SkyRender

After doing some testing and confirming that it's very easy to get this to happen: ...I'm going to have to bump this topic back up. Contract-locking is a very real possibility with achievement contracts being impossible to cancel. All it takes is a few careless upgrades and a few bad launches, and you can be stuck with no way to take any contracts to recover your funds. Making them at least not part of the regular contracts list would prevent this rather handily, as well as make it possible to ease new players into the contract system without potentially locking them out of the game almost immediately.

I don't know how for sure how part rebalancing is going to look, but I have a fair idea of how unit conversions for strategies will change. Funds-to-science will be nerfed by at least an order of magnitude, reputation/science-to-funds will be buffed by at least an order of magnitude. Some adjustments will be made to how Aggressive Negotiations works so it neither drains your Reputation like a sponge for rockets larger than a basic orbiter, nor gives you access to free money when you recover vessels on the launchpad. And I really hope they fix the bug that causes Reputation to be discounted twice in the reputation-to-science/funds strategies. Contract payouts are definitely going to get an overhaul too, as well as building prices. The way the two are (un)balanced now, Hard is just an endless grind and even Normal involves an awful lot of tedium to get access to the tools you need to do interesting missions.

Don't bother, we know when it was added: when the Info tab was added. 0.20 to be exact.

I found that out by accident back in 0.23.5, actually. Then I promptly forgot, and wondered how I'd renamed all of those asteroids before. Mystery solved!

I will be the first to admit that I'm not a great artist. But I figured I'd sketch something anyway. Then my scanner decided not to work, so I had to take a photo of the paper I sketched it on. As a result, this looks pretty darn guerrilla: It was interesting to draw, anyway.

I can very much relate to the topic creator's woes, as they were what made me initially quite leery of 0.9. I have found a few workarounds, however. For the SAS issue, always stick an OKTO or HECS on your craft. They're small and not that heavy, and the OKTO is unlocked pretty early on the tech tree. It does suck that pilot Kerbals get such an enormous leg-up over the other classes, but that's just how it is now. For the expense issue, most of that is due to building upgrade costs being two times too high. You can scale them down to a reasonable rate by halving the penalty slider's value. Yes, really; it makes no sense whatsoever that this is how you adjust building costs, but that's how you do it.

There's just something undeniably beautiful about Pol. The rolling hills, the liquid-looking rock spires, the amazing terrain colors... It's my favorite of the Joolian moons.

The actual screenshot of my first-ever rocket never existed, because I never took a screenshot of it. But this was my first "serious" craft (ie. not built for the express purpose of blowing it up): Even by the standards of 0.11, it's not much to look at. But it (mostly!) worked.

Is this topic still going? We've established already that the interest fluctuations are consistent between versions and have an upward trend of increasing interest. People move on, and come back later. That's the nature of gaming, really. Trying to turn it into some sort of panic or make it out as something to worry about is making mountains out of molehills.

I have to wonder how that thing would fly in FAR. Somehow I suspect that the answer would be "not at all".

Well done. You have taken your first step into a much larger world. Though it seems astonishing now, in time you will look back on this moment and realize that it was merely the beginning of something far greater. Well, as long as you don't go back to letting an autopilot do everything for you, that is. But after experiencing the thrill of doing it yourself, I would think that path will seem less appealing now.

I will always remember Hot!Moho for an infamous Scott Manley line in his first video showcasing it: "Well, it WAS going really well until it exploded." That line sums up most failed KSP missions quite well, and applied especially well to attempts to land on Moho prior to the heat being removed.

Just a mid-version lull. It's not anything new, really. Generally speaking, the forums flare in activity around a release and then ease off at a steady rate (generally stabilizing at some point where it's mostly just the regulars), until the hype for the next release starts building. I've seen it happen literally for every release from 0.12 onwards, so it doesn't even faze me at this point. It is kind of sad to see people leave, but at the same time, that's how it is in any community. Most of them come back for the next release, if nothing else.

