tater

Yeah, the struts thing has always been absurd. If every craft you built was untextured, but you had to manually drag the same, white texture onto every part, they'd still be defending that, too, I guess "you have to paint stuff in RL, right?"

Was snowing this morning.

A quick look at the 1.1 forum shows no threads regarding the look of parts at all. Perhaps a 1.05/1.1 comparison of parts might be a useful post over there.

Actually, KER doesn't really go far enough from a planning standpoint---it does from it's side of things, but we really need the ability to pull up "Mission Planning" that allows us to set a parking orbit (at some arbitrary date), then apply multiple maneuver nodes, and see what the dv totals end up being. 100 km LKO insertion burn to Duna, then propulsive capture at Duna, then circularization there, then Kerbin transfer burn. The nice thing is that that type of thing is really already there (I guesstimate by switching to my station orr whatever in parking orbit, then checking out the burn---but that is for NOW, not for 117 days from now. Yeah, there are transfer window planners, so you have to find the travel time, then add some slop for getting to the target site, then leaving, then look up the return burn, etc., and all that is simple transfers (and/or aero-captures), not slingshots, etc.

The problem is not instantaneously determining the dv of the remaining bit of a single stage during a burn (though even that can have issues with some bizarre craft), it's anticipating what those numbers will be in the future. You need the data in the VAB, or it's not really useful. Now a "total burn time" for a given stage is easier (assumption of 100% throttle), but that doesn't help too much for planning (though it might let you know the craft in the parking LKO can make the X minute burn for Duna with the transfer stage alone).

It's not fundamentally incredibly difficult, particularly if everyone built rockets that looked like rockets, but they don't. It has to deal with the bizarre crafts that many people make.

Here's one thing that none of the 3 KSP modes do, that I can see in both "campaign" and forms of instant-action in some games---variability/randomness. Yeah, it's anathema to Squad, but it is a useful gameplay device. Take a game I actually contributed mods to, Silent Hunter 4. I could bang out a quick map where my boat will come across a convoy, or the Kido Butai in certain waters, then play it to see how I manage. This to me is much like KSP sandbox, since I know the entire setup ahead of time, and I customize it to my liking. Once I'm in range of the targets, however, SH4 is vastly superior to KSP in this regard, since I could play that setup 10 times, and have as many outcomes. Sometimes the escorts detect me early, sometimes they don't. Sometimes I evade the depth charges, sometimes they shack me. There is a little of this in KSP, certainly with atmospheres involved, but any fault/difference is only my fault, there is never a failure, nothing random. In campaign mode, it's even more complex, and I am constantly put in novel situations, and novel situations that compound on each other. A stray H8K spots me in shallow water, and damages the boat. I am now in the middle of a patrol, with a slightly impaired boat, but I don't want to come home empty-handed, so I deal with it. This latter example is exactly why I want a career system that is actually good. I don't need/want it to spam me with random goals, I want the game to result in novel problems to solve, which is a very different thing. An intelligent failure/testing system would add a lot here. I would love to have an Apollo 13 moment, now and again, though clearly that also requires build times, etc., since the KSP solution would be to simply launch a brand new, purpose-built rescue craft minutes after the problem presented itself, lol.

In short, no. Every unit time that passes during the burn decreases the mass of the craft and changes the twr and remaining dv.

Assume that perhaps science mode s where noob players are steered to to learn the ropes. Instead of a mere "milestone" award, have that milestone actually meaningful in terms of data given the player. Delta v is not a complex concept, and in fact every player that actually tries to leave orbit (or rendezvous) already sees for every single maneuver node they already use. Having that number appear once they get to orbit, for example, as something they cannot miss, is a little learning experience. It could be a pop up window upon reaching orbit the 1st time in a given save of that mode. "Congratulations on reaching orbit! You've discovered that your spacecraft needs 4500 m/s to achieve orbit, any less than that in the VAB, and you won't make it!" To continue with your random player example. They get to the Mun, and plot a node to get back, but come up 50 m/s short on their maneuver node. They in fact chose a poor place to do the burn, and actually had the dv to get home, but only know that they now have 0 LFO left. Had the game bothered to tell them they had XXX dv remaining, and their sloppy, plotted burn used XXX + 50 dv, they'd have perhaps tried out nodes in different places of their orbit to see what if anything worked. Instead, they learn "moar boosters" when the craft they made was perfectly suited for the job.

