The_Rocketeer

Hmm... well there was a time when it was possible to reach 1000m altitude on an antiradial trajectory while still doing 2 or 3km/s. Of course surface contact with the ocean in that scenario is hardly likely to result in a requirement for buoyancy calculations... Perhaps just nobody has really thought about this in a while.

I learned of the barn some time ago, and while I love the 1950s cropduster aesthetic, I also think the whole bringbackthebarn business was just a storm in a teacup. The released aesthetic was simple, but clean and straightforward, and I find it really hard to envision downgrading the facilities fo the point where they are made up of trailer parks and a big red barn. Even the tracking station is just a hobbyists telescope-observatory in barnland, not a satellite dish to be seen. And what, KSC getting rid of renewable wind turbine generators is somehow an upgrade? I think the barn belongs to a pre-KSC era of kerbal development, somewhere after fixed wing flight but before the MK1 Command Pod. I'd love to see these assets turn up in a meaningful way somewhere, somehow, but I do think the Barn KSC concept is dead, and rightfully so.

If I'd never seen this thread, I would never have known KSP had an EULA. I mean, sure, in theory it probably had to have one somewhere, but in 5 years of KSP I've never seen it to know it.

While alarming, this is not entirely surprising. It is in the nature of earthquakes to have a number of quakes in series as stress hotspots are passed down the tectonic fault. There may be still more quakes to follow, hopefully of diminishing magnitude and at increasing distance from population centres. I hope that this disaster is soon over as painlessly as possible.

Wishing everyone great safety. However (and I qualify this by saying that I'm a private person writing from the safety of the UK with no first hand knowledge of any earthquake ever, nor of Squad's business or personal locations in Mexico)... assuming the business has been somewhat affected, I think it unlikely that we'll hear much of anything from anyone at Squad for at least a few days. Frankly there will be more important things to be doing than checking in with the forum. Assuming nobody at Squad has had their personal safety or that of their families threatened at all, there remain the sustained problems of structural checks, power cuts, transport infrastructure issues and broadband failure are likely to be a problem. Equally if anybody has been seriously affected, Squad are hardly about to make a public service announcement about it - it would be disrespectful. I think this is a great place for well-wishers to offer sympathy and concern, but I recommend avoiding conjecture or starting rumours at this point. An official statement will likely follow at a suitable time. Retracted - somehow I missed the other thread!

It would probably be considerably easier to add variants of the parts with lights facing the other way, or have a separate "undercarriage-light" part, than have a dynamically tweakable lightsource built into the wheel system. I would in favour of an undercarriage overhaul. I find the shape and size of the landing gears quite unsatisfactory, particularly the length of the struts on the larger ones, forcing you to mount them high on the craft and deal with the consequent clipping or else face high-CoM instability issues. I also would prefer to see side-stowing and rear-stowing gears, and more options for fixed undercarriage - roverwheels, it turns out, are incredibly heavy and draggy. But none of these things are gonna be very high on my hitlist of things KSP most needs, and all of them are covered by mods. So.. agreed. But meh.

After all that... it really didn't work out good did it.

Watching it is mesmerising. It makes me think of this thing:

I can't wait to see the car truck tank er... power station..? ...you're putting this in.

Arthritis

Thanks for clearing that up JPLRepo. A way to launch two connected but separate vessels would also be a great help in the realm of stock hinges and bearings. There could be other applications and untapped potential here. (Perhaps that would stir up Azimech's enthusiasm a bit more too )

I'm confused as to how is different from launching two vessels connected by a docking port at the same time?

@Azimech I tried that as soon as I noticed this - no joy. The same problem is affecting my electric props, trim and symmetry groups both. Latest release versionwise. I do have a string of (mostly cosmetic) mods installed, but thought I'd ask in case I'd missed something Squad had done.

So having looks at the source, this looks a bit theoretical to me. There is no example of a real world rocket demonstrating this, just a patent citing functional specifications for a propellant grain that does not appear to exist yet.

Been tinkering with turboprops again, I'm having problems with variable prop pitch because the game now isn't treating the blades as a group on one slider but as individual sliders per tooltip menu. Anybody know how to get around this? On a related note, trim adjustments on the shaft seem to be forgotten as soon as I switch to the main craft again.

