ringerc

I've noticed a bug where the mission status summary starts reporting non-focused vessels as having extra crew each time crew on the focused vessel go EVA and return. At least where there are spare seats in the unfocused vessel. Consequences seem limited; while the vessel will be reported as running out of a resource or having depleted it, TAC seems to re-calculate the actual supplies onboard when you focus the vessel using the correct crew count. Crew don't appear to die while the vessel is unfocused, or the bug in the status summary isn't sufficient to cause death. 1.2.2, x86_64, Linux. I'll work on a repro case, but mentioning this in case it's an "oh, duh, I know what that is" problem. Oh, and on an entirely unrelated note (forum software merged posts, sigh): Personally I'd love extra time-limited rescue missions where you've got only so long to reach the stranded kerbal before they kark it. But I suspect it'd be somewhat difficult to implement it so it wasn't too easy, but wasn't impossible or entirely unrealistic to reach them if planetary configurations were unfavourable. It'd probably need to be aware of relative planetary configuration, and I don't know if the contracts subsystem can do that. It'd be fun though. "Hey, the vessel Jules is in suffered unplanned spontaneous disassembly while aerobraking in Eve's atmosphere. He was able to use RCS and vent some waste to raise his orbit so he won't re-enter Eve's atmosphere and crash, but he's running really low on biscuits and would appreciate a lift. Pronto, like. He's got about a year of half rations before he has to start eating the furniture, and there's no furniture, so scram."

The key here appears to be separatrons. They're KSP's only short-burn booster, offering great TWR without lugging a bunch of mostly-dry booster. Whacking 8 separatrons on almost anything gives it spectacular acceleration even in atmosphere. I still want Kerbal centrifuges.

Hi all I've been playing with 1.2 and the G-force option. It's fun once you turn the tolerance down enough that you have to start actually caring about it; the defaults are very forgiving. However, I'm pretty stuck on a contract to get two tourists to fall unconscious while sub-orbital. It doesn't accept them losing consciousness in a flight that then becomes sub-orbital, nor losing consciousness on re-entry. They must lose consciousness while sub-orbital. The problem is that KSP doesn't consider Gs from centrifugal (go away nit-pickers) force. I built a rocket-powered centrifuge that got the tourist module out on the end of a beam spinning so fast the navball was just flashing. Nope, they didn't care, and nor did the parts, even though they would've really been turned to a thin paste on the walls before the whole thing fell apart. So you have to use linear acceleration. But none of the reasonable-sized engines have the grunt; KSP doesn't have very high TWR short-burn engines so you have to fake it with under-fuelled big boosters. So you need lots of boosters and/or to launch a truly ridiculous engine with a teeny amount of fuel. At .5-g tolerance I could do it with 4 Hammer SRBs each fueled to 1/3 to optimise TWR, but launching that is a pain. Two S1 SRBs launching a 3rd fueled to ~20% did the job better. But it's an expensive pain relative to the utter pittance that tourism contracts pay - and "turn my brain to paste while in orbit" ones don't pay a useful amount more. If you start your blackout burn while still in high atmosphere you have to time it carefully so the lose consciousness after you reach 70k, since *being* unconscious or *regaining* consciousness when in space isn't good enough, you must *lose* consciousness in space. Right now a player on default G-force settings will have to launch a cluster of 8 part-fueled Hammer SRBs or something absurd, which means a pretty serious vessel just to get them up there. I really think this is a bug as it stands. Since rotational Gs don't count, either these missions should count losing consciousness in flight after sub-orbital, pay a LOT more, or just not be generated. Even if the tourists were made to have more easily squished little brains it'd still be too hard on default G tolerance. What I really want of course is rotational G to count so I can rocket-centrifuge their little brains to mush. But I'm pretty sure that's tricky for the physics system. Is it meant to be this tough and unrewarding, or is it just not quite baked yet? Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/semhA This finally worked: This ... I really wish this had. Or the version I originally did that launched into orbit, anyway. But no centrifugal G force = no kerbal paste at 200+ rpm: Ignition! It's not exploding, it's meant to look like that. Really. See the pretty green G meter? ... even though it's spinning so fast it's stretching out impossibly: Oh, also, thanks for the awesome Linux support and lack of DRM. I bought a second copy just because you guys rock and I've been playing since 0.8.x. The 1.2 update fixes the Intel graphics driver issues too

