tater

Wow. This thread explains a lot to me. A constant observation I have about career is that it gets easier as you progress, not harder... but it never occurred to me that it was any more difficult to go to Jool as the Mun for anyone, as the exact same skills apply to doing both, it just takes a bigger craft. Apparently I was wrong about difficulty WRT many people. I have Nethack in a terminal window open right now (as always ). YASD gets me to this day. I never had much trouble with KSP, but then again before playing KSP the last time I had thought about orbital mechanics I was doing problems on paper with my HP15C, so I had some idea of what was going on before starting (and Nethack still gives me fits at ascension).

Actually, I think there is a lot to compare if you keep a wide view. There is no real plan in either (base gameplay in Minecraft "survival" is a joke, really). Both are more about just "exploring" and building stuff (very broad building in Minecraft, specific to crafts, bases, etc in KSP. Both games are in fact hardest at the beginning (in KSP career vs MC survival), and become progressively easier as you play. My kids wanted MC, so I got it, and I've played it a bit. I like it, and I like KSP, though like my career complaints in KSP, I complain about the weak "career" mode in MC.

Here's where a real "management" game, and not "player doing every single thing, including walking for each astronaut" would be nice. Say I build a new HLV to get my Duna ship parts to LKO for assembly (I tend to play 6.4X, so maybe Jool would be a better example for stock ). OK, so Jool ship assembly in orbit. I launch the first one as a simulation, decide to alter the design a little, then I simulate the new design---say even designated ahead of time as such as @Pthigrivi suggests. It works fine. What would be really awesome... would be to not have to launch the thing again, when I just launched it, and I now know it works. That's where some automation would be nice. I assign a crew to it, hit launch, and then perhaps I get a few options like telling them to place it in a circular orbit at 100 km, and then I watch it (or not), and get to work on the next part of the Jool ship to launch. In that case, the automation would be predicated on having at least "simulated" it once.

There's a thread in the general section that suggests that a majority of players never leave Kerbin SoI. Wow. I suppose that changes the dynamics of career rather a lot, actually. Most of my goals for improvement, aside from wanting it to feel like there are actually trade offs, are predicated on wanting a better replay experience. It might be interesting to consider different career modes with different player bases and goals, and not try to envision a catch-all career mode.

They had to man-rate a spacecraft the first time they flew it with crew aboard. So STS 1-4 were all 2-man crews, with the ejection seats just in case. The increase in abort options were very slightly increased due to the seat I think, not much value, but good for CYA.

So it won't pull a "no hatch" part for rescues? Cool.

Yeah, this is entirely the fault of the mod, the way the game grabs rescues is to use a random crewed part, so if you make parts with crew, without hatches, there is a problem. A better solution would be for stock to pull a .craft file from a "Rescued Craft" folder. The ability to spawn in whole craft files would be incredibly useful for more than just rescues...

The first Shuttle orbiter did have ejection seats, actually, they were in place for STS missions 1 through 4.

I tend not to use the colored version very often, your list seems reasonable.

There's a lot of cross-pollination between contractors and their "customer" the US government. Anyone with a good definition of what constitutes a "space program" I'd love to see, I don't claim my ideas are well-stated

MM KJR KER KAC KAS/KIS

Ehricke and Merrill, Space Flight V1 Ehricke, Space Flight II: Dynamics (Principles of Guided Missile Design) Both of these are pretty decent, the latter is harder to find, though there are places that print to order so you can get both for less than normal crazy textbook prices (under $50).

@mattinoz says it well, it's about pace. What kills the feel of career (aside from the many other problems with it) is that I feel like I discovered rockets on Monday, and I'm landing on the Mun (or farther) on Friday. This is likely because that's probably what happened. @Brainlord Mesomorph is on to something, R&D is actually a good place to put a broad time sink, and this alone could make the game take up time. We tend to launch a lot of rockets, etc, so the build time/rollout mechanic is something that people would interact with very often (possibly making it tedious), whereas the tech tree is accessed relatively infrequently. Another possible way to move time in a way that becomes transparent would be to warp time while the player is in facilities (except the tracking station). Since I spend a fair amount of time in the VAB, it would be easy to mess around with even a simple rocket design in the early career, and have many days pass. As long as there is something akin to KAC built in, it's not a problem.

NASA is, and has always been a pork factory. The votes are bought with pork, and there are many in government who ended up rich, who didn't start out rich. Government (even the Presidency) doesn't pay well, they got rich somehow... you do the math.

Dragon 1 is not even close I would think.

I played for a while without KER, so I was pretty adept at the KSP standard "winging it" approach, at least as far as Duna returns, and certainly probes. I am risk-averse in terms of kerbal lives, I rarely lose any, actually, but I also send probes. I've even sent "all up" crewed missions minus the crew (with a probe core added) to see if the thing will work. KSP being what it is minus KER, I then tend to send a series of craft to any target. One with the crew, and the rest are tankers. Very inefficient. Once you have the dv information, then you can plan much more aggressive missions, since you actually know what it will take. I honestly think this is part of the reason Squad claims to like the "shared experience" of not having randomized solar system seeds (which would help replay, IMHO). Since they don't give the player critical information (dv budget, and dv of craft), you really need many, many trials and errors to get the craft the right size.

