Hotaru

I have mixed feelings. It will be nice to have a 0.625-meter jet, a medium-thrust 1.25-meter jet, and a subsonic 2.5-meter jet, but none of those are what I'd have asked for if Squad had offered me any one new jet of my choice. I'd have asked for a new supersonic 2.5-meter jet--something I could use to build Mk 3 SSTO spaceplanes with three engines (two size-2 jets and a Mainsail/Skipper) the same way I build Mk 2 spaceplanes with two Whiplashes and a T-45.

Good to see KSP on the list, good to see some other games I like on there too (not least FTL). I've always said there's no such thing as "objectively good," you can say a game was successful--it made money--acclaimed--critics and the like spoke highly of it--popular--users gave it good ratings--but good is just down to whether it works for any given player. There are a lot of "good" games on that list that didn't do much for me. I'm not a huge FPS nut so I didn't get much out of Half-Life 2. I never got more than an hour into Morrowind (the NPCs drove me nuts) and I got bored pretty fast with Oblivion too. And I can't fathom putting Mass Effect 2 or 3 ahead of the original, or New Vegas ahead of Fallout 3. So while it's amusing to see somebody else's opinion on the best PC games ever, that's all I see it as--just somebody's (or in this case a few people's) opinion, not more or less valid than my own. What I liked about this PC Gamer list is that they don't pretend it's the last word, they pretty much present it as nothing more than their own opinions, for us to take or leave.

This is why I'm probably going to err more on the side of StageRecovery or just using expendables in my next career save (which might actually end up being a science save anyway, I'm a little tired of the career grind but I still want tech progression). The first time I watched one of my reusable rockets reenter and land safely was exciting! The fiftieth time, not so much. In fact I have one reentering at this very moment, which is why I'm on the forum posting about it and not in KSP doing something interesting.

My current strategy is to build my early-game expendable lifters as cheap as possible, and use reusable SSTOs as much as possible in the late game--generally that means space planes for light cargo and passengers and single-stage reusable rockets for medium to heavy cargo. In my current (1.0.2) save, only the absolute heaviest payloads get sent up an expendable boosters. I'd love to use FMRS--mainly because it would allow for fully-reusable two-stage-to-orbit designs like Aerospaceplane or early Shuttle concepts--but I've never had much luck getting it working reliably. Will probably give it another go after 1.1 comes along.

I actually alternate between 2 and 3. I've tried playing pure stock a couple times but I always find there's a few mods I really can't live without--mostly cosmetic mods (Texture Replacer and EVE) and a few informational mods (KAC and KER). And by "can't live without" I mean "get frustrated and/or bored almost immediately without." I think the farthest I've gotten in all-stock is a circum-munar flight of a slightly modified Kerbal X in sandbox mode.

After spending a few days experimenting with mods for 1.0.4, getting back to tying up the loose ends of my 1.0.2 career in preparation for starting over. Jool Orbiter 2 continued its tour of the Joolian moons, having visited Laythe and Tylo repeatedly and Pol and Vall once apiece, it missed only Bop before finally crashing into Laythe after running out of fuel. All in all, it was one of my most successful probes (even though its antiquated instruments returned relatively limited science points) and I was sad to see the end of it. In the meantime, Bill and Leechelle took the Kazak down to the surface of Duna for the first time. The descent was a lot gentler than Val's rocket had been, not least because Kazak had decent-sized parachutes. They would've been the first Kerbals on Duna if Val hadn't beaten them to it. Still, they brought a lot of science points back to the Rumfoord for return to Kerbin.Bill repacked the parachutes so Kazak is ready for one more trip to the surface (targeting a different biome this time) before it is jettisoned in Duna orbit and Rumfoord heads for its next stop, Ike.

I've noticed something a bit like this. I keep Max Physics Delta Time per Frame set really low (like 0.005) because I prefer to have the game run in slow-motion at high FPS rather than low FPS in real time. However, any time I use phyics warp (even just 2x), that stops working and the game seems to revert to a much higher physics delta per frame setting--everything runs in real time, but at reduced FPSe. Since the result tends to involve low-FPS-induced Krakens I generally restart when that happens and avoid using physics warp if I can help it. Although I haven't tried on a stock install, my modded installs have been doing this since 0.90. I do have a mod installed that allows custom warp speeds (can't remember the name), I will try uninstalling it and see if that has any effect although I think this has happened since before I added that mod.

