BlackAdder128

I want to say I'm sorry you had such a bad experience with the game, but honestly I'm really having trouble feeling it. Despite issues here and there, I thought the game was fantastic and more than got my expected hours of enjoyment out of it. For people who like this type of game, it's among the best out there. Squad isn't perfect, and I'm usually a serious critic of studious that made games like Fallout 3 or Fallen Enchantress that I've found too buggy to play. But your issue sounds like a bit of a niche one. It kind of sucks to fall into that niche, I admit, and I'd be frsutrated in your shoes too. But I'm less than impressed by your response.

I've also got a mining operation that grabs ore from the surface, mostly because there always seemed to be contracts available for moving ore to kerbin orbit. I took one of those miners and am doing some resupply before I send it off to Jool SOI. The mothership has the ISRU in a cargo bay. Putting the landers on dropped the delta-V a bit, though. I may have to build some larger extensions to put on the front. I don't know that the operation is that efficient, though. The 3000 ore once converted can fill 3168/3520 fuel on the lander. I seem to use almost half the fuel getting to minmus and back because the lander is so much heavier on the return trip. Or put another way, it took 3 trips to net the ~5000 liquid fuel I had used on my mothership plus refuel the lander. So it's probably better (aside from cash missions) to build something a little heavier with the ISRU on it. '

1. Forgetting to *deploy* solar panels on a probe once I'm in orbit and need them. 2. Obscuring hatch with parachute, etc. 3. Keeping time warp too high on return to Kerbin and crashing into it. This and other forms of impatience is the #1 killer of all my kerbals 4. Design was a little too top-heavy + no fins.

Nah, can't deny I'm proud to be an involved Dad and put the kids before the games. That doesn't mean giving up the games, though.

As a father who must also sensibly prioritize wife+kids over playtime, I feel your pain. I play similarly, also using reverts for emergencies/tests/glitches but not load/save. I haven't hit too many similar situations, because I'm pretty good about hitting pause and shrinking the Kerbal Window, but it's painful to walk back and find a crashed ship and whatnot. I've definitely found myself carefully planning my missions so as not to have to quit while something I care about is in non-terminal orbit. But there are a few times I have to just take my lumps and move on. And no, I can't expect my wife to care about it. My 10 yr old I can sometimes convince of the gravity of my tragedies. On the other hand, his favorite Kerbal pasttime is trying to become the next Danny2462. He has very little respect for little green life.

Supporting thread safety and debugging is definitely a nice step, but I'm skeptical that processor utilization will be high out of the box. I imagine there's still a lot of library and end-developer work left to really get the performance, but I'd be happy to be wrong!

I agree the amount of work would be quite high. I might have to dig in and do a toy mod to convince myself just to convince myself of the insanity of the idea. I've got a Star Citizen account. I think the result will have high immersion, but any game that surrenders to "You have a max speed of X m/s (where X <= fighter jet speeds)" doesn't quite satisfy my "But physics!" dream. - - - Updated - - - My potentially naive sense is that the PCs probably could handle something like that if you yield a bit on the graphics side and take full advantage of multi-threading. PC's are tapering off in terms of single-threaded performance. If you want more power, it's multi-threading or bust. But I don't see Unity, etc. taking full advantage of that yet.

Ok, I will preface this by saying this may be a stupid idea, and is almost certainly impractical. Yet I just can't get it out of my head. I've always enjoyed games like Elite, and a couple years back I briefly had a blast with X3: Terran conflict. It had lots of combat, a halfway-decent space trading econ simulator, and such scriptability. However, as much as I enjoyed space fighting and trading games, there was always a voice in the back of my mind screaming, "But Physics!" But now I've come to know and love KSP: Physics is here. So I find myself wondering, what would it look like if you added trading, combat, and scriptability to KSP? People have already done some of the work, as there's MechJeb, numberous weapon mods, and mods that add new resources. But what if you could mine a wider variety of salable resources? What if there were competing Kerbal space agencies that placed a few stations in various orbits where you could dock and trade resources, steal them, or simply rapidly dis-assemble your competition? Perhaps you could keep positive relations with one space agency that you used a a fence. Meanwhile, mercenary combat seems like it could be pretty doable. I could imagine using something like CupCake's dropship with a couple weapons to fend off pirates and do some bounty-hunting. What if the progression in the game started with a trading ship in orbit instead of a VAB on the ground, and you had to lease the use of a company's VAB until you could buy your own? I just have to ask, on a scale of merely impractical to utterly nuts, what do other people think of the idea?

"Pfft. Efficiency is overrated. MY small satellites cost about 200k apiece." It sounds like you invest big up front and try to get a lot of use out of them. Still efficient, but not cheap. "But honestly, money hasn't been a problem for me even in my Hard career." I had a hard career going for beta, and I just kind of got bored with it. Yes, I made money with every contract, but it felt a bit grindy. I'm playing a "moderate" career mode, because it kind of makes me think about cost efficiency, even though I can progress in relatively few missions. I like the challenge of incrementally improving the cost of going to, say, Gilly and back, with a full science load for 230K (it turns out I could have eliminated the bottom stage, because I made it back with 1900m/s of delta-v). I just like having the measure and having it matter enough to act as a motivator. In career mode, it seems unmanned missions are generally better for quick cash, though.

