Hyomoto

There has literally never been a better time to play. Today's mission? Collecting a tiny probe released as part of a Minmus expedition which entered Kerbol orbit and returned with some sweet temperature and goo readings. I think I might start getting a micro-fetish, it may not be fast but this bugger has 2800m/s dV and last I checked, that's almost enough to send it out to Dres (One way of course :P)! It also fits neatly into a 2.5m service bay for both deployment and recovery! Though steering it is a bit of a nuisance, 'forward' is 90 degrees port of the readout so the next iteration will probably have the battery and the probe core swapped.

There are the various icons you can use to represent your ship on the map, has anyone ever modded a plane icon into that list?

I think you keep fading into another thread. Once again, this isn't a complaint about the difficulty of the early game. It's not about funding, or contracts, or science unlocks—it's still a conversation on the initial launchpad and VAB upgrades. My observation is I experience a hump getting to that point, and then afterwards the entire game opens up. This is not something you can "debunk" unless you can prove I've never actually experienced this. Though I think you've actually proven my point better because you got me thinking: I do make the game a lot harder on myself, you are right that I don't build "efficiently". I take lots of contracts, and my missions are almost always to complete at least one, but usually two, three or even four on a single mission. So I guess I can see why the game is so easy for you, it's not that you are some superhuman player (though obviously you are quite good) it's that you take the most direct route to victory, ie: unlocking parts and upgrading buildings. If I was willing to just grind past the 30 part limit, which you are right: it's completely easy to do, I'd never experience that. I tend to meander around the early game where I am limited in parts, part count, size and weight. But that only further reinforces my hump because once past the 30 part limit, there are no real limits any more. With 255 parts to play with, trying to figure out how to fit two satellites on a rocket that needs to orbit Minmus and return two tourists isn't "easy", but it's nowhere near as hard as figuring out how to haul a Flea, radial decoupler, Mk-25 parachute and take a temperature reading in a single flight with a plane that can't reach the altitudes needed to perform two of the tests. Because that's when I get really creative, and I'm sad when I get over that hump and I no longer have viable restrictions on my progress. I should have picked up on it when you used the term 'strip mine', but we clearly have nothing in common with the way we play. Though it does explain why other people have other humps, we all have different things we want to achieve and different walls we encounter doing so. It's not that there are no humps, but as I said in the title of my post: this is my hump, it's how I experience the game. So if you'd like to 'debunk' something, do it somewhere else where your post doesn't come off as trolling. How high do I have to take this again?

Interesting, I might do the same then. I've gotten used to seeing it, one of those look the other way things, but if rolling it back makes it all good again I'm not terribly attached to the clouds on the main menu versus the ones in play though I might try seeing if one of these aren't the culprit first.

That's sort of an interesting point. Planes have definitely gotten the love they needed at this point (except for wheels, wheels still could use some, please 1.1!) but it makes you wonder what they'll start focusing on next. There's still a lot of potential in the land of rovers, satellites and 'colonization' that can be tapped for inspiration.

That's a good point Xavven, I definitely have a self-imposed set of rules that make the game harder. For example, I always want to leave and return with the same ship, but if you're willing to put a bit of infrastructure to use it's easier to build the ship to get the science in one big gulp and have it rendezvous with another one thus saving a lot of engineering headaches. GoSlash, I'll be interested to see how you fare. The yields are lower but grinding doesn't make the game harder, though I think it does exacerbate a couple things that might otherwise be unnoticed. Whether that proves they exist or they are self-inflicted thereof I suppose is the topic of debate then.

Epox, I'm not sure why you've never experienced it but I've seen this plenty of times in the past. Not sure if I'd seen it in the Overhaul version but yeah I'm getting that too. Might be a incompatibility. Perhaps there is a mod we have in common that causes it somehow? I don't have a terribly long mod list (comparatively I suppose), but maybe you have one or more of these? Antenna Range B9 Procedural Wings EVE (duh) Chatterer CollisionFX DistantObject EditorExtensions ImprovedChaseCamera KAS KerbalEngineer KIS Pilot Assistant PlanetShine TextureReplacer WaypointManager

