Hotaru

The successor to Bravado is Project Daring, which will be similar in general concept but built around the Brillig rocket and using more complex staging to achieve longer ranges. Daring 1 is planned to target Dres, although new kermanned missions will probably be on hiatus at least until the return of Bravado 5, if nothing else to keep my KAC window from getting too cluttered and this thread from getting too confusing.

Boring stuff: TL;DR: Fixed lag issues, updated SVE, installed SVT, fiddled with strategies. Starbus Valerie on the Mun. Starbus S-100: a new passenger rocket. Bravado 5: Gilly expedition. Bravado 6: Objective Jool and the end of an era.

When your measure of system performance goes from "frames per second" to "seconds per frame."

One way to get around insufficient power for transmission is to start the transmission and then go into high time warp (at least 100x, maybe more--if in low orbit you may need a mod that allows it). Sometimes this has allowed me to fully transmit data that couldn't normally be transmitted in real time without running out of power. I think of it as throttling the transmission rate, which the antennas should be able to do anyway. (Something a bit like this happened to the Galileo mission after its high-gain antenna failed to deploy properly.)

Question @sdj64: Is part welding allowed (and if so, would it count as stock or modded)? In this day and age of autostruts it doesn't really allow you to do anything you couldn't do normally in terms of structural rigidity. My main reason for using it would be to keep part count civilized; my practical upper limit is around 250 parts, and while I could definitely do a Jool-5 mission within that limit with no welding, I might be able to do a much cooler mission if I did use it.

@NISSKEPCSIM Not that specifically, but that era of design in general. George Pal movies, Chesley Bonestell paintings, that sort of thing. And of course the Tintin Moon Rocket. @cantab It's actually not built to operate in atmo at all; it's really just a slightly fancy way to move 17 kerbals between planetary orbits and surfaces of airless bodies (although with parachutes it could probably handle Duna as well). Functionally speaking, the "wings" and side pods are there purely to give it a wider and stiffer base to stand on than stock landing legs.

Honestly this version of multiplayer sounds like it could be doable with mods pretty easily. Standardized KCT settings, plus a new mod that reads achievement dates from a file (or writes them to the file). The game already stores achievement data information in the save file anyway so all the mod would have to do would be to read and display it, then give the player appropriate rewards. Synchronizing the files online so two players could play "against" each other might be trickier for a mod, as it would undoubtedly have to be done outside KSP, but should be possible.

Went to the Mun in style.

I actually like rescue contracts too, and I felt kind of bad that I had to disable them to make my current career work. I think making rescue missions not-for-profit (i. e. the only reward is the Kerbal and maybe some rep) and ditching the increasing hire costs would pretty much balance things out: that way the player would have a meaningful choice between a rescue-based and a hire-based program (or some of each). As it stands now, from a gameplay point of view, hiring is pointless as long as rescues are available. As far as variety goes, they do eventually start showing up beyond LKO--which is itself a problem, seeing as the game only checks where you've sent any vessel, kermanned or otherwise, so if you send probes first (like me) the rescuees start beating you everywhere--but I agree a little more variety to the orbits, especially in the LKO ones, would be a nice addition. Another nice touch would be to make sure they avoid spawning in altitude ranges where they might intersect another sphere of influence, so they don't get ejected by the Mun (or crash into it) before you can rescue them. Or, alternatively, put a warning in the contract pointing out that their orbit might intersect another SoI--so time is of the essence.

Brevity II exploring the highlands of the Mun. Base Constancy and Brevity II: surface ops on the Mun. Bravado 4: exploring Ike. Defiance 11 and 12: Kerbin system ops.

Yet another part that the stock game has been lacking for a long time. Yes, there are stock ways around the lack of big landing legs and yes, there are plenty of mod options (some of them very good!), but for those of us trying to stick to a stock game for the sake of it (like me at the moment) or playing on console, we really are in desperate need of proper legs for really big landers. Really, I think if Squad wants to know what parts the stock game is most severely lacking, they should scroll through some pictures of user spacecraft and look for where the lack of a part is causing everybody to constantly have to either use zillions of a smaller equivalent (e. g. RCS, Rapiers, SRBs) or come up with crazy and cumbersome workarounds (e. g. landing gear). They have taken a few steps in the right direction recently by adding the Goliath jet and larger wheels, but there's still a lot of huge gaps in the lineup for sizes above 1.25 meters.

Not even Wernher? Or was bloaking tech not a thing when he left?

Actually now I figure 14 to go (11 if you only count solid-ground landings) and 3 done (4 if you count Kerbin). [Kerbol], Moho, Eve, Gilly, [asteroids], Dres, Ike, [Jool], Laythe, Vall, Tylo, Bop, Pol, Eeloo.

@StupidAndy Let's not get ahead of ourselves... so far we've only proved the gravitational influence of Dres. We still haven't made absolutely sure. (Also I'm curious how you figure nine to go. I count twelve!) The Bravado 4 landing craft, LC-3, during its descent to the surface of Ike. Bravado 3: back to Duna. Bravado 4: Ike! Sagacity 7: investigations into the existence of Dres.

