Hotaru

I don't think it's quite as limiting as it looks, the only major limitation I see is that a few engines don't work well in atmo, and are therefore not much use as lifters. For instance, The T30 and T45 are extremely versatile engines. I've used them as 1.25-meter booster engines, of course, but also in clusters for 2.5- and 3.75-meter rockets, as sustainer engines on SSTO's, and as upper-stage engines on a variety of heavier ships where a Terrier would be too weak and a Poodle too heavy. On landing craft, I often have a choice between the Terrier, 48-7S, 24-77, LV-1, and O-10 in various combinations, and I generally pick whichever is most convenient for the ship's configuration over which would be the most efficient--for example, if I use several radial 24-77's in place of a Terrier, I can do away with landing gear and have my ship land directly on its tail. I've found uses for all of those engines in my current career save. I do think there are plenty of gaps to be filled--mostly a lack of larger jets, nukes, solids, etc.--but I don't feel like my creativity is being stifled. If anything I think my designs have gotten more interesting and varied in 1.0.2 than they were in 0.90.

Having by coincidence just witnessed a solar (Kerbolar?) eclipse from Kerbin orbit, my observation backs up your calculations: The Mun is definitely noticeably smaller in diameter than the disc of the Sun, so this is an annular eclipse and at least a little energy should still be sneaking through around the edges. I don't know about the distribution of energy across the area of the disc, though, so I can't say if you're right about the amount of energy. I believe KSP determines an eclipse by where the center of the Sun is, not the edges, so you stop getting electricity precisely halfway through sunrise or sunset--it also doesn't seem to take into account local topography, which is especially noticeable on Minmus, where I've frequently noticed my ships continue receiving power long after the Sun has passed below the apparent horizon.

Two ways. One is serious career-mode, generally no reverts, lots of sensible, conservative designs, being way too cautious and trying very hard not to get my Kerbals killed. My current career save has a very good safety record, no ex-kerbals and only four serious accidents: an unmanned rocket crash, a manned test flight saved by the LES, a tipped-over lander rescued from the Mun, and an SSTO repaired on-orbit. Other is messing about in sandbox. No regard for cost, efficiency, or Kerbal safety, doing dumb stuff just to see if I can, building ships that, while cool, wouldn't make sense in career mode. Still usually don't revert, since Kerbals are in unlimited supply and none of my sandbox projects are major time investments anyway. I have plenty of fun either way. Sandbox silliness makes a nice break from career stress, but the structure of career is good when I get bored with sandbox.

Same here. I've found uses for just about every engine I've unlocked so far in career mode. Even the Aerospike.

I think the engines we have are pretty well balanced, except for the Aerospike, which could do with a more consistent ISP curve (mainly to make it useful on Eve again). I do agree that there are gaps to be filled, though, especially in different size categories. 2.5- and maybe 3.75-meter versions of the jets, Rapier, Aerospike, Nerva, and SRB's would all be appreciated, for instance. My only other complaint is that the visual models of the engines don't always match their performance... as I understand it vacuum engines should in general have large bell-nozzles while sea-level engines should have smaller ones--as it is with the two 3.75-meter engines--but a lot of the other sets have this backwards (Mainsail vs. Poodle, T30/45 vs. Terrier). Not a huge issue, and I suspect the nozzles on the Poodle and Terrier are short as they are largely because they're meant as lander engines--the Terrier does look a bit like the Apollo LM engines.

Taking a look at the Elcano ground-circumnavigation challenge, thought I might give it a try. So I opened up my sandbox save and started experimenting with rover designs. First, I built a little racecar type thing around a Mark I inline cockpit. I couldn't resist adding a few boosters. Unsurprisingly, the enterprise quickly devolved into adding more and more rockets in an attempt to set a new land-speed record. Some of the runs went better than others. I did, however, build a reasonably functional ejection seat. Useless, admittedly, but functional. On its best run, the LSR Mark IIE disintegrated at 574 miles per hour, and I am still no closer to driving around Kerbin or anywhere else than I was yesterday.

Any requirement to be able to return?

Level two, but you need to upgrade Mission Control as well if I recall.

Yeah, I've always thought they were a little too durable. Personally I use the VNG parachute mod to give them their own parachutes so bailing-out is a valid escape method in atmo, but it would be nice if they actually, you know, NEEDED the chutes. As for the jetpack delta-v, I assume it was done that way to give Kerbals more freedom to jetpack around on low-gravity planets... having to actually walk several kilometers on the Mun for a survey contract would be unbelievably annoying (it's annoying enough on Kerbin!), so I guess I hope they don't change it. On the other hand I would be in favor of limited EVA fuel (say, you can only refuel from the pod two or three times rather than infinite times), to remove some of the exploity "get-out-and-push" options for spacecraft rescue. Although orbital skydiving sounds fun. Must remember to try it before next update, on the off-chance they actually DO nerf Kerbal durability. PS. It occurs to me that nerfing jetpack delta-v would make rovers a more useful option for some of those survey contracts, so maybe it wouldn't be so bad if they did. I can't decide...

