cpast

Will the new KSO support a hatch in the nose, or is this a fixed nosecone?

First off, contracts and budget are already planned for the next version of KSP. Contracts are already implemented, actually, and I suspect budget is too by this point (i.e. basic implementation down, subject to change). I'm assuming, then, that this is a suggestion for a specific budget/contract system. With that, some points to keep in mind: * First, a budgetary system can require heavy tweaking. Every single thing incentivizes some playstyles over others. It's not always clear what effects they'll have, so they need tweaking after the fact. * Second, because this requires experimentation, Squad isn't likely to (and shouldn't) just take numbers from anywhere for it. My point is, you should explain why you came up with the numbers you did; just saying "this is how much money you get for doing thing Y" isn't very useful, but saying "The budgetary system should encourage players to do X by providing Y contract" is potentially useful. Now: The system you propose seem seriously flawed. First, it makes interplanetary missions effectively impossible in career, and makes anything impossible for people who like to play a whole mission through at once (instead of switching between many missions at a time). If you want to run a whole mission at once, tough luck - the timewarping to get even to the Mun will kill a bunch of science output. Interplanetary? You literally won't be able to get to Eeloo if you launch the day 0.24 is released and want to arrive before 0.25, and waiting for launch windows means you'll get at most a couple interplanetary missions off in that time. Second: Recovery of parts as parts means that past a certain point, money becomes far less relevant. A player who builds an SSTO spaceplane never even has to *look* at a budget again; all the budget constrains is fuel costs ($5/unit, which is kinda low) and simultaneous missions. Since the no-timewarp-if-you-want-to-get-anything means you have to run simultaneous missions, that means you have two features fighting each other, one requiring multitasking and the other setting a hard cap on it. Even then, all you have to do is have a massively overbuilt SSTO, use a cheap high-ISP engine and the very cheap fuel, and deploy the upper stage from the SSTO. Boom, lifter budgets cease to matter. Third: The contracts you propose are "Do X, earn Y" in perpetuity. There's no variation; it's not really much deeper than "Press X for money". This is a problem any proposed contract system has to deal with; one way Squad's doing it, for instance, is experimental parts. There, accepting a contract gives you a part you haven't unlocked yet that you're supposed to test; even if the actual test is "Do X in Y orbit around Z", you have a serious choice: you can use the experimental part in other craft, but have to recover it if you want to do so, as losing all of your finite supply will make you fail the contract; the question then is "Do I feel comfortable risking the part in this unrelated mission, or should I save it?" and "Hm, when should I actually do the contract, after which I'll lose access to the part?" Those contracts are interesting because they introduce choices for the player. "Put payload X in orbit Y" doesn't, really - the player might pick his launch infrastructure, but there's no meaningful difference between any 2 such contracts.

The KSO mod has nice space station parts, and a REALLY nice space station tug. I also like the orbiter part of it, but even if that's not your cup of tea, the station parts are highly recommended. There's also a texture mod of the FusTek parts to match KSO aesthetics, if you want to mix the two.

Right, but you can't get the content of, say, users who have left - all you can get is your own content, because Squad has backups even if you don't (that's not something special Squad did, it's standard practice with any server ever to have backups of data). His signature at one point read "Users come and go, their legacy should stay forever." He had copies of his own stuff, but his objection was to the fact that people's legacies were being lost. Relevant post of his: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/79011-The-Curse-Thread?p=1143643&viewfull=1#post1143643 (note: this was its own thread till it was merged into the Curse thread, which is why it looks like an OP, not a reply) About explaining his reasoning: Look, I'm not TT, I'm just repeating what he said. He couldn't care less what site Squad was moving to, he cared that they closed Spaceport and took down public access to all files on it. He now doesn't want his mods reuploaded, and per the license, that means you can't reupload them. It doesn't matter what site you use, since his problem wasn't with any specific site.

For some reason, many threads seem to be getting marked as read when I have not, in fact, read them. Any idea why this is happening? Is there something I'm doing to accidentally mark sections read? I'm using Firefox, if it matters.

Why, exactly, is terrain destruction a critical feature of a game mostly played in orbit?

Nope. TT didn't object to Curse at all. He objected to shutting down Spaceport, and, more importantly, losing all the content that was uploaded only there. Any upload to any other site would be both against the license, and against his clearly expressed wishes; Curse has nothing to do with anything here.