Mk 2 Clamp-o-tron I use pretty often, my standard 4-seater space shuttle in my last career had one. As an added bonus the built in 75 monoprop ended up being enough for most missions (and on longer missions it could restock from space stations). I love the Ant engine, use it all the time for very small landers--it's the Spider I rarely use. I suspect that just comes down to personal general preferences for radial or in-line engine arrangements.

Varies wildly depending on my mood & whether I can be bothered coming up with something interesting or not. I started out with "Auk I," "Auk II," etc. for my early-game Mk1-pod based ships in reference to Rocket Boys/October Sky, then for a while kept up with the "things that don't fly" theme (Dodo for probes, Walrus for Mk1-2, etc.). There were a few music references for a while there (the only one that survives in my current save is Aqualung, my automated tanker ships). In more recent saves I've gone for book/movie references (Rumfoord expedition to Duna, Strangelove for a prototype nuclear ship, Barbicane Station in Mun orbit, etc.). A lot of unmanned probes are just named descriptively (ContractSat 3, Jool Orbiter II, Eeloo Flyby I, etc.). In my last save I named my airplane/space plane types as diminutives of "star" (Starling, Starlet, Asterisk, etc.) and then gave the individual ships alphabetical names so they were easy to keep track of (Alice, Beatrix, Constance, etc.). And some things never get named at all, my reusable boosters have only ever been called "Reusable Booster."

I've been playing this game since last December. Landed on the Mun fairly early on, which was nice, but somehow the biggest "first" for me was always going to be putting a Kerbal on Duna. (This has been delayed by a combination of my over-cautious career-mode play and the fact that I like to "earn" achievements in career before repeating them in sandbox.) Anyway, yesterday my first two manned expeditions to Duna finally arrived: Although she was launched second, Val took a faster trajectory and arrived first. The parachutes didn't save quite as much fuel during the descent as expected... ...but the landing was successful! (Although the rocket is sitting at a worrying angle.) Finally! A few days later, the Rumfoord aerobrakes into Duna orbit. Although Val was the first to land, the Rumfoord will collect orders of magnitude more science. It's already gotten a lot just from processing data through its lab during the transit. Much more will follow once the main landing craft--Kazak--returns from the surface. In the meantime, two now-antiquated Jool Orbiters, launched years ago, finally arrive and begin surveying the Jool system (my first missions to arrive there in any save). Jool Orbiter II, which was launched second but arrived first, has so far completed flybys of Tylo, Laythe, and Pol, and is now on course for a Vall encounter. Jool Orbiter I, on the other hand, got in trouble when the map failed to anticipate a Tylo encounter. The probe had to expend most of its fuel to redirect itself via Tylo into a stable orbit of Jool--and then had to use the rest to avoid crashing into Tylo! It came within a hundred meters of the surface (!) and burned the last of its fuel, but it did end up in a stable orbit of Jool with periapsis low enough for "space near Jool" science.

If you do meet any half-full glasses, just make sure the bottom half is full before you get too close. I think what you're calling pessimism, I'm calling pragmatism. "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst" and all that. I don't just vaguely expect good things to happen on their own, I hope they happen but I expect bad things so I can be prepared for them and deal with them. I'm happy when things turn out OK, and never too badly let down when they don't. It's a nice way to be. In this case, I severely hope Squad has some concrete reason beyond blind optimism for giving the porting job to Flying Tiger!

In my mind it's more like a "no experience = no particular reason to expect good results" argument. Sure, we don't know for a fact they can't do it, but we have no solid evidence to suggest they can do it either. That said, I have an idea that somebody at Squad might know something about Flying Tiger that we all don't. If that's the case, it's entirely possible that Squad has a reasonable reason to expect good results, even if we don't know what it is. I hope that's the case.

I posted my mid-career SSTOs a couple months ago; here's the state of things in the same (1.0.2) career in the late-game, with all tech nodes unlocked: The Starlet Mk III replaces the old T45 engine with an Aerospike and the ram inlets with shock cones, adds docking lights, and adds a Mk2 probe core in place of the SAS wheel, along with a few other minor changes. (The Mk IIIb also swaps the now-redundant avionics cone for a standard size-zero cone to save a bit of money.) There's also a light cargo version for deploying satellites and very small interplanetary payloads. The Starlet is probably my favorite ship I've ever built in KSP, it's a very cheap (about 35,000 spacebucks per unit for a Mk IIIb), efficient way to deliver Kerbals and light cargo to LKO and personally I think it's pretty nice-looking to boot. May even try making a real-life model of it one of these days. This is a medium cargo shuttle, mostly designed for retrieving payloads from LKO. I went with the TweakScale option to keep the part-count civilized, it's much less laggy (especially in atmo) than my attempts at a "proper" Mk3 SSTO have been. Although I ordered three of them, so far the type hasn't proved as useful as I'd expected. This is its only mission so far, to retrieve what turned out to be a Launch Escape System from LKO for a contract. In future the cargo bay may be swapped with extra fuel tanks to allow it to serve as a medium tanker. This is the 3.75-meter version of my reusable lifter on the way up... ...and after landing. The three-tank version (so far only used twice) can put about 40 tons into LKO unassisted; this two-tank version can lift about 25 tons. Both can also use expendable boosters (solid or liquid) to carry heavier payloads. Between this, the old 2.5-meter reusable lifter, and the Starlet Cargo, my space program basically has no more use for expendable boosters.

