tater

In KSP we do none of that. We slap it on, and if it works, we don't have exploding wreckage. The same massive planning, simulation, and testing you refer to would in fact apply to every single aspect of rocket design that in KSP is not a thing. It's a non-argument, IMO. Real fairing sizes, to the extent they are not in fact arbitrary standardization are set by AERODYNAMICS. That is what should set them in KSP. If the atmosphere of Kerbin allows ridiculous fairings, so be it, that's where not following reality takes you. What are real issues with fairings? Cross sectional area… maybe moving the CM lower due to empty space on top?

Wow, then Apollo doesn't collect anything until Jack Schmitt arrives on the moon. All science gains need to be massively reduced. Say by a factor of 10. So a munar sample is 12 instead of 120. THEN, the science skill level is a straight multiple (Science skill +1 times base value) for the value of that collection. So pilot gets 12 ((0+1)*12), as science 1 guy gets 24, S5 gets 72.

Typical wide landers forced by other KSP limitations are then not a thing. Say 4 x 200 tanks held with radial decouplers to a central tank. That's 3.75m without the 2 decouplers and 2 gear, so 4m, anyway. So your first such lander requires the very end of the tech tree, and a monster rocket. You could design the stock expanded fairings to be wide enough to accommodate "normal" designs, which is in effect forcing a standard on people for those carried craft designs. It honestly won't affect me, as I put landers in interstages, and station parts barely bulge past their nominal diameter, anyway. I'm just fine with procedural.

Assume finite numbers of fairings. Fine. How many per base part diameter? 2? That's 9 parts. 3? That's 12 parts. 5? 18 parts. Delta IV has 4 as a reality check.

Real launch providers set standards to make their job easier, more predictable, and more cost effective. Current real rocket companies have a few fairing options per launch vehicle. Call it 4, for argument (2 diameters, and 2 heights for each). So KSP would need 15 nose fairing parts in that case (3 bases, and 12 fairings). That is a lot of parts. It still doesn't address the player deciding what his own standards might be. So in that case, perhaps the first 4 fairings built in PF for each base diameter would become "standard," and the only fairings they are allowed in the future for that diameter base. Choose wisely. What if there was an emergent technology that could not be folded, but was so awesome, virtually all new sats would include it, but fairing all had to be 1m bigger than they are now? WOuld that tech be abandoned, or would ULA/SpaceX/etc make bigger fairings? I'm not a partisan for PF, I just see limiting fairings to effectively just 1 as a bad idea.

FWIW, ULA says they will make custom fairings, but no one has taken them up on it.

PF is not unrealistic, they could make arbitrary fairings, assuming they work, they choose not to for economic reasons. Perhaps a stock PF implementation could have fairing cost X up to 1.5X the base diameter, then have the cost skyrocket as the diameter exceeds this. Say they are "free" at 1.5X, and cost 5-10,000 per 0.1m above that. That would make a de facto "stock" at 1.875m, 3.75, and 5.625 fairing, with others costing more.

Except, again, there is only 1 company making a given part.

It's sort of like watching youtube instead of just reading. Perhaps I'm showing my age, but I prefer written summaries vs installing something with no idea what it is doing.

I'm still not seeing how the 2 ships in technical fool's example are not synced in time. Each payer can warp at will, then sync later? That seems… bizarre. If Tardis were already in orbit, and was on the other side of Kerbin when DeLorean gets to the pad, are you saying they could warp until rendezvous? What about any other players? Say 2 people playing and they are in munar orbit. Seems like it should be Day 123, hour 7, minutes, seconds, etc for every player in the entire kerbol system at any given moment, or things are not exactly where an impartial observer in a fixed frame would see them. It mentions (but in no way elaborates on) career. Could you run a shared career, that is persistent, and whoever joins the game can simply take over a craft and fly it? I suppose that is a way of having no time compression at all (or warp warps the whole clock)

Is it easy to mess with the time compression rates per click? It might be a generic RSS issue, but it doesn't reliably drop compression, and they are set faster than stock already, which makes accidents more likely. Having high compression makes sense with larger solar systems, but it's balanced out, possibly to the negative, if I have to creep around with little warp because I'm afraid of having my craft disassemble upon hitting the atmosphere at high time compression (that happened to me, set up a nice, shallow reentry, warped, and it dropped after the SM had broken off in an explosion---luckily the mk1-2 still had its heat shield and 2 of 3 chutes intact after the accident).