I don't think you're reading it correctly. He specifically mentions SRBs because he specifically says "if you use them/test them [whatever 'testing' is] in the wrong conditions, you have to be prepared to recover them intact". That implies that normally, you won't be recovering SRBs intact. It wouldn't make sense to be able to easily use an experimental SRB on all your launches by slapping a couple parachutes on the side; if you want to use an experimental SRB (or an experimental part in general) on another mission, you should have to take special steps to ensure that it works right. That's the biggest issue with letting you recover dropped parts: KSP doesn't have reentry heating, or maximum aerodynamic stress, or anything like that. It's really, really easy to slap a bunch of radial parachutes on a booster, and the parachutes don't weigh a ton. 3 stock radial parachutes are enough to safely recover an ARM LFB and stock nosecone; 5 suffice for a Mainsail (with its lower impact rating). they weigh only 0.45 tons. That means that recovery becomes trivial for all but the smallest rockets (where the 0.15 tons for one parachute could actually matter). Recovering should not be easy. I'd *like* to be able to reuse parts of my boosters, and it'd be realistic to have that idea, but doing something like this would practically eliminate the point of designing for reusability. Budget should encourage careful design, where you actually have to think about how to recover as much as possible, and it's hard to recover everything; if you can just slap a few parachutes on and call it a day, there's zero challenge in designing for recovery, and pretty much every single ship becomes trivially fully recoverable.

Right, but atmosphere isn't why it's hard to reach orbit on Earth - it's because the Earth is so big (and, yes, the atmosphere matters a bit, because it means stable orbits have to be hundreds of km up, but that's also the case in any proposed KSP atmospheric system). Atmospheric drag isn't a huge issue, delta v-wise; I think I read somewhere it's only a few hundred m/s on Earth, out of a 10 km/s total delta v to LEO. Atmosphere isn't a good way to compensate for scale. Changing engine and tank performance is a good way to compensate for scale.

Staging isn't obsolete if you don't like overbuilding designs. Once budgets appear, there is strong incentive to build cheaply, and that means, among other things, not using massive single stages on small payloads.

I just manually tested this; it seems like changing the DNS record to match the main site (or using a CNAME) would in fact work, as kerbalspaceprogram.com is the default site for its host.

How would the movable seats work? I have the ALCOR, but I wasn't aware of movable seats (or is it just that you can change the origin point of the camera?)

I don't think aerodynamics should be a built-in difficulty level. Anything that is relevant in sandbox mode shouldn't be subject to difficulty settings; difficulty is a more game-y element, and belongs with the more game-y mode (career). That said, I agree that intuitiveness with at least some connection to reality is the most important property; fairings should reduce drag, pancakes shouldn't fly, and I shouldn't be able to suddenly change direction at high speed. But a given craft should fly the same way on any stock install. Or that they're aware of the issue, that they don't have this issue at the top of their priority list, and that they have better things to do than reply in the eleventy bajillionth thread about aerodynamics. Actually, isn't Hugo (the intern) working on spaceplane part overhaul? I feel like I heard that somewhere. Many features they're adding are core. Contracts are essential to making career really distinct from sandbox; without budget, there's no reason to care about efficiency of designs. That's core. Aero works strangely, and has no connection with real aerodynamics. That doesn't make it the only important thing, though.

Ah, thanks for the better explanations. Is there a reason bladders wouldn't work for non-cryogenic non-hypergolic fuels? Or do those not really exist, and all non-hypergolics use liquid oxygen?

I have personally used head-bouncing in an abort mode. It can definitely work on solid ground.

Can you also bring up a kick option?

I'd imagine it's because RCS systems are hypergolic. In non-hypergolic systems (like lots of lower rocket stages), the combustion has to be kept going, and so fuel flow needs to be pretty consistent. On the other hand, hypergolics ignite spontaneously when the two propellants come into contact (or when the one propellant comes in contact with a catalyst, depending on the system), so it's not as big a deal if non-fuel enters the combustion chamber.

Similarly, the demo advertises mods at Spaceport, for whenever you get around to making a new demo.

In my old career save, I had a few tested, rated lifting subassemblies, with descriptions saying the highest weight and altitude I'd used them with (including one that was rated for X tons to Munar orbit). In my newer save, I've been doing a lot more space stations. Those tend to get more one-off assemblies, with the exception of smaller pieces (Station Science experiments, for example), which I had just saved one of, and then made new ones with different experiments by loading the saved craft and swapping out the experiment module. Also, now that I've started to use the KSO in LKO, standardization is much easier - I load my custom KSO craft, and just swap out payload.

I think he was trying to link this thread.

In many of the current IVAs, the seats have really limited fields of view. Is there any hope of you unlocking them so the Kerbals can look around more? I'm especially wondering for the cupola, where currently it seems like none of the seats can see out of the big top window.