HebaruSan

NASA, ESA, Roscomsos, and a panoply of other experts would convene to compose the most bizarre, incomprehensible response possible, then wait in vain for a reply while the aliens look for better conversation partners.

I think the name for the concept you're talking about is "neoteny." Maybe that will help your searches.

I'd like to know too. My hope would be for the announcement of a policy that going forward, all known critical/crash bugs must be fixed before a pre-release version is shipped as a full release (there are still at least 2 known CTD-on-launch issues on Linux, plus another problem where the game window resizes itself at launch to unplayable dimensions like 1000x1 pixels). I took this for granted as development common sense and was kind of shocked when 1.1 rolled out regardless. Of course, the pre-release for 1.1 is now long over; it shipped before it was ready, but it can't be un-shipped. All anyone can do now is hope that future versions are better, and part of that is providing polite but still negative feedback so SQUAD has a sense of the experience players are having. And yes, even redundantly; if a thousand people experience a serious problem, it's misleading to the developer if 999 of them stay silent because the first one has already complained. @Snark would surely not count his software as well-engineered simply because magically no one talked about the problems it had. tl;dr: Ship a crashy release, expect complaints; they're the canary in the coal mine of your product.

I think you have the general parameters accurate enough for most sci fi stories. A further wrinkle to bear in mind is that interstellar space isn't an absolute vacuum. Even beyond virtual particle pairs, there are regular particles floating around that you'd have to fly through, and as you go faster and faster, they turn into a constant barrage of high energy impacts all over your ship. One of the advantages of a ramjet is the possibility to divert some of them with the intake field, but I believe that only works for particles with a charge, so you'd need some other strategy for dealing with neutrons.

Replace the magnets with rubber bands that exert the same amount of pull between the same parts. All they do is try to compress the structure, not rotate it.

100% agreed on the unreadability issue (though there is some irony to your complaint in the context of your sig ). The below screenshot snippet is from the wiki. Even if you find the colors readable, the font size is nano-scale compared to the numbers for funds and science, and the labels are even more difficult to take in at a glance because they shift around to different spots on the bar as the value changes. And on the topic of the colors, they convey virtually nothing because you can't tell a) how many colors there are in the bar overall, b) how wide the strip for each color is, or c) where the boundaries fall numerically. Presumably the idea was to make this value more "fuzzy" than the others because it represents public attitudes rather than spendable points in an account, but in practice it works out to be not very different from giving no information at all. As for your problem of mysteriously missing points, obviously that's something I can't comment on without being able to track or investigate the issue myself. But that's difficult with my current rep value effectively hidden; for all I know, I might be losing rep constantly due to some bug but not noticing it because I have no idea what my rep is now or was in the past.

I would recommend reading the dev notes if you're interested in what will or will not be changed in a given version. SQUAD is pretty open/transparent about what they're working on, so there's little need to guess. If you're hoping for change X while the announcements are all about progress on change Y, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment (and frankly I see comments along those lines more often than I'd expect). The focus of 1.0 was aerodynamics and heating, and 1.1 was Unity 5 and wheels, and SQUAD made no representations that there would be improvements in any glitches afflicting large stations. I'd also make a note in support of @sal_vager's point about how ambiguous the term "Kraken" is on these forums. It's essentially a synonym for "bug" nowadays; the wiki lists no fewer than 26 separate issues that have gone by some variant of that name. If you want to be clear, you pretty much need to spell out exactly the problem you're having. http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Deep_Space_Kraken

Can anyone speak to how many US federal agencies operate like this, with individual line items allocated by Congress? Is it most of them or just a few? Regardless of your individual program preferences, a single chunk of money for NASA to allocate autonomously according to broadly defined priorities (promote domestic aerospace industry, service some LEO payloads, develop manned space presence, do planetary science) should at least result in more continuity, as it's more difficult to change broad goals than the specifics of budgets. I wonder whether that reform would be possible.

