soulsource

The most spectacular thing I encountered yet was a reminder that one shouldn't taunt the Kraken by using physics warp while landing. An unmanned probe, built for testing the LV-N engine on a sub-orbital trajectory was just on its way back, and I didn't have the patience to wait for it to land using the parachutes, so I enabled physics warp. Well, obviously due to a numeric inaccuracy the Kraken the thing collided with the ground, the nuclear engine exploded, and the probe went back upwards. At first I expected it to slow down again and crash into the ground, but it didn't. Obviously the Kraken held it in its grip and pulled it away from Kerbin in order to devour it. It kept on getting faster and faster, and a few seconds later it passed the orbit of Minmus - on a trajectory that looked pretty much like a straight line out of the Kerbol system... Since one should not watch the Kraken in action for too long, or risk damage to the save file sanity, I switched back to KSP (what was luckily possible) and abandoned sacrificed the probe to the Kraken...

After manned return missions to Moho and Eve back in the good old 0.23.5 days (somewhere around page 900 of this thread ^^), I finally did a manned landing on a different planet than Kerbin again. Jeb is the first Kerbal I sent to Duna. The long time between can be easily explained: I used Remote Tech for 0.24 and 0.25, and in both saves I barely managed to finance and deploy a deep space comms network before the next version of KSP was released and I decided to start over... Now in 0.90 I'm only using the stock bugfix mods and KAC, so it was rather straightforward to go to Duna. Screenshots will be posted once the ship is returned to Kerbin, what might take some time, as there are still some contracts to be finished and the transfer window is still quite some time away...

If I understand your question correctly, it'd help you if you could follow the patched conics for more SOI changes, right? Luckily, there's a game setting for this. Edit: I posted a wrong link. Now it should be correct.

I've been to Moho in 0.23.5 with a 5 Kerbal ship including a 2 Kerbal lander. There's still a video of the "Centerprise" mission somewhere on my HDD at home, which I haven't uploaded yet, because it has very low quality, as I didn't know how to use my screencapture software properly at that point... In my current save I've just launched my first probe lander going to Eeloo. Given that I can hardly resist any profitable contracts within Kerbins SOI it will take quite some real life time until it reaches its destination... I've been ignoring Dres up to now, but if I don't miss the transfer window I'll definitely be going there soon.

My mission(s) to Duna left Kerbin orbit. It's a crewed ship with an attached lander for Duna itself, and a heavy unmanned probe with 3 Science Jr.s and Goo containers for Ike. The ship with the Kerbals will of course return, but the probe will probably be stuck on Ike, so its data will just be transmitted. After launching these two ships, I accepted a contract to put a satellite in Duna orbit, so I launched another lightweight probe, and then another contract for an orbit around Ike popped up, so there are now 3 probes and one ship on their way... While preparing the probes for Duna I realized that Eeloo looked suspiciously close to a transfer window as well, and indeed now a lightweight probe is on its way to land there. Apart from that I did some grinding - visual surveys of Minmus and temperature scans of the Mun - in order to finance the Tier 3 upgrade of the R&D at some point in the future...

I usually gather several satellite contracts for Kerbin, Mun, Minmus, and then send up a cheap sat that has a reasonable dV (~5km/s), landing legs, a thermometer and a seismometer (I haven't unlocked the gravity scanner yet). I try to reach as many of the orbits as possible. Once all contracts for orbits are done, the sat gets recommissioned to do temperature and seismic scans of Mun or Minmus until it runs out of fuel. If possible I try to land it safely on Mun or Minmus, if not, I try to crash it. Afterwards it gets renamed to "Decoration", and is declared "Debris", so it doesn't show up in the craft list any more.

I built my first plane for this save, hired a new pilot, put that thing on the "runway", pushed the throttle up without realizing that the "runway" isn't even remotely level, and booom. First casualty since I started playing 0.90... I think I'll ignore planes as long as I'm playing with reverting disabled...

