Aerindel

I don't know if the respawn but they are all so far apart in both space and velocity that asteroid hopping is hardly any easier than just going to one. It is. My entire base of operations in my last game was centered around Gilly for inner system work and Pol for Jool missons, but you can't move those, which would be a pretty fun thing to do. I'd love to have a near infinite source of fuel in Kerbin orbit, even if it took a ton of work to get it there.

As a big sci-fan I was really hoping that this would turn out to be doable in KSP as its a classice sci-fi trope, I had dreams of building a massive colony ship out of a asteroid with engines and hab modules mounted all over it and mine all my fuel from it as I went..but the reality is that fuel payoff is so low asteroids are useless. Now...if you could mine them for metals and construct ship parts on one that could be interesting.

I don't think anyone has ever said otherwise. The idea that we are blaming the testers themselves is just a strawman the apologists are trotting out to be knocked down. Of course its not their fault. Everyone wants KSP to be all that it can be. The fault lies with the testing process or lack of one that was put in place by the devs.

Except the solar panels don't really do anything. The most effective way to control heat is to mount the engines on a big tank of cold fuel. Trying to control heat with solar panels only buys you insignificant gains. There is a reason that real heat radiators are not part of solar panels, they are oriented 90º wrong for heat radiation.

Yeah, that is what is truly upsetting about this. If the people in charge are still in denial that doesn't give us much hope for ever getting a finished game. On the other hand, it seems that everyday more and more people are showing up here asking the same question.

Fair enough, but one of those ways should be as a resource to fuel large complicated missions.

Not if you use the claw on a fuel truck. Its very easy that way.

You just need to go higher up. I don't even think about going horizontal until 50KM

Fixed in 1.02

This ship can run 6 nukes for 30+ minutes until it runs out of fuel. The only part that will overheat and explode are ironically, the gigantor panels mounted up front. The fins in the back are not for heat purposes but to help stabilize the craft during aero-braking.

Good to know. Like I said, I haven't been there since .90 Wish I could go to Duna for the first time again. It was pretty exciting. I started playing back when orange tanks where the largest you could get, and the ships where so flexible it was like flying a spaghetti noodle. No way I could get a big enough ship into orbit so I built and refueled one with SIX docking missions, but I was able to send a science lab and two landers with that mission and return samples from both Duna and Ike.

By the time you land a rover you will know what your doing. Best way to get your PE down is to use the aforementioned method of fine tuning your injection orbit until your PE is where you need it to be with only a minor in approach burn to fine tune it. As to your altitude, I have no idea what it is now. You will have to play around. I would shoot for 30 KM for my first test. And don't forget to reduce your parachute pressure to the minimum. On Duna depending on your altitude you can crash into the ground before your parachute even opens. For this reason low altitude landing sites are usually easier. And get 1.02 before you get too far, it has several aspects that are radically different (and improved) from 1.00.

Sounds good to me, although you could skip the probe return mission and just do manned. Once you get used to it you will find yourself cruising back and forth to Duna without really thinking about it. Your life will be a lot easier if before you send your manned mission you land a rover and then drive to a nice flat spot and use the rover as a landing target. Duna has a lot of hills and you can lose a perfectly good mission to a slope. Also think about sending a backup unmanned ship into Duna orbit first, something with lots of fuel that can bring your kerbals back if your manned mission runs out of fuel. Right now for my first 1.02 Duna mission I am building an automated fuel depot on Ike in preparation and then going to send a self fueling DAV (duna ascent vehicle) to my landing site so even if my manned lander breaks the kerbals will have a way home. Remember, going to another planet isn't any harder than going to the Mun, you just need more fuel, and take the time to set up your Duna orbit several months before you get there when its cheap and you can fine tune it with RCS. If you just drop into its sphere of influence without looking you can use up all your fuel just trying to get into a decent orbit. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that my focusing the view on your destination planet you could do this.

Luckily for me all the stuff I really like to do happens in vacuum so aero doesn't really matter much as long as I can still launch okay.

Exactly what I did. It seems its always easier to make a ship that refuels itself than to use a separate tanker miner. Too bad as fueling stations would be fun but ISRU is so light and small you may as well just stick it on your favorite ship and be done.

Good question. I don't think anyone knows, but I would suspect if 1.03 is as different as 1.02 was from 1.0 there will be hell to pay.

You stopped playing because the very first ship you can possibly build isn't very good? Just walk around the KSC a little bit and you will get enough science to unlock decouplers. As for returning science equipment, by the time you even have science equipment you also get more and better parachutes, and as soon as you can do EVA's you don't ever need to bring the equipment back anyway, just collect the data with a scientist. Also, I have no idea what you are talking about when you say something explodes. I just tested a Mk1 with a M16 and a Flea booster and nothing exploded when they landed.

If all you want to do is fly small unscrewed craft then who cares? Why mine at all? The point of mining is to make large complex multi-crew and multi craft vessels possible. - - - Updated - - - A lot. I put a class E into a Kerbin orbit and it used up all the resources of the asteroid and didn't even leave enough fuel to return my ship to Kerbin.

Maybe. But that would create another issue, with a realistically sized planet it would take about eight minutes to get to orbit instead of the two that it takes right now. This is would be great for realism but I could see it turning off a lot of players.

The problem was that the air was so thin that the only way to slow down was use parachutes while you where still going insanely fast. If you make the parachutes behave realistically then that means the air has to be thick enough to slow you down to something near terminal velocity before you smash into the ground. Apparently this creates a problem for airplane program enthusiasts who want to fly panel trucks to orbit. - - - Updated - - - I think the root issue is that in real life the atmosphere is many times higher, giving a much longer fall time so that it can be both thin and yet still be able to slow spacecraft. Kerbin's air is just thin shell yet it has the same gravity as earth so if the air is not thicker you can't re-enter without invincible parachutes. The very fact that Kerbin is an impossible planet makes realistic flight and realistic re-entry mutually exclusive. I doubt when squad first came up with this system they ever imagined so many people would want to fly airplanes but now it is what it is. Maybe Kerbin just needs a twin planet named Plankin or something with 1.0 atmosphere and a SPH only KSP on its surfaces. At least that way we could all share the same basic laws of physics.

uh, what? That is like one jool mission.

You have a point but people who just hunt bugs seem to miss basic gameplay problems. You need people who are just playing the game for fun to find out if it, you know, actually is fun. QA with just bug trackers is like hiring DuPont to judge a painting because they know a lot about paint.

Good point. Maybe I am just so excited to finally have a reason to land anything besides a one man lander on a planet that I don't care about all the other problems with the science lab. Life support would change EVERYTHING. There would actually be a reason to use launch windows instead of just launching whenever you feel like it and then warping in orbit until things line up.

No, you can't turn back time but an explanation from Squad would go a long way to restoring faith in the process.

As you say, SSTO's are very advanced technology. Maybe instead of changing the laws of the universe there should just be some particularly powerful SSTO engines that you can only unlock at the very end of the tech tree. People who just want to build airplanes can play a sandbox game and everyone else can build rockets and then eventually unlock super engines (linear aerospike anyone?) and then stop using rockets and switch to SSTO's just like we would in real life. It seems this would make more sense that having fundamentally different laws of physics for different play styles.