mrxak

Yeah, they have better things to do (actually making the game) than playing it a lot and getting really good. I don't mind at all if the Squad guys suck at their own game.

Same. While I very much appreciate those with early access to experimental builds doing streams like this for all of us who don't, I really wish they were all a lot better at the game. Interceptions are so trivial once you have a basic understanding of orbital mechanics, I find it astounding that those who are so well known on YouTube or Twitch are so bad at them. This isn't just at Manley, but all the KSP-TV folks as well. I would watch a heck of a lot more KSP-TV if they would stop spending so many minutes fussing with maneuver nodes in every stream.

Sounds like testing is going quite well and we'll see the patch relatively soon. I did see some bugs in the KSPTV marathon, but hopefully they're not too hard to fix.

I'm definitely hoping that we will see a resource mining system in place in the final game. Obviously it's not needed to do everything in the game, so newbies can ignore it. Heck, we saw in one of the streams that somebody had managed a Grand Tour with a four part stock rocket. The docking system already gives us the ability to refuel, so there are endless possibilities for a "beginner" who doesn't want to touch resource mining. But resource mining doesn't have to be as complicated as the chart they initially showed off. I myself had some concerns about the amount of weight I'd need to launch just to get all the necessary equipment in place for even the simplest of mining operations. Perhaps, eventually, we'll see something much more simple. One module that mines liquid fuel components, and another that refines them into liquid fuel. Then another module that collects oxygen from an atmosphere and fills up the other part of the tank with oxidizer. You can take away a lot of the boxes and arrows from the chart, and still have a fully functional resource system. If that saves me from having to launch dozens of refuelers, that's really all I need. It doesn't need to be complicated to provide worthwhile functionality. Include Kethane-style scanners that can say this region of the Mun has all the materials needed for this type of resource, and land a refinery. Newbies don't have to worry about the chemical ratios of Oxium and Propelium, just that everything they need for a particular fuel type is present at a given location. Let the refinery module worry about collecting the right materials in the right proportions. Discard the rest as waste, spewing out into the ground, the atmosphere, or space. But again, none of this is necessary for beginners to play the game, until they decide to try something more advanced, just like beginners don't ever need to use nuclear or ion propulsion. But it will provide a great deal more depth to the game for more advanced players, and after all, beginner players eventually become more advanced, and it'd be nice if they had more to do.

There are things that are important, and at the very top of the list is the continued survival of the human race. Preventing a killer asteroid is part of that. So is colonizing other planets and other solar systems. I will gladly salute anyone who is working towards those goals, and Ed Lu is one of those people. He'll have my eternal gratitude once the program is up and running. In the meantime, he has my deep respect just for trying, and just for talking about it as much as he can. We should have been doing this decades ago, and I'm glad he and his colleagues are on the case. It sounds like they've got a tremendous team with serious skills and knowledge. I'm confident in their success, and the project has my full support. I agree with many others that his stream during KerbalKon was a major highlight, and I hope his talk resulted in a lot of donations. I don't care what anyone says, a real astronaut came and talked with us live, and that's a big deal. That's a very brave and incredibly talented man, who could have done anything with his life, but he's chosen to do something very important and selfless, to literally save the planet, and we should be honored that he took the time to talk to us.

I don't think that feature is dead, but what we will eventually get will be much more simplified over what they first teased. I certainly think in the short term, they'll get some backlash over that announcement, though, so I hope they clarify and hopefully that will calm everyone down.

Seems pretty self-explanatory. Scope complete means all the bare bones of the game exist, the basic engine features and so on, whereas feature complete is more of a content thing, like more planets, more biomes, better graphics/effects, new parts, every tweakable you could ever want, everything perfectly balanced and playtested etc. etc. Once the game is scope complete, they can work on all those little things that everybody wants, but aren't major priorities right now. Squad wants to get the game scope complete this next year, so basically by 2015 we'll see all the aspects of the game implemented at least at a basic level (or so they hope). So career mode will have the three currencies implemented, for example, instead of just the one, though maybe there won't be all the experiments and such that will be in the final game. Multiplayer will exist, though may not be polished. I got the impression that resources aren't dead, per say, so we might see some basic implementation of that, too.

