kotomikun

The same way I name everything else. Badly. Stupid vessel names like "Wombotron" and "Landerdoge" are common in my saves. Often the destination is worked into the terribleness, such as "Duna Lawnchair" (and its successor, "Duna Lawncouch"). Multiple iterations of this nonsense led to a base near the mod-planet Sarnus known as "Shawarmus Base." Occasionally there's a marginally clever one like "Red Rover." Names of the saves themselves are even more bizarre--my big giant visit everything career save was "The Road of Ultimate."

The cupola is meant as space station decoration, so it's not a big deal that it's terrible as a command pod. The other two big pods are meant to be command pods, though, and they're not exactly efficient--the Mk2 can weighs more than 3 Mk1 pods but only seats 2 kerbals, and has a lower crash tolerance. The Mk1-2 weighs nearly as much as 5 Mk1s, but in terms of crew, torque, monoprop, and electric charge it's the same as 3 basic pods; it does have a much higher crash tolerance, but you're unlikely to crash at between 15 and 45 m/s so this rarely matters (maybe in a very rapid disassembly seconds after launch, but most people just revert when that happens anyway). The price of those pods is also crazy-unbalanced; Mk1 is 600 kredits per kerbal, Mk1-2 is 1267, and Mk2 is 1625. Most strangely of all, the "budget" one-seat lander can costs almost 3 times as much as the Mk1 pod. But mass is generally the "true cost" of a part because money is pretty easy to come by, and doesn't even exist outside of career mode. Balancing mass with utility is probably the more important issue. I still find it weird that Kerbals themselves don't weigh anything, but that's a separate problem...

Yeah but, technically, all the planets are that. Except Jool, obviously; and Eve, which is more of a lumpy sphere-shaped deathtrap. I found this one by accident on a tourism visit to Minmus--right near the equator, at the edge of one of the "flats." Apparently most/all of the new ones are greenish.

A further upgrade was made to the Tourist Trap line of cash cow craft, making room for 20 passengers in fancy fender-bender-proof capsules. By sheer coincidence, there were 7 "high-gee" contracts available totaling 20 wealthy victims, so Val and Bob set off to visit the Mun and Minmus once again. The two-million-fund profit from this trip should help pay for a trip to Duna, if that transfer window ever gets here... The engineers must have infared vision, because they keep forgetting that electric lights are a thing. Luckily, one of the neater craters was experiencing high noon. Or perhaps high moon. Wait, what's a "moon?" They had, at least, been thoughtful enough to not block the passenger windows with the fuel tanks. Bob and Val checked out the nearest crater-inside-a-crater. Insert your preferred meme joke here. On the way out to Minmus, they flew through the canyon at the east end of the crater, for completely scientific, non-thrill-seeking reasons. One midcourse 90-degree turn later, they reached Minmus's north pole. A tiny Kerbin seems to have landed there, as well... Bob got to plant the flag this time, but Val apparently pranked him with a backwards-printed one. Either that, or this is a reflection. But there aren't any big flat monolithic objects way out here, right...? After a quick hop to the lowlands, where Bob discovered he could somehow transmit to Kerbin straight through a hill, it was time to head home. Fuel appeared dangerously low, but it turned out they were looking at the wrong part of the d/v map, and they had a few hundred m/s to spare. One of the batteries exploded in the upper atmosphere, but the other two were fine. Bill suspects it was one of those seventh-generation Kamsung models. The tourist pods were robust, but the command pod was so flimsy that, if the ship tipped over after splashdown, it would explode like a sledgehammer made of confetti. Except the confetti would be science parts and... probably some other kinds of parts. But KSC's instantaneous Star Trek transporter recovery technology brought it back before disaster could strike. Wait, why aren't we exploring the solar system with that?

