Esme

Yay! Now can we pleeeeeasssee have some proper aerospike engines in the game instead of the plug-nozzle job that's been masquerading as an aerospike? (essentially an aerospike is a more pratical version of the plug-nozzle design (uses gases to form the spike instead of a hardware spike), whch is kind of an inside-out bell nozzle design)? I am sooo looking forward to playing the v1.0 version of the game and start my campaign game to set up a self-sustaining colony on Duna!

I just tend to think in terms of the diamters in metres, although I also like the Mk0,1,2,3 idea too. But here's a thought - try converting those sizes to non-metric units. They're pretty close to 2ft, 4ft, 8ft and 12ft. Hmmmn... NASA influence, maybe? ;-} Next size (roughly 16ft) up would be one rod, pole or perch.... <grin>

If this is the official forum, then they should post here first, end of story. One doesn't sign up for an official news delivery system of any kind with the expectation of getting the relevant news second to those subscribed to a non-official delivery system.

So, it could be Valentina being launched into space at high velocity in a delta-wing space-plane with proper v^2 lift physics from a volcano through volumetric clouds and into space, off to Vesta and thence to the outer reaches of an expanded solar system like Voyager - with a special new vehicle aboard to explore whatever she finds when she gets there? Fab! :-}

The problem with that is twofold - first, the time it takes to go between external and internal views, read the thing, and get back outside again. Second - the IVA one isn't very readable. (actually there's a third - no IVA if what you;re trying to land is a probe). I would love to have a full set of IVA readouts and instruments so that one could attempt to fly entire missions from IVA - but I would also like, whilst working on (slowly) improving my piloting skills, some means of accessing altitude over terrain data whilst not in IVA.

5th Horseman - Thank you, but I was quite deliberately testing 0.90 unmodded - otherwise how can I be sure that any issues I encounter aren;t caused by mods? I normally play with quite a few mods, but not whilst testing the basic game. I also have several hundred hours of play time* under my belt, and I know well about looking for ones shadow, and I was in surface mode - I always switch to that mode once my horizontal velocity is reasonably small compared to my vertical velocity. I repeat - the game NEEDS an altitude over surface indication of some sort, and a clear indication of whether ones vertical speed is negative or positive whether it be an on-board altimiter or an option to have Gene Kerman give you the readouts in a pop-up window if you request it. IMHO. *seriously. I know some of you can scarcely credit that anyone with THAT much experience can still find landing on the Mun a trial, but it is indeed so. Mind you, I did spend rather a lot of time happily puttering around Minmus by land in one game a couple of versions back (had a full-blown base and several outposts set up :-) ). Anyway, call me a slow learner if you will,but I've only once reached Duna and Eve (both with probes) and recently a not very close fly-by of Jool recently. Minmus I have covered. I can do orbital rendevous passably well, now. Tackling the Mun feels like taking an X-wing against the Death Star to me. Well, not quite that bad, but I really do not like attempting manned landings there unless I know the site I'm aiming for is more or less flat - because I've already landed a probe there. Darn it the editor isn;t spacing this properly - apologies if it reverts to a single block of text yet again!