Enjoying giving this a go. I can't *believe* the performance improvement. My laptop would've melted on the default settings, now it's merely slow for a simple mission. Truly impressive. The typeface change is ... interesting. Brings me back to the early days of unhinted anti-aliased text when type renderers used to smooth text without considering the pixel grid. Now, where are my glasses... Places like the engineers' report entries where non-antialised text are used are dramatically more readable by contrast. AA text is fine for larger typefaces, but should be DISABLED for smaller type or correctly hinted, pixel-grid-aware text should be used. As-is it's pretty horrid. Also when I split and re-stack a rocket to insert a stage or something, it seems to randomize the staging even more than 1.0.5 did. If I had {decoupler,engine} {decoupler,engine} and split then reconnect I get {decoupler} {decoupler} {engine} {engine}. Not super helpful. The main issue I'm having right now is that my saves have vanished. All dialogs in the game that list a set of choices are blank - the game load dialog, flag picker, the mission picker when I start a new dummy game, etc. They worked yesterday, but today all are blank. I haven't knowingly made any changes but the game has crashed repeatedly, so maybe it mangled some state in one of the crashes. If a clean install doesn't solve it or it comes back I'll raise it here. (It's gone from rock-solid x86_64 in 1.0.5 on my Fedora box to very flakey on 1.1. Do you have a crash report / upload page where I can send cores and logs? Disabling the optional shader use seems to have helped a bit...)

Strongly agree. I found the IVA "c" exit key really confusing when I started. This I have to disagree with. You'll sometimes be mashing "f" in the hopes of grabbing a ladder that's spinning past or similar. It'd be really annoying it that meant boarding accidentally.

Please tell me this includes a fix for the claw kraken? It's been messing up my plans for a giant orbiting asteroid base for ages...

In 1.0.2 and below you're really unlikely to need a heat shield. My heavy mining base landed with a mix of parachutes and reverse thrust. In 1.0.4 you're probably going to need heat shields and to keep everything very tightly behind the heat shield to avoid being obliterated, unless you do many high atmosphere aerobraking passes or a big retrograde burn first. Even then, possibly, given how harsh the curves are.

That'll work on 1.0.2, but be instantly crisped on 1.0.4 I suspect.

I find that about 20% returns on science is reasonable - you can mostly complete your tech tree with exploration of Mun, Minmus, Duna, Ike and Gilly, plus some high capture data on Eve. It makes getting to the Mun actually challenging because you don't have big boosters yet. You're likely to want to do a flyby to collect some research data before attempting to orbit, and to orbit and return before attempting landing. It's way more interesting (and makes you really appreciate the big rockets when you get them). By the time you're heading for Eve you're also likely to have have science labs doing their thing on their long interplanetary journeys, mining bases with accessory labs, etc, contributing small bursts of research work too. Personally I wish the contracts offered "stretch goals" early. "Well, we know you've only just landed on the Mun, but how do you feel about an unmanned Duna lander?".

One of the issues I run into in KSP when doing Apollo-style missions is the sheer mass of the lander modules. The size-1 module is 80% the mass of a full command module. The size-2 module, 2-man, is over half the mass of a robust, re-entry capable 3-man command module. There's no life-support to worry about so the short livable duration of the lander module vs the command module doesn't come into play. IMO that's one of the reasons it's often cheaper to just land the lot. Especially since you can then save on RCS mass, etc. Then again, I'm a semi-routine user of ablative lithobraking as a landing technique, so I might just be crazy. Burn out just above the surface and use the empty stage as a crumple-zone.

