herbal space program

I started with all stock, then went to using a variety of parts mods, and now I'm back with all stock. I think I will stay there until the 1.xx release cycle stabilizes and I have played and discussed it to death, probably another 200 or so hours. After that, I presume it will be a good long wait before the devs come up with anything new, so I will surely be counting on all those mods to keep things interesting.

Hello all, There's been a fair bit of discussion on this, mostly revolving around the idea of having an AI competitor agency in the game, but I don't think I've seen this idea come up yet in the discussions of this question. It seems fairly obvious though, so my apologies to OP(s) if it has been discussed at length before. How about having your space agency require a certain amount of funds annually to maintain operations, based on the level of the buildings you have? I've heard it discussed before that there should be an annual budget for the agency, but as funds coming in not going out. With that type of system, there would be a real incentive to meet ambitious time lines in the game, mostly as you start exploring other planets, but possibly earlier with some other minor tweaks. There would also be no need to implement anything nearly as complicated as a rival agency, which I can't imagine the devs even considering for quite a while. It could of course be a toggleable/slideable option in the game config, but would be part of at least the default moderate and hard modes. I think that type of system would add an interesting new dimension to both the time and money aspects of the career game. Thoughts?

On my first successful Tylo landing, with contracts for tylo flag-planting and surface samples, I failed to notice until it was too late that I had the symmetry on 4 instead of 2 when I placed the landing lights. When I went to disembark, I saw that the result was a mK1 Illuminator coming straight out of the middle of my ladder. There was no way to go around it and no way to jump over it either. Oopsie! - - - Updated - - - Early in my current 1.0 hard career game I ran my first Munar orbital mission completely out of juice by running it in physics time wrap with the thermometer display toggled on. I had no control authority but the engine gimbal and an LV909 engine that didn't generate any power. I was able to get it back to LKO, but despite many f9s I could never maintain control authority long enough with the tiny bit of fuel I had left to keep from turning nose-first and burning up. That was in 1.00 though. I think the aero might be a tad more forgiving now.

As somebody who looked down their nose at MechJeb in this forum, I feel I should hasten to add that I don't think that any particular aspect of the game is its raison d'etre, nor that MechJeb is all bad. I just wanted to express my personal opinion that those who have no interest at all in mastering the piloting part are cheating themselves out of some of the best aspects of the game. Learning how to do all that stuff proficiently was really one of the best parts for me. For those who have already mastered it and just want to build big quickly, using MJ makes perfect sense. I think even I would download it if I were to try to build another giant space station like the one I posted several months ago in the craft showcase http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/22251-Showcase-SPACE-STATIONS%21-Post-your-pictures-here?p=1518814#post1518814. Manually docking all that stuff took forever, largely because of the excruciatingly slow frame rate. I would not reproach anyone for not wanting to do that again.

I guess that's true if you look at it one way, but another way of looking at it is that if you depend on MechJeb or Kerbal Engineer to do certain things, then you are only learning half of the skills required to play the game well. I really don't need any help anymore estimating the deltaV of a particular ship or reaching a specific orbit. It's all become second-nature to me, and gaining those skills was a big part if the satisfaction of paying for me. As to the parts mods, those have often been out of balance with the stock game, giving you capabilities that are not in line with what the devs consider proper. You can basically bypass various engineering restrictions that they consider an integral part of the problem solving content of the game by using various OP modded parts. Of course if that's what makes the game fun for you, there's nothing wrong with that. But eventually you may find yourself hungry for more of a challenge. Another reason I'm playing all stock currently is that I'm participating more in the community in terms of development suggestions and I want to be able to comment in an informed way here about what playing the stock game is like.

"We play with stock-only capabilities and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." -John F. Kerman

Seems like a great idea to me, although I agree with Murph that decaying orbits and escape trajectories might be pretty hard for the game to manage well. I was definitely thinking myself though that it would be great if the ships you rescued could be salvageable in some way, especially if doing so would allow you access to a formerly locked part. Just sticking a docking port on the pods might be a good start in that regard. I also feel like the game, at least the one I'm playing now, is just generating way too many of these contracts. My last four missions in my current hard career game have involved picking up 2-4 stranded Kerbals with a MK1+Hitchhiker-based bus and carting them to whatever the destination du jour is. Not only do I get to fill the roster of my space program for free this way, but they all also get lots of experience just for being along on the ride! When I land, there always seem to be 3 more rescue missions available. This seems like kind of an exploit to me, because given this possibility there is apparently no reason ever to hire a Kerbal from the applicant pool. Why pay for a raw recruit when you can get paid instead for an astronaut with instant experience? I believe the scheme you posted at the beginning for a limited number of missions with escalating difficulty would definitely have less of a Monty Hall feel to it.

