PhoenixCola

I just preformed a full scan of Kerbin for anomalies, and can confirm that the new surface features do not appear on the map.

Nice find on those crystals, did not find anything except Baobab trees, flying search patterns for over 6 hours now >.< But I just love this expansion, a whole game just opened up for me extremly, later I might try out building helicopters, and after that I have a date with Eve for a new type of a mission. Big kudos to Squad!

Big kudos to Squad for making planets more interesting and having a reason to stay and plan surface missions. I was waiting for this a loooong time, it will be a expansion that brings me back to KSP for sure. Cant wait!

Thank you for replies folks, really, I appreciate it a a lot, this is really the best game community I participated in by far, those are some great replies. I just wanted to clarify on KJR bit, while I just love the mod, as pointed out by @Amianoob, I am as well internally divided on its use, I kind of hated myself for using it, and at first I thought it would make things just too good, and it rides on this fine line of "Being a Kerbal Way" vs "Being a Real Sim", and naturally, there are conflicting opinions. And as @regex pointed out, things were really bad, I am playing since 0.17 and lived through all kinds of good changes, as many of people here did. Strutting becomes with time an art form as @TMS said, and it adds that junk,duct tape and zipties feeling, and even real spacecraft are strutted sometimes (Space Shuttle is a shining example, still wonder at times how the hell did that thing work so good.), so it might be that this does not need adressing. However, when I look at 3.5m parts, and the fact that they are implemented by Squad in the stock game, and that they work so badly, I am personally more inclined toward KJR rigidity. It feels far more natural than rockets that seem to be made of some rubbery material. This is the part where the game does not punish you for doing something wrong, as it does with other things, it just refuses to cooperate on the level that it should, and the poor strut is caught in the way as "rigidizer" for something that needs to be the job for joints. For me in general the feeling is not diminished, and there are pretty much the same amount of explosions in my gameplay, it just eliminated larger rockets breaking under their own weight and behaving like they are a piece of rubber. And with introduction of reentry effects, you have to be really careful not to push the ship beyond its design capabilities. So while they could make stuff more rigid, it would be great to make ships more sensitive to pure aerodynamic effects, and really push out those dangers of max Q for example. It could be that Squad is a really young development team, and they have demonstrated their skills in really improving the game beyond my expectations actually, so it might be that as they are getting more and more skilled, they will squash some of those things listed. Also, did anyone else notice that the "planets" on the loading widget actually move in a wrong direction respectful to their in game orbits?