Back to my 1.0.2 career, all the preparations finally starting to pay off. Assembled and fitted out, the Rumfoord, with a crew of eight commanded by Bill, finally departs Kerbin for Duna and Ike. Unsatisfied with a cumbersome "engineers' mission" like the Rumfoord being the first to Duna, Jeb and Val secretly converted an old expendable booster into a one-shot, one-seat, five-stage, direct-ascent Duna rocket. Cleverly disguised as an Aqualung tanker ship, the rocket was rolled out a few days after the Rumfoord burned out of orbit. Since it has only one seat, they flipped for it; Val won. She launched on a faster trajectory than the Rumfoord and is now on course to encounter Duna several days ahead of Bill's ship. In the meantime, the Constant finally arrived at Eve... ...encountered Gilly... ...and sent mission commander Shannon Kerman--veteran of my Elcano challenge Munar circumnavigation--down to the surface by EVA to plant Kerbal-kind's first flag (in any of my saves) outside the Kerbin system.

Do we have any confirmation that this is actually a thing? All the "official" reports I've seen so far have just been reporting on the now-private video--if I recall the PS4 and X-Box ports were announced with quite a bit more fanfare. Have we actually heard from the devs about this?

Taking a break from my 1.0.2 career to play around in 1.0.4 sandbox, trying out mods for my next career. One of the things I enjoy about sandbox is I get to do stuff I might not have tried in career, like an Apollo-style Mun mission. As far as I know there's no engineering reason to do this, in the scale-model system the mass ratios work out so a direct-ascent mission is smaller and cheaper than a lunar/munar orbit rendezvous. But in sandbox I figured it would be a fun way to test out some part mods, so I had a try. Launch. It's not a true Saturn/Apollo replica, the lifter only has two stages and the lander only has one, but it used the same general mission profile. Transposition and docking. Finally got to use that KW petal adapter. Also enjoying the VSR version of the Poodle which actually looks like a vacuum engine. Separation and the landing craft starts descent. On the surface. Although the lifter and CSM had plenty of fuel to spare the LM actually cut it pretty close, it only had about 100m/s left for rendezvous.

I only briefly used Linux in the first place--it turned out to be a major headache to set up (and even boot into once set up) on my machine and the performance was noticeably worse than on Windows (I assume because OpenGL but I don't know what I'm talking about, really). Since the Windows 64-bit fix works reasonably well on my system, I've been using that ever since. Seriously hoping proper 64-bit support on 1.1 works out, the workaround is better than constant crashes and/or low FPS and no AA but has some very annoying nuisance bugs. That said, I like the idea of Linux and I liked what I saw of Ubuntu when I was experimenting with it, so I'll probably end up returning to it some day. Just not on my current machine.

Interesting. I still wonder whether this is a genuine thing or not--all the news articles are just referring to the now-private video, none mention any other official announcement. I've got no problem with console ports (although I question how well KSP will work on consoles, for various reasons), but I am more than a little worried about this Flying Tiger company. I seriously hope Squad knows something about them we don't. At least with a third-party doing the ports they shouldn't take too much time away from development of the game itself.

One reason big SRBs (like the ones in KW) are hard to use is that we can't give them thrust curves. I've tried building low-cost lifters out of the KW 2.5-meter SRBs but the problem is if I set their thrust so they just barely get off the launch pad, by the time they burn out the TWR is up to 6 or 7. If we could have even a simple, linear thrust curve, big SRBs would be a lot more useful.

