natsirt721

In order from more-likely to less-likely: Hoses. Goddamn, we can explore the whole solar system, but we don't have hose technology? Especially with the addition of stock ISRU. Using the klaw for ground ops is a pain in the behind. As someone who loves the NERVA engine, I would like to see a set of 2.5m LF tanks. Having to use the LFO tanks minus the O is really frustrating, seeing as how ~half the volume is totally unused. Sure, you can make do with the Mk2/Mk3 LF tanks, but they don't quite have the same looks as the cylindrical 2.5m parts. On the topic of nuclear parts, a 2.5m NTR would be nice, something with a decent amount of thrust. Of course, a gas-core nuclear rocket would be a fun end-game motor, but that may be a little too speculative for the devs to consider adding. Movable parts. I don't have any experience with mods that do this, but having robot arms and cranes would seem make base construction so much better. More minable resources and some new resource converters. Minable ice / pumpable water for electrolysis, collectable CO2 for NERVA use, plant growth or conversion in to methane, different grades of ores to return different materials. Probably not practical until the life support update, which will put a much larger strain on consumable resources making ISRU necesary. Something that might be nice, that I haven't seen anyone mention yet would be radiation. This would probably go alongside a life support update because we would need a system for tracking the status of individual kerbals (food, water, sanity, acute / lifetime radiation doses etc.). Something akin to Van Allen belts around Kerbin and Jool, solar flares and cosmic rays, and the NERVA should be radioactive in some form or another. This would limit the utility of the NERVA to orbit-orbit operations. A variable-radius shadow shield would be a necessity, as well as some form of medical bay for reducing the effects of radiation poisoning. Remember, water has a great HVT so that could provide radshielding as well. Perhaps a set of standalone nuclear reactors as well? Ideally I would like to see trojan points, but that has seen a bunch of discussion recently and given how KSP's physics works that is probably a pipe dream.

What does everyone consider a 'good enough' ore concentration? I just ran a surface analysis on my base and got 9.2%. Should I bother looking elsewhere? Is searching for high value ore concentrations really worth it?

Sure, no atmosphere no problem. That's a difficult problem to model, but we can assume that Kerbin's own DSN is reasonably powerful and/or already compensates for atmospheric attenuation. On the TX end, well, that's a difficult problem to model. Remember the game uses soft occlusion i.e. signals through solid rock, so I don't think the gaseous atmosphere is going to have any bearing whatsoever on signal strength. The game also has a difficulty option for plasma blackouts IIRC. Second, transit time is another issue, but if you want that, go install remotech or something. I don't think there is anything wrong with the current system as far as communication lag goes. As someone who has played around with remotech a bit I can tell you that it is very annoying to arrive at your periapse only to find that you don't have a connection and that your Duna lander is now a deep space probe. But, if you want that, the modding community can deliver. Perhaps you confused transmit time with transit time? EDIT: Couldn't have said it better myself, StahnAileron

Well sure, we do have time warp, but for things like the MPL you don't just start in and fast-forward until it is finished. Or maybe you do, and that's a gameplay choice. I think the 'infinite time warp' argument doesn't hold for a lot of things in KSP, primarily ISRU (but also transfer windows and travel times) like tater said. The idea here is that you shouldn't be penalized in terms of science return for having poor signal. Either you have a connection and can send the data, or you don't and can't, but being able to half-ass the transmission and only get a partial return is nonsensical. That being said, there should be some penalty - and seeing as how KSP is a game based on real world science, why not look to real data transmission for a better solution. Sure, you can warp through if you want, but the transmission system could be tweaked to make this a less viable option. Personally, I feel like the current system is a little funky and would gladly accept an overhaul to make TX/RX more realistic, if more challenging. Probe design would also have to be tweaked to account for constant power draw, hence the manual bandwidth limiter on antennae. Your signal strength and antenna would set a maximum bandwidth, and you could further lower that if you didn't have the power requirements to do it in one go. The probe should definitely still be controllable during data uplinks, I think that would just be frustrating more than anything else.

In the current system, any science transmissions are multiplied by your signal strength, reducing the science return for your experiments. Before 1.2, transmitting science only incurred a proportional penalty for transmission versus recovery, but now this proportional penalty is again divided by signal strength. This seems non-intuitive - If I collect n bits for return, I should be able to return all of n of those bits, and a weaker signal just means that the transmission will have to have more redundancy to prevent data loss. It seems silly that my data is just lost to the ether because of a poor signal-to-noise ratio, when I should be able to constantly re-broadcast the data until I have 100% of it accumulated on Kerbin. The Shannon-Hartley theorem seems to verify this, but I also don't know much about information theory and this could have exactly 0 bearing on the situation that I'm discussing. I propose that instead of a proportional science penalty, there would be a proportional time penalty, incurred by requiring more bits to be transmitted as a function of signal strength. At full strength the required bits to transmit would be that listed for the experiment, and with decreasing signal strength, a logarithmic or pseudo-logarithmic function to determine how many redundant bits should be transmitted. If the Shannon-Hartley theorem is valid here, the S/N term would be a function of signal strength, and the bandwidth the advertised bandwidth of the antenna doing the transmitting. This would require some interaction between the science dialogue window and the antenna system, as the dialogue window would require knowledge of the primary antenna onboard the spacecraft. I do realize that this would greatly reduce the penalty for having poor probe connections, however if the signal strength to S/N conversion function were curved steeply enough, it could offset this by requiring an extreme amount of time and EC to transmit data. Something that could be useful here would be a manual bandwidth limiter to ensure the probe didn't deplete its batteries right away in the event of an hours or days long transmission. At this point I'm just spitballing, but let me know what you think of this idea. EDIT: whoops, wrong forum. I need to not make posts when I'm tired.