Things I've learnt in the last 24 hours: 1. I am somewhat a victim of too much previous experience and as a result had managed to overlook a few things here and there. Thanks to Scott Manley's video on getting started in 0.90 for making me re-assess and look at the game ab initio properly. 2. Having started going through the tutorials (which I had not realised had been updated - haven;t seen any mention of that anywhere previously), I went through them up to the Munar landing one. The service module apepars to have barely enough fuel - IMO it ought to be a larger tank back there, bearing in mind the idea is to teach beginners. At the end of this tutorial, it reccomends the player have a go at trying to land. This startled me, because trying to actually land on the Mun is far and away the hardest most challenging thing I've encountered in the game thus far. The problem here is (a) no height above ground readout ( the speed indicator seems to be able to go from teens of metres per second downwards to teens of metres per second upwards without bothering to go through zero in-between. It was impossible to make a gentle landing in the LEM provided, given teh uneven surface of the Mun. In my opinion, some kind of height over ground indication AND indicator whether vertical veklocity is positive or negative is essential. An rough angle of slope indicator of some sort would be helpful too. Also, © harking back to the probes before Kerbals or vice-versa thing, because Munar landings are so difficult there is no way that I would ever want to attempt to land on the Mun with Kerbals before I've done the job with a probe first (and hopefully managed to find a relatively flat spot for a manned craft to aim for). This is due to my psychology - I have noticed that I really get immersed in games I'm playing, to a greater extent than some of my friends. In Minecraft, I can get claustrophobic in mines, vertigo up heights and dislike being anywhere too dark. Similarly in KSP, I really do NOT view my Kerbals as expendable, and regard every time one of them dies as a tragedy. Whilst losing one in , say, a freak landing accident on Minmus is sad (I'm very au fait with landing stuff on Minmus), Munar landings as things currently are is so difficult - to me - that I am loathe to attempt to put Kerbals on the surface of the Mun, except on places that I know are flat (and I don't know why many say that the interior of craters tend to be flat - they don't seem any better than anywhere else to me). And to explore the rest of the Mun, I want to be able to use rovers, rather than have to repeat the process of using probes to find relatively flat spots, then follow up with a manned landing - which might well be economically uintenable in career mode. 3. The EVA bug also makes it rather fraught to collect science on EVA. I'm a lot better at EVA manouvering in orbit than I used to be, but when I press F for my Kerbal to grab a ladder, I expect them to do just that, not suddenly twist and zoom off into the black at a great rate of knots! During the Career game I started (but am going to have to abandon - simply ran out of funds), one one mission, I landed Jeb in the desert, which was a biome that hadn't been visited before. He couldn't get at teh hatch just by walking close to it, so I tried jumping and aiding the jump with the rocket pack on his suit. This did the trick, but the instant the F(grab) indicator lit, he suddenly zoomed a good 10 metres straight up into the air - far higher than a jetpack can take a Kerbal on Kerbin's surface! 4. I don't like that Mission Control is where we get contracts from. That should be from an admin building. Mission control should be a place that sends and receives data during flight. I noticed that in some of the tutorials, Gene Kerman is giving information that otherwise would not be available to you. I liked that a lot. Might I suggest that perhaps there is always the option to consult with Mission Control the plus side of which is that you get extra info, the negative side of which could be a loss in reputation (and possibly science and cash as well, as is necessary for game-balance)? That way, the expert pilots amongst us that get into a rare scrape can call on Gene in an emergency, whilst those lesser pilots (like me) can use Gene's advice more often - and get a sense of achievement as we find we need to call on him less and less often? Right now, I really, really want Gene talking me down on Munar landings, and giving me those altitude over surface readings! I'm still not convinced that Career mode is for me in its current incarnation (which is, of course, Beta!). I AM, however, very glad that it's there, as I can see how much it adds to potential gameplay, and I cannot express how delighted I am that KSP allows such freedom in the number of ways that one can play it, both within the game itself, and via the use of mods. I can imagine that one day, I will succeed in setting up a self-sustaining base on Duna in Science mode, and think to myself 'hmmnn.. wonder if I can do that again whilst beating the beancounters?' Anyway, I hope that's helpful as feedback!

The only thing that's crossed my mind that I haven't seen proposed here is that maybe Science could also accumulate at one point per day above and beyond anything garnered by one's activities in the game (or, rather, there could perhaps be an option to enable that). This to represent Science inexorably progressing in other ways away from KSC, and also to give those who are struggling another option to help themselves out (ie: worst case, they could just fast forward through time to gain a few extra science points they need. The drawback would be that if they're playing career mode, some contracts may have expired). But that's just a thought, and one I'm not too bothered about one way or the other. I am VERY much in favour of Cpt.Kipard's 'tech-star'. On the subject of different tech trees, ISTR when I played with teh KSP Interstellar mod, it allowed the loading of different tech trees. I can imagine thet it might not be simple implementing a tech-star if the system is intended to deal with tech-tree's, but if the tech-progression system could be made flexible enough to allow for tech stars as well as tech trees, then that's the main problem sorted for everyone, I'd think. Total ability to choose technological progression through the game.

