Snark

Also, what does the game say about why it thinks you're not done? That is, if you go to the mission UI, where it lists all the mission objectives, look to see which of them are incomplete (i.e. not lit up green). That will really help you debug the problem.

I don't see it that way at all-- setting the thrust on the SRBs is PART of engineering things correctly. A big, big part of designing an efficient launch vehicle is making sure that it balances its speed right as it rises-- too fast too soon, and you end up wasting lots of fuel battling needlessly high drag. That's a big part of why liquid-fuel engines are so attractive, because you can throttle to control that. The fact that you can't throttle SRBs is a major part of their charm (for me, at least)-- they give a benefit (cheap), at a cost (engineering challenge due to lack of throttling). It means you have to balance them very carefully at design time. Adjusting their thrust is part of that design. It's highly unlikely that the optimal thrust level of takeoff will just happen to be an integer multiple of the booster you're using, so you fine tune it. Perhaps the most dramatic example of that is right at the start of career mode, when essentially the only ship you can build is a Mk1 command pod sitting on top of a Flea, with a Mk16 parachute to cap it off. (That ship design should really have a name. I propose "Model T".) Putting a 100%-thrust Flea on that is tremendously overpowered. I did a little experiment: run that with a 100%-thrust Flea, then with a 30%-thrust Flea, and see how high they go. The 100-percenter made it to 4521m altitude; the 30-percenter got to 5704m! The challenge with SRB is spreading their thrust out to optimize the boost from them. I often find myself using a sort of "poor-man's asparagus" with them. It's like this: Suppose I work out that to launch my ship, I need 8 radial SRBs (doesn't matter which kind), and upon doing the math, I work out that if I put them all on 80% thrust, I'll have my desired total takeoff thrust. So instead of putting on a single 8-symmetry group set to 80%, I'll put on two 4-symmetry groups, one of which is at 100%, the other at 60%. It looks exactly the same, and the takeoff thrust is the same. However, the advantage is that the first set of 4 will burn out early, then I can jettison them and I still get another period of thrust out of the remaining 4 (which at that point are probably plenty, given that a lot of mass has burned off by then).

There's a very simple and easy UI technique (no mods required) that's helpful when doing your burn. The following explanation makes two assumptions: 1. That you've already made your trajectory adjustments and are on a collision course with the ground, and it's just a matter of knowing when to start your retro-burn. 2. That you have already gotten some 100% thrust time with your engines during your current "flying session" on the ship, so that the game knows what your acceleration is. Here's the technique: 1. Go to map mode 2. Hover the mouse over your trajectory (like you do when you're going to make a maneuver node) 3. Make a maneuver node that's exactly precisely at the point where your trajectory intersects the ground. 4. Grab the retrograde handle and drag it out. Your projected orbit will start shrinking towards the impact point. 5. Let it keep doing that until it shrinks to zero and the prograde/retrograde indicators start flipping back and forth. Now you're done, you can leave map mode. At this point your maneuver on the nav ball will tell you how many seconds it thinks you need to burn. The actual time you need to burn will be typically be less than that. How much less depends on your angle of descent and your TWR. Shallower angle (i.e. more horizontal) = larger fraction of estimated time. High TWR = smaller fraction of estimated time. I generally find that it ends up being about 70%, in practice. Anyway: you now have your burndown time. Set your SAS to "hold surface retrograde", poise your finger over Z, and wait until your "time until maneuver" is the calculated amount of time. If you've estimated it exactly right, you'll slow to zero right at the surface. Assuming you left a bit of safety margin, you'll slow down to reasonably-slow at a fairly low altitude, and then you can complete your landing manually as per usual.

Apologies if I'm missing something obvious, but am I misunderstanding how scanning works? The scan map overlay makes no sense to me: - Have a planetary scan of Minmus working - Have two ships landed on Minmus - Each of the landed ships has a surface scanner and has scanned its biome, so I should be getting reasonably accurate results, right? Except that the one that I carefully landed right in the middle of a brightly-glowing overlay patch is only seeing 0.92% ore, whereas the one that's sitting in a totally un-highlighted area of the map is reading 5.5%. What am I missing, here?

