Xavven

There are several reasons career is harder than science mode. It adds limited funding and limited starting facilities as constraints. In science mode you have limited technology but can build as big as you need to and can retry as many times as needed. In career mode, you can fail the game if you fail too many time in a row and deplete your funds. Career also forces you to complete contracts to replenish funding. Some of those contracts aren't worth the time and effort, or might even cost you more to complete than they actually pay out, so you have to know enough about the game to pick and choose the right contracts. Contracts also might require precision landings, specific orbits, etc. and many of those requirements (and the skills needed for them) aren't needed in science mode. I find it to be more fun than science mode because of the added challenge. It has its shortcomings that have been discussed quite a bit over the years, though. My personal opinion is that it could be improved by having annual costs that increase as you upgrade facilities and have more flights in progress, and annual government funding that increases as your reputation increases, and reputation decreases if you haven't done anything in a while -- this would make time warping is more consequential.

I like surface exploration too, but I dislike rovers specifically. My exploration vehicles are mostly hoppers. When propellers were added, my Eve exploration vehicle of choice became a quad-copter. Before that, I had designed a rover with a roll cage and flip-righting mechanism and drove several tens of kilometers with it, some manned, some not. It's fun trying to get up a crater edge and back down without eating dirt. But in the end, wheeled vehicles are too slow for instant-gratification me.

I don't miss that at all! And then there were times when adding too many struts would cause parts to explode on the launchpad, so you'd have to figure out which ones to remove to stop that problem. It was a balancing act. Ugh!

That is pretty noodly! Mine looked a lot like that when I joined circa 0.21 or so. Was that screenshot taken before 2.5m parts?

I remember learning how to build thrust plates to make big rockets when the Rockomax Jumbo-64 was the largest fuel tank we had and the Mainsail was the most powerful engine we had. Everything back then had to be asparagus staging once you reached a certain size. Now we have 5m parts and my rockets look more reasonable.

Great idea! Thanks for sharing this. I put mini docking ports on things I think will need refueling, but even though a mini docking port is light, its weight is actually significant on smallish satellites. It's sometimes enough to unbalance a craft to the point that I have to counterbalance it with either a second mini docking port or something else of similar weight on the opposite side. I'll definitely use this trick.

OP is wrong. The orbital velocity of a circular orbit at Mun's altitude (12 km) is 543 m/s. As 543 m/s of delta-v would put you at a dead stop, meaning your periapsis would be literally the dead center of Kerbin, it couldn't take more than 543 m/s to lower your periapsis to aerabraking altitude. I'll fire up KSP right now to check the actual. Ok, here we go. Screenshots say it all:

The reason it takes less delta-v to return to Kerbin from a Mun orbit than it does from an equivalent altitude from Kerbin orbit is you're in a way using a powered gravity assist. The Mun itself has an orbital velocity of 543 m/s with respect to Kerbin. And let's say your spacecraft is orbiting around Mun at 280 m/s. That means that from the perspective of someone on Kerbin, your spacecraft is going 543 + 280 = 823 m/s when your spacecraft is orbiting in the same direction of the Mun. But on the other side of the orbit, your spacecraft is going in the opposite direction, so an observer on Kerbin would see your velocity as 543 - 280 = 263 m/s. It's only when your spacecraft is going neither with nor against Mun's orbit that your spacecraft looks like it's going 543 m/s around Kerbin (the equivalent of another spacecraft orbiting Kerbin at the same altitude as Mun). So if you want to go slower with respect to Kerbin, would you rather be the spacecraft orbiting Kerbin at 543 m/s, or the one going effectively 263 m/s during a certain part of its orbit around Mun? If you burn to escape Mun while going the opposite direction of its orbit, you end up with a lower orbital velocity with respect to Kerbin. This is the video that helped me understand gravity assists the best. Although it doesn't explain your specific question, the concepts are related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utpzQfDdUJs and pay attention to the 5:00 - 6:00 part the most. The key thing to understand here is that you take into account BOTH the velocity of your spacecraft AND the Mun, all compared to the parent body.

I still find it odd that EVA fuel is magically refilled when returning to the craft. Shouldn't it be taken from monopropellant or something? Infinite EVA refills just doesn't seem right.

