purpleivan

When I landed on Mun for the first time, I only had about 5% of fuel remaining in the descent stage, so at least in that way I was true to the Apollo 11 experience. But the guys on board where happy to make it down in one piece.

Although it's quite addictive and more of a challenge than my flights usually are, space planes aren't likely to be my go to solution for many things.. But I have to say that flying them is a lot of fun. BTW.. agreed on the desirability of hoses. Beer hoses especially would be most appreciated, although they might lower my launch success rate a bit

From experience, developing a game for PC and for console are two very different things. From the sounds of it the team at Squad may have been doing their best when making the conversion to PS4/Xbone but lacked that all important experience of console dev. One of the last things that you do is to break any accepted standards related to controls, especially when you're have the additional problem of trying to match the controls of a PC game (compounding complexity with confusion) and it seems that has happened here.

I see what you did wrong... you put the wheels on the wrong side

Dennis Kerman came out a little more "evil emperor of the universe" than I intended and Grace eyebrows should probably have been put on Valentina.

My missions use formula more like this. Entertainment = ((KSP + TV - cooking_dinner)/work) / Time * (luck + rule_of_thumb) + send_more_fuel_later Improvements on this much appreciated.

Unfortunately my Kerbin home would be a bit wet as it's in the middle of an ocean, but the Mun holds no such problems. So this is what the view from my room would be.

Would you go into space with this motley crew.

For making interplanetary burns then LV-N's make a lot of sense. After all, with the time involved in getting into the transfer window, the transfer itself, braking into an orbit and most likely adjusting your plane, then an extra few minutes to make the transfer burn is small change really. In my current main game save I have a small fleet of little nuke tugs to do the interplanetary leg work to get a bunch of other vehicles into position for mining operations at Minmus and Ike. Initial fuel section headed for Ike station Mining base delivered to Ike orbit Habitation and docking core of station headed for Minmus I even used a couple of modified tugs to haul my Eve return vehicle the Eve Redux out there Then act as a return vehicle to bring Maxisa back I have much love for the nukes

This as well as gamepads that recognise my leaning to the side to mean "go more that way" and PC's that unfreeze when shouted at

Maxisa Kerman minutes from touching down on Kerbin after her return trip to the surface of Eve in the Eve Redux

I landed a space plane for the 2nd time. With my first space plane trip to orbit and back a couple of days ago, I overshot the KSC by a few miles so ended up landing at the alternate landing site on the airfield island. This time I overshot by half an ocean, then spent 15 minutes turning around and flying back to eventually make it down on the runway at the KSC.

Part 5 - Return So with Maxisa in the Eve Redux in a safe although not quite circular orbit, it was time to get the return tug into something more useful orbit-wise as well. It had been left in a highly elliptical orbit, which just missed the atmosphere, so the first thing to do was to bring it into the atmosphere for a little aerobraking. With the PE set at about 88km, the tug passed into the atmosphere with little affect on its AP, so the pair of nukes on-board were started to pull the AP in. That’s a bit better. But how deep can the tug go on the next pass without getting too hot, so I adjusted the orbit to a PE of 86km. This is turned out was about as low as I could go without risking detonating the tug. Even at this altitude the more fragile components were at risk of exploding due to overheating. My solution was to tumble the vehicle occasionally, to allow the cooler components to take the heat, while giving the hotter ones a welcome break. After a couple passes through engaging in this little tumbling act, I realised that I didn’t really need two of everything, so I decided to sacrifice a solar panel and battery on one side of the vehicle, to give me an easier life protecting the remaining ones. Sacrifice of the components to the Eve goddess of massive atmospheric heating was by fire. Typical explodery results as the little solar panel detonates its hidden stores of dynamite. After many, many (I think about a 10) passes through the atmosphere at 86km, the AP was reduced to 1429km, so with some fuel remaining in the Eve Redux and my patience with the whole aerobraking thing wearing thin, I decided I’d circularise the tug at the AP and have the Redux meet it there. So Maxisa gunned the engines and adjusted the orbit of the Eve Redux to a circular 1121km one. Then it was time for the Tug to circularise its orbit. That’s better. The Maxisa made the necessary burns to arrange a rendezvous with the tug. And there it is! Good thing too as there is precious little left in the Eve Redux’ tanks. Time to EVA over Eve, to get to the more spacious accommodation on the tug. With Maxisa safely on board and after a little warping to get into the transfer window, it was time to set the burn for home. See ya Eve. After a course correction the Eve Redux was set for smacking into the Kerbin atmosphere at an altitude of 60km, although the approach was a little less equatorial than normal. Hi Kerbin. Looking beautiful as always. Just before grazing the atmosphere Maxisa had this nice view of home. As well as aerobraking, with plenty of fuel left in the tanks, it was time to light up the nukes again. Nice! However almost the whole of the daylight part of the orbit was over water and I wanted to bring Maxisa in on land. Only one thing for it then… BURN TIME Adjusting the angle by some 20-30 degrees took some doing, so there wasn’t a lot of fuel left after the adjustment to the orbit. With the adjustment done, time to make the re-entry burn. Followed a little later by the friction burn. Then much more burning. Good thing these components are so well built. Well… except for the nukes which exploded, but hey… their job was done anyway. Nice view for Maxisa to enjoy as she heads down on the chutes. Almost there., just time for a last look out of the window before touching down. Home again.