Yeah, I figured we weren't going to get a Devnote Tuesday this week. Just looking forward to 0.23. And yes, some news about 0.24 would be great too in a little while .

I wasn't complaining, I was just curious about what my expectations should be. I would completely understand if there was no update this week.

So are we not getting a Devnote Tuesday this week because they're too busy working on fixing experimental bugs?

So I've never been much of a spaceplane pilot. Building them never was very interesting to me, flying them even less so. But with Science, suddenly I see spaceplanes as very useful, particularly with conducting atmospheric studies over a variety of biomes in Kerbin's atmosphere. Perhaps in the future when we have biomes for Laythe, they'd be even more useful, since surely a long-range aircraft flying through the atmosphere of a planet so far away would be more efficient than sending multiple landers that take readings as they come down to the ground in various areas of distant worlds. Now, I understand the basics of spaceplane construction. I can absolutely build a solid, maneuverable craft capable of reaching the altitudes I want and flying around for a while. What I don't know, simply due to my inexperience, is how to tweak a craft for optimal range. To that end, I'm looking for some guidance. What makes for an extremely long-range airplane? I'm talking about around-the-world trips, here. The longer the range, the more biomes can be Science'd in a single trip. It seems to me that higher altitudes have less air resistance, and so the plane wouldn't have to work so hard to push through it all. On the other hand, higher altitudes have to cover more distance, take more fuel to reach to begin with, and may have more intake needs, which adds weight. There's also the matter of how much lift is really needed, and how big or small a plane I should be building. Or perhaps, I should build some kind of glider that does sine waves through the atmosphere with the engines off much of the time. So, anybody got a lot of experience with long-range aircraft? I'm not looking for anything that leaves the atmosphere, just something that can cover the most distance possible while conducting Science in either the upper or lower atmosphere (whichever gets the most range) or both (if the ideal elevation is somewhere around the 18km border). I'm not above copying aspects of another person's spaceplane if anyone has pictures of some range-optimized craft. Please share!

I'd like to see a lot more structural parts, in general, of varying lengths and sizes and shapes. The more the merrier. If there was a KSP release with nothing but new structural parts, I'd be happy.

Presumably there would be expansion joints and ridiculously strong futuristic materials composing the entire structure. Any civilization with the energy to even get such a massive structure in orbit would surely have advanced materials as well. Would it be an engineering marvel? Heck yeah. But even large structures today on Earth are designed to be somewhat flexible, or they'd tear themselves apart too from wind or the shifting of the ground. We just need new materials that can handle greater stresses than we're used to accounting for.

They've suggested they might someday have some expansions that add significant features, with enough content that would be worthy of a whole expansion, but they're really focused on KSP for the time being, making it the best game it can be in the scope they want KSP to have. Stuff that would go beyond the scope of KSP as a game essentially about building and flying rockets, they may someday do but it's a long way off.

There are a handful of technological steps along the path of civilization that I think, broadly speaking, can apply to every species. 0. Tool building. 1. Dominion over food sources (through agriculture, aquaculture, domestication of animals, etc.), and raw materials (mining, logging, etc.), moving away from hunting and gathering. 2. Mass production of tools and machines such as with assembly lines, factories, automation. 3. Orbit achieved around planet (including landing on any moons). 4. Escape velocity achieved from planet to reach other planets, asteroids, etc. in the solar system. 5. Escape velocity from solar system to reach other solar systems. 6. Escape velocity achieved from galaxy to reach other galaxies. 7. Escape velocity achieved from the observable universe to beyond the observable universe (FTL). Roughly, 3-6 requires a certain amount of energy, and so would be comparable to the Kardashev scale. 7 is impossible... or so we think so now. 0-2 is necessary to achieve 3+ with any regularity (otherwise it's a fluke). Right now we're at 4 with our probes, and we're flirting with 5, but for humans themselves we're a fairly pathetic 3. I can't imagine any species that have achieved interstellar travel being all that interested by us, and even if we start colonizing the rest of our solar system they still probably wouldn't care too much about us unless they wanted resources from our solar system and we happened to be in the way.