tater

My mac shows a reduced memory footprint, which is great, but my ground textures are stretched out. I uninstalled ATM, and they went back to normal (the Mun is a great example, all the surface has the craters smeared out looking like brush strokes, take ATM away, and they are little craterlets, etc). I installed the x86 version, and again, it showed a memory reduction (2.18 or so vs just shy of 3 GB). Did I do something wrong?

This could certainly be a mode of play vs the player as pilot. In that case you are player as Space Program Manager, stuck as you are with some possibly braze, but quite possibly stupid astronauts. I't totally have a save like that, and another where I do the piloting.

All the planets contracts should pop up based upon when good launch windows appear. The game can use something like the launch window planner, and if the delta v is below XXXX in Y months, then the contracts should start appearing, along with the date range of the good window.

A "kerbal-linked" autopilot is not an "autopilot," it's the kerbal flying… doing his job. An autopilot is his computer flying instead of him. The Kerbals should be AI guys capable of doing missions at some level, and their skill would be a factor if the player choses to hand off to them.

For what it's worth, your english seems excellent. Welcome to the rest of the forum.

Presumably players in a FIFA game have different stats like, mass, rate of turn, speed running, etc. That's the KSP equivalent of different rocket engines or SAS systems, not the pilot. Do any of those characters have the ability to break the game physics? Say, no players can FLY, except that one guy, he's really buff, so he can fly.

Adjust Isp/thrust? No.

Yeah, they should be plotted, and even some ideas about the surface for some. Mars from Earth was not drawn very accurately for quite a while, and no real maps until we sent probes.

BTW, the kerbal-cannon only happens to me if I use the hatch-click to EVA, not if I do it from the picture below… YMMV.

Anthlon has the right idea. The base view in map mode would be appropriate to observation from the surface of kerbin with a telescope. "Science" missions would make it possible to unlock alternate map views. First would be drawn maps, but there could be a toggle to a photographic view provided you have taken pictures (like scansat, sort of). Make a reason to to pioneer/voyager type flyby missions.

Assuming there is a chance of mishap, I'm even fine with those. It's not like you'd be forced to let them land. I'd like to be able to have some scheduled service at some point though, entirely piloted by AI astronauts (even out of focus).

Great ideas. This is not "autopilot," BTW. There is a pilot aboard, and that is the kerbal.

The ability to identify biomes might be a skill.

Does the FAR incompatibility mean it will only affect control surfaces, or that that effect means that it will otherwise break either? I won't play without FAR, but I also don't build spaceplanes because I'm not keen on magic, so I won't see control surfaces anyway.

So I posted an idea in suggestions about having contracts use a launch windows type pluggin to present missions when there was a good window to do so. What if the kerbal skill level could tell you where to place a maneuver node in some fashion? For example: You set a target, say Duna. Based on skill level, a section of the orbit track becomes another color, letting you know where to place the optimum maneuver node? It might even highlight which direction to stretch, go green within some range of ideal, etc. The game would then start with at least one of the default astronauts having some high skill (for noobs to use to learn).

There has been plenty of talk about contracts and how screwy science is that I have seen. They are all abstractions, and could be abstracted better, clearly, but at least they don't break flying. This does.

You're grasping here. Really. Kerbals operate their space program however I operate it. That's the point, right? I'd say that any improvised improvement by my astronauts becomes SOP. How do I do that? Abstraction is fine within something that is already abstracted at a similar level. Anything they do to "career" stuff like rep, science, funds is perfectly fine since those systems are huge abstractions to start. In FLIGHT, a couple m/s can actually distinguish success and failure. Abstracting things in flight need the fidelity of flight even as abstractions, or they break it.

