Pthigrivi

^That's great, thanks for doing that Kuansenhama. I really like that hex panel! I deliberately skipped a few because they'd already been mentioned but you could put me down for: - Larger static and deployable panels - 2.5m Nerva and 1.25m ion - 1.5m and 2.5m nuclear reactors - Mid-large wheel above the TR-2L, and replace the XL3 with a large crawler style track - EVA attachable fuel line (and strut) - Aerodynamic RCS blocks and lights.

Yeah this has been high in my mind throughout all of my suggestions. Difficulty settings are fine for setting funds and science returns, but they don't reorganize the tech tree. For this there really should be a few thoughtful changes to make progression as manageable and sensible as possible no matter where you place your settings.

Remember this is quite early in the game and low speed landings are pretty challenging for new players. At that stage of the game providing a forgiving landing platform is more important than the fractional weight savings of the tiny legs.

I tend to agree with this. The game really does seem to encourage players to go for a Mun or Minmus mission early, so it makes sense that they'd give us proper legs to do it. Lots of people have said they should start with planes and probes but hooey to that! Id actually like to see a few changes for landing gear: move the LT-1 to Survivability, the LT-05 to Miniaturization. Above that I could see the LT-2 redesigned with a toggleable aerodynamic housing, and an even larger set that either folds out and telescopes or rotates down space x style.

Maybe a better way to say it would be that all science information is automatically stored on all pods. If a ship undocked, the information would still be on both pods. If two ships with different data logs docked the data would be duplicated so that each had both compliments. After transmission a player could be prompted to clear data. They may want to keep it in case the new antenna system could provide a boost, or they may want to clear it just to declutter the window. Samples would have to be different. I'll confess Im not a programmer so I couldn't say exactly but keeping track of each sample's name and value and where its stored could prove difficult. I suggested a maximum of 3 sample slots per pod (or perhaps 1 sample slot for each seat) to give some balance to the Science Lab, and these samples would need to be tracked until they were processed or recovered. You would also need UI in the VAB and in Science Labs for reviewing previously recovered samples and loading them into Materials bays. Materials bays themselves would need a special UI so you could see what's been loaded and how far along each sample study has progressed. I imagine they would be labeled things like "Surface Sample from Munar Higlands" or "Upper Atmosphere Sample from above Eve's Oceans", or in the case of special contract samples "Larvae sample for Sean's Cannery". I think for simplicity once a sample was recovered or processed Materials bays could be loaded from it indefinitely. That way players don't feel like they have to gather 20 samples everywhere they land (this is about de-grinding things, after all). I'd love to see something like this in stock, but if you're really into the idea of modding this we should probably start a thread over in Add-on Discussions.

I'm usually against part upgrades but I have to say I don't hate this idea. It could be tough to find but there could be a balanced way to offer a few finite improvements over time. If they were held within 10% or so they could provide a nice incentive without breaking the game.

I generally play stock but goof around with mods from time to time. They're fun, but often get a bit weedy. There's already a lot going on this game. Its also time consuming. For anyone who's busy with other things it can feel tough investing hours into something and not really getting very far. I love KAS and TAC but I'd prefer to see them in a simplified, fully integrated form. USI-LS is close, but the greenhouses are a bit finicky and I'd love to truly live off the land. I also tend to think habitation modules without a simple habitation mechanic doesn't really add much beyond some RP color. For me the question is how could these types of features be brought in in the cleanest, most streamlined fashion that still adds that layer of thinking and possibility to a cohesive game. Other mods like KER and KAC especially really should find some kind of implementation, as they are themselves big time-savers. I don't think we necessarily need all of the information KER provides, but some basics like dV and TWR would hugely cut down on repeat missions, help players improve faster, and overall shift time away from frustrating failures toward more fun, productive missions. These kinds of things could pretty easily be staged into building upgrades if Squad was afraid of overwhelming new players with too much data. Its one thing if you run out of fuel in on the surface of the Mun and have to send a rescue mission, its another if you run out of fuel around Jool with an orbitally constructed mother ship because you had no information about transfer windows or how much dV you had on board.

I just posted some thoughts on experiments over in the career fixes thread so I wont repeat them here, but yes^ definitely differentiating between experiments and using them to unlock information valuable to the player outside of the tech tree would be the biggest thing for making experiments useful after the tree is complete. Making heat and drag bars visible, accurate resource mapping, aerobrake and trajectories factoring drag, TWR and dV information all seem like great places for this. As for what to do with accrued science at this point... Its hard to say? Converting them into funds is fine, but I agree with a few others here that the funds multipliers for bigger contracts are probably much too high. This might be difficult to balance, but it would be nice if we still had to think carefully about budgets even when mounting late-game Jool missions. If late game funds were tightened up converting science to funds wouldn't seem redundant or past the point of real value. All of this would be easier to discern if the game provided a slightly more defined goal. I happen to think it should be focused on exploration, with a general main-quest win state accomplished after a successful crewed mission to each body in the game. This isn't to say that even after this contracts for building bigger and better stations, bases and managing a real interplanetary colony system couldn't still be a fun, open endgame. Roverdude's MKS is fun but probably a little unwieldy for stock. Just including some basic life support systems with scrubbers and greenhouses fed perhaps with IRSU fertilizer could make for a relatively simple but still ambitious colony mechanic.

