tntristan12

Meh. I think that's silly. I really wish the time outside reflected the time in the game. For that matter, I think time should progress normally in the VAB. It absolutely kills my immersion.

I'm actually a big fan of interstellar travel and warp drives. I would love to see a stock implementation somewhere along the lines of what HarvesteR mentioned a long, long time ago (and probably doesn't remember). However, I do believe the scope is more in line with an expansion pack than the base game. What an expansion it would be, though!

Probably, but I hope not. These older suggestions were often ignored because of the young state the game was in. However, now there is no reason to not at least promote them. The devs have announced 1.0, so this is the time to really consider cool features like this. It's worth a look, no matter how old the OP.

I'm actually glad this got necro'd. Old suggestions like this were often left to fade into obscurity because the game was so young that it was considered "not ready yet" for this level of polish. I think, now that 1.0 is around the corner, the devs *really* need to consider code optimizations like this. I'm not holding my breath, though. To quote regex, "this is squad we're talking about."

This is something I would really like to see in KSP before 1.0. Right now, Courage and Stupidity mean absolutely nothing. They are just arbitrary values which, while they might determine what facial expressions a kerbal has, do absolutely nothing for gameplay. I can think of a few ways this could be fixed! First off, I would like to see either the stupidity bar inverted (intelligence) or the courage bar inverted (cowardice) so that the stats can be more easily compared at a glance. High bars == good (or bad), and low bars == the opposite. Furthermore, I'd like to see them add some more attributes. I'm not sure what those would be, but more attributes would be nice to round out the kerbals' personalities. If we can have something like that, I think it'd be a good idea to tie those parameters in to how kerbals perform certain tasks. For example, high intelligence kerbals get more science from experiments; high courage kerbals make better pilots; and maybe high... I dunno... resourcefulness? ingenuity? something like that would make good engineers. Now, when you hire a recruit kerbal, you should be able to specify their job for them! Bill, Bob, Jeb, and Val are all pre-assigned, but recruit kerbals can be made into whatever role you want. However, the rate at which they gain experience, or perform their tasks might be dependent on their personality parameters. This way, parameters aren't just a random bar that is of no use to players. It can be used to make decisions about hiring kerbals and assigning them to their respective roles. Thoughts?

That segment is just floating in mid-air still fully functional, but obviously not where it's supposed to be. So, in combination with some other more minor issues (like rotated parts passing through other parts in the same vessel), it looks like there's very good reason it has yet to be released as a stock part. This bug literally ruined my kethane base way back when. My miner got so bowed in the middle that it could no longer drive, so I nuked the save because it got so frustrating

I've never understood why renaming a craft was tied to the power it had in the first place. If I point at a thing and say "that is a television", I don't expect somebody to come smack me and shout "you can't call it that! It's not plugged in!" I agree on both counts EDIT: Then again, what is the map view but a less omnipresent version of the tracking station?

Lol. Yeah, I don't think an update has been this unanimously praised since 0.18 added docking! - - - Updated - - - I do agree about the hairline. I think just a little bit of a break in the even-ness of it would do much to make her head look less like it's covered up with a skullcap.

I think Squad hit the nail on the head with this model. She's distinctly female, but also distinctly kerbal. Cute without being oversexualized. And they definitely did what they were intending to do as far as making her "as disposable as the guy kerbals." Plus her pose is great!

L points absolutely do NOT act like gravitating bodies. You are never pulled towards an L point. In fact, for 3 put of the 5 possible L points you are actively being pulled away. The other cases are only stable because the forces from the two bodies pull you in that direction. There is simply no way to simulate or approximate L points using an invisible gravitating body. It's a kludge - a hack. It's a dreadfully inefficient and problematic one. It is not even remotely close to what is physically happening, whereas patched conics have a basis in reality. It is accurate enough to simulate what happens in stable orbits around either body, and what happens when you go between. L points are a perturbation - an exception rather than the rule. They are not going to happen, so let's not get this thread more off topic than it already is.