TL;DR: How do you manage to get anything big enough to take off again to survive Eve re-entry in 1.0.4, keeping it stably behind a heat sheld without being instantly annihilated? Hi all I'm attempting an Eve rescue mission in 1.0.4, with the tweaked thermals. I'm finding that anything beyond a capsule with a heat shield that I try to drop into Eve's atmosphere is just obliterated by heat, even if I enter on a pretty gentle angle (Pe = 76k). Anything tall enough for a couple of stages just gets anihilated at about 70k, with heating seeming to go almost exponential so that most of the craft explodes at once. It's not the usual gradual burning up of pieces of craft and disintegration, it's more like the whole thing gets hit by a bomb. From intact craft to drifting fragments so suddenly that the graphics seizes up for a few seconds on my poor laptop trying to render all the simultaneous explosions. I've even tried putting the whole craft in a faring with a heat sheld on the bottom of the faring, hauling the whole monstrosity from Kerbin, and injecting it into a shallow Eve atmosphere-skimming orbital trajectory where it makes 20+ orbits before finally going suborbital and begining final descent. So it's moving at low-circular-orbit speeds for its final entry. The faring is shaped like a rivet with a wider head so it self-orients retrograde, which made it a nightmare to launch but means the craft is oriented with all the heat shields pointing the correct direction when the faring is discarded or destroyed. No matter what I do ... kaboom - the faring overheats and is destroyed, and then the craft within is instantly obliterated by heat. The only things that survive are landing gear, struts, capsules, engines, and heat shields. So I have a cluster of fragments gently drifting down to the sea through the soupy atmosphere. I can't even rocket-brake down effectively because exposed rockets (solid boosters, or fuel tanks of liquid rockets) get obliterated by heat before even reaching 80km. This doesn't seem right. Happy to follow up with craft files, screenshots, etc. Happens with or without any mods. Ideas? Edit: Getting similar results if I do tests at Kerbin by launching the vessel into a high Kerbin orbit and power-diving toward a Pe of 32k or so at 4.3km/s re-entry velocity (to simulate Eve's greater gravity and atmospheric density). Near-instant obliteration. The vessel sometimes survives to 34k or so, but well before the heat shield is depleted the craft lands up tipping slightly out from behind the heat shield and being instantly annihilated. I guess the question is then: How does one keep anything but a very small craft behind an heat shield in 1.0.4, given that the point at which all drag is applied is the heat shield? I can't use aerodynamic effects because anything exposed to the airstream is instantly obliterated. SAS doesn't have the power without absurd reaction wheels and batteries. I can't make the vessel conical behind a bigger heat shield, since there are only up to 3m heat shields in KSP. Here's a series taken with a Kerbin re-entry simulation. Used MechJeb for testing purposes to make sure I was 100% dialled into the surface velocity vector, entering the atmosphere at zero degrees angle-of-attack. Re-entering a small-to-medium stack suitable for Eve surface escape inside a cigar-shaped faring. If I use a rivet-shaped faring (with a "T" top) then the faring is not occluded by the heat shield so it gets obliterated early in re-entry. If I discard the faring and deploy airbrakes the vessel fares better, rather counter-intuitively. Until the airbrakes overheat and the whole thing explodes in an instant. (I'm finding that these harsh Kerbin re-entries seem to simulate gentler re-entries to Eve, e.g. many aerobraking passes then an aerocapture at ~3.2km/s, Pe=80km, given the higher low orbit velocity around Eve and its denser atmosphere. It's easier to test different vessels this way. Nothing survives, though.) Edit: OK, I think part of the issue is that Eve's atmosphere ends at 90km, but is incredibly deadly by 70km. There's just not much margin for orbiting within the upper atmosphere bleeding off speed, especially since fuel tanks tend to be instantly destroyed on contact with the upper atmosphere so it's difficult to achieve really flat trajectory. The steeper re-entry angle on Kerbin that I'm using to simulate Eve is having a similar effect. However, there seems to be no margin at interplanetary encounter speeds, even on Kerbin, between enough aerobraking to lead to aerocapture and total destruction.

I find the center-of markers nearly useless because of their lack of extension lines. This would be a big improvement.

Ion drive and decay power is cool, but what about solar sails? Their thrust would be fairly easy to model - just a nonlinear relationship with distance from sun, adjusted for relative speed toward/away from sun if you wanted to get fancy. Off-axis thrust for non-90-degree headings would rock too, but there's probably not much point worrying about it. A deployed sail would be too delicate to tolerate torque and shear force, and would fail immediately. Is the issue with these that the engine would need to be capable of applying an impulse to an object that's not the current gameplay focus? Even if it's just an intermittent, timewarp-dependent periodic addition of the integral of thrust since the last interval, i.e. quite coarse? (Or alternately, a precalculated vector that the vessel follows, like an "orbit" but derived from its thrust). 'cos that'd be nice for ion drives too. Especially since you can't timewarp under thrust, it's incredibly tedious to use them to get a probe anywhere.

