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The tech tree as it is is completely absurd. It needed to be completely redone several versions ago.

Walk away from the wreck? often. Gas it up and fly away? Nearly never unless they are purpose-built for rough field landings, and even then that would be a grass runway, not a random roughly flat spot of the right length. I live in New Mexico, and we have many, random flat spots. They look flat, until you are walking them, no jet, and few light aircraft specifically built for rough fields could land without problems at random places. Planes in KSP don't even need wheels, all aircraft wings have a higher impact tolerance than any of the landing leg parts.

Two issues. One, there is no Soviet Union, so there is no longer a claim. Two, the US disagrees, and it can be solved the way territorial claims have historically been solved, treaties, or war. See, it's political No exceptions to the WMD thing was... political. It was not about "peace," it was the fact that the US could plausibly have done something the CCCP could not, so they vetoed it. Political. It's all politics.

Having to role-play things that are obviously screwy is bad game design, IMO. It would be better to make them rational. What would be the best possible solution might be to have a slight variation of the "tweakable" things already on such parts. You can control the amount of mono carried, for example. Maybe have a couple version you can set in the right-click menu. One is the "short duration" version, and is lighter, the other is the long duration version, and is heavier. LS mods could then use that hook and provide the difference, and otherwise people can "cheat" and use the lighter version, but the part says "short duration" right there, so role-play away to square that.

The default can be to use the stock solar system. This is really about career/science replay value. Think in terms of players who have landed everywhere already. What's the point of going to the same places, particularly when you already know exactly what kind of craft it takes to get there? If you've only played in the stock solar system, here's something to try. Get Sigma Dimensions (mod) and set it to make everything 2-3X larger and farther apart (there is a 2X mode that does this as well). This works perfectly well with nothing but stock parts, in many ways you'll barely notice a difference---except all your notions about how much ship it takes to get places will be entirely wrong. Play career or science mode for a bit. It will be like when you first started as far as rocket design goes (in terms of size, not basic good design). That will give you a sense of exploration from the craft design POV, just not the solar system (because you'll still know what everything looks like having been there before).

Yeah, I suppose I could do some drop tests to see what the deal is with how impact is mitigated by gear/legs. I have no issue with the effects propagating, actually. The LEM landing parameters (the graph of acceptable horizontal vs vertical velocity) was shaped like this: ^ / \ | | and called "the dog house." (sorry for crappy ascii art) They had to keep the apex was 0 lateral velocity, and ~3 m/s sink. This was to protect the structures above the landing gear from presumably compression forces (3 m/s to 0 in 0.1s is ~3 gs, in 0.01s is ~30, etc, so more than launch stresses depending on how compressible the soil is, and how quickly the craft decelerates). I'd like to see something like the landertron mod being a thing (that functionality could be added to the septratron part as an option), and have a real difference between splashdown, and land landings for capsules. Again, it's about having designs in KSP be less universal, because designing novel stuff is kind of the point.

Yes, I know there is a mod that shows part damage. Very cool. Another thread got me looking at impact tolerance of parts, and had me reading a technical paper about the landing dynamics of all the Apollo lunar landings. Yet another thread was about the tier 0 runway, and why using that is dangerous to aircraft wheels, but landing at speed someplace that should be fatal (anywhere, on any world that is not a paved runway) is not. Since I land with chutes and/or landing legs, and I do so at LEM-like sink rates at touchdown, I never notice the impact stuff, except watching crasher stages hitting sometimes below me. I think that all the engine parts should have the impact tolerance reduced to effectively zero. Maybe 1 m/s. The engines should be incredibly delicate things you would never land on, ever. Oddly (not really, I suppose, because "spaceplanes!") the spaceplane engines are magically set to far higher impact tolerance for some reason(rapier, etc). I realize that in the past there were not so many parts, and you needed to land on wings, etc, but that's simply no longer the case. Making parts more delicate where appropriate creates design challenges, which is sort of the point of the game. Simple proposals: 1. Add more runways around Kerbin, some at tier 0 level, all the way up to paved and long. Fix tier 0 to be not so awful. 2. Make everywhere else in the solar system at least as bad as the current tier 0 runway to land on for aircraft wheels. 3. Make launch clamps and some landing gear/legs to tier 0. 4. Reduce the impact tolerance of all the engines in the game to near 0, the jet nacelles can be slightly higher (by slightly I mean maybe 1 m/s higher). A Apollo LEM descent engine buckled not from impact with the lunar surface, but from overpressure due to running near the surface. These can all be easily designed around with the game as it is. Better damage: Ideally, there might be a couple levels of damage instead of perfect --> #LOLEXPLOSION. Some parts like landing legs and wheels (do aircraft gear, I don't make planes?) already have this. Add this to other parts, and it could be as simple as a damaged texture. Damaged tanks could leak at some rate, damaged engines would simply not work. Damaged structural parts have impact tolerance reduced by half or something. Engineers could perhaps patch leaks, or allow an engine to work. Damage could occur at the tolerance, and destruction at (tolerance)*3 or some value that works. This gives them something to do, and makes landing something to actually have to think about.

