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A massive work over of the contracts. As much as I want a total change in career, within the extant career system, quality of life would be improved by checking contracts and making sure they are sensible, and are not harmful to immersion in some cases. 1. Ridiculous part testing contracts. Please, read over them and get rid of the absurd tests or requirements. Not just jets in space, but huge SRBs on the Mun, etc. Dumb. 2. The number of rescue contracts has become absurd. At any moment I have more of those than I have astronauts in flight. If there are other Space programs out there, then I want a Space Race, not just evidence of their failures, which leads to 3... 3. I like the rescues with crafts, but they need to check for player accomplishments better. Send a probe to the Mun, and you start getting rescues even from the munar surface. I haven't landed there yet (I landed a probe that was in orbit with some fuel left to get some science to unlock stuff I wanted for my manned flight). I'm apparently about to send kerbals to the Mun, and the surface and orbit are littered with other kerbals. 4. Survey contracts need to make sense. Not 2-3 readings in 1 area, and ONE as an outlier. Redo them so that they read as a mission to learn about a single region in detail. 5. Fix the base and station contracts so that it is explicit that follow-on missions are to add to existing (contracted) stations.

The Flying Pig? I couldn't find a pic of delicious pork belly with wings. - - - Updated - - - This works, as SPAM is SPiced hAM. - - - Updated - - - Agreed.

Roverdude, I might as well ask this. I like the USI Kolonization stuff, but what do I need to do to make that mod closer to stock? I'm trying to dribble in as few mods as possible to prevent problems (lower part counts, etc), and with your ISRU already in stock, I figured that I could use what we have built-in, and stick with the habs for some outposts or stations (and it works with USILS). What cfgs/directories can go bye-bye? USITools? the CRP directory? Then dump part cfgs that look like I don't need them (drills, refineries, etc)? Feel free to kick me in the head or something if this is an inappropriate request for info, I spent a lot of time modding SH4, and I get how much of a PITA tangential questions and requests can be

In effect, to me this is saying that career is not good for anyone (not sure I even disagree with that ). Replay on career, or an advanced player in career is patently awful, IMO, for a number of reasons: 1. We know what to expect everywhere, there is no sense of exploration. 2. We know exactly how to make the early game crafts required to progress (the only time when career is actually challenging is the early game, and more so if you are a noob). 3. We can quickly figure out where to game the system or make choices on tech/upgrades since we know what we are doing. The basic notion of career in KSP is entirely wrong, IMHO, I'd love to see a ground-up change.

Pathology (medical specialty)… they tested a learning system on finding breast cancer in biopsies… it learned the usual rules in a few minutes, then found a few new things to look for (new rules) that pathologists had never noticed. In no time. Medicine in general can have many bits taken over. What about lawyers? Much of their work is finding precedent in old cases. They look though old case law, which is an exercise in "where to look" right now, because no one could possibly look at ALL case law… except a computer. Same with IP law (a buddy of mine is an IP attorney). Science? Again, looking for patterns in the way the natural world behaves, then creating a model that describes it, and predicts future observations. That's computer work. Maybe we should all learn how to make artisinal cheese.

I'd prefer a mod that treated the PILOT as the "mechjeb" since our astronauts should be capable of operating alone if we so chose. I haven't used MJ ever, and I prefer driving the spacecraft, but I'd love to be able to have scheduled resupply missions that my cadre of pilots could simply do without me having to (and any failures they have would result in cool rescues).

While I am quite disinterested in this personally, I'd like to see an odd variant for career. It would require kerbals that could actually do things themselves… AI kerbals of a sort. You could start the game with a large prop or jet as a stock item (clearly the ridiculous runway would need paving (or at least Marston mat)). That craft would have a few mounting points to hang craft off of. The player would design their X-1, X-15, whatever, and instead of having to launch from the runway, they can select to be carried aloft. They might set a target altitude and direction of flight, and the AI kerbals drive them there in the stock B-29ish thing (upgrade to a jet later?). People now are forced to do X-plane things without a ride to high alt first.

A properly thought out career mode could work this way---or take other paths by player choices.

Some guys I had as profs were working on a "subselene" at Los Alamos. It looked somewhat like a drill head for tunnels, but was nuclear powered, and it used the thermal energy from the reactor to melt lunar regolith (a simulant in testing) to make glass. As the drill moves forward, the regolith is melted, and seeps into the surrounding soils. What is left is a tube in the side of a hill (crater, whatever) that is lined with glass. Cap the outside end, and you have a habitat.

I just remembered, she did not fling off immediately, I had her RCS on, and her attitude would not change (she'd not rotate) and I had to thrust down to get to the rescue craft. Could she have been "on strike" or something? Perhaps the rescued hulk somehow was not given the 15 days?

Manual labor? I'd worry more about people who sell their intellects right now. Learning systems are scary good already. I'd argue the bigger concern might be intellectual jobs, not manual labor.