There's also the matter of lander geometry. The refinery is such a pain (for me, at least) to fit into a lander, mainly because the sides aren't surface-attachable. From the ground up, the lander ends up something like this: engine, fuel tank (with radial ore tanks as saddlebags), refinery, crew cabin. It ends up being a tall, top-heavy thing, when what I want a lander to be is squat. Leaving the refinery in orbit makes the lander design easier, plus I'm not schlepping the refinery's 4t up and down each time. I do kinda wish there was some mass loss when refining, just so the "surface or orbital refinery" choice would be more interesting.

+1 to this. Service bays nicely solve a problem that's been annoying me in KSP since forever: the lack of a 1.25m probe core until you're waaay up the tech tree. Pretty much every vessel I have needs to have a probe core, whether it's crewed or not, since I don't want to be at the mercy of pilot availability. However, being limited to 0.625m probe cores means that I have to play games with adapters/struts/etc. to build these ugly in-line contraptions (e.g. adapter from 1.25m down to .625, then probe core, then adapter back up to 1.25, then add struts to make it sturdy). With a service bay, I can just drop a probe core into the bay. Done. The service bays are also nicely sturdy (14 m/s impact tolerance), which make them handy for interplanetary lander probes early in career, where mass is at a premium and not having to have engines on the lander comes in really handy.

+1 to PlanetShine. It greatly enhances the visual appeal of the game. Besides the effects around planets, another nice thing it does is to add super-bright-glaring-white-with-inky-black-shadows lighting when you get really close to the sun. It always kinda bugged me that I could send a probe skimming practically to the sun's surface and it still is lit up like a normal sunny day on Kerbin. This really adds a dramatic "whoa, I'm going where it's hot" feeling to it. Another must-have, IMHO: Navball Docking Alignment Indicator https://spacedock.info/mod/1098/Navball Docking Alignment Indicator CE-2 ...it's tiny, has incredibly small footprint, and is really useful. I have no problem docking without it, but the lack of a "docking port cam" is so annoying that I have to play tedious games with the camera to make sure I'm lined up right. This is a small but very useful thing that improves the gameplay experience without really taking away any difficulty.

What I'd like would be a KJR that only applies to fairing contents (with reinforcement that disappears when you pop the fairing). Better yet, if stock just behaved that way. I don't like to use KJR myself, because I like the design problem of making the rocket stable enough-- it's fun for me. But fairings are where that particular fun hits its boundary.

One potential issue which I raise because A) the OP mentions the lander clipping through the fairing, and I've been bitten by this myself: Fairings don't stop physics inside. Or even give any physical support. We all know by now that floppy rockets don't fly well, and we use all the usual design techniques to avoid such problems. However, much as I love the fairings, they behave in a way that I find counterintuitive, and would not be surprised to see others have trouble with as well. The first issue is that the stuff inside a fairing undergoes full physical simulation, even though you can't see it. It will wobble. This is made worse by the fact that the fairing doesn't provide any physical support at all for its contents (which seems wrong to me). When they do start the first subtle swaying, it's invisible, and you don't notice until it gets so bad that it makes the whole rocket wobble, at which point it's easy to misattribute the problem (e.g. "My engine is psychotic" rather than "My rocket is floppy"). Making things still worse: I find that I'm considerably more likely to build a floppy rocket when a fairing is involved. The fairing looks big and solid when it's not, giving a false sense of security. Also, having the fairing there discourages me from using struts in some of the places I'd normally put them, such as where the strut would penetrate the fairing (the game does let you do that, but the behavior is buggy/inconsistent and it just feels wrong to me). Moral of the story: Be careful with fairings, and firmly secure their contents.

When the light turns green and you find yourself wanting to drive your car more fuel-efficiently by flooring it up to the speed limit and then coasting.

Another handy indicator: check the ascending/descending nodes. If they say some number close to 180 rather than close to 0, you're backwards.

