Armisael

This forum will doubtlessly be an unbiased, random sample of all KSP players as well.

How on earth are the world's firsts not enough to justify sending a mission to Dres? You get √286.6k for a simple flags and footprints mission - on hard. Then why are you bashing a mode that you hardly ever play?

Career mode isn't grinding contracts - that isn't how it plays. You make plenty of money fairly quickly. Someone else just said this and you all-but-verbatim told them that they're wrong. I don't care if you don't like career, but don't tell me that I'm wrong about how it's played when you're a diehard sandbox player.

Why do you expect people to respect your game mode when you continually (not just in this thread) bash the one they like? Why should I respect your opinion when you don't respect mine?

You really aren't helping.

Yeah - you don't care about progression. Many people do. The implicit condescension of "you're too boring and unoriginal to come up with your own goals" keeps things fed, though.

If it isn't useful you might as well blow it up - by definition it isn't doing anything useful.

Since this discussion is, as always, actually about justifying playing career mode instead of sandbox mode... I enjoy career because it generates situations I wouldn't've thought of on my own - particular combinations of tech limits, part count limits, weight limits, and cost limits with the challenge of working in unusual part test contracts. Yes, you can grind cash and science out with contracts and obviate some of those challenges - but you don't have to. With the exception of a few telemetry-based challenges you can do all of these things in sandbox mode - but that doesn't mean I'd think of them.

Have you considered symlinking the duplicated files together? Everything except the gamedata and saves folders should be identical, and you could even link up duplicated mods (saves a little more space, and settings changes would propagate between the different installs).

I don't think it's accurate to conflate challenge and realism. I spend about half my time in a 64k playthrough using stock parts, which I personally find extremely challenging, but it is by no means realistic. Hell, one time I mounted heatshields radially to act as fins during an aerocapture - nonsense in the real world, but a reasonably effective solution in scaled KSP.

I'm not an RSS player, so I'm probably missing some of the nuances here. That said, what's your launch window? It seems to me like you ought to be able to get an intercept by simply adding normal/antinormal to your LKO ejection burn (both earlier and cheaper than your burn seems to be be).

I only have anecdotal experience from the two people I've introduced to the game, but in those cases, yes, it did exactly that. The first VAB upgrade is expensive enough that people do sit with that 30 part limit for a little bit.

Aside from not adequately informing the player that the tracking station and admin building upgrades are very important, career mode actually does a pretty good job of guiding the player. It has all the benefits of science mode in part introduction, the pad and VAB upgrades do a good job of organically encouraging the player to build small efficient rockets, and the contract system helps set the player up for more advanced activities, like rescues and docking.

I don't think you can implement a good fix just by fiddling with masses. You can't get around the fact that rocketry is ruled by the almighty kilogram - people will settle on the lightest parts (read: the lander cans) unless you give them a really good reason to do otherwise (adapters are so lightweight that . I think you'd need to determine a particular role for each class of part (command pods, lander cans, the cupola, the hitchhiker pod, the various cockpits) and fiddle with the stats to make each part desirable in a certain role but lackluster otherwise (eg, lander cans are light but fragile and provide low torque and battery whereas the cupola is heavy and fragile but provides lots of torque and battery for a spacestation). That said, I deliberately didn't propose a particular solution because I suspected the following discussion would get rather down in the weeds. Rebalancing the command pods seems to be a popular idea (in theory, at least), so I'm satisfied with this thread. I have some ideas for personal changes, but I think I'll want to try those personal with a mod in 1.1 before I get to suggesting anything serious. Actually, here's an interesting question - which command module would you like to see different modules balanced towards? Personally I think that the Mk1 Command Pod is about right and other modules should be changed to be roughly as useful (in their niche), but I recognize that not everyone agrees with that.

That isn't how the steam betas work - there's nothing the devs can do to change the system's basic behavior. Steam changes you files when you switch branches - it overwrites files that are different, adds any entirely new files, and removes any files that no longer exist. When you change branches (and you can change to a branch whenever you want, as long as it exists), steam changes your files as necessary. There's no "maybe" about being able to switch back - you can do it. I can't say how big a download that'll be since I don't have access to that branch. It's fine to not know how steam works - just don't tell people that you do.

That isn't how betas work on steam. You can switch between the two branches as frequently as you want.

Theoretically speaking you could use interstellar hydrogen as your reaction mass - scoop it up as you fly along, and use it as your ion drive fuel. It'd require really truly mind-boggling amounts of electricity to get any reasonable amount of thrust (hydrogen is light, and interstellar hydrogen isn't particularly dense), but it should be possible.

It looks to me like the kerbals just upgraded the lights. The shadows on the ship never made any sense to me anyways - why wouldn't a VAB have lots of lights?

Do you have a link to that thread? I'm curious to see what thought processes people went through.

That isn't really an argument either way - you can ignore any non-gamebreaking issue by setting personal rules for yourself. Would it bother you if squad decided to cut the mass of the Mk1-2 in half, or would you just roleplay a little differently?

I think it's pretty universally acknowledged that some of the command pods are never the right choice from a purely mechanical perspective (roleplaying can justify anything). The Mk2 Lander Can, the Mk1-2 Command Pod, and the Cupola are all so heavy that I can't think of a single thing that they really do well. Conversely, the Mk1 Lander Can is so light that it actually is more mass-efficient for carrying kerbals than the Hitchhiker pod. These could probably be re-balanced by just changing a few numbers in the part files - dry mass, battery and monoprop capacity and torque are all easy - and I'm sure that SQUAD could find a popular community tweak on this front if they were interested. Assuming SQUAD found an good fix for this, and implementing it took one guy 15 minutes, would this be something worth doing? It would give us more interesting parts (and remove a distinct trap item), but it could alter the properties of rockets in the current saves rather fundamentally. Your thoughts?

Eve and Duna also have atmospheres, so you can partially or fully aerocapture (if your ship is shaped right).

The barometer's readout is measured in kPa; the parachute's deploy pressure is measured in atm. 1 atm is ~101.3 kPa, so when your barometer is reading 1.25, you're at ~0.012 atm - well below the 0.04 minimum pressure you've set. The full-deploy altitude you've set doesn't matter if you aren't above the minimum pressure. Parachuting onto Duna is tricky, because some terrain is high enough that you never reach your minimum pressure - the highlands and (apparently) the poles reach that threshold.

What's your payload?

I think that the most popular way to do transfers is by burning directly from low Kerbin orbit to set up an intercept with the body in question (using a maneuver node, obviously). Personally, I use a launch window calculator to figure out when and where to place that node in the first place - this is the most popular of those, though this other one has better pictures for figuring out what the output of the calculator means. You can minimize travel time by taking a more direct route