I believe that if you really think about it, it would not be so hard to come up with a scheme for deciding when to unlock stuff without restricting anybody's gameplay. The current contracts system already tries to do that, but doesn't quite have it right. To use the example of going to Duna, it is somewhat complex but totally doable to calculate what the maximum deltaV ship you could build is based on what combinations of engines, fuel tanks, pods, and building upgrades you have. When you reach a high enough maximum theoretical deltaV for your lightest command pod to make it to Duna's SOI, that's when the set of milestones unlocks. You are certainly not going to do it with only 30 parts, no batteries, and 18 tons launch weight! As to your example of doing it only with space planes, there's basically no way you could get to that point given the current tech tree and aerodynamics without having the rocket parts to do it as well. The system could always err on the side of generosity. I would also argue that deciding what planet to unlock when is the only even moderately difficult problem in this system, so I suppose you could always have those milestones visible. Other stuff, like mining ore, redirecting asteroids or exploring with rovers, has perfectly straightforward tech requirements. In your OP you actually suggested that the system should somehow decide what is within reach, so you tacitly acknowledge that this is not undoable. At any rate, I think it's less important to restrict what's visible at any given time, which is basically about not making the UI too confusing, than it is to restrict what program areas can be active at any one time, because not doing the latter basically allows the player to completely ignore the whole idea of having to manage contracts at all.

I think OP's idea to explicitly separate the random and one-off contracts is a good one, but I'm not sure I like the idea of having all of them available all of the time. I think it might be better for one thing to have them appear only as they become unlocked in terms of tech progress, and also to allow the player only to have a limited number of them active at any one time. This could be analogous to the "programs" idea that was floated in another thread like this a couple of days ago. You could select up to two general areas to have active at any one time, like "speed and distance records" or "atmospheric flight", and then be allowed to have some limited number (depending on building upgrades) of specific contracts within each area active at once. If this were kept as a separate tab, and the procedural, i.e. "commercial" contracts had their own page and number limits, then the whole kludgy thing of having all those automatic "record" contracts at the beginning could be eliminated. I assume they just did that because they realized that with only 2 active contracts allowed at the very beginning, you have to do too much inane grinding to really get your program off the ground. With a system like that, you could have 4-6 contracts going at start and thus not need this "records" artifice at the outset. As to the milestones contracts carrying monetary and science rewards, think they definitely should have them, either as one-time rewards or as increases is some sort of periodic agency budget, which is an idea that has also been kicking around the forums.

As long as they do actually fix all the bugs, which I assume they will, I don't think it matters that they called this release 1.0. There is certainly $40 worth of content in this package.

Basically, I think what happened is that the devs just ran out of time (i.e. money) before they could really properly finish the career part of the game, so they basically left us with a placeholder. I assume that they decided that if they're going to spend a lot of time creating quality content to go with this giant space sandbox, they are going to have to monetize it by offering it as an expansion pack or a 2.0 version. That is OK by me, as I have already gotten my original $24.95's worth out of the game many, many times over and would gladly pay them more to finish the job. But I sure hope that after they've all spent a couple of weeks lounging on the beach, they do come back and get to work on the next phase. For them to walk away now would just be very sad.

To clarify, I mentioned the ladder and the lights specifically because they aren't really critically necessary for most of the things you'd want to do, they just make playing the game a big pain in the behind in the situations where they come in handy. Fumbling around in the dark trying to find the dang thermometer before leaving zone JX-QTX or trying to hover with the jetpack with one hand while hitting the f key with the other are not my idea of fun things to do. Squad should just let us have these little things at the beginning, because for one it makes no sense to have to land on the Mun before you can have a ladder or landing lights, and for another not having them is mostly just annoying rather than challenging. - - - Updated - - - I totally agree with this also. There should be a separate first-tier entry point for Kerballed, unkerballed, and atmospheric vessels.

I totally agree with what you said, but I would add that it highlights a general problem with the current career mode: You unlock the whole tech tree so that you can do lots of different things, but once you've done that, the career game doesn't have any new goals for you. There needs to be something beyond just unlocking the tech tree in career mode. I posted my basic idea in another thread in this sub-forum, about digging up alien artifacts to get FTL technology, but it could be a lot of other stuff as well. - - - Updated - - - It's one thing to invoke specific developments in history as a rationale for gameplay-compromising changes to the tech tree, but OTOH having to wait until Tier 5 to get a flippin' LADDER is just mentally challenged. Ditto lights and about half a dozen other items that really ought to available at start, because not having them is just a pain in the exhaust nozzle and contributes nothing to the idea of expanding your capabilities according to a common-sense rather than historical model.

