Violent Jeb

I can re-create this bug consistently. In my case, it exclusive has to do with placing groups of mirrored struts greater than two, onto mirrored placed parts of a difference amount. For example,If i manually place two pairs of tanks, and place another pair near them, I will get strut errors if i try to use four struts to connect these pairs of two. Worse so if i try to connect 3 struts to 4 tanks. I can sometimes Finaggle them into place but upon reload they are all messed up. This can also happen If you have a pair of struts on a centered object then move the tank to a radial position without reconnecting the struts. There is a phantom strut attached to nothing. Any complex strutting that isn't even i usually do one by one.

I feel like more things in the tech tree need to be unlocked at a lower level. That said, even parts that are in different categories, often require parts from other nodes. Radial decouplers without struts is rather pointless. Equally so for radial decouplers without fuel lines. If i pay for radial decouplers, I should have access to the accessories for multi-staged/asparagus flight. Same thing goes for Batteries & Solar panels. One or the other (don't care which) should be almost available from the start. Putting them that high up and in different nodes is a huge demand just for a simple rechargable vessel in space. It's like we're expected to bum around on kerbin for 3/4 of the tree. While we're on power, the Radioactive Isotope Is equally sad. I believe it requires 300-500 research points, to provide its near negligible electricity. IIRC it's already balanced with the solar panel by the increased mass and reduced output, so having it at the far end of the tree just means i'll never use it in a typical career. Not until I start using MK3 parts is the radioisotope unlocked. Silly. The only way to have a "fun" campaign, is to start with max funds (or tweak the decline penalty which for whatever reason affects the cost of buildings) so you don't have to choose between maneuver nodes or a ship with more than 30 parts. From there you add anywhere between 1000-3000 tech points depending on how much kerbin grinding you'd like. Most career playthroughs I have to decide early on; do I want rovers, or planes, or spaceships. Why limit me so dramatically? Good wheels require another 300 points. So it usually ends up spaceships, then rovers, and don't have points for planes until wayyy further in the campaign. I often end up designing a craft minus 3 parts, then grind flights just to get enough science to unlock one part, design craft again minus 2 parts, then grind flights just to get enough science to unlock one part, then design craft again minus 1 part, then grind flights just to get enough science to unlock one part, then design craft again, finally complete and ready for a practical mission of my choosing. These are all problems which arise due to design problems within the tech tree or career mode itself..

I believe you can already alter the monoprop on hand from the VAB, unless you mean more dramatically. Regardless, adding more monoprop doesn't simply balance these pods. There are many situations where i don't need monoprop on a pod at all. It'd be nice to have a few options. Heck, i'd be partial to even slightly modified retextures so I have 3 different looking versions of the same pod. Just so that my entire fleet doesn't look like it was sponsored from one company

I like lvl one runway for a variety of reasons. It's a good place to test cruising speeds of rovers on rough terrain. It's also good to test your skills getting a bird in the air. Unfortunately it's brutal for landings

I think this is a very good analysis and agree 100% that the pods need drastic re balance to make more than 1 or 2 viable. I even like the baseline figures. It'd be great to see something like this in the not so distant future.

I vehemently disagree with such a requirement in a video game. Making a spreadsheet to play a game? That's an arrogant demand of man-hours for every player for something could quickly be programmed into the game. Unplayable without mechjeb, KER, a scientific calculator, or the ability to do intermediate math with pen and paper every time you want to play a game. FWIW, I can't google anything with KSP open without the very real possibility of a CTD. Sounds good. like, its fine if you admit you're forcing people to compute numbers (or add a mod) out of some self-righteous idea of "educating the masses", but don't try and say that this game is in any way enhanced without a dv readout (even via alt-F12). It's not.

I see the problem! You have your airplane straight up, this will cause a stall. If you nose down and fly horizontally you should be able to continue enjoying KSP

Just going to throw my hat in the ring. I've tried a few LS mods and they work but inevitably it is just another part to click on your ship. 1 year mission, stick on part A 10 year mission, stick on part B Extended mission, stick on reusable container C with collector D, and have a GREAT DAY Ultimately, you end up with 3 or 4 more resources in the resource bar that you can watch. Either it drains too quickly, everyone dies and you redesign - Or it remains stable, and now you can ignore it for the rest of the mission. It falls into "realism at the expense of fun" and it's also just more data to run through that CPU Bottleneck, and "x+2" for part counts across the board. Not only that, but I daresay the stock system is designed with the present value of crafts somewhat in mind. Adding massed parts which serve no genuine purpose but a small UI gauge and another failure parameter actually decreases the potential range of any craft. So LS will add a "not so complicated" matter of balancing LS demand, but add a relatively complicated matter of increased ship mass, making missions needlessly larger and more elaborate. There are mods that do this fine. Anytime I've used LS It only ever discourages me from using manned crafts and eventually uninstalling because i'd rather have higher performance crafts than extra UI to monitor.

