Kodiak42

So, is this thing compatible with 0.24?

I'm not sure if it does this for all parts, but when I grab a parachute, my Kerbal flies off in such a way where he is unresponsive, the ship is often damaged, and the fate of the parachute remains unknown. Parachutes were causing serious handling problems before the update, but they weren't game breaking under intended use.

Bring your pet space rock(s) home with a bunch of parachutes. Or you could walk your pet space rock(s) around the Kerbolar System.

The Blue Danube (with explosions courtesy of Monty Python)

Although they may be more expensive to build, they're much cheaper because hardware is only purchased once. However, as opposed to staging setup with 100% hardware recovery, the advantage might just be that you can land somewhere, refuel, take off, find some other celestial body, repeat for as many celestial bodies as desired. For now, in reality, 100% hardware recovery staging is better, but once we start building refueling stations on the Moon, Mars, even Titan, THEN the advantage will be with the SSTO.

Hmm... I wouldn't save that if I were you, Jeb might have managed to do that with the power of the Kracken

You do realize how unimaginably empty space is right? Really, the average human mind is psychologically incapable of fully imagining how little there is in space. You see that little dot out in the distance, no, that's a speck on the camera, the smaller one, the one that looks like a dead pixel among this star-field, that's a colored-in field representing our sphere of influence, not even our planet, just our planet's sphere of influence. Keep in mind, that's a planet's sphere of influence, which dwarfs your meteor shower to a point that is just slightly unimaginable. NASA scientists aren't so concerned with random space debris because virtually all the debris they need to worry about are the trash we leave in space, the trash from a rocket that launched from the same launchpad they're reusing right now. And KSP already has that debris. Space isn't really random, but it's empty, very empty, I can't stress enough how unimaginably empty space is, because even if you could imagine how empty it was, there is nothing quite as empty to compare it to.

Ticked off people are more likely to complain than satisfied people, please keep this in mind. Quite frankly, I see the new engines as a tradeoff: You get an engine that's better on paper, but still not as versatile as the mainsail. Pointing out how this engine completely outclasses the mainsail is like pointing out how the new five meter cluster engine completely outclasses the single five meter engine. You say the stats put the new engines high above the mainsails because their numbers look better on the screen, this is true when on the launchpad, but the mainsail is still more usable as a launch-from-lander-lifter (i.e., getting off of eve, duna, laythe, tylo, or some other planet). As with the RAPIER engines, yes, they were best for SSTO's, but they were also the worst at everything else.

First I would like to start off by saying that science isn't exactly a resource that you need indefinite amounts of, and I usually have a problem with exhaustible resources, but the need for science is also exhaustible. As for experiments that take time, that's sort of what the lab does, but time warp doesn't really work with the lab. Most of our current experiments are exposures (the goo container and materials bay), logs, and samples. Logs should be instantaneous, and samples shouldn't take too long. Only exposures would make sense to have a sort of time period, I can really only see a long period exposure giving you a little bit of science over time, but would eventually be exhausted, and even the total amount would be small (relative to something like logging atmospheric data on another planet).

I imagine that we will have what we need to send a robot arm into space to do robot arm stuff in space. It's really hard to say which direction squad might take this game in. Hopefully the aerodynamic system will be upgraded, although space pancakes are funny, it's because of their absurdity. Hopefully using Ion engines won't be as boring as watching paint dry. I also imagine that what I've mentioned is only scratching the surface, I have no idea how much squad will add or how far they plan to go.

How do set-in-stone tank sizes challenge me, the things are easy enough to mix to hold any amount of fuel I need and be any size I need.

I'm not opposed to this, but you have to admit, it either won't be what people want, or it will take forever to bugfix

Faster time warp... Anyone who regularly makes interplanetary trips knows why, and a easier way to transfer fuel between craft that had landed (Let us be the first to put a gas station on the moon)

Have you made sure that it wasn't your center of lift that was in front of your center of mass? In ksp's current state, your center of drag and mass are the same, aside from slight deviations due to a few low mass parts. From what your accounts say... um... pics please... I can't think of a single craft that would do this outside of a mod.

How is science grindy? What are you talking about anyway? It's not at all grindy unless you decide to exhaust a body for science before moving on to the next. If you decide to launch a brand new craft for each tidbit of science you want, yeah, that could make the game a little grindy, but you don't need to. As for how collecting temperature data on the mun helps you unlock a mainsail, Research Grants. As for your first suggestion, do you really want to play a game that makes you pointlessly wait or a game where you unlock stuff for actually accomplishing something in your own creative way (and even if you did have to wait, science doesn't work like "it'll take this long exactly", it's "we have no idea how long this will take, hey, go see how this works, we might be onto something"). As for your second suggestion, NO! NO! NO! NO! How is random part breakage as a critical part of game progression any better than plain random breakage?! Kerbal space program is a game about knowing what you're doing, not rolling dice. As for your third suggestion, (sarcastic tone begin) Yes, because I would LOVE to try suboptimal garbage just to get further rather than visit another planet and do experiments. (sarcastic tone end) Take twenty random people and they'll know who first set foot on the moon but they won't know the technical details of how they got there. I can see you mean well, but KSP is a game, not a simulator, and the critical difference between a game and a simulator is whether realism is sacrificed for enjoyable gameplay (REGARDLESS OF THE NAME; since this is the internet, SOMEONE will come up and say "But [something something] Simulator sacrifices realism for gameplay")