Aerindel

Which I think is how it should be...at least for the existing tech tree. It really makes me sad their aren't any really awesome parts locked away behind 5000 science barriers. The existing tech tree is pretty much just current technology. It would be cool if after you unlocked it you could start opening up future tech to play with.

The tech tree is not the game. You don't win the game when you fill it out. Filling the tech tree just means that the REAL game has begun. Its like building your first safe house in minecraft, its just means you now have the foundation to build what you want. I personally love the way the science labs work, although I would make them larger/heavier to be more of a challenge to launch. The old sample return missions seem really boring now compared to launching an actual science vessel to a planet and doing research for months, which btw, is a lot more realistic than just flying down, picking up a rock and returning to kerbin for the science. Instead of running a bunch of identical boring missions to each biome your encouraged to run one BIG mission and them to stay there and explore.

Good question. I don't know, chasing down bugs perhaps and not actually playing the game to see if basic gameplay works rather than just trouble shooting crashes? And yet what appears to be emergency action is what was taken by squad who released two updates just a few days later and just hours apart. Yep. Never tried to be on the test team or really had any interest in KSP except just playing it, it wasn't until 1.0 dropped that I actually felt like I needed to jump on the bandwagon and try and find out what the heck had gone wrong with my favorite game. Until 1.0 each update felt like an improvement to the game, it was pretty shocking when it went backwards in what was supposed to be the full release. I don't have the power to help anyone, I'm just adding my voice to the chorus shouting "the emperor has no clothes" People need to be upset. That is the entire point. In order for people to even start to think about change they have to be upset. You keep trying to say I am claiming to be a hotshot or something but that I've said nothing of the sort and its entirely besides the point. The gameplay problems with 1.0 where not things you needed to be good at the game to find. They where things that a novice player would have run into on his second or third launch. The only difference is that a novice player wouldn't have known that it wasn't supposed to be that way, he would have just thought the it was a bad game. Maybe that was the problem? all the testers where so experienced they never tried a simple rocket re-entry? There is a real problem in many fields where people become overqualified and start missing the basics. I'm an EMT and help write standard operation procedures for a fire department and see it all the time where people who are trained in advanced techniques lose sight of the actual job at hand in favor of specific procedures. I honestly could see that happening. If I hadn't started KSP over from scratch with 1.0 it could have been a long time before I ran into some of the problems. I just don't know, I wasn't on the test team, I don't know how it works...I only know what the results where. Established QA is compromised. But I do have a suggestion: the testing phase should be divided between teams testing for stability and performance and a team that is testing actual gameplay as those are really very different problems. There is no doubt that 1.0 had less technical bugs and had better performance, but that is like saying that a book was really good because it didn't have any spelling errors. Where the testing team failed was in looking at the actually experience of the game. How the new features made you feel while using them. Instead of bug reports they should have asked for psych reports. They should ask people how re-entry felt in 1.0 rather than just asking if the game crashed or not. If you read the various slam posts on 1.0 very few of them are about technical details but rather about the emotion that the game creates, or fails to create. The second and most obvious issue was that they moved way too fast, adding entire classes of new features in one update without a beta. New Aero, a heating system, a mining system, a heat shield system, these weren't just updates, these where entirely new fundamental systems that where just thrown out in the wild, all at once, when normally any ONE of these would have been a major new release. Luckily, about 80% of the problems with 1.0 where fixed in 1.02. The only reason we are even talking about this still is because this type of incident is not normal for KSP and it has people rattled. Lets face it, we are in a dark age of gaming right now, the industry as a whole is floundering around, AAA is releasing broken and boring content and trying to squeeze more money out of us while doing it. The indie scene is in chaos with true gems, shovelware and vapor ware all competing for attention. FTP and PTW games are poisoning every level of the industry. Kerbal is one of the very few good things to come out of gaming in the last few years, and it almost shot itself in the head with its big official release.

Ah yes, the kzinti lesson. Okay, well, I've played with my design and managed to come up with a aero-braking, reentry stable vessel with enough delta to get to eloo, LV-N's that can burn for 22 minutes before overheating parts and living space for kerbals that is on the opposite end of the ship from the engines. They aren't as protect as they could be but COG concerns mean they the fuel tanks need to be where they are, and its better than my other design that had the engines mounted up front with the kerbals living behind them only a few meters from the exhaust streams. It even has two spots to mount landers (yet to be designed)

Finally working on designing a new class of interplanetary ships for 1.02. I used to always stick my atomic engines far away from my hab modules but no with 1.02 I want to place heat shields up front for aerobraking (wether I need them or not, it seems more realistic that way and looks awesome) This also means I need my fuel tanks up front or all the mass in the back flips my ships in hard aero braking maneuvers. But, since you now have to stick your atomic engines directly to a large heat sink like the fuel tanks this means I need the engines up front too. This is easy to do but I find myself asking if there is would be a radiation risk to the crew if they where in a hab module behind the atomics. (obviously not directly behind but they would be within a few meters of the exhaust stream. I realize the exhaust itself is not radioactive but would there be a cone of radiation emitted behind the engine itself? I could also stick the heat shield array at the rear of the ship but then I would have my engines exposed to aero-braking forces which seems like a bad idea. Obviously from a gameplay perspective none of this matters but I play KSP more like a roleplaying game and like to build craft that make sense.

Uh, there was no challenge at all in 1.0, you didn't every need to do anything except open a parachute since they where invincible and instantly slowed you down at any speed or altitude. Re-entry IS to easy in 1.02 but its much much harder than it was in 1.0 which was the easiest re-entry model we ever had. At least in the old version parachutes broke or ripped off at high speeds.

