tater

All excellent ideas, as is 5thHorseman's idea for damage, and such damage could require repair (engineer), or evacuation. Arkie87's idea is also good, perhaps for SOME such contracts. I think in general KSP needs some "AI" or "NPC" action. Put a station in orbit for some entity, then it becomes a source for those "rescue stranded kerbal" contracts. Perhaps rescue and return to Station X you built for the other program. More variety is good.

Great idea.

Now that they have added the new contracts, they need to tweak them. 1. The visual observation, and indeed most all the Kerbin missions as written are sort of absurd. I can land a capsule in the idle of nowhere, and do the required contract, which is really complicated often, but then I hit "recover" and apparently kerbals drive up, fly a helo in, or whatever to recover my craft. Could I just bring the instruments with the recovery vehicle and save the trouble of a rocket launch? I'm fine with Kerbin science missions, but they need to make sense. Place a satellite with at a certain (unlocked for mission) science instrument in a low polar orbit, for example. There are not many that require spaceflight. 2. They need more novel rescue missions. 3. Contracts need much shorter periods to fulfill them, and there needs to be a penalty for not taking contracts at a certain point. So if you dismiss a contract without ever accepting it, you lose rep, for example. Rep would impact what kids of contracts you get. Constantly refuse contracts seeking better ones would reduce rep, and result in worse contracts after a while. A strategy at the admin office might allow you to dismiss more contracts without penalty in exchange for money, whatever ("Picky" contract acceptance). First the really lousy contracts need to be mitigated/dumped, though (test a jet engine on Minmus or stuff like that). You'd be allowed a certain number of dismissals per unit time, "free," but at some point you need to take what is offered, or lose rep. 4. Some contracts linked to good launch windows. "Launch a Duna mission between days 213 and 253." Success would be upon gaining science near Duna, perhaps, the date is just to let the player know when a low-energy launch window is. 5. Better part testing contracts that make sense. Lander company wants its landercan on the Mun. As others have suggested, variable returns based upon getting within X% of mission requirements for a test. So you have a chute contract, and if you miss the velocity by X%, your reward is decreased until you are so far out the reward becomes 0, or the failure penalty. Slop to make those missions less tedious, particularly if there is a penalty for not taking contracts in the first place.

My very first post here was about career mode and science. The paradigm has not changed, just the slight (mostly pointless) variation now added. Some contracts make a lot of sense, others are still mostly annoying. All this is also connected to how exactly wrong the science/tech paradigm is. One, break science into Planetary (pure science), Medical (kerbal physiology in the space/microgravity environment/life support), and Spaceflight science (rocketry, etc). Two, rework the tech tree so that different kinds of science are required to unlock next levels. For example, command pods and other crewed parts require Medical AND Spaceflight to unlock. Lander parts might add in a small add mixture of Planetary science (how to keep munar dust out of the snacks, etc). Contracts would then be related to specific kinds of science to do. Pure, planetary work, or long-term manned labs to see how kerbals deal with spaceflight. In addition, tech would be unlocked as it is for parts contracts provisionally, so that you can get stuff in advance of unlocking it. Missions drive tech, mission completion doesn't drive tech (we didn't land men on the moon so that we could then learn to build a lander). The cart is before the horse. There also needs to be "real" science. By this I mean science that is not abstract, but actually useful. Add a camera part (can have upgrades automatically, so the more advanced you are the better they work, without chaining the part to keep the count down). Alternately all command pod, science lab or probe parts have a camera with no extra part required. Flying over a world maps it, which can simply change the zoom level allowed the player on that world. It might also allow showing the biomes with enough advancement (based on research facility rating at KSC?). Other useful science can be thought up. A real reason to do stuff like send probes. In a perfect world, the Kerbol system would be slightly randomized each new game to make such probes/data really useful. Even if it is just slightly different orbits, planet mass, atmosphere, etc. Enough to matter, without being gross changes that break things. Using the "stock" system would be a difficulty option. Another idea I proposed was that the launch windows should generate contracts with specific launch date ranges. This is a tool for new players to see when the best windows are. "Launch a probe/mission to Duna between days 213 and 253." for example.

Plant flag missions should be limited to one per biome. This is abusable, but also makes sense since there are no "continuous science" mechanisms. Having a manned presence is not unrealistic to continue to generate science, particularly WRT spacecraft design.

¡Feliz Navidad!

What does alt-f12 do?

Shadow angles are not dissimilar here: Another with a low sun angle: Obviously there is also the issue of photographic light capture vs the eye. Still, full moon is bright enough to easily navigate by on foot, even cutting through scrub with cactus around my house, and dusk on the Mun starts getting far more difficult to work with, even though the sun is entirely above the horizon. In an image above someplace you can see my munbase 1… on a hill. I landed thinking that since I was well to the sunny side of the terminator, I could pick a spot well… it was surprisingly dark, and I set her down a few hundred yards from where things were actually flat due to poor visibility Maybe it's just the brightness altogether. If the sun at the Mun was substantially brighter at all times, then dusk would be the same relative difference, but would be less noticeable until closer to actual sunset.

