Warhawk

TL;DR -> The vast majority of people don't care whether Kerbals are female or not, but because they don't care, they don't speak up about it. As a result, the ones who do speak up are the ones who have an agenda to push, and can claim they are the "majority" simply because they are among the only ones talking. Those who try to counter them are mocked, as is customary by those pushing an agenda, such that the image of being a vocal "majority" is maintained. Thus the minority actually enforces it on the majority. It's a form of control. Proof -> If the game was really so "misogynist" that people didn't play it, KSP wouldn't be approaching 1.0 status, would it? If it was so bad, it would show in its sales. KSP has been successful and renown up to this point, without this topic ever being necessary. Result -> The end result is that KSP becomes a minefield of gender titles and pronouns, which was precisely the reason why Squad should never have introduced Valentina Kerman in the first place. They had a chance to simply sidestep it by never mentioning it again, and failed, opening the pandora's box seen here. There is now a precedent, and the media attention will be forthcoming. Have fun with it, fence-sitters.

Everything I do is part of a larger system, which means various creations have tasks that all work together to get somewhere. Individual design is secondary to the program as a whole. Naturally compatibility between ships could be a problem, but thanks to the wonderful world of standardized docking points and the Kerbal Attachment System mod, I can avoid the worst of real life's problems in that regard. The system is governed by three tenets: The Mission, the Means, and the Future. Mission is straightforward: the short to medium range goal, be it landing on the Mun or orbiting Duna. The Means is determined by what parts I have available; I refuse to speed-tech in career so I have identifiable eras and limitations in technology are always foremost on my mind. And lastly I say the Future because I don't want to send up half a million credits of space junk once the job is over. From that point on, each ship/station/device has a given role and is produced and launched in the order that is needed. I have an unwritten checklist for each kind of vehicle, drawing directly on real-life principles such as redundant systems, emergency abort modes, generous life support requirements, radiation shielding, and so on. Various mods make these things pertinent, like life support and random system failures, but even when there aren't mods I do it for the sake of the experience. But the intention of designing for the future is important, which is why I give all of my designs more than they ought to have for the Mission they're meant for. A fuel station will have extra docking ports for more tankage. A space tug will have mounting points for different docking port sizes and claws to carry different payloads. Landers will be rated for the most demanding planet in a system, such that they can be used on any other moon or planet nearby, assuming complete recovery. Some consider this wasteful, but I have the last laugh when my 20 year old station is feeding argon gas to nuclear-electric spacecraft en route to Eeloo, at a fraction of the cost of their expendable ships. As for specific ships themselves, I already have a good idea of what each part is capable of. It helps to stay as stock as possible, since this is experience gleaned from repeated use. Likewise, I have "families" of designs rather than custom launchers/spacecraft/landers for each and every sortie, further improving both reliability (incremental improvements) and flight crew experience (my own). Starting with an objective within a mission, and knowing what each part is capable of, I build vessels all in one go, and then test them as separate parts: A rocket or station designed part by part will not show you the overall mass distribution and/or performance until it's assembled, whereas building the whole thing in one shot and then fine tuning it in chunks avoids that problem. Kerbal Construction Time gives you a "Simulation" mode that costs money but doesn't actually blow things up and get astronauts killed. I use it to test each segment in sequence. Other than that, there aren't any hard and fast rules I follow. The order that I build and test segments of ships, which are segments of systems, is arbitrary until things really get moving in space. From then on time is a factor due to crew and part endurance.

We turned Gene Krantz into a guy who shrugs off losing his crews, Wernher von Braun into a stuck-up jerk and basically the entire Apollo-era astronaut corps into a bunch of bumbling idiots. I wonder how this will go down, considering you now have to make female kerbals carelessly stupid, prone to accident, and incompetent at their jobs, only barely succeeding at even mundane tasks. So how about it? After all, it's only fair.

And people wonder why we haven't colonized Mars yet.

It's a shell of a space simulator packaged for easy consumption. It comes equipped as a box full of explosions, but with a little elbow grease you can turn it into something grand.

Like many games, KSP can be as serious and as deep as you want to make it. At some point you need that kind of depth, otherwise it gets old. The only question becomes: Will you even bother? KSP has seen me binging for months, and I've learned more about space exploration, colonization and technology in that period than I ever expected. KSP is one of those "springboard" games where all it takes is a little gumption and it'll send you flying into Wikipedia, NASA publications, engineering treatises and the like. I only wish more people saw it the same way, since from where I stand players never seem to really cooperate on any regular basis. Kids posting in roleplay threads is the best I've seen, and that falls far short of a "design bureau" like I'd hoped for.