I totally remember those days! I joined KSP right around the time it entered Early Access on Steam, like 0.23 or something. Bigger rockets were so wobbly you'd have to build a skeletal structure out of i-beams and then attach the tanks to it. Bigger monstrosities would have dozens of struts. Most players on the forums recommended the Kerbal Joint Reinforcement mod which fixed the noodly-rocket syndrome. Since then, the devs made the joints more rigid in stock, but if I'm not mistaken, the Kerbal Joint Reinforcement mod still exists for players who want even more rigid rockets. Just a suggestion for the OP. But personally, I think stock strikes a good balance. Rockets that are a reasonable size and don't have tanks hanging off the sides tend to be rigid enough, and a couple strategically placed struts here and there shores up wobbly issues on bigger rockets. But it's nothing like the old days where it looked like your rocket had a freaking spider web of struts all over the exterior.

This right here. Once I unlock the Gravioli detector, Dres is one of my targets for orbital science farming.

I frequently flip my rovers because I don't drive cautiously, so my designs include a roll cage and motorized hinges that flip the rover back over.

Eve is good for rovers. Solar power is plentiful, and the high gravity gives you traction. Going up a mountain is kinda hard though if you don't have great power to weight. My first rover had to do lots of switchbacks and spent a lot of time recharging batteries. My Eve rover mission transmitted over 3000 science back because it was able to visit so many places! Ultimately, however, I scrapped the Eve rover in favor of an Eve quadcopter. It can get around much faster.

If I'm not mistaken, you can launch a new science lab and then collect the same data and get more science again. You just can't repeat the same data experiment in the same lab. This makes it so that science is infinite, only limited by available funding, which you can get from repeating contracts within Kerbin's SOI. This also means that the game loop is a little different than most games. Usually you're forced to progress until you beat the game. Career mode on the other hand is sandbox with some grind thrown in to give the illusion of purpose. Honestly, it works sorta well, but its limits really start showing the more I play KSP.

I remember several threads on this same subject years ago. Science labs are OP in my opinion if you make the assumption that the goal of the game is to complete the tech tree, make tons of money, and push out to the innermost and outermost planets. Indeed, that's the gameplay loop that KSP set up. However, this can also be thought of as an open-world, sandbox game where you make your own goals. The lab gives an alternate means of completing the tech tree without forcing the player to grind Minmus landings or go interplanetary. Speaking of which, last I heard the statistics showed that a lot of players (not just the ones who post on this forums) don't actually make it to the interplanetary phase of the game. For them, the lab is the key to make the later nodes of the tree accessible, which you need if you want to make giant Mun landers that takes 20 passengers, or space shuttles. Neither of those are required to mine science from Mun and Minmus, but people make them for fun. Lately I've been playing around with quad-copters despite not really needing them for science or money farming, strictly speaking. That said, I have a suggestion. Time warping needs to mean something. I think that your space program should have a monthly operating cost that represents building maintenance, salaries, etc. and that operating cost increases with building upgrades, kerbals currently on mission, and probe cores on mission. That way, when you time warp to get a new set of contracts, complete lab science, or get breaking-ground deployed science finished, it actually costs you something.

Over 1700

Try doing a quadcopter mission on Eve. I just got done with a design that has a max groundspeed of 128 m/s at 10,000m altitude on Eve. Much faster than my last ground rover design could achieve, and hills were of course no problem since, y'know, flight.

That's a good point. It took me a lot of trial and error before I settled on my current plan for Gilly. Start with a low Eve PE on the intercept Lower the AP to about Gilly's altitude on the orbital insertion burn Go to AP and raise PE to about Gilly's altitude as well Orbit is now slow enough that inclination change isn't expensive. However, this assumes you also get yourself a low inclination in a mid-course correction on the way to Eve. Which, yeah as a newbie I never knew to do this or even how to do this.

