Wiseman

If I wanted to make a bunch of part placement changes, is that a thing I could do with a Module Manager patch, or do I need to edit the EngTechTree.cfg itself? Or, is there another method that I'm not seeing? I was hoping to do a balance/progression pass to smooth things out for my next heavily-modded career game, and I wanted to put that together in a way that doesn't step on any toes.

I can't really play Sandbox for the same reason I can't really play Minecraft. I don't have any motivation to build big/pretty things if the goal is just the satisfaction of doing it. I could get to Duna, drop Kerbals there, a rover, an airplane, whatever, but if there's no framework to guide my actions and provide me incentives and rewards, it feels pointless. That may be because I've put in my time and learned all the basics, though. Rocket said it better than I was going to: That's really what it comes down to for me. I need that game structure and framework, or else I feel like I'm just playing with model rockets in my backyard - the pieces are pretty, but the game is all in my head. I find myself more inspired to do neat things in Career, anyways. In my latest game, the Strategia mod helped me to earn enough money such that I never really have to grind, and it gives me potent and clear objectives. With that in mind, I assembled in orbit a large interplanetary vessel, landed a Duna ascent vehicle and science rover, sent a crew up to the vessel in a descent capsule, dropped them on Duna, and then performed a science-gathering road trip in the rover on the way to the ascent vehicle. That's a cool mission, and I may have come up with it just as easily in Sandbox, but this way I see tangible rewards for all of my efforts. Piles of funds and science rolling in (since I set up a RemoteTech network ahead of time), and even more when I get the crew back to Kerbin, all sorts of milestones checked off; lots of little Skinner-box lever-pulls I wouldn't have gotten if I had planned this out in Sandbox.

Since this is a mod-related issue, it probably belongs in one of the mod sections. However, let's get the simple troubleshooting out of the way - are you trying to fire those engines on the launch pad? They produce practically no thrust at surface level.

I love this idea. I've been toying with a similar mod concept for a while now, which also centered around opening "projects" that would encompass a lot more than just a single contract. Up until 1.0.5 (and the penalty on declining contracts), I've always tried to bundle several contracts together, so I could plan a larger mission, to, say, the Mun. Instead of fulfilling one contract, I build a large craft or several smaller ones to hit a bunch of objectives in a short span of time, which I find to be more satisfying. I definitely like the idea of flipping the contract system around, and declaring where you want to go and then getting a bunch of contextual contracts to pop up all involving that objective. Would that be something that is possible with Strategia, maybe using Contract Configurator? In my ideal world, I would declare I want to open a project (a first manned spaceflight program, or one of the planetary exploration strategies you've previewed already), and the Strategy component modifies global costs/rewards. Then, you would see that most of your contracts now involve going to that body/accomplishing that objective, and there are two sets: Milestone contracts (first orbit/first landing/rendezvous/etc) and repeatable contracts (deploy satellite/perform science/etc). The strategy would be "finished" with a capstone contract, which would have a big reward much like the rewards on your previewed strategies, and finish out your work on the given body. You could keep the program strategy active to wrap up anything you still wanted to do, but there'd be not much else but the repeatable contracts at this point, and that should be good encouragement to move on. That seems like it would allow for the granular control of contracts (with all the "new vessel" goodness), but allow strategies to dictate your space program's immediate objectives. In any case, I'll definitely be watching this closely!

Farewell, Maxmaps! I have looked forward to tuning in for every Squadcast since I started playing. Your positive attitude and excitement about the game, about space exploration, and about reaching out to people to ignite their own passion for space (and launching little green men) has shone through on every episode. I'm sad to see you go, but wish you the best in the future!

Have you tried adding kerbals?

So many bugfixes - Claw's bugfixes made stock, tweakable everything stockified, thermodynamics made less weird... This will keep me playing until 1.1, for sure.

My hype levels have increased tenfold since the devnotes! I'm on board!

That's so awesome! It's really good to see KSP getting recognition for the amazing work the team has done in creating a game that's both educational and incredibly entertaining.

Yeah, that's what I wound up doing. Edited my save to revive Jeb, and relaunched/Hyperedited all my old craft back into place. I stole some undeserved science off Eli for my trouble.

Maybe I did something wrong, but this update put everything I had on and around Serran on Eli, including a space station, a lander, and a SCANSat satellite. It put an Aptur lander on Lave, and destroyed a crewed ship I had in orbit around Aptur (bye, Jeb ). I assume the latter event was because Jeb was in too low an orbit around Aptur when I made the update, and he was burned up on rails in the atmosphere. Everything that was around the Mun is just gone - who knows where it went, I didn't have a lander there that would have survived the swap. My stuff around Kerbin seems okay, though.

