wronkiew

Career mode space train to Duna, waiting for the escape window. From left to right: 1. Duna/Ike/Kerbin lander 2. Duna ascent stage 3. In-space lab module 4. Liquid fuel for NTR 5. NTR 6. Lander fuel Unfortunately the stack got the wiggles during assembly and destroyed one of the deployable solar panels on the lander. I blogged an earlier space train mission to Gilly here.

That is hilarious! I got a mission to put a satellite in keosynchronous orbit, but the indicator showed retrograde. It took a few launches to convince me that was what I was really supposed to do.

I'm suggesting a change to that feature for career mode.

I ran across a missed opportunity to move the game forward that shouldn't be too much trouble to implement. Jeb was killed trying to land on a cliff on Kerbin. He touched down two legs of the landing vehicle, then the whole thing pivoted upside down and exploded. It seemed impossible that anyone could have possibly survived such a crash, but the astronaut center listed him as "missing". Miraculously, a couple of missions later, Jeb was back! He must have survived somehow and wandered back onto the base. Here is what was missing. Why didn't I have to go mount a search and rescue mission to get him back? Earlier I had to rescue an unfortunate stranded in orbit using nothing but my rendezvous skills and the flicker of starlight. Jeb could have popped up as a career mission with no reward but his triumphant return and maybe some reputation points. Then I'd have to demonstrate some pinpoint landing skill to complete it.

Oh, they landed it. Took some finagling to keep Jeb on the ladder. Quite an EVA report!

Some more suggestions: Add orbital rendezvous objectives. Bring two separately-launched spacecraft within 50m of each other and recover at least one of them. More advanced objectives could be swapping crews and docking. Add an abort test. Design a spacecraft with functions assigned to the abort key. Hit the abort button while in the lower and/or upper atmosphere and recover what's left of the craft successfully.

Ah, excellent! I hadn't gotten that far yet.

HarvesteR mentioned that the Kerbin biomes were created as a way to get initial science points. I think that's great, because it gives the Kerbals a chance to test their spacesuits and hardware in various environments, like NASA sometimes does with craters, barren islands, and undersea laboratories. After playing career mode in 0.22 for a while, I think there are some additional opportunities for science that I was sad to see were missing: Points for flight control and SSTO tricks. Right now you get points for recovering a suborbital mission with the control module intact. There should be a new category for landing a craft with all parts it launched with intact. Points for low altitude, suborbital, and (massive points for) orbital. I'm pretty sure it's possible to do the low altitude task with just the initial parts. Points for successful VTOL tests. There should be a bonus for landing a ship that launched without any parachute parts. It's probably not reasonable to expect players to be able to do this until they have developed landing legs. Science for crew reports during reentry. Not only would this be valuable science IRL, it requires a degree of player multitasking needed for more advanced missions. Finally, I would like to see the tech tree reworked so where a technology has two prerequisites, both need to be researched before the more advanced one is made available. Thanks for the awesome game!

Nice blog! The LV comparison was fun.

Not to discount your argument that private space has benefitted from advances made by NASA, but I think your numbers are off. From Wikipedia: Also, there is a big difference between payment for services and seed funding.

There's the Google Lunar X-Prize worth about $30 million. If there are any winners they will be the next to land on the Moon. Not with passengers, obviously, but it's a start. NASA itself simply does not have the money or the ability to even plan a credible manned Moon landing under the current constraints. It is possible that that could change five years from now, but only if either SpaceX is wildly successful or the mandatory spending problem simply evaporates. Major government procurement reform would help there too. One private company seems like it has the right set of people to make a go at a private human landing: Deep Space Industries. They have published some papers about manned Moon landings, although their spiffy web site advertises an asteroid mission. I think asteroids are more interesting anyway, can't wait to see them in KSP.

Yeah, that's not going to fly with the Wikipedia editors. Want to help? Get an article published about Scott Manley in a mainstream publication. This comes pretty close to meeting the notability guidelines: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/the-grid/kerbal-space-program-video-game-inspire-new-generation-astronauts

Oh, that would be cool too. The models would definitely be less useless if you could refuel from them.

I've been wanting something like this too. I often use KAS, but it feels a bit like micro-managing to have to EVA in the spaceport. How about dedicated landing pads on the grounds. When you land there eventually a fuel truck drives up and refuels everything and recharges the batteries. Something similar for the runway too.