SkyRender

I tallied up from all of my 27 (!) KSP installs over the years for a grand total of...! 2,037 screenshots. Blimey, I've been at this for a long time, haven't I? Around 20% to 25% of those shots have found their way onto my site and thus been featured on this forum, too.

It's actually a bit vague on that end: "The HSC was an invention of necessity - how do we store 4 Kerbals on-orbit without any real provisions for return? Who needed this remains a mystery, as do his motives." I believe "provisions for return" was meant to point out that it has no control capabilities of its own, not that it can't survive re-entry. Seeing as the lighter Mk2 Crew Cabin holds as many Kerbals as the Hitchhiker, is lighter, and is expected to be exposed to rather high dynamic pressures on the way to orbit, it's a safe bet that the Hitchhiker is similarly capable of surviving re-entry.

This Duna lander, creatively named Duna Lander, is pretty solid. It lets you take 2 Kerbals down to the surface and back, and has about 1820m/s dV in total. You do need a small burst of engine power to keep speed below 6m/s when landing, but other than that, it practically lands itself. And best of all, it's 100% reusable; just refill the fuel in orbit!

Just today I ran into a rather odd one. I have an asteroid catcher attached to an asteroid, and the moment I time accelerate, it self-destructs quite violently. Mind you, this seems to be completely unrelated to whether or not it's attached to or even within 2.5km of the asteroid; it just sort of spontaneously explodes the moment time warp reverts to 1x after going above it.

Really I only care about the construction readout data that KER provides, though I can see why you might want the flight data too. Thanks to the upgrade and experience system, that can actually be implemented now, of course. Most of the suggestions thus far have been for flight tools, so I'll make some suggestions for the VAB/SPH. Level 1 - What we have now. Level 2 - Provide delta-V information (requires R&D level 2) and Kerbin-specific TWR. Level 3 - Provide option to check TWR for other bodies (requires R&D level 2) and burn times. I've already mentioned before that they can pretty easily sum up stage dV in tooltip form by mousing over a given stage's indicator if they want to keep screen clutter down.

I've been to and from each one at least once; most quite a bit more than once. After this long playing KSP, it would be kind of amazing if I hadn't.

Of course I've been to all of them. I rather like Dres, I think it's an underrated planet. Eeloo's pretty interesting too. Moho's a bit of a dump, though it's easier to drive a rover on than either of the other two mentioned here. Higher gravity's good for something, at least!

Some sort of filtering system for contracts is certainly in order, that much I don't think anyone is going to argue with. My idea was for a toggle system, but this idea would allow for more flexibility.

Shockingly, this is actually a miniature version of the aircraft it's modeled after. The original is the Hughes H-4 Hercules, also known as the "Spruce Goose". It is one monster of an airplane; I've seen it up close several times at the McMinville aerospace museum. The Mk3 parts immediately made me think of it, so of course I did my best to replicate it. Much like its original counterpart, it can fly... barely.

I'm probably not nearly careful enough with my Kerbals, honestly. So confident am I in the safety potential for my various craft that I don't even bother with abort systems on them. Granted, I think the last time I had a rocket actually suffer explosive and spontaneous unplanned disassembly on the way to orbit was some time around 0.18, but still. My Kerbals must think their engineers are insane.

I'd suggest a compromise: select the mods that are most essential to you. My own essential mod list is very short indeed: Kerbal Engineer Redux, Kerbal Alarm Clock, Ferram Aerospace Research, Procedural Fairings. Once you have your essentials in place, add mods as you feel is necessary instead of on a whim. Having a KSP install loaded down with as few mods as possible tends to up stability by quite an appreciable margin, I find.

Building upgrade prices are much too high, especially in Hard mode, reducing much of Career to a boring grind. Fortunately this can be somewhat fixed with an unintuitive reduction of funds penalties. And hopefully SQUAD will be addressing the problem with adjustments and a proper logical slider for building upgrade costs.

It would be nifty if a variant of this became part of stock, called something like Hybrid Career mode (since we already have Science Career mode). Though it would be the sort of feature that would need to be paired with some form of resource extraction, or at least a means of making Funds outside of Science.

