Not a Cylon

Heh. I actually came here specifically wondering about KAC (assuming that's Kerbal Alarm Clock?), without which interleaving missions is infeasible yet clearly encouraged. Which brings up a point - many mods aren't things I think should "become stock." KAC does way too much for something that should be built into the game - really, just letting any vessel halt warp, and making maneuver nodes halt warp automatically, would cover the most important ground. Content mods are different, I suppose, but UI mods are pretty inevitably going to add more functionality than would do the base game any good. So, to answer the original question, I assume it's the same way they always decide on what to implement next; mods just give them a way of measuring user interest and field-testing early implementations.

Fair enough. I guess I've been spoiled by the warnings. Also, this didn't feel like a parachute issue, which comes from information I had but overlooked (which chute is on which stage); this is the game being unclear about how the parts work. Yes; one of them was just a launch vehicle that I wasn't going to use again. So it didn't need to keep the dock. That's true, but the warnings are often spurious for this sort of reason.

It's deeply infuriating to find out that you forgot to unfurl your solar panels, when you only find out after you've done a bunch of other crap in the meantime and it's too late because they need power to deploy. (I would also suggest that it seems reasonable that the panels would keep a bit of power in reserve so that this can't happen.) This kinda goes on a list of things that make Career Mode a lot less than it should be. I'm clearly supposed to interleave missions in order to undertake contracts and such, but the game is really not set up to support it. Kerbal Alarm Clock should not be as necessary as it is, for example.

After hours of painstaking maneuvering, it turns out my brand-new Mun station is useless because I put the !@#%!@$ dock on the bottom of the cupola module and attached it to the nose of another pod. Now when I undock them, the dock stays on the wrong ship :-( I'm mad enough to throw things. Did seriously no-one make this mistake during testing? There was testing, right??

UGH. Also hating the fact that you can't revert a flight once you've quickloaded. That's another thing no other game does - loading should never destroy anything (besides the current game state).

Bug, misfeature, whatever; it's a serious issue. It should never be this easy to lose that much data. Needing to hold F9 is a good idea, but it doesn't help if I think I've quicksaved recently but haven't. PEBKAC is no excuse for bad design. Three Mile Island was PEBKAC. At the end of the day, if the game is ruined for me, it doesn't matter if it's my error that was the proximate cause. Good games (and good software in general) don't make these errors easy to make. What differentiates KSP from most games here is that most games keep their quickload and their autosave synchronous - quickload usually goes back to the previous quicksave or autosave. Hence quickload never goes back farther than some sort of logical checkpoint, which in this case would be the launch. It's a subtle difference, yet it's crucial. In the interest of constructiveness, I can see several solutions: There could be a warning when F9 would load a previous launch. "Are you sure?" is a design crutch, but it would help (as crutches usually do). F9 could go back to the latest quicksave or the beginning of the launch, whichever is later. Almost equivalently, the game could automatically quicksave at launch. (This may bite people who expect the current behavior, of course.) There could be easy access to, say, the last five autosaves. This would be nice in general but presumably would need a bit more development effort.

I've seen a few posts where someone describes hitting F9 and losing days of progress as PEBKAC - i.e. the user's fault. This is [insert stream of profanity here]. It is an atrocity of design to let a single keystroke undo arbitrary amounts of progress. This is a bug, and about as serious as a bug can get. The kind of bug that loses players. The kind of bug that makes "v1.0" a sick joke. In the name of all that is fun, please fix this bug.

YES. I just got nearly apoplectic over this, and I lost maybe a few hours. Any more and I'd be done with the game. This is basic, basic stuff; a 1.0 release should not eat people's saves. I just left a negative Steam review for this alone. (It's a little more satisfying to one-star something, I've gotta say.) Why not warn when loading the quicksave would revert more than the current mission? Or overwrite the quicksave at launch? I have never seen a game where quickload could ever go farther back than "restart level" or the equivalent. That's simply not what quickload means. (As for making backups, if players are backing up their saves to avoid accidents, the game is doing something horribly wrong. And the best that could do is limit the damage to the last backup.)