One type of mission that I always wished they would have, which would also nicely deal with this type of "exploit" (if you call it that): Procedural commercial payloads. It would work like this: The contract is to "Put Company X's specific payload piece into such-and-such situation (specific orbit, surface of Mun, whatever)." If you accept the contract, then when you go to the VAB/SPH, that part shows up on the "Commercial Payloads" tab. The part has the following characteristics: - It's a procedurally generated part that has a generic gizmo look, for example a cylinder with top/bottom attachment nodes. The size, shape, mass would be part of the randomness of the contract. (You'd see the numbers in the contract UI before accepting, i.e. "this payload is N tons, is diameter X and length Y". More awkward payloads would be worth more funds.) - You can only get one of it (it's in limited supply). - The default spacecraft icon for a vehicle that has a commercial part on it could be something custom and different which signifies "commercial payload." The contract would be to put that specific part into whatever orbit (or other situation) designated. It means you have to design a custom spacecraft around that part, and you can't have one ship satisfying multiple contracts unless you make it move multiple payloads (which is a valid option, and presents design challenges of itself). The fun part would be having occasional freakishly awkward payloads, e.g.: super dense; big & draggy but super light; really long and skinny; unable to tolerate high acceleration; etc.

I'm actually really happy that KSP doesn't have a "win" condition, or an ending. For me, what makes KSP so brilliant (and the reason why I'm still playing it avidly, as much time as I can get, more than a year after starting, without getting tired of it) is precisely its free-play, open-ended nature. Like other great games of this ilk-- SimCity (pre-5) springs to mind-- there's no "win condition" or specific objective that has been artificially imposed by the writer of the game. The game is what you make it. If KSP had a "you win" condition with cut scene, I know what I'd do. I'd go "wow, neat!", and work really hard to get there, and then be all excited when I get the big cutscene... and then I'd put the game down and never play it again. Because I'm "done". However, as it stands, there's no such thing as "done"-- or, rather, I get to decide what "done" means, and I can change my mind again and again to play it over and over. Yes, "unlock all the nodes in the tech tree" is one form of "done", and I did that. But then I just pick other "done" conditions, such as "get all the science possible out of the Kerbol system." (this was back in pre-0.90 days when only Kerbin/Mun/Minmus had biomes). Or "fully exploit Jool system" (after biomes added). All sorts of variants possible: 1. Install Kethane. Add self-imposed restriction "no orbital debris, no throwaway hardware" (e.g. discarded boosters from Kerbin ascent need to be soft-landed with a 'chute). Visit every body in Kerbin system. 2. Same deal, but do a grand tour that visits every body in the system without returning to Kerbin or shipping any supplies out. 3. Install RemoteTech, try everything that way. 4. Install Karbonite + Extraplanetary Launch Pads. Work up to "launch my first small workshop + miner", then complete the game (whatever I've decided that means) without ever launching anything else from Kerbin. 4. Pick some arbitrary win condition (e.g. "land on and return from body X"), with a goal of doing it in as few total launches from Kerbin when starting from scratch. 5. Same deal, but goal is "complete by earliest possible calendar date." 6. Same deal, but "with the least amount of tech researched." ...it goes on and on. Having a "you win" condition supplied by the author of the game would color the whole experience, even if I choose to ignore it. It would add a pressure to the game design that everything has to be seen through the lens of "how does this feature contribute towards the goal of winning". The Sims doesn't need a "win", nor does SimCity 4... and I think KSP gets along better without it. I understand that opinions vary and others won't necessarily see it this way... but this feature (or, rather the lack of it) is a major part of the reason why KSP grabs me in a way no other game has for a very long time.

