KSK

I always figured the parachutes were simply cut free (as they would be in real life - check out any images of Apollo capsules after splashdown and before recovery). Once the parachutes aren't attached any more then in gameplay terms they're not adding anything, so why not save a bit of graphical overhead and have them disappear? Spacecraft recovery operations are abstracted away anyway in KSP so I'm afraid I really don't see any point in having the parachutes not disappear. Or at least I would put it a long way down my list of graphical improvements.

Quoting this for truth. Good game design is hard. Good game design when you're essentially kicking off a new genre (and therefore don't have much else to draw inspiration from) is harder. Good open world game design on top of that (as opposed to Assassins Creed 'looky here I can collect all of these McGuffins or all of these other McGuffins' style of open world play) is harder still. KSP was an enormously ambitious concept that grew organically from a rather small game and started out as HarvesterR's hobby project. It's not surprising that we can find points to pick on - the amazing thing is that so much of KSP is done right. With that said - in my opinion - it is a pity that Career mode hasn't lived up to the promise of Sandbox mode. But to end on a positive note, sometimes it's the small things that make all the difference. For example, I'm not sure whether this was new to 1.2 or whether I'd just never spotted it before but thank you whoever decided to make kerbal experience a thing in Science mode. That made me a real happy camper. Now if some clever modder could figure out a way of automatically upgrading the space centre buildings as I work through the tech tree in Science mode, that would be perfect. At that point, I could install KCT and call it done. For my style of play, that would let me side-step most of the niggles that we've been talking about. You see - I've always liked progression in KSP. Even before Career mode was a thing, I would build infrastructure, put (then entirely pointless) satellites up because hey - a space program needs comm-sats right? It's why (and I can hear @tater rolling his eyes from here ) I was a fan of the Barn. I love the idea of a bunch of amateur rocketeers starting off in a barn and eventually building the kind of grandiose space program that Von Braun had in mind with his Integrated Plan. Ahh well. Imagination and the odd mod can fill in enough of the gaps.

Ahh, OK. I stand corrected.

Well who knew. According to Wikipedia, "...nuclear fission is either a nuclear reaction or a radioactive decay process in which the nucleus of an atom splits into smaller parts." So I suppose by that definition an RTG is a fission reactor. I suspect most people would go with @kerbiloid's definition though - I know that was my first thought.

Completely agree with your first point. Your second point is a fair one and difficult to answer simply because it depends on so many things. A new player for example might consider a Minmus landing to be the end-game - and quite rightly so given the skills they've had to master along the way. Then there's the question of how one measures progression through the game. Skills mastered? Planets visited? Tech unlocked? You could make an argument for each. Kerbal experience is an interesting metric though. Consider that orbiting Kerbin and planting a flag on the Mun and Minmus isn't quite enough to get a kerbal to level 3. To get to level 4 (if the wiki is still correct) requires a flag on Duna and Ike (there are others but Duna is an easy first target for interplanetary flights) and to get to level 5 requires flags on Duna, Ike and Gilly plus an orbit of Eve - again picking the easier targets. To me, that suggests that (roughly), landings around Kerbin's SOI could be considered early game, landings on Duna, Ike and Gilly could be considered mid-game (ignoring the blatant anomaly that landing on Eve grants the same experience as landing on Duna) and anything after that (with fully leveled up kerbals) is end game.

From @RCgothic's excellent post (which I feel smarter for having read!), I would say a Chernobyl like incident. Reactor goes prompt-critical, which is bad news for whatever spacecraft it's attached to, but the sudden temperature rise, lack of geometry change to the fissile mass, and (unless the Star Federation is willfully reckless) insufficient enrichment of said fissile mass, should stop it going nuclear-boom. Edit. I'm also guessing that using sufficiently enriched material is a bad idea even for the Star Federation because it would just make the reactor too difficult to control.

Yes - I never knew quite how many ways there were of pronouncing such apparently short and simple words. Really interesting thread!

