Observations of a new player (1-2 weeks play)

[Zylark]

At this stage KSP is pretty much a bare-bones framework of a game. Which if I remember correctly is part of the dev team strategy. First make a feature, add in just enough assets to make it work, tweak and refine. Additional assets and features to be added as development progresses. Meanwhile, impatient players use the great ability to mod the game to flesh out or add new assets and features according to how they see fit. Which have resulted in some pretty impressive work and I might add a much more enjoyable game compared to playing stock.

Some mods features even make it to the core game, by 'accident' (squad going "now why didn't we think of that?!") or it have always been somewhere on the agenda just not been done yet. Spaceplanes is a good example. They'll also do some career tracking of Kerbals (like final Frontier perhaps?), a Connected Living Space feature is in the works as well I think. New and improved Navball. More to be announced I'm sure once 0.25 is out the door.

On my short-list of really needed features are something akin to:

- Kerbal Alarm Clock : Never miss a node when warping

- Kerbal Engineer Redux / MechJeb (sans autopilot?) : Fine control and plenty of crucial information

- Procedural Fairings : Making ungainly things look cool on the launchpad. Throw in a better atmosphere and aerodynamics model, and we're golden

- Open Resource System + Karbonite / Kethane : In-situ resources is a must

- Station Science + Dmagic Orbital Science : Making stations be more than fuel-depots

- SCANSat : Mapping out places before visiting them. Especially useful for sniffing out resources

Still early days, will be interesting to see where this game is headed. And even should some favourite feature be missing for the stock game when the final DO-UNTIL statement is written, there will always be mods. Making the game what you want it to be

Edited September 2, 2014 by Zylark

[Wanderfound]

On my short-list of really needed features are something akin to:

I'd add Kerbpaint to that one. Plain white may do for utilitarian things, but when you're hooning around in a racing spaceplane, you've gotta have a cool paintjob available.

It would also allow much nicer looking mix and match builds for the rocketry folks; no more hideous orange Rockomax / white LFB combos.

[tater]

I understand that it's a WIP.

[tater]

So not quite 3 weeks yet. I have one item left in the tech tree, and it's spaceplane parts and I haven't used any of the previous ones yet. Career needs some serious work. Contracts are repetitive, and mis scaled, IMO. Many are impossible as far as I can tell. I don't do any of the in flight ones any more, as I have had so many that I made odd craft to do, had every requirement with a green check… stage the test object (which had a requirement to use as part of the staging process)… nothing.

The money is obscene, I have I forget how many millions right now, and my most ridiculous rocket costs maybe 100 grand.

[tater]

Wife on call this weekend, mostly doing kid stuff… though yesterday she went to hospital at 9am, and came home this morning at 5:45am, so last night I modded up and played til ~4am

Woot!

Added:

FAR

DRE

Procedural Fairings

SNACKS

Gotta add some more soon, was starting small.

[Linear]

tater if you use FAR and it seems a bit overwhelming, NEAR is a great alternate (wish it was around earlier).

Good luck

[paul23]

As for contracts: I've always wondered why they don't have contracts like: "put this satellite in an orbit at XYZ altitude" - then you would get a custom satellite (which just has a mass/attachement points/drag) and you would have to put it 'there'. That would make contracts actually feel realistic (call them communication/weather/geo/earth/deepspace observation satellites), those would come after you have a decent amount of fame and been "to the mun and back".

[tater]

So far I've hardly noticed FAR. My first couple launches were… less than ideal (sorry, Jeb!), but other than that, not bad (I'll admit some malice in trying to see what might happen if I departed from an ideal flight path ). Perhaps it's because I've been building rockets that look like, well, rockets from the start. I had an unfortunate reentry a couple times, trying to finger out by experiment how steep I could come in, and decided to err on the side of caution in the future. Other than that I've not had an issue. I haven't flown much in stock (would need to hook up my stick and set some snap views, etc to be comfortable), so I have little to unlearn.