No idea why this was bumped to top, but the feature exists in 0.25 now, with the radial decoupler rings that jettison everything attached to them.

I started off adding "realistic" panel sets to my vessels and soon realised it was ridiculous. I only needed three of the smallest flat photovolataics so one was facing the sun most of the time and the vessel would run fine with only its integrated battery. If I did lots of dark-side manouvering I'd add a battery, but even the teeny panels still recharge it fine. Part of the issue is that there's no real reason to use antennae and other power-consuming units, so there's not much for the panels to supply unless you're using an ion drive or lots of gigantic reaction wheels.

I couldn't make DPs snap together either, even when stacked (0.25). Maybe the basic first port you get doesn't support it? (Not at the PC with the game right now, can't remember model name). Aren't they too fragile to bear much of a load anyway, and inclined to shear under load? I've seen people warning that they're so weak that moving a station has to be done very carefully to avoid shearing the docking ports, and people using scary hacks like tri-stack connectors of docking ports for strength. (It'd help if it was easy to add a vertical decoupler between two parts that're already joined together somewhere else, but the game seems to have real issues with having one part connected to another by multiple decouplers, it only wants to snap the first one in place, the other just sits there, connected to one surface and touching but not connected to the other.)

Yeah ... I quite like the idea of chain contracts. Contract series: Space lab for Petrodyne. 1. Orbit the core lab module 2. Add a habitat module 3. Add fuel and power storage 4. Fuel it all up for its long operational lifetime 5. Boost the completed structure into its final orbit. Don't break it! 6. Send up the crew. Be careful, they're squishy and they don't like your sustained 8G boosts. 7. So, it turns out we need solar panels. Would you mind adding some?

This suggestion appears under the "don't suggest" stickied topic. Because, well, it's hard, and not a good use of time. I cannot overstate how hard moving to a new engine is. Even upgrading to the latest Unity would've been a lot of work. A new engine means making a new game that re-uses most of the design and the assets (sounds, meshes, textures, bitmaps, etc) of the old one, with some tweaks and conversion. It's a great way to set progress back a couple of years. It's worse than that. It's more like "You have a Ford with a wrecked engine, and a small jet engine from a Learjet that you want to use instead. Unfortunately it takes different fuel, it needs somewhere to send the searing hot exhaust, it's the wrong size, and it spins thousands of times too fast to use for direct drive of the transmission. So you land up taking the Ford apart, heavily modifying a few parts, and re-using them on the completely new vehicle you build around the new engine. It takes five years, and the result still doesn't work as well as either vehicle did originally." If you don't write software it's hard for me to fully describe how huge a job changing a game engine is. It's like rewriting a program from running on a local desktop to running web-based. It's *huge*.

