lazarus1024

It has been awhile since I've made a rover to run missions with. About the only time I really use them these days is if I am building a processing/fueling base on the dirt. Need something to move fuel between the base and a lander. Beyond that, yeah, IMHO, if you have to go more than about 3-4km, it gets painfully boring. I do build rovers sometimes just to tool around an area of interest. Example, I'll sometimes put a lander down near the edge of a crater and some mountains on Mun/Duna. Then it is nice to be able to get around a little. Drive up to the top of a mountain, put a flag up there, drive back, etc. It would be nice if there was a cruise control option.

This, this, this. I don't do it as often as I should, but I DO do it periodically. It has saved my bacon a couple of times. Beyond that, I sometimes port between machines. Desktop, laptop or tablet and it is nice to be able to take my current save, play on that and reload it on my main machine (desktop). In a lot of ways, I am really looking forward to multi for this reason. Run it on my server and then I can (hopefully) have a persistent environment to run on any of my machines without tossing around the save files. That and so that my sons can start playing directly with me.

I used some of the 1x6 panels for the first time in 1.0.2. No option to retract them once I had them extended...are they totally non-retractable now? Or are they only retractable with an Engineer? What about the other panels? Are they non-retractable now as well?

Err, no, you cannot transfer the license. It is locked to the BIOS. Try to move it to a different machine, unless you are desoldering the BIOS to take it with you, Windows will not activate. Calling MS to explain they MIGHT allow the activation if you are swapping boards within a machine. They likely will not give you a telephone activation code if you are swapping across machines entirely.

Since KSP is currently a lot more focused on single thread performance...that isn't true at all. Also back to AMD versus Intel...yeah, you'll probably notice a big difference. My Laptop has roughly similar single thread performance to most of the newer AMD desktop processors. I can tell you I notice a BIG difference between my desktop and laptop with extremely low graphical settings (to ensure zero of the bottlenecks are the iGPU on my laptop). Yeah, my laptop will handle some fairly good sized ships, but my desktop is a beast in comparison. Which it should with a good 60% higher single thread performance. Yeah, I've limited the threads on my desktop so I can ensure the "quad core" part wasn't coming in to play (technically, my laptop had more threads because it is hyperthreaded and my desktop isn't). KSP relies heavily on single thread performance right now.

Depends on airflow. Granted, even with still air, you are probably convecting 80% of the heat from the radiator as convection and conduction in to the bits of the vehicle touching the radiator, but a measurable and reasonable amount is still being radiated (by my math, using .20 as the emissivity of heavily oxidized aluminum, about 200W). This would of course be at idle. Spray paint that thing black and you'd up that significantly to 900w or so. Of course you'd also reduce convection...which would be a bad thing, since that is the primary way it removed heat (since your radiator is probably dumping 10% of the energy produced by combustion, with only about 30% of it utilized as workable energy by the engine and the rest out the tailpipe or in to outer bits, like radiated/convected from the engine itself, the engine oil, pumping air, etc.). Engine cranking 150hp means it is probably dumping something like 9-10kw in to the coolant. That is a lot of heat to move. As everyone else mentioned, radiation is how they work. Which takes a great deal of surface area and/or a very high temperature. I haven't looked at cooling systems for space vehicles in AGES, but my guess is a lot of the manned ones use heat pumps to make this more efficient. If you are only trying to cool something like 80F coolant a few degrees, it is going to take a HUGE surface area, even in space. However, if you utilize a heat pump and can heat that coolant up to 200F on the hotside, you just doubled your radiative losses. Heat it up to 400F and you've nearly doubled it again. So what might have been a 10m^2 radiator, you can bump down to 5m^2 or even 2.5m^2. This is a big issue with generating and utilizing power in space. You have a 1000w electrical system in a space ship, you are going to need to radiate 1000w of heat. Give or take of course. The shell of the ship will radiate heat. Then again, in sunlight it'll absorb heat. In orbit, the balance is generally on losing more heat than gaining (because half your ship is in sunlight on the daylight side and at night the entire ship is radiating heat). At least from "room temperature". Hence why "shut down" space stations stablize at something like 0F or so. However, start generating electricity and using it on the station and you can quickly "bake" the ship if your radiators are not working. A few kw of power can seriously heat up a station if you cannot dump some of that heat. Space shuttle had radiators in the shuttle bay doors and the shuttle would orient itself so that the radiators were generally facing away from the sun to dump heat. If they bay doors failed for some reason, the shuttle would have limited time in orbit before it would have to return to Earth, because it would have no way to dump the dozens of kws of heat being generated.

