SkyRender

Ike got so high on the chart for the same reason as Dres did: it has a lot of biomes! Ike and Dres both have 8 biomes, and interestingly have the same multipliers, meaning they're effectively equivalent. Same thing happened with Pol and Vall. Moho's massive edge also comes from its huge biome count, at 12 total. Eeloo got 2nd not from its biome count (a respectable 7), but because its Landed multiplier is quite frankly enormous.

Sure does! I made all of the appropriate adjustments, including accounting for the fact that you cannot get both Landed and Splashed Down reports for oceans for anything save EVA reports and surface samples.

So now that all of the planets and moons in KSP have their own biome maps, the question comes up of which one is the most valuable. Most would probably guess Eve, Tylo, Eeloo, or Moho. I decided to crunch the numbers, and the results are in: #1: Moho (18,520) #2: Eeloo (16,650) #3: Laythe (14,593) #4: Eve (13,819) #5a: Ike (10,255) #5b: Dres (10,255) #6: Duna (9,923) #7: Tylo (9,850) #8: Bop (9,621) #9: Mun (9,087) #10a: Pol (7,857) #10b: Val (7,857) #11: Minmus (7,034) #12: Gilly (4,786) #13: Kerbin (2,753.6) #14: Sun (1,170) This is just for doing a single instance of every possible experiment in every possible biome (as applicable), so you could theoretically eke out higher overall numbers with repeat experiments. That said, the margins are wide enough from most of the bodies that the ranks wouldn't shift, for the most part. I was kind of shocked that Tylo falls so close to the middle, given how much trouble it is to do anything there.

This occurred to me this morning: the player is going to want to achieve those various "Kerbin World-Firsts" contracts. There's no way they can avoid it for a lot of them. But having to accept them as contracts doesn't really make sense, especially not with limited contract space in the early Mission Control building. More to the point, it's very easy to lose out on one of those contracts or have your early Mission Control contract list polluted with them and no way to cancel out of them, locking you in a situation where you cannot make the Funds necessary for a launch to even achieve them. The solution is easy enough: desginate them as "special" contracts, separate from the normal contract list, and have them all be accepted at the start of the game. But when listing them under the accepted contracts, only list the ones that the player currently has progressed far enough to know about. This would preserve the intent of these contracts (to push new players to attempt those big goals), while neither cheating experienced players out of them nor tripping up new players by getting "contract locked" and unable to proceed.

Funds are definitely much tighter now that building upgrades are part of the mix. It takes an absurd amount of grind even on Normal to get up to basic interplanetary capability right now, let alone up to a level where a normal player would be willing to risk a Mun flyby. Science remains absurdly easy to get by comparison, especially with the still-10-times-too-powerful Outsourced R&D. Personally I think that the "achievement" contracts should not be ones you have to accept from Mission Control at all. Every last one should be accepted automatically at the start of the game, and simply have their details hidden until reach the point that they would be revealed. The way it's set up now, it's very easy to never even get offered a number of them (most notably the altitude ones, but Explore Minmus has been known to also fail to show up for ages).

That 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000C temperature tolerance is quite impressive. It could survive comfortably inside the core of the sun. Or in the core of a neutron star.

RealChutes is one of those mods that I never knew I wanted 'til I got it. So glad it's up to date for 0.90 now!

My own two cents on the matter: we are all still effectively testers for the game as it stands. It's our responsibility to point out where we see imbalances, gameplay problems, bugs, glitches, and other issues that could potentially harm the product's appeal to those who are waiting for the 1.0 release. While our means of addressing the problems currently in the game could occasionally use a bit of work, the fact of the matter is that we are giving the developers something useful to go off of when we complain that it's "too hard" or "more tedious" or "unbalanced". It alerts them to where there are tweaks to be made, adjustments to be considered, and effort to be focused in order to ensure that the final product is solid. Now I personally feel that the current building prices are (from testing, mind you) around about 2 times too high as it stands. I also feel that building upgrade prices should have their own slider, as the current slider used for it does not have any obvious relationship to building upgrade prices at all. Admittedly my initial reaction to this was a bit hostile, but I have since cooled down and explained this in a more reasoned manner, as well as made suggestions on how to address this problem. You should really not be too judgmental of someone when they complain or bring up issues, as they aren't doing it because they hate KSP; just the opposite. They're doing it because they want to see KSP succeed. Taking issue with people trolling, of course, is a completely different matter. But it's also important to recognize the difference between that and just airing grievances.

If you know that, sure, it's quite handy. Most players don't actually know that.

Set the funds penalty slider on the difficulty screen to 50% and suddenly the building upgrade prices go from absurd to fairly reasonable. Just a little tip for anyone getting sick of spamming bottom-tier missions dozens of times just to afford any upgrades at all.

Yes, I know that as well. The problem is that you can't find out what direction the orbit is in until you check the tracking station. That's a problem when planning missions based on contracts, since you keep having to swap out of mission control to check what direction the required orbit is in.

That's kind of the point I'm making: gameplay-wise, Pilots start out with an extreme edge over their Scientist and Engineer counterparts. It's to such a degree that there is no reason you will ever include an Engineer or a Scientist on board any mission prior to building a 2-Kerbal-capacity craft or installing a higher-level probe core to replace them.