Thanks for the detailed responses, I appreciate it. It's one thing to know which keys to press - after all, they're the same keys you use for controlling your vessel normally - and another to understand how they *work* in the context of the completely different model of control in EVA flight. Everything behaves differently. You also have to know that EVA suits have RCS and that you have to turn it on. So it's not a matter of "I can't find the controls" so much as "er, I'm drifting away from the ship and none of the controls do anything, what do I do?" then after figuring out that the suits have RCS, "auuugh, everything flies crazy!". Yep, so I figured out why it'd stopped responding after a while. It'd be nicer if the UI told you why it was ignoring control input, that's all. If you're out of fuel your stage diagram shows empty fuel bars. If you're out of power, there's nothing visible until/unless you think to pull down the resources menu. I'm talking about things that reduce the "friction" for new players, the "um, ..." moments. OK, that makes sense. I've since read a bunch of the forum posts and gathered that impression as well. It'd be nice if it was labeled "Career (beta)" mode. Yeah, it's true that some of the ridiculous ones can be fun challenges too - I did enjoy the challenge of getting a monstrous booster stage to escape velocity. I guess if the financial constraints were more real, so you couldn't solve every problem with "build an even bigger rocket" it'd be cool to keep the ridiculous ones. You get to judge if you can actually achieve them or not. Right now, it's a matter of "build a bigger bunch of asparagus". (I love that term!). Right, so again it's a "that's not finished". Fair enough; be nice if that was somehow visible in the UI so it wasn't quite so confusing trying to figure out what's going on when you start playing though. Fair point. It's certainly prettier. I guess when drag is implemented properly it'll matter more too, big flat surfaces and sharp edges create horrible turbulence. That's what I started doing. It's pretty minor really. Also, it's actually hilarious when rockets go boom, the main issue is that my poor pathetic laptop can't handle it so I get a slide-show explosion. Yeah, I use thrust and consumption data from the extra detail menu, it'd just be nice to have the option not to have to do quite so much manual calculation for the simple and obvious repetitive stuff, so the brain work can be left for the "interesting" bits of rocket design. I have a notepad with total burn times and total impulse from the engines I use, for example, but it'd be handy to have that in the UI. Adding this sort of thing through the research tree and/or difficulty options would be nice. Blind experimentation is awesome fun for getting to orbit and the Mun, but gets pretty old by the time you're trying to get five-stage probes to the planets. The lack of a parts manifest for your rockets (per-stage or otherwise) makes it harder too, because you have to visually hunt around to figure out what the components are. Especially when using subassemblies where you might not immediately have the manifest for it to hand. And if there was a manifest, it'd be a pretty un-fun part of the game to go down it with a calculator looking at the parts details and adding stuff up. Why not hide orbital tracks and make us do all the calculus for those too? (OK, that'd be kind of cool in hard mode, in an infuriating kind of way). Aaah. OK, that makes sense. The flat little model had me envisioning a single big wheel for rotation around the main axis. I wonder if part descriptions should mention that they aid control in all three axes, or if that's just a "well, duh" issue.

