Kerano

Anyone else disappointed by the new LV-N? I was originally excited when I saw the liquid fuel requirement and the increased mass. However, in practice the massive heat production from the engine effectively locks you out from playing the game at regular intervals. Not fun. Spamming parts to act as "radiators" is not really a viable workaround when you already have hundreds of parts and a low framerate. I think either the heat production from the LV-N needs to be toned way down, or we need a single heat-sink part that can be placed above an LV-N to remove all heat problems from the engine.

After giving it a fair chance, I'm sorry to say I no longer find the LV-N engine fun to play with. When I saw the liquid fuel requirement and the increased mass I was excited and couldn't wait to try it. However, the massive heat production from the engine effectively locks you out from playing the game at regular intervals. To me, that is not fun gameplay. Spamming parts to act as "radiators" is not a viable workaround when I'm already working with hundreds of parts and a low framerate. Either the heat production from the LV-N needs to be toned way down, or we need a SINGLE heat-sink part that can be placed above an LV-N to remove all heat problems from the engine.

Question regarding resource contracts - does the X units of ore have to be extracted in one go? For example if I have Ore tanks with 1200 units of space and the contract requires extracting 2350 units, will I be able to complete the contract by filling the Ore tanks twice on the same ship?

KSP 1.0, fresh install, new career, no mods. Just noticed I have a tourist wanting a "Suborbital flight on the Sun". Paying a woeful 19500 funds for the experience. Is this a mistake or intended? I guess you can burn retrograde near Jool to get your periapsis down then bring it up again after the contract completes, but that would still be insanely costly. Note I haven't even been outside Kerbin's SOI yet, the Pol missions are due to a bug with taking data from the Poles of Minmus.

I have a tourist wanting a suborbital flight on the Sun. Mistake or intended?

I'm also surprised this bug got through QA. You only need to reenter the atmosphere once to notice the problem. Ah well, hopefully it will be fixed with 1.0.1.

Yeah Harvester made a big post about it a few months back: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/content/325-Overhauled-Aerodynamics I guess they decided they didn't need it after all, or else that it was too much work for 1.0.

The whole heating system seems a bit like black magic at the moment. It feels like we should be given at least some basic display indicating where the heat is and which parts are in danger. Playing blind to one substantial element of the game isn't particularly fun.

I've been playing through normal difficulty career to get a feel for what a new player will experience. Pretty much encountered the same things: * First few flights are great, the money rolls in quickly from the default contracts. Progression feels quick and rewarding. * After those first flights the difficulty suddenly jumps up. There's not enough money to get all the basic parts along with all the necessary upgrades for a basic Mun shot - so if you're not experienced with strapping together SRB monsters and navigating blind, you're forced to grind out a lot of contracts for cash before you go any further. This is the point where if I was new to the game, I would be getting frustrated. Other thoughts: * Lack of science from contracts is a real loss to the game IMHO. It was perhaps a little easy to get contract science in previous versions of the game, but I really enjoyed that it was an alternative to the biome-hopping grind. It needed tweaking down, but 1.0 pretty much obliterated it altogether. * Tech tree is OK for a veteran player but very unforgiving to a newbie. Number of nodes should probably be reduced a little to allow for more meaningful choices. Parts that usually work together should be on the same node, not split into 3-4 different nodes in different areas of the tech tree. I have enough difficulty getting science as a veteran, how is a new player supposed to cope with this tech tree? * Weird stuff going on with the new aero, particularly reentry. Pods desperately fight to turn the wrong way and burn everything up regardless of how you build your ship it seems. Deploying mysteriously invincible parachutes in the upper atmosphere seems to be the only solution for now.

+1 for the reentry orientation needing a fix. I've tried all sorts of different craft designs over several hours of playing, and all from the lightest to the most bottom-heavy always struggle desperately to flip around in the 25-30 km region. Adding more torque doesn't help much. Only solution I've found is to stack up parachutes on the narrow end and deploy them high in the atmosphere, since chutes are apparently impervious to heat effects unlike everything else in the game.

Yeah I wondered why Pol turned up so early. Went to the poles of Minmus within the first couple of hours. Good to know there's a fix coming.

Bedtime here, but if I check my phone and see 1.0 is out before I get to sleep I may just have to get up again.

We're within a matter of HOURS of the release of 1.0. Feeling as excited as a young kid on Christmas morning.

Not everyone is familiar with physics conventions. There's no shame in not knowing something, it's just an opportunity to teach. If you check my post I was correcting someone who believed that kilo prefixes would 'just cancel out'. If you already know that isn't the case, no problem. Not everyone does. University physics tutor here for the record.

They don't cancel, they multiply. Try a distance of 1 km and a force of 1 kN, see what you get for Work energy. Work energy = Force * distance Then try it converting to the correct SI units of meters and Newtons.

No - kilograms are SI units, but that's the exception. SI units allow you to do physics calculations using standard formulas without any adjustments. For example: Work energy = Force * distance This equation gives Work energy in Joules if you use Newtons for force and meters for distance. If you try to put in distance in kilometers and/or force in kilonewtons, you'll no longer get the correct answer in Joules. Physics is full of equations like that which are very easy to solve if you stick to SI units, but which won't work if you use non-SI units like kilometers and kilonewtons. (Unless you know what you're doing and adjust both sides of the equation accordingly.)

Yeah the SAS system looks like it doesn't handle the new aero well at all. Lots of nasty wobbles where it's turned on. WinterOwl commented on that during his video too. On the plus side it looks like launching with SAS off seems to work pretty well as an interim solution (judging from WinterOwl's launch).

Yep... required a lot of determination and many, many quicksave backups. (EDIT: Reply was to a comment that apparently has since been deleted.)

Hmm, still only 4 preview videos? Kind of expected more by now. I'd really like to see a video showing an in-depth look into the resource system. WinterOwl's video was good for most things but definitely lacking in the resource department.

Please make sure to release videos to Youtube immediately after the Twitch session. Twitch has severe performance issues in my location.

If you feel that way, why not buy another copy... and gift it to a friend!

This video was the one that convinced me to get KSP nearly 2 years ago. Good choice!

Awesome devnotes, so excited for release next week! Thanks to all the devs for your hard work on getting us this far. KSP 1.0 is looking to be absolutely amazing! Return of the Magic Boulder perhaps?

I would expect the end of this week - Friday or Saturday is my bet.

Yes, asteroids have finite fuel reserves relative to their size.