Ithankyou! (sigh - really REALLY must get new glasses soon! 8-} )

I loved the pics that were released of the barn with the caravans. I really, really, really want that in my experience of KSP. It said to me 'crazy kerbals trying to go well beyond what they ought to be capable of' - which is very KSP. If the purpose of bits of it were hard to identify, then surely the model is tweakble? Add a larger freestanding dish in the tracking station area, paint the caravans bright colurs and include a mobile fast-food caravan at the recruiting centre, make the caravans dull grey and very orderly in the Admin part, etc. And that sandbagged launchpad - brilliant!

What the heck happened to that absolutely beeyootiful set of Tier 1 buildings, with the barn and caravans, that we were shown some time back? I was looking forward to seeing those in-game, the things it starts with at the moment look like place-holders, and, well, rather dull. The barn and caravans seemed very KSP 'Hey, we've got nowt but a barn and some stuff taped to caravans, and some tools and 'spolsives, but we're going to space (or give it our best shot, anyway), yay!' kind of thing, whereas the current Tier 1 look rather clinical and, well, dull. I do hope we get to see the barn+caravans in the finished game!

I'm one of those who ha a preference for only wanting to have to bother with collecting science, but I decided to give the newly rejigged career mode a try again. Unfortunately, it still doesn't suit me. I think the reason I don;t feel comfortable with it is that the contracts seem rather arbitrary to me. Why flight test an engine if it's already in use and has been performing fine? If it was the case that there was a certain amount of risk of explosion the first time an engine is flown, and that risk decreases per flight, I'd see more point to it. And I'd be wanting to do such tests with unmanned rockets at first. The current system just feels a bit 'grindy' - I have successfully put a sattelite in orbit, but am way short of being able to upgrade any of te hbuildings. SoI'd have to do odd 'tests' for no other reasons than that in order to ever be able to get better parts and do more interesting things, I have to do them. Contrast this with a science only game where yes, I do need to gather science points in order to be able to unlock more parts, but I can make every flight one which has a reasonable objective, even if it doesn't directly gain me more science. I like the idea of upgrading capabilities by upgrading buildings - giving my discomfort with the Career game, I am sad that the buildings aren;t upgradeable in teh pure science game. Likewise crew experience - I very much like the sound of the way it's now implemented, but it's a shame if it's not available unless you play a Career game. In short - I'd enjoy career mode more if the contracts made more sense in encouraging progression and/or had more obvious point to them (eg: build small space station and put into orbit; dock with space station and leave 2 crew in orbit; exchange crew at space station, etc - the swap crew at space station ones might not be strictly necessary, but they are logical) and I;d like to see crew experience and upgadable builings in pure Science games. Long term, I will, of course, be using mods to add thigs in that I like the idea of (MKS, Tac LS, ScanSat...), so it may well be that I can have a perfectly enjoyable game with a modded KSP, just thought I;d let you know my first impressions of KSP unmodded though. :-} As I haven't been able to get beyond level 1 in the Career game, I'm now going to start a science-only game :-}

I'm not a fan of career mode as it is at present but I am looking forward to seeing what the next iteration of it is like. I was greatly heartened by the fact that SQUAD allowed us the ability to play old-style (ie: just collecting science) rather than having to pay attention to the beancounters and do what look to me frankly ridiculous missions at times (please note - I don't mind that some are ridiculous. I do mind if I HAVE to do them to advance) once the career stuff kicked in. Between pure sandbox, science sandbox and career, looks to me that most folks should be perfectly able to play KSP their own way. I also do not like the standard tech tree, and haven't found one yet that I'm entuirely happy with. For heavens sake, wheels should be available from the start, as should the ability to create unammned probes. However - KSP is -evidently - extremely moddable. So long as this remains the case, I can;t see me falling out of love with KSP. Despite still struggling with Munar landings, I've now landed a probe on Duna and done a Jool flyby. Ok, so I'm evidently nothing like as good at this game as many here, but then again, the sense of achievement I get when I finally manage to do something I;ve been struggling with is enormous. One day, I WILL build a self-sustaining base on Duna. One day... :-)

