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steveman0

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  1. Honest question: like what? I have 150 hours or so in game now and have not found the need for them. I managed to deploy a rover by just tipping my carrier vehicle over. Robotics seems like a low return per invested hour of development time in my estimation making it sensible that they aren't prioritizing it.
  2. Uh what? Maybe I'm missing a point here since this statement is wrong, but we've landed several mobile craft on multiple bodied. None that I know of using tracks. I asked because given the number of rover missions, I though there might have been one, perhaps not by USA/NASA that did use them.
  3. Are there any examples of tracked vehicles used in real space missions? I feel their complexity/reliability wouldn't be justified for their potential benefits. I don't see them as a necessity if they make wheel controls work well. Something more suitable as a mod I think.
  4. I continue to hope that the silence and apparent slow progress is due to them recognizing these limitations and being hard at work at substantial infrstructural redesign of some of the core systems to accommodate the performance needs. I see potential for batching parts for combined simulation, offloading background sim to other threads, and surely other opportunities to address performance needs while working around some existing bugs by essentially writing the systems responsible for the bugs in the first place. I would have hoped that this kind of work would be precisely the kind of fundamental effort they would publically highlight to show why it is difficult, takes time, and is resulting in otherwise slow progress in areas that are of immediate attention for players.
  5. Given the nature of how orbital colonies will have to function as a mobile entity, it wouldn't surprise me if you could deploy a colony equivalently that is floating on water. Maybe there are distinctions here that would prevent it, but we'll have to wait and see I suspect. This might be the kind of things that the devs haven't thought to try that someone will find a way to make it work if only by using some clever trick to do so.
  6. At a minimum, I would like to be able to set waypoints at ground locations and mark these and automatically provided mission waypoints as targets. These targeted waypoints should provide a navball icon just like targeting a docking port for docking. If this takes orbital spin into account (as it should because orbital spin is a factor in ground speed), you could then simply enter target mode rather than surface mode to burn retrograde of target for your landing. I think the only notable new functionality that might aid this is to be able to point relative to horizontal (pro or retrograde) to adjust horizontal velocity only. Target mode doesn't provide an easy way otherwise to burn off horizontal velocity first above target before during a vertical landing burn. Having a separate indicator for horizontal speed would help here too. Precision landing then would involve setting your waypoint for desired landing, burning to adjust horizontal velocity towards target, burning to zero horizontal velocity once aligned over target, and finally burning for the touch down landing. Automation is something that will come with the resource update when we can have the game repeat our flight plans. The the game should still require learning how to execute the landings and provide the tools to do so reliably without requiring odd visual extrapolation without indicators.
  7. I like this and wanted to add that it'd really help clean up all of the autosave workspaces that get saved as separate copies that inevitably get saved over as the original, but not actually the original such that they get retained as permanent duplicate copies.
  8. My biggest grip is that the forum search feature doesn't work very well. It often reports no posts found for simple one or two word searches despite a few minutes of googling pointing me to an active/open bug report for the subject I looked up. It's hard for me to feel confident in filing a bug report when I can't be sure it hasn't been reported a dozen+ times (like the case I was referring to above).
  9. Yes, I believe you do receive a notification popup even with a crewed craft. The UI icon showing a satellite symbol I think should mean the communications status regardless of whether you have crew or not. This might be relevant if you were to leave your ship and plan to control it remotely. I don't know if there's a separate icon for control status aside from a center-of-screen prompt that comes up when you try to provide input to an uncontrollable craft.
  10. I left behind or repopulated past planets with the 130 Gm antenna and no longer receive any notices about vessels losing communications. I sent a probe to Eeloo with no issues after this. When you see the popup message, it isn't always for the craft you are currently controlling. Check the satellite icon on the nav ball to confirm control with the current craft. I suspect a major reason they don't do more with commnet is precisely because they don't yet have a good way to visualize the effective coverage. If you do have proper coverage, it does seem to work as intended from my experience.
  11. Depends on the kind of player you were in KSP 1. I tallied about 150 hours in KSP 1, but never felt the desire to leave the Kerbin SOI. The game did a poor job encouraging exploration in the campaign and I found contracts really grindy. KSP 2 does a much better job encouraging exploration with the For Science! update. I'm up to 125 hours and it has been a blast. Been nearly everywhere in the system now. Going to Moho soon, studying up on SSTO design for Laythe, and then to battle with Eve. Sitting on 123k spare science after finishing the tech tree ready for colonies when it lands. Worth every penny I spent on the game and it will only get better given the team's strong emphasis on quality in their release cycle.
  12. I think you are misunderstanding the quote. I only read it as the fact the game is in EA / not complete / still under development is as a GaaS in that the challenges of resources constraints and interstellar will come later as these parts get finished. It's nothing intentional beyond the shear reality that these will take time and thus can't be released immediately. So your conclusion is the exact opposite of what I think. I think it is clear they still aim to complete and release content as quickly as possible while meeting their quality standards. For Science! Shows this. There was nothing in the quote to suggest anything has changed.
  13. I never said you're playing the game wrong, I said you are failing to optimize your mission. There is no wrong way to play the game. There is however several ways to optimize your mission. Principally, lowest mass / highest dV. You are making the claim that these engines are terrible yet are failing to recognize they are a more optimal engine choice in a number of scenarios. You are of course free to ignore the optimal strategy and build some other Kerbal solution, but it's incorrect to say that the engines don't have a purpose. In several of your engine comparisons, the deep space engine will provide more dV for less ovall craft mass. Taken to the largest craft designs, the ISP advantage will result in higher dV, lower mass, and higher craft TWR in vacuum due to the efficiency advantage. This makes them absolutely worth the science spent on them when you build craft for these scenarios. It's important to note that tier 4 is entering part scales for colonies and early interstellar. Analyzing all of these parts in only the context of simple interplanetary missions will give the wrong impression. You must remember the context for their use. The deep space engines as their name implies are optimized as a kind of methalox equivalent to a higher thrust version of the ion engines for carrying payload efficiently to deep space.
  14. Adding my feedback from weekly challenge #48 using ion engines to Dres. During the challenge I had two or three cases where I did not have thrust under warp. The case I'm 100% sure on was in Dres' SOI while trying to capture, i.e. I was on an escape trajectory. When I was in Kerbol's SOI, I did several burns with thrust under warp without issue. Earlier in the mission I recall one or two other scenarios where this occurred. Neither significantly jeopardized the mission so I didn't note them as carefully. Comments and Discord and here made me think back and I believe the scenarios could have been both in Kerbin's and Duna's SOI on escape trajectories.
  15. This seems to demonstrate that you dom't know the value of isp for optimizing your rocket and mission. While a higher TWR can help in some cases, the extent of this is far less than you are thinking. Certainly far less than the benefit of 20% overall fuel efficiency especially since the increased fuel efficiency allows you to carry less fuel for a higher mission TWR. The example you originally cited with the skipper would have the skipper having far longer burn times because you'd have to carry more fuel (mass) for an equivalent journey. You can't look at engine thrust on it's own.
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