So a space program must do "science?" Because all the first US space program launches were entirely learning how to launch rockets. So NACA was not a Space program. If "science" is required... then most manned spaceflight does't count. My definitions for your perusal: If you launch spacecraft* with other people's money taken at gunpoint (this is the implicit transaction under all taxation schemes), you are a "national space program." NASA, ESA, etc. If you build spacecraft for other people to launch, you are a "contractor." If you launch spacecraft for your own purposes without the requirement that all your funding come at gunpoint, you are a "private space program." If you launch crew for money for a national space program, you are still a private space program, just like Delta is an airline, but not an airforce, even though the USAF flies passengers (troops) in "airliners" that they own. If Delta bombed places for money, they'd be a private airforce. (*note the "spacecraft" here. The craft must reach space, so model rockets... not a space program until they hit 100km)

So to be called a Space Program you have to use other people's money? SpaceX qualifies there. Or you cannot do it with a profit motive? I think if you look into the history of NASA, and how some of LBJ's buddies made out, NASA might not qualify . I think it's enough to launch vehicles for your own purposes to be called a Space Program, though this is pretty much a semantic argument.

I've sent probes everywhere (and returned from most), though I usually bail on stock before going past Duna with crew, then start up in a scaled system (usually 6.4X distances) with life support. At 6.4X Minmus is about a 90 day round trip. Been everywhere there, too, with probes. Crewed missions are rather trickier in that scale with LS. I never build planes. I think I did when I first got the game around 0.24. I only unlock aircraft tech nodes in career if they have rocket parts in them, and never upgrade the hanger or runway---not true, I upgrade the hanger 1 notch to make some rovers for testing.

If he's not in destructive testing or computational fluid dynamics in RL as a job (with things like rail guns), he probably isn't simulating it at all. He's making some assumptions, and creating a damage model. Which is JUST FINE. Just don't treat it like SDI people can use his game to decide if their satellite is properly armored, lol. I said I have no idea, what are you going on about. Mir was not hit by macroscopic debris often (if at all). So what happens when a 1 kg, or 10kg object hits spaced armor (which is all a "Whipple shield" is)? It will not render macroscopic particles (say bearing balls made of tungsten) "harmless" at 11+ km/s, it will mitigate them, possibly (this can likely be simulated decently well as we have penetration data for regular arms, albeit at lower velocities. Note also that if typical spaced armor defeats X gram impacts at typical velocities, all sides will simply make sure their dispersed particles are large enough to do actual damage. (this reduces to-hit chances, as there is a cloud of larger particles, that are smaller in number over a given volume). Microscopic damage is not the issue. We can certainly do the math in terms of energy left in the target (heat), but without some formal information on the physics of hypervelocity impacts, any damage model in this game is just that, a game's damage model. Again, I'm fine with a game having a game damage model, and the designer can make some assumptions about what he thinks might happen. It't not a simulation, however, unless it can be checked against real data and verified. Claiming otherwise is absurd. Regarding spaced armor, this has been well understood for some time. In a world where all the enemy warships are so armored, the penetrators change. Now hit the shield in the image you linked to with a tungsten rod of the same diameter, but several times the length (and energy goes as v2 so the velocity matters). Such a long-rod penetrator will only sacrifice the leading cross-section of the rod on the spaced armor. You could disperse these easily by having them wrapped around the missile like a fasces (roman), then spinning the missile slightly (on its long axis) right before dispersal. You now have a cloud of long rod penetrators moving along the velocity vector of the missile. The radial velocity given, and the time to impact establishes the density of rods per cross sectional area that might cross the target. The central missile mode is free to maneuver as well, if that's useful. Or, the impact can just be a 10 kg blob of dense material (steel, whatever), and that Whipple shield in the image is just gone compared to the hit from under 3 grams of Al. It's important to remember what the spaced armor NASA looks at is designed to deal with, vs people intentionally trying to defeat it. A realistic outcome in a game for this example would be that in a statistical number of samples within the game, you'd expect this to be replicated (the rare case of a non-fatality). A physics model would need to include rather a lot of detail to have this be possible without it happening much of the time. With a table you could require a simple random % roll that matches the RL % of such failures that result in living--if it's 1 in 10,000, then you set the chances to that, and boom, realistic outcomes. It's wrong-headed to think that an incomplete computer simulation is somehow automatically better than paper "simulations" using random numbers and lookup tables. Military (naval, usually) war games could produce reasonable outcomes in this manner---because they calibrated their % tables based upon RL data. They knew how often their battleship gunners hit targets at different speeds and ranges, for example, and they knew that certain events (critical hits) could occur with some % (RN Battlecruisers hit in the magazines, for example). Over large numbers of simulated battles, they could have "realistic outcomes" in their war-games. I'm not saying, and haven't said that such a system is better, or preferable, I've said that with an incomplete "simulation" it might not in fact be any worse. The proof would be real life data. You seem to like putting words in people's mouths. I've made no such claim. I'm fine with arbitrarily fine-grained damage models, my only claim is that they are not likely simulating anything, as we have little data on how real spacecraft systems fare when clobbered by hypervelocity objects. Better examples might be the targets of a-sat tests, or spacecraft collisions. Of course we only know they were utterly destroyed, not the mechanics of their destruction. I have seen ships in that game (vids) covered with holes (glowing) and they are still mission capable---but I have no idea what size projectiles they were hit with, and at what velocity. I cannot recall if it was up the thread, but someone talked about through and through hits wasting energy... I'm unsure if that would be entirely correct. Anyway, it's only a simulation to the extent it models real life to some level of fidelity (within the parameters set as givens within the game). KSP is a sort of zeroth order orbital mechanics simulator, for example. Throw in principia, RSS/RO and it's slightly better at simulation. Still a game, but you'll get sort of realistic results (the right craft will be capable of what they are actually capable of to some margin). CoaDE is a game, and it looks like it might be really fun, just don't make assumptions about accuracy of simulation if you have no idea (and you and I both have no idea).

