Madrias

I'm not a master of SSTO's, nor any good at rockets, but, I'd be thinking of just getting it into orbit first, then using a docking port and a second launch fuel tanker to refill it before sending it to Minmus. It'd be a little less delta-V requirement, and once you're in orbit, it's just a matter of picking a destination. As for that payload... Is there any way you could possibly send that thing up empty? It'd make it much easier - every bit of weight you can keep out of the payload is going to make the climb to orbit easier. Once you're in orbit, then send up your fuel tankers to refill your payload. And as for SSTO... Does it really have to be, or is this a challenge where you have to SSTO and you're determined to put the most amount of mass in orbit?

There's always a small percentage of the highly-vocal minority that make a lot of noise about things. The problem, and this is why I brought it up, is that console gamers outnumber PC gamers by a rather very large number. Even if we assume 10% of each community (PC, XBox, Playstation) to be this highly vocal minority, and 10% of that group (1% in total from the whole community) are the hostile ones in that minority, that's a lot of people. As for why I said it that way, I can only call it as I see it. It shows how good the moderation team is here that things like this can go un-noticed by a large portion of the community. And as MajorJim said, I feel bad for you guys, because you do a thankless job and it's about to get worse. I try to bring constructive criticism to the table, and even on the wheel issue, my only reason for being so upset about it is not that the stock wheels are broken, but that Squad stripped so much code out that the dozens of mods with wheels in them are also broken, as in completely non-functional. So we're forced to use the buggy, broken wheel code that seems to be a big problem to work around, landing legs that slide down hills, and landing gear that breaks too easily without explanation (as said before and elsewhere, a weight-limit in the part description could help on this). But the problem with any gaming community is that the anonymity of the internet brings out the worst in people. Add to that the Console Rivalries, the PC vs. Console rivalry, and the most hostile members of each community being the loudest and trying to claim they speak for everyone, and we're looking at an oncoming... um... yeah, I can't think of something that wouldn't be censored here.

I've got a couple different versions of KSP, both modded and unmodded. I have a bone-stock version of 1.1.3 set aside, as I have for 1.0.4 (sadly, I didn't think to do the same for 1.0.5...) and 0.90, and 0.25. I've also got modded versions of 1.1.3, 1.0.5, 0.90, and 0.25. And modded versions going back to 0.18... I archive a lot of stuff.

About the only reason I'd even call that one Kerbal is because it hit the ground and exploded. I'm surprised they didn't self-destruct it when it started going sideways. After all, who knows where several tons of spacecraft was going to go when it went out of control like that. Otherwise, there's nothing funny about it. Spacecraft accidents aren't a bloody joke. That one was unmanned, and that's the only reason anyone can crack a smile about it. That's a lot of man-hours, a lot of money up in flames because of an accident.

I don't typically auto-pilot, either. I've had MechJeb installed a few times, only to find out that about the only things I use on it is the landing assistance and the docking assistance. That, and I usually had no problem letting it handle burns for me. But, time and time again, I found MechJeb wasn't really helping me get into space. Might have to do with the fact that I'm a spaceplane pilot, or that I'm an idiot who doesn't know how to configure MechJeb properly, but basically, I fly to orbit, Mechjeb handles any dockings, helps me with landings, and flies my ship between point A and point B. When I remember to install the silly thing.

Sounds like things are moving along rather well. I've got an unmodified version of 1.1.3 standing by.

As any KSP player knows well: There is nothing wrong with More Boosters. (Now, if you're playing in Career mode, by all means, do the math or guess-and-check with TWR and thrust balancing.)

A little experiment to do would be to start a poll, and ask how many people on the forum are playing KSP 1.1.3 and how many are playing a different version of KSP. Offer a third option for "I'm playing both the new and an older version of KSP," and a fourth option "I've stopped playing KSP, I'm just here for the community." I can't speak for the whole community, but I speak for myself when I mention I'm still mostly rocking 1.0.5, short of a few attempts on 1.1.3 to get used to the new wheels (and now I'm waiting until the jittery wheels and sliding feet are fixed), and I'm mostly using 1.0.5 because, hmm... Let's see here... Oh, yeah, the Unity 5 update broke not just the stock wheels, because I wouldn't care about that too much, but it broke all of the wheels, mods included, that'd been made before. Which means that I'm stuck with wheels that spaz out the instant I put one-too-many on my crafts to make sure the wheels can handle the weight of some of the things I'm throwing around, that stop working when I put a protective fender over the top of them, and that went from "Can't make a corner without flipping" to "Can't go up a hill without sliding, can't go around a corner without spinning out, and can't go over a bump without flipping."

