Troubletcat

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're not SUPPOSED to do anything while retracted. Why would they? Or is this thread a joke that I'm not getting...

I agree with you 100% on this, and that's my playstyle as well, but there are a lot of people on this forum who enjoy meticulously crafting/planning everything down to the smallest detail, and that's valid too. I think adding some of the information given by KER to the game as an optional setting is the best way to go here. I don't ever want a stock autopilot beyond the "hold this heading" stuff currently in the game, though. I didn't care for the review itself. I don't think you should use mods when reviewing a game. It's pretty clear to me that the author used MechJeb's autopilot instead of taking time to actually learn how to fly, and flying your rockets is a big part of the game. If somebody prefers flying with an autopilot and finds that more enjoyable that's 100% fine and valid, but I don't think it's appropriate for a review of a game to rely on a user-made mod to remove a good chunk of the gameplay.

It's a bit silly at the moment. I never use heat shields. I tend to land my entire upper stage including engine, all science bits/utilities etc. for more recovery money. I like that I can point the engine into the airstream and have everything survive when returning on a sensible trajectory at low-orbit speeds, I think that should still be completely possible, otherwise rocket designs get a lot more limited in some ways. But I shouldn't be able to return straight to the planet from Minmus or interplanetary without a heatshield. Might lose a few solar panels and batteries if they're exposed on the sides of the rocket, but right now nothing terrible will happen to you. And that's just silly. Plus it makes the heatshield parts pretty much pointless. I'm pretty confident Squad is going to balance this Soonâ„¢ though, so whatever. It's not THAT big of a deal.

Safely landed on Minmus, where nothing unfortunate can happen to her. I try really hard to keep my orange suits alive, but I can't just leave them sitting in the complex either, they want to go to space! I'll bring her home eventually and send her somewhere else, though.

Whoops, I meant to say west, not east, but yeah, the door is on the east side of the VAB. Basically one fin should be pointing up after you've turned east off the pad. If that's still not clear take a look at the video I posted on page 3, where I actually fly the thing. Sometimes more than three works better. Really depends on the rocket. But that's generally my go to configuration. If you're using angle snap it should be a breeze to get it on the right angle (since one of the directions it'll snap to is the correct one).

No. It's more like 3500m/s now, but I don't have the exact figure. When it comes to fins, I've found they do help, but it depends on where you place them. Try putting them right near the bottom of the rocket and use 3-way symmetry so that one is pointing straight "up" (i.e, west on the launch pad. Check the first screenshot in my post on page 2, you'll see what I mean). This tends to work very well for me in combination with the LVT-45 gimbal and the pod torque, generally have pretty good control as long as the rocket isn't very long or wobbly or just going way too fast near the ground.

Well if you click on the link for pre-release builds in the OP, there have been lots of updates to the dev branch lately, so I'd assume it's being worked on, just not ready yet.

Once you get used to the new aero, you'll find certain things much easier now than they were in .90 and earlier. Stick with it!

I think people are massively exaggerating the difference in aero modelling between 1.0 and 1.0.2. All my rockets that I made in 1.0 still work pretty much exactly the same, and if you listen to what the devs are saying very little was actually changed in terms of DV requirements for orbit and stuff like that. I think saying that "soup" is back is an incredible exageration as well. 1.0.2 aero is extremely similar to 1.0 and nothing at all like .90 and earlier. Getting to orbit and flying planes are both (in my opinion) far, far easier, more intuitive and more realistic than they ever were in stock before. The only thing that's harder is spaceplanes (since you lose air to keep jet engines running at much lower altitudes) but honestly they were absurdly overpowered before. Tl:dr; Change from 1.0 to 1.0.2 was small. New aero is good (not perfect, but good) and I have no idea why people are flipping out.

Yeah, see... that's what I said. The pics in this thread just seem hugely overbuilt. This is similar in costs to my rocket for that mission, but a little different design.

If that's happening with regular rockets like the one you showed, you're going too fast too low in the atmosphere anyway. Go slower until you get higher up.

Nice! 600 science from one mission for 36k!