"Mission Control," of course is not actually mission control (the Tracking Station is really Mission Control). The Mission Control building is in fact a contract office---what it should be (and change the name) is Mission Planning. It should include something like the tracking station, but with a built-in "hyperedit" of a sort that allows you to place an imaginary craft in an orbit (and time stamp) of your choice, then it should allow placing maneuver nodes. This would allow some idea of the dv requirements for given burns (obviously a KER-like thing would also be needed so you could actually use that information). I agree that the reward should be for careful play, but I'd also like to see some "light this candle" stuff where you might screw things up, requiring a rescue, or other novel choice.

Yeah, I think that something to encourage possibly adverse launches (in career mode, mind you) would make sense. I end up keeping revery and quick save on all the time for two reasons: 1. I can't tell you how many times I've hit "launch" only to realize I forgot to change the crew, or put a relevant part on once it's on the pad. 99% of my reverts are for this reason---with KER I don't end up reverting because I lack the dv for orbit, for example. 2. I keep quick save on because of crashes. That said, I so infrequently hit F5 that it usually doesn't help me much. Once I have a crash, then for the next XX times I play, I tend to save often... then I forget, and that's when I have a crash, lol. So my "house rules" are not to use reverts/saves much at all. I will "simulate" some aspects of a mission using hyperedit (or the simulator in KCT when I play with that mod)---usually this is for landers on worlds with atmospheres. If the craft doesn't cut it, back to the drawing board, but I'll fly the whole mission for real if it works for the task it is designed for. In the other thread I suggested have a certain number of "free" reverts, and a lesser number of free autosaves... this would be per year. Once the free ones are used, then you'd pay in funds, and/or science. Reverts over and above the free ones might be pegged to the cost of the craft. Loads from a save would be similar (cost of base craft, not the remaining stage). My goal would not be "hardcore," so much as gaining the failures that we are stuck with due to error, since we don't have failure modes. Right now, it's trivial to just revert if you like... even if you don't do it, it's not the same psychologically IMO as knowing that "this is the real Eve landing attempt." If that makes any sense. For career I think it is important because costs, etc, need to be balanced. If the assumptions for career (on the part of the devs) was that you'd launch 5 times to get something to work, losing money each time, and the reality is that people revert 4 times, and launch once, then the rewards balance is totally fubar. By controlling this to a degree, it allows tuning the career game better such that it might actually be possible to lose without becoming grindy (as "Hard" mode is to me... it's all grind, it adds nothing that is actually challenging to me).

This is not a big deal, IMO, because you can do both. This is huge, new players, or anyone unfamiliar with orbital mechanics already doesn't really "get" transfer windows at all. Another huge issue. The lack of something like KER is a critical failing. Yeah, I know it's hard with cruddy crafts that don't actually look like rockets to get it right all the time, but it could have a big disclaimer that if it doesn't look like something you see on a news website about rocket launches, the dv value might be very wrong. The "Explore" missions should occur in advance of a transfer window, and should perhaps list optimal dates for sending the mission right in the text. The one thing I would like to see is the ability to set map focus not just on my craft, now, or the target world, but on the maneuver node itself, as well as any arbitrary point along an orbit.

Yeah, it's certainly complex. KCT's explicit "simulation" mode makes a lot of sense in that regard---it also has R&D taking time, but no pitfalls as per OP's suggestion. I'm just sort of getting 1.1.2 back to where I want everything to be, so I might have to mess with KCT soon (I tend to play mostly vanilla after an update so I can make fair commentary on it). This is where "career" vs other modes needs to be considered. I think in general it would be nice to be able to toggle elements of career into sandbox, for example, such that if you tick all the boxes, it becomes career, tick some, and it's science mode, and everywhere in between. Regardless, it's fair to observe that if you don't like the limitations of construction and missing a launch window---play science mode. I think those limits are in fact critical to career being better. YMMV.

There was a thread about adaptors for multiple engines in stock I replied in... then there were pictures of ways to hack it. Seeing the Mk1-2, awful, riveted 2.5m tank, and kludged on 3 engine upper stage made me realize that I don't use the stock parts at all any more. Thanks again for this awesome mod.