The "positive forum movement" is moderators banning people who break board rules. That's literally all it ever can or will be. You can't slap a PSA on the wall and expect people to magically unload their jerk ways. Likewise you can't sway a rational crowd by appealing to nothing but "feelings." Most of your suggestions involve self-censorship, which is to say you're expecting those who comply to walk on eggshells every single moment, to even censor their thoughts, and for what? So that others don't "feel" a certain way? Even if you were successful, what exactly would that accomplish? We're assuming that negativity is created by "negative people," right? Like jerks? Well a jerk is going to cuss, rant and rave no matter what you do. You could pamper them and dote on them and do your best to make them "feel" all warm and fuzzy but they're still going to be jerks. They're going to stay that way. Probably until the day they die, as a matter of fact. Or what if you meant negativity as in what I'm doing right now? Which is to say: disagreement with any lick of conviction behind it? Am I being negative and a net drain on the forum because I don't buy into this feel-good movement at all, and even find it somewhat dangerous? You do of course realize the implications if you said yes. You'd be telling people with convictions, any of them, including moral and ethical ones, that they shouldn't stand up for anything, because it makes some people "feel bad." It's bad enough caring about the fickle feelings of a jerk, but shutting up others to create some kind of padded-room environment is even worse. Yes, yes it's practically an obligation to "support this message," and to do otherwise looks "bad." But that's what you get when you only deal with feelings, isn't it? I didn't need a dozen prior examples of this kind of petition in other communities over the years to know it isn't going to change anything, and that it's wishful thinking with a hint of self-aggrandizement (members feel good about it, even though it's not accomplishing stated goals). The only useful suggestion in the OP is supporting or backing up the peacemakers in some way, but that implies a kind of camaraderie that large, mostly anonymous boards never really have. A couple of people can do it with a bit of dedication and humility, but it'll never turn into some "movement" with all of the "mass" implications that come with the term. If you really want to make this place a "positive environment," whatever that phrase really means to you, then you're going to have to do the same thing that countless other radicals have done: You're going to have to go on a witch hunt. And by the time you're done, you will be worse than the jerks and "negative-nancies" you set out to silence. What else is there? Maybe if ego really 'was' something to be triumphed over by everyone involved you could go into the gritty implications of having a community with so many appeals to elitism and snobbery in it. At least then you could have a discussion about facts. But then what would the solution be, anyway? Ban everyone who claims they're a scientist IRL? Stop any and all discussions of the latest mission at SpaceX? Or perhaps KSP mission logs too, since there are plenty of people who would scoff at "noobs" and "casuals?" Delete all criticism of Squad? Take your pick. Either you go on a witch hunt or you ignore it. Either you use blunt force to remove people, topics and even ideas, or you simply tune out the ones you can't or won't stand. Forum rules about swearing, flaming and obscene content are already a kind of "witch hunt lite," based on the notion that there is a "jerk tolerance level" defined by those rules. So unless you want to make them even harsher, becoming a tyrannical jerk yourself in the process, then I honestly don't see what else needs to be discussed.

Cue elephant in the room: Pull up Youtube and the vast majority of videos are about aircraft of some kind or another. Pull up random screenshots on Steam and they tend to be aircraft. Ask new players what they're doing, and over 50% will say "building a shuttle," after which the majority will give up and build a plane instead. Makes sense, doesn't it? It's easier to make aircraft than it is to dare to go beyond LKO. It takes less time to cycle through ships/crashes, it's fancier to look at, and for most people there's "more to do" since many of the difficulties in spaceflight are either missing or don't strike new players as being justified: Who needs to worry about orbital eccentricity when you can stick to good ol' fashioned up and down, high and low, ground and sky? I get the impression that the relatively silent majority doesn't touch rockets nearly as much as people think around here. And apparently some of the would-be Youtube personalities get this because they keep churning out plane after plane in FAR, usually emphasizing how it's modeled after some combat aircraft or another.

I recovered a crew from a 50-day long station construction mission. As I tend to delete ribbons that are earned in favor of a custom arrangement, I pulled up the FF overlay. Much to my chagrin, I had most of my data wiped. Most. In fact Jebediah, Bill and Bob were untouched. Every other Kerbal had a 100% wipe of both ribbons and missions. I never removed any mods between the last time I checked and now, though I did add miscellaneous parts. I also did some save file editing for other reasons, but I can't imagine how that would break this mod if all the data remained intact in my persistence file. Like another poster earlier, I did load up another profile/save to test certain things, though I had done that before without seeing a wipe. So yeah, apparently there's such thing as a half-kraken here. I find it curious that of the three Kerbals whose records stuck were one each of every class, and the original 3 to boot. Also interesting that the ones on the mission itself lost their data as well, yet still earned new ribbons in the process.

Neither stock aerodynamics nor FAR seem to model ground effect. If they did, Scott could have snaked his way to the initial point and landed that machine at a much lower speed. Of course, ground effect decreases drag as well, which means he'd still need more effective braking systems.

Effectively yes. I caught him on IRC once and in regards to future habitation rings and etc. he said, "Maybe after 1.0." Aka don't hold your breath. Porkjet does a lot of things, and parts getting left behind is a natural consequence of his not having a dozen concurrent lives.

I might have installed it incorrectly, but the fix I picked up a ways back in this thread didn't correct the "spinning = no crew capacity" part of the glitch. Currently I can inflate it and deflate it, but cannot stop a spin once rotation has begun (without deflating) and cannot place Kerbals in it until the ring is stationary. Does this sound correct? EDIT: Disregard, this issue arose because I was using a scaled up version of the part for other purposes, and the layered animation tweak config file didn't apply to anything other than centrifuge1, even after duplicating the code for the other part. I manually added the LayeredAnimation lines in the part.cfg of my centrifuge2 and was successful.

This is going to sound a bit cheeky, but it appears no one else has proposed it, so I might as well register and bite that bullet: First, is it possible to disable automatic ribbon awards? Yes, that means shutting off the bulk of the plugin so that you have to manually assign ribbons for all achievements. And Second, is it possible to modify the ribbon precedence/order/arrangement as it is displayed? My military sensibilities get offended when my pilot wings end up at the tail end of my ribbon rack rather than first and foremost.