I started my mission named Alpollo 13 (Alp from German Alptraum - nightmare) today. It's an orbital station based study of several biomes of the Mün (whenever there's a "Plant a flag on the Mun" contract...). While some time ago I did a similar mission with an ion engine based lander, this time I went for a traditional chemical rocket design. The most expensive part to bring to münar orbit was the big orange fuel tank, which should contain sufficient fuel for landing 10 times. Sadly a little bit of fuel had to be wasted for docking it, but I'm still optimistic that it will last for 10 landings at least. The cool thing was, that I had two contracts for building new orbital stations, one for Kerbin, and one for the Mün. By launching the station core to low Kerbin orbit, the first contract was completed, and by bringing it to münar orbit the second one was done... While returning from the first landing of the mission, I stumbled across one of the easter eggs on the Mün. I've been playing for quite some time now, but this is the first easter egg (not counting the island airfield) that I found. Leaving Kerbin Full station: The return shuttle isn't docked yet, but as the station is now, it can be moved using the nuclear engines mounted on the orange tank - their COT is more or less aligned with the stations COM. First landing site Before docking the lander again Off topic: Has the option to embed iframes been removed from the KSP forums? I couldn't embed the imgur album any more, yet I remember doing this previously...

Deep space refuelling? While I do see the possibility to implement this in a meaningful way - electrolysis of water from Dunas ice caps for oxidizer or extracting carbohydrates from the oceans of Laythe for liquid fuel for instance - I see a very large potential to make this way too unrealistic and easy. If there is a meaningful explanation why a certain resource can be obtained at a certain location, I'm fully for the possibility of deep space refuelling. If it's just land anywhere and get new fuel, I strongly oppose the idea. Regarding aerodynamics: I'm a big fan of FAR, but it's probably too difficult for new players ("what's a derivative?"). If such an advanced aerodynamics model will be implemented, it needs to be optional.

What I'd like to see: Bug fixing and balancing.

Thanks a lot! If I would have upgraded the tracking station first, it would have been more clear, I guess.

I've just upgraded my mission control building and tracking station (in this order) and now I'm wondering what is meant by "flight planning". Does this mean one can somehow plan missions before they are started? If yes, where and how? Or, is this just a fancy name for the ability to place manoeuvre nodes?

Sometimes EVA works without ejection in stock, quite often it does not. My first Mun lander in 0.90 (without mods) is a Kerbopult, launching Jeb dozens of meters whenever I hit the EVA button... So, thanks for the fixes, Claw. I'm installing it right now. Without the decoupler and EVA fix KSP wouldn't be as much fun.

I think that most parts are either OK or gone for good. As long as the engineer isn't called Montgomery Scott Kerman, I think that there is simply no chance of repairing broken fuel tanks or engines. Also, repairing solar panels after seeing them disintegrate is at least questionable if there is no replacement part storage available... What could on the other hand make sense would be science equipment. The Mobile Processing Lab and the Science Jr for instance are pretty fragile right now, and as I understand. this fragility should reflect the delicacy of the stored experiments, not the frame around them. So, I could imagine that for these two modules a range of impact speeds might be defined in which they loose their function (and stored data?), but stay structurally intact, and can be fixed by an engineer. Furthermore, struts and fuel lines might be made break- and fixable. For these parts, the question would be, if only previously placed parts should be repairable, or if there should be some kind of part storage and the option to place new struts during a mission (similar to the KAS mod). While for the other parts Darnok suggested I can imagine how their failure should affect the ship, but it's hard to think of suitable conditions for failure. Completely random failures as with the Dang It! mod are out of the question from a gameplay perspective (except maybe as an optional gameplay element for hard mode - and in such a case one can always just use the mod itself...). Shock might be considered here as with the science parts.