Really looking forward to Unity 5, even if x64 doesn't materialize, it'll hopefully be nice to not have to worry quite so much about part count, currently the one big constraint on my designs that doesn't make realistic sense. Audio overhaul should be cool as well, for me good sound design is one of the most important aspects of immersion. My only concern right now is that I hope we can get a 1.0.3 patch first--even if the only thing it fixed would be the memory leaks in 1.0.2, I would be extremely happy. Right now I basically can't install major part mods: even though KSP currently starts up using about 2 gigs of memory, after a few scene changes it's right up around 3.2 and I have to restart. (I'll probably eventually go back to running x64 on Linux but I get noticeably lower FPS there and no AA, plus my Linux setup is incredibly annoying to boot into, so I prefer Windows ("I prefer Windows." As a long-time Mac user, never thought I'd hear myself say that.)).

Is this with kerbals or just generally? I've sent at least a flyby probe everywhere except Eeloo and the Jool system (both in 1.0.2 and in 0.90, although I haven't sent one to Dres yet in 1.0), but so far my kerballed experience in any version is entirely within Kerbin's SoI, except for a single deep-space science station in my current career save. Only moon I've visited so far has been Ike. My problem is I always play career mode (I do mess around in sandbox a lot but basically never launch serious missions there), and I have yet to get as far as even a manned Duna mission before changing my mod setup and having to start over. My current career is looking promising though, not least because I'm waiting for a couple of mods to be updated before starting over yet again. Also, interplanetary space is scary. PS. Looking at my signature reminds me my Eve probes have not actually arrived yet in 1.0.

I pretty much always use maneuver nodes. Usually let MechJeb set them up and then adjust them manually if necessary, although sometimes MJ gets confused and I have to do it myself. (Yes, I could make a Munar injection burn without nodes or MechJeb, and did the first few times I did it, but after sending about the five hundredth identical unmanned tanker out there I started looking for ways to streamline the process.) Simple stuff, changing apoapsis and periapsis, radial burns, that sort of thing, I just eyeball though, ends up being less work that way. One of these days I'll try an all-IVA, MechJeb-free Mun mission (probably still with KER giving me orbital info, though, and maybe RPM). Maybe even in real-time, make a weekend project of it.

Landed my first Duna probe in my 1.0 career: Never said it was an impressive probe, but it did land (admittedly upside down) and return data from the surface, so good enough for the Explore Duna contract.

Very cool! Hope you don't mind, I made a version that can can make orbit without the fairings: I am using KJR but I think it's still reinforced enough to work without it. Even with the second stage deleted it still has enough delta-v left on orbit to fly to the Mun and back. I can upload the craft file if it's OK (I'm still new here, don't know what the etiquette is for modifying other people's designs).

My passenger SSTO lost its nose cone during aerobraking on return from Minmus. Rather than just rescue the passengers and abandon the ship, I thought I'd try using KIS to repair it. I still had an old Mark III expendable rocket partly-built in my KCT inventory, so I put a replacement nose section in place of the LES and sent it up with Jeb, Val, and an engineer called Wenrine to rendezvous with the SSTO. It took a little experimenting (since I couldn't control the EVA jets while manipulating the parts) but after a few tries Wenrine managed to bolt the new nose section and avionics cone onto the front of the SSTO. Good as new. Both ships landed back at KSC with no further trouble.

Kerbal Aircraft Expansion has some 2.5 meter airplane cockpits. EDIT: So does Stock Extension, although it is not updated yet so some parts may need adjustments before they work properly in 1.0.

Technically this is an SSTO, everything but the payload fairings (and the actual payload, of course) is recovered and reused. It carries about 2 tons to LKO, not enough for manned ships or fuel tankers (although it can use expendable boosters to improve its payload (I might install Stage Recovery to make them reusable boosters, in fact)) but it has substantially reduced my career-mode cost-to-orbit for medium cargo like space station modules. The airbrakes keep it stable through tail-first reentry. Only downside is Mechjeb's reentry guidance doesn't quite know what to make of the airbrakes, so the landings aren't very precise; I've yet to get one closer than about 15 km from KSC. Planning to make a bigger version with a KS-25 instead of a Mainsail once I've got the appropriate parts unlocked. This one is called Starlet, it's an improved version of one of the models I posted a few pages back. Nowhere near as impressive as a lot of the designs elsewhere in this thread but it's my first career-mode passenger SSTO and I'm maybe a little too proud of it. 4 passengers, 37,000 spacebucks, no end-game tech, makes it to LKO with about 250 m/s to spare. Once refueled on-orbit it has about 1800 m/s to work with for flights to Mun or Minmus orbit. I've built three of them so far (Alice, Beatrix, Constance) in career mode + KCT, where I've got them operating a regular passenger run between my three space stations at Kerbin, Mun, and Minmus. Admittedly, Alice did need some on-orbit repairs after it lost its nosecone during aerobraking, but other than that they've worked very smoothly. I've even figured out how to get Mechjeb to do most of the work getting them to orbit and back, so I only have to hand-fly the takeoff, final approach, and landing, which helps relieve the tedium of repetitive launches and also makes their performance more consistent. I am having fun.