Not to be outdone by Jeb's unnecessary jaunt to Minmus with 4 tourists, Val blasted off with 10, from three separate contracts, and planned to complete three additional contracts along the way just to show off. The "Tourist Trap X" has 2.5-meter tanks, but no 2.5-meter engines, which is definitely for style and not because the engineers haven't gotten the bigger engines to stop exploding yet. It even has a teensy Spark in the middle, to fulfill an absurdly lucrative contract to test it on a Minmus flyby. Some of the tourists demanded a Mun flyby--lumpy gray spheres, so hot right now--so Val used it to gravity-assist vaguely in the direction of Minmus. Gliding in towards the landing site, Chaddred thought he saw space-yeti tracks. KSC assures us it was a hallucination caused by tainted snacks. One dangerously zigzaggy landing sequence later (need more reaction wheels on version 2.0...), the party bus came to a complete stop. The ten-elevenths of the crew lacking astronaut training (a.k.a. jetpack training) couldn't leave the vehicle for photo ops, but they seemed to enjoy the experience anyway. The landing legs managed to survive reentry, and turned out to be essential because eleven parachutes apparently aren't enough to get the landing speed low enough for those wimpy Hitchhikers... the capsule, that is, not the kerbals. Even so, the hardworking parachutes attempted to stop the craft as it slid down a hill at one meter per second... ...and then it fell over. But nobody died of acute explosionitis (nor did they black out momentarily and forget to pay for the trip), so Val declared it a success.

Trying out some Career in 1.2, sent some rich idiots generous civilians up to LKO in the Tourist Trap V-II... ...but, with quite a bit of fuel left after reaching orbit, Jeb decided to fly his not-magic capitalism bus to everyone's favorite frozen wasteland. Somehow, there was enough fuel left over from this little stunt to fly Jeb and his unwitting passengers back to Kerbin. Their entry was too shallow, though, and after a few passes, the ablator started to run out. Jeb, more due to impatience than actually paying attention to his resource gauges, engaged the emergency airbrakes. The passengers remained blissfully unconcerned as their cabins skirted the limits of their heat tolerances. Fortunately, and inexplicably, the entire ship survived its sideways plasma dive, and they all coasted down for a safe landing in a flat and uninteresting desert. These tourists now have more training than most of our astronauts...

Kerbals are golems made of kryptonite; they're a sort of kr-man, or "kerman." Apparently, a blob of the stuff achieved sentience from billions of years of exposure to space radiation, and crash-landed on Kerbin because it hadn't yet developed enough language skills to distinguish it from Krypton. After realizing its mistake, the golem (kolem?) society started a space program to find its way home. Being made of rock, they live forever and don't need to eat or breathe, but they wear spacesuits to protect any Kryptonians they might come across in their travels. And so they can have cool jetpacks.

There's a couple of possible reasons. My last "big" save involved missions to all the planets (except Eve's surface...), plus several additional planets from mods. I ended up trying to finish it in as little in-game time as possible, avoiding skipping past too many transfer windows, since that seemed wasteful. Also because having Kerbals out on missions for many decades feels "cheaty" or illogical; they don't age or require supplies, but we sorta feel like they ought to. The other thing is more straightforward: with the default timewarp limits, even at max speed, interplanetary trips can take several minutes of real-time (compare to visiting the Mun, which takes around 10 seconds). You can't do anything until you get there, and there's not much to look at, so it can get tedious. Especially if you miss the direct transfer and go around the sun several times trying to find an encounter, which is probably what most new players do for their first few interplanetary missions; kicking yourself straight from one planet to another takes a lot of precision/fiddling and, often, knowledge of transfer windows. Plus, since the physical warp goes to scary-red at max speed, people may think the regular warp is dangerous at max speed, too (which it kinda was before the game automatically dewarped at encounters, and that sometimes doesn't work) and keep it below that, which makes transfers really slow.

Flew a plane over to KSC's mountain range to test some things about the dreaded unstoppable ragdoll tumble. Most of the plane exploded during the "landing." Probably should have taken that as a warning... Jeb found a nice picturesque cliff to tumble down. At first he seemed to enjoy it, but then the Kraken tried to steal his spacesuit. Wow. That's the first time I've seen Jeb look unhappy when no explosions were occurring. Not surprisingly, some combination of high speed and eldritch spaghettification did him in, but he'll probably be reincarnated in the next Danny video.

It's not necessarily unrealistic, since it's kinda hard to stop falling down a 70-degree slope, but it's really tedious (nothing else in the game leaves you 100% helpless for minutes at a time) and kerbals often ragdoll for no real reason (physics glitches). Brakes, or anything else already suggested, would be great. Maybe let them tether themselves to the ground, even while already falling?

