Draft

Holy smokes, looks like my timing was apt. I just found this last night, and my hat is off to you- this is outstanding stuff. Well done!

I haven't been able to thoroughly investigate if it's the case, but I have a suspicion that aerial survey contracts aren't quite taking the terrain height into account when generating waypoints.

Yeah, looks like somebody else figured out how to fix that little niggle

Then announce a proper 'kerbal management' aspect of the game, where you CAN assign your kerbals to do tasks based on their skills and experience. Don't shoehorn magical buffs into normal manual gameplay that muddles the skill of the players.

It seems to me you haven't read the devnotes or Max's post where they outright said how they're planning on Kerbals affecting spacecraft performance.

And it's a flawed argument because, you know, vessel control actually is mapped to player control. And has been for the entirety of KSP's development. People see themselves as the pilot because they pilot the ships.

Your reasoning works for the thrust perk, if you turn your head and squint. The SSMEs were also overthrottled, if I recall correctly. Engine efficiency is the biggest, most blatant, most nonsensical magical ......... Axe it.

I still disagree that the baseline performance of perfect PLAYER input should be incompetence

So you're arguing that unresponsive controls is good game design for KSP. I disagree completely.

It's functionally equivalent, if not better.

Which would be fine if I wasn't manually controlling said ship

Except for when they've entertained the idea of training kerbals to fly missions on their own with an experience system. Do you think every time a player lands they use the same amount of fuel? Do you think that One astronaut always uses exactly the same proportion less fuel than another one? If it's minor enough to not make a difference there's no point to having it anyway. Claiming it won't be a big deal is a diversion.

KSP isn't Skyrim, nor should it be.

I've been yelling about kerbals influencing craft dV elsewhere, and I'll yell about it here. No bueno.

"RCSBuildAid "fixes" this, treating landing gear and a few other parts as massless so at least what you see in the editor is consistent with what you see in flight." Will this respect MM configs to re-enable physics for some of those parts?