I put my hat in for the Terrier. I AM a number crunching Kerbalnaut. I've build several lunar landers, and i typically design them able to land on the mun and return to kerbin in a single stage. no clip or offset. NERVA is too much engine for the task at hand. By the time you put liquid fuel in there you'll be up over 10t. Landing legs will also be an issue. Put a rockomax X200 on top of a spark (and your pod), and you get over 3000 dv for 4.6T & 1190 Funds. That's a very competent lander with a minimum of 3 parts. Something like 5-10 TWR. Strap on SAS, science and RCS to suit your needs. It's so consistent (part count and weight) I usually don't bother with much else. FWIW, the COM is so low on this lander that I can consistently land without any landing gear. Want to bring a friend? Simply throw on a lander can. This design is a huge workhorse for me because of its flexibility. I find landing takes apx 600-800 dV depending on your orbital height (i'm usually coming in from 50km orbit).Return trip to kerbin can be anwhere from 800-1500 depending on how efficient you are and where you are on the surface. This usually leaves ~1k Dv to play around with, mun "hops", science experiments, (even lunar orbital rendezvous if that's your thing) etc. This method is so efficient I can usually design a launch stage which can accommodate 2 or 3 of these landers without too much trouble, and get 3x individual kerbals and landers on the muns' biomes per mission. .

^^Does that mean don't bring it up again? speaking of which, when is the rocket part "re-do" going to happen? 2016?? Personally, i love the confusion. Nothing quite like spending a whole night getting a craft perfectly where you want it to be then finding out you can't detach a giant chunk. So Kerbal ! Oh well, there's a mod for that - hyperedit force a corrected version into orbit. Hopefully a mod will come along that hacks this feature so we don't have to wait.

•1.25m cockpit w 1.25 adapter on both ends. lander can doesn't count. I want something designed as a cockpit. like MK1 inline but for the space faring people. Alcor is probably better than what we'd get, and its out already. •1.25m cupola, for days where i want a good view without a 2.5m ship. •LF only tanks (even if the mass ratio has to be nerfed, its much more attractive then hacked half empty tanks.) •Larger ion propulsion engine •Larger 2.5m ore tank •Smaller than 1.25m nodal parachute •Larger landing gear (maybe something that can hold a nerv off the ground) •retractable landing gear with offset wheel (retractable wheels appropriate for a rover/lander) •larger radial mount monoprop tanks (probably just a bugfix on the existing tanks) •A small rhino-like engine, so that small SSTO atmospheric rockets are more viable - all similar engines have well over 50%+ losses in atmosphere •A larger RTG •EVA attachable fuel lines (sometimes i don't want to dock, esp on the ground, just want to send some fuel over - mods can do it all day long) •MK3 cockpit balanced for spaceflight •3 person lander (2.5 or otherwise), which is even remotely competitive to jeb-rigging an MK1 & 2 Lander cans. (Lightest 3 person cockpit - 3.9 t - MK1 & 2 Lander cans = 2.16 t - eg, dv tight missions necessitate ugly looking craft) Just off the top of my head. I'll +1 this too.

+1 agreed. Have discussed how this mechanic is illogical elsewhere general consensus, use mods, stock system is infallible. Contract configurator is a great one. Why decline the same contract 100 times and demolish your rep, when you can save wear and tear on your mouse & brain by toggling them away!

my mistake, thought i read space in the title.

I never made that argument. I had said if you are going to add exceptionally similar parts, you should at least add parts that are more central to the concept of the game. But it would seem clear that I have no idea what this game is supposed to be about anymore. So whatever, sorry to rile you all up.

There should be more rocket engines than intakes, this is a game about building rocketships, save for 3 atmospheric "stages". You already know this, but the engines are necessary to solve the rocket equation almost anywhere in the kerbol system. The intakes are relevent only in an airspace I can traverse vertically in about 60 seconds. This is one issue that i have with the game. Each issue, whether big or small, is summarily discharged without a second thought. They tell you to take your bug reports to the bug tracker. I'm not here to do anybody's job. I am providing evidence for things I have observed in this game. I am providing suggestions as best I am able for how modders or developers more capable than I could improve this game. If nothing else, the takeaway from this thread is that I feel -they- need to stop spamming intakes on KSP in general. We don't need new ones in 1.1. That sort of thing. just IMO.