The way you would run out of resources in Kethane is why I switched to Karbonite, Bases didn't make any sense in Kethane. And neither do orbital refineries. Its expensive you move stuff around so it makes sense to move fuel rather than ore, or at least it should. With 1:1 ore fuel conversion it doesn't matter but 1:1 is also terribly unrealistic.

Well, you don't have any fins or a SAS so how do you expect to control it? Stick some fins on the back end. You also can't yank rockets over at 10k like you used to. Start your turn very slowly at 1k and turn a few degrees every 1k after that until you hit 45º at about 15-20K As for it falling over on the launch pad, that is strange, does it always fall the same direction? Its possible you rotated it by a small fraction on accident. I would rebuild it from scratch and it should balance just fine.

Yeah, I don't know about that. Kethane was the first mod I got followed by Karbonite. Those where the only mods I got. Its really very hard to explore past Duna without fuel mining, and not very much fun as you can only take fairly small craft, or massive ships that take a dozen launched to construct in orbit and are only good for one mission after that. And yes, asteroids suck. You use more fuel matching velocities than you get out of them.

Stuck somewhere between Kerbin and eve waiting for a rescue mission.

I think that is what everyone is saying. It seems very unlikely that the QA problem has anything to do with the individual testers, it has to be the system they operate in.

Yeah, I actually think thats pretty cool if you view Kerbal as the dream of 1960's spaceflight that never came true.

Then explain how 1.0 happened? I ask again, did anyone actually play the game? I don't mean start it up and see if it crashes but actually try to play the game, as in do normal fun KSP activities like fly a ship to another planet or re-enter an atmosphere? I don't see how. I came up with three options that could explain what happened and only the last one could remotely be the fault of the actual testers and I even labeled that one as unlikely. Its beyond belief that the testers missed the problems 1.0 had if they where actually given 1.0 so I assume that they where either not actually given 1.0 as we saw it to test, or that their bug reports where not read/ignored.

Craft with radial mounted heat shields (but not mounted to radial parts) post aero braking only the heat shield is hot, radial parts protected. Same craft without the radial heat shields central stack protected by central heatshield, outer sections now overheating.

Heat shields are different. I just tested this by aerobraking a large interplanetary ship with an assembly of seven overlapping shields. 6 Of them mounted radially, they worked as they should and completely protected the parts behind them. I'll try to get a picture up.

I didn't realize they changed the engines....which I guess means they did it right.

I love them as well. Finally my spacecraft look like spacecraft and not flying oil rigs....at least until they get into deep space where then they magically transform in a puff of glitter into a proper zero G vacuum design. Yes...that was a backhanded complaint about the fragmenting effect, but really, I could live with it, I just would prefer something else.

No, its getting sane now. What was totally insane was to introduce entire new classes of gameplay without testing. And, yes, I am going to say WITHOUT TESTING because 1.0 had so many totally broken gameplay elements that I can't imagine that anyone with authority actually tested them even once. I found major problems with just my second 1.0 launch. And no I'm not talking about all the people complaining because their .90 ships don't work, those people should be ignored, I am talking about all the people like myself who have hundreds or thousands of hours into Kerbal who where waiting for 1.0 to start their "real" game and who found a totally broken package. I mean, just look at how many people with low post counts but early forum join dates are talking about this all of a sudden. You have people who joined the forum years ago who only now have felt the need to start posting. 1.0 was not just the normal "kerbal" 1.0 was a special kind of mistake. Nobody is saying that 1.02 didn't need to happen, it did, emergency action was needed to save the game after 1.0 but 1.0 should never have happened the way it did. Even a halfway competant testing system would have found the major issues in literally ten minutes of play. Either the testers where not give 1.0 as it released, or they where not listened to, or they testers chosen where some bizarre element of the community that uses kerbal to simulate truck driving or something. (unlikely) The reason we are so up in arms right now is because when you see a fundamentally broken system in charge of something you really like it causes a lot of fear that we will lose kerbal as a enjoyable game and whole house of cards will come down. 1.02 had more changes from 1.0 than 1.0 had from .90. What will 1.03 have in store for us? A few minor tweaks and bug fixes? Or will they throw more fundamental game changes at us without any testing to see if they actually work.

I like them. They could be better but for right now I am really happy that all my rockets look like rockets now and not flying oil drilling platforms.

Oh. In that case, never, and I leave my orbits cluttered with junk because I think it would be pretty cool to actually have to re-create "Gravity" but space is big.

1.0 was depressing. 1.02 is awesome and has never been more fun.

Since when did Kerbal have escape pods?

I don't think its too hard, but if you've played the game for the last couple years its too boring. The missions I come up with on my own are fare more interesting and challenging than the busy work of career. If I was playing the game for the first time I think it would be fun but once your experienced its a waste. Science Sandbox for me.

Solar panels are useless for controlling temps. Don't even bother. The trick is to set up your nukes so they are directly attached to a large fuel tank so the heat doesn't get bottlenecked. Looked at your ship I can see exactly why yours blew up, decouplers transfer heat poorly, you can't use them for nukes with long burns. The way your ship was set each nuke could only dump heat into its own small tank. Stick them to the side or end of one big tank and you will have much better results.

In 1.0 they where indestructible. You could deploy them at 3000m/s and they would instantly slow you to 100/ms, so not only was drag broken, but the entire re-entry mechanic was irrelevant.