I'm not trying to bash DMP, but there is simply no possible way for someone going to the DMP thread to understand any of this from the mod description content whatsoever. The last few posts have given way more information than is on the mod's own FAQ. This is the sum total of description the rest of us have to work with: "DarkMultiPlayer is a multiplayer mod for KSP 0.90. It supports subspace-style (and master controlled warp) warping & career mode, with an easy-to-edit server database." I looked at it a few months ago, and could tell nothing about it, then looked at it just a few minutes ago. Ditto. As I said, I'm not against MP as long as it has things where they should be. I still don't get how anyone could be in a different time (the subspace bit) to need to synchronize past possible net issues, but I'll take your word for it. Ping times might be an issue, what if you are closing at 50 m/s, ready to brake to station-keeping with target, and you lag? Debris everywhere?

Warping is not magic, it's changing the game time clock vs the player's. The craft ends up doing the same thing it would if you left it on 1:1 and walked away for 5 years. Reverting is unrealistic, I usually don't do it (I do it on launch if I realize I didn't remove the crew, or somehow stage separators got switched, or some other dumb thing that would never happen---or when the SRBs separate clearly but none the less blow up the rocket because that feature is FUBAR right now). I don't quick save, either (have a couple times to work out bugs like frozen kerbal, or docking ports that would not decouple, so I could retest fixes, and or edit the QS, but never in normal play). I read the OP in DMP, and it doesn't give enough information for anyone to have any understanding without actually playing. It's like "no pics, no clicks" I'm not going to play it to know what it does, I'll read the description, then if that makes sense I will play it. It explicitly mentions "subspace" in the OP. No place does it say that all craft behave exactly as they would in a single player's game, so how am I to know?

Works very well is not the same as "not ridiculous." If there is any ever any difference between the position of any 2 bodies at a given moment then there would be if it was all in a single player (or 1:1 time) version, then it is ridiculous, IMO. Ie: if an outside observer in a 1:1 time frame sees anything wrong, ever, it's magic, and you might as well add FTL. I have nothing against MP, but time needs to move in lockstep, at all times, for all vehicles/players, or it's weird. EDIT: no, I have not tried DMP. I read the OP post, and could not for the life of me tell what exactly the mod actually does (details of the "how"). It says "subspace style" but that is meaningless without an explanation. The FAQ is no more helpful. Since subspace isn't a thing, I can only assume "magic" unless it is explained in some detail, someplace. As I said, I have nothing against MP games, but meshing it with a game that pretty much requires time compression is nearly impossible for anything more than very narrow, scenario play. Take Silent Hunter. You could maybe do an engagement once both sides are aware of each other (after the first fish hits, or an escort detects the sub). That said, can people really hang around for a 20 hour depth charging? I think not. KSP is worse because you have the combination of long times required, plus potentially high closing velocities. I could certainly see noodling around with it, but again, it would be for very narrow play as far as I can tell.

Orbital rendezvous is clearly one of the more difficult aspects for noobs. That needs a tutorial for sure. The rocket building could use an explanation of where the CM should ideally be WRT the CP. If they add reentry shock heating (they should), they should do a reentry tutorial. The Scenarios should be more fleshed out.