Here's the thing though. It's *very* accurate! Unlike the "invisible third planet" idea that keeps popping up, patched conics are actually based on real-world physics. I'm not sure a lot of N-body physics activists (or "hacktivists" in the case of those who *really* want this invisible third planet) realize that KSP didn't invent patched conics. The approximation is set up by treating the gravitational force from the "smaller" body as a disturbance until the point where its magnitude is greater than that of the "larger body." Doing the math on it yields a sphere of influence inside which the smaller body is dominant. You can create a MatLab simulation to see for yourself just how close the approximation is! You have to get to pretty large timesteps in your numerical integrator before you see a difference. Patched Conics is such a good approximation that it's often used as a starting point for more complex force models when planning interplanetary transfers (which I'm sure you know require insane amounts of precision). For KSP, Patched Conics is the best we can get without implementing a numerical integrator that runs at higher time warps (which would be very unstable in Unity). We're not talking "off by a few meters." This is more like "the Mun is now on a solar escape trajectory" kinda thing.

Like I said: other star systems, massive physics updates (e.g. relativity), high concept science stuff, and the ability to properly establish colonies on other planets are all things I believe would fit the scope of expansion packs that Squad is referring to.

No. 10 chars... ...Just kidding! But no. Seriously. No. This thing has been hashed and rehashed and re-rehashed and literally every time N-body physics comes up as a suggestion, somebody suggests this, and it would not work because physics does not work that way. Not that it's a big deal or anything. I mean, Legrange points aren't even that stable (EDIT: Did I say "that stable"? I meant to say not stable at all - at least, L1 through L3), except for the L4 and L5 points which, in this case, would lay *on* the orbit of the second body anyway. So, if you really want to pretend that Legrange points are a thing, you can do what I do and put your satellite up in the second body's orbit, and use save-file editing to remove any uncertainty in the orbit, then proceed to not touch it ever again. I use this strategy for my comms satellites in RemoteTech, and it's pretty effective.

Funny. This mod is oddly reminiscent of my real life research. Might be worth getting just to play around with it!

I think the problem is that science experiments are not persistent. Now, by that I mean that when you conduct an experiment anywhere in the solar system, you can lug it around wherever you want, then take it home and collect the full science reward. Well, that is fine for certain things like soil samples, but completely breaks down for other experiments. Take, for example, the science jr. parts bay. Say I take it into zero gravity and I observe its behavior. I like to imagine that my scientist kerbal up there has taken a note of what he has seen. That information may be transmitted for what it is worth, but that is it. If the scientist wanted a more in depth look at the bay, then under the current system they would have to fly it back down to Kerbin and have it looked at in the space center. Do you see the problem yet? Once I fly my parts bay down to Kerbin, it is no longer in zero gravity. How on Kerbin can I then yield more scientific value from that than I would have gotten by just transmitting the report of the experiment? The experiment was destroyed the second I applied acceleration! So let's revise this system. Say that, instead of flying it to Kerbin, I lift a laboratory module into orbit and dock it with my science jr. Now when I analyze the experiment, I have a full suite of instruments I can observe it with. I can get more science analyzing it in the laboratory module than I could have gotten by transmitting my results as my scientist saw them. In this example, the science jr. experiment has a hierarchy wherein the laboratory module is worth the most science, transmitting the data is worth less science, and returning the science bay is worth no science (unless I reconduct the experiment on Kerbin). Other experiments should have hierarchies as well! For example, returning a soil sample would obviously yield the most science. Analyzing it in a laboratory module would be worth less, and transmitting the data would be worth little (but some) science. Something like this would engage the player more, and require that they strategize to gain the most scientific value from their experiments versus just attaching a bunch of science modules onto a probe and ditching it back in the atmosphere to collect full science on each.

One time I set up an orbital rendezvous *too* well, and sent a 500 part ship crashing into my 1500 part space station... Fortunately, the explosion was so huge that the game crashed and I started the rendezvous over again.