Not as impressive as I expect you're picturing. 2009 Mac Pro with Windows 7 in Bootcamp, although I sometimes play KSP on OS X as well. Can't remember what the processor is off the top of my head but the graphics card is a Radeon 5870. It's not spectacular but considering it's nearly a decade old and has had about half its parts upgraded or replaced over the years, it handles modern games surprisingly well. FPS is anywhere from 10 or so up to around 30, depending on what I'm doing. The graphics mods don't actually cost me much FPS, most of my lag seems to be from part count. Persistence and Endurance stations are both near 200 parts with a couple of spacecraft docked, and the FPS there is around 15. It's a steady 15 though, which I find a lot more tolerable than a stuttery 45 (which is what, for instance, GTA V gets). I also keep my physics delta per frame very low (like 0.005 or something, I don't remember) which runs everything in slow-motion but improves FPS by 50% or so. I use physics warp as a sort of "turbo boost," taking advantage of a glitch that causes it to reset the delta per frame setting, if I want to switch to worse FPS but real time, but I have to restart if I want to go back to slow-but-smooth mode.

Boring stuff: TL;DR: installed Bon Voyage (background rover ops) and some QoL mods. The prototype Mark IV rover during a test run in the deserts of Kerbin. Defiance 5C and 7: aerocapture experiments. Brevity: a kermanned rover on the Mun. Mark IV rover: a test drive on Kerbin. Lucidity 1: Jool probe. Bravado 2 return to Kerbin.

Good ideas then & still good ideas. I would add that either A. the contract system should check whether the player has sent Kerbals to a destination, not just probes, before spawning rescue contracts there or B. there should be some sort of "space race" mechanic added in which the player is actively competing against other companies/agencies for contracts and prestige. A. would undoubtedly be easier to implement but B. might be more fun, at least as an option. I'd be severely surprised if Squad implemented such a system but it'd be a good mod idea. I bet Contract Configurator could already do about 90% of it, and mods like Extraplanetary Launchpads already have the ability to spawn craft away from KSC.

@EvilEmotaku The deeper red is from GEM FX, which @Andem put me on to a couple pages ago. It's an external program that does post-processing effects, dirt on the lens, film grain, that sort of thing. One side effect of it is that reds get a lot richer and more saturated while blues and greens get kind of washed out. So Duna looks spectacular, but Kerbin and Laythe don't look as great--I still need to play with the settings to try and fix that.

If anything, it's more practical to rescue Kerbals right off the bat. With default settings, even hire number 5 (i. e. your first after Jeb, Bill, Bob, and Val, who you get for free) is pretty expensive, and they only get worse from there, up to the point where single Kerbals cost more than all but the most insanely elaborate spacecraft. So unless you manage to kill off the original 4 before you get into orbit, purely from a gameplay point of view you should never, ever hire a single Kerbal--there's a limitless supply of them up in orbit you can get paid to acquire. Another problem, which I've complained about elsewhere, is the weighting system--the more rescue contracts you accept, the more you get. If, like me, you have a rule of always accepting them, you very quickly end up running the Kerbal Space Coast Guard, doing nothing but endless rescue missions till the end of time. Personally I've mitigated both these effects in my career save by disabling rescues in my contracts.cfg and setting fund penalties to 10% (which keeps hiring costs civilized, though they still escalate eventually), but I completely agree the whole concept of rescues and Kerbal hiring costs is in severe need of a rebalance.

@EvilEmotaku Neither have I, although I've only landed on Duna maybe a dozen times up to now (even counting probes) and never really explored it. My guess is it has something to do with the site, which was in the Midland Sea region (3°S, 84°W) at quite low elevation whereas all my previous landings were on higher terrain. I suspect the lowest layer of SVE dust storms is at very low level, so below most of Duna's terrain, meaning thick dust storms only occur at elevations less than about a kilometer.

Thanks! The current plan is for a new self-propelled space station, Permanence, to be sent to Duna at the next window, along with more Aqualungs and some surface hardware. It will support more extensive exploration of the Duna system while the focus of the Bravado program shifts elsewhere. Here's Gledia with a more mature version of the rover prototype from a couple posts ago, during a test drive on Kerbin: Once the hardware necessary for surface refueling is ready, one of these will go to the Mun for further testing, and (if that goes well) another one will go to Duna.

Bravado 2 departing Duna orbit. Hotaru Star Lines flight 1: the first space tourists. Bravado 2 departure from Duna. Bravado 3 and 4: continued exploration of the Duna system.

Honestly, I've always thought we could do with a longer runway. 2.5 kilometers--about 8200 feet--is short for a real-world runway. Plenty of real-world runways are well over 4 kilometers long and some are nearly 8 kilometers. The shuttle runway at the real KSC is 4.5 kilometers, and the longest dry lake runway at Edwards AFB is 12.7 kilometers. And most of those are meant to accommodate normal, subsonic jetliners. Considering a lot of what takes off and lands on the KSC runway is massive hypersonic spaceplanes, asking for a runway big enough for an ordinary wide-body airliner seems perfectly reasonable. PS. Yes, I know the runway is big relative to Kerbin, but the aircraft landing on it travel at speeds comparable to real ones.

The fifth kerbonaut class with a prototype six-kerman rover. Back row, left to right: Gilbree, Erithis, Darina, Corrick, Vasya, Jate. Front row: Erigee, Wenmy, Statha, Gledia, Joelin, Chadgan. (OOC: In an alternate universe, Erithis was the first Kerman to circumnavigate Minmus.) Defiance 3 through 7 and the end of Project Intrepidity. (This ended up being kind of a long one--normally these would just be routine crew rotations, but something interesting ended up happening on just about every flight.) Munar exploration and a new rocket. Sagacity 4: a Joolian grand tour.

I agree; two situations I can think of where this would be extremely useful are setting up satellite networks and planning interplanetary transfers before liftoff.