I think @sdrevik's point was that by the time you've unlocked that 160 point node (along with the other nodes needed to build an interplanetary probe) then you're already able to send an easier and scientifically more lucrative crewed mission. So unless you're dead set on going for a 'probes first' game, you may as well do the crewed mission first. As such he was bothered by "KSP going down the road of being a 'one way to play it' / everyone uses the same strategy, rather than being a sandbox where you can use various strategies of manned missions, probes, science stations, etc. to accomplish your goals..." It's not so much that getting that 160 point antenna node is hard - it's that there are much easier (and arguably better) options available much sooner in the tech tree. Then again, try getting to that 160 point node without getting any science from crew reports or EVA reports? Maybe try getting it without going to the Mun or Minmus? Suddenly it looks a lot harder to get to. It's only trivial if you follow the well-trodden progression path and a lot harder if you deviate from that path. But I think we're talking past each other a bit. You seem (and please do correct me if I'm wrong) to be regarding the early game as something to be skipped past once you're bored with it - which as you point out, is very easy to do. Whereas I'm coming from the viewpoint of 'wouldn't it be nice if there were more ways to play and enjoy the early game, rather than skipping past it.'

Could be awkward when singing sea-shanties with a lisp. 'Farewell and adieu to you fair Laytheian laythays.' 'Farewell and adieu to you laythays of Laythe' 'For we're under orders for to sail to Old Kerbin.' 'And we may ne'er see you fair laythays again.'

It would be good to know what mods you had in mind...

Fortunately, Jake had the great good sense to set his sequel relatively far in the future and to be deliberately vague about timelines. I don't think it's ever mentioned explicitly in the story but from the various thread comments, The Next Frontier is set approximately 30 years after the events of First Flight. That gives me quite a bit of wiggle room, especially if you count the events set out in the epilogue. More importantly, it gave Jake enough wiggle room to write a loose sequel for a story in progress. I don't think I'm giving too much away if I say that First Flight is not going to end with Starfarer 1 in a parking orbit around Kerbin. However, the story will be heading Next Frontier-wards by the end and I've had a lot of fun working bits of Jake's world-building into my epilogue. Jake writing The Next Frontier in parallel with me writing the formative chunks of First Flight was a lot of fun and really helpful. On a practical note there's nothing quite like a peek into the future to help steer the direction of a story. And having bits of Jake's world-building to draw on and watching him build bits of my world-building (as and when it came out) into his story was a real buzz.

Cheesebusters?

I have to confess - I don't really grok MLP but I guess it's a big enough internet for everyone. Then again, I'm writing fan-fic about googly-eyed green aliens so who am I to judge. Epilogue is done. It'll no doubt benefit from being stuck in a metaphorical desk drawer for a few months and then from a final round of editing before it's needed but I'm pretty happy with it right now. Without wishing to be too pretentious, it takes the story back to its roots in some ways but should still end it on a suitable note! Definitely looking forward to sharing it, along with the final chapter - and I understand that it's traditional to finish the rest of the story first, so I'd best crack on with that now.

For me it's not about ignoring biomes, it's about Mun/Minmus biome farming being the overwhelmingly superior way of progressing through the tech tree. Once you've figured out enough of the game to get to LKO, it's reasonably straightforward (especially with the in-game tutorials) to get to the Mun and Minmus. After that - bam - more science than you can shake a scientific stick at. Yes you can go interplanetary and yes you can use orbiting labs (with a bit of self-control on the timewarp button they're not even too broken) but both of those options are significantly harder then Mun/Minmus biome farming. That's partly because of the amounts of science available but mostly because the tech tree is geared towards that Kerbin-Mun/Minmus-interplanetary game progression which means that most of the useful technologies for different play styles come near the end of the tree. Changing the difficulty slider doesn't affect that much, if anything it encourages more biome farming just to scrape enough science together to do whatever else you want to do. Even if you're going interplanetary in a Mk1 capsule you still need reasonably advanced power generation (because solar is less effective) and taking along a proper suite of science experiments is handy too. What would be nice would be to have a tech tree that allows more options once you get to LKO. Want a standard progression to the Mun and Minmus? No problem. Want to focus on interplanetary probes and get your science that way? Go for it. Want to build a space station before going to the Mun and use an orbiting lab to get a boost from some of those early LKO experiments? That should be an option too. Heck - putting more than one kerbonaut at a time into orbit before you've unlocked the first third of the tech tree would be an improvement. Those alternative play-styles are hobbled at the moment in that to unlock the parts to do them properly, you need to farm significant amounts of science from the Mun or Minmus. Which makes them a bit pointless. This isn't about difficulty - it's about variety. Give me an FL-T400 tank, a Mk1 capsule, some landing legs, a couple of decouplers, a Swivel and a Terrier and I can unlock the whole tech tree by going to two destinations (unless I self-impose a swingeing science penalty). But who wants to do that every single game?