Never. If I'm resorting to tubes full of stuff-that-goes-boom, then I'm going to use as many as I feel I need to blindly chuck my rockets into orbit. If I've got a few extra boosters on my ship when I'm nearly in orbit, I'll drop them there.

I'll weigh in here on this, and only because I want to see KSP succeed. If, and this is a big "if" given the track record of broken releases and beta-test-grade stuff shoved out on the PC community, Squad manages to release a really, really bug-free version on Console and it works fine, and if they manage to quit breaking saves moving forward, then KSP Console could thrive. However, if KSP releases in the quality of these 1.1 releases we've had, with broken rover wheels, airplane landing gear that are made of toothpicks, marshmellows, and explodium (granted, part of this could be solved by putting a weight-limit in the descriptions of the gear), and the multitude of little bugs typically fixed by mods, KSP Console is going to falter fast. Why? Because of a few things, and I'll detail a list here. Bugs on the Console aren't tolerated well. Let's face it, we've been exceedingly tolerant with bugs, crashes, and save-breaking updates. That won't happen on the console, and it's partly due to the next reason. Console Gamers in general have a short temper. No, not all of them, but all one has to do is look on YouTube for how many gamers throw controllers into TV screens, or start screaming into the mic, or switch off the console. Yes, these are usually in ultra-competitive FPS games, but part of that community might play KSP. Now picture these gamers going full rage on Squad because they've released a buggy game, and they can't get a plane to fly off the runway, their rockets wiggle apart and explode, and then to add insult to injury, the patch that fixes some of these bugs adds new ones and breaks compatibility. This highly-vocal and volatile minority will also take it out on the KSP community when we try to offer advice. Those who manage to succeed in this highly toxic minority will offer the advice of "git gud" and "lrn 2 fly, noob" instead of "If you place the center of lift behind the center of mass on your plane, it will fly much better." Controls. The bane of our existance on PC is the dreadful nature of our digital inputs. Yes, we can get away with this by plugging in joysticks, flight-simulation-yokes, throttle quadrants, etc. and a lot of us do. You'd think the controller would be a great alternative, right up until you realize, it's only realistically better for flying than the keyboard is. For controlling the VAB/SPH, you need a minimum of 12 buttons just to have: Rotate X+/-, Y+/-, Z+/-, Symmetry +/-, Small Angle Shift, and Angle Snap On/Off, plus a part selection button, and one to toggle modes (place, move, rotate, and root select). Now, this can be simplified to 8 buttons by eliminating the - controls, but it means that you've tied up the ABXY (or the PlayStation counterparts) and all four shoulder buttons just for editor mode. Thumbsticks aren't as precise as a mouse (although arguably, they can work well enough in a pinch), so part placement will be a little more difficult. Let's face it, KSP doesn't have a learning curve. It has a rocket-sled pointed at a learning wall. Either you succeed because you know the laws of aerodynamics, a little rocket science, a bit of spaceflight history, and have a pinch of luck/skill on your side, or you proceed to slam into the wall at Mach 5 over and over again until you get it right. And getting it right takes a lot of time, and can be rather frustrating. Consoles are great for games that can be picked up, played for a couple hours, and put back down again. KSP, a single mission can take all day, most of which is spent either re-engineering your craft, or sitting in map view playing "catch the intercept" with whatever planet you're going to. And so let's use a hypothetical scenario here: You've just come home from a bad day at work and turned on your console to play a game to relax and unwind. Which would you pick: KSP, a Modern Military Shooter, or a Modern Action RPG? Would you say KSP is exactly a relaxing game when just learning? I know I wouldn't. While KSP is a great game for those who know a little aerodynamics or rocket science, it still requires you to do all of the hard work yourself. Even NASA has help with piloting, and got to the bloody Moon and back with computers about as powerful as a Commodore 64. Unless there are plans to include a stock-ified version of MechJeb and Kerbal Engineer Redux, you're gonna have a lot of console gamers looking at the math left in front of them and saying "Screw this, I'm playing (insert game here)." KSP does one thing excellently deep within, and that is the fact that nothing fails without a reason. If your plane crashes and explodes just after takeoff from doing a heavy backflip, stall, then back-flop, it's because you designed it wrong. It gives you the tools to say, "Hey, look, my CoM is behind my CoL. No wonder it flies like a brick with a paper plane tied to it." But it doesn't lead you to that without knowing basic aerodynamics. There's no in-career/Sandbox tutorial on "How to Build your First Plane" or "Rocket Building 101" or "Rovers for Dummies" to teach you "Hey, your center of lift is in the wrong spot and could make your plane very unstable." There's no easy button to push that says "Simulate fuel drain" so that you can watch the center of mass change when building that first plane. There's no easy button to push that says "Check my TWR" to make sure you actually have enough punch to get off the pad. As a result, and this points back to that rocket-sled-learning-wall, you end up with players who look at KSP and think, "Cool, a space game about an alien space program!" and then two or three hours later, are upset because Rocket 1 fell over on the pad, Rocket 2 got off the ground, overheated the parachute, and then exploded on impact, Rocket 3 veered wildly off and became Single Stage to Ocean, Rocket 4 hit the VAB, and Up-Goer 5 went up straight and true, but despite reaching space and going rather very high, never made orbit because they just went straight up to try orbiting. In other words, KSP could highly benefit from some tutorials. Yes, I know, there's supposedly tutorials in the main screen, but they're almost inaccessible without backing all the way out from your current save. And the stock crafts really, really need to be revised to allow them to just work right out of the gate, without being excellent at anything. So there should be a basic little trainer plane that does a great job at teaching you how to fly, but will never be space capable, a first rocket that won't make orbit, but will show how to do proper staging and what a rocket should look like, and a basic rover capable of traveling around the space center, but isn't useful until some parts have been added. I think KSP might be able to do well on Console, if they can squash the crippling bugs first.