Alright, here's the video of my flying one of the rockets from my post (if you don't want commentary you can mute it/skip around to the good bits). Some other notes: -Obviously can't fly to 10km/turn 45 degree anymore, should go without saying. -Like I said I'd definitely change the Greydisk a bit if I flew it now. It only just BARELY had enough fuel to safely capture at Kerbin and was quite unstable at launch, so I'd probably add a tad more fuel and some wings, however, I think you can see that it'd only be very small alterations needed from watching this video with such a similar design. -The lander is obviously a completely different beast to this rocket, but I didn't want to make the video 45 minutes long to cram in both. -Don't go too fast! Getting very mild visual "wind effect" or whatever that's actually called is okay. Any more than that and your losses due to drag are going to be more than your gains from getting away from the planet's gravity faster. You definitely should not see exterior flames while launching. At least, that's been my experience. So use thrust limiters on solid boosters to keep speed to reasonable levels until you get up high. -The lighter your upper stage is the better. I get a lot of work done adjusting my orbit with only ~35 units of fuel because the craft is so light at that point, and the fuel I have left is probably enough to return the ship shown to Kerbin (if I wanted to). Definitely still would've had enough even if I hadn't entered the Mun's SOI at an advantageous angle by pure luck. Also keep in mind that a light payload has a knock-on effect and means you need less fuel on the stage before the payload, which means you need less on the stage before that, and so on. Obviously don't leave any vital equipment out, but minimalism is your friend. -Fairings... Only use fairings if your upper stage has lots of crap sticking off at weird angles making the rocket do strange things. They're heavy, don't bring one if you don't need it. Make sure you make them as thin and pointy as possible if you do use one. If you add a big fat fairing to an upper stage that's generally pretty thin and well balanced, you're going to add both mass and drag, instead of reducing drag. -Maneuver efficiently. I'm not actually very good at this - I don't have any physics education or anything like that, but... well, if you're flying in a much less efficient way than shown in the video, that's... bad, I guess?

Hang on, I'll make a video demonstrating those rockets real quick. Might take a bit of time to upload to YouTube though.

The rockets in the last couple posts with images all strike me as massively overbuilt. My sat for all "specific orbit" contracts inside Kerbin/Mun/Minimus costs around 15k funds. My first munar return lander was less than 50k even using big clusters of 1.25m engines because I didn't have 2.5m engines unlocked yet. This can bring Goo to pretty much any orbit you might want, including stuff like extremely inclined/eccentric Mun orbits. It can also land on the Mun or Minmus if you want. You don't actually need the inline reaction wheel, it's just slow to rotate in space otherwise. You can also cut some parts to bring this sub 30 parts so you can do it with the starting VAB. I have a slightly smaller/cheaper version for less eccentric orbits or if I know I won't want to land it. SRBs are limited to about 60% thrust in both this and the next design. I used this for a very early manned Mun flyby, although that was in 1.0 not 1.0.2, haven't tested it in latest version. That said I've found the difference in rocket performance between 1.0 to 1.0.2 to be negligible and a few things actually flew better. I would probably put some wings on this if I wanted to use it again now. This was my first manned Munar return craft. I now use one that costs about 5-6k more funds using the bigger engines, but this got the job done. Also, just looking at the shape of your fairing and the shape of the payload, I'd guess the fairing isn't doing you much good there. I'd ditch it and shove on a nosecone.

I generally agree, but I'd like to point out that building upgrade costs DO scale with difficulty - specifically, they're based on the "Funds Penalties" slider. Although upgrade costs should really have their own separate control. Also don't personally agree with reducing upgrade costs on normal, I found getting to the second tier of buildings on normal to be very quick. I think there was mention of bigger landing gear/legs being planned for a patch in the near future. I also think that there's going to be an intermediary stage of upgrades for weight/part counts like you mentioned - remember, one tier of the KSC was pulled from the update because people didn't like the art for it, to be included again later. But yeah, good points about balance, especially strategies - those really need some tweaking. I haven't noticed inconsistency with science high above planets but if that's there it should certainly be fixed.

