tater

The nice thing was that the signal to noise ratio of early discussion groups (Usenet newsgroups) was actually pretty high as virtually everyone in the conversation was a science or engineering person.

A a/b b

100% closed loops aren't a thing, so I really don't see the issue. Honestly, once you achieve such a system, life support ceases to be a concern. Any system that would allow this would be sort of silly, IMO. Right now they are working to increase the O2 recovery rate towards 75%. I've read about ideas for getting it as far as over 90%. Any life support system without consumables is pixie dust.

LOL. There were about 100 domains (total) when I first started playing with what is now the internet (ARPANET).

Maybe kerbals are sort of rational and don't need PR for NTRs The real problem with Contracts/Missions is that unless there is a player-driven way (as regex suggests) to create custom missions on the fly, they will necessarily become boring/repetitive. Clearly more variety helps, but there is honestly limited variety possible. How about probe missions? That would add some variety. They could include scientific gear as if they were part testing (required to be on the probe). Crasher probe for a body (take high orbit, and low orbit science, then impact target). Flyby missions? (maybe requires entering SoI of multiple bodies). Lander. Rover. Other, stream of consciousness stuff: I mentioned it above a wants, but satellite contracts should result in the satellite not being owned by the player. THEN, they can become fodder for follow-on missions: 1. Science removal. "Take science" from a satellite that was required to have an experiment. Perhaps an engineer or scientist of a certain level can reset experiments? 2. Repair. Something is damaged, and requires repair by an engineer. 3. Return to orbit. Have a satellite contract that requires some small motor and fuel, and it needs to be in orbit with at least X fuel remaining. Follow-on mission involves a malfunction that sent it off into an extremely eccentric orbit (crosses mun and minmus orbits, so it might get interesting). Needs to be returned to original orbit. Player gains control of it, and a small amount of fuel remains---excellent piloting might get it back without help, or go grab it and return. Has to be an expensive sat to be worth it. 4. Deorbit. Contracted to remove a defunct sat from orbit (fulfilled by placing in any suborbital trajectory).

This. A set of stock-alike soviet stuff would be awesome.

sumghai is right, unless it is established to be something interesting, I don't see a need. That said, all the airless worlds could use some cratering love.

Very true. Spamming the contracts with base building around (or on) Duna and Ike just because you've visited Minmus is bizarre. Or satellites there… for what? It should be (again, "Mission," not contracts for some company) more like "place a science orbiter in polar orbit around Duna with these instruments." Something that actually makes sense. This would be cool. It goes more to some fundamental issues with the KSC that are perhaps semantic. The "Tracking Station" is in fact "Mission Control." What they call "Mission Control" is in fact the contract/planning office. Contracts should be 3d party stuff like "launch our communications satellite for us," and I'd be fine if the payload appeared as a subassembly in the VAB. There needs to be a "Missions" tab where either the player selects from a broad range of available "Explore" type missions, or has a way of creating them as you suggest. Yeah. I was surprised no one commented on my suggestion for time-based funds/science payout for certain missions. By setting reasonable periods for the payouts, you create actual control of time passage in KSP without resorting to a build system like KCT. This is a de facto "budget" system. All the explore contracts can be redone to provide monthly funds, instead of up front/completion. If the milestones for all those contracts were expanded (orbital stuff can have rendezvous and docking milestones, etc, etc), then time would tend to pass anyway as you work through them. Some milestones can require spending X days in orbit, then a week or 2, etc.

Time based funds/science would work fine. You could lose rep, or even any continued funding at all if you go some period without launching anything.

Most all real probes would have cameras. There is an easy way to compare if transmission should work, and how well. Is the data a number, or made of numbers (digital)? If yes, then 100% transmission. Other than surface collection, it should all be 100%. Crew reports would mostly be science, not some subjective opinion, maybe photos. From the era this is roughly analogous to, high-res photos were film, so they'd bring back the film (which should then improve in the tech tree, however, once digital cameras don't suck).