So, snail shapes go slow and cheetah shapes going fast? Who knew...! I'm not closed to the idea of new parts as a rule, engines included, but I do think that there are already redundancy issues with the ones we have in KSP. Unless the engine adds something new that makes it unique (think of the Dawn, Nerv or RAPIER), you're basically just playing top-trumps, inventing new cards just to be the best. None of the engines in KSP are exactly like their RL analogs, all are abstracted to a certain extent. Thus, I don't find the argument 'these exist in real life, so they should exist in KSP' very compelling. I'd prefer an example of an engine in RL that fills a niche that no engine in KSP currently does. A great example would be a water pump-jet/impeller engine (jetski propulsion) - nothing like this exists in the game yet. I could get behind a suggestion like that, because it's not just a tweak but an entirely new direction that opens up many more possibilities.

Can we go back to the 'if it's a mod it will be slower than if it's stock' discussion? I'll admit I don't really know the difference between how KSP operates the core game to how it operates mods, but I'm struggling to see why this would be noticable, if it's even true at all.

@AlamoVampire I am entirely serious, but don't let that upset you. Re-entry effects are coded by Squad, and also disabled by Squad. I suspect there is a reason for this that goes beyond the belief that Squad are simply too lazy or too mean to do anything about it. Your assertion that this is "something that squad really should turn on already" is unfounded. The mentality of "well a mod does it so what's the deal" might be a lazy argument, but that doesn't mean it's a bad one. The Mod has it fixed, therefore Squad can focus their time on something more important, like testing and bugfixing the console port, or more inspired, like the upcoming Making History expansion, or more anticipated, like fully supported multiplayer or a higher-res skybox. Players don't need a mod to turn on a bit of code, but if they want it the mod it exists, and if they don't want it or don't care... well. Whether the feature is enabled by a mod or by the stock game, it'll still use resources and files that otherwise would not be used. Having few mods in general might correlate to better performance, but that doesn't mean that making a mod stock means it will necessarily run better. I can't really argue with your point about (console) players who can't use mods, but frankly they have bigger problems that they would be better off Squad devoting time to at the moment. For what it's worth, I think this is a great mod, but I don't see any reason why it need be anything more.

(skipped 1 and 2 cos yeh, I know) 3. So you want Squad to change the game to fix a problem you already fixed for yourself even tho it may have undesirable effects for an unknown number of others, even tho those others might prefer otherwise. 4. You literally already did this. The mod made changes you could have made yourself by editing a file or two. [Edit: this mod appears to be cleverer than was previously implied] What you're asking for is a button in an options menu that you'll use once and forget about. Same thing.

Then why would you want it to be stock instead of mod dependent? On, it would appear, is not on.

Turning off launch plume smoke helps with slowdown during launch, period. Whether that's because something else is eating up all the system resources is moot, because there's nothing we can do about that. What we can do is build rockets with fewer, bigger engines, which reduces the amount of smoke. During re-entry, presumably any part that gets hot enough will generate re-entry plasma smoke. This is a significant difference between a launch plume and this feature. If every part during launch produced a smoke plume, you might find the slowdown affecting your game too.

Because answering questions from the fans would be a full time job for a much larger team, and would have a negligible effect (if any) on their key directive, which is to produce, test, release and support the game. Chatting about hypotheticals to make the fans feel loved would be a monumental waste of professional time. You're right to draw attention to things you'd like to see take a higher priority in development, but it really isn't justified to criticise the dev team for not talking about these things with you right now just because you want them to. I think this feature looks good, tho I'm more impressed by the distance shots (red streaks) than the close-ups (little puffs of pale gold). I'm also concerned about tanking performance on large or complex ships. Not every descent is just a pod on a chute. SSTOs, surface and atmospheric vehicles, bases - these are a bit more involved than that.

Banoffee.

Actually I heard there's a KerbalCon every year, held on the Moon. I know its a bit of a hassle to get there, but c'mon guys. A) you are ALL rocket scientists, and B) you don't even need to go interplanetary and C) your smartphones have more computing power than Apollo. Get to it!

I've seen the effect after surface impacts - Mk3 parts do it very well as they have excellent impact resistance, so the parts don't pop. G-force, like impact force, is still force - you just exceeded the structural limitations of the joints. Personally I think this is awesome. I'd like to see a lot more distortion of parts and joints, and less total-destruction of parts. Makes surviving a crash landing and attempting a recovery far more interesting.