I'd stay away from AMD, especially for KSP. With the transition to Unity 5, things may change a bit, but right now it is single threaded performance that means a bit more for KSP and AMD's single thread performance is abysmal in comparison to Intel. On multithreaded, well, things may be somewhat closer there. I can't really speak to whether KSP leverages a lot of integer or floating point calculations, but generally in most gaming comparisons, Intel has quite a lead when you include any discrete graphics card in to the mix. Honestly, KSP is pretty graphics light. I have a $100 Nvidia GTX750 and it runs KSP smoothly at 1080p and all of the nits turned up. Where I can get stumbling is truely massive ships. My i5-3570 running at 4GHz however can lift most of what is KSP pretty easily however. I can't say I've run a spaceplane with 150 parts in any circumstance, but multi hundred part rockets and space stations don't really cause issues for it. Frankly if on a budget, I'd look for something like an Intel i3-4330 processor with 8GB of RAM and something like an Nvidia GTX750 or 750ti to drive it (frankly AMD's current GPUs are also energy thristy without great performance and prices aren't super attractive either). Assembling it yourself you could probably put it all together for $550-650 depending on exact choices in case, SSD/HDD, power supply, etc. At a price point of $300, you aren't going to be able to assemble anything decent. Really $500 is the starting point for a "decent" gaming system. Obviously an uber awesome one is more like $2,000 but you can make a pretty respectably good one for $500-600.

This stuff kind of makes we wish we could tinker the autosave feature and have the ability to restore from X number of previous autosaves. I rarely feel the need to restore from my own muck-ups. Having 3 kids under 8, there are enough times I've run because of "insert liquid where it shouldn't be" and accidently didn't hit esc to pause, or had to parent, head turned and look back at my screen and...crunch. Well and I'll admit the occasional time I've invested tons of time in to something only to be 12km off a Mun landing with some impressive lander and realize...it is the night side...and Jeb forgot to pack his landing lights...opps. Please note, that last one I managed a guess work suicide burn and managed to touch down while only crushing my engine, but the lander survived and it had a seperate ascent stage. Manage to get back to my orbiter, dock, transfer the trickle of fuel I had left in the ascent stage and get back to kerbin with 1 unit of fuel left in my TMI/return stage. Cutting it a little close... I've had it where things didn't work out with night landings. I guess for me, I don't mind too much if it is pilot error, but when it is a straight up engineering boo-boo, I tend to revert. Or if I can't revert, restore a quick save...which I often fail to do often enough.

I don't think I've gotten within 5km before at such a distance, but I have gotten within something like 50km and tightened it up after that and gotten dock. As you found, you sometimes have to tweak several times on you way towards your meeting place. I doubt I've had the distance within 1,000km at anything over half an orbit away. Time warp to a quarter orbit, tweak a little. Time warp a little more, tweak a little more. Rinse and repeat. You kind of, sort of have to do the same thing with asteroid rendezvous (unless you get one within an SOI of something). Ignoring asteroids, I think I've done it 3 or 4 times over the years. Once to rescue a ship, once to try it and 1-2 times because I was building a space station orbiting between Duna and Kerbin. I only latched up 1 or 2 modules before I threw up my hands and said it was too much work.

Oh, and a space telescope. Whether it is a "legit" science part that can be used for science in different places, or one that is pure functional, I think it would be cool to be able to have a 1st person view out of it (with pan/tilt capability and maybe zoom too). Nothing extreme, but a 3-10x max zoom would be cool. Be neat to do things like look up at your space station in Mun orbit from your Mun base. Or try to spot Jool. That kind of thing.