GoSlash, I apologize if I was too heavy on the sarcasm. I thought I'd written I was playing on Hard which based on feedback, clearly makes a difference. I get there are ways to cheese the game for veterans. I mean, you can suicide launch someone into Kerbol orbit to pull a couple world firsts for some easy cash. Give em an antenna and you can even send back some decent science. You can skip the Mun and hit up Minmus in 30 parts which has better contract payouts, higher science, and is cheaper in deltaV. It's also flat out easier and safer to land on which yields even greater payouts and science. But despite that, I still find the jump from 30 parts to 255 parts as more beneficial than being able to, for instance, EVA or take on extra contracts. Primarily because once the pad and VAB are upgraded, I can pretty much go anywhere. So I read, "You just gotta be more efficient in your designs." as somewhat facetious. If I turn up payouts and skim right over it, I might never notice it, but since I've played this way I know it's still there. As an aside, it's interesting because once you have those first two upgrades, the launchpad tonnage becomes the next real limitation since you can max 140 in six parts, but less so than 30 parts because you have a lot more breathing room to work efficiency, at which point I wholly agree with you. There's really only so much you can do with 30 parts. Heck, there are docking ports in the first set of R&D nodes, so if you are willing to build in space you can go as big as you want, efficiency be damned. I thought I wrote that I was playing on Hard in the OP, I'll add it if it isn't there.

You too? Me too! Although the texture is messed up and I never bothered fixing it Anyways, it's not anti-virus because I don't use anti-virus. However, I did do some tests. My Surface Pro 3 boots and restarts at pretty much the same speed, but my G752VT is also a slow boot. It's showing as about 10 seconds slower, but unless Windows 10 is making abysmal use of my SSD I should certainly be seeing more than a 10 second improvement on boot times. This makes me feel a little better because it doesn't seem isolated to the Alienware specifically, I'm guessing now it must be some service(s) that are taking a long time to boot. Probably the, ahem, analytics processes. If I had to wager a guess.

Windows definitely does it's updates on restart. And if I have updates to do, even the cold boot will take longer and I'll get the wheel. But that's really why it's so strange is that if there are no updates to do, the cold boot is full afterburner while a restart is still slow. As a comparison, I have an Asus G550JK with Windows 7 on it. My boot times there are about 10 seconds, and so are my restart times. I know Windows 10 has a lot of new architecture, it has 'fast startup' which I need to read up more on. And ... done. So yes, the whole idea is that Windows 10 will take a snapshot of your drivers and services on shut down so next time you turn it on it doesn't have to start them, it just reads the file it made. That definitely explains the blisteringly fast cold boot and why it doesn't happen on restart, but it doesn't explain, then, why the boot is so slow to begin with. My Surface Pro is putting my laptop to shame on this one and that's not a good look. I tried doing a clean boot and that hacked about ten seconds off, but that's pushing it down to 127 seconds according to the event viewer. I turns out I had a 17 second boot time back on the first of November ... what has changed ...

GoSlash, despite my heavy sarcasm I still argue my point. This isn't a 'man, it's sucks there's this hump' thread, it's a I've noticed over my 700 hours of gameplay that there is this hump. I get it, you build highly efficient rockets that waste naught a drop of fuel but it really has nothing to do with this thread. Optimizing my ascent profile might help me get to the Mun a little easier, but it won't change the fact that the 30 to 255 part increase pretty much opens the entire game up no matter how inefficiently you build. For me, once I've done that, the rest of the game flow is pretty organic. It has nothing to do with how I build my rockets. Look, everyone is very proud of you. You are an old member, you've got a lot of hours under your belt and you use FAR, and DRE, and AJE and you can build rockets without even looking at the screen. We're not going to think less of you if you say, "Yeah, 255 parts is a pretty big jump." But that is what this thread is intrinsically about.

Are your elevators set to also affect roll? Because those produce a heck of a lot of lateral force. Otherwise you could try pushing your ailerons further in, it really shouldn't be necessary from what I can see but if the previous solution doesn't work it might be worth looking into.

Gosh, I can vote. There are times I love building largely accurate rockets, but it's also fun to build something insanely stupid it shouldn't fly ... and then getting it to fly.

My technique for getting a Munar encounter is far less scientific. I burn at about a 70-90 degree angle to the Mun. The encounter window is pretty large so while it's definitely not the most efficient method but I've never missed a transfer, I do need nodes for Minmus though. I think. I guess I've never really tried.