I've used Glowstrips in 0.25 - works fine. I like placing pairs of strips each side of docking ports, and if on a space-station, each pair set to a different colour. Really helps with orienting your ship when docking - particularly if the ship is nightside of whatever it's orbiting. I have quite an old Dell OPC with a very old graphics card - I just turn down to textures to 1/4 res and I also have to turns atmospheric effects down (so I get the reentry glow, but not the flames). Whilst framerates near surfaces or other vesseles occasionally drops such that times passes a bit slower than RL,I still find I can use lights reasonably, and the game still looks pretty good to me...

If someone had told me, forty-odd years ago, bearing in mind I was raised using slide-rules and could do mental arithmetic faster than the first pocket calculators that I saw, that I would one day mile at moments of beauty in virtual realities that existed in a computer that I would own myself one day, I would have found it hard to credit. But here I am, and I appreciate every darned one of 'em, because anything that adds beauty to the world should be treasured.

My first ever Jool probe, Magellan-1, consisting of a large core probe surrounded by 4 small probes to drop off at targets of opportunity, has had the darndest problems. First of all, having escaped Kerbin's SOI, it was cruising along nicely towards its manouvre node three weeks hence to insert it into its transfer orbit. About a week later, I went to check on it, only to discover it was in a highly elliptical orbit about Kerbin again, what the heck?! So I set up a burn to kick it back into circum-kerbol orbit when it hit perigee, and that went fine. Then sort out a new manouvre node to get it to Jool, once it was out of Kerbin's SOI for the second time. Oooh... delta-V situation looking very marginal. Hmmnn. Ok, so lets use up some of the monopropellant in the secondary probes, to reduce mass. Yep, looks like that might just be enough to rescue the mission, but I'll probably need to ditch two of the sub-probes. Select the two to be sacrificed, and decouple them. Click-bang! The decouplers went spinning off into the void,leaving the probes in place. Darn, they must've just been clipping something. Sooo.. I decided to burn nearly all the monoprop, which both helped push the apogee up a bit and reduced the mass, meaning I got a few hundred more m/s dV from the nuclear main drive. Came time to burn, I ended up with a Jool enounter, about 350m/s dV left in the main engine, and maybe 10-20m/s left in the monoprop tanks. Kraken willing, I at least get a distant flyby of the system (about a gigametre out from Jool at closest approach) - will 350m/s dV be enough to do anything else? I'll find out in about 2 years...

Well done, KSat, that is excellent!

Two days ago, I successfully manouvered a probe into circum-Duna orbit, the first time I've ever achieved that. Having collected a little near-Duna science, several orbits were made photographing the surface from a rather elliptical orbit. This evening, the periapse of the orbit was dropped first to 50km, then on the following orbit to 25 km, then on the next orbit to 10km. Atmospheric entry went well, and parachutes were deployed at about 8km above MSL. Half of the remaining fuel was used to slow the probe's horizontal velocity, and the descent by parachute began. Descent speed stabilised at a little over 11m/s and the engines were used to slow this to just over 5m/s just before touchdown. Explorer-1 landed safely in a dunefield some tens of kilometres west of a very large canyon system. Materials science was performed from the surface of a body outside Kerbin's SOI for the first time in my experience of KSP. <grin> Darn, but that feels good!

I dream of having hardware that good on which to run KSP. My kit is an old refurbished Dell Optiplex 745 with a non-standard size graphics card, which means I can't upgrade it, and so I find I need to play with the graphics quality turned down. But you know what? I found it made little difference in how well the game looks (as in - it still looks good with the graphics turned way down), and the only thing I can't get at all is the re-entry flames, just the ship heating effect. The gameplay is, of course unaffected by the graphics quality. I do use several mods in my games, too. I'd imagine that if you can get the demo version working,you'll be able to get the current version working fine - the demo is way behind the current version, incidentally, the current version is easier to use/play (IMHO).

