herbal space program

I actually like the air in 1.1.2 quite a bit better than 1.0.5. Things are possible again that were not in 1.0.5, like getting a Mk1 nuclear-powered SSTO on orbit with almost 6km/s deltaV left in the tank. Heck, I'm not even sure I want them to fix the bugs if it means they're going to nerf my planes again!

I use no mods to make things easier, nor have I ever touched HyperEdit. The paint is all worn off of my F9 key though...

I spent practically the whole day yesterday working out the formulas myself for calculating transfer window times and positions between planets. using nothing but pencil and paper. Boy have I forgotten a lot of math since college! I used these formulas, all the orbital data from the Wiki, and the calculated transfer phase angles from Olex.biz to construct an Excel spreadsheet that allows me to determine the date and position of every transfer window between all of the planets from Moho to Jool, from day 1 to eternity. The first transfer window in the game, for those who care to know, is Kerbin-Moho on day 9, 3hrs, 40 min. The next Kerbin window is to Jool on day 183, followed by Duna on day 226. There is no transfer window from Kerbin to Eve, which was the body I was particularly interested in analyzing, until day 550. Successive Kerbin-Eve windows alternate between sides of Kerbin's orbit every 679 days, processing 68.8 degrees prograde every other window, and return to just retrograde of the same spot every 5 cycles. And on and on. It looks like my best window for a cheap Kerbin-Eve-Moho transfer is number 24, occurring in year 30, which was what I originally set out to determine.

How about if we get to multiply our scores at the end by the ratio of our payload mass to the 1.5 ton minimum, keeping the original base score calculation and 80k limit on lifter cost? The more mass you send, the lower your base score will be, but the higher the multiplier. Above some mass, it just won't be possible any more with a lifter significantly under 80k, so cost is still a factor. Landing the payload and/or returning it to Kerbin safely could each also create score multiplier, say 1.5X. With multipliers rather than fixed bonuses, your base score, that is how cheaply you can bring the whole thing home, will always still be a key factor. If the whole challenge is about getting a 1.5 ton payload into 500km orbit, I feel like we're already pretty close to being done with Maccollo's entry.

So would you consider awarding further bonuses for more ambitious missions with lifters under the original cost limit? I'm working on a lifter that I think can land Jebediah and return him home for a little over 50,000. While this wouldn't score so well with the current rules, I think it does address your broader goal of maximizing ROI for a Moho mission. Landing Kerbals and bringing them and their experiments back would greatly increase the amount of science and money your investment will earn in a tight career game. Anyway, it's just a thought. I'll of course post my mission either way.

I think they know that what passes for career mode now is kind of a stub. The reasons they haven't fixed it are that implementing some kind of aerodynamic model and updating the game engine, both big tasks, could not be put off any longer. I also suspect that making career better isn't really so much in their wheelhouse. Coming up with an engaging and rich campaign experience is a completely different set of skills than figuring out how to simulate space flight. I hope they are not kidding themselves that they can learn all this on the fly instead of bringing in some new talent. What they have now has some serious conceptual problems, like the fact that even for an experienced player, it starts off really hard and then just keeps on getting easier. For example, if you want to rendezvous,, dock, etc. early in the game, you have to do it without the benefit of SAS or RCS or even a target indicator. That exercise is pretty challenging even for an experienced player and for a beginner it's next to impossible. It should therefore only be introduced later in the game, perhaps as some sort of "Jebediah has to rescue a stranded astronaut but his RCS and SAS are malfunctioning" contract. The bottom line IMO is that unlocking the tech tree is just the wrong thing to have as the central motivating factor of your campaign, for this very reason. There needs to be some other narrative motivating you beyond that, and this will require the generation of a whole bunch of de-novo content. It also represents a major conceptual crossroads, which means there are bound to be disagreements within the team about how to move forward. I hope that navigating this passage is at least close to being the next thing on their agenda.

Less lift, less drag than before. That will have all sorts of effects. I had to slap around 1.33X wing area on my planes to make them fly like before. Up high, things drop off faster now as well.

The idea is to see how much you can cheat the standard dV map using only Kerbin and Mun as gravity-assisting bodies. Here is my entry, requiring a total of 1297m/s to get from LKO to Jool: http://imgur.com/gallery/XQSnn/new. It was based on hopping up to a 3:4, followed by a 1:2 solar orbit, using retrograde apoapsis DSMs to create angled orbits. Can you get there for less, using only the Kerbin system? Can you go to a different body with a better ratio of actual dV to nominal dV? Based on the Olex.biz calculator, the linked tour has an actual/nominal ratio of 0.68. Beat that for any other body and you win! You should start from close to a circular 100km LKO. I will make a leaderboard as soon as anybody submits an entry...