Only a soulless monster could let their Kerbals die. But I play with no saving/loading and I rarely include a better escape plan than "stage off everything that can be staged off and deploy the parachutes" so sometimes accidents happen (especially with spaceplanes)... plus the stranded Kerbals I've lost when they've run out of life support before I could get a rescue ship to them... i cri ever tiem

For large bases you almost always want to launch them in parts and assemble them on the target body. If you really want to do it in one launch, my only advice is "Add more boosters". Always add more boosters.

The signal delay feature definitely no. Without a comprehensive autopilot (which I don't want to see added to the stock game either) it just makes flying unmanned craft way too painful. As for connection requirements... Ehhh... I think we can all agree that Squad needs to do SOMETHING to make having satellites serve a purpose. The launch contracts don't cut the mustard there. Building up a comms network adds another layer to a feeling of progression and persistence to the game, as do space stations and planetary bases. None of which have any very compelling reasons to be built at the moment. But I'm not sure RemoteTech is the right way to go about it. I think it makes things much too hard for more casual players and new players. Maybe if it was only enabled on hard mode, but if that's the case, might as well leave it as a mod. I think that there must be a better solution to making satellites useful. Don't know what it is though.

I've got stayputnik's in orbit around Kerbin, Mun, and Minmus and have landed them on Mun and Minmus as well. I actually thought it was a fun challenge. SAS was already in the game in the first version I played so I never really had the experience of flying without it. It's very doable, but much harder. I really like that the first probe core you unlock is so basic and hope they don't change it. However, I do think it'd be good if it was earlier in the tech tree considering how basic it is. Survivability maybe (after all, it's the ultimate solution).

1. High TWR in the stock game are mostly just wasteful, but only inside an atmosphere. The problem is that as you go faster you experience more resistance from the atmosphere, so it's more efficient in terms of fuel consumption not to go too quickly when you're low inside atmospheres. As an aside, 2.5 is probably still considerably higher than you want for a launch TWR. Aim in the region of 1.2-1.8 for launch. Aside from being inefficient, it can make your craft more wobbly or harder to steer as you get to high speeds in the lower atmosphere. If you use FAR instead of the stock aerodynamics it can rip your craft apart completely. 2. Delta-V was covered pretty well by Norpo. It's hard (but possible) to figure out based on the information given to you in-game. If you want to know how, here's the wiki page that explains it: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Tutorial:Advanced_Rocket_Design . Otherwise use Kerbal Engineer. 3. 4,500m/s is enough for LKO in the stock game. As an aside, you can make it to orbit with considerably less than 4,500m/s delta-v using FAR or NEAR.

32-bit applications can address up to 3.5gbs of RAM. If you run KSP in 64-bit mode it'll be able to use all the RAM you have that isn't already reserved/used by something else. I'm able to run KSP in 64-bit mode on Windows 8.1 with no apparent problems, but your mileage will vary there. A lot of people can't really get it working. Also certain mods, including some very popular mods, are disabled in 64-bit mode (much to my annoyance...) so there's that to consider as well.

As I understand it, from an end-user perspective there are still two hangars (as emphasised by it being mentioned a few times that there are still different backgrounds), and I expect that we'll still have a different default craft orientation and launch facility depending on whether you click on the spaceplane hangar or the VAB when looking at the KSC. It's more of an internal change to stop the game having to load two different scenes that are functionally very similar - so it's now one scene with a couple of different configurations. That said, they've confirmed you'll be able to freely switch between the hangar-style and VAB-style symmetry now, and I expect it'd be trivial for them to add an option to decide what you want to launch from, so maybe they have or will in the future.

I'll just keep playing my current career for now since, what am I going to do, NOT play KSP? And sandbox mode simply doesn't interest me anymore now that career mode exists. But I'm not going to try and "finish" it or anything like that. I will try and bring all my Kerbals home before I switch to 0.90 and make a new save though. I'd feel bad leaving them to starve.

Lots of interesting stuff in here I didn't know, cool to get some details about what exactly the building upgrades and kerbal skills (other than pilot, already knew about that) will be like. My hype continues to intensify. Also, thanks lots for making this! I don't squadcast, so this is really appreciated.