My question, Cyzyrndm, would be you have a PID for both your vertical speed and altitude, correct? So what is the easiest way to find out which one is causing you problems? For my recent craft I was able to get it to fly rock solid at warp, but I feel like that was a lot of luck. Mostly because when it's acting up I'm rarely sure if it's the vertical speed or the altitude that's causing the oscillations. I don't know if this is WAAAAAY too far out there, but it would be interesting to see a graph of the PID outputs so you get a better idea of what's happening when it's going wrong.

GoSlash, I've read and reread your post and I just do not get it. I'm not sure what you are trying to convey in the context of my original post. The best I can get out of it is "I've gotten so good I have no limitations." Which, while that's pretty awesome that you've gotten to that point, I don't get what that has to do with my 'hump'. Are you suggesting if I got better at the game the hump would disappear? Is this advice? Are you suggesting my rocket designs suck? Because, I can assure you, I build highly efficient designs; take this SSTO for example, a model of irreducible complexity.

Well, based on what you guys have said I don't really think unlimited should have it's own building at all then, if a 'fifth' tier is needed it could easily be a 'legendary' upgrade that serves as a sort of endgame content since unlimited is something I'd wager most computers rarely make use of. It's also weird that the pad goes 140t -> unlimited since you can EASILY hit that ceiling with the later parts, but 250 parts is pretty much enough to build all but the most insane of crafts. Speaking of which, your guys comments on science got me thinking. I really like building planes, but it's something I pretty much always have to put off to some extent because of the lack of scientific gains from it but mostly that the lucrative contracts require parts you cannot unlock until later anyways. So it seems rather than having R&D limit the price of the node you unlock, it could instead limit the science you can spend altogether? That should help with the science hump some of you described since you could specialize in whatever you wanted, upgrading to fill out your tree rather than progress further along in it. For example, right now the tree is about 1200 science to unlock everything with the first R&D upgrade, why not let the player spend that however they want? If you want to pick up a 500 science node, so be it. I think there would definitely be a lot more interest in how you go about unlocking the tree at that point, even if you did it 'wrong' you can take a loan from the bank out for an upgrade. With a fourth tier of building you could do something like 400, 1500, 10000, 50000, unlimited. It's interesting because it would serve as a gate on node value to some extent still but you'd have more freedom to choose your path which is generally a good characteristic for a progression model.

I have an Alienware 15 R2 I recently purchased. I put my own 500GB SSD into it because as most people know Alienware is stupidly overpriced, and in this case the 500GB SSD upgrade is 500$ (already high) but I got mine on Black Friday for 130$ on Amazon. Side note, the Samsung EVO 850 500GB do go on sale from time to time, I pretty much pick one up every time they do. Back on topic, I used Arcronis True Image 2015 to duplicate the drive, installed it in the computer and booted it up. I'm pretty used to SSD's by now, definitely used to this operation, and I'd consider myself generally pretty qualified to work on and tinker with my own systems, so I expected an immediate improvement in boot times—but there was literally none. It took the exact same time as the platter drive. So here's the wierdness: and I can honestly say this is a first. It turns out there IS a huge difference. If I go from a cold boot, it takes less than five seconds to come up. That is, if I go to Power > Shut Down, when I next turn it on it is stupidly fast coming up. It's so fast I thought I had left it in sleep the first time it happened. Awesome, right? Exactly how I like it. Well, not entirely, because when I do a restart it still takes 30 seconds to a minute? First world problem to be sure, but I cannot fathom why this is happening. At first I thought it was just windows installing updates, and in many ways I still do because this happens when it does, but generally speaking if I cold boot, I get the Alienware logo and then the desktop. If I hit restart, I get the Alienware logo, then the spinning circle and then the desktop. And that spinning circle is apparently where the time difference is. I've entertained the idea that maybe it's not actually off, but hibernating or sleeping, which I honestly suppose it could but I'm choosing Shut Down. I also have a Surface Pro 3 which normally just sleeps but when it does have to be powered on it takes no longer than a regular restart. And lastly, as far as I can tell, my Asus G752VT ALSO doesn't have this problem, it's definitely local to this laptop and this one situation. So I'm really looking for anyone who has experience, useful not complaints, with Alienware or Windows 10 that might be able to provide some insight on this. I'm sure it can be fixed, I'm not sure if anyone that reads this would be able to help but if you've experienced something like this before I'd appreciate the help.

MY DESIGNS ARE GETTING DUMBER! Also, that feel when it finally flies.