Of course! The purpose here really is to try to boil down some constructive feedback for Squad, but I'd be happy to see some of these in any form. If I were to pick out just one thing to delve more deeply into it would be the science system. This was the more thorough breakdown I drew up a little bit ago:

I mean their names are Bill, Bob, and Jebediah.

^Oh I'm sorry I misunderstood then. That's an interesting addition. In your thinking would there be other computer controlled active flights?

Im not saying the space race system couldn't work, but I agree it could end up being even more proscriptive than what we already have. The real foil in KSP is the physics of spaceflight. Tylo and Eve are your adversaries, not the soviets. Kerbal is already very successful despite some of the current wrinkles, which means something is certainly working. To me tightening up career mode would mean identifying the activities that make Kerbal fun, growing these, and shifting gameplay time and energy away from processes that get a little draggy. If we were to be as helpful as we could be we would also be able to identify these areas as precisely as possible so as to make changes as efficient as possible in terms of the most gameplay improvement for the least possible (re)development time. To me, the activities players enjoy most are: 1) Problem solving in the VAB/SPH--creating new, working machines. 2) Using these machines to overcome complex challenges in flight. 3) Learning physics not from reading a book (or flavor text), but by engaging with it in real-time. The elements dragging things down a bit are: 1) Requiring players to engage in repetitive, sometimes tedious missions to achieve goals. 2) Attention diverted from flying to repetitively click through many instruments to earn science points. 3) Being forced to repeat long, complex missions due to lack of information and trivial failures. So to me the most efficient solutions would be: 1) Focusing the game on exploration and giving players control over what body to explore next by making World Firsts prominent and available from the outset. 2) Reducing science grind and making experiments more engaging by tying them by automating collection and tying payouts to specific maneuvers. 3) Provide players with progressive, timely information to help them improve throughout their program's development. For now I'll leave out the lack of defined goal and end-game as this is a slightly more controversial topic, but I do think the fact that players are treating tech-tree completion as game completion is probably an indication that something is missing.

No, those were suggestions for middle tiers, which are fine but a bit bland at the moment. Use your imagination though. These are little green dudes who want to go to space. Realism in this case is pretty flexible. I don't think we need be overly concerned with cleanrooms. I think its quite easy to imagine they needed cheep, uninhabited land to test rockets and found an abandoned airfield that was once an old farm. There could be half disassembled aircraft and shipping containers around, the SPH is a rusty old hangar, they're running operations out of a winnabago, its a good story! Later as they progress they can afford bigger and badder equipment, but this places you where they began. This is why those of us that understood we were looking at process renderings were so excited, because career mode was finally embracing a sense of real creativity and character.

Like I said, I have zero interest in starting another big fight over this. Needless to say, it does seem Squad has learned we can't be trusted with this kind of thing. Think about a game like Skyrim. Obviously the dragon armor looks 'cooler' than fur armor, but that's not to say both can't have their own artistic charm. This is pretty standard stuff in gaming. I happen to quite like the idea of a few intrepid kerbals cobbling things together from spare parts in old farm turned abandoned airfield. Its just fun, and there's a bravery and a romance to it, the way a kid might imagine building a makeshift rocket out of parts from a junkyard. And yeah, after a few launches, reaching orbit maybe, you're going to start upgrading to more rough-industrial looking buildings, then space-age, then a state of the art facility. Sure, you could just have tier zero be a bland miniature of the current facilities, but you'd be missing a huge opportunity for the player to engage in a real sense of story and progress. Just a few images that could be cool for tiers 2 and 3:

But the buildings are inherently bound up in the process of progression. The first teir shouldn't look as "nice" as the last teir, that's precisely the point. Funkier, cooler even, but deliberately less polished. In fact the greater the difference the more sense of accomplishment and growth they imply.

Many of them could work for both, and should, really. I know they're rethinking some of the rocket logic, I really hope we'll get a fuel-switch type option for tanks. I'd love to have a larger 2.5m bay option as well. It's a bummer that after putting a materials bay in the service bay there's no more room for another inline 1.25m part.

I'm really praying this thread doesn't devolve. Before people go nuts again, try to remember that what they showed us was work in progress, not the final product. Anyone who's done modeling or really any form of art knows it's pretty rare to mill something out in final form. You work first in studies, sketches, and drafts, slowly honing down to a finished form. What's seen above was somewhere along that chain, and was released as a sneak peek in the (unfortunately misplaced) hope we would be mature enough to understand that. We've paid for our overreaction sadly in the loss of a 4 trier game for more than a year. I'd just hope people could show a little patience and an aesthetic open mind over what's to come. That said, besides the obvious gameplay advantages of the more gradual step-ups 4 tiers would provide, I really do think the barn held such promise. There was a playful character to it, the hint of a real story of scrappy beginnings that seemed rich and fun and fit so well. I'm really hoping something of that survives.