I suppose I'm another member of this group you keep saying doesn't exist. I wanted more realistic aero and heating pre-1.0, but I didn't like the idea of designing my crafts around a mod. I'm as happy as a pig in excrements now that my rockets flip without fins or blow up with the wrong descent trajectory on a stock install. I'm looking forward to the stock comm system for the same reasons. I like the idea of giving antennae a more meaningful role, and I see it creating some potential for a progression system that unfolds organically rather than being mediated by some kind of "points", but I'd rather stick with the common experience that new players would get out of the box. Launching, getting an intercept, capturing, and landing could also be said to be such challenges. Maybe some people simply enjoy dealing with those challenges repeatedly rather than considering them overhead?

In case this info is new to you (hard to tell), try pressing tab a few times in the map screen to set focus to your destination planet. Makes it much easier to see the effect of a given burn on your arrival path.

Indeed, this achievement, great as it is, is owned by somebody else (which while understandable is still sad, given that it was from childhood dreams). Now @HarvesteR has the chance to start a new thing that will be truly his, which makes me very happy. May the next game do so well that he can purchase SQUAD some day!

So did they finish enough of the burn, or are they now on an escape trajectory past Kerbin with no engines?? You've got me hankerin' for a look at their map screen!

The gameplay must flow. And for interplanetary, it mostly doesn't, at least for me. Science and career modes present the artificial but highly visible goals of accumulating science points and funds, and the gameplay trade-offs make these possible and most efficient to acquire within Kerbin SOI. That's my problem: Unless I play with the explicit goal of going to a specific planet, the natural ebb and flow of the game doesn't lead me there. (Disclaimer, this has probably improved somewhat since I had my experiences; I have not done a career recently.) I'm also another victim of the Kerbal Alarm Clock mindset. I installed it because I got tired of missing maneuvers, and I soon got accustomed to a real-time play style. I used to launch a new craft in sandbox if my next alarm was more than 20 minutes out, which works fine for Mun and Minmus shots. But there's just no way I'll ever have the patience or dedication to put in 1200+ additional hours of gameplay on one save to hit a transfer window that way. Case in point, after finishing the pre-career tech tree on Mun and Minmus, I started a new sandbox and launched one would-be lander per planet immediately, transfer windows be darned. Each one got an encounter (but many looked doomed to fast flybys). Then with all of that set up, I asked myself, am I really ready to time warp now? Is there nothing else I want to get done first? Do I maybe want to send another ship now? It felt like an opportunity I wouldn't get back. So I messed around a bit more, thought of some more Mun lander designs to try, etc. Then 0.90 came out, and I started a new (career) save. None of those interplanetary vessels ever arrived; I think they got deleted when I later opened that old save without the KER chip part. Eventually I realized that if I was ever going to have one of these interplanetary adventures, I would have to dedicate the save to just that one mission, not the efficient accumulation of points or experimentation with design ideas. Having finite time to play, I picked Jool for its variety; an initial mission did several landings, and then a follow-up flotilla colonized Laythe shortly before 1.0. These actually arrived because I decided in advance that I wasn't doing anything other than Jool in that save, so time warping felt OK. So yes, it's largely psychological, but not entirely so. The in-game incentives could provide smoother stepping stones and more motivation.

It's hard to tell how it would feel to play this in advance, but I'd at least like to try it. One suggestion to go along with it: when you pick a body to see available contracts, I think it should spell out the game rationale for that body at a high level, like "An X planet with Y where you will have to deal with Z and learn to W". This would make the progression feel more coherent and easier to understand.

By the same token, being able to demonstrate something that might be a problem with a design that has clear flaws that are known to cause that problem doesn't mean there's a bug. And that's the rub. How do we determine whether it should work? You're just asserting that it should. Others are explaining why it shouldn't (center of mass is too rearward in both cases). If drag is what's making it unstable, then it would be unstable whenever the center of mass is toward the back. If flipping around moves the center of mass toward the front, then it could stabilize in that orientation. That's what appears to be happening in both of the examples so far.

Understood, but limited parts or a choice to design for re-entry of extra parts does not mean there's something wrong with the aerodynamics. When claiming there's a bug, it's important to have a simple, clear example to rule out alternative explanations. Do you still flip if you fix the problems that people have been posting, maybe in sandbox mode? It seems that your support for these claims is mainly your own intuition, which is not shared by those you're talking to. It's possible that it should not be stable as it is, or that it should be flipping around, or that the back of the rocket doesn't have as much drag as you think. The only way to know is to run tests to pinpoint the cause, and this is where fixing the issues people have pointed out comes in. Maybe the F12 aerodynamic arrows would also be helpful to see what's going on.