First to start of, I have been restraining myself from writing this post for over a year now, and am beginning to think that I might be just too whiney in my head, since I seldom see topics like this brought up on the forum. It feels like everyone is fine with stuff I am about to mention and only a few people bring these things up. First of in pretext I would like to say that KSP has been and still is my No 1 game, most of the time the only game I have on my PC, and it is an absolute marvel and refreshment in video game industry. There is hardly any game so rewarding and beautiful as our beloved KSP. I have not seen any developer so engaged with community and actually willing to listen to it as much as Squad is, for me they are a shining light in the ever more profit driven game development world, which more and more often provides us with gaming titles that are not even worth mentioning and remembering, let alone playing. And that is the reason why I am feeling even more obligated to throw my thoughts in, and raise questions i feel are important in a hopefully non whining, constructive way. The first question I would like to raise is, what is KSP becoming? With every update, I have a greater and greater feeling that KSP is becoming more and more of a "framework" for community mods, which are for me a more and more a necessary "evil", hell, if you want to do something in KSP in a really enjoyable way, you are going to do it with mods, and this is great that it exists, but it also creates some unavoidable "walls" which modding can't deal with or deals with in some very faint and unreliable way, due to KSP / Unity limitations. Even some mods developed by community have made it into official release, which is awesome, and I think this trend should be continued to a certain degree. I am however disappointed in Squad's focus on certain game aspects, mainly, why is so much attention given to non-flight parts of the game, there are some things which were really critical, but there are some that I cannot believe took precedence over things that are still a major issue ingame. Mainly, I want to point my finger at actual gameplay after you hit spacebar to launch a flight for the first time.I will just throw some issues out of my mind which I really cannot believe that someone in development process finds acceptable, and again someone in QA phase gives it a go for release. 1) Patched conics have been a nightmare for the entire life of the game, and they are a really critical element of any mission, they are getting fixed now, hopefully, so it took all this time, even through official release (1.0) of the game to even get into fixing of those. 2) Rocket stability / part attachment node strength. Anyone who claims that spaceships are fine should try deleting EAS-4 Strut Connector from GameData and trying to play that way, It is almost impossible to design a large rocket without that part, it is the only thing that enables construction of all those awesome huge ships everybody loves, and even that fails at larger scales, Kerbal Joint Reinforcement (KJR) becomes a necessity at this point, and again, why is it implemented by community so awesomely, and developers are not taking a similar course of action, beats me. 3) Mission and timewarp management - Again, if you have 2+ ships in a mission that are set to execute some node in future, it becomes a real real pain to manage all those, nodes are skipped, encounters missed, missions screwed because when you switch ships once you cannot revert anymore, so here again comes an intervention from community - Kerbal Alarm Clock (KAC) or similar mods that will make the game playable at this level. Also It is great that we don't have reports of epileptic seizures when timewarping at max while on launchpad / KSC view, I look away/turn off monitor every time I have to do that, it is just nauseating. 4) Planetary exploration - Now this is the part that makes me want to rage, because this is the greatest waste of potential ingame of all. There are the known planets, Moho, Eve, Kerbin, Duna, Dres and Jool, and their respective moons. And there is nothing to do on them, once you land on a body, there is almost nothing that motivates you to actually stay there and dig around, do science, try to survive, you know all the good stuff that space gives you. There are anomalies that you could visit but they don't do anything but give you the bling factor when you find them, and are almost impossible to find, even worse a lot of them were removed or buried below the surface, so they are unreachable. (Magic boulder, I will miss you forever.) And then, we are supplied with parts that would enable exploration of bodies further away than Eeloo (nuke engines, ion engines, RTG-s) which have absolutely no real use, everything within the stock Kerbol system is far inside the reach of conventional chemical rockets and solar panels, so there is no real need for high tech parts like those. Regular engines + asparagus will get you anywhere you can go in stock system. Some planets will break your ships by simply landing on them or even loading a craft on the surface (yes i am looking at you Eve)... So in order to remove all that dullness there are again some spectacular community made mods that will try and mask the overwhelming dullness of planets that are supposed to be places which should make your heart want to explode with excitement. Notable huge ones are Outer Planets Mod, Distant object enhancement, Environmental visual enhancments, and a huge selection of additional science mods, basebuilding mods, lifesupport and lately a visual candy - Scatterer, which try their best, but really cannot change the fact that there is nothing to really do in space once you left the launchpad, because of nonexistent base mechanics to expand on! Hell, the most interesting thing that happened on planets in stock game beside resources being introduced are actually biomes, which were painted by a community member! 5) Contracts and rewards - This part is really done much better than anything mentioned above, but could still use improvements, mainly things like Eve and Moho should give a ton more science/money because they are far more difficult to complete than anything else. Some are just completely stupid and impossible, but hey, its really fine compared to issues mentioned above. So, I am reluctant to say "KSP is supposed to be a space exploration game" because it is not only that, if I am correct, it should be a merger of a flight simulator, construction/engineering game, manager and space exploration, and if so, why oh why is so much attention given to a lot of trivial things and improvements that are tied to the management part of the game and there are close to none improvements in other aspects of the game, mainly things I have addressed above. So what are your thoughts, am I completely wrong and am I playing the game completely wrong, or do you resonate with things mentioned and are feeling a bit undercut on these important aspects in the way I do? Thank you all for reading, peace, out. Wall of text critically hits you for over 9000 damage. You die.

Minimus! I was blown away when I first realized it was there (in 0.16), was the first object I landed on, and is plain awesome! Tylo must be the second one, love zipping close over the mountain tops at orbital speed Pol / Laythe share the third place, pol for being original and Laythe for being really fun However, I consider Kerbol system a bit boring, I miss the outer planets really much, and i do not understand why Squad has not implemented Gas Planet 2 & 3 already.

Downloaded v9rc3 30 minutes ago and was sad to see the big map not working, came here to post screenshots and found rc4! Thank you so much, without this mod i didn't even want to start playing, so now I am confirming everything works so far.

The bodies do not cast shadows, but I think solar panels behave in a correct way when Kerbol is eclipted by another body. So while you don't get the realistic looks, you still get realistic behaviour.

1> Learn to use asparagus staging. If you never seen this at work, launch a stock Kerbal X rocket, examine how it works. 2> Read KSP Wiki. That is the one single best resource for KSP. 3> Learn interplanetary transfers, the best place to start is ---> http://ksp.olex.biz/ 4> Learn to aerobrake, this is a technique you can use for saving up tons of fuel when encountering Jool, Eve, Duna and returning to Kerbin. 5> Always try to use the lowest possible parking orbit (70000m) for doing transfer / deceleration burns due to oberth effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect 6> Tune your approach to target from a large distance, the farther you are, the less fuel is required for corrections. Fine tune when you get closer for perfect maneuver. 7> Assemble your craft in orbit via multiple launches instead of launching a huge rocket with one part. 8> Always launch in a 90° direction to use the rotational velocity of Kerbin to your advantage. (I played KSP for 6 months without knowing this, always launched in 270° direction because i liked the scenery.) 9> Use the OX-Stat solar panels often, they are massless and perfect for keeping your spacecraft under power in case you forget to deploy better solar panels.