The first problem you can actually fix! Go to your KSP folder and open settings.cfg. Find the CONIC_PATCH_LIMIT variable and change it to a bigger number (6 will be sufficient for pretty much anything save a 3-moon encounter in the Jool system starting from a gravity assist off of the Mun in Kerbin orbit; and how often is THAT likely to happen?). Problem #2 is one we have to deal with in real life too. Problem #3 actually is too, believe it or not; predictions are always off by a bit. Always bring extra fuel. You can deal with problems #4 and 5 by always entering the sphere of influence of a planet at 100x time warp or less, and always lowering time warp before you get too close to periapsis. I cannot recommend Kerbal Alarm Clock enough for this sort of thing, as you can set up the game to automatically drop your time warp as you approach SoI change or as you approach periapsis.

I found personally that dropping building prices by 50% (you can adjust them, illogically enough, with the funds penalty slider) makes the whole experience much more tolerable. Especially on Hard difficulty, where building upgrades are effectively 3 1/3 times more expensive than on Normal. The high building prices don't make the game harder so much as they make things much, MUCH more tedious.

Here, let's tap into the comms chatter for the Hitchhiker module, shall we? Oh dear.

This discussion does seem to pop up around this time of year, I've noticed... Anyway, I found KSP back at the end of October or the start of November of 2011 (the exact date has eluded me now) by watching a video posted by one of the early SomethingAwful LPers, Maxwell Adams. He showcased KSP 0.8.4 and showed how fun it was to blow up rockets in a futile attempt to reach space. It looked interesting, so I went ahead and got 0.11 (which was the most current at the time). It was good timing: the approach of the pay-to-play version was announced not long after I started, shortly after I'd made my first successful Mun landing in the then-new 0.12 version. I backed KSP right away when that happened. It's been a wild 3 years or so since then, but KSP's always been one of my top picks for what to play during that span. I'd say I have more than justified my purchase by now.

Either that, or Kerbal #1 is pondering what he can use in that JUNK drawer to incapacitate Kerbal #2, who looks like he just snapped.

Anyone remember the old BFE-6000 mod? Now that was an engine! Scarily enough, the NASA engines aren't that much smaller than it...

The science/reputation-to-funds strategies are more in need of adjustment than their counterparts, I find. The imbalance is blatant there, to the point that making them 50 to 100 times more powerful restores the balance nicely. Cutting the funds-to-science/reputation boosts to 1/10th to 1/20th their current level, by contrast, fixes their imbalance. This is all in the current contract system payout frame of reference, of course, so these rate differences could easily change if contract payouts were adjusted.

Eve definitely needs a boost for landing and flag-planting. Any Kerbal who survives that process and gets back to Kerbin deserves all the experience points.

Personally I prefer FAR out of the various aerodynamics mods, though I would not recommend either it or NEAR for newer players. As such, I also am in the camp that's hoping for SQUAD's improved implementation of aerodynamics to be something of its own. Particularly given that there's no stock fairings (procedural or otherwise), FAR or NEAR would be very poor choices.

There's a section of the border between the Northern Sinkhole Ridge and North Pole biomes that counts as the Northern Sinkhole. I discovered this by accident when I sent a rover there. It's about 1KM into the ridge from the flat plane that borders the sinkhole.

I don't really have a problem with Fine Print's station/base contracts, myself. They provide an incentive to build them, and allow you to craft more elaborate missions with actual pay-offs for going to so much trouble. I think the real issue is that the station/base contracts don't really acknowledge when you already HAVE one. But making an iterative "expand station/base" contract would be tricky to implement, not the least because it would require the contract system to be able to recognize player flights in progress. Though doing that could well be useful for making more robust contracts overall, come to think of it...

Hm. Depending on the value of a Mun flyby, you could possibly bypass going into Munar orbit entirely and get exactly 16xp from Kerbin orbit, Mun flyby, Minmus flag-planting, and a brief solar jaunt. This calls for science! (By which I mean testing, of course.) Post-testing edit: It works! I sent Bill up on a mission with Jeb and Bob to Minmus and solar orbit after, with a small (and entirely unnecessary) gravity assist off the Mun on the way. Upon their return, Bill had earned 16 exp (Jeb and Bob had already been on a mission to the Mun before that, so they were assured their level up). So all you need to get a Kerbal from starter to level 3 is a quick fly-by of the Mun, a flag-planting on Minmus, and a short jaunt out to the sun.