Achieved a docking using the Mk1 eyeball (because I was daft enough to have forgotten to install Navyfish's docking indicator mod when I upgraded to 0.24!) for the first time. Only my fifth or sixth docking ever, too. And with that, started construction of my first proper space-station in LKO, in my first game using TAC life-support. I've since docked another unit, and a few hours hence will have the final unit+lifeboat docked (WITH Navyfish indicators this time!). I must say, I find suitably positioned glowstrips from the glowstrips mod don't half help one to orient when trying to close to target when on Kerbin's night side.

Had a nice moment the other day when I stupidly got a Kerbal stranded in orbit early in a game. Except... hmmn.. still have the last stage attached, and the periapsis is only 70.1 km, and I still have a decent amount of electricity left.. - so I started spinning the whole shebang, then detached the capsule just as it was swinging down toward Kerbin. It now had a 68km periapsis, and several orbits and much high-altitude aerobraking later, landed safely. Made me grin!

Many thanks! Although I shan't be using rsync - not that I can't or don't use the command line - it's just that I'm more comfy with GUI's and only use the command line as a last resort :-)

Apologies if I'm being a bit dense, but I can't fathom what precisely is needed to install this mod properly. When unzipped, I get a Gamedata folder, which I open and I see a 'Realchute' folder, which I then copy into KSP's GameData folder. So far, so good, so normal. Then I look at the 'Module Manager files' folder, which has a GameData folder within it, inside of which is another 'Realchute' folder and a dll file. Sorry, but the instructions to 'merge' don't mean much to me. I've noticed this kind of instruction creeping into things (not just in KSP) but never having seen any explanation of what that actually means, am reluctant to follow instructions to do so (particularly after one attempt to allow my OS (Linux Mint) to do so which completely mucked up the situation). Possibly an age thing - I'm used to copying files to the correct place, and am quite definitely starting to fall behind the technological curve generally. If you could explain what to do with the Module manager folder files in terms of copying and pasting, I'd be most grateful.

Ithankyou, Sir! Thought it'd be something simple I'd missed (I seem to have been born with a degree in ability to mis the flippin' obvious/simple, at times!). However, it really ought to tell you somewhere that you have to right-click the parts to be tested.. Never mind, it's still the best beta in the world that puts many 'final release' games to shame! Ach - nope, still doesn't work. There is no 'Run Test' option given. Will try another 'test part contract, see whether that works. Have just tried the Sepatron 1 test, multiple times. Never any 'run test' option on a right-click. relevant info: I'm running the latest version of Linux Mint, 32-bit version. Clean fresh install of KSP 0.24, then with the Kethane and MechJeb2 installed. All appears to be working fine, except the test contracts. I was ensuring that parts were flown within the parameters given by the contract. With the Sepatron 1 contract, I tried initiation both by the normal next-thing-in-the-stack process, and also by manual intervention (clicking onto the part and setting the thing off). In neither case did I get a 'run test' option on a right-click. Will see if Alt or Alt+Win (which is what I have to do to transfer fuel) works. UPDATE: No, there is NO 'right click' on part to 'run test'. Kenbob5588, that was an unhelpful comment, and sidetracked me from where teh real problem lay, unfortunately. The problems I had were caused by a couple of things: 1. Initially, It hadn't been clear to me that the conditions given for the contract had to be present before the part to be tested was started. I;d somehow gained the impression that so long as the part was operating whilst teh ship was flying within the stated regime that that was what mattered. In this I was incorrect. 2. In the Sepratron tests, I hadn't noticed that the Contract had not remained pinned open - and the LVT45 one was dropping down instead. I didn;t notice this at first due to the red text on slate grey background. I would regard this as a bug - if I click on a contract, I want the durned thing to stay open at THAT contract. I have now managed to test the LVT45 and complete the contract, but getting to this point was quite an excercise in frustration... I think tea is required. And possibly cake. :-)

-which I didn't find easy to use in situations where I had more than one contract on the go. It's a nice idea, but needs a little work to improve usability. IMHO.