Some more of my space plane shenanigans. Heading to orbit. "You were supposed to land right there"... "oh you meant that KSC" Banking round Not far to go now. Made it

Had another crack at making the KSC runway (managed it this time) with a larger space plane using the Mk2 cockpit. My overshoot of the KSC brought new meaning to the term "going around", but at least I put it down on the right runway this time. Although after all the tribulations of landing, I deployed the chute and forgot to keep the thing straight, so rolled off onto the grass.

The strangest thing that happened in my playing of the game was when I sent Roley Kerman out to the abandoned airfield island. I drive around the airfield for a few minutes before the screen went black and the vehicle (minus everything except the Mk2 Lander Can and everything attached to the top of it) appeared thousands of kilometers above Kerbin and traveling at high speed away from it. With his jetpack as the only means of propulsion I burned EVA'd Roley and burned retrograde until his fuel ran out, although I new there was no real hope of that working... just had to give it a try. Eventually both Roley and his lander can disappeared from the Space Center display and a few days after that he reappeared on the roster.

Well here's a couple of options. 1. Ignore the KSC monolith... it's your fiction, so whether to include it or not is up to you. 2. Integrate it... tell the tale that the monolith was known about, but misunderstood to be something more mundane (e.g. a part of an early kerbal Stonehenge), so was largely ignored. Then the surprise when one is found like it on the Mun, either before or after the discovery of the arches. Neither of these may fit with what you want you want to write, but if you want to stick to a canon that you are not in control of, you can't get too upset when those that are in control of it make changes.

It would have been more impressive if I'd been aiming for it

I almost managed to stop on the runway, had I packed a chute I'm fairly sure I'd not have slid of the end of it

Form my first space plane orbit and return flight.

"Nooooooo... don't let it in, you'll doom us all"

This evening I landed my first space plane (sent it up last night). Ok, that's not a big deal to regular wing merchants, but for a dyed in the wool rocket jock, like yours truly, it was quite the experience. It took a few attempts to get a vehicle together that would actually make it into orbit (or even to the other side of the ocean), but once I had those wonderous Whiplashes strapped on, it was plane sailing. Well, I got into a 75km orbit with about 15% of fuel remaining and just about dragged it down to a landing on the Island runway. I overshot the KSC and was a little off track for a landing there also, but handily I was pretty much lined up for the island strip. Just a shame the runway there wasn't a little longer, or remembered to pack a parachute. It was fun to finally have a crack at sending a spaceplane up and making a reasonable accurate landing, but the time, the time... it takes soooooo long compared with my usual rocket based entertainment. Still going to be taking a crack at this again in the near future though.

Ok, I'm going to throw in my two cents on this, not as a game developer (30+ years in the industry) but simply as a player of the game. I also don't want to jump into the hornets nest of what Squad should prioritise, or how much the game is "doomed" or not. This is simply about by experience playing a game. I've been sending my little green thrill seekers (and not so green probes) around the Kerbol system for a few days short of two years now and for the first six months of those I had zero mods installed. No KER, Mechjeb, Scatterer, parts packs etc. etc. etc. and at no time did I think "wow... this game is broken", I was simply enjoying what for me has best $25 I have ever spent. With no plugins I made it to Mun, Minmus, Dres, Duna and Eeloo with return missions. I set up two large space stations in Kerbin orbit, one of them pretty large. It wasn't until I set about an Eve surface return mission that I installed KER. This wasn't achieved through a deep knowledge of orbital mechanics and the ability to make DV calculations of multi-stage vehicles, but by trial and error and rule of thumb. Is that accurate to real life astronautics, hell no. Was it an efficient way of getting around the Kerbol system, not a chance, as almost every ship I sent out, I had to rescue with a refueling tanker (even had to send two once) to bring them home. Would I have made quicker progress to these and other bodies if KER and other add-ons had been a part of the stock game, sure I would. BUT... it was amazing fun and that ultimately is the point of a game. Almost every mission was an Apollo 13, where I was forced to come up with a daring rescue plan to bring my little green guys home and at no time did I think that I had to have some add-ons to make the experience worthwhile. Regarding the point about not wanting to end up regretting spending money on KSP, I would simply ask how many hours do you have logged on the game and how much did you pay for it. I have about 2000 hours, for the princely sum of $25. Compare that with the many $50-70 experiences with triple A games that provide perhaps 25-100 hours, even with replay at higher difficulty levels and KSP has been for me, remarkably good value. I know that this can all seem as some kind of fanboy drivel, but I have plenty of gripes with the game (don't get me started on reliably positioning maneuver nodes and sliding landers) in it's previous iterations as well as its current form. How annoyed was I that I had to edit save files to bring unresponsive kerbals back to life and free un-undockable vehicles from space stations... really annoyed that how. But through all of that, the positives have been so massively outweighed by the positives. The usual disclaimer: This was my experience, but experiences may vary.

Excellent... most entertaining video I've seen on here for a while. It even included the extinct volcano hideout.

Although VR would probably be an interesting thing to experience within something like KSP, there's a bit problem with it for this particular game; controls. Even with Raster Prop Monitor allowing the player to remain in IVA throughout the mission, you really need to us the keyboard for sufficiently rapid control of the vehicle. Some controls could be moved to the VR systems' controllers, but these would not be sufficient to handle the number of actions that the player would need to access quickly, in order to control the vehicle sufficiently. Control is one of the biggest issues that a developer needs to address when working on a VR project (I'm currently in the early stages of one now using the HTC Vive) and that experience tells me that KSP as a whole simply isn't a good fit for VR for that reason. One part of KSP that probably would work well with however is EVA, as the controls are much simpler.