I was very happy when I tried out 1.0.2 stock aero to find that my old Mechjeb ascent profile from FAR in 0.90 worked pretty much unmodified. I am a little discouraged at how hard it is to build finless rockets, even with Mechjeb controlling the ascent (real launch vehicles haven't had fins since the 60s) but on the whole I find that just about anything roughly rocket-shaped works fine so long as I stick some fins on it and limit the acceleration to 15 m/s^2 for the first 20,000 meters or so of ascent. KJR helps with the noodle-rocket problem, but honestly I was getting along just fine without it until my rockets developed an annoying habit of blowing up on the pad (not sure what exacerbated that issue, but KJR solved it--the reduced wobble was an added bonus). All in all I'm having fun with the new aerodynamics. Rockets have to make some kind of realistic sense, airplanes handle MUCH better--coming from years of X-Plane, I could hardly fly planes at all in 0.90 stock--everything just behaves the way I always expected it to behave in the first place, only now I don't need mods to make it happen. I do wish they'd make fuel tanks drain in the opposite order, though. Or just have them drain evenly, like with jets.

Just to let you know, I installed this mod with a career save already in progress and found that, while the mod worked fine, all my existing ships in space had had their stock LF/O tanks magically refilled. (Admittedly, better than having them magically emptied!) Uninstalling did not fix the problem, reverting to a previous save did (fortunately I make hard saves all the time so it looks like I'll only have to repeat one routine SSTO launch). I can't think of a way around this short of manually editing the save file, which unfortunately seems like more trouble than it's worth seeing how many ships I'd have to edit. Great mod in any case, I will definitely reinstall it next time I start a new save. May actually end up starting a new save partly so I can use this mod, in fact, perfect solution for the LV-N LF tank problem!

I imagine the devs want to keep the focus on building & flying space ships rather than "program management." Although I agree that a monthly budget would make more realistic sense than the current contract system, and possibly make reputation a little less pointless to boot, currently (even with a few program-management type mods installed, like KCT) I'm spending the vast majority of my time either building stuff in the VAB/SPH or out there controlling ships (or reading internet forums), only occasionally stopping by Mission Control or the Admin building, which is as it should be. As much as I love X-COM, I often felt like I spent more time in that game micromanaging my resources in the base than I did actually fighting the aliens--I'd hate to see that happen to KSP's career mode.

Cool! You're right, I just tried reducing penalties in my persistence file from 1 to 0.1 & now Kerbal number 26 would only cost me 42,000 spacebucks instead of 420,000. That makes sense, still expensive enough to matter (still more expensive than my 4-kerbal SSTO) but not enough to be prohibitive. It's not a perfect solution since I actually think the building upgrades are pretty well balanced with penalties at 100%, but since I've already got all my buildings upgraded in my current save anyway I think I'll leave it this way. Now off to hire some Kerbals, finally!

I also wish for at least landed-only EVA. Using KCT I'd like to be able to service my SSTO's on the ramp without having to recover and relaunch them just for the tourists, and I worry about tourists getting permanently stranded just because their ship doesn't have a docking port for me to rescue them. Plus, what's the point of buying a ticket to the Mun if you don't even get to go outside? Agreed on all tourists in the same contract should have the same itinerary. I'm liking the tourism contracts on the whole but having to keep track of who all wants to go where is getting tedious.

I actually love the idea of Kerbal hiring costs in principle, as you say, it makes them feel a lot more valuable and it does make realistic sense that hiring, training, equipping, etc. new Kerbals should cost money. It never felt quite right in 0.90 that they were free and in limitless supply, although I never quite had the heart to treat them as "expendable." My main problem is the ridiculously costs--orders of magnitude higher than the cost of actual missions--which, combined with the easy availability of lots of rescue contracts, renders hiring Kerbals pretty much pointless from a gameplay standpoint, at least the way I've been playing (also with KCT, incidentally). Also I don't see how it makes any kind of sense--either realistic OR gameplay--that Kerbal "n" costs less than Kerbal "n+1." Realistically, why does training one astronaut make training the next one more expensive? Gameplay-wise, why should I be actively discouraged from using large crews or having lots of missions going at once--especially when I can accomplish pretty much the same thing anyway by completing rescue contracts?

Kerbal hiring costs are one of my main issues with career mode. I've got 20 or so Kerbals right now, all from rescue missions except the original 4; it would cost 400,000 space bucks to hire another one--or I could use a reusable SSTO and get paid to rescue one, or even several at once, for basically just fuel costs--potentially a million-dollar mission if I take into account both the profit from the contract and the savings from not having to hire the Kerbals myself. Even if I consider the entire cost of the SSTO (40,000), the entire cost of the space station where it refuels on-orbit (150,000), and the entire cost of the refueling tanker that services the station (90,000), that's STILL less than it would cost to hire a new Kerbal! I wonder if Kerbal hiring costs are tied to the "funds penalties" slider like building upgrades? Like you, I always thought of that slider as a "failure is not an option" mode and cranked it up; it never occurred to me till reading this thread that it might be responsible for high upgrade costs. That would be extremely cool.