Out of curiosity, is there some way to enable an auto-return to center? Essentially, I'd like to make a self-centering rotatron, so that after applying an input, then releasing the key, it automatically starts returning to its default position.

Tested this for Science! And yeah, the wheels don't work. Nothing catastrophic happens, the wheels just literally do nothing. Looks like when KSP switched to unity 5, they left no room for backwards compatibility, which I personally think was a bit foolish. I can understand putting their own wheels on the ridiculously-unusable new wheel code that spazzes out when too many wheels are in the same 2.2km zone, but at least leave the unity 4 wheel colliders as a fallback for mod support. And yes, I know, someone out there's probably asking, "Why would you risk your game to test this?" One, I did it to a brand new save, so I wouldn't lose anything, and two, I've got high-speed internet. If I had to do an emergency re-download of KSP because I broke something really really badly, I wouldn't be too bothered by it. And three, if something broke terribly, I could give a warning to leave this be, and if something broke smoothly, I could simply mention what happened. And in this case, things failed smoothly. Honestly, I was hoping for something epic to happen, but I suppose not all tests can have catastrophic results every time. Never been so disappointed in breaking something before. And to think I tried to come up with every solution to break these things when I was on the testing team ages ago... Still, I'm not worried. I'll just remove the non-functional Kerbal Foundries from my 1.1.3 save and continue my usual insanity.

Tank steering, or is there a return-to-center mode on hinges in there? Might have to try it if it's the second.

This, admittedly, was back in 0.90, but I was having fun land-skimming in a motor-glider and mis-interpreted my wingspan. That bit of debris up there in the first picture, at 1.3 km away, that's my other wing, or more specifically, a couple solar panels and a control surface. Landing wasn't so great, but then again, you try landing a plane with one wing and keyboard controls. (As for the parts, the cockpit was from the SXT mod, the engine and tail boom are modified derivatives from it by duplicating and config bashing. Needed glider parts that were sturdy, and I wanted a small electric propeller engine, and a battery-laden tail boom made more sense than having one full of liquid fuel. Made for a decently fun land-skimmer provided I didn't do that. Apologies for the craptastic lighting, I wasn't intending on crashing my plane, I was enjoying a last-minute just-before-dusk electric flight. I just figured I'd take screenshots when it happened.)

I vote that we make sure said fish is a live shark first, though.

Definitely could use some bigger boosters. And some smaller boosters. And more boosters in general. More Boosters! "If the number of boosters on the ship = x, then the number of boosters you should have is x+1. Remember to redo the math after adding a booster."