Yes, that's exactly what I thought. I guess I didn't read that second bit too good. Anyway, it's good to know that this sort of idea was at least on the table at Squad at some point. Now that they have the sandbox more or less finished and a rudimentary career/campaign mode in place, I think that Squad pretty much has to go in this type of direction if they want to turn KSP into a full-fledged franchise. Either that I guess, or they have to turn it into a Minecraft-style multiplayer sandbox universe, with users acquiring plots of land to develop within the vast spaces on all the different planetary surfaces. I guess there's no reason they couldn't do both, but I think the former would be significantly less difficult. Either way, I think they have a whole lot of people out there like me who would be happy to plunk down another $25 or whatever to see this incredible canvas they have created get populated with some new content.

I think those are all great suggestions. Finding interesting stuff is the perfect way both to make the planetary surfaces less boring and to give some greater sense of purpose to the exploration contracts. Also, as to your point abut the surfaces having to be procedurally generated, that is of course true, but they could still do a lot more with procedural terrain. How about some rivers on Kerbin, for example? Also, the various artifacts you have to hunt for could come with their own more elaborately designed terrain overlays that could be procedurally integrated into random locations within certain terrain types on whatever body. That way, they could be in a different location every game but still have more depth to the terrain modeling than the generic procedural landscape. As to what resource the alien artifacts might have associated with them, I think that it could perhaps be a special sort of science that allows you to acquire special alien techs with special capabilities. Things for example that would let you create super-efficient engines or autonomous probes to search for resources, etc. The ultimate FTL engine could be some gigantic thing that would be challenging even to boost into LKO, and around which you have to build a great big ship with lots of specialized resources, etc. on board. It would be something like building the space ship in Civ, except you'd actually get to fly this one! - - - Updated - - - While I am in awe of all the amazing things that various modders have accomplished, I think that a real campaign, with the sort of depth that would create a truly immersive game play experience, would ultimately have to be implemented by Squad. As they have done in the past, however, they could always take things produced by modders to use as a basis for creating such a campaign.

How about letting us build other runways?? It could be done for money, just like upgrading the main buildings, except more expensive the further from KSC you are.

Hello all, As one of the many here who have played this game more or less into the ground during the pre-release phase, I don't think I'm alone in feeling a little bit let down that now it's finally 1.0, and although the new aero and re-entry have been fun to play with for a while, it really doesn't feel like the game between 0.90 and 1.0 has offered us much of anything new to do. To me, it feels like what is really missing from the game as it stands is some sort of overarching campaign-like goal, a victory condition as it were, that goes beyond just unlocking the whole tech tree. Right now the contracts system offers a number of basic skills-building hoops to jump through, and for a new player I imagine these offer a pretty decent game play experience, but for us more experienced players I feel like it gets pretty ho-hum pretty quickly. At the same time, I feel like there is this gigantic solar system they've built, but it's basically unpopulated with anything that makes one spot on the surface of a particular body much more interesting than another. So what I feel the devs really need to focus on next is giving us some reason to explore the Kerbolar system other than accumulating science points in order to develop capabilities for which there is no ultimate goal. My idea for how to go about this would be to have the various exploration contracts that come up yield evidence of the existence of alien artifacts, which can be analyzed in situ for some amount of science, but must be recovered to yield all their secrets. These artifacts, getting ever remoter and more difficult to recover, would form a chain of clues that, together with sensor scans, etc. generated by the contracts system, would lead the player to some ultimate boss artifact than when fully exploited would allow for the construction of an interstellar drive. The ultimate goal would be to build some sort of mega-ship containing this drive and a whole bunch of Kerbals and use it to get to a new solar system, the exploration of which would form the basis for a later version of the game. Science would thus not be only for acquiring techs to build ordinary space ships, but to solve the mystery of the aliens and to build the final goal mega space ship and launch it to another star system. I think that compared to what they have already accomplished, building that sort of content would actually not be that much work for the folks at Squad, although I think they would have to bring some new people on board who are more specialized in that sort of game development. Anyway, that's my basic vision of how this game could really go to the next level. I would love it if others out there would add to this thread by describing theirs!