I think you address some problems with extant KSP career (random challenges apparently for the sake of challenges), but not "Career" as a concept... if that makes any sense. On one hand it's 100% fair, since KSP career is KSP career. Unfortunately, KSP career is simply awful on multiple levels, and if a person's judgement on any notion of career is colored by how KSP does it, that's unfortunate, because career in KSP could actually be good with a decent paradigm in place. Not better, but actually really good. It's like at all the choice of focus branching points, they intentionally made the wrong decisions, lol. Fine Print addition is a great example. It was an excellent mod for what it did (playing along within the fundamentally broken system), but looked at objectively, it just adds more, random contracts to a career system that feels nothing like running a space program or private rocket company startup. A few posts mention Minecraft. I'd make another analogy. My kids play creative, which to me is mind-numbing. It's 100% self-driven, so apparently I have no imagination (to those who make that claim regarding KSP Sandbox). Heck, my daughter likes flat worlds to build stuff, which makes creative even more mind-numbing, I prefer architecture to have a landscape context. Survival, OTOH, is also incredibly bad in MC, but when there is an update, and my kids convince me to try it, I always play survival, anyway. Partially because I like coming across cool scenes here and there (a village with a nearby temple half-buried in sand, for example). Borrowing from this, is part of the reason I'd prefer a randomized Kerbol system as an option. That sense of real exploration would add value in just getting someplace new... Even variants of existing worlds, new maps for the Mun that it can switch between, etc. Instead of frankly lame easter eggs, I'd rather come across a unique, plausible geographical feature now and again. This would add a lot to exploration, IMO. If this included a kind of "fog of war," where you only know what should be known by ground-based astronomy to start, then we instantly have a "career" progression, even in a game that is strictly speaking "sandbox" mode. Take atmospheres, for example. The range of possible values for Venus was huge until the Soviets actually sent a probe. In sandbox, with a random system and certain elements requiring "science" acquired locally to nail down, a crewed mission might be a very bad idea without first sending a probe (or grossly overbuilding your lander/ascent vehicle).

^^^exactly. You get the dv of a burn, and the time, but zero data on how much dv you actually have, or how long your engines can fire---the latter should be trivial (I could be entirely wrong here) for a given stage, as they burn fuel at a fixed rate, and they know the amount in the tank, right? dv is obviously more complicated as the remaining mass is constantly changing with burns.

Yeah, I know, I meant as "regular" parts, not cool, SSTU parts. I suppose the tanks could at least have fuel types, if the gear won't work. I guess the fuel types could include mono or even EC as a consolation prize for the lack of panels, etc.

I love the LC parts for airless landers. Even just the pods and default LC tanks. Really, they are very nice to have.

Adding to what regex said about the coding being non-trivial, what about a dv readout that is not precise? Ie: Suborbital, possibly orbital, definitely orbital, possibly escape, definitely escape, and so forth. The readout would be Werner's board with a drawing of a parabola hitting Kerbin, an orbit with a "?" next to it, and orbit and a tangent with a "?" on it, and so forth... Assuming all the boundary value cases fit in there.

This makes no sense at all. Let's separate the dv readout, and the dv map for a second. Add a dv readout, and the player is _still_ forced to do trial and error, the only difference is that they get to see how altering the craft in the VAB changes the dv number. Slapping on "moar boosters" is not always a very good solution, and learning the "tyranny of the rocket equation" without seeing the dv is a sort of remarkable leap. With the dv readout, the player can actually figure out why their rocket is not working.

While I don't fundamentally disagree, I find it funny since the game (unmodded) provides us with no long-term planning, heck no short-term planning tools whatsoever. It would be awesome to see not just the always requested dv/twr data available in stock, but the ability to "doodle" with maneuver nodes as a form of mission planning so we could then design a craft that hits the dv requirements for each of the burns required.

The idea that "climate change" would entirely wipe out humanity is absurd, as are most of the options. If the mass-extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs (or the extinction events before that one) didn't wipe out everything alive, then lesser events won't wipe out humanity, because we, unlike dinosaurs, can mitigate the effects of anything short of an extinction-level event (and we can deal with some of those with some engineering). That leaves the nice post above, "evolution," along with "cosmic" events as the only possible answers. The next most likely might indeed be pandemic, though it's a poor adaptation for a virus or bacterium to kill 100% of its hosts, it's not an impossible random adaptation, I suppose (rabies is virtually 100% fatal---a few survive in induced comas, though, I believe, so if it were airborne...)