Yep, these are really cheap and fun career mode sat launches. One 8K satellite net me something like 250K funds from 2 contracts.

Gotta agree that the Skipper is a good mid-stage engine with decent TWR and efficiency. The mainsail is a better lifter for anything not ultra-light, but when I'm playing career and don't have the ARM rockets yet, it's also my favorite asparagus.

Good answers, thanks! I'll probably stick with the lighter engines for my travel stage on probes, and try to make the LV-Ns work on motherships. I guess if inter-planetary travel is too efficient, there's no incentive to play around with mining bases. I'm enjoying the fact that setting up stations now makes sense in career mode (so far, I like the structure). But I've been really looking forward to building a monstrocity to go "colonize" Jool's SOI.

I've recently been playing with some unmanned probe designs in 1.0.2, and I happened to notice that for my initial designs, nuclear engines seem to give me less delta-V per weight, cost, and part than Terriers or Poodles, even when I dump the oxidizer. Is there something I'm doing wrong? Anyone else find a good home for LV-N's in their designs?

Nothing so exciting: just landing a Kerbal on the Mun and safely returning with a 23K lander.

It's not so bad. My 2-person Mun lander costs in the range of 40K. Version 1.0 really pushed me in the Mun lander category: my cheapest lander was 20K or so. In previous versions, I had spent clsoe to 50K.

Learning curves are cool. I've landed dozens of kerbals on the Mun, and still occasionally botch the landing, especially when mission sites aren't on level terrain. However, with career restrictions getting tighter and tighter, I've been going with lighter and lighter landers. I finally botched a landing on Minmus with a lander so light (funds being way harder to acquire than science) that even after falling over I was able to just retract the legs, spin rightside up and then put the landing legs back out. Now I'm tempted to drop an extra reaction wheel on there and see if I can repeat the trick on the Mun!

Thanks for the link. I hadn't heard of these guys, and it was both a good inteview and a relatively interesting show to plug. Kudos.

The funny thing is, one of my first landers to reliably get to Duna in career mode happily made it to Dres and back. Of course, that's back when "career mode" was just "science mode" and I built 300+ part monstrocities with huge amount of overkill to go everywhere. My Munar and Dunar rockets these days are designed to be cost efficient for .25, and they're a fraction of the size of the rockets I used to build. My piloting has improved nearly as much since those days, too, so that the delta-v transfer plot actually nearly matches what I see in practice. It just seems like everything is hard in KSP... the first time. After that, it becomes nearly routine, but I keep finding new goals to hit and more efficient ways to do things I used to do inefficiently.

Got a chance to watch the video. I didn't find anything wrong with your voice, although except the volume was a bit low, and combined with a bit of sing-songy intonation it's a bit hard to follow. I've the habit of doing the same thing, so when I read or speak to others I have to make an effort to break rhythm or just the sound of my voice puts people to sleep. I was also kind of confused about what your installed mods were (that's going to affect your goals on a per-session basis). That made it a bit difficult to identify with the experience. Unfortunately, I'm a bit goal-oriented, so typically I you-tube to learn how to solve specific problems rather than watch people chill and play. There's nothing wrong with that, and a lot of people do it, but I'm less lkely to tune into that kind of thing. But you seem pretty good at the game, so I think you'd have a lot to share with a bit more organization applied. Good luck!

It really depends on the content (narrating in an entertaining way can be difficult), but I'll give it a look-see.

It probably took me about a week's worth of playing to get to the Mun. I was stubborn and didn't google how to build a proper lander, so I had several instances of my lander falling over until I figured out how to do it right. Duna was also a pretty big challenge for me, initially, because I didn't have an intuitive grasp of how to build a proper rocket: I leaned towards bigger engines and moar boosters! Then I watched a couple youtube videos and found a few decent references. But that was part of the fun for me: exploring how to build stuff without looking up the answers. Then later, I went and did the reading to figure out how things were supposed to work.

I agree with others that, having spent some time cutting my teeth on KSP, I'd like the option to have more realism. So far, that particular demand has been met by mods, although one could imagine increased realism over what even mods support. I think the main question is what additional realism, among existing mods, should be applied to stock Kerbal. Ideally, the answer might be "All of them, all completely configurable" such that everyone gets the experience they want. That doesn't seem -ahem- realistic. If the devs wanted to add FAR, then deadly re-entry, then life support, that would be awesome. If they further added large planets, realistic commication, etc. - that would be pretty cool too. And I hope SQUAD continues pushing configurable realism for 1.0. But to be perfectly honest, if the devs just walked away today and called victory, I'd still feel I've gotten my $25 worth and more. So I'm not inclined to complain.

I would say yes. While KSP is a niche program, it currently dominates its niche: nothing else can touch it in what it does. I don't think the niche will die, which means the only threat to its immortality is replacement by something superior. SQUAD has done an exellent job: I find it difficult to believe that KSP could be wholly supplanted in the next 10 years.

Stock ony, so far.

I just dowloaded the set of mods for "Realism mode". Considering the relatively high number of hours it took me to get to the point where I wanted a more challenging experience, it seems fully appropriate to rely on mods for that.