In some cases, it's transfer time. A lot of us play with a ton of mods, and we stick with the older versions until mods update to the new one. In other cases, as with 1.0.5, there's crippling bugs in the new version. Keeping 1.0.5 comes down to two words: Working Wheels. An experiment for you in 1.1.3, which will show you exactly why some of us are on 1.0.5 and older: Build any semi-large craft that requires at least 12 wheels. Use any wheel other than the XL3 ones. Enjoy your dancing, uncontrollable nightmare. (if it doesn't bug out on 12 wheels, add wheels in sets of two until you find the breaking point. It may be different for everyone.) Now, with that design in mind, if you still have 1.0.5, build the same craft. Take note of how the wheels don't bug out. Also take note of all the mods that made good wheels that are still stuck in 1.0.5 because Unity 5 trashed the wheel code. Also, take note of all the people complaining about the landing gear being made of toothpicks and styrofoam. While some of this is pilot error or engineering errors (Hard landings, or not enough landing gear for the weight), you also have to deal with the same rover wheel bug problem causing dancing airplanes that eventually either break their gear or wreck the plane. On top of that, landing legs, from what I've heard, now suffer the exact same problems as the rover wheels, and more. Some reports say that they slide, or your landers play dancing-spider on touchdown. So basically, the game's better in every way, except you can't take off or land airplanes because the wheels are prone to spazzing out, and you can't land rockets because the landing legs are rubbish, and you can't use rovers because they end up being dancing exploding spiders. At least, that was 1.1.2. I haven't thrown around 1.1.3 enough to see if it's also buggy, but given that there was no mention in the changelog about anything relating to wheels, I'm gonna let the community bug-test that for me and see if there is any improvement. Meanwhile, I'll stick to 1.0.5 until I hear the wheels are improved and actually usable again.

I play in Windowed mode, and with two screens. KSP and something else, constantly. KSP in the SPH, I'm probably either watching a movie, looking at crafts on YouTube for inspiration, or listening to music and browsing the forum. KSP in the World, it's probably music and the Forum.

Well, I never binned 1.1.2, but I never made a backup of it. My last backup is 1.0.5, and I have 1.1.3 now. Haven't spent much time with 1.1.3, though. 1.0.5 has working wheels and a lot of mods I love using. I've only launched a couple rockets in 1.1.3, and nothing overly substantial.

Yep, except there's nothing to explore. It all looks the same. I mean, even if the other planets have nothing to start with, would it be impossible or impractical to dot Kerbin with a few major and a few minor cities, each with their own runways and a bonus to recovery for landing on a runway in a city? And I'm sure if enough Kerbals were deposited on other planets, they'd start making an outpost with similar construction to the KSC, just so they had somewhere to live that isn't their space ship. It'd solve a problem for me, which is that the only things I see on the planets other than the easter eggs are my own footsteps.

I think that, more than balancing a budget and unlocking science points off the tree, is why I don't play career mode. Couldn't ever point out why, but that sounds like the reason. I'm one of the KSP veterans who started in 0.18 (might've been 0.17, but I mostly remember airplanes being a thing, and that jet engines actually needed an intake now) and for me, flying a mission from start to finish is very satisfying. Flying a mission from start to near finish, leaving things in orbit, was satisfying. Starting a mission to orbit, having to then jump back to KSC and pick up contracts that just unlocked, launch a towering pillar of satellites into orbit, scatter those off toward their destinations, jump back to my first mission and start the transfer burn, settle into an orbit around the Mun, jump over to the KSC and grab a contract to deorbit a lost Kerbal, retrieve said lost Kerbal, move a satellite from the Mun to Minmus to satisfy a contract, make my Mun Landing, and then forget about the Mun mission for a while because we really need to pay attention to the probes creeping toward Jool now. That is not satisfying at all. I'm not saying that Career mode isn't capable of being fun, I'm just saying that I found no fun in it myself. Career mode, in the early game, is grindy as heck. Then when you think it's going to get better because you're able to go interplanetary, it's still grindy as heck. The only time it stops being grindy as heck is when you end up filling out the tech tree before you've even explored more than Kerbin, Mun, Minmus, and one other planet. And then it's just boring because you've got fifty-billion missions started and no desire to finish any of them because they're not worth it anymore. I think that might also be a big chunk of why I don't go interplanetary in Sandbox: there's even less to do. At least in Science or Career mode, you get to use those science experiments and get witty comments. In Sandbox, you get a generic thinner-than-toilet-paper dialogue about how no-one's listening.

I've had Jeb look that worried once before, and it was when I deployed main-drogues too early (using full chutes as drogue chutes because drogues weren't slowing me down enough) and the chutes broke because I was going too fast. It only lasted a few seconds before he had his grin again. And yes, he did survive. Emergency cockpit ejection and parachute systems were installed just in case I couldn't slow down the rest of the plane.

I'm a novice at train driving, but I do use the SAS. With reaction wheels (if any) set to SAS-Only, then the computer helps me keep from rolling on slopes. But most of the time, I don't have reaction wheels onboard, and turning SAS on is an artifact of me being a keyboard-pilot.