D'ohh! So many things to think of when you're having a computer make up names for you

Last night I finished working out my 8 year, <1300m/s route from Kerbin LKO to Jool using gravity assists from only Mun and Kerbin. Details here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/139121-kerbin-kerbin-slingshot/&do=findComment&comment=2601515 I'm sure it can be done better and I hope somebody tries.

OK, so I finally finished my Kerbin/Mun assist-only route to Jool. Please see the linked album for images. The bottom line is it required 1297.6m/s total dV for me to get to a Jool encounter, which saves almost 700 m/s relative to the 1987 m/s ejection burn required for a direct transfer. Total transit time is 8 years, 200 days. http://imgur.com/a/XQSnn The whole principle of doing this is to climb a ladder of resonant orbits through successive gravity assists. The course I chose was based on a 3:4 followed by a 2:1 resonant orbit, using deep space maneuvers near my solar apoapsis to create an angle of incidence between my orbit and Kerbin's for gravity assist. I started with Kerbin a bit less than 30 degrees ahead of Jool. Next time, I would probably try a bit more than 30 degrees. I ejected Kerbin-prograde with a 950 m/s burn that went low around Mun, as pictured. This gave me an initial solar orbit with a 20.18 MKm apoapsis and a period of 596.7 days. this is 28 days longer than the 568d period of a 4:3 resonant orbit, which seems to be sort of a sweet spot to shoot for wrt any resonant orbit. From a bit after the Ap of that orbit, I burned retrograde for 169.5 m/s (DSM1), lowering my period to 564d and setting up a Kerbin encounter after 3 orbits, at the far intersection. Setting a periapsis of ~1000km at this encounter, I was boosted into a new orbit with Ap 30.1 Mkm and a period of 882d. This again is 30d longer than the 2:1 resonant period of 852d. From near the Ap of that orbit, I pulled back for another 173.1 m/s (DSM2), resulting in another Kerbin encounter on the very next go-round, from which I was able to get catapulted to a Jool encounter from an 88km periapsis. Another 70 m/s of plane correction and a tiny in-plane maneuver got me captured via a retrograde Tylo encounter. Anyway, this route is not quite as efficient as the PLAD route (1000m/s), but that route only has one window in 17 years while this one can be taken as often as the direct Hohman transfer window comes around. Anyway, I'd be interested to see how much this can be improved upon, but I think I'm done with it for my own part.

Although I certainly don't think it would wreck the game to have such a thing, I feel like the introduction of tweakable tanks and the mass readout in the engineer's report has made calculating it yourself in the VAB/SPH so easy that I really don't miss it that much. For the sorts of missions I'm doing, I like to keep logs of dV expended/remaining at various points, so even if it were available I'd probably just keep using my spreadsheet anyway. OTOH, way back before you couldn't get your full/empty masses in a matter of seconds, it really was a drag not having one!

Just putting stuff in orbit and landing on other planets is pretty easy. Maybe you should try something harder. Have you built any space planes yet? How about dropping an asteroid on Mun to see what happens? How about seeing how far you can go and return from using an SSTO? Ever built a helicopter? An ion glider? Jool5? Eve rocks? In only 200 hours, you'd have to be superhuman to have mastered all those challenges.

Thanks! I'll try that. This issue has basically caused the mission I was working on to grind to a halt, so it will be a big help.

Ermm, what? where would I set that flag? I'm not launching KSP from a command line.

I played through career mode one time with standard hard settings except for f5 in case of crashes. There were a couple of tight spots early on, but then it got really easy pretty quickly. I can't imagine why I'd want to do all of that again, unless there is a whole lot more content involved next time. I did engage in a couple of career-based challenges after that, like how much science/$$$ can you accumulate for how few missions in the early game, but that got old fairly quickly too. Now what interests me is using sandbox mode to push the envelope of what can be done in the game. I hope one day career gets some serious love from the devs and I have a reason to play it again, but until then I'll just play with my space planes and gravity assist tours.

I don't find the game unplayable exactly, but the fact that it CTDs almost every time I try to minimize it to look at my spreadsheet has sure made my current mission a pain in the end that should not point towards space. I hope they don't need several updates to get around to fixing that one..

Unless you're you're playing some sort of hair shirt version of career mode or involved in a lowest dV to Minmus challenge, I can't see why it matters so much one way or the other how you do this. For Mun or other bigger bodies, how you come at them matters a bit more.

