Olterin

I'm curious as to whether RemoteTech could be added as an allowed mod? As far as I remember it shouldn't interfere with the actual challenge since it involves a kerballed craft, while RT handles unkerballed vehicles - but it would be fun to have, imo. Will try this with v. 1.0.4 one of these days, I think.

So far, most common for me is "wrong ascent trajectory", since my fuel-to-orbit is rather delicately balanced. Second to that is probably "oops, I shouldn't have tried to do this one more suborbital hop"

... Well, to be fair, when you plan maneuvers using maneuver nodes, you do get a deltaV required displayed on those nodes. But I feel this discussion is best suited for another topic.

I played stock at first. Then, upon finding out how easy it was to install mods, I tried plenty of those out. However, over time it's become tiring to keep up-do-date with all of them and the stock game is "close enough" for my realism "requirements" to keep having fun launching planes and rockets - so I went back to playing purely stock. I keep a spreadsheet around for calculating my deltaV budgets, something many seem to do with a mod - I find that doing so manually makes me think the mission through more carefully (and overall immerses me more).

Thanks OWK, I always miss the Squadcast at the usual time due to timezones - it's great to have a written summary every time! (Consider this applying every week for maximum post efficiency )

As the two posters above me said, you should aim for a (25-)30 degree climb by 20 km altitude. My latest ascent profile was somewhat like: go up to 10km while going at roughly mach 2, begin final ascent, go full throttle at 12-13km, switch to rockets when jets cut out. This leads to some overheating issues if the spaceplane isn't carefully designed though, but it worked for me. Final jet velocity was about 1350 m/s, from there I think I used around 1200 m/s to get a final circular orbit at 80km altitude.

It's out, 156.2 mb steam patch downloaded. It's been a good thread, guys ;D

This. Oh well, all the new features and parts will have to do.

Wait, someone's been keeping stats on this thread? That's not hyped enough! MOAR HYPE, MOAR!

The hype is stroooong with this thread.

Yes, we need dat server killmail ;D

Scotty, we need to go faster! (Are we there yet?)

Personally I'd say more polish over new features. But, if you could sneak in some "features" that are cosmetic in nature while not detracting from the polishing process, that would be great (clouds?)

What do they say ... third time's the charm, right? Next week, now that would be nice to see it reappear.

I second this. It has been a staple of every single version of KSP I played ever since I found it. Fills in the gaps of the stock lineup very nicely.

When you don't test your parachute deployment plan for a Duna landing, and then sometime during the landing, on IVA, you hear a sudden *boom* after you deploy the chutes. ... It was totally not our ascent stage, was it? And what's this thing flying off towards the ground at a high velocity?

I can only chime in with what was said before: this update, being as big as it is, needs to be the non-release beta version (0.99?). Then listen to community feedback and fix bugs, and release 1.0. ... Or ideally, split it into smaller updates that can get community-tested. ... And yes, missing many things for me also, most notably reentry heating (please please please, this is integral to actual space travel, how can we have an atmosphere and not have temperatures affect our craft? There's even a max temperature listed on parts for crying out loud!). Reviewers might give the game as-is a hard time: I can already imagine "but where are the clouds?!?" and "... but what's the point of that note about max. temperature if there's no heat?"

Hm, a non-toggleable change in fuel flow logic ... not sure how to feel about that. I mean, fuel balancing is ultimately something that the player should be in charge of, right? I could come up with gameplay reasons why I'd want my tanks to drain in sequence on an air-breathing engine (such as wishing for more stability as the flight goes on, which requires a CoM/CoL relative shift), and then there are of course times when it's more convenient for the fuel load to automatically balance itself out.

Time to attach some parachutes, maybe?

The new numbers seem a lot more sane, though I'd probably still cut it a bit (maybe reducing final result by another 30% or so) - but at least 350 science from such an exploration contract isn't quite as broken as 22k, since that's about the ballpark of science you'll get from all the experiments sent - I feel like that's a good ballpark to aim for with 100% commitment, doubling up the science potentially gained from experiments.

I looked at the numbers really quickly, in particular, only the outsourced R&D bit - it still appears to be rather broken. If you consider that 100% of funds being converted at a rate of 1/3 of what stock does is still well over 200 per contract for some of the more lucrative ones ... well. That doesn't bode well. I've been doing some thinking, and perhaps due to getting more funds converted for each increase in level of commitment, the conversion ratio should go down instead of up to make the overall progression slower and not end up being ridiculous. (The idea being that the strategy should show payoffs at low commitment levels, but the payoffs don't soar into high heaven when you commit 100%). I'll look into the numbers some more over the weekend and maybe come back with more feedback.

... And here I was, hoping to include this wonderful mod into my new 0.25 game Shame to see it die.

This train (thread) needs to go faster! ... Looking forward to it, hopefully it'll be out when I'm back from having some food

An idea on how to approach the Elektron issue of continuing resource consumption - stock jet engines stop working when they run out of intake air, maybe something similar can be done with the Elektron?

As per my previous testing, it appears that SP+ 1.3 breaks KSP x64 when used with MM 2.2.0, but does work with MM 2.2.0 when using KSP x32. A combination of KSP x32, SP+ 1.3 and RPM 0.18 appears to work without issue.