Folding wings, so that you can do things like make a "sail plane" for Duna or Lathe (or Eve). Electrically powered prop engine for the above places too. A nuclear reactor at some point. Big, heavy, TONS of electricity. Heat sinks/radiators. Maybe a small fixed part as well as a bigger, more efficient, folding radiator part. Robot arm with a grasper at the end. Maybe in two sizes and strengths (1.5m and 2.5m "sizes"). Like one that can pick up .5t on Kerbal and one that can pick up 1.5t on Kerbal. Extendable/collapsable "accordian" type structual parts. So you can, for instance, mount an RTG and a high gain antenna on a probe core, stick it in a fairing and then in orbit, you can extend out the RTG and high gain away from the probe core. Or you can mount stuff in a plane/shuttle bay or equipment bay and then either use a grasper arm or accordian part to extend it out. I am VERY much looking forward to SQUAD doing the Unity 5 transition as well as the full audio pass. Maybe more than any other thing. So far I am LOVING 1.02. The game feels a lot more complete between the new aero, the new parts, re-entry heat, etc. Granted, I am also in the club where I wouldn't mind if re-entry heat were turned up a little, so that on normal difficulty you had to actually worry about it a little (IE needing heat shields, at least for "beyond Kerbal" re-entry type velocities). At higher difficulty settings you should need to worry about re-entry angle, not just if you have a heat shield or not. All of that said, two things I am hoping for eventually are multiplayer. That and hopefully either a release focused on "moar parts" or continuing the awesome itterating of parts. Both low level, mid level and high level parts. One of the other things I've noticed is that there could be some more rover parts. Maybe a "capsule" or two that are dedicated rover capsules (A la, "Mars rover" type stuff). Maybe a scientific instrument so that probes can take soil samples as a very high level part.

What is everyone doing with Duna? I am a ways away from going there, but that thought did just occur to me. Pre-1.02 back in .90, I had been setting them to 1,000 meters and things were good. What about now? Should I be going 2-3k? I rarely rely on parachutes on Duna to actually get all the way down, but I do tend to rely on them scrubbing a few hundred m/s of velocity as well as letting me float slowish to within a few dozen meters of the surface and then turn the engines back on. Great for making multiple hops. Parachutes, brief engine burst, land. Repack, take off, parachutes, brief engine burst, land again. Rinse and repeat.

My brother-in-law was fawning over it back awhile ago. 3 years ago now? I can't recall how long ago that was. I bought KSP back at .14 (it may have been .13.3). It is hard to remember that far back, but I think it was the first updated after the Mun was added that I bought it (or maybe it was the 2nd update after the Mun?). I've been active playing it all along from when I bought it. At worst there might have been a month or two where I didn't get any play time for personal reasons, but I'd guess I probably average at least 30hrs a month over the last 2 1/2 or 3 years now. Some weeks I might put in 20hrs in a week, others I just might not have the time to play at all. As it stands I don't think he plays it much anymore. As it stands KSP is pretty much the only game I ever play. It is a combination of being addictive enough along with being a father of 3 and a job that sucks up too much of my time as well as some other hobbies that are a time suck (home brewing beer, yeah, that sucks up a lot of time). I am super excited about possible Multiplayer, especially if it is multiplayer with personal server persistance (like Minecraft). Especially if it will be possible to do multi with Career mode at some point. My son is a huge KSP nut and my younger son plays a little here and there. I could probably even suck my brother-in-law back in at some point. To me the possibilities with multi are nearly endless, especially with resource gathering (I mine and refine fuel and then deliver it to my son's interplanetary ship as an example).

Seriously guys, here I thought 1.0 would be the last major update and you'd only do some minor stuff. Then some day might come out with a big expansion pack of a KSP2 or something. Why, why do you keep giving us things! You should cease this generous behavior at once*. It is like you hate us or something. *No, seriously, SQUAD you are awesome. Keeping giving us more. Unity 5 sounds like a horrible pain, but it also sounds like a massive positive overhaul. I like the sound of more effective multithreading. Should help it run on my Bay Trail tablet even better (I hope?) let alone my desktop/laptop. Audio pass also sounds delicious.

Eeloo. Never been there. Been everywhere else. Since 1.0/1.02, I have only just played a little. Mun is as far as I have gotten so far.