BoomerDog9

This. Also, 'Fifteen minutes of time per week' spent reading forums potentially leads to 'six hours' of time per week spent reading forums, which is perhaps not the best use of development time while the team is crunching out a major engine overhaul. What level of depth of context can you possibly achieve in fifteen minutes?

Here's mine. I'm a bit of an old-schooler.

There was a pretty good short story once by Fritz Leiber called 'A Pail of Air', about survivors on Earth coping with the aftermath of a tiny black hole shooting through the solar system and pushing the Earth into a solar-escape orbit.

I tried following Greco-Roman naming conventions, but there's a temptation to start naming things after real-life rockets (Thor, Atlas, Titan, Saturn, Juno, etc) and this becomes confusing after awhile. Also, the fact that these are things made by Kerbals and not humans, feels awkward when you stick a non-Kerbally name on it. But without knowing more about Kerbal history and mythology, it's difficult to do otherwise without the time to spend writing that kind of backstory. In my current Career mode game, I've got a convention going where I assign a Zodiac constellation to each planet or moon. Mun missions are 'Virgo' (in honor of the alternate-universe 'Virgo 2' mission to the Moon referenced in Fallout 3), so there would be Virgo-1, Virgo-2, Virgo-3, etc. Minmus missions are titled 'Aquarius-#'; my soon-to-be-launched Eve/Gilly explorer ship will be the first 'Capricorn' mission (let's hope the Kerbals aboard 'Capricorn-1' fare better than their terrestrial cinematic counterparts!). Aircraft/aerospace craft have a nickname and a letter designation, starting with 'S-#' for scout, 'X-#' for experimental, 'R-#' for reconnaissance, 'T-#' for trainer, 'O-#' for orbital transport; once I start getting into BD Armory a little more, I might commission some A-#/F-#/B-#. I also have a role-playing thing where Valentina likes to rename whatever ship she's on a 'Ladybug-#' immediately after launch, frustrating the bosses and PR folks at Mission Control no end. :-)

I'd like to add that I certainly agree with a lot that's been said here. There are some bugs I'd like to see squashed, but none of these are seriously impacting my gameplay (at least, not on my Win-7 64-bit rig). I rate KSP as 90% 'finished'; once a real 64-bit .exe is introduced, some bugs are fixed, and these new features are rolled out in 1.1, I think that would satisfy my definition of 'complete', especially given this amazing mod community taking advantage of the game's incredible extensibility. What I'd like to see further explored (either in mods or in the 'stock' game): * Discovering life on some of the planets/asteroids. Anyone remember 'Starflight'? One of the things you could do in that game was bag-n-tag alien lifeform samples (plant and animal) for cash-on-delivery when you returned to the stardock. Something that lets me track, analyze, capture, and retrieve sample of alien life would add some interest. * More in-depth geological exploration. Another 'Starflight' feature was the ability to fill your cargo hold with precious metals and ores, and bring them back for money. The ISRU systems out there seem to tackle this mainly as part of a method of refueling ships and making parts. Would like to be able to harvest industrial crystals, rare-earth metals, precious metals and gems, and interesting minerals, and to be able to put examples of these in a 'natural history museum' trophy-case at the KSC. * Space-race competition. It'd be nice to have the concept of competition for space achievements and space resources with other Kerbal nationalities in the game as NPC races. It would certainly add an additional layer of motivation to the experience. Things like map-editor support and multiplayer would be nice at some point, but I really think those sorts of things require expansion-level support, and should only be rolled out as a thoroughly designed and tested package, not on an after-thought basis to round out an incremental version release. Keep up the good work, Squad, I'm at over 900 hours played with 50 installed mods and still haven't lost any enthusiasm for Kerbal Space Program!