Agree one hundred percent, that's my biggest issue as well. I'm constantly having to switch focus targets and move around just to fine-tune my maneuver, and doing goofy things like trying to angle my camera just right so that I can see if I have an encounter on the far side of the Sun, when my camera is on a ship in orbit around Kerbin. Love this suggestion, very well thought out.

Community Choice, as well! Wow, two awards!

Firing up the stream in 10 minutes!

Did you know that the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) has a Kerbal Space Program tournament? I didn't either. But since I started playing KSP a little more than a year ago, I've attended three of these tournaments, and they're always a good time, if only to meet fellow Kerbonauts in person and chat about the game. This year's objective was Colonization. The objective was kept secret right until the start of the tournament, to prevent practicing for the specific mission we'd be doing. Players scored points for having kerbals on EVA on a variety of different planets and moons, and the person with the most points at the end of two hours won. The points went something like this (going from memory, so this may not be quite right) Mun: 1x Ike: 1.5x Eve: 2x Eeloo: 3x Laythe: 5x Something like that. As with many of you, I imagine, the first thing I saw on there was the huge multiplier for landing on the relatively easy (compared to the other, airless bodies) Laythe, and so that became my objective! I'll be streaming tomorrow at 10am (Sunday, 9/6/2015) and basically re-enacting my mission profile, along with all the horrible mistakes and 360 no-scope rocket-flips I did. Spoiler: I won the tournament, with 88 kerbals bobbing happily in Laythe's ocean at the end of the 2-hour mark, so look forward to the Space Bus 9000 and Space Bus 9001 headed to the Jovian system! KSP Forum Streaming Calendar Event My Twitch

Ominous backlit individual making demands, an emphasis on rushing out satellite coverage to secure confidence and funds... Someone likes XCOM Enemy Within as much as I do!

I think the actual bug here lies in the way that the game handles splitting ships up after docking and undocking. My understanding about the way KSP works is that when two ships dock together, you don't have two ships anymore, you have ONE ship, and a couple of lines of text in the ship's persistence file that remember things like the name and classification. Then when you undock, it splits them into two ships again without actually knowing anything about the ship that once existed as a whole vessel - it just snaps the Legos apart at the docking node, and rebuilds the ship from there, since what if you docked ANOTHER thing to the second ship, etc etc. My assumption is that it attempts to read the old name and classification from the previous root part / command part, but that's just me speculating. The process seems to work mostly okay for the actual physical separation of the vessels, but the naming and vessel classifications are a crapshoot. It seems to me that KSP has a hard time dynamically figuring out what a vessel should be named and classified as, especially if you glom together a bunch of different ships together and then break them off asymmetrically. If you have a fuel tank or something as the root part of a vessel, that seems to exacerbate the issue.

This looks so incredible! I can hardly believe this is the same KSP. Keep up the fantastic work, I'm psyched for when it's completed!

Wow, these parts look great. I love how far people can run with the stockalike style. I'm looking forward to USI-LS integration!

Pretty sure everything you're looking for can be done with Infernal Robotics, along with KIS/KAS. People make some pretty crazy stuff using that, including cranes and gantries for base construction.

You could use Contract Configurator to create your own contracts and/or use the many contract packs for it, and then use StockNoContracts to make sure nothing else shows up. Pretty sure that does exactly what you're asking for. You will have to learn the "language" that ContractConfigurator uses, but from what I hear it's not too complicated. There are gobs of examples in those contract packs, in any case.

I love how it inspires learning simply by presenting challenges. "Go from here, to the moon. Here's your box of parts - have fun!" Finally accomplishing goals that are mostly set by yourself is quite a rush, after all of the work and iteration that had to happen to make it possible. Then, seemingly all of a sudden, I find myself plotting gravity assists through the Joolian moons while listening to podcasts about the history of rocketry.

Oh, okay, so they should just hire a few more HarvesteRs to make sure they're staffed 'round the clock. I wonder if they just didn't get the memo, that teams in charge of "large games" don't ever get a break again, ever?

"Showing less energy" God forbid they take a vacation. They've been back a whole week, with plenty of bugfixes. Mods are not a priority for SQUAD to maintain, that's always been up to the modders - and 1.0.4 was a patch designed purely to rectify an issue with 1.0.2 save games. This sort of abject doom and gloom punctuated with speculation is not helping anything. This is mostly what I see around the forums that contributes to the air of negativity and the perception of "hate". Constructive criticism is one thing, but I see a lot less of that than I see the other stuff.

I wish I knew. The forums have become a far less pleasant place because of it, since the announcement of .90 at the latest. It seems rare to see anything but negativity.