IMO, the progression from easiest to hardest is: Kerbin orbit Mun Minmus Ike Gilly Duna Eve (landing only, no return) Dres Jool system (except Tylo landing) Eeloo Moho Tylo landing/return Eve return The only reason I put Gilly before Duna is that Gilly requires so little delta-v to move around that it's worthwhile to get there to trigger contracts like "get temperature readings from these locations on the surface". You send one lander with a thermometer, pressure sensor, accelerometer, and gravioli detector with ~3000 m/s of dV on the lander stage and your money problems are over. Each contract will only use about 100 m/s from the existing lander, so you can complete a bunch of them before running out of fuel. Also, the Jool system might be harder to get to than Dres, but in terms of science it's far more worth it. You can collect a metric ton of science with a fly-by/orbit probe that neither lands on anything nor returns to Kerbin, but that swings around every moon, high orbit and low orbit, transmitting science back. If you have gravioli by this point then it can complete the rest of the tech tree.

Short answer: yes Long answer: I've been a gamer for about 30 years, and I've played more KSP than any other single title in my entire life. That speaks volumes to how good this game is. Sure I have some criticisms, but only because it's my favorite game and I continue to care about it.

My rovers are built like go-carts with a roll-cage, and the roll cage is attached to a hinge on one side. If I roll over accidentally, the whole "roof" of the car flips open like a clamshell, flipping the rover back onto its wheels. But the most important thing I learned about rovers is that they aren't very good in low gravity environments, but only because I'm impatient and want to go 30 m/s everywhere. On places like the Mun, I just build hoppers with 3000+ dV. On higher gravity areas like Eve, that's where rovers shine IMO.

Juggling between missions just isn't fun for me. Normally I like to play for a certain amount of realism, and in reality a space program isn't going to hibernate for 2 years waiting for a Hohmann transfer to complete, but I really enjoy playing a mission from start to finish. The time elapsed since the start of the game is just a number and has 0 effect on gameplay. Who cares if my space program has been going for 400 Kerbin years?

I'll start by saying all of that is perfectly valid, but the wonky things that make the game fun to you, make them not fun to me. I want my rockets to look aerodynamic. I don't want my decoupler on my spark to look like its fairing is floating in mid air. I want it to look: like this not like this I get that I the game will allow you to do whatever you want, but what annoys me is that it makes no sense. This looks bad to me (no offense) because of the extreme drag the ledge at the bottom should cause. Nobody should build something like this:

Two main reasons: You start with manned spaceflight and don't get probes until mid-game. And oddly, Kerbals don't need electricity to live, but probes do have a constant electrical drain, so probes aren't viable until you get solar panels from the Electrics node. Parts get grouped into some of the most random research nodes. Examples: Advanced Exploration has extendable ladders and... the Mobile Processing Lab. These aren't even close to being the same level of complexity. Advanced Flight Control has RCS parts (okay makes sense) but also... command pods? The Skipper is in Heavy Rocketry, the 2.5m fuel tanks are in the Fuel Systems node, and the Rockomax Brand adapter (1.25m to 2.5m size) is in the General Construction node. Unless you have the Making History expansion, you need all three nodes to make use of the 2.5m rocket size without it looking like a wedding cake. Side bonus: the 2.5m EP-25 Engine Plate is in the Specialized Construction node, a full tier higher than Heavy Rocketry and Fuel Systems. Longer fuel tanks for a given diameter are often in higher science node tiers compared to their shorter versions, which is pointless when you can just stack two of the shorter ones together to get the same amount of fuel. Except the Tier 1 VAB has a 30 part limitation (which makes no sense) so early on, getting the longer fuel tanks helps you circumvent that limitation, but then the Tier 2 VAB has such a high part count limitation as to not be a factor at all. So the gameplay loop doesn't really fit here. The 0.625m stack separator is in the Miniaturization node, but the 0.625m regular decoupler (which should be a simpler part) is found a full tier later in the Precision Engineering node. You need one of them if you want the Spark engine in the Propulsion Systems node and not have it look stupid when you attach it to an upper-stage and a middle-stage on your rocket. And for some reason the Propulsion Systems node has the Status-V Minified Monopropellant Tank in it (the one with 7.5 monoprop fuel) which TBH should be in the Advanced Flight Control node with the other RCS tank. And Propulsion Systems also has the Baguette external fuel tank, but the smaller Dumpling external fuel tank isn't found until a full tier later in the Precision Propulsion node. None of this makes any sense!!

IT Professional here. Microsoft Office famously does this to avoid data loss and corruption. Ironically this has backfired in our current environment and actually causes data loss, but despite that, the concept in general is sound.