing me down working on these parts. Any advice would be great. Im currently using Blender for the modelling/texturing. I have unity installed but havent really seen anything helpful importing/editing parts in unity in regards to nodes. -ADEdge

I think most people have the wrong idea about the voices. There might very well be voices added in for the tutorial kerbals, which will be speaking backwards spanish (I think), so Im going to guess that its not going to be a system where the Kerbals actually talk or anything, rather just make their kerbal-ish noises. Who knows though, Harv mentioned that it was both a voice and music volume control setting, feels unlikely that there would be music coming in this update. But why implement the volume controls, if theres no use for them yet?

Yeh quicksave is a nice safety-net to have. I look forward to there oneday being a 'hardcore' mode though, one of the many KSP related things Ive been thinking about lately. There would be no quicksave, and there is no 'end mission'. Every crew you launch has the potential to die then and there on the launchpad, or a million miles from home. All with no way to save them or revert back to a previous save in the event that something goes horribly wrong. Youd certainly end up valuing your best pilots/astronauts more, and probably end up only putting them on rockets that have been tested and are safe enough for the more major missions. And rescue missions would suddenly be much more stressful and demanding, not to mention everything becoming more rewarding (in the event that things go well!) I imagine this could be a setting for the single played 'campaign' mode. It would certainly be interesting to see if the Kerbals became more 'embedded' in the game experience too. As in youd have stats for each of the Kerbals back at the KSC in some building which dealt with the hiring and training of Kerbals and keeping track of their career details. Perhaps you could even give them medals as well. 'First kerbal on the Mun', 'First Kerbal on Duna', a medal for visiting a large amount of moons/planets in a lifetime, a medal for bravery - saving 'x' Kerbal lives during rescue missions and so on. You could view a summary of the events of a Kerbals life, whether theyre still alive, retired or KIA.

Never, I enjoy the challenge of learning all of this stuff by hand of through research - even if that means a bunch of frustrated/failed missions. I know some people would consider MechJeb to be one way to learn, but it just wouldnt do it for me.

Heh, yeh... Try again when 0.17 is out

I still play the games I had back on my Commodore 64 (on my laptop), so Im not entirely sure what the concern is. Im sure that well after Squad have finished with KSP, there will still be some hardcore modders left, who will continue to work on the game as with other popular games. And yeh, KSP 2 is always a possibility too anyway, not to mention any other games Squad might work on into the future.

Newer trees look good, still seem out of proportion though, they seem way too big compared to a rocket (unless trees just grow giant on Kerbal)