Looks like hype/clickbaiting by the headline editor. The actual text does not say or even imply "major" (because the author, like us, has no idea what will be announced ) and is a copy/paste of the NASA press release plus a summary of what Kepler is. Do let us know what they announce, though! I'll go the other direction and guess that they're having trouble keeping it operational after the recent "emergency mode" hiccup and will now be running it at half power.

Did they? Which ones? I went to the science section of Google News, and the headlines were: 'Second Skin' May Reduce Wrinkles, Eyebags, Scientists Say From sweet potatoes to orchids: Kew report urges global scientific community to secure health of the planet Solomon Islands, Site of WW II Fghting, Are Vanishing Rare Mercury Transit Thrills Skywatchers Around the World (Photos) Ancient trade routes written in camel genes Atomic oxygen detected in Martian atmosphere Nearly Pure Water Ice Coats Pluto Moon Hydra Ancient lava bubbles reveal conditions on primordial Earth NASA's New Mercury Maps Offers Textured View Of Planet's Landscape It's not about to blow, but magma is moving under Mount St. Helens Blue Origin Landing Looks Very Sci-Fi When Seen From the Booster Killing of Famed Yellowstone Grizzly Intensifies Protection Debate Starfish babies return in droves to the West Coast following massive die-off 71-Million-Year-Old Fossils Excavated In Antarctica May Provide Insight On The End Of Age Of Dinosaurs A fight to protect 'the most valuable real estate in space' DAILY DISTRACTION: Scientists reconstruct 250-million-year-old aquatic reptile NASA opens vault of space-age tech Recovered SpaceX Falcon 9 booster headed back to port What are the chances of life on another planet? News about mystery star KIC 8462852 I checked the article about Tabby's star. No actual "news", no suggestion of an upcoming announcement, just a summary of previous reports. Unless they've pointed Kepler at Mercury, I don't see a story that looks related.

I find the default bindings more intuitive, especially for rockets.

Looks like a standard "this is what we did in our program this month" press conference. Are there any actual indications that it'll be something major?

Limiting myself to avoid duplicating the many good recommendations above... Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Footfall Larry Niven, A World Out of Time Robert L Forward, Dragon's Egg Robert L Forward, Timemaster Poul Anderson, The Boat of a Million Years Pick a few things by Philip K Dick at random Harry Turtledove and L Sprague de Camp, Down in the Bottomlands (found by thinking of its premise independently and googling it ) If you can make time for one non sci fi book: Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Interesting. One obvious way to do that... Easy: Flyby contracts Medium: Orbital capture / return contracts Hard: Lander contracts I wonder how that would play out. A first time player choosing Easy would do a series of flyby missions across the solar system and probably feel pretty good about that. Then they'd start a new game at Medium (or maybe there could be an upgrade-difficulty button to keep the same save) and figure out how to get into orbit and return, potentially adding Δv to previous crafts for the additional burns. Then they'd do a Hard campaign and learn to design and fly landers. I can see a few issues with that approach, but it might be better than having all the same kinds of contracts in all difficulty modes.

North, actually, but all you saw in-game was that the sun rose over there and set over there, so it was still natural to call the direction of the sunrise "east" before it was changed.

What I do is (based on a previous forum post by someone else that I've lost track of): Use SAS to lock prograde Go to map screen once your Ap is around 70 km (maybe earlier once you've practiced this a few times) Hover mouse over Ap marker to see your time to apoapsis Adjust throttle to keep this between 30 and 50 seconds; so if it's below that, throttle up, and if it's above, throttle down Continue till Pe marker rises above 70 km Allow your time to apoapsis to drop below 30 during the final stretch, with the goal of reaching 0 seconds exactly as Pe reaches 70 km As bewing says, the "Ap climbing rapidly" is your time to apoapsis getting away from you. If you watch that number directly and keep it in a suitable range, you'll prevent that from happening. It's not so tough once you get a sense of how different throttle values affect it.

I believe Bill S. Preston, Esquire said it best...