I believe the two things that will herald the arrival of a serious human presence in space will be microgravity manufacturing and microgravity metallurgy. Some microchip company will find a way to deploy an orbital microchip factory, and start sending down ultra-efficient CPUs for use in government and research sectors. Testing, maintenance and systems management will probably require a permanent human presence on this orbital factory. As profits are made on this endeavor, more launch bandwidth will come online to support it and help it grow. Other industrial interests will want to explore the properties of various materials that can only be created in microgravity. Currently the human race is dependent upon materials which are available only on a 1g rocky-terrestrial planet with a dense atmosphere. As an orbital lab-foundry operation expands our catalogue of possible materials to include those which can be made in microgravity, some of these new materials will no doubt find themselves profoundly useful for high-technology applications, and industries will move mountains to start producing them in greater and greater quantities. This too will lead to more humans in space. Gathering the available resources to fuel these two kinds of orbital industrial operations will then bring into existence the low-delta-V shipping lanes between LEO, L4 & L5, Moon surface, Mars, Ceres, various asteroids, and the Jovian moons. It's just waiting for that one company to get hungry enough to get out there and start turning a profit, then others will follow.

I'd like to see KSP 2.0 do the following: 1) Provide more immersive and interesting POIs, worlds, celestial bodies, and even make empty space more interesting with additional space-only biomes where deep-space solar-wind analysis, quantum particle scans, ambient gamma- and cosmic-ray observations, etc. could be useful projects to accomplish. Maybe some on-the-fly procedural generation code that increases the elaboration of a world's POIs the more time the player spends there... 2) Tie into software like Astrosynthesis 3.0 to allow fast procedural space sector, star system and world generation (though beefed up with more realistic geological and atmospheric chemistry modeling) to come closer to a randomizable, replayable interstellar-level game... 3) Leverage some features found in other sandbox games like Minecraft and Space Engineers, to give players the ability to tunnel into the various worlds and build even more elaborate above- and below-ground constructions... 4) Bump up the astrophysics modeling to allow n-body physics and the ability to leave craters on celestial bodies when they get hit by asteroids, up to knocking their orbits out of whack / total conversion to asteroid debris (so that Space: 1999-style catastrophe scenarios could be possible)... 5) System variables to track the total Kerbal population of Kerbin, and other habitable systems; variables to track the effective quality-of-life and technological standards of these settlements; and a game feature that determines the current level of relative success of your space program as a function of whether or not a greater number of Kerbals are living at higher standards of living compared to how well they were living at the start of the game. If my solar system has a late-stage population of only 1,000 Kerbals with all techs unlocked (because I spent my money on research missions instead of a couple of crucial asteroid-divert missions), that might not be as great of an outcome as having a billion Kerbals at late-stage, with only half the techs unlocked... Probably 2.0 will require everyone to have evolved toward 128-bit computers based on super-conducting processors manufactured at the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, meaning that 2.0 will risk becoming 'historical fantasy' as opposed to 'speculative aerospace simulation', but it's still fun to spitball away at this stuff.

It works, with issues as described earlier. I'm running Windows 7 64-bit with 8g RAM and an old Intel Core2 Duo 2.66 Ghz CPU. Performance (with graphics set to high-res textures, render quality == Fantastic, terrain detail == High, frame limit == 120 FPS, anisotropic filtering OFF, force OpenGL disabled (the last two to get Scatterer to work right), and 60+ mods installed (including EVE, Scatterer, Planetshine, and Interstellar Extended) hovers at 5 to 6 gigs with occasional CTDs or system hangs. I'm going to ramp down the RAM burden by cutting back on settings and a couple of the memory-eating mods, but this will be the build I'll be playing with until they release a formal 64-bit. I have seen some occasional weirdness with it when loading x86 saves (one of my early-game satellite-deployment rockets went into a crazy hyberbolic trajectory over Kerbin during its ascent, then crashed the game); and the issue with the KSC buildings in Career Mode flipping to fully-upgraded can sometimes allow you to exploit, as sometimes the game code recognizes the upgrades as real and not just cosmetic. You can thus have your Kerbals take samples at all the KSC locations in early-game for a tech boost, discover asteroids, etc while the glitch lasts. Annoying issues aside, this is so much better than x86 version if you like running with more than a few mods.

I just got a pop-up message from Steam saying that KSP 1.0.1 is now out, so hopefully that's gotten addressed...