I've been getting rescue missions out the wazoo this game. I've gotten several missions to rescue from around the Mun and also one for Minmus. One time I went up with an empty Hitchhiker container and came back with a full one. They're really kind of like getting free money, because without them, I don't know how I'd staff my space program! It's also great to load up the bus using a Hitchhiker and take it to Minmus and back, because all the Kerbals inside get the experience. It almost feels like cheating. I've got two now that are in retrograde Kerbin orbits, but I think I'll wait for at least one more to make it worth my while. Sorry guys!

I also think the programs idea is a great one. Another thing I would REALLY like to see as well is for the exploration contracts to at least sometimes have you actually FIND SOMETHING in all those places you have to scan, visit, sample, and report on. Things to find could include unique terrain features, rare resources, alien artifacts that give you out-of-sequence techs, or even a kerbalized version of the Bob's Big Boy statue! That sort of treasure hunting would make the career game so much more fun for me. They could stretch the value of each individual easter egg by having you first notice something anomalous in a flyover mission when you complete it, then have that completion automatically generate a contract to visit that site on the ground. They could even add another step after that where you have to dig. If I really start fantasizing, I imagine that the alien artifact finds could represent a chain of clues that have to be followed one by one, to progressively harder-to-reach sites, ultimately leading to a boss alien site that after a lot of poking and prodding would yield a faster-than-light drive that allows you to visit a different star system! OK, now I'm just talking crazy, but there's SO MUCH they could do to make the game more fun by having exploration of all the bodies result in more than just the same old boring Kerbal selfies. As it stands now, I'm having a hard time staying motivated to play through a career game in 1.0, which gives me a big old sad. - - - Updated - - - Maybe not Stock 1.0, but if they bail on the game now, they will be leaving it half finished! What is the point of creating such an awesome simulation world if you don't actually populate it with cool stuff to find and do? All the modders are awesome, but there's no way they are going to be able to make the kind of concerted, multi-person effort that will be required to implement content that has real depth. Squad has to that, and although I don't expect them to do it all for free, if they don't do it at all I am going to be genuinely upset. - - - Updated - - - I guess part of Squad's problem is that they are not really the right kind of programmers to be creating an immersive linear campaign-style game. That takes a pretty different skillset from creating an amazing physics simulation engine, and I think it's fairly clear they are out of their depth with the career part. They need to see if they can poach some people from Firaxis!

I believe I bought it at version 0.18. It was quite a while between then and when I joined this forum, which I guess explains your poll result. I imagine the general public would give you a very different distribution. I'll bet there's probably some way to get that info on Steam. I do seem to recall somebody posting that it was their #1 download right after the 1.0 release, so clearly quite a few people did wait. ....OK, reading upthread people said the game wasn't even on Steam until 0.19, so I guess that must have been when I bought it.

They really need to deal with this one. It's a royal pain on the exhaust nozzle.

I guess that would be this, my Jool 5 mothership: http://imgur.com/a/fIgi3#0 ...how do we embed Imgur albums again?

I've been Getting all sorts of Kerbal rescue and tourist missions from practically the beginning of the game, even though I still don't have any parts with crew capacity >1 after 7 quite productive missions. Putting all of those as well as the RCS port in the 90 science tech tier just seems wrong. I know you can do it by stacking two Mk1 pods, but that's just silly! There are all sorts of examples like this, where stuff that you really should be getting pretty early is not available until mid-game. ...Like why does it take until tier 5 to get a flippin' LADDER, for Kraken's sake? That's just plain stupid!

1) Moar stuff to see and do on all the bodies! 2) A better thought-out system of career advancement, with many much-needed tweaks to what you can do when in your career progression 3) more depth to the contracts system, extensively based on things that get implemented in doing Item 1) above. Missons to go visit some specific spot should involve finding some kind of easter egg a significant fraction of the time!

My first Munar landing was an Apollo-style Munar orbit rendezvous mission in like 0.19, using a Mk2 lander can. The orbital rendezvous and docking was not so hard, but actually landing took a fair bit of the paint off of my f5 and f9 keys. I never really drilled a hole, but I ended up on my side over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Trying to toggle back and forth between the docking and flight modes with the keyboard to do the RCS translation to get the dern thing headed straight down was just impossible. When I finally stayed upright on the gazillionth try, I was dancing all around the room. Then I started using a Nintendo controller and suddenly it was easy! I'm amazed so many people still fly with their keyboards. Now it takes landing on Tylo to get my pulse rate up. On the other hand, I'm playing a hard career game right now and my next mission will involve doing it without the benefit of RCS. That might not be so easy!