I really like your crippled-and-in-danger rescue. Something that's not just "oh, ok, I'll get to you some time in the next five years while you orbit in your space suit". I'd also like some with more mystery and/or challenge, not just "do this random thing". Mini-scenarios that introduce new challenges and build new skills. Things like least-time or least-fuel orbital rendezvous / orbital insertion / transfers necessitated by time constraints or fuel constraints on supplied vessels. Manoeuvres without full navball assists introduced with missions where you take control of an existing ship that's had gimbal lock / display failure / etc. Out-of-resource and system-fault scenarios where you can rescue the crew *or* for better results, repair/refuel the vessel and let it carry on its mission. On surface recovery missions in variously challenging environments and going from recovery of a lone crew member to recovery of a whole disabled lander. Search-and-rescue missions where the exact target location isn't known. Bonus points for keeping the missions goofy and based on Kerbals doing incredibly silly things to get themselves into absurd situations that're still fun and challenging. Examples: A kerbal on EVA on a big highly elliptically orbiting asteroid forgot to secure their lander. In other words, they forgot the parking brake. They bumped the throttle while reaching back in to lock the controls and it boosted away from the asteroid, leaving them and the extended-life-support rover behind and only a little bit charred. They're going to be taking a very long trip to the edge of the solar system and it's going to get awfully lonely. Then they'll get fried by the sun on the way back in a few years. Their ship's nearby in a matching orbit, but the post-it note they wrote its location down on was stuck to the lander so they can't just use RCS jets on their suit to reach it. Rescue them. Bonus points if you dock with their lander and bring it back, then fly their lander to their ship and dock it so they can continue with their mission. A recent launch of a space lab has failed to reach a stable orbit after premature separation of the final stage on the circularising burn. I didn't hit the wrong button, really, it just fell off by its self. The lab is grazing the atmosphere slightly on each orbit and you don't have too many orbits before it begins re-entry. Rescue the Kerbals within - or for a bigger reward, dock with it, boost it to a stable orbit so you get to keep using it. (It's a fancy lab module with a bunch of nice equipment on it and a couple of docking ports; a really attractive thing to rescue if you're in career mode once resources start to actually matter in the game.) Orbiting dude has only two days of oxygen, better get to him soon. He kinda forgot to fuel up his RCS before going EVA and he only noticed when he pushed off to fly around to the other side of the module. Um. Help? Orbiting dude has only two days of oxygen, better get to him soon. Nell and Jessie were really annoying in that tiny little can so I decided to go outside for a breather. The next thing I know we're boosting and I'm tumbling away. It's nice to be away from them at last, but it's getting stuffy in here... A Kerbal on EVA around Mun had their RCS jam on and they're now on a highly eccentric orbit that grazes incredibly close to the surface. Rescue them, but don't plow into the Mun in the process. A lander module's gyros failed and it went into an uncontrollable tumble orbiting Mun. Grapple it, stabilise yourself, and EVA-rescue the crew within. Or get the crew to EVA while it's tumbling and hope they don't get smashed by the tumbling ship then go catch up with them and rescue them. A ship's engine failed to shut down and burned to fuel exhaustion, causing it to reach Kerbal escape velocity - but only just. Go fetch. Better be quick! A Kerbal on the Mun (or your body of choice) got too excited flying their lander around and forgot to keep an eye on the fuel gauge. Bring them some fuel. A kerbal ejected from a jet after engine failure. They're stuck in the mountains. How are your VTOL jet/rocket skills? A kerbal got lost on EVA on the Mun and they aren't responding on comm. Locate them (get within say 2km and their marker appears) then rescue them. You can use a rover. You can use a crater-grazing low orbit module for visual search. You can build a probe with a camera scientific module (want want want!) and transmit photos to base for analysis to find them. You can hop around with a lander. It doesn't matter. A kerbal decided it'd be fun to land on a big asteroid using just the RCS jets on their EVA suit, but they used all their fuel on the way down. There's just one problem... they don't know which asteroid they're on. So, Joseph promised he knew how to fly this thing. It turns out he doesn't. Please help us. He's trying to put us down on Minimus but we're pretty sure he's doesn't know how and he's not listening. (Meet up with a craft that keeps on boosting directly at right angles from its current orbit around Minimus at some particular point, changing the orbit angle but not its altitude, then rescue all the crew except Joe, who refuses to leave, via EVA. Or for bonus points dock with it and then land it and yourself on Minimus. Intact.) "Fred and Karen were arm-wrestling because they were bored and one of them kind of hit the stage separation button by accident. So we're on a high suborbital trajectory and we could really use a hand, 'cos this thing isn't made for re-entry". Two crews were playing docking-chicken and they both lost. Meet up with each damaged, uncontrolled crew capsule and rescue the crew. (One of them will collide with an obstacle in a while, but the game doesn't point that out; you need to prioritise them yourself.) A crew decided that Minimus looked boring and they'd rather go to one of the planets, but it turns out they didn't bring enough fuel for the orbital insertion. Save them and chastise them. Bonus points if you can instead transfer enough fuel to get their craft back home ... with a competent crew, this time. A ship's electrics failed while it was boosting, sending it on a wild tumble up out of the ecliptic in orbit / at escape velocity without the ability to shut down the engines. Meet up with them and either fix (via EVA) and refuel the ship, or just rescue the crew for reduced points. A ship is leaking atmosphere and it's not going to make it back to re-entry and landing. Or rather, the ship will, pity about the crew. Go fix or rescue. A crew went on a mission to explore a planet. They got bored on the way and detached the lander module so they could fly some loops around the ship, but they forgot about it while they were having lunch and now it's gone. (Take control of the errant crew's ship at mission start, and EVA one of them out to the lander, or boost to meet it and re-dock). Challenge mission: A ship is on an excessively steep re-entry course after a miscalculation and it's out of fuel now. Help them. (You can go meet them in a new launch if you're quick, but there's not much time and if you screw up your docking you risk re-entering right along with them. The better solution is to detach the landing capsule and burn all its RCS fuel on a puny prograde boost so it re-enters at a better angle, but the game won't tell you that.) A ship miscalculated its boost to Mun (or whatever). Badly. It turns out that those letters have different meanings, you can't boost on the z axis if it says x. It's on course to loop out past Minimus. Take control of the ship (becomes available at mission accept) and put it in orbit of Mun. Be careful, there's not much fuel left to correct the crew's mistake. We had a fight about who got to do the EVA and we couldn't agree, so we all went out. Then Fred realised that he'd left the airlock on auto-secure and we're locked out of the module. We're all hanging on to the ladders ... er, kerbal transfer assistance devices ... and we could really use a hand getting the ship to a station. It's kind of embarrassing. (Dock a one-kerbal tug to a larger vessel and perform gentle manoeuvres to match its orbit with a station; mission only triggers once you have an orbiting station that has no manoeuvring capacity of its own. Be careful not to manoeuvre gently or they'll lose their grip on the module.) A ship is on a collision course for an asteroid and the crew have freaked out. Take control and bring it to rest relative to the 'roid. (Could be done by rendezvous or by granting remote control). Our probe seems to be due to impact the Mun, not orbit it, and we're not sure what we did wrong. (Correct high velocity impact vector into a nice circular orbit by taking control of a craft. On success a message in the contract completion text chastises the engineering team for using krebs instead of meters). A ship's nav assists failed when it was due for an orbital insertion burn and the crew have no idea how to orient without the pretty icons in the navball. Help them. (Challenge mission, do an orbital insertion with no navball retrograde/prograde icons etc.) Further challenge mission: The ship's gyros have failed (gimbal lock). Do an orbital insertion with visual orientation. Lots of possibilities, especially with putting ships you take control of into difficult scenarios and introducing easy fault conditions that don't require engine changes (or, in the case of navball restriction challenges, only require options that already exist).