If, and that's a big if, the terrain and conditions were unique and timewarp was upgraded so that long travels could be done quickly (including warping through SOI transitions with reasonable transition accuracy - I don't mind spending extra delta-V to slow down if the trip's made quicker), then yes, I might spend more time off of Kerbin. Also, they'd have to fix the terrain-seam bug where the default Unity wheels catch on the terrain tile edges and destroy rovers (yes, I know, we see a wheel, but it's really just a stick with a wheel on the end, and that's the problem - the default wheels catch on the slight imperfections in the map layout and cause problems) before I'd seriously consider the extra time of building rockets and figuring out how to land my contraptions on, say, Eve. (Eve's a fun planet in its own right, but the pain of getting to it, getting through the atmosphere and gravity density, it outweighs the fun I can have driving around because there's just nothing to do there. Now, if that super-gravity made the terrain more interesting, and the pea-soup atmosphere could make flying more interesting (which, I'll admit, it does.) and they worked together such that a mobile base with two or three foldable scout drones could be used to explore where you're going to drive to next, then I might consider leaving Kerbin for a while. As it is, it's just Kerbin tinted purple with pea-soup atmosphere and high gravity. Yeah, I'll admit to prioritizing the destination over the trip. For me, getting there is not the fun part. Building the rocket or spaceplane to get me away from Kerbin, yeah that's fun. Driving around on the planet surface? The first times I did it, it was fun, until I realized the only differences are the effect gravity has on my machine, and whether the ground is more flat or not. But now, after having landed on each of the planets once or twice, the destination is no longer interesting enough to justify the trip. I mean, yeah, some of the stuff on your list is difficult and a great engineering challenge, but I have done some of it. I have gravity-assisted into a Jool Orbit with Laythe. Was planning on landing at Laythe, but didn't dare hit Laythe's atmosphere at interplanetary speeds. So technically, it was a Gravity Assisted Laythe landing and return, just I used Laythe and Jool to slow down enough to land safely. Only done it once, and fun though it was, I can't recall the conditions all the planets were in that gave me that slingshot. Leaving Eve with a Kerbal, I've done this, just not stock. I have no interests in trying to do it stock. In fact, it's one of the biggest reasons I ended up figuring out there's no advantage to going to other planets other than the mystery of the first landing, because bringing all that crap with me just to get basically a MK1 Cockpit, barely enough fuel reserves, and a nuclear engine back to Kerbin, well, I didn't find it quite as fun as it sounded originally. I have little interest in Jool-5 or Grand Touring, just because of the above mentioned things. Jool-5 might be interesting, but I've been, as mentioned, on all the moons before. Grand Tour just doesn't sound fun to me. One ship to all the planets and then back home, even with mod parts, is still a massive amount of sitting at 10 FPS waiting and waiting and waiting. There's then the morality problem: there's two known problem worlds that have a huge difficulty for returning from, so do we consider this a one-way Grand Tour and leave Kerbals behind, or do we over-engineer our stuff to drag these guys back to orbit, and have room for them to ride home again? It's why the big missions never really appealed to me. But, then again, perhaps I'm just not into the numbers game as much. I don't like sitting here calculating every ounce of fuel I'll need to get to Eve and back with a cockpit, fuel, and engine. I'd rather throw a rocket stack together that I know will make it to Eeloo if I flew it properly, but I'll use that to fly to Duna because my dV window is huge comparatively. Efficiency is not my strong suit.

I'll weigh in on this one and my reasons why. Yeah, I don't go interplanetary. I've done it before, visited every planet once, though individually and often times not in the same saves. Why don't I go interplanetary? It's simple: There is nothing I can do on the other planets that I cannot do back on Kerbin. If I want to go boating? There's an ocean no more than 5 minutes away from KSC by rover. If I want to fly a plane? Build it in the SPH and send myself hurtling over mountains, barely above the ground. If I want to make a rocket? Typically, I don't, but I can make a rocket and fly it to orbit. If I feel like driving for a bit? I can build a rover and wander around Kerbin. I can do almost anything without leaving Kerbin. For the one or two things where I need low gravity to enjoy them, well, it's not hard to get to the Mun or Minmus, and then I can have my low-gravity party with rocket-rover crater jumping. As for how to fix this? I'm pretty sure that until we can build cities (and no, making bases and outposts doesn't count, I'm talking the idea of shipping a few dozen kerbals to a planet and having them automatically build a city with similar architecture to the KSC, with roads and buildings.) and thereby shuttle Architect Kerbals to planets in all three modes (Career, Science, and Sandbox), there's no real use, at least to me, to go to the other planets.