basic.syntax

Just wanted to relate my space plane experience with .90 before reading these last two pages, that, you can have beautiful symmetric flameouts... far to early... if engines are placed in symmetry, but intakes are [alt]-copied. (Full agreement with AlexanderB. And thanks to Kasuha for a great thread and pix making things clear.) I had much better results with the annoying, tedious process of alternate careful placing of intake/engine, intake/engine - all 'new' parts, for 14 engines. (140 ton fuel lifter.) Several times I was thinking "rockets are far easier to work with, why am I still messing with this..." then I arrived here and started to make progress I hope that Squad may come up with a fix that changes how these types of parts are evaluated and sequenced, behind the scenes.

Last chance sale, good time to pick up KSP, for yourself or a friend

Agree on satellite clutter! As your rep increases, the complexity & pay increases... when you get to the Mun, you start getting Mun satellite offers, and on and on... my Solar System view is a mess of orbit circles. Agree with pandaman, I think the contract should remove player control after the orbit is matched ("Thanks, we'll take it from here"), and clean them up, after a few days have passed. On the "endgame" - once you have completed the tech tree, you're kinda done. I wonder if it should be made more difficult to complete (spread the parts into more, smaller groups; make the tech map taller, not necessarily wider) given that we now have biomes everywhere. The solar system has been painted with a huge new pool of science points. But once it IS all unlocked, KSP is now sandbox, with endless random contract missions. Squad has opted for an open-ended design, where every player decides for themselves what "done" is, instead of "Mission 31." (Then we would argue if "Mission 31" was a fitting end, for what came before it. One thing I do like about scripted missions, is players can try the same thing again in a later play-through as their knowledge improves. Online, you can compare how others did, with your solution to the exact same problem.) KSP is a puzzle-solving game, with a huge pool of parts and near infinite combination of ways to assemble them, I think that's most of the fun. An official story campaign mixed in with the random contracts would be very nice, but I'm happy with what we have so far.

Does KSP snap into proper screen/mouse alignment, in normal configuration, latest drivers, windowed mode? ( [Alt]+[Enter] ) You may be stuck with that for now, if performance is OK. This could be an obscure bug that goes away by itself, in a subsequent update of KSP. I missed that you wrote "forcing OpenGL: I did try that and it solves the problem at the cost of making the program run unbearably slow." That is very interesting, but I'm not sure where to go from there. Some graphics cards and CPU's with 3D graphics, do poorly with OpenGL. The first thing folks would look at dxdiag logs for, is what graphics card (if any, many current CPU's perform basic 3D graphics functions) you may be using. On DxDiag display tab: what chip type? Better still, if you can post pictures on an imaging hosting service (imgur seems very popular here) screenshots of the first two tabs (System and Display) of DxDiag would be great. [Alt]-[PrintScreen] cleanly captures the current window, to the clipboard. It can then be pasted into any image editing app, like mspaint, saved as jpg.

Seems like something with display driver, KSP's interpretation of screen coordinates when it starts. Have you tried changing windows screen resolution? Try something smaller than current, even if its distorted for your display size (aspect ratio) and run KSP. Not to stay that way forever, but to force KSP to look at new numbers. if KSP fills a smaller resolution properly, then go back to normal size and see what happens. Separately, in KSP toggle between window mode and fullscreen with [alt]-[enter] to see if that helps. Does this happen with other games? Get two full-screen games running, and [alt]-[tab] between them.

I have no trouble strut-reinforcing fuel tanks and other SRB's, but the biggest SRB gives headaches. I can easily see all strut placements on TOP of the SRB, but the end points often get buried below the surface, when placing on the side. That makes it hard to move or remove strut connections on the large SRB. I've borrowed a picture from this unrelated post, that shows strut connector endpoints are more visible at shallow angles. The second endpoint down, on the SRB on the right, is not visible. Is this a known issue, perhaps something to do with the collision model not aligning with the textured surface? Is there a work-around, that doesn't require rebuilding / recompiling the model in Unity? (A bit over my experience level, at this point.) Taking inspiration from Structural Wing Type A does not attach properly [workaround inside] I tweaked part.cfg node_attach values for the SRB, successfully increased the SRB's attach distance from other objects, but strut endpoints seemed to ignore that.

As you complete contracts, reputation goes up and contract quality / pay go up. It does seem a bit grindy through the first 20 contracts, but that impression also depends on if you think working with the first level VAB and 30 parts is a "grind" - or an interesting set of puzzles to solve. (I'm not using any mods.) I was reminded of a scene in the movie Apollo 13, after a big accident knocks out C02 scrubbers, the guys in mission control dump a box of random parts on a table: the sum total of what the returning crew has available, and come up with an ingenious solution. Once you start getting orbit contracts, and figure out the method of matching orbits, funds start rolling in. Those plus some aerial surveys (that I did by launching a parachute-plane attached to a clamp above the runway, because I didn't have wheels yet) brought me to the first VAB upgrade. Then I was offered an orbit contract of *the sun*, that would pay out 4x the typical Kerbin orbit... and decided I had met my personal limit of challenges for the day, and let it go

The Kerbals are... cartoon characters. They set the tone for an endless tug-of-war between a hand-made space program that's full of jokes in the IVA's, parts descriptions... and a desire for more realism. I think having a cartoon aesthetic to the barn tier and some kinda hokey cartoon riveted plates is just fine, it is metaphorical exaggeration of the progression from kid stuff, to grown-up stuff, when you get to the final VAB and plug in some NASA parts.

