Torgo

It still takes humans to create this content on an ongoing basis. Those humans generally like to be paid in a currency useful to them to pay their living expenses. Unless there is a money tree in the Squad break room, or perhaps some sort of goose that lays platinum eggs on a continual basis, Squad needs to acquire this money via commerce. At this point in the software's life cycle, new sales likely do not make the revenue needed to sustain support. At $40 US per copy, assuming a rent & utilities cost of $10,000 per month, you'd need to sell several hundred copies per month just to earn that (yes, the math is 10k/$40 = 250, but Squad doesn't keep all $40 from each sale). You haven't even touched on development costs at that rate. An option would be a massive marketing campaign to try to generate some new sales, but they are already likely near saturation. Pretty much everyone that is going to buy the game has bought the game. You might get a decent 1 time bump, but nothing to sustain development. If a company is no longer making a profit by producing or sustaining a product, they stop making or sustaining that product. That's how business works. Business that lose money go out of business. This isn't a game like Everquest or World of Warcraft where you can continue to develop and roll out new content to a massive player base on a regular basis. There isn't much new to offer outside of expanding the game world or adding new parts. As optional content, Squad could offer this to those who want to purchase it. Those that do not wish to purchase it do not lose any functionality in the game for which they've already paid. And chances are, the mods for what Squad would offer already exist for free, anyway. To me, if there is any kind of long term development in the works, that would mean the chances are better you'd see a KSP2, built on a better engine, with better performance and more features, sold as an entirely new product.

There are a couple flavors to choose from... should one be in a position to actually have to choose between them! Though, technically, the Uzdar-Havy center isn't in DC, it's in Virginia just outside DC.

Really? It's right here on this page... This IS a great story, and there are a whole bunch of us who want to see what happens next, but the author has told us, in his own words, that it will be a while. Best not to poke the author.

But have you ever seen a bird?

Happy Birthday!

I apologize for the lack of updates lately. I'm away at a poker tournament (conveniently scheduled around my cousin's wedding), and I'm in the middle of developing a presentation that my 5 year old and I will be giving later in the month on Astronomy for Kids, so that's sucked away most of my free time. At least I'm going to get to work some Kerbals into the presentation, since astronomy is a gateway drug to rocket science. By the end of this month, the aliens will finally interact with the natives.

Just tried this out and I like it so far. It's pretty intuitive. Two suggestions for features I'd like to see: Allow us to set our initial target orbit (80 km is default for Kerbin) Allow us to manually enter engines from mods. You shouldn't be responsible for scouring every mod. Let us that use them do some of the work. All the data needed should be available in the construction menu, right? This could also help with your Tweakscale issue. We get the new values after tweaking, we can enter them.

Would depend on which genes were dominant. At 3 feet tall, Kerbals would be about half the height of an average human. A hybrid could check in along a whole spectrum of heights.

It's possible to do it, if you set out to do it. If you don't want to do it, it won't happen. If someone else does it, it has no effect at all on your game.

Good thing you weren't with my wife and I when we tried to watch Gravity. Did the film makers actually expect us to believe someone wouldn't stay married to George Clooney? Ruined the whole story for me!

I swear to everyone this was not a plant or a setup... but it did make me get the next two slides ready early.... No, Jim, it wasn't your house. It may have been Bob's house, though. I'm glad nobody was home.

And it's time for a little atmospheric interface....

Think it's a KIS thing. Could also use the Electromagnet, too, if the agency paying you doesn't want the craft damaged. Could also add capture and return a ship (either via re-entry or in a cargo bay) contract. This could be a lot of fun. Would be very cool if the orbit of the target could be hidden, so you have to find it first, then figure out how to get to it. Have some ships easier to find than others.. from knowing thew full flight plan (easy), a broadcasting transponder (medium... can find it but have to track it), to a ship running silent (need some sort of radar to try to detect it, hard). An added bonus would be if the ship could try to escape you, but that may be beyond the reach of modding.

Like rescue or recover contracts, but now it's capture and return. A spacecraft is entering kerbin orbit carrying ______. Intercept this craft, capture the crew, return it (or dock and transfer cargo) to base.

Just call them letters of marque and you're all set.

Hoping to get the rest of the chapter done tonight.

If you account for every picture being worth a thousand words, your total is much higher!

On to Chapter 5, which would have been here much sooner if stupid things like life didn't get in the way. On the bright side, though, my 5 year old son built, launched into space and safely recovered his first rocket, totally outside the tutorial structure and with no adult help. That's not to say there was lots of trial and error leading up to it, and he still has a bit of trouble getting to actual orbit, but it was a wonderful milestone. He was playing KSP on the PS4, and now flies his rockets much better on that platform than I can. In chapter 5, we head back out into the inky void of space, where we join the Andromeda on its way back to Earth, a little crispy but intact. Some things may have changed, though... Dave's in there, too, and he also looks like a kerbalized human. So our heroes know that something is different about themselves, but they can't figure it out. They look normal to each other, like they have always looked to each other. Now if they can only manage to land this can in mostly one piece, they may get to meet some new friends.. or not. There are a lot of things that live in Florida that can kill you, assuming you make it through the sky in one piece.

ScanSat thing sounds exactly like I reported. Luckily my bird that went bad was due to be de-orbited anyways. Looking forward to the fix.

I'm using mods. I'm using a whole stack of mods. I'm fairly confident it has to do with the ScanSat update breaking something. Sending the logs, modlist and savegame via PM.

I'm playing with the default profile enabled, no changes. So far in the saved game, up until this afternoon, everything had been working great. Today, I had a whole bunch (6-10) of rapid fire malfunctions, mostly limited to one probe which had been fine until now. The only changes made between last night and this afternoon were updates to ScanSat (v16.4) and the CleverSats Contract Pack (v1.3) I have multiple satellites using ScanSat parts, but it seemed like they only affected the one. Is a log kept of the failures? I poked around logs, game data and KSP data, but didn't see anything in the log files. I suppose it could be in the persistence file, but I haven't dug into that yet. From the ScanSat update notes: The stock ModuleResource and RESOURCE nodes are now used to handle power usage. If you could tell me which logs (or pieces of the persistence) would be of most use to you, I'd get them over to you. Thanks!

If Kuzzter is doing it, we know it will be better than Superman vs Batman, but that is setting the bar so, so very low. He'd need to find a Wonder Woman space suit for Valentina to really make it pop, though.

I just finished adding a whole bunch of rare critters that spawn in the Olympic Shooting Centre. Women's 10M Air Rifle should be fun tomorrow morning!

+1 to Stage Recovery Recover those boosters, comrades! recover them harder!

So this is just a week or so late... but I've been suffering some severe writer's block. It's worse than my college creative writing class when I had to come up with a sequel to my first story, "Brainy Smurf: Son of Satan." This past week, it felt like my brain ate a steady diet of cheese, unripened bananas and red meat, and washed it down with 5 gallon jugs of milk... and no amount of mental prune juice was working. I even broke out my DVD of the 80's version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to try to break the logjam... But now, finally free... the boring, waaaay too much talking conclusion of Chapter 4... seriously, if you are having trouble sleeping, these next 8 slides are like 8,000 sheep. Chapter 5 has much more action... and is already written, so all I need to do is get some screenshots.