cpast

We won't get the RC at all; it's for QA (and maybe experimentals, but it definitely looks like it's just for QA)

SteamDB (tracks Steam info): http://steamdb.info/app/220200/history/

scratchpad is apparently for QA and development builds. Looks like an RC to me as well.

If this were done (and I'm not sure it should be, for the reasons regex mentioned), they could force it to the lowest possible recovery percentage (10%).

Perhaps they're testing it. That's not instant, you know.

If it won't take a landing at a certain speed, its crash tolerance should be reduced. As it is, we know exactly what speed it'll take a landing at.

What's your periapsis when you first enter the atmosphere?

If nothing breaks there will be a release candidate soon. Then that is tested, and only if that goes well is it released.

Litho*break*ing would mean you don't even need the aerocapture.

Also, Rowsdowser just confirmed that the RC will be just to the testers, not to the general public.

Saying "You failed! Here's a mode where you can't fail!" is just one step up from the game telling you "You kinda suck at this; here's a mode even you can't fail in". Career mode seems like it's the main focus of the game (it's certainly a major part of the advertising) - it should not be the hard mode, with new players expected to probably play sandbox until they get good at the game. It should be a mode which a brand-new player can start as their very first game, and not be made to put them off. Difficulty options relating to financial rewards would work well for that.

Proper testing can take well more than 30 seconds. It depends on the bug in question.

Tumblr is an official source, just as much as the forum is. That's the official Squad Tumblr account.

Not really -- there is a consequence to doing poorly, because then you find yourself unable to afford anything but the simplest most boring contracts.

Presumably, the reason danRosas's tweet happened before a forum post is that no one at Squad is hovering over him monitoring what he tweets - if he has a thought he'd like to share, he'll default to his usual way of sharing it. Likewise, with Maxmaps yesterday, he might have just been on SA when he got word about what was happening with the last-minute bugs, or when he decided "eh, I'll share this" - his job as a PR person would seem to include going on non-official sources and talking about KSP, after all.

Personally, I'd also like to see more differentiation between Kerbonauts.

That may be to reduce load on the server.

Chill it *how*?

The devs no longer use the dev blog system; they now use the article system.

You appear to have missed the discussion we were having - the whole point of the discussion of incentives is that the physics sphere provides an incentive to minimize stage dropping. We can have a serious discussion about incentives with any incentives, including "dropped stages cannot be recovered".

Because if you get an advance, it means you accepted the contract. Many of them have deadlines, which means that once you accept them, you have to do them within a certain amount of time or else face failure. The more you fail, the worse your contracts, the smaller your advances, the less interesting are the things you can do on your advances.

Yes, but that doesn't mean Squad should not worry about stock incentives.

We're getting off-topic, I think. Back to topic: How likely is it that you get launched within the narrow window of the ITN?

Patched conics are sufficiently accurate to be used in mission planning when not near SoI boundaries. SoIs are not approximations invented by KSP, they're from astrodynamics, and when not near the boundary of one, you aren't losing *too* much accuracy by ignoring all other bodies. Atmosphere borders, valid, but not important over short timescales at typical orbital altitudes. Gravity gradients - not relevant for small craft. Magnetic field - not ordinarily relevant for orbital mechanics. Re-entry: that's not orbital mechanics. Drag: You mentioned it with "magical atmosphere borders", and are now repeating yourself (drag deep in atmosphere isn't orbital mechanics). How "not really"? So, your argument for a simulator is based purely on aesthetics? It has nothing to do with the behavior of things ingame, and is just "does this graphically resemble the real thing"? Playing shooters has literally nothing whatsoever to do with actual marksmanship, which depends largely on physical control of the rifle (which shooter games do not simulate at all, since it's point-and-click).

No, they don't. KSP reflects how actual orbital mechanics works. It downplays *engineering* challenges, but orbital physics is reasonably accurate; rendezvous works the same way as in reality, for example. In contrast, shooting games have literally nothing to do with actual shooting in any way.