Great points - agreed! I think its cool that funds / rep / science are displayed in distinct ways, but, sometimes you just want to see a clear number.

I doubt they will redesign VAB's at this stage, except if it was something easy like grabbing whole building and scaling it down... which might make some of the proportions look wrong, depending how much it was shrunk by. I want to see my "space program flag" somewhere tacked up on the wall in all the VAB tiers, not just the last.

The new Mk3 is perfect opportunity to introduce a set of double-size (in all dimensions) wing parts, will help us get parts count down on large planes. This could be simplified by a tweakable option as others suggest, so the toolbox doesn't get cluttered.

Homespun humor is all over the place, in the IVA's and every part description. KSP is "sim lite" and meant to be equal parts fun (or funny) and educational. It will probably not take long to start upgrading from the "barn" tier, when it's finalized. Fits perfectly with the can-do, carefree attitude of KerbalKind. They started with duct tape and bailing wire, and never stopped trying

It is possible to adjust payout percentage of normal values, up to 1000% during new game setup, if you want to cut down on the "grind."

Barn tier is delayed but still expected to appear... sometime. Its mentioned in the FAQ here.

Just because a survey mission is offered in your early rocketry era before flight tech stuff is unlocked.... doesn't mean you have to take it Someone else (not saying ME) may not mind the expense or challenge of landing on target, in a rocket / ballistic trajectory survey.

This is a thread in Support opened mainly for the 64-bit career problems, it may have some things you can try now, like force-destroying your buildings, and new stuff may pop in, as more folks post in it. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/103115-The-buildings-start-out-fully-upgraded-in-career-mode%21-Please-please-help%21

If you tried KSP 64-bit version, it may have visually upgraded your buildings, but the game still treats them like they are not upgraded. A few posts back, Flying Wolf quoted from the FAQ. But you should be able to downgrade buildings in the save file, and continue playing regular 32-bit version. If you have KSP via Steam, look here for your save file: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Kerbal Space Program\saves\[name you gave to career mode game]\persistent.sfs 1. Before doing anything, make a backup copy of persistent.sfs into a new file, like persistent.sfs.BAK 2. Open persistent.sfs in notepad. 3. Search for the section "name = ScenarioUpgradeableFacilities", and set all to "lvl = 0"

A minor observation: the fully upgraded SPH/VAB have a flag on the wall. The first and second tier don't have one. I think that should be a constant in all tiers. I think your chosen "space program flag" should always be on display. Perhaps in the first tier, its draped over some crates in the corner... then in the second upgrade, someone hangs it on a wall, but didn't do a very neat job of it.

Thank you, Squad! Sleep loss now in progress.

This. Sort of. I wouldn't be so much in favor of supporting procedurally stretching parts to fit in the editor, that would add a new layer of unreality to it, and could make aligning anything to the stretched thing require more stretching, rotating... a cascading mess of problems. I like the snap-together real-parts modeling metaphor. ("This is a real Thing, that you can plug into / snap onto this other Thing.") But I'd support all parts having upgrade levels that we choose to activate (and in career mode, pay for) in the editor. A level 2 wing part might be twice the size, a level 2 SAS twice as effective... a UI listing available upgrades / variations for the selected part in the editor would be neater, compared to cluttering the toolbox with 4 size variations of the same thing. You can get really close to this, by customizing the difficulty of a new career game, and setting Science and Fund rewards per accomplishment or contract - up to 1000% of normal values.

#3 - was answered in the most recent weekly dev notes: choosing a probe core will matter . http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/102494-Devnote-Tuesdays-The-Beta-Than-Experimentals-Edition #4 - I'd also like to see a science part or improved game feature, that helps identify biome boundaries. "In character" Kerbals shouldn't know the names in advance, just that "this area is unexplored." When you're looking at the orbital / solar system view, your current ship info tells you a bit about this, and every time you do a crew report, it tells you Where this is being done. Some basic info could be shown to us in the main UI, and shown more clearly at a higher tech level, with a science part.

The "Can Do!" spirit that all Kerbals share inspired me to this title idea for .24: Budget Projected, Contract Accepted! Let's keep the positive energy flowing!

I tried out Carbon v1.3 today, and wanted to leave some tips for others who might try running it against .craft files from v23.5. (no mods) 1. A parts list isn't included with the 1.3 download. Carbon AutoAnalyzer makes it for you. (This was a great idea, for forward-compatibility!) 2. If you run Carbon AutoAnalyzer from the main KSP folder, it will pick up some incorrect data, resulting in a "null value" JIT debug error, when you attempt to load the newly-created parts list file. 3. To work around this, run Carbon AutoAnalyzer from the Parts sub-folders. 4. Copy it first in the folder ...Kerbal Space Program\GameData\Squad\Parts, run it and open the parts.list text file. 5. Copy it second to the folder ...\Kerbal Space Program\GameData\NASAmission\Parts, run it and open the parts.list text file. 6. Copy the NASAmission parts text, to the end of the Squad parts list text file, save this, and use this combined parts.list file with the main Carbon app. Some part naming syntax may have changed in v23.5. Some parts names in the parts.list file contain "_" underscores, but when loading some .craft files, an error will appear that a part could not be found... the same part name, but containing a "." instead. Example: an entry for fuelTank_long appeared twice in the Carbon AutoAnalyzer created parts.list. Workaround: edit one instance of fuelTank_long to fuelTank.long. Also seen with ksp_r_largeBatteryPack. Suggestion for future: It would be nice if we only had to load the parts list file one time, such that it persisted across all three tab functions