BLUESTREAK

(Also - nicest online community ever...!)

Just a short note to the Dev team. I was going through a bad patch a year or so ago; I'd split up with my long term girlfriend and was very much down and in a rut. Life didn't seem to have much point at all and I was in quite a bad way. I'd always had an interest in space and astronomy when I was 8-9 years old, but had generally let my interest wane a bit. I was looking on steam for something to take my mind off things, when KSP took my eye. Not expecting much - the space genre never gets anything right, after all - I bought it and loaded it up. My first rocket exploded. The one after that, too. After the sixth or seventh rocket had scattered itself over the KSC, I finally achieved sub orbital flight, and the feeling of achievement was palpable. Here was something special. For a whole afternoon, I forgot about my worries and proceeded to scatter pieces of flaming wreckage all over the place, giggling away as I did so. From that point on, whenever I felt down, I loaded KSP and forgot about it. A year later, and I have a wonderful fiancé, I'm studying astrophysics and I spend most evenings in the garden with an 8 inch reflector telescope. And I can trace it all back to one cold, miserable April afternoon when I bought KSP. So, yeah. That's kind of it. Thanks KSP team

I like this idea a great deal. It breathes life into the little chaps, adding huge amounts of character for little additional effort. I think that a radius from the point where they were last controlled by the player based on Stupidity/Courage is a good idea. They're then free to roam. Give them a few animations - note taking, photos, sample taking, rearranging kit, etc and suddenly you have something pretty good. You could link the animations to stupidity levels; the brighter Kerbals taking samples and notes, whilst the thicker ones... jumping up and down on the spot in low gravity, waving at each other, trying to pick their noses through their helmet visors etc. It gives the individuals character beyond how much they scream on takeoff! All in all, this would prevent the overriding impression that I always have of getting to the mun, everyone getting out, and then just hanging around, gawping at each other... The malicious side of me says don't add in anything about cliff faces; if a player is daft enough to leave them on a percipience, over they go! However, that would probably be a little harsh; a bit of code based on terrain contours would probably suffice. Edited for fat fingers.

£17. Of course, all the money I'm now spending on a degree in physics may also have to be added to that total... still, It's the best £17 I've ever spent!

I'm all for this concept, but in a way that makes sense within the context of the game - things that are relatively easy to find, evenly distributed and rewarding. Say, for example, that you're EVAing on the mun... at the moment, it's a case of hop out, take a surface sample, stick in a flag, jump back in, job jobbed. If I've got a rover it's realistically only so I can go to a nearby biosphere to do very much the same from a science point of view (discounting the natural desire to do doughnuts or drive off the edge of craters, of course). So far, so standard. So... what if, on the way to the next biosphere, I see something interesting? An unusual rock, for example? Out I hop, pick it up, and up flashes the ol' science text box saying something along the lines of "Odd... A quartz rock in a silica region - what's this doing here, I wonder?" (+10 Science), or words to that effect. Evenly distributed at random on the surface of a planetary body, with an occurrence of 1 per square kilometer or so. In effect, small items within the context of the game that are rare enough to be unusual when you find them, but not so rare as to stop people deliberately searching, exploring, and generally nosing about. You probably won't find one but it's a nice surprise when you do. It also helps prevent the grind of checking off every biosphere on a surface and running the familiar routine: "Crew report? Check. Surface Sample? Check. Mystery goo, Science Junior, instruments? Check, check, double check. Right, done. Ah well, no need to ever come back to the Midlands again..." There's always a reason to explore. and keep going back. And keep launching.

Although, as 'construction' is on the WNTS list, I think we'd better leave that particular suggestion there...

That's just it. Spacewalks are damned dangerous things to do, and whilst it's very Kerbal to go out just to look at the view, I want there to be a reason to do so. Construction isn't something I'd considered, but in retrospect it's obvious. Perhaps some form of Canadaarm that can only be operated on EVA, in the manner of the rover seats - either for moving satellites out of payload bays, or sticking orbital constructions together - something that can only be done from outside the ship. Because otherwise you do one spacewalk in one SoI, get the science points for it... and that's it. There's never any need to go EVA there ever again. And frankly, that's not much fun. Fixing something that I've bumped into, or sticking a ship together, collecting munrocks, placing experiments - that's what makes KSP for me! What we have now with the science biospheres is a very promising start, but there's a whole wide vista of activities that we could get the little guys to do. It's just the beginning.

Absolutely. I remember the very first time I got orbital in KSP, back when I knew so little about the game. Finally! After all the explosions, I'd finally - oh, happy days - finally got Bill up there, and now all I had to do w- Oh, crap. Reentry. Oh hell, I forgot about that... The panicking realization that I was going to reenter, I didn't have any more fuel to maneuver - I'd killed another kerbal! Bill! No - but wait! that angle looks shallow - just right, by pure fluke, just enough, by god, to get Bill home. Just right that he wouldn't burn up or bounce to a higher orbit. Hell, it was tense. The first lick of flame around the capsule, the look of terror from Bill, the G meter creeping slowly up, would the capsule hold...? Yes! Yes, IT HELD. One of the tensest moments in any game I'd ever played. But there - yes, there! - the tiny parachute opening, billowing, bringing Bill safely home and not fried to a cinder as I expected. The feeling of relief was palpable, the triumph gloriou- wait, what do you mean, no reentry heat? I'd give anything for every reentry to be that tense. No matter how good I get at this game, I want to know that what ever glorious achievements I guide my Kerbals to, it's not over until they're home again. Until they've gone through the terror of reentry, the crushing silence of radio blackout... No, the game is cheapened without it.

Zero G EVA: Repairs, repairs, repairs. The ability to stick solar panels back together, repair damage from clumsy dockings, that sort of thing. I think that EVA packs should be something that needs to be researched too - prior to that, Kerbals go out of the door on the end of a lifeline anchoring them to the hatch which limits their ability to go floating off, in a 1960's sort of way. A tug on the cable would bring you floating back to the hatch. This way EVAs start off as fairly useless before slowly becoming a really useful thing to do. The ability to anchor yourself to things would also some in really handy too - I'm thinking asteroids with no gravity. On a surface: Place scientific instruments such as seismic measurers, laser returners, magnetometers, spectrographs, cosmic ray detectors, temperature gauge, barometric readers, gravity meters, etc - all of which have to be researched first. A portable telescope might be an idea too, depending on the final design of in game scopes, although I appreciate that this is in the 'what no to suggest' list. A small camera to take photos might be an idea too. The ability to put down portable lamps for doing all of this at night, with a limited battery life so after a while you'll need to go recharge them - just to give a bit more to do... And sandcastles. Yeah, sandcastles.

So, I've been playing KSP since about 0.18, and I've been an avid reader of the forums since then, but in a 'Oh, I'll get round to registering at some point' sort of manner. I'll admit that I was firmly in the 'that'll never work' camp, until I read this thread. I only registered just to say how awesome this invention is. I know that it'll probably only last until the next physics update, but it's still fantastic nonetheless. Yeah, so that's basically it. Wow. Just wow.