I re-iterate: realism is an acceptable sacrifice for fun. If it's part of a game and it's reducing the fun, it doesn't matter how realistic it is, it shouldn't be that way. See my previous statement. Also, see devs' statements to the effect that they want Career mode to be what new players get into. Making it unreasonably hard for new players runs counter to that goal.

In real life, absolutely. In a game, it breaks the balance horribly and effectively ensures that nobody will ever use the other two roles until they can reasonably get two Kerbals on board their craft. KSP is not real life, and it's quite an acceptable break from reality to establish a gameplay mechanic that's properly balanced but unrealistic. Because the way it is now is not fun or interesting, and only removes viable options from the player instead of adding to them.

Why, exactly? All that does is makes one class of Kerbal absolutely necessary at a time when one of the other two classes (Scientist) is far more critical. It's not a fair trade-off for less experienced players, it's literally saying "you either put a Pilot in your craft or you will not go to space today". That's bad design, plain and simple. More to the point, as it stands there are zero benefits to putting a Scientist or Engineer on board before they get to rank 1, so why does the Pilot class deserve to have such an overbearing and essential role right from the get-go?

Pretty simple request, but a reasonable one. As it stands, you don't really know whether the orbit they want is prograde or retrograde until you go to the tracking station to check (which is a bit of a pain in the butt as well, but would be trickier to fix). It could save a lot of trouble and horribly inefficient U-turns in orbit if we knew before we launched which way the contract expected us to be launching the probe in. It would also help steer us away from accepting a contract and preparing for it to be part of a larger mission, only to discover upon actually launching that the probe needs to be going retrograde while the rest of the mission needs to be going prograde.

In the interest of being a helpful tester, I did a few test runs with current pricing on Normal, adjusting down funds penalties for failed contracts as a makeshift building price adjustment slider. What I found is that the "sweet spot" for your typical player (ie. the sort who would choose Normal instead of Easy, but would steer clear of Moderate or Hard) would be somewhere around 50% of current prices. I was able, upon achieving orbit, to upgrade enough facilities that I would be able to reasonably perform a Mun mission in short order were I a typical player (ie. I had the tracking station, astronaut complex, mission control, and launchpad upgraded to rank 2; the VAB upgrade is the main hurdle left, and at it's well within reach via another launch or two). The price level wasn't quite as bad off as I thought, which was a nice surprise! Though custom control of building prices with an intuitive and independent difficulty slider is definitely something I'd recommend for a future update.

I've been expressing much the same sentiments as this thread pretty much since 0.90 came out. The building upgrade prices in particular caught my attention, mainly because in the preview video of 0.90 the prices are 10 times lower than they are in the release version; that's something that kind of sticks out in my mind and suggests that the adjustment up was an 11th-hour decision. I like the idea of every Kerbal being able to perform at rank 1 of a given job, as I don't think the devs quite understand just how challenging it really is to control a spacecraft that does not have any form of stabilization.

How exactly are building prices reasonable when I can run a full-scale mission to Jool and all of its moons for less than it costs to upgrade just the R&D facility to level 2? I'd love to hear your reasoning behind this. EDIT: Converting prices between US dollars and Funds (approximately), the Kennedy Space Center would have cost about $25,000,000,000 US to build if it were built at KSP prices.

And what contracts are you taking that pay out so well, for that matter? Most of them seem to peak at around 50,000, which leads to an awful lot of grindgrindgrindgrindgrind just to get even one building upgrade.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's noticed that 0.90 has kind of upped the tedium factor of the early game by several magnitudes. I think the building prices are the main culprit, since their upgrades lock away basic features like EVA and surface samples, not to mention the ability to make a craft capable of something more impressive than a Kerbin orbiter. Having to save up millions of Funds just to unlock basic gameplay functionality when you're getting 50,000 Funds from a particularly rewarding contract is not really very fun, is it?

Definitely waiting for this mod to update. FAR without procedural fairings makes the game boring.

So now that I've properly sat down and toyed around a bit with 0.90, I can say with certainty that the building upgrade prices are too high across the board. Even on Normal, it turns the game into a tedious grindfest to churn out enough Funds to get your facilities upgraded to a level that makes them even marginally useful. On Hard it's just absurd, since not only do you have double the cost of the already-too-expensive Normal building upgrades, but you're getting about half the funds from contracts, meaning it's actually three or four times more tedious (not to be mistaken for three or four times harder, which it's very much not). Just getting the Space Center up to a level where a typical player could reasonably attempt a Mun mission costs almost a million Funds simply in upgrading facilities on Normal, which grinding out from contracts around Kerbin will take hours of tedious repetition of quickly-tiresome Kerbin-centric missions and part testing contracts. It's not really very fun this way is what I'm getting at here. I think the missing building tier would probably help quite a bit with this problem (the jump between tier 1 and tier 2 space center facilities in terms of gameplay option expansion is often jarringly huge right now), but even that would not change the fact that you could run a full-scale mission to Jool and all of its moons for less than it costs just to get R&D up to tier 2, let alone get your VAB, launchpad, mission control, astronaut complex, and tracking station up to par for a basic interplanetary mission.

There's also the fact that Custom difficulty just adopts the building upgrade cost rate of whatever difficulty setting was last selected. That's pretty unintuitive.

Be that as it may, a slider definitely needs to be implemented. Custom difficulty adopts whatever setting for building upgrade price rate was in place for the last selected difficulty setting.