sedativechunk

+1 on the Minecraft discussion. That game is alive and well despite getting near half a decade old now. I think I bought that game around 2010. I prefer KSP over that game but it is still a blast. I think KSP will life for a very long time as long as SQUAD keeps it alive and it has this very strong forum and fanbase. No other game like it exist and I don't think anything will come close to it. It has public support from NASA and it is something I feel we need in today's world. Nothing against Minecraft, but kids should be inspired to get into science and engineering. Where Minecraft is more of an artistic time killer, KSP has a bit more of a purpose. It teaches real concepts behind physics and has more of a sense of accomplishment when you land a kerbal on another planet or moon. One of you did mention it would be nice to have another KSP or a game like it that is more stable/better graphics from a bigger studio. That would be awesome, although somehow the "kerbals" are what make the game interesting. These little green men you get to fly from planet to planet.

Eve is my biggest challenge in this game. I've dumped nearly 400 hours into this game over the summer and have not successfully got a ship to and from Eve. In fact, even science vessels have gotten destroyed by the heat/atmosphere alone. I've done several test/probe landings. Let me tell you now that it is VERY hard to land in a precise location on Eve. Attempting to land near a probe on the surface in a spot 2,000m above sea level, every time I landed about 40-80km away.That scares me for a manned mission. Nevertheless, I attempted one. I build a pretty nifty lander that could return from Eve if it landed on one of the plateaus. Unfortunately it burned up during reentry (I'm using deadly reentry). It is truly a demon planet.

No, nuclear rockets are NOT cheating. They are a stock (vanilla) part of KSP and they actually have been built and tested in ground firings in real life. The nuclear rocket is a real concept when talking about interplanetary travel. Back in the Apollo days, they were building and testing actual nuclear rockets in the American desert. They are truly efficient rockets and one was even proposed for the Apollo rocket for traveling to the moon as the upper stage portion. Unfortunately to this date, a nuclear rocket has never actually been launched in space in fear of catastrophe. If the rocket were to explode while in Earth's atmosphere, there is a risk of radioactive waste covering a widespread area of land. Look in amazon video if you have prime, there are some interesting documentaries on the nuclear rocket program in the 60's. The facility where they tested these rockets still exist today, untouched all these years. If you want to talk about "cheating", the one mod I consider cheating to an extent is the alcubierre/warp drive. Wrap drives are theoretically possible but I sincerely doubt humanity will ever actually build one, at least not in any of our lifetimes.

Hi everyone, I'm streaming a mission to Eeloo right now, here is the link: http://www.twitch.tv/sedativechunk first live stream on the forums, if I screw up you get to see it. Hardcore mode, deadly reentry and life support, no mechjeb. Audio is disabled I'm listening to music. I posted it on the livestreams section as well. Just thought I would share if anyone is bored.

That's an awful one sided view don't you think? What if it's a newcomer who doesn't know mods exist for KSP that bought the game in the past week or so? I don't think that's the way to go about it. Usually if someone ask me a KSP-related question, I will give them a stock option and a modded option. I don't try to shove the mods down their throat, though.

Hello everyone, I just found that KSP has a twitch TV channel and also post links on the side of the forums to people streaming. Where can I sign up/join this if possible? I actually do stream KSP, I'm a hardcore player (using deadly reentry and life support) on interstellar trips. My local buddies usually watch me but if any KSP fans are out there I would like them to join in. Is there anywhere I can post on the forums when/where I will be streaming? I'm mapping out another interplanatery flight possibly for tonight or tomorrow to Eeloo if anyone wants to watch. Just wondering if there was a forum to share these on or if I just post them here. Thanks!

I randomly stumbled across this HGR mod pack and I absolutely love it! It was perfect timing because I've been desperately looking for some Soyuz-based mods for KSP. I've never actually found this one on Steam before. Above is a screen shot of me docking the soy-juice ship to my space station 200,000 meters above the surface of Kerbin. I have to say I absolutely love it as well as the provided pre-made ship to take into orbit. The soyjuice is extremely efficient for traveling in low Kerbin orbit and I think it's going to become a permanent addition to my space station ferries just as the real one (I also have the space shuttle but it's a bit big and clunky to dock!). I'm planning a new mission to Eeloo on my current save so I may try and work one of these command pods into my lander. My only minor complaint - I had difficulty putting the ferrings on when trying to build the rocket myself. Maybe it's just me as I've always had problems getting those things on from other mod packs. Other than that, awesome mod pack and great job developing it. Very nice you even included the IVA view! This mod is so nice it feels like it should be an official part of the game.

OP, I recommend just getting some mods, not much more else you can do. Most people complain this game is too hard, a lot of casuals can't even get past the Mun or Minmus. On my game, I use deadly re-entry and tac life support. Definitely makes interplanetary missions more interesting/challenging. Especially if you are one of those kind that likes to Aerobrake on Duna. Try doing that on Duna with deadly re-entry and you will get a much more challenging experience. If Duna is too easy, shoot for Eve. A true hardcore player of this game can do Eve with life support and deadly reentry and return. Please attempt this and then come back and tell me this game is too easy after that. Or Moho, like one of the others said. Definitely the most Delta V costly missions in the game.