This is such a terrible mechanic, IMO. If that is what a player wants, they can do sandbox or science mode, right? I want career… I dunno why I want career, actually, I want context I guess. Let;s rethink science/funds return over time for a sec. There are missions that pay decent funds, and nearly no science, like science from orbit, right? It's grindy, but you can take them over and over as fast as you can exit contracts, enter tracking, click probe with sensor (or a crew compartment), send science, return to KSC, decline contracts til you see another, repeat. That's right now. We'd have to test, but at 30k a shot (and 1 science), and no time passing in Mission Control, you can fill the bank account in no time if you can stand the clicking (I just checked, the munar contracts are ~70k, and 2 science). We are told that science over time is bad, because players will just warp past the time. SO WHAT! The time then passes. The other contracts or goals that actually have time limits MATTER for the first time. So time-based contracts for funds (science/funds per unit time)---the mere existence of them---instantly make time matter with no KCT-like stuff at all. Note that they need not make X funds per minute, and Y science, they'd make maybe 5,000 fund per MONTH, and 0.5 science (or whatever). Yeah, you can warp ahead, but if all the contracts (and the early explore goals at the least) have reasonable time limits, then it is self-defeating. You could take rep hits (assuming it is made to matter) for every X months with no launches, possibly as another mechanism to curtail serious abuse. How would this play? Say the starting career fund rewards are low, and players actually struggle a little with funds (hard to imagine now) after rebalancing. Then a few contract types that pay a few thousand per month exist. You might only be allowed so many based upon facility upgrades (another balance tweak method). So our player now has nearly no funds after a tragic accident involving poor Jeb, but needs 20k to build a rocket for what he wants to do next (mission already selected). He has a satellite in orbit can make that 20k in 4 months of collecting data. He time warps---but 1.0 is supposed to have skip to node, so it uses THAT, 1 click, 4 months pass---and he can can now do the next mission because he has the funds. That extra click or clicks to skip ahead is less grind than the clickfest of taking the same contract now (which pays better), and time actually passes. Make these contracts useful enough that they effectively fund an annual program a few thousand at a time. It is a time mechanism that uses nothing not already in the game, and succeeds entirely because it is a beneficial strategy.

Those upgrades are still easy, though. I just played a RSS 3.2x career with KCT, life support, etc and have unlocked everything (including some mod parts past the stock tree). Was slightly harder funds wise at the start due to it being hard to make orbit (turns out I dragged my KIDS folder over forgetting it was set to make stock with FAR harder, oops). Past that, same as stock. Only difference is that a few years have elapsed in the game world instead of as many months (or weeks, lol) in stock. BTW, the strategies i threw out there were spitballing, I just don't like the current stuff even a little, and it is misnamed, IMO. Also, there is no real way around contracts, any contracts, from being grindy. Overly novel is contrived, and obvious are obvious. The flaw is that they are the ONLY way to get funds, and since time is meaningless, budgets would be meaningless. The "tycoon" element isn't really in play, IMO, as there is no competition, no time frame, and your crews cannot actually do anything autonomously. For that we'd need to at least have the ability for kerbals to do some routine missions themselves (station resupply, etc). I'm trying hard to justify career vs sandbox, but it's difficult

OK, that makes sense. So the text editing is only in the case of a part name that is clear in the cfg description, but not the part name. Cool.

If by "meaning," OP refers to some purpose imposed upon us by some outside entity, then none whatsoever, as no outside entity is demonstrated, and any capable of imposing "purpose" on us is incredibly implausible to the point of being ridiculous.

So you cannot merely delete the named cfg files themselves, but references to them in another file (notepad reference implies I cannot simply look for the part_name.cfg)? Also, for such a truss/boom/whatever, I do not require it be reversible. I imagine assembling a spacecraft with NTRs well back on a set of trusses that are compact to start, but end up being 10s of meters long deployed. Regarding tweakscale, it's just another mod added to the mix. I'd prefer to keep the mod count as low as possible. If IR had a truss, I might well decide it was worth it, but as it doesn't, I don't have any use for it. Is the single, deployable part (like landing gear, shielded docking port, etc) more or less complex in terms of how the game deals with it than IR?