Odd thing just happened. Playing a new career with 1.0.2. Finally decided to take a rescue mission as I have a probe core to stick on a mk1 now. Rendezvous with Jenvie's hulk. I'm a couple hundred meters away. Switch to her pod (mk1 inline cockpit), and EVA her. She was outside, and I had time to turn her suit lights on, then she shot off, and I mean SHOT. I switched back to my rescue craft to match with her… she was already kms away. OK (!?!). Then I get a message a second later that she died of starvation (I turned death on, obviously). Obviously whatever shot her off is not related, but I didn't realize she had no EVA support. If you don't own the verbal, does it not get LS supplies for EVA?

LOL. Sadly, it will launch to orbit with a tiny tank, and a 909, and can reenter directly from Jool with no damage.

I said balanced, not fair or fun Really I mean relative to each other in terms of balance.

Flowerchild, realistic is automatically balanced. If all stuff relevant to gameplay was "realistic," it would be internally balanced. Gameplay is different, I'd balance that by messing with how much kerbals use since that's obviously a fiction anyway. it is odd to me that many people who claim they want LS also want it to become a 100% efficient closed cycle---which means LS doesn't matter.

An in-game difficulty setting (or per save, ideally) would be nice. That way I can have death on, and my kids can have it off (they can;t stand the idea of killing cute kerbals)

I actually really like your new LS as something for Stock, frankly (and you know that my first exchanges with you on LS were fairly opposite ends of the spectrum---you changed my mind. I just find it funny that people who will have no issues with "LOL I BLEW UP JEB" have such an issue with LS possibly killing someone. I suppose WRT Jool (I always send probes first, and that is very much "end game" for me the way I play), I'd not ever send a craft that could not get to Jool, and at least hang a round a year or so---and I'd send resupplies ahead, and likely behind as well. Course my last Jool mission was in 6.4X, so I needed rather a lot of LS. I like the "rescue" as a sort of goal, as well, as I consider unplanned stuff like that to actually be the most fun (which is why I'd like some sort of rare failures, but the current mod make stuff break constantly).

No one is saying it is too deadly that I have seen. You'd have to actively try to manage to burn anything up.

Are you suggesting that whatever the base settings are in 1.0.2, those should be considered definitive, forever, and that Squad should not ever change them? Or are you suggesting a more "beta test" approach where people should beat up the sliders, and post experimental results from different settings in the hopes that a better value might be crowd-sourced? I'm gonna use FAR/DRE as soon as they are out, anyway, but it seems like critiquing the extant aero is a good thing, given the fact that we know that certainly 1.0.2 was barely tested (it came out right on the heels of 1.0.1, so however many hours between times the number of people testing is the sum total of testing).

This is why LS is so very awesome, IMO. It is the only thing that makes KSP get actually more difficult farther out. - - - Updated - - - This is exactly why I prefer lethal life support, actually. I virtually never lose kerbals. Even in RSS configs (kerbol system, scaled up between 2 and 6.4X, mostly, I try many of them out). LS is basically the only way I can manage to kill any (and that is rare). My solution to "oops" is to plan missions with redundancy. I sent fuel/habs ahead, for example. Any one who loses kerbals some other way should be fine with lethal LS. Any stock LS solution should drop warp in advance of LS running out, perhaps with a player controlled slider---maybe per craft? IN that last idea, you'd set a slider for a given craft for when the game will kill any warp in progress, and warn you. If you are on Duna, you might set it to a reasonable travel time from kerbin to duna, for example. For a station, it might be set to default (default might be 15 days or something).

Reentry problems are not likely a thing with mini-kerbin, frankly. The low stall speed shown in a gif on another thread is concerning, the stall of that shuttle requires a wing area about 10X+ higher than it is (I did some quick calks for wing area as a function of stall speed, and I assumed it was basically entirely empty (~22 tons)). I don't think that people shouldn't have to experiment with physics sliders to play.

Yeah, it uses the EC from the service bay, but also from the capsule. I've been turning off the battery in the capsule just to be safe (don't want to run out and not be able to deploy chutes, etc). Thanks for the heads up on the R&D upgrade, I've not gotten that far in my 1.0.2 game yet.

Best might be for people to accept that reentry is meaningless on mini-kerbin. When RSS is out I'll mess around with stock, but at 2X, 3X, etc. It might be interesting to see where it starts to matter.

If you use a service bay, and throw batteries in there, how can one get charge from them to a capsule on the other side of a separator? Option/alt clicking doesn't seem to do it.

The entire career paradigm is bad, and the "difficulty" levels no not actually adjust difficulty, but grind. Here's the bottom line on replay in career: It will never have good replay value with the Kerbol system never unchanging. There needs to be "fog of war" in KSP for replay---and even for new players to have a sense of exploration.