Well OP I'm not sure what to tell you. I don't know about everyone else here, but I have VERY high end gaming computer. I'm too tired to post all the specs now but it has an overclocked 5Ghz processor on a water loop with an overclocked MSI HD 7950 graphics card. Everything is extremely fine tuned and I've even broke a few overclocking records with this rig without blowing up my system or using liquid N. I can play literally every game on maximum settings including Crysis 3, Battlefield 4, and many others in 1080p glory. The one game I have the MOST problems with believe it or not, is KSP! KSP, it's not the most optimized PC game in the world. It gets lag issues, especially with huge ships/space stations. The more mods, the more issues KSP has despite being so mod-friendly. Around my space station, my FPS dips to 15-25 FPS. It sucks. The whole point I am trying to make is, you can have the biggest, baddest computer out there, but KSP won't run any better. It's just not optimized that well for high performance rigs, there are limits on RAM, and the game doesn't really load/render everything in the best way to perform well. Believe it or not, more so than CPU/GPU, I recommend you get a solid state drive solely for KSP. With a lot of mods, this game can take several minutes to load.

... you people recommending him go to orbit, I disagree. OP, have you done an orbital rendezvous before with anything? If not, then do not even thing about attempting to put Jeb in orbit! There are a billion things that could go wrong. The biggest one being that your lunar intercept will put you in an orbit in the opposite direction that Jeb is going in. You would have burn alot of fuel to correct the orbit and then burn even more to catch up with Jeb. I think a plain and simple rescue mission, try to land right on top of where he is, it may take some practice to get close to him. Your orbit, you will have to put the orbit "past" where he is on the Mun, because as you burn retrograde that path/orbit will move in. TO build a rescue rocket, I'm assuming you got the MK1-2 pod to house three Kerbals, build something with that. If not, you can always add a ladder or something for Jeb to hang onto. Make a rocket using the tiny rockomax engines: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Rockomax_48-7S These are extremely small/light weight/fuel efficient for landing on the Mun. Make a simple fuel efficient lander and land close to Jeb. I could probably do it easily but it's hard to explain!

Oh my, I remember the first Kerbal I got stuck around the Sun/Kerbol (it was Jeb). You're kerbals are doomed if you are out of fuel in an orbit around the sun! EVA pack is not enough to get back to Kerbin, and you would also need a very lucky/chance occurrence of the rocket entering Kerbin's orbit. That can take hundreds if not thousands of years of in game time to happen.

Okay, I am not the greatest math person however I am majoring in IT and put close to 400 hours in this game now. From my understanding (and own experimentation in this game with the engineering mod) it's pretty much impossible to get off of Eve using SSTO design, even with most of the modded part packs out there. I can tell you now in particular it's just not possible with the stock parts including the ion engine. If I'm not mistaken, the MK1 lander can is the lightest stock vehicle that contain a kerbal, and with a single ion engine (with a small xenon container) does not give you enough thrust-to-weight ratio to leave Eve or even get off of the ground for that matter. Ion engines are practically useless on Eve. Maybe someone will prove me wrong but I have yet to come up with a design that would work on Eve with ion engines. Let's assume you are okay with using mods, however (not "cheating" or debugging crap but fair-play mods). From my own experimentation, the most efficient and close to single stage you might be able to make is to use the KW Rocketry pack. The KW rocketry pack (if I'm not mixing it up with interstellar) contains liquid methane rocket engines and fuel tanks. Compared to all the other engines (including ion, nuclear, and even some of the interstellar engines) they seem to give the most thrust-to-weight ratio out of all engines particularity for Eve. They are extremely powerful engines. Even in reality, Space X I believe is experimenting with liquid methane rockets for first stages. I think one fuel tank and methane engine would get you about 4,000m/s of ÃŽâ€v. The number to leave the orbit of Eve (from one of it's higher mountains/peaks) would be about 8,000m/s, so technically it may be possible using the liquid methane rocket to leave in a single stage. It's just it would be like a small building on Eve in terms of height, however. IT could tip over very easy and also (if you haven't tried it before) it's VERY HARD to do precision landings on Eve if you were trying to land on a high valley in an exact location.

I've found ways past these excessively long engine burns. On all my interplanetary ships, I leave one of the bigger fuel tanks with a massive rocket on the end for leaving Kerbin, sometimes even refueling it. This seems to get my out of Kerbin's orbit in only 2-3 minutes versus wasting tons of fuel (and time) trying to escape Kerbin. That's not to say for orbital insertion sometimes I still have to fire the nuclear rockets for a long, long time... if and when I do, well, you just got to wait it out. I don't like to leave my PC in case the ship accidentally turns or something and then I have to do it over again.