I already have to use the configurator to eliminate the infinitely spawning pointless contracts that I don't want/need. However, I am going to complain in advance. I don't want to feel "cheaty". Stockalike is the name of the game. I want to sit down, and play this game like it had a nintendo seal of approval from the 90s and not have to open up a debug menu, or code something into the game myself to make gameplay fun. Is that not clear? I don't want to lose penalties just to have affordable buildings. The mod I had referred to is what i imagine the administration building program would be if you had the funds in the beginning to purchase it (which you don't). I don't need to complete a bullplop contract for "infinite money". I want to do real science, real research, real operations, and get funds. If i am careful designing, and recover parts where possible, I can easily accrue funds and focus on the actual game. If i waste Ships, I won't. Simple & it works. As it stands now in a vanilla game you will CONSTANTLY be fighting the game to have enough funds to do what you want, for at least the first few hours of the game. Given the frequency of updates and reinstalls, there should be a way to simply start a career and go. Most games call that "easy" mode. The only way to do that here is to just give up on career mode alltogether, which is a shame. I'm p sure the OP wants the same thing. To be able to start a career, and not have to manipulate the game, one time or many, hacking your save, or grinding contracts, just so that you can simulate a space program, and decide what you'd like to do in the solar system while getting paid modestly for it.

That's a perfectly acceptable opinion. That in mind, we should have two textures and slightly different versions of the MK1 pod, MK1 cockpit The MK1 Inline and absolutely the landercan. I don't see what makes these intakes so aesthetically valuable that we can get two of them OVER any two pods, liquid only tanks, or whatever. I would LOVE to have that same privledge when designing a spaceship. This is supposed to be a spaceship game right? Not one of the 500 "earthlike" flying sims right? Its an oversight, and it just "plane" panders to the air/spaceplane committee, while the spaceshipfaring citizens here are stuck using the same sutff since who knows what ver. How many engines added since .90 are designed for use in vacuum specifically? erm, not many. How many parts at all have been recently designed for use in vacuum specifically? Like, if you like the intakes because you build planes or whatever that's AOK with me but lets not cover up the fact that NOTHING else has that kind of variety. There are more air intakes In this game than there are solid fuel rockets and ISRU parts COMBINED. There are more air intakes in this game than there are scientific sensors. PS, thankyou for the intakes link

A - good point, thats why the pre-cooler features should be retained, while the duplicate part should be deleted. FWIW, Spaceplanes in the SOI of kerbin will require no Heat-Shields that i know of, unless you're wreckless. B - I sure do. My complaint isn't about my system lagging. My system runs fine, and i manage my install to keep it that way. My complaint is that parts that serve no purpose WILL lag other peoples systems. Its almost more of a complaint that my parts list is already loaded with spaceplane parts, and I shouldn't have to sit here confused at the appearance of a part because it in-fact has the exact same characteristics as another. C - I'm fine with introducing parts slowly. (don't get me started on the tech tree). It would be infinitely less confusing to simply have one part, rather than two where the advantages are almost nil and very hard to discern. New players aren't going to be building spaceplanes primarily (based on where the RAPIER and similar tech unlocks), but they are going to have to parts that are virtually the same once they unlock hypersonic flight. D - I'm aware that MJ and KER are mods. My closing point is more to illustrate that poor decisions are constantly affecting my ability to enjoy this game even as much as I have in the past. Duplicate spaceplane parts strikes me as ignorant, as does keeping DV readouts secret. Why "keep out" relevant parameters of space flight, but "keep in" almost identical plane parts??? Makes no sense. That's my point. When all these modders have lost interest and all i'm left with is duplicate parts and arbitrary difficulty/grind, who do you expect to stay interested? Would you care to weigh in on the function of the two parts, and that they are virtually the same in application and operation? Would you be able to give me a purpose for the Nacelle once I've unlocked the Pre-Cooler? See, other parts in the game, when you "upgrade beyond" them, they still have a use in certain situations. Not this one, sorry.