Could you tell from watching which pilot was which, yes or no? If you had readouts on how much fuel they used as well, and they were identical burns, etc. That's the test. If it uses more fuel, it should use more fuel. Not have one judged "more efficient" with exactly nothing to show for it in trajectory. Set up a KSP scenario. A rendezvous and docking. Have a new player do it, and other players of various experience. The amount of fuel and RCS left gets measured for each. If you watch them, they will fly entirely different paths. You'll be able to tell en route who is doing a good job and who is not. You'll likely be able to rank them reasonably well just by watching a youtube of them doing it. What you are suggesting is the same person flying the exact rendezvous 5 times, all looking pretty much identical, then having the fuel use remaining altered arbitrarily. Our great player might actually do a little less well on one, but that might be the expert kerbal and uses less fuel, even though anyone watching would say he made a big error (say he hits "Z" by mistake). ,

The player is controlling everything, though. If the verbal is, then in a "scenario" play, with a kerbal of stellar skill, a noob should not be able to fail a simple task. If he can crash the Mun rocket, Jeb is obviously not to be considered in control at all. (or dock, whatever). Yeah, but how they do things differently matters. We can watch the ship do what it is doing. I should be able to watch 2 ships rendezvous and dock with a station (load a quicksave and do this, one of skill 1, the other skill 5) and tell FROM WATCHING THEM which is more efficient. If the two maneuvers look identical, but one uses less fuel… MAGIC. What about if you do the Skill 1 better than you do the skill 5 (accidentally hit the wrong key)? The an independent observer might think that the one that used more fuel was actually considerably more efficient. Magic. A EE is going to rewire the ship in flight? He's then going to change it back when his copilot takes the helm?

Unless you don;t control it. Make AI kerbals, then have skill actually mess with the fidelity of the orbital maneuvers, not an abstraction of "efficiency."

This kind of comment helps no one, and I think that the people that hate the new "feature" idea are not even remotely suggesting anything negative about the devs. Good game design is hard. Really. The simulation aspect is far easier, and easier to do well when more "realistic" because they then know how things are supposed to work without introducing problems. A good rule for science fiction in general is to "break as few laws of physics as possible." Usually the ante level is some sort of FTL travel. Breaking regular physics has a ripple effect, as the tech to do that easily becomes scary (any sufficiently interesting space drive is also a powerful weapon). We all would like to have Kerbals matter, the trick is to come up with constructive ideas how this can be done without breaking physics.

It's worse than that. The same actual pilot (the player) could do the exact mission 5 times… say he's taking stuff to be built in orbit… someplace. All 5 will arrive with predictably different fuel volumes. (nominal, 1% more, 2% more 3% more, etc). Make AI piloting a thing (like MechJeb), and if the player CHOSES to let Bill Kerman fly, then they see what happens when he flies, including skill level. Add uncertainty to each maneuver done by AI pilots. Maybe there is an alternate way to set mission goals instead of the player making a node, and the AI pilot doing it? What if you could set the mission goal as an orbit at 30km above the Mun, instead of designing a couple nodes? Then if the first injection is botched by AI, the AI has to do a correction… using more fuel. You see how this can work. The trade off for the player is the ability to let the astronauts do their thing, but he might have to bail them out if they screw up. Which is FUN, actually.

The engine leaves the factory floor able to do 133% of what is on the brochure. Why can Jeb use 133, and Max can only use 100%? He has longer arms and can push it forward? The mechanism for this is overheating, and is already in the game. Engines that actually overheat are really "100%" at max where they don't overheat, and anything above that is dangerous. So very well said. There is NO conflict between simulation and fun. None at all. It's not a thing. Fun has to do with game design choices, not the underlying mechanics that tell the parts which way to move.

It's magic, that's the problem. The game can be many things, but "magic" shouldn't be one of them. How about discovering alien artifacts to buff your ships… that could be fun, too. Lots of games have power-ups, right?

I've played plenty of actual RPGs before. With dice. Skill simply modifies randomness. They are adding the skill, but none of the randomness. The problem is the combination of an abstraction (skill), with a simulation (yes, simulation, the game is simulating space flight, regardless of how accurate that ends up being). The 2 just don't mix nicely with the play controlling things. I'd rather have AI kerbals to use for missions that have become tedious.