It looks like they're wearing really weird Halloween masks or something.

It depends on the mission profile. If I'm just working in LKO or around the Mun/Minmus, 70-72KM is the target altitude (outside of contract requirements, obviously). Close-interplanetary, I tend to boost it up to 75-77KM. Distant-interplanetary, up to 80-82KM. I like to keep the orbit low in general so I can get the most out of the Oberth Effect.

I don't think adding life support would run counter to keeping the game accessible, actually. It all comes down to implementation and options. But I do have to say that life support probably would be best left to a Moderate/Hard difficulty option. It would act as a good differentiating trait between Normal and Moderate difficulty, in fact, as the two are more or less the same thing right now while Hard is distinctly different with its lack of quicksaves or launch reverts.

I am also in the party that would suggest a simple spoiler/flap toggle for control surfaces. If you're already putting in the code to support it, there's little reason not to implement it this way. I second that a scheduler system akin to Kerbal Alarm Clock would be very useful in stock. Time genuinely is of the essence in KSP, and certain aspects of space exploration (transfer windows, mission event planning, etc.) demand the ability to keep track of when to pay attention to a given craft. Such a system would also open wide the doors for life support options, too, preventing players from accidentally leading their Kerbals to an untimely death in orbit due to paying attention to something else. A comprehensive scheduler widget would take some time to make, of course, so it does make sense why it would not see immediate release for 1.0. But I do hope it's developed eventually.

I'm giving KSP a break this weekend and spending my free time playing Tales of Xillia instead. It's been sitting in my backlog long enough, I think. Contrary to the thread theme, however, I don't particularly feel like playing KSP until after I'm done, as Tales of Xillia is actually very fun and engaging.

The reason why Tylo tends to be given generous margins in those cheat sheets and the like is because every second you spend fighting gravity adds up quick there. Since gravity is so high, often landers have pretty low TWR relative to it, meaning inevitably you end up fighting gravity even more on the way down than you would otherwise.

You have roughly enough documentation just with your Kerbals' stats, seeing as the only way to get numbers like that otherwise is to hack the save file. And it wouldn't be hard to prove that you didn't do that just by providing your save file, because it would be nightmarishly hard to fake those stats with all of the required evidence. Seriously, the number of hacked-in flags that would require alone would take almost more effort than just doing the real deal yourself. I say go for it. If you want some ideas on how to set the challenge up, just PM me; I'm pretty good at figuring out rule systems for this sort of thing.

Well done! Sounds like a proper challenge for Career mode, if it hasn't been proposed already: getting Kerbals to earn their stripes for every single body in the game. May want to search that forum for a challenge like that, and maybe make one if it doesn't exist.

Bilbo, Samwise, and Merry Kerman are all favorites of mine. Sadly, you cannot get Dandy Kerman (he's a dandy Kerbal... in space). Alas.

In honor of , I named one of my Mun science missions Ji Plug Pu Melon Nai. It included a lander called Antonio Stella Bottom Tile, and a return vessel called the Nicolas Marty.

I'd say Career mode is over when you've completed all of the Kerbin World-Firsts Society contracts for exploring other planets and moons. Or it would be, anyway, except that they're very easy to miss out on if you jump the gun and go somewhere before the game generates the contract to do that for you. Really hope 1.0 sorts that out and makes them overarching goal milestones that aren't explicit contracts, it would solve a number of issues (including the contract-lock stalemate scenario, something I don't think the devs intended to be possible).

There's quite a few factors not mentioned in that infographic, of course. Like the fact that Kerbal materials are hyperdense for their size in order to help balance out the fact that Kerbin is a little over 6 times too small. It's not a perfect conversion by any means, but it is important to consider. Also important to consider is that, at least in stock, atmospheres in KSP are close to split pea soup in density and eat up a huge amount of the delta-V budget when taking off in them (going by FAR vs. stock numbers, around 800 to 1000m/s of that 4500m/s orbital budget is eaten up solely by the atmospheric model's shortcomings).