I absolutely agree 100%, and I have a problem with it. I'm actually offended that squad just tries to smooth out flawed mechanics with some quick modifiers and that people support that course of action. Why on earth should the cost of a building be labelled or related in any way to "failure penalties"??? Have you ever seen a construction company called "John's failure penalities & renovations? What if I want cheaper buildings, but the default cost for failures? What if i actually want a stock install? (LOL) The modifier for building costs should be under a "building costs" label, I know that's an unbelievable concept. They could even relabel it to: "Failure penalties / Building costs", but i digress.. Let's take a step back though, and imagine the problem without the band-aid of building costs being tied to failure penalties simply because they scale in the same direction. Without the modifier, OP is absolutely correct. The career on "NORMAL", should provide a player with a pleasurable experience which should require little-to-no grinding. Even with a "custom normal", where only funds are adjusted, you are nowhere close to what a "normal" difficulty should be. In most games, normal difficulty is quite similar to EASY difficulty, or is used in place of EASY. A "custom normal", will yield 500,000 funds. Now, you could simply add a higher cap to the funds, and then you wouldn't need to tie the building cost to arbitrary modifiers. But with a custom normal, 500,000 is nothing. Your first R&D tier will cost - 450k VAB with more than 30 parts - 225k Doing EVAs off the ground? - 75k Manuever nodes so you don't freeball your flights like no space program EVER??? - 150k Total - 900,000 Oh, you wanted to change your contracts to get rewarded for exploring? another 563k, which you'll want to buy before you knock off the easy achievements in the kerbin SOI Normal Beginning MINIMUM Upgrade Total - 1,463,000 funds. So a "normal" campaign requires 1463 - 500 = 963,000 ADDITIONAL Funds just to get operations even remotely functional. That's almost twice the starting funds. That's not including the cost of craft or the insane cost of hiring Kerbals. Now, given an average starting contract reward of 10k, that is going to be 96 grinding flights, or some combination of the above. If you cave and do a mun mission, the explore the mun pays apx 200k. This means that you need at least 3 missions to foreign bodies to even have enough funds to start the game. Even if i could pound out the design and execution to under 1 hour, that would require MINIMUM 3 hours to simply acquire the funds to start doing what I want in this game. There are posts from dec 2014 talking about the extremely broken costs for facilities, and they have continued to avoid admitting their mistake and continue to throw modifiers and solutions at this problem because some of the 1337 members just swear up and down that normal is easy and can be maxed out in 2 flights. Normal is NOT easy, and it IS annoying. Glad that there is at least a way to adjust the cost, even if it is broken. My suggestion is to simply raise the starting funds cap from 500,000, up to between 3 & 5 million. Let it default at 50k still, but let people play the game how they want. OP, you are not alone. I use the "Science Funding Mod" to help and make the game be more "balanced". Using this mod I am able to start a "500,000 custom normal", and not have to grind. Wish SQUAD could figure it out too.

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Well i'm glad i'm not the only one. You're right - i see now that it is producing half as much, while drawing 5x more. That means it is 10% as efficient at most. I really just don't see why they couldn't just adjust the outputs, or scale the darn thing linearly, why do a bunch of input and output parameters move in opposite directions. It makes no sense that a physically smaller object can process 5-10x more of anything, when the output is less. It's not only the converting, you can timewarp during the mining process and as long as the craft had electricity when you started timewarp it'll continue to mine until the ore tanks are filled. I am hoping for some improvements for ISRU tech come 1.1. I'm okay with a smaller unit, just not a smaller unit that has a larger input capacity.. The lighter drills are a good thing. I think there needs to be a better solution for ground based transfer (unless i just cave and use KIS/KAS).

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I tend to think that 30-50 is more than appropriate. It only becomes too much when the plethora of options become a hindrance rather than an improvement. In my case, B9 or KW rocketry[sic] were both mods that had way too much content, and not only did it over-complicate my building process, it was using a massive amount of my free CPU. Now, the VAST majority of my mods are gameplay/utility mods, which I generally feel should be stock, or the features should be integrated in stock in some way. ATM Ambient Light Adjustment (seriously, what other game has no brightness settings :mad:) Distant Object Enhancement FuseBox KAC KER MJ Precisenode RPM ScanSat Stock Bugfixes Test Weight There's a dozen off the top of my head. if it enhances the game or improves your design / build process, then its not too much!

I found that there is at least one rogue mod in 1.0.5 CKAN which caused my game to lag massively. I did a fresh re-install, and it seems to be fine now. I will be installing mods 1 by 1 for the meanwhile to try and identify the culprit and conflict. Also, have you or do you use Active Texture Management? I've found that since ~ 0.9 it has been quite helpful at compensating for the high stock number of parts. It is required mod/utility #1 for me.

TL;DR In the stock game you either need to have experience in college level math and physics or a cheat sheet, Otherwise, you can also use the mods KER or Mechjeb, both of which can generate these values in real-time, along with various other features.