The absolute oldest was of a Mun landing in the demo, but I can't find that one, so here's what I'm pretty sure is my first Duna landing, from almost 3 years ago: I can tell it's from the early days because I apparently hadn't learned that F2 hides all that junk on the screen; that's why there's several ancient mod popups awkwardly shoved to the bottom. PuntJeb was a velocity tracker for Kerbals (long before the EVA Navball became a thing) and VOID was a KER-esque mod, which I needed for this mission to target the mothership. Because I hadn't figured out how to show debris in the map, or that putting a probe core on the mothership would have made it not debris. Heh heh... But yes, my first Duna mission had a separate transfer stage--note the docking port on the bottom of the lander--because it seemed necessary (it isn't) and I had done docking in Orbiter a bunch of times. KSP docking was much harder to get the hang of, for some reason. Probably the lack of instrumentation... and the wobbling... Bonus shot of Bill regretting his life choices:

Sent a little nuclear space-tug out to the Mun and Minmus. Also discovered that the game really hates this rocket design for some reason, it kept crashing mid-launch. Well, that's what prerelease testing is for, after all. For "fun," it only had 3 solar panels and no batteries, so keeping it from running out of power was a little tricky. Had to turn it towards the sun with RCS at one point. Mmm, radioactive exhaust. After using much more fuel than expected to reach Munar orbit, the lander heads down. Val takes in the gray vistas. Or is it grey vistes? Could be a nice place for a space resort. Or maybe a rover-dunebuggy course. After burning the fuel supply down to dangerously low levels, she reaches Minums... where Jeb, apparently, already planted a flag, but forgot to tell anyone. Val swears she didn't vandalize the plaque or anything. Before returning home, we've got some unfinished business with the Mun... ...a.k.a. the impromptu radioactive waste dump. In space. Her capsule, thankfully, swings back to Kerbin and gets bathed in a different classical element.

Even with the old, simpler probe system, I suspect most players rarely, if ever, used them. Maybe for mapping ore, but not for visiting a new planet; I never see anyone making a "first landing on Duna/Mun/whatever!" post that's just a probe, and not a Kerbal or three posing with their vehicle. Landing a lifeless chunk of metal on a distant planet just isn't nearly as fun as flying a cute little green dude/dudette there so they can bounce around and plant some flags, and then trying to fly them home safely. Yeah, launching a probe is more efficient, but you can always use more boosters. The devs know this; that's why career mode is so skewed towards kerballed missions. Maybe the new antennas are more for the nerdier, RemoteTechy side of the playerbase. I'm still hoping the game will eventually have (simple) life support, dV readouts and maps, and some sort of transfer window tool. That way, interplanetary missions would take a bit more expense and/or planning (and probes might be more appealing), but it'd be less intimidating since there'd be a straightforward means of figuring out how to do it within the game. As it is, going interplanetary is nearly impossible without doing your own research, watching third-party tutorials, and/or using mods.

Playing around with 1.2... Jeb made an, uh, unconventional spaceplane: Yeah, he neglected to include, y'know, wings, relying instead on RCS engines and good old fashioned overpowered reaction wheels. Really wasn't expecting that to reach orbit, especially given how long it took me to build a working spaceplane, as opposed to a space jet-car or whatever the heck this is. With the gliding capabilities of a clogged pipe and most of the landing gear already destroyed by aerodynamic stresses, landing it was out of the question. So, after deliberately wobbling through reentry to stave off disintegration, he decided to "fly" semi-horizontally and then open hatch, insert self while skimming over the ocean at 750 m/s. For whatever reason, he survived, with a little help from his jetpack; probably broke some diving velocity records, and/or bones.

The biggest problem is that, for the Pods and Cans, the mass-per-kerbal is higher for the ones with more seats. This doesn't make much intuitive sense, and if it was slightly lower, it would actually be efficient to use the pod with the carrying capacity you need, instead of a cluster of Mk1s or something. The Mk1-2 has an insanely high 45 m/s crash tolerance, but that should be impossible in a crewed part. (100 mph? Hope you like giant green pancakes!) The Mk2 doesn't even have that, which is why people rarely use it. The cupola is fine, it's a decorative part for space stations and bases, not meant for efficiency. The hitchhiker is supposed to have terrible crash/heat tolerance for the same reason, but it should probably weigh about the same as the rebalanced Mk1-2. And come to think of it, more evocative names to distinguish the various pods and cans would be nice.