Sigh. I did go back and put the link in but it seems that this 'mobile friendly' forum software has a problem saving post edits when made from a tablet. Anyway - link is here. Sorry about that and hopefully it's not paywalled for anyone. Apparently the SNRE design was studied during Project Rover although I haven't been able to find anything definitive to say whether a working model was ever built. Incidentally, here's a nice scale drawing of the engines that were built during Rover - judged purely by eye Pewee doesn't seem to be much above a metre in diameter and Pewee is pretty old technology. I'd be surprised if SNRE and it's descendants (SNRE crops up quite a lot as the reference design for later NTR studies) weren't practical designs even if they haven't been built.

Except that the DSN doesn't include relay satellites around other planets and is quite capable of communicating with spacecraft out at Pluto and beyond. Not quickly mind you, so I'm not sure if it would be capable of real-time mission control of crewed missions over interplanetary distances but then signal delay over those distances is going to make real-time control from Earth a bit tricky in any case. CommNet is a fun game mechanic that gives you another reason (other than science) to send probes to places but I don't think it's particularly realistic. Agreed. Biome farming is by far the quickest and easiest way to get your science points. Going off that well-worn track is disproportionately difficult which is a shame. I find it also pushes me into slightly absurd measures like farming the KSC biomes for scraps of science.

Bimodal nuclear thermal engines (can be run as engines or generators) can be quite small. According to the introduction to this paper, the enhanced SNRE design (which I believe stands for Small Nuclear Rocket Engine) is 59cm in diameter by 132cm in length and can generate 25kWe through a Brayton cycle turbine. So a 0.625m fission reactor is entirely realistic. Any size of rocket sized fusion reactor is currently entirely fictional.

Doesn't matter a bit - just makes your version of him stand out a bit.

Agreed but sometimes I don't want to repeat the same journey over and over and over again just to fine-tune a design. Quick example from my current game - I launched a scanning satellite into a nice neat polar orbit around Kerbin. Booster flew well, upper stage had plenty of fuel in reserve for a reentry burn and disposal in Kerbin's atmosphere. Satellite got to it's planned orbit, ran the scan... and ran out of power halfway through transmission because I'd chosen the wrong antenna for the job and hadn't included enough batteries. So I cheated. A quick dab of infinite electricity later, I had my resource map of Kerbin and it was time to head back to the VAB to tweak the design and try again for my Mün mapper. Now I could have de-orbited the satellite and tried again but really, there was very little point. Getting to a polar orbit is routine and I knew the booster was sufficiently over-engineered to handle a much heavier satellite (proof - I used the same booster to put the redesigned satellite around the Mün - where it worked very nicely!). So the journey was essentially done and I saw no good reason to repeat it. Especially when the reason for my first satellite design not working was a bit arbitrary. Why do I need to transmit the whole map in one go? Why can't I transmit the first third, recharge, then transmit the next bit? Of course, this is where somebody pipes up and tells me I can do exactly that. Edit - I should point out that this is a Science mode game, so cheating like this doesn't come with any financial penalties.

I know that feeling. I'm liking it so far. Light hearted but nicely written, I'm enjoying your version of Wernher - my apologies, Wherner - and I laughed at: "We could even come across the "clouds" that are sung about in the myths of old." Looking forward to seeing where this one goes. Around the World in Eighty Days, kerbal style!

Wonder what good ol' John Young made of that first shot? I don't recognise the other two - the versions previously released to the public I should say.

That looks great! Going to make me smile whenever I quit to desktop. Thanks!

Oh those are great! Really like the rover shot. In fact, would you mind if I took a copy for use as wallpaper?

Just don't forget the servicing and maintenance. Regular baryon sweeps will keep your deflector in tip-top working order.

The perfect picture to go with the old 'Motivating Kerbals' loading hint.