That's not bad at all. People routinely do that right now. If you time warp to Jool, you are doing it. I tend to have many concurrent flights, and my longer missions only end up time-warped when I am warping in Kerbin SoI for rendezvous, transfers to Mun/Minmus. With KCT, I'm actually building stuff during part of that time. From a gameplay standpoint, almost no difference, except that something that would have taken 1 WEEK in stock, takes a couple years in KCT---with exactly the same real hours played, and missions flown. The "time warp" thing is a non-argument, really. With a KASA "strategy" where you have a budget, you'd not be able to just warp, because without any results, you'd simply have all your funding pulled. Long warps would effectively be "game over." What would be a "several year wait," other than an actual mission, anyway? I should add that the lack of meaningful time creates a far worse exploit. Accept trivial contract with good payout. A couple clicks later, reward. Go back to contracts, reject until you get more trivial contracts, repeat. How is that possibly worse than time warping, exactly? I should load up stock, and just mess with this a little using stuff I already have in orbit/landed various places in a save. Other than the real-time seconds it takes to go to the different craft and click, that is my ONLY time constraint, I bet I could generate millions per Kerbin day just on "science from orbit" contracts alone. It;d be a grind, but I guess you could unlock the tree like that as well. Somehow that's better than time warping a month for a huge rocket to be built…

All Fine Print did was add more contracts (some of which are nice ideas) that get annoying, fast, because they constantly repeat. 99% of the parts testing contracts are just dumb, and while the survey stuff is OK, it's like they intentionally make them logistically hard just because. A bunch of surface stuff near one spot, then some random spot elsewhere.

KAS is pretty amazing for base design, I have to say, and I only use the links and spare parts.

One, I don't use tweakscale, so that's off the table. Two, I can certainly prune the parts, but I'm never really sure what I need to delete to be honest. Three, nothing looks like what I actually want, which is a deployable truss of some sort. I should add that I never actually DLed IR until just now, and had no idea the part count on it was as low as it was. I had seen pictures of things made with it, and assumed there must be a million parts (many must have been scaled). Still, noting looks like what I want.

I don't want many of the parts, in short. If it were just IR alone, then I might not care, but more and more parts jest become cluttered, particularly if many I will never use. A previous build I had with a number of mods tended to crash after playing a while as the memory use climbed, basically I want the stuff I want, and not the rest

Yeah, U-2 looks bigger than 1, smaller than 2X engine area. Without reading the areas on the wiki page, or in fact this thread, I would have never thought to put more intakes. It's the kind of person who is willing to exploit games that figures out stuff like that (past eyeballing the intakes and trying to keep them below maybe ~2x the engine part). I'd expect to SEE those parts on the designs, however. So 1 engine with 4 intakes should be obvious by looking. If they are on top of each other, the areas should clearly be identical to 1 part. I'd consider any design that hides multiple intakes to be… nothing I would ever take seriously. YMMV. (I'd add that if this is common practice, it reenforces my lack of using the hanger at all, lol)

Yeah, I'd be all for a simple implementation of this kind of thing. I never even considered IR, looked like just too much stuff.

I would not count those. The intake parts in KSP have cross-sectional areas about the same size as the engine cross section. Those 2 examples have cross sections less than the area of the actual engine (or very close to it). Define "air intake = 1" as an area equal to the input of the engine itself. I'd bet that anything approaching 2 is not a real thing, but some fraction larger than 1 is likely found in RL. EDIT: I looked at the wiki, and for some reason parts with areas clearly identical to the engine itself have vastly smaller areas listed. My observations would be entirely based upon only playing the game (if you need to look it up in a forum or wiki, the game is not giving you enough information). It's like not using nosecones, and clipping. Nothing I ever considered doing. I always added nosecones, have never clipped anything, etc., I'd not know that you should not use aero parts on rockets if I did not see it here.

Regarding a "Space Race," there is a way to do it without AI. Any AI. A kind of multiplayer. Click "Space Race" (a new career option). Your other settings for career become slightly more limited (to some presets). The game then uploads your progress per unit time to a server. Basically there point at which you reach each milestone (including some disasters) that matters for a space race, with date/time stamp and the craft files that accomplished said milestone. They would be tagged by preset difficulty level. When you play, it will pick from those other players at the same diff level, chose ONE, and their milestones will represent the competition. So you are playing against other KSP players anonymously. Ideally, there would be a competing center, and you'd play against people choosing that other center, in a "dream" version, there would be stock-alike soviet stuff for that center.

I've only built a few aircraft, ever, in KSP, but I would consider putting more than one intake per jet engine pretty comical, frankly. If stacking them actually helps, someone should tell Rolls Royce or Pratt & Whitney, they're missing out.