tater

So you'd play this for the space stuff if it was My Little Space Ponies all other aspects identical then?

N2O how is it you play at all? You said in the other thread it crashes every 15 minutes. On stock, mine locked up a couple times in the VAB switching mirroring on a part, but other than that... Never crashes. not saying hours doesn't, but I'm not seeing floods of posts about instability. Heavily modded mine will crash above 3G. RAM usage, though. Certainly needs to be optimized, but you seem to be an outlier reliability wise. What gives? objectively, the career mode is the worst bit, IMHO. I voted no on the poll, btw.

Sage, the game just added gender, you claim. The names are male. They look like human males. I ask the same question no one answered before: if the characters from the start had been magical ponies and unicorns or princesses, would you be playing? If the answer is no, then the gender matters to you. You say "no gender," where there is no gender as long as they are, you know, male. My daughter asked if there were any girls the first time I showed it to her. She wasn't primed for this issue, and instantly read them all as male. I'd bet money that the vast majority of people confronted with extant kerbals would ID them all as male.

"Sales" means people buying the game. Anyone buying it because of this feature who would not have before is positive. A girl turned off by no girls, sees girls, and buys game. Win for Squad, win for the girl who gets to learn some orbital mechanics and have fun. No downside. IT's gotten better, but my daughter used to rant about legos. They added stupid, pink legos with girl characters ("friends") and she hates them. She just wanted the regular kits to have some female characters in them. Nearly every Harry Potter lego set had Harry, you needed to buy the bizillion dollar Hogwarts to get Hermione. Simple thought experiment. If instead of green kerbals, what if the astronauts were basically my little pony characters or pink princesses. Would you be playing, yes, or no? Would your son if you have one? The answers are no, and no.

My daughter was excited. If she plays more KSP, win!

"Hype" applies to US. We already bought the game. We don't matter from a business perspective unless there is a chance of further sales. I'd already buy KSP 2 sight unseen, even as an alpha kickstarter, so again, hype doesn't matter. Yep. It is my understanding they always wanted girl kerbals just because. Funny anyone could possibly get negatively worked up about this.

Nonsense. Sales is ultimately the only reason that matters. If they cannot have this function as a business, then there are no updates, no fixes, no new content. This is their job. They have families, bills to pay. - - - Updated - - - Note that they always wanted female kerbals, so "this" in this case is calling it a "secret feature," hype, watching us guess… all that is SALES, the work was already done for whatever reason.

Did you grab the main 3.1.1 version, or click deeper to the dev version and try that?

What brings more outside press useful for sales? Any news to us is preaching to the choir. People here read the dev notes like bankers parse the Fed chairman. Anyone making too much of this… is making too much of this.

Without seeing their sales data, and knowing what edu, etc, looks like, it's kind of hard to say it's unnecessary. Perhaps it helps sales in some demographics, or perhaps edu customers have asked for it. Business decisions are entirely legitimate. No bucks, no Buck Rogers, as they say. I just informed my daughter, and she is excited to see them. She's played a little, and already likes kerbals as creatures. My son doesn't care one way or another (he's played a little, too, when I can get him away from Minecraft), but he said something to his sister like "now they have girls for you to play!" YMMV. My daughter's not super princessy, either, she's more the batgirl type (with combat boots). First thing she did in mine craft was to find skins, even though she never sees herself in minecraft (usually girls, but not girly, if that makes sense). It's not a feature I care about at all gameplay wise, obviously, but so what. This is far less of an issue than the destructible buildings to me (something I have yet to see in actual play).

Helps them for edu version as well, I'd bet. BTW, do I get snacks for guessing right?

Pork. The longer it takes, the more money will be spent, period.

Yeah, contracts would still be random, that is Acme Rocket Company wanting some idiotic test, like their air-breather engine tested underwater on Laythe. Like someone paying NASA to launch a satellite in the 60s. Missions would be different. Those are the actual goals of the space program. You, as director, would choose the plan for the next round of missions, then the sub-missions generated more randomly would be tailored to that plan---your plan. Right now, you either do your own thing, regardless of dumb contracts, or you do contracts, and don;t have much of a plan (or work contracts into whatever your plan is. I'm looking for a mechanism whereby the player drives the space program planning, instead of being reactive to these random "contracts" (most of which are pretty crappy). I'd do away with all parts-testing contracts unless they make sense, too.

What's the range on omnis in RT? I recall it being very short.

I'm standing with my post from this time yesterday, V = Valentina.