This may look like a bunch of cheap grapefruit comsats thrown into random eccentric orbits in the vague hope that one of them is bound to have a line-of-sight to a vehicle in low orbit at any given moment, but it's actually a highly sophisticated network based on very complicated calculations of orbital mechanics and geometry which are, unfortunately, secret. Or so Linus and Wernher tell me, anyway. (Yes, I'm half-cheating by having a DSN-style three-point ground network. But I'm just trying the mod out in sandbox mode and I got bored after about the twelfth identical comsat. And it actually did have about 80% coverage even with just the KSC station.)

Sent the Constant--my first Kerballed interplanetary mission--on its way to Eve and Gilly. Since the VAB was idle and there was a Jool window coming up, the administration decided to send a cheap, chemically fueled, one-shot reconnaissance mission--the Danutless--there as well. Dauntless fueled and manned in Kerbin orbit. A few days later, outbound for Jool with a crew of three.

The art on the new one is better--it has better mesh and textures--but if I had to pick I'd still have the old one. The new one just looks kind of dull, more like a business jet than a space ship, the old one looks like a 50's X-plane. I prefer the older, "right stuff" aesthetic, personally. I wish the old Mk1 could get an overhaul to bring it more up to the standards of the new one and the 1.0 Mk1 inline, but even if it doesn't, I'll still mod it back in to 1.1 if it isn't still included. That said, the new one isn't bad, and ideally I'd like to have both. Ordinarily I'd say one more part can't hurt the memory footprint too badly, but in this case it's one more part and one more IVA to boot, and those are pretty heavy on the RAM, so I can see an argument for picking one over the other in the name of memory usage. Also I have to agree that a 0.625-meter node at the sharp end instead of a built-in nose cone would be an improvement (especially if we could have a shielded Jr. docking port to put there).

Fair enough. I'm definitely not complaining about the small parts, I'm actually pretty excited about them. To be honest, we really need both. The only size where we really have anything like a "complete" set of parts is the original 1.25-meter size, all the others could do with expansion. 1.25-meter now has two jets, the Rapier, a bunch of LFO rockets, three solids, and one nuke, the other sizes only have a couple of rocket options each (plus the 0.625-meter ion), no jets, no nukes, no solids, no nothing. Personally I'm optimistic at this point. It looks like this next update is aiming to fill in a lot of gaps in the stock lineup so we have reason to expect that future updates will continue to do the same. A lot of business jets in general and the Lear in particular have fairly rakish cockpits, the new Mk1 pretty closely resembles the sharp end of a Lear jet. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree the Mk1 cockpit doesn't look good as-is, it definitely needs an overhaul (as I said, just like the overhaul the Mk3 got sometime around 0.25). I just personally prefer the current fighter plane/X-plane style canopy to an airliner-style windscreen.

Sent up my last expendable Aqualung Mark I tanker ship (the triple-T45 clusters in the boosters were marginally more cost-effective than Skippers). Assembled a 12-Kerbal, 4-part surface station for a contract... ...and landed it on the Mun as Base Ardan, where it is now happily producing completely unnecessary science (as I filled out the tech tree ages ago). Launched the prototype Mark III fully-reusable Aqualung.

Looking at that album, it's very nice to see some much-needed work in the area of jets, and the new SSME-style rocket looks good too. I do have a couple of concerns, though: First of all, although having the big 2.5-meter jet stackable is cool, it's pretty much useless if we can't get rid of the pylon (a simple button in the right-click menu to toggle it would do) and if we don't have a 2.5-meter intake to go with it. I'm also worried that there seems to be no supersonic version, so this won't help much with trying to build Mark 3 spaceplanes without resorting to zillion-Rapier clusters. Second, I severely hope that new Mk 1 cockpit is in addition to the old one, not replacing it, although it sounds like it is a replacement. Honestly, I like the old one much better, the jet-fighter styling fits the KSP style much better than the business-jet version which looks weirdly out of place. It could definitely do with a texture/model overhaul to get its styling more consistent with the inline version (similar to the overhaul of the Mark 3 cockpit a few versions ago) but I don't like the complete redesign. Personally I'll probably mod the old one back in. (I love the Mk 1 cabin though, should be very useful for tourist flights.) Last, as cool as the smaller and same-size parts are, I still think what we need is bigger parts. The 2-meter subsonic jet is a start, but I'd really like to see more 2.5- or 3.75-meter jets, Rapiers, solids, and nukes especially. Maybe even think about adding 5-meter rocket parts. Main reason being it's nearly impossible right now to build large vehicles (rockets or space planes) without the part count going through the roof and associated performance hits. Still, the new parts look fantastic and I am very much looking forward to them, as well as Unity 5, hopefully supported/stable Windows x64, and all the other improvements it sounds like we're getting in 1.1.