To be fair, the revised ending to ME3 was free.

My interpretation of that plot is that it only depicts within certain tolerances. It seems that there are buttons that allow you to show the tolerances (i.e. you could see where 10% of the resources are in the areas you have scanned. I would imagine that the actual distribution is continuous.

That's a bit of a strawman, don't you think? Nobody is saying "DLC" (which it has already been stated is NOT planned) would limit your access to KSP in its final state. Furthermore, not everything that fits the scope of an expansion pack (I say expansion pack because I believe if they go that route it will add significantly new content and be able to stand alone with all of its features) is possible to create in an add on due to the limited access that modern have to the deeper code that runs the game.

If they were to release an expansion, I would love to see something involving interstellar travel to procedurally generated systems. Yeah, I know they said they don't want to procedurally generate the kerbol system because they want a universal experience that people can talk a out, but surely it is reasonable to provide some uniqueness for extrasolar planets. If they went that route, perhaps they could devote an expansion (or part of one) to high-concept science fiction ideas like space elevators, solar sails, warp drives, things like that! Relativistic effects would be cool if they had engines which could get you moving really fast like that. I would love to see an expansion devoted to colonization of the kerbol system. Perhaps including the ability to establish space centers on other planets, which function like KSC, and from which you can build and launch vessels. Maybe terraforming could be part of this?

Very fair point. I stand corrected. Still doesn't make much sense for heliocentric orbits though, since you never actually come close enough to the sun to worry about crashing into it. You're preaching to the choir on that one. Yes, it is unrealistic, and as somebody who is taking a graduate level course on spacecraft navigation I can attest to the fact that determining a spacecraft's position in space is no trivial thing. However, keep in mind that nearly everything about KSP's UI is designed to make it accessible. Hell, I don't think even Orbiter went into that level of detail - requiring you to determine your position using celestial navigation or GPS or whatnot. I think something like that is a reasonable break from reality. Besides, how exactly does pinging the Mun with a laser beam tell you where you are at relative to the datum? By that logic, the system is already broken anyway. Also, I do agree that surface mode should give you the radar altitude anyway.

I've been pulling for this feature for a long time. I think I would go one step farther and say "give the altimeter a datum toggle like the speedometer has." For example, the cycle might go: 1) distance from surface of planet. 2) distance from center of planet. 3) distance from currently selected target (for docking, since the altimeter is basically useless when you're trying to dock) For bonus points, tie it to the speedometer datum toggle, so 1 corresponds to surface mode, 2 corresponds to orbital readout, and 3 corresponds to target readout. EDIT: It'd be really nice to toggle them independently, but have them switch together when the transition is automatic (like when going from surface to orbit mode) Tangential aside: Heck, let's make the Pe and Ap readouts in the map menu measure from the center of the planet instead of sea level, because that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever!

Wait... my [bEEP] alarm just went off... computer! Scan that post! Hmmm... I see something. Computer! Enhance that last part! What was that? "So far"? Ah. With a glowing endorsement like that, clearly 95% of mod makers and the entire KSP dev team are just delusional, and perhaps trying to keep all the x64 to themselves. Please Squad! Give us our broken x64 if it means milint33w can continue to show us how amazing he is at bucking the trend and proving everyone else wrong with brilliant evidence such as "it works great so far." This can only end well.

Definitely one of my favorite mods, and an absolute must-have. SO glad to see it is being worked on again!

All the news is so fantastic I can't stop grinning! It's like they intentionally saved all the best stuff for last! The only things I am dying to see in the game before 1.0 are environmental enhancements such as clouds and atmospheres (a la EVE and AVP), sound effects that vary with altitude (Atmospheric Sound Enhancement), and a better science system that lets unmanned probes do science and doesn't allow all results to be valid in all places at all times. Life support would be awesome too, but I suppose I can live with that being in mod form.