I waver a lot. If career was half-decent, I'd not play anything else... but it's not even half-decent. Career is often described by pure-sandbox people as being for "people who lack any imagination," which is entirely wrong... though the KSP career system seems to be designed as if that was the case. Regex is spot on about what career should be, though, which has pretty much no overlap with the career system Squad has given us. Their take has been to double down, and simply give us more lousy, random contracts, when what we need is something utterly different. On the topic of Sandbox, I'd go so far as to say I'd love a feature that I'd also like to see as an option in career... a randomized solar system (both in scale and available planets/moons. A "seed" that would scale stuff 1-6X, for example (planet size, and distances separately), and perhaps have a library of XX pre-designed planets/moons to choose from, of which only Y are used in any given game. This would pretty much require a progression in even sandbox, as you'd actually need to figure out what works. This creates an instant "career" for the player with no other limitations at all (though a couple like LS and some sort of construction time, or even just an annual budget---would fill it out nicely).

A dv readout is actually required for "trial and error" to be a thing. Assuming the player doesn't "cheat" and look up a dv map externally to the game, the whole point of Jeb's "trial and error" should be for the player to figure out what the dv requires actually are. Yes, in RL you'd do the math, first, but even if you maintain the supposed "kerbal" notion of doing rather than planning (which I don't), then keeping track of the dv is required. If you assume they have the rudimentary math skills to have figured out minimal requirements beforehand, then it's similarly required. For players who are truly new to even the idea of spaceflight from a physics standpoint, this readout is similarly critical. Build something with this final number and it works, and another and it won't. It's useful in the VAB to watch how dv changes with different designs as well. Long ago I suggested a "kerbal" idea for a dv readout. We have Werner in the VAB anyway, how about a blackboard (later it can become a whiteboard when the later tech tree is unlocked) that shows a simple drawing of a rocket trajectory. If it lacks orbital dv, the paths hits the ground (with a drawn explosion). If it has orbital +- some amount, then it shows both and a "?" If it exceeds escape velocity, it can show escape, and then various bodies with a "?" or even a loop around them if it is clearly enough for a propulsive capture. That would be a way to do it with no numbers if they are set upon no numbers for some inexplicable reason.

The contract paradigm is fundamentally flawed. In the case of weighting, take OP's examples of orbital contracts he lacks the tech to complete. He then follows your advice and "invests" rep in rejecting them, causing those contracts to go away. Great. Now, he gets a few he can do, gains the tech to do the orbital contracts... but they are no longer offered, because he already told the game he hates them. If the contract system is never going to go away, then at least the contracts should be interesting, reasonable, and rational. Very few contracts even meet one of those criteria. EDIT: I should add that I realize that there is a semi-truck full of lemons (the entire career/contract system) and you're making lemonade with them. I have spent a lot of time thinking about the contract system, and it's a non-trivial task to design any sort of decent career system with the contracts as a backbone. It tends to seem, well, random.

I think what sandbox lacks for me is a feeling of time progression. Hence my "personal scenario" style of play in sandbox. Of course, standard career also entirely lacks any sense of time progression.

Given posts already here I'd say death by hyperbolic rhetoric.

You might as well change it to only be people, because my same observations apply. Even if only "what will end all human life on Earth?" were to be the question, ALL is remarkably unlikely in any case that doesn't destroy the Earth.

I always play a career with a new update, or indeed with a new mod set. My favorite topics tend to be bashing KSP Career mode, and how frankly awful it is... it can be slightly improved with mods, but it is fundamentally flawed. I long for a career that would make career the only mode I would play. I also do sandbox, but while I would not say I have no "goals" in sandbox, I don't run multiple, concurrent missions in sandbox. I tend to pick a goal, then complete it in sandbox. In career I'd do other things waiting for my probe's many year journey to Jool (6.4X), or while my crew was en route to Duna, but in sandbox,I'd launch the parts of my Duna ship, then time warp the mission and do it in one sitting. This is so true. Career is perfectly awful, and feels slapped on. It cannot be fixed well within the current framework, it really needs to be scrapped and done from scratch with real direction, IMO.

It might not be new to 1.1, but it should certainly be fixed.