That kind of terrain should break off any gear that hit them. When it comes to fund recovery for vehicles, any lost gear (including legs) should result in a total write-off f the airframe. All the engines---rockets as well as the OP plane parts that can magically survive 20+ m/s impacts---need impact tolerance reduced to basically zero as well (and the launch clamps should be tier 0 since any rocket resting on an engine bell should be destroyed).

^^^^ This would be one less part I'd ever have to put on any spacecraft, ever. Hauling stuff from one place to another is a silly side quest thing, just like all the grand tour contracts (that I don't have any interest in doing, ever, either). New, empty worlds would not be hidden (except maybe small moons undetected astronomically), but the specifics of them would be hidden... maybe that world has a canal system built by aliens! Nope, just craters. Thanks, Mariner 4. The extant world certainly need small scale detail, but I'm unsure what could be added that would make it truly novel to go to the Mun again. On top of that, once you discover such a place, you then know where it is in all future play unless they come up with a way to randomize surface features. Also, and this is important, it changes nothing at all about the types of craft you need to build. Nothing. Changing the size/distance of worlds means that your rut of building stuff for the kernel system goes out the window.

I've been on the net so long I've never had an email address that wasn't just my first name @, and that includes the iCloud address on my phone, lol.

Dragon is at ISS.

To be fair, all the gear, and in fact the whole "impact tolerance" thing needs looking at. Typical lunar landing vertical velocities were well under 2 m/s.

I tend to see the HH as a space station part. Partially it's a general problem in the stock game of not really having crew parts matter in terms of differences (your whole point in rebalance in some sense). I always play with LS, so I tend to forget it's not a thing. Regarding landing sink rates, I think the mk2 is heavier, perhaps that is optimized for different landing situations. Less than 6 m/s is not practical? I've never landed anything higher than that, even my first mun landing, lol. That said, I see your point. That makes me wonder about something tangential... career "difficulty levels." These tend to merely be "grind levels" in my experience, but craft survivability would be a much more interesting place to go. Easy uses the stock values, with Normal and Hard decreasing tolerances by some %. Engine bell impact tolerances should drop to near zero, frankly.

Impact speeds are odd because we don't injure kerbals as they should be. The LEM was designed to touchdown at a max sink speed of 3 m/s. That was for purely vertical. Any horizontal component reduced this, and ideal was sort of in the middle, say 1.75 m/s or so. Part of the rationale was to not exceed the tolerances of the rest of the LEM. That would put the impact tolerance of a mk1 can closer to 4 m/s perhaps (as a sort of LEM analog). Obviously gear should mimic this as well.

The SpaceX people have an incentive to be as rosy as possible in their predictions. No one posting here has any hard data on resuse, and spacex has little data on it as well. Until they have numerous relaunches under their belts, saying it will save gross amounts of money in actual practice is nonsense. Is it false? I have no idea. The idea of cost savings is completely plausible. The amounts quoted? Seem plausible, if optimistic. I'll wait for some actual data to make a judgement.

It was a small movement in architecture. Do you see any cities in a building anyplace? It never happened. There's a good book, but it's out of print and costs a bit now: http://www.amazon.com/Megastructure-Urban-Futures-Recent-Editions/dp/0064303713/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1460270433&sr=8-1&keywords=megastructure Kenzo Tange Tokyo plan

Megastructure... I remember thinking it was cool. "Machines for living," etc.