Another handy thing to do (may seem like a little thing, but I find it surprisingly satisfying): When I put lights in the bay, I go to "Action Groups" (only need basic, don't have to have a fully-upgraded science facility) and add "toggle bay" to the Lights group. When I turn the lights on, the bay swings open. When I turn them off, it swings closed again.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the rebalancing act they've done. They've seriously nerfed some of the engines I previously used heavily (I'm lookin' at *you*, "Spark"), but truth be told, I think I needed that to kick me out of my rut. Amen to that! There are several engines that I used to *never* use, now they definitely have their role. I specifically like what they've done to the T30-vs-T45, to the SRB-KD25k, to the toroidal aerospike, and to the LV-N. Also, I now actually have a reason to use a Poodle-- never used one before, ever. That, and also: gimbaling matters more now than it used to. With the new aero making it so easy for rockets to start flipping if you get more than a weensy bit off prograde during ascent, having a gimbaled engine *really* helps with stability. I used to never use T45, under any circumstances-- heavier, lower thrust, just simply not worth it for gimbaling that I didn't need. Now it definitely has a place. Yes, it got some much-needed love. First, its Isp is a lot better in comparison now (since most other engines got nerfed, and it didn't). Second, the new change in Isp calculation (to reduce thrust rather than increase fuel consumption), coupled with aero rules that favor a lower starting TWR than before, really give it a leg up. I look forward to trying it out on an Eve lander. One thing that I like a lot better now is the biggest SRB, the "Kickback". Never used to use them at all-- the super-long, thin design was just too inconvenient, never seemed to fit my designs (which tended to be low squat asparagus things), it was just too much of a hassle. The new aero rules turn that on its head-- being long and skinny really helps it, and it also fits better to my rockets (which are themselves taller and skinnier than they used to be.) I actually like what they did here. I agree with you that it would be nice for it to have interplanetary competition, but I think 1.0 made it more interesting, by making it *less* convenient in several ways: 1. A lot more massive than it used to be. This limits its usefulness on smaller ships (where the mass of the engine itself reduces the benefit of Isp). 2. Generates a lot of heat, requires more attention to ship design. 3. Runs on just liquid fuel rather than LFO. This makes it a pain to engineer if you want to have a ship that can switch between it and something else-- another design challenge. 4. New aero rules make it less attractive to mount radially during lift-off. But putting it in-line on a massive ship is awkward because it's only 1.25 m. All of these together make it harder to use and more specialized than it used to be-- they more than outweigh (for me, anyway) its improved Isp relative to the other engines. I actually wouldn't want to see a 2.5m nuke engine unless it was significantly nerfed in some other way (really massive, perhaps), since the size/shape of the current one forces some interesting design challenges.

Agreed that there needs to be some work there, but I think 1.0+ is a significant incremental improvement over 0.90. Two things in particular that they did which are big steps up, IMHO: 1. Greatly diversify the tech tree. It soaks up a lot more science to max everything out. 2. Change contracts so that they're mainly just about money-- they give practically no science. You get science from doing *science*. The thing I really disliked about career mode previously was that all the grinding I had to do to make the money caused so much science as a side-effect that there was no reason left over for me to actually go out and *explore* stuff! The collateral science from contracts, combined with the narrower tech tree, meant that I "pegged the meter" and had everything up to the "90 science" limit researched, with science piling up and nowhere to spend it, until I finally earned enough cash to upgrade the science facility. That part is fixed now, and I like it much better. If I want science, I gotta do science. Kudos to that. That said: I agree that there's a certain amount of "grindiness"-- in particular, the upgrade costs to the science facility (and, to a lesser degree, the VAB) are so huge that it does turn into a grind for me. I don't mind the cost-a-lot-of-money part; it's the fact that it's not granular enough. It's more fun to play when it's "do a little work, get a little benefit" rather than "do tons of work over a long time with no benefit whatsoever, then get everything all at once." One thing that will help with this, I think, is whenever they get around to adding the "tier 0" buildings, so you upgrade each building 3 times instead of just 2. That will allow for the steps to be smaller, and ought to help out with the waiting-to-upgrade-the-science-building doldrums.

Another point that frequently gets overlooked: Fairings Are Your Friend A pretty common scenario is that you have an ungainly, non-aerodynamic orbiter perched atop a sleek, streamlined booster section. Upper stages tend to have all sorts of draggy bits poking out (batteries, solar panels, radially attached paraphernalia of various sorts). This is a BIG contributor to the rocket-flipping problem. Draggy thing in front of streamlined thing = bad. Fortunately, there's a good solution to this problem. Just put a fairing around the ugly draggy top stage; you can pop it (and save the mass) once you're above 25km and drag's not an issue. Works wonders. You still have to be careful not to point too far from prograde, as other posters have already pointed out ("straight up and crank to 45 degrees at 10km" is dead as the dodo), but the fairing mitigates a lot of the problem.