Yeah, true, I was thinking incident at a normal angle. But with no attenuation, that incident light is grossly in excess of what you'd expect at the same hour on earth/kerbin. So you've got cos60 per unit area of surface at that angle, but the incident light is higher to begin with (it's like 1300 W/m^2 at LEO, and under 400 at the surface (sun at zenith), right?, so ~3X dimmer). So 1/2 brightness per unit area with 3X the illumination and it should still be brighter.

Sun is almost half obscured in this image. The landers are good as they are illuminated. The surface was dark regardless of angle. I think it is looking at watts/m^2 or some equivalent, and basing the brightness on that. Still, using sun/moon as references, the moon is some 500,000 times less bright at full than the sun, and my yard (which is dirt/granite, I live in NM) is grossly brighter than the shots above under full moon light, and the sun here should still be a couple hundred thousand times brighter than that.

No, it's not. The incident light should be the same for a surface normal to it. Note that the landers themselves are dimmer, they should actually be brighter if anything, as their vertical surfaces are now closer to normal to the incident light. In addition, any ground scattering would be towards the landers as well from the angle pictured. This is flatly wrong. The are reducing the incident light at low sun angles. There can be effects due to the actual surface, and scattering, but there is no preferred direction to particles of regolith, so the scattering should be comparable regardless of time of day. I misused "twilight," I mean the period around sunrise/sunset in general, there should be no twilight at all, obviously. <EDIT> note that the rover lander (tall one that had a rover slung below) is about the same brightness in all 3 images (slightly dimmer). If scattering from soil is isotropic, then it should be not as dim. If it scattered preferentially as a reflection (equal to angle of incidence), then the shot looking towards the sun should in fact have the ground brighter, not darker. Perhaps they coded illumination based upon Kerbin? So yeah, the light from a given cross section (normal) is spread out more on the surface, but it seems grossly exaggerated. Another thing is the relative effect. The sun should be so intense, that even is measurably dimmer (grazing angle on surface) it would still be very bright. Images on the lunar surface are only not blown out entirely due to high f stop or a lot of filtering. So you'd get less light hitting a given munar surface area than a X hours before, but the quantity of light would still be greater than light during most of the day on Kerbin since none is reflected/absorbed by atmosphere. Seems overly dark with the sun still high.

The sun is well up in ALL the images that follow. The Mun has no atmosphere, therefor there is no reduction in incident light except the brief time period when the sun is actually cut by the horizon, limiting the light by whatever percentage of the sun is obscured. It's gives an atmospheric look, certainly, but the important word there is "atmospheric." Not noon, kinda late afternoon: A little later Later still. Later. Sun position for the last image above.

I get the idea, and at least it's more like aspects of real life than most leveling… it's just that in a game, you might have a guy manage to land, say a few km from an abandoned lander. He walks to it, climbs aboard… but is not allowed to fly it because he lacks "qualification." Yeah, a stretch, but you get the idea

All the images posted above should be uniformly bright, only the shadows should change.

The sun is well up in ALL the images that follow. Not noon, kinda late aftern0on: A little later Later still. Later. Sun position for the last image above.

The "qualification" idea smacks of "leveling," which is a universally cruddy game mechanic.

A simple way to make flights outside Kerbin SOI slightly easier would be to have contracts for exploration to other words generated based on periods when launch windows open. Like "Duna will be ideally situated for an exploration mission launched around Year 1, Days 230-250. Blah, blah.

No, the sun is UP in the image above. I'm not talking about it not being perfectly black at night (star shine would actually be non-trivial at night, as it can be here in New Mexico, away from town), or just before the sun rises. The image above is typical. The sun is up---everything except the shadows should be as brightly lit as high noon (not counting specular reflections, with depending on local terrain might actually be brighter at low angles (crater walls can reflect light back that might otherwise be reflected towards space at higher angles). They seem to have twilight coded in general, which only works for atmospheres.

I need to try this, looks great. Does it stop the problem of there being twilight on airless worlds? (Seeing as that effect might be related to the way they deal with light and atmospheres)

Google had this image from the thread here, (image posted by The Right Trousers). Unless the sun is cut by the horizon, reducing light by whatever percentage is obscured, it should be either night, or day. I realize this image is old, but it looks much the same now.

I'll have to take a screenshot. It's very simple, the sun is above the horizon, and it is less bright than "high noon" on airless bodies. It should be no different, twilight is a function of atmosphere. I would take one now, but I'd have to wait a munar month, or send a lander to the terminator, and I don't have the time right now.

Jeb's dead, baby, Jeb's dead.

No one has noticed this?

/Applications/KSP_osx/GameData/ Then the mods in their appropriate directories within GameData.