This is a non-real time way to do multiplayer. 1. Have 2-3 locations for space centers in KSP. 2 are equatorial, 1 someplace else. You are assigned one of the first 2 at random each career, or in harder diff mode you can pick the 2d (higher latitude) site. 2. KSP adds the ability to record flights. (i.e.: keeping a log of all control inputs) 3. Add a new requirement for flights. You would have a pull-down for each launch where you assign it to a contract, or a destination (if you leave blank it doesn't record). This links the mission recording log to a certain mission (say "explore the Mun"). 4. The game then sets up a rival space program that is "AI." This is easy, because once in orbit, everything is on rails, anyway. Your game would pop on the net, and "borrow" a flight from another person's game to populate these "AI" missions. The game would have to record executed maneuvers, etc, so that when loaded into your game, they would simply repeat exactly what they did in their game. So at day XXX, year 1, another player at the other launch site sent a munar probe to land. Your game happens to borrow that (it goes out looking for craft assigned to "explore the mun," and picked that randomly), and if you happened to be in orbit above their site, you'd see the rocket launch, and you could track its progress.

If hammer/mushroom rockets should not be a thing (because of physics), then the new aero model should make sure they are not a thing in game. Period. The limit on fairings should be physics, not some arbitrary notion of what a fairing should look like, or some arbitrary sizes determined by… committee. I personally don't care as long as I can fit reasonable KSP landers inside a fairing.

Decent gameplay and time compression are mutually exclusive. "Subspace" is not a thing, sorry. Naval games (another interest of mine) suffer the same problem. You MUST compress time to play, but unless everyone compresses the same, any outcomes are nonsense. This means that except for craft within physics distance or so, no MP is possible without it being ridiculous. Ships moving in "subspace" and the space race era of KSP makes no sense whatsoever. Make a sci-fi version of KSP, with FTL as the only altered tech. Have ships "warp" by warping/jumping/whatever using the FTL mechanism, then newtonian within normal space. I'd play that.

If you don't have DRE, then reentry is friendly. If you have DRE and want it less dangerous (normal is pretty non-dangerous anyway) set DRE to "easy." I'm not seeing the problem.

Played a little (version 3?). Failure happens rather a lot. I did maybe 6 flights in a new career, and I had multiple failures per flight. Leaks, lower thrust, mostly. Do part classes start off as very unreliable, then get very reliable after time? The individual parts that are flying a long time then get less reliable again as they approach the MTBF? I was thinking that for me, what I'd like to see is this (and it might be impossible, I'm just saying what I'd like): A class of part would have some % chance of a design failure. Once that failure happens, then you reduce the chances of that failure ever happening in future parts of the same type. The overall chance of a new (different) failure with that part would then be set very low. If a 2d failure occurs, that gets a design change. All this is separate from MTBF events near the end of life of a given part. This is for classes of parts. Failures should be rare, in other words, and your space program should be able to learn from them, and correct them.

If you think there are only 10 legos… you don't have a small child When I was a kid, yeah. My son's legos are way better, no caveats.

I'd add that the stock 1.25m tanks, arranged in height, are 1, 2, 4, and 8 units high or so.. Once you unlock the 800, why not let the player slide between them in height? As the diameters relate to fairings, it sucks if you can almost get a lander in, but you cannot since you could have shaved the tanks down to make it fit (impossible if 1.25m is the smallest), or could have had a 0.1m larger fairing.

Again, nothing now is in a vacuum, anyone making a spacecraft looking to hire a launch knows what fits. I'd wager they'd make any fairing you like if your checkbook is big enough.

Very cool. I'll install and maybe play tonight.

A "campaign editor." For KSP, this would be a career editor. Then people could generate new career games others couple play. You'd be able to set the currency/strategy/science/tech tree interactions and values. You'd be able to set the date (moving the planets around to that date) so that best windows might vary from stock in terms of days from first play. You could create "stock" ships or subassemblies loaded by that career (say satellite payloads). You could place craft anywhere in the Kerbol system. Add a way to have the ability to add craft to the game based up date/contract/whatever hooks. Then you might create a rival program's stranded Duna mission at some point, and you get a contract to rescue them.