Sorry yeah this was a misleading summary. What I meant was the runway should always be smooth, but the tier zero runway should be much smaller, and increase in size with each upgrade to finish at the current tier 3 length and width. I'd be down with an angled secondary runway but since there's no wind its not really necessary. Even if you're going for a polar orbit its pretty easy to turn soon after take-off and run up almost all of your speed facing north.

Yeah this I think is where game progression really comes into play. That trial and error stage is hugely valuable and kind of critical to the early stages of playing, where you're trying to get a sense of how much fuel you need for different stages, attempting to gain an intuitive knowledge of ISP and launch profiles. No matter what, this stage is going to be hard, and keeping things clean and uncluttered from information overload seems smart. This initial informationless stage to me really extends to a players first successful orbit. Next players naturally will be gunning for a Mun or Minmus mission. Even at this point they don't really need to worry too much about delta-V--just starting to get acquainted with maneuvers and landing seems plenty. It's after this point as players start to move into mounting interplanetary missions that things like delta-V and transfer windows become really invaluable. There's no reason this kind of staged information growth couldn't be managed through building upgrades--granting things like alarms and dV and mission planning at tiers 2 or 3 out of 4. As you've said, this game is plenty hard. What should be the focus is helping players to improve. Trial and error is a big part of learning, but in the later stages of the game it can be a huge time suck, and draws players into laborious, repetitive gameplay rather than allowing them to focus on the elements of the game that are most fun. Think about it, if you were a new player with no transfer window information how many probes would you have to send to Duna to figure out the optimum window? How many hours of gameplay would you spend trying to answer this one question? 2? 6? 10 hours? And that for each planet? That seems completely insane to ask of players, which is why people use KAC and olex to do it for them, because its not a good use of in-game time. If you run out of fuel trying to reach the Mun, no biggie, send a rescue mission. But if you're building a multi-launch, orbitally constructed Jool mission you're going to need a dV estimator or risk wasting an incredible amount of time. This is the same reason I've advocated making science experiments involve themselves in the act of flying or become automatic, so that in-game time can be spent learning, flying, and exploring, rather than endlessly clicking through parts. More than that though, a game really ought to be at least a self-contained playable experience. If stock players have to pause play, minimize the game, open a browser and search through online dV charts and transfer angle calculators something is wrong. Tools necessary to play the game should be in the game, and not require pulling players out of the experience and wasting time searching online.

Since this is the new Career catch-all, just wanted to log a few recent thoughts on contracts: - Contracts could be categorized by the body they pertain to so players could more easily sort and plan missions. If this were done the total number of available contracts could be expanded to perhaps 5 to 10 per body depending on reputation. - World Firsts and Explore contracts to Fly-by, Orbit, Land and Plant Flag could be merged and made available from the outset so players could see the rewards for these missions and more easily focus on them. Advances for these missions however could be locked until a player had amassed enough reputation. The reputation needed to earn these advances should be visible to the player ahead of time so they can strategize. The contract list might then look something like this: Mun: - Explore the Mun - Fly by the Mun [completion reward] - X Advance [Y advance after Z rep] - Achieve Orbit around the Mun [completion reward] - X Advance [Y advance after Z rep] - Land on the Mun [completion reward] - [X advance after Y rep] - Plant a Flag on the Mun [completion reward] - [X advance after Y rep] - Ferry VIP to Orbit around the Mun [completion reward] - X Advance - Collect readings around X [completion reward] - X Advance - Place satellite in stable orbit around the Mun [completion reward] - X Advance This would give players much more freedom to direct their own space programs, visiting the bodies they wish to, while still providing optional constraints, rewards, and side-mission ideas to stretch their creativity.

This thread was another noble effort at collating some thoughts on filling out career mode, a topic that comes up fairly often.

I don't think you have to worry. It's not remote tech, my understanding is things will operate normally without the new dishes, the effect will be purely additive.

All I can remember is Max tweeting about shmelta-vee one time.

Being able to see when parachutes seems pretty critical to me, especially for new players. Re-entry has gotten a lot more difficult with 1.0.5 and making sure you can get your speed down before its too late is really important. I'd be reluctant to make this experiment dependent in fact. I tend to think there are plenty of challenges players face that they might go online and ask help for, they shouldn't have to go online to find out "c" gets them out of IVA. With so much going on the game should really bend over backwards to provide players with the information they need to play. There's certainly a balance between overwhelming new players with more data than they can handle and giving intermediate players access to things like transfer windows and dV ratings. I don't think they need to go as far as KER, but somehow, staged into building upgrades and fed with experimental data perhaps, tools could be provided that would help them move to interplanetary missions without mods or eye-balling planet angles with olex. I imagine the devs know this. A lot has been filled in and I'm sure there's more to come.

I thought the idea was that things would work as normal, but if you've built a communications network you'll get science boosts, presumably increasing the transmission value of science data.