I just flew a manned pod with the small legs on top of a small liquid fueled engine. Took it hopping around KSC doing short VTOL flights. I did very, very careful low horizontal velocity landings and worked on the principle that any landing you walk away from is a good landing. I didn't have ladders yet, so once the pilot hopped out he couldn't get back in anyway.

Sounds great to me, especially if it was a quick and easy Level 1, Level 2, etc, not individual tech selections. After all, getting to Mars with an asparagus clump is awesome.

To reduce repetitiveness I'd rather see more focus on things like fault simulation. It's one thing to design the perfect ship and perfect mission. It's another thing entirely to get it there on budget and without any lowest-bidder parts bringing the whole thing to grief, leaving your valiant engineer kerbal half way to Mun trying to fix the engine for the retrograde insertion burn. (Higher difficulties only, of course). Your complaint seems to be that it's all too like reality. Why do we send rovers to Mars? Because we can. Because it's cool. It's interesting. We might learn stuff. I'd like to see that "learn stuff" part expanded over time - cool planet surfaces, stuff to find, lightweight solar fliers to launch and build, moons to explore.

Yeah ... the combo of subassemblies and staging has bought my launches to grief repeatedly. Stage 1 ... firing ... burn .... separation in three, two, one, WHAM, the nose-mounted lander just decoupled, fell off and went tumbling away. Whoops. That wasn't mean't to happen. Hope Jeremiah's OK in there.

Payload specialists would be good for articulated arms, bays, etc once those are available and supported. The science side sounds good. Engineering IMO should be coupled with parts failures in higher difficulties. Your engineer might be able to get that thing working again. If nobody's got a clue, you can fly on without it ... hope it wasn't important. Similarly, sure you can do a propellent transfer, but it'd be way safer (and you'd spill much less) if it was done by someone who knows how to do it. I'm just not sure piloting makes any sense. The game is based on direct control. You wouldn't want to introduce annoyances like lightspeed lag and comms occlusion (so it can be eliminated by a pilot), as it'd be really painful when you just wanted to launch a probe. Especially since the game isn't going to have programming/automation features for probes. There's no way you can land a no-return Mars probe with real-time telemetry. Arbitrary restrictions on missions you can fly seem similarly unfun. Most of the other things I can think of for a pilot skill to do are automation-type tasks that are explicitly out-of-scope for the game design. The real issue is that unmanned probes are directly controllable at infinite distances. Personally I don't bother wasting the extra boost getting Kerbals into orbit, and just use unmanned probes unless I want to take surface samples. Or laugh at Kerbals. Perhaps the crew should just be there to scream entertainingly like they are right now? 'cos, really, if there's no automation and the player directly controls everything, there's not much for them to be except supercargo. (Now I'm trying to decide if it'd be entertaining, horrible and scarring, or both if low-courage Kerbals screamed "ohgodwe'reallgoingtoDIIIIIEEEE" on re-entry, etc. Scarring if they actually did die.)