I've landed and successfully returned a Kerbal from every terrestrial body except Eve, Tylo, Bop, and Laythe. The two demon planets for me in this game are absolutely Laythe and Eve. My last attempt to Laythe I lost 8 kerbals. Two in a landing vehicle and six others inside the Taurus crew capsule. I was trying to aerobrake (with deadly reentry) and things didn't go as planned. On my last save, I also lost two kerbals on Laythe when they went over water instead of land. Eve, I recently set up a one-way science outpost. For whatever reason, my solar panels heated up and exploded and the kebals died in a few minutes (because of tac life support mod, yes I play hardcore). This past week I've just been building a space station in Kerbin orbit with the tiberdyne shuttle mod. I'm hoping I can use this to-be super massive space station as a fueling outpost for interplanetary travels.

This is an interesting discussion. In terms of anything like a plane, I recently just started using the Tiberdyne Space Shuttle mod. It has some minor issues in 0.24 but works fairly well still. Like others here said, spaceplanes (or shuttles) are extremely efficient for transporting cargo and things into space. The shuttle works exceptionally well for transporting cargo and with contract mode, recovering the entire craft saves lots of credit. They are also good for creating significantly less space debris, especially when dealing with creating a space station. But there's another side of the shuttle argument, and it's similar to reality; shuttles are clunky and dangerous to fly. Versus a classic teardrop capsule, they just aren't as friendly for recovering humans/kerbals.Also I find the game more time consuming/hassle trying to bring back/land shuttles instead of just dumping a tear drop capsule into the ocean.

Yea, just go for it, it's just a game (although sometimes it feels like more!). Personally I think Dres is a good proving ground for you, though. A moderately far-away planet with no atmosphere to test your abilities at reaching a planet without aerobraking available. It's not too difficult to land on and it's got a pretty cool giant crevis on the planet. I recommend Jool afterwards. and it's orbiting moons. It's VERY difficult planet to conquer, requiring tons of fuel/resources to travel and leave, especially if you are using life support addons. But Jool is like it's own mini solar system. But Jool is awesome.

I was wondering what are the best mods as far as visual enhancements go for 0.24.x. Prior to the contracts update, I was using the EVE mod with the "Better Atmosphere's" but both are a bit dated/clunky as of 0.24. Is there any good 0.24 mods out there for visual enhancements? Visual mods I mean as in realistic looking kerbin, clouds for planets, skyboxes, and etc. Any tips is appreciated!

I wanted to add into this. I have about 250~ hours into KSP on Steam and I just tried .24 today (I didn't even know it was updating today and i'm kind of sad because it bricked alot of my favorite mods). Anyway here is my feedback to add to this post. First and foremost, and I don't like the current currency/reputation system. I think it's terrible, in fact. I was really looking forward to this update but I'm finding it frustrating and annoying just building the simplest of rockets. I still haven't completed a single contract, they make you complete some ridiculous/notorious things to try to complete them. Some of them are completely impractical such as launching a basic MK parachute over 370m/s when you are moving faster than the speed of sound! I unlock parts and then it restricts me due to insufficient funds. OP also mentioned that it kind of kills the science system which should be more separated. But more than all this, I don't like to bash KSP and Squad because this is probably one my most favorite indie games in the world, but the reason this entire system SUCKS is because of the 2.5km part limit on launch. Scott Manley did a video exploiting this. You use solid rocket boosters for example (which I use many on some of my bigger rockets) and when they fall past that 2km mark or however far that physics limit is, the parts disappear and you get ZERO return on them regardless if you put parachutes on them and what not. They also need to have a rover part on them (which is silly) to make them recoverable. This entire thing makes this new career mode entirely broken IMO. So basically every time you have a launch and use up expensive rocket parts, you can't recover them. To add on to this storm, I enjoy using the "deadly re-entry" mod and it is completely unrealistic/impractical to recover massive rocket parts. Just like the real space programs, I always recovered that tear drop capsule from the sky. Never no huge monstrosities. Oh well, that's my feelings towards it.

I guess this is an interesting idea. Although I don't have a problem necessarily with the VAB, I think the editor for building them could use ALOT of work. It can be so furiously frustrating trying to add wheels and other components to parts in KSP, especially if you are building rovers that are set in a vertical position. Another flop with rovers is that, currently KSP doesn't have any legitimate parts for storing a rover. You know, like you basically have to mount it on top of a rover or some other goofy configuration, you are unable to put it in some storage bay like most realistic rovers are without mods.

Hello! Here is the design I did just this past week to capture a class E asteroid. Ironically the night I was planning an asteroid capture, the movie "Deep Impact" was on if you've ever seen that one (great AAA movie from the 90's recommend it if you never watched it). It inspired this rocket design I came up with. It features two nuclear engines on the side with four smaller space shuttle style thrusters (can't remember the name of them in the parts list). The nice thing about the thrusters is, firing them I get 40 minutes of burn time with .36 TWR. It's nice for catching up with asteroids. The nuclear rockets can burn for 2 hours and 30 minutes so I can safely capture and control the asteroids. The only thing is, they are VERY HARD TO MOVE. But I did manage to capture this one and get it into a stable orbit. Kind of hard to see the shuttle design but there it is. screenshot