That's why I'd suggest a library of hand-made worlds to chose from. More dimension to the existing worlds would be awesome, and that would eb valuable alone, but any mode of play where "discovery" or "exploration" is truly a thing cannot have to use the same worlds over and over. A simple example... Minecraft. I play that rarely, and sometimes new seeds are just "cool," and you feel compelled to walk around just to see what;s around the corner.

I think ground-based needs to simply be assumed. Since tech tree nodes are the only time progression in the game (that's an entirely different issue), when a certain node set is unlocked, you get more ground-based data. Knowing that the moons exist doesn't alter "discovery" at all, because from telescopes, they are simply DOTS. So we know there is a retrograde dot in a certain orbit around Jool, and it's pretty small. We still have to go there to see what it looks like. Given the cool moons of Jupiter and Saturn, there is room for interesting discoveries.

The problem is that changing any treaty is a 100% political activity, and given the body that makes such laws, people will get to vote who... arrange their entire lives around fantasy (I'm trying to be as diplomatic as possible here). It's an irrational system, so technical arguments don't matter. The countries that actually do space will have variant political interests and might disagree.

Just checked and for Duna the map will not zoom closer than ~260,000m. It starts out just past Ike, so over 2 million. My suggestion would be for the start point to be substantially farther out, but on the "buff" side, you'd be able to zoom as close as you'd been with a craft (and some telescopic camera parts might allow zooming closer than craft altitude). Then sending some atmospheric instrument might allow for unlocking that atmospheric prediction ability, etc. Some stuff is points, some stuff is actually useful. I think that the default career/discovery might well be "stock," but honestly, for replay, it needs to be random. Once you know what altitude to set periapsis for a Duna landing, you'd have to forget it---that or you need a game mechanic that only allows certain settings to happen if certain science is done, which I think would be a mistake (say you cannot adjust the parachute deploy values unless you do some atmospheric science at Duna first) as it could get grindy.

There were 12 known Jovian moons by 1951. 2 were discovered in 1974 and 1975. 3 were discovered by the Voyager probes. Most were later discovered by large terrestrial telescopes, interestingly enough. Had the probes been designed to look for new moons, they'd have likely found more. In the context of KSP, I suppose you could either have more discovered (like asteroids appearing) later in the game, or you could add a space telescope part that would then discover some smaller moons---though a probe might have already found them at that point. Note that strictly speaking, this is "unrealistic," as kerbin based scopes would have seen them, but it leaves it as something to discover on orbit for players. Yeah, unlocking the biomes would be another useful experiment as it tells you where to land. The perfect landing site would be at a meeting point of biomes (or close enough to walk/drive/lander-hop between them. Showing biomes on the map makes that better. BTW, "blurring" need not happen. The extant map system places the starting view at some distance away. We could determine where the map camera is, say it's 1 million meters for example. The camera then has a zoomed in view, that hits a "floor" at maybe 10,000 meters? (again, I'm, making this up, it might actually be higher than that). My suggestion would be to have a simple mechanic whereby flying missions (ideally with a new camera part, but all crew vehicles can be assumed to have a (film) camera that does this once they return to kerbin) reduces the altitude "floor" for the map view. In a perfect world, it would do this based on location as well. So with a thoroughly mapped world, you might be able to zoom the map all the way in. The starting map camera position could depend on what is known from astronomy, so for Duna that start altitude might be what the planet looks like from a ship that has just hit the SoI for Duna (a reddish ball with ice caps) Other worlds might be a colored circle. Totally doable with the current map mode, it's just a camera position.

Man, the more I watch vids of the landing the more I want them to build a bigger drone ship, lol. The lateral movement after the landing bounce was sorta scary

Been everywhere in stock. Mostly I play rescaled with life support and (modded) career, which makes kerbaled missions rather more difficult (and mostly stock sized parts, I should add). Eeloo in 6.4X is pretty far, and I sent probes there (including a lander).

I can only assume this is predicated on some assumptions about turn around costs that will only actually be established well once they are actually doing it.