I've been grinding contracts for funds... Mainly part tests, but also another rescue mission without maneuver nodes... The first attempt of the rescue failed, because I didn't pack enough batteries and haven't unlocked solar panels yet, so the (luckily very cheap) unmanned rescue ship is now stuck in LKO. The second attempt launched with several batteries more, and was a full success. This time I was also smart enough to harvest some EVA reports while the to be rescued Kerbal was still outside the capsule but already on the ladder, circumventing the limitation that I cannot send Kerbals on EVA yet. I've upgraded the Mission Control building, since there have been two profit yielding contracts available, which I wanted to keep for later (until I get the "Explore Minmus" contract, as they go well together), but with only two slots for active contracts that wouldn't have been possible. So, I have to start saving again for the upgrades of the Astronaut Complex and the VAB... Maybe if I manage to harvest enough science to unlock solar panels I might be able to start the first unmanned and non-returning Mün missions soon... I'll also try to build a manned returning lander, but within the 30 parts limit that might be challenging, and probably I won't be able to earn much science... Also, I'll have to overengineer the lander, as I'm not really good at landing.

I installed 0.90 and started a new career at hard difficulty. This time completely without mods, because I want to see the new features the way Squad intended them to function. I must say, the souposphere is a pain, once one is accustomed to FAR, even though I always combine FAR with KIDS which I set at FAR->Stock (Universal). It just doesn't feel right to me any more, to plough through the broth of the lowest souposphere layers right after launch... Anyhow, I'm pretty happy that I didn't start with mods installed, because without them I could fully appreciate the new limits imposed by the upgradeable buildings. For instance the 18 tons limit with the starting launch pad is just enough to go to orbit with low tech parts, but probably one cannot get much further. Also the fact that one first has to upgrade the Astronaut Complex if one wants to EVA greatly adds to the games difficulty, making it much harder to obtain science, since one cannot simply spam EVA reports while orbiting Kerbin. The funniest and most exciting part was nevertheless my first rescue contract, which I finished without upgrading the tracking station, so I had to perform orbital synchronisation by bare eye. You can imagine how proud I was when I had that little bugger finally aboard the ship. Sadly I was too stupid to realise that I could have misused the presence of a Kerbal outside the capsule to gather lots of EVA reports from LKO before upgrading the Astronaut complex... Well, maybe next time... My first craft in the new save looked exactly the same .

Same here... It got particularly worse after I installed Remote Tech. At some point I decided to calculate all flight plans using spreadsheets, but honestly, that decision didn't stop the growth of the pile of paper...

My PC, which is just capable of running KSP at an acceptable framerate (mainly due to my megalomania when it comes to part counts), has following components: CPU: AMD FX-6350 GPU: Radeon R9 270X Ram: 8GB DDR3-1333 Storage: 30 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD OS: Gentoo Linux (64 bit, of course) I call it Sir Crashalot, thanks to the latest AMD RadeonSI graphics driver updates, which boost both, performance and crash rate... As said, performance with KSP is acceptable, but could be better (the ingame clock is yellow most of the time...). Do you think it's the old RAM I'm using, or more likely the CPU?

That sounds a lot like you're talking about the HUD feature of VOID. Check the VOID configuration dialogue (the parabola icon in the toolbar), which should have a button to reset the HUD positions, as well buttons to enable or disable the HUD.

Landed on Eve and returned. With quicksaves though.

I think you'll need to upload it to a video sharing site (vimeo, youtube,...) and then embed it from there.

At the moment with stock aerodynamics, or better, the lack thereof, the shape of your ship is completely irrelevant. A slim aerodynamic looking rocket will fly as well as a pancake shaped monstrosity, given they have the same weight. An actual aerodynamics model is being planned for a future release of KSP nevertheless, probably the next one. In the meantime, if you want aerodynamics that reflects the actual shape of your craft, you can have a look at the FAR mod, but be warned, without additional mods (for instance KIDS) it will make reaching orbit ridiculously easy. About the contract, I think everything relevant has been said already: Complete it on the way up.

When I have no clue what to do in KSP, I usually play a completely different game, often one that can be played without thinking too much. If the game doesn't require much focus, or consists of repetitive tasks, the mind drifts to something else, what in my case often enough ends up being planning mission for KSP...

Technically it's possible, but a huge part of the game would have to be rewritten. So, practically: No. Edit: Oops, I was too slow...

Objectively, it's probably not the best game ever made. But of course this isn't about objectivity, it's about moar boostaaars. So, subjectively, I'd put it as #2 of my all time favourite games, between dwarf fortress and the original realms of arkania series.