Snacks is merely a name for lumping all consumables into one item. As such, it's a perfectly fine LS mod (you can set it to kill them if they run out in the cfg). IFLS is similar, really. Those two are exactly what I'd want to see any stock system looking like, particularly for new players (adding a power requirement to snacks would be required, though). All systems for the foreseeable future will require some input of mass, if for no other reason than losses to space (EVA suit venting, leaking, etc). I love the compulsive detail of TACLS (in my RSS install), I get that, but it's not necessary to follow all the LS issues at that detail level, IMHO, it clutters up the UI for new players in particular. All that matters in the end is what mass of "stuff" gets consumed per astronaut, per unit time. Assume the scrubbers are designed properly, etc. It's not like you can stuff extra kerbals into a station in an emergency, if it is built for 4, I would assume it is properly designed for 4.

I'm nominally fine with subscriptive games, but I think then the demand for updates would be a bad idea. Not to mention the trouble for modders. Add-ons, or paid new versions I'm fine with. I think the basic exploration model we have now should be "scope" for KSP 1.0, and the idea of colonization, resource extraction, etc should be done as a paid add-on (v 2.0) since they need to monetize it somehow.

Your mission control IS self-driven. There are finite science missions in KSP, limited by how the game allows science---which is by definition arbitrary. Right now, you can take "science experiment unit" to a few different altitudes and all the biomes, click, and get "science." So being overly concerned that you lack freedom to do what you like is sort of silly, IMO. It's all nonsense anyway. In my scheme, there would be "science" missions generated by KSP to literally cover ALL possible science gathering in the solar system. You would be free to pick whichever constellation of missions you desire, the difference is you'd usually have to pick them before you send them out. What would you want to do? Explore asteroids for science? Scroll down to the "Asteroid rendezvous mission" and take that. Skip Kerbin SoI and got to Dres? Accept the Dres branch, then do science there. The point is that the missions would be put into a context, and would then be generated in a way that both makes sense from a space program POV, and has some challenges for the player in terms of mission parameters. Not crazy complex, but just requiring that you do science to establish landing areas of interest, etc.

Add Fred Pohl's Gateway to the Kerbol system, in a random orbit (changes each career) way out towards the Oort cloud, likely highly inclined. Looks just like an asteroid/comet from any range, but is covered with docking ports (with craft attached). Dock with it, and it has a massive IVA to explore, and crafts that pop you to other systems

I've said a few times, I think the entire arrangement of science/tech/contracts is messed up. Contracts should be commercial stuff. Launch Satellites, test parts, mostly. Make sure the sats cannot be retasked. Follow up missions might be to grab a sat, and bring it to a lower orbit for "repair," or perhaps a contract could trigger parts to be broken, and the repair mission is to send an engineer astronaut of appropriate skill to repair it? Something for engineers to do! Linus Kerman and Werner Kerman should then come up with pure science Missions, in the same area we now find contracts. These are what your program's own science/rocket guys say about the direction the program might take. Add a bunch more, with some of the ideas suggested. "Munar Exploration" would unlock a suite of missions, some of which are required precursors for others, for example. Each mission set you then choose would have a budget (what is up-front payment in "contracts"), and a short enough time window for completion after you accept it that they budget cannot merely be borrowed for other projects without some serious risk (the penalty would be meaningful). Some missions might then unlock test parts as well… the munar exploration has scanning from orbit to find suitable manned landing spots, but might then suggest a test landing mission (player could skip to manned, obviously). The test mission might be an unmanned lander and an instrument the player doesn't have. They take the mission to get that part (say it has to be set off on an unmanned lander on the Mun, then that node unlocks). Tying rewards directly to specific acts of science.

I was joking about looking down in KSP, there's nothing to see, hence the I'm not worried about my RL story, it was a few decades ago, lol. The prof was in the dome, too (come to think of it, he might have been the one who suggested it---funny guy, died a few years ago).

Yeah, but they need to be USEFUL.

Really this falls into the broader category of "cameras." Assuming a revamp of science (more below), they could add: Low-res camera (starting tech science item). High-res camera. Space telescope. Revamp of science: 1. Separate "contracts" generated by 3d parties from "missions" generated by KSC staff. Pure science would be heavily weighted to come internally. 2. Science contracts would be generated in a way that requires certain accomplishments before others are suggested by Linus/Werner. Mapping bodies for appropriate landing sites (lo-res first (space from orbit, basically), then high res of areas of interest (the latter being like visual surveys we have now). High res would generate landing missions. 3. Space telescope would function as low-res for anything outside Kerbin SoI, high-res for Mun/Minmus. This means you could unlock the visual survey missions from Kerbin orbit for distant worlds.

No, sorry, the guy above me said the name was confirmed… I knew it was a real name, and who she was or I would not have posted it, so his use of "confirmed" confused ME.

An actual space race would be awesome gameplay, IMO. A good reason to undertake... Not optimally tested missions.