You are not doing Squad nor the devs any favors OP by trying to stamp out criticism on this forum. Frankly, I find this broadside at everyone who dares complain offensive. If you are referring specifically to unfair criticisms of the devs themselves for the (clearly defective) product Squad released, there have not actually been so many of those. Mostly, there have been allegations that the hands-on developers are getting egregiously overworked and underpaid, which is a narrative that (while I have no idea if it is actually true) is quite consistent with the product Squad just released. Squad and the developers are not the same thing, and posturing as if criticism of Squad's business model is the same as disparaging these poor overworked programmers is disingenuous. And blaming the victim, i.e. telling the players that their impatience is the cause of this unprecedentedly buggy release, is just preposterous. If you want to single out some individual who makes some particularly nasty remark, have at it. But this approach to all the malcontents smacks of former Soviet republics.

I think they would be nuts to do this whole engine upgrade now if they weren't going to add a bunch of new content to this "version" of the game, i.e. this code base. If I were in their shoes, I would hire some creative consultants and more content developers, then use them to help create one more significant content upgrade that is still covered by the original price of admission -- not a huge upgrade, but one that will keep everyone interested while the development process goes on. Once this version is bug-free, any future content additions should be handled as expansion modules to the existing game for at least a couple of cycles. These should be relatively cheap (say 10 bucks), but still cost enough that they will maintain a working revenue stream for Squad. While all this is happening, they need to come to grips with the crossroads they're at creatively and figure out just where this game is going. If they want to keep their broad player base alive, they need to come up with something major to keep it interesting for them. That could be a bunch of different things, but only when it is clear what that is should they start developing KSP2 in earnest.

When I was playing career, I most certainly kept using the same booster stacks again and again for missions that were in similar ranges of tonnage and dV from LKO. It was already enough of a grind without having to assemble essentially the same rocket over and over. Since then, it's been a mixed bag. Sometimes it seems like it's less work to just slap something together for the job than it is to go find something in all my save files and sometimes it doesn't.

Before career mode existed, I also used to play guided by the notion that everything should be done in as little Kerbal time as possible. It was a way of making the game more goal-oriented for me, and it introduced the interesting (to me, anyway) challenge of juggling as many parallel missions as possible. I still did interplanetary missions, but I had to keep track of time so I wouldn't miss the transfer windows between maintaining all my other missions. When actual career mode came along, I was kind of disappointed that there was no element of minimizing Kerbal time included. I must admit though that when I brought up the idea here a while back of having some sort of time-dependent money burn in the game, like annual rent for the KSC, it was roundly rejected, and I think somebody even went so far as to troll-rate the thread . So I guess the devs made the right decision to leave that out, but I still kind of wish it was there.

Hmm. I must say that I've found that if I focus on the body that I mean to encounter and zoom into it, I can almost always manage to rotate the view so that my node is somewhere behind the planned encounter along the same line of sight, allowing me to see both at the same time. What drives me nuts is trying to dial in the dV with the scroll wheel, which moves either in tiny, useful increments or maddeningly large jumps based on no particular logic AFAICT.

There's a mod for that (Precise Node, IIRC), and the cognoscenti around here were kind of amused when they learned that I had undertaken all these really fussy multi-planet trajectories without it. All I can say is you get used to its stupid behavior eventually, And to be honest I also get a certain level of satisfaction from feeling like I can fly all these maneuvers using my own hands and some gauges. Using a machine to type in the exact answer somehow feels like cheating to me.

Reading through this thread, I think the devs are in a tough position with this whole question. It's really a matter of what their target market actually is. Most games, even highbrow ones like Civ, will hold your hand so that even if you are essentially incapable of sustained, systematic reasoning you can muddle your way through. KSP just plain didn't do that, while at the same time offering a type and level of simulation experience that was beyond anything else available for this sort of scenario. What made it my favorite game ever, a virtue that it shared with Nethack, still perhaps my second favorite game ever in spite of its most venerable age, is precisely its sheer difficulty. I had to think hard to make things work. I had to be creative! I had to genuinely push my own envelope of reasoning and calculation, and consequently the feeling of reward I got when I finally achieved success was unique. When I first landed on Mun successfully, I was ecstatic, jumping up and down in front of my computer. I honestly don't think I ever experienced that level of gratification playing any other computer game, even including the first time I escaped with the Amulet of Yendor without cheating. I really don't want KSP to lose that magical, singular virtue, but I have to acknowledge that this level of obscurity and difficulty may just not play to the sort of audience you need to target in a really big-time, big-dollar release. They have a very fine line to walk.