Gan_HOPE326

I had a desperate need for a lot of dirty, cheap money, so I fulfilled two extremely rewarding missions at once - sent a probe to Gilly, put into a specific synchronous orbit (for a contract) and then used it to land and take measures, completing my exploration contract. The probe was a well tested model, with a simple LV-N rocket for the interplanetary part and a bigger Rockomax based vector for reaching Kerbin orbit. Total cost, 77,000 credits. I had also planned a kerballed mission to Gilly to deploy a permanent base, but that failed on account of a... small miscalculation. I put a huge starship AND a huge interplanetary vector in Low Kerbin Orbit separately, then docked them... then found out that they were almost useless because leaving LKO with that much weight and only an LV-N engine was almost impossible, seeing how the burn would take longer than the orbit itself and therefore all I can do is slowly spiral out in a most inefficient way. They're still up there while I try to figure out what to do about them.

That would ruin my devious take-two-birds-with-one-stone strategies where I FIRST put a satellite in the required Duna orbit and THEN after the 10 seconds of stability are passed I use it to land, take scientific data, and fulfill the exploration contract, all with a 70,000 credits vector + probe ensemble though .

I've bought KSP on its previous update and was very happy to see it updated to Beta (Than Ever, no less). After playing a bit with 0.9, my impressions are mixed. The good Career is certainly more challenging. I like the experience system, it makes you value your crew. It also gives much more sense to the previously almost equivalent different probe bodies. New biomes are appreciated, and the introduction of more contract types in career mode makes the experience slightly more varied. However... The bad I'm kind of torn about the upgradeable buildings. It's a neat idea, sure, but the costs are excessive imho when playing on Normal. And by excessive I mean: they require a lot of grinding. After a while it isn't even a matter of challenge, because you KNOW that you can send how many satellites in however weird orbits around Kerbin, Mun or Minmus, or even Duna. It just takes time. It isn't a challenge any more; you only learn to be quick, dirty, and cost-effective. I'm at a point where I need money to upgrade my research center or I won't be able to research the 500+ science techs. It takes something around 3,000,000 credits! That's... a lot. I racked up almost half the money by fulfilling Duna+Ike exploration contracts, but had to do so with a cheapish 70,000 credits interplanetary probe because I couldn't afford to spend too much on it. The next logical step would be sending a crew to land, but there's no contract for planting a flag on Duna anywhere in sight and I really can't justify the expense - if I want to do it, I'll probably have to go Science or Sandbox. Which kind of kills the purpose. What I mean is, missions have to be logical and progressive, and a bit more programmed. Random missions now and then are okay, but it would be nice to also have more pre-scripted missions with well thought out challenges which naturally follow our progression. On the other hand, I'm asked to land a 12 kerbal supporting outpost on Eve, which is sheer madness right now. Also, it isn't explained what exactly counts as an "outpost" - must everything be in a single piece, or is it okay to just have multiple facilities on the surface? The leveling up mechanic for Kerbals ends up being grindy as well - if you hire a new pilot, you better send him to Mun and Minmus so that he can rack up some experience before you send him on more complicated missions. So yeah, that's the take away: nice ideas but too much grinding and too little creativity. We can add that ourselves, of course, but I was hoping for the missions to give me a good starting point, not kill it by forcing me to do repetitive, useless tasks in order to gather enough money to spend on what I really value and care about. Though that's a perfectly accurate depiction of how working in science feels like if I've ever seen one (but I already do that 9 to 5, so please spare me in KSP...).

I think that's... normal? If you're thinking about the shrunk buildings, that's just a new feature of 0.9, you now have to earn moniez to upgrade them to their full size .

I guess this should be done through the nVidia XServer panel but it looks too complicated and possibly dangerous to bang my head against it right now. I'll probably experiment a bit tomorrow. I wish you guys good luck, kinda feel your pain since every new software release is always a new wave of bugs ...

Well, actually, it's a GeFORCE GT. I'm on a laptop btw, running the game on 1024x768. My readme.txt confirms it's Version 0.90.0 Beta. Here's my hardinfo report: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12810066/hardinfo_report.html

I can confirm this bug, here's a screenshot, happens on Ubuntu 14.04 on vanilla KSP and yes, turning antialiasing off fixes it.

I just found this, it seems relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit

I presume this part isn't a spoiler, but read with caution: Who else raised an eyebrow during the "they faked the Moon landings" part? As in what about all the other space stuff we made and put in space? All those gajillions of satellites? Even ignoring those (they didn't go to the MOON, after all...), this film's gonna be out of date as soon as SpaceX, China, or somebody else lands someone on the Moon, especially if they touch down and find an old, faded flag and lander base sitting there. The moon thing as pointed out by others wasn't meant to be true in-universe either - it was a conspiracy theory which became accepted reality because it was easier to think it like that and just stop pondering on mankind's "past greatness". It was also a not-so-subtle jab at American schools teaching creationism or such, imho. On the ending, it wasn't just Cooper all along, it was MANKIND all along. In some unspecified future, mankind gained the ability to mess with spacetime, and they managed to do so retroactively (well of course, if you can transcend regular spacetime, time travel shouldn't be a biggie). So they created the Tesseract for Cooper to find and use so that mankind could survive. It's one of those mind-blowey "stable time loop" things: mankind survives thanks to Cooper's success, but Cooper succeeds thanks to the fact that mankind survived. I was heavily reminded of Asimov's "The End of Eternity" there.

I did love the part where the guy had to dock with a spinning ship. I tried that in KSP once... ONCE. Took the whole blasted day and in my case the ship was barely rotating. 'Course they did have the convenient benefit of a docking port right on the rotational axis xD My interpretation of that was for the spaghettification, it's been shown clearly that Gargantua is, well, gargantuan. Probably a supermassive black hole with many million suns of mass. Otherwise, that planet couldn't have survived orbiting it close enough to have such a high time warp factor, nor the astronaut would have managed to pass the event horizon without harm. Given that, it might as well be that he never reached the point of spaghettification - after all Magical Future Humans managed to snatch him away and put him into their Tesseract space or whatever. So there's that, I say he simply was caught before he got too close to the singularity (that thing must have been several million km in radius anyway). For the ships/3rd law, I just assumed they counted on ejecting all that mass with explosive bolts to gain a bit of momentum, plus of course losing mass. So yeah, not 100% exact but people complained about the science being "too convoluted" like this already . On another note, am I the only one who was calculating DeltaV and ISP for that amazing atmospheric lander of theirs in his head during the movie ? That was truly something, atmospheric decent without parachutes AND take off on two Earth-like planets in a row with no refuel and no stages. Must have been an atomic motor .