I hear ya on that one! I think biomes are a good idea-- right now, there's not much actually to see on a given planet or moon ("Well... I landed here at Duna... now what do I do?"), so having biomes gives more of an incentive for repeat visits. (For some folks, at least. I'm a completist, I like to feel that I've milked each body for all its science. I maxed out on the tech tree just on Mun/Minus, and still went on to visit all the other heavenly bodies. I realize that wouldn't necessarily be everyone's cup of tea). However, it can get awfully repetitive-- the almost-the-same thing that you point out. I like that it's there, and there's a fun challenge in building a planetary mission that's designed to land-and-take-off multiple times, and it's good to have some game-related reason to do that. But right now, with science easy to max out on just Mun and Minmus, it feels (to me, at least) like it wouldn't be all that fun if all they did was give the other planets the same treatment they've given the Kerbin system thus far. What I'd like to see would be to add some diminishing returns for each heavenly body with biomes. Set up the math so that it's worthwhile to visit, say, three or so biomes on a body, and that visits to other biomes after that becomes less and less rewarding from a science point of view-- there's still some payoff (for the completists), but one doesn't feel as if one has to cover everything to get the benefit. For example: Define a science "scenario" as situation + instrument for a given body. Right now, you can repeat each scenario (e.g. "Gravity scan while landed") for each biome, and it provides full science each time. Suppose each successive biome (on the same body) only yields 80% the science as the previous one for a given scenario. (Or 70%, or whatever number works.) That feels like it would keep the benefits of biomes, while addressing the repetitiveness. Also, it just feels wrong that I should be able to max out the science tree without even leaving Kerbin and environs. I would find it more fun if, after visiting Mun/Minmus two or three times, I've got the tech to go to somewhere else (e.g. Duna) and then build from there.

I hear ya on that one! I think biomes are a good idea-- right now, there's not much actually to see on a given planet or moon ("Well... I landed here at Duna... now what do I do?"), so having biomes gives more of an incentive for repeat visits. (For some folks, at least. I'm a completist, I like to feel that I've milked each body for all its science. I maxed out on the tech tree just on Mun/Minus, and still went on to visit all the other heavenly bodies. I realize that wouldn't necessarily be everyone's cup of tea). However, it can get awfully repetitive-- the almost-the-same thing that you point out. I like that it's there, and there's a fun challenge in building a planetary mission that's designed to land-and-take-off multiple times, and it's good to have some game-related reason to do that. But right now, with science easy to max out on just Mun and Minmus, it feels (to me, at least) like it wouldn't be all that fun if all they did was give the other planets the same treatment they've given the Kerbin system thus far. What I'd like to see would be to add some diminishing returns for each heavenly body with biomes. Set up the math so that it's worthwhile to visit, say, three or so biomes on a body, and that visits to other biomes after that becomes less and less rewarding from a science point of view-- there's still some payoff (for the completists), but one doesn't feel as if one has to cover everything to get the benefit. For example: Define a science "scenario" as situation + instrument for a given body. Right now, you can repeat each scenario (e.g. "Gravity scan while landed") for each biome, and it provides full science each time. Suppose each successive biome (on the same body) only yields 80% the science as the previous one for a given scenario. (Or 70%, or whatever number works.) That feels like it would keep the benefits of biomes, while addressing the repetitiveness. Also, it just feels wrong that I should be able to max out the science tree without even leaving Kerbin and environs. I would find it more fun if, after visiting Mun/Minmus two or three times, I've got the tech to go to somewhere else (e.g. Duna) and then build from there.

Suggestion: Change it from "convert N% of funds into science". Instead, make it multiplicative: "get N% less funds (from everything), receive N% more science (from everything)." e.g. set the slider to 20%, I get 20% less money for everything that gives money, and 20% more science from everything that gives science. I think a big part of what makes this feature seem "broken" to so many people is that it goes against a basic KSP game mechanic, which is "science is about discovery." Squad did an absolutely brilliant job with the basic design of how you get science: by going places and doing new things. New experience = learning = science. Especially key to the design is the fact that you can't get more science by doing the same thing again. If I've got my seismic scan from a particular biome on Minmus, I can't get more science by doing that same thing again. I have to do something different. This is a great way to give the player an incentive to go lots of different places and do different things. The get-less-science-if-you-transmit mechanic is great, too-- it gives you a reward for doing a return mission, which is a bigger challenge. The current turn-funds-into-science mechanic turns that on its head. No discovery is needed. Just turn the crank and out comes science, in fully-repeatable fashion. There's no reward-incentive for going anywhere. By making this to a percentage boost to science, that means all the basic game mechanics still hold-- something that was zero science before is still zero science, all the rewards are still in place. It just makes it so the player has the option of making science a bit less hard, in exchange for making funds a bit more hard. (And of course, one would need to tune the percentages for playability/balance-- i.e. likely the percentage boost to the one shouldn't exactly equal the percentage hit to the other-- but that's just a detail to work out.)