The planet? CRATERS EVERYWHERE! Space? MUST. KEEP. CLEAN. All recovered stages must naturally splash down or be recovered manually! So the exact opposite of theend3r. Though he makes a good point, space debris could be exciting. I think I avoid it mostly because of potential lag. Bring on 1.1!

Hmm, katateochi I never considered it like that but I think you might be onto something. Perhaps rather than a bulk investment and upgrade to the building, the various buildings could provide smaller bonuses you could invest in. Not sure if it's too gamey for some tastes, but after investing enough the model would update to the next stage. I think that would be an excellent way of going about it because not only would it provide a better gradient, it could easily be tweaked for the number of stages, bonuses, etc... per tier rather than having to add an entirely new building just to provide an extra route. nadreck, Personally I like the large drops required for most of the upgrades since it gives you these definitive progress points to work towards. I've never really rushed science because like I said, I can usually do the same thing with more parts from earlier stages. Don't get me wrong, I love building planes and the research for those is expensive, but a large docking ring can easily be made out of four smaller ones which come at 90. But that's an interesting point, and I agree the new contracts definitely encourage certain gameplay it might have been easy to ignore before. But if we're playing on similar settings, I find it amazing you don't see the VAB and pad to be the bottlenecks. Perhaps it's just that you have two humps?

What else? Stupidity, that when taken out of context, probably looks even stupider. Still awesome though. The context is, I was trying to find a way to complete four contracts in the same flight. If solving problems is KSP at it's best, some contract configurations can give it in spades.

I'm a fan of career mode, played it since it was science mode, and never bothered with creative once it showed up. I've also played on 'Hard' since difficulties were introduced. Playing today I noticed something about career mode that I'll just simply refer to as 'the hump'. There's a lot of debate over what order parts should be unlocked in, whether manned or unmanned missions should come first, whether planes should show up before rockets, etc... There's a lot of mods that try to address this but I have a theory that there is a more subtle issue with career mode progression than that. Remember the old 'barn' tier of buildings that will be making a comeback in 1.1? Basically, my view is this: there are some pretty significant non-part specific limitations at the beginning of the game because of the number of parts you are limited to, and the weight/size of your vessel. It can be quite challenging to cobble together 30 parts to make the trip to Munar orbit, let alone anywhere else. Granted we all have different tolerances or preferences which make this easier or harder (I play on hard so science is quite grindy at the start), but it seems to me those initial building restrictions posed by the launch pad and the vehicle assembly building are far more significant than a lack of part diversity. I can build a cluster of engines and fuel tanks that bypass a need for a mainsail, but only if I can cobble together enough parts to do it and get it in under weight. In fact, the biggest benefit of unlocking some parts early on is the ability to simplify otherwise ridiculous, yet still effective, designs. Essentially while some parts do unlock new gameplay opportunities, many of them simply open routes of efficiency. This is basically the early game hump. And I'm not complaining. That moment where I'm on the cusp of getting somewhere but trying to get it in under budget, or running a mission to get science to unlocks parts that will let me do so, is where career 'feels' the best. So for me, the issue is once you have enough money to unlock the expanded VAB and launch pad, the gating is pretty much over and it becomes science mode again. The jump between 30 and 255 parts is pretty much endgame material—you can build a ship to go anywhere with those restrictions, and later contracts give exponentially more rewards versus difficulty so money is really only an issue as long as you are stuck on Kerbin. It seems, more than anything, this has the single largest detrimental effect on the progression of career since, in my experience anyways, my first hurdle is literally to expand the VAB and launch pad and then that's it: hurdles over. It doesn't matter what order you force the player to unlock parts in; ingenuity will win the day. The imposed size/weight/part budget is far more imposing, and I'm really hoping another tier of buildings will help with that. Of course, and this goes a bit off my original topic but folds in nicely is I wouldn't mind seeing a couple other building gates. The administration building goes mostly unused, and like I said: money is no issue once you get past Kerbin. So why not crank up the part cost gradient and add in a part discount to the admin building? Or perhaps rather than gating science on the R&D, have it reduce the cost of nodes making it more attractive, and less mandatory, of an investment? Anyways, these were just some thoughts I had this morning while playing and I wanted to share them with the community. It looks like my ship is nearly in Munar orbit though, so I'll cut it off here.

Thanks Squad! Still love the game even after spending 700 hours with it!