Codraroll

Well, I can see silos working for one other reason: They could be placed anywhere, with no changes to the terrain. They're meant to clip through terrain, so it doesn't matter if they do. All you need is a function to remove terrain scatter in the immediate radius around the silo. From a technical standpoint, they would be very easy to place wherever they are needed. Also, for radiation shielding purposes, it's more feasible to build real-life off-planet cities underground than above the surface. That means that launch silos could be a relevant, yet peaceful element of planetary bases. With an underground (or in-silo) vehicle assembly apparatus, you could launch rockets directly from your Mun, Minus or wherever base. The inherent size constraint would just be a neat gameplay feature. There's no reason to build missile silos on Kerbin, but they could be a very integral part of off-planet bases. Although, Kerbals don't need to worry about radiation, and the bases would look quite boring, so I'd rather have launchpads and buildings on the surface.

Conceptually, I agree with the idea, but you need to specify the conditions better. Tying it to contracts could be problematic, since at which point would the contract look for debris? Contracts such as "test engine in orbit around Kerbin" tends to decouple a piece of debris at the same moment the engine is activated, thus generating the penalty at the very moment the contract is fulfilled. Meanwhile, contracts for building space stations can involve several launches while working on the contract, and you may even do multiple at the same time. Send a station module to the Mun, alongside a lander which nabs a flag-planting contract on the same trip. How would the game know which pieces of debris belong to what contract?

It was already stated in last week's devnotes (or was it the week before?) that Laythe is getting a revamp, so it may be that the changes you're asking for have been implemented already.

Can I interrupt the thread a little with some musing? I just realized that space stations and ground stations in Kerbal Space Program are nearly polar opposites in terms of gameplay: The game gives you plenty of opportunity to build a wicked cool space station: You send modules up in orbit, you dock them together indefinitely using RCS and docking ports, there are plenty of parts to build with, and they're overall just convenient to build. The entire docking mechanic seems tailored for space station construction. However, the benefit of putting together a space station is marginal at best. You have so few reasons to build them, so all the parts and all the docking is, putting it bluntly, for naught. They're really cool and easy to build, though, so many players build them just for the vanity. They're sort of like epic car jumps in GTA - the game doesn't reward you for it, but it's so fun you do it anyway. Meanwhile, ground stations. Perfect for flag planting missions, sending Science from the surface of various bodies, giving you a permanent presence outside Kerbin, and of course, you can extract resources from the ground. However, the stock game gives you really few parts to use for your ground station, and the mechanics of assembling them are clunky at best. Lining up the elevation of docking ports is a real pain, even on flat ground, moving the modules in place is cumbersome (can be done with some rover skills, but it's difficult), and to refuel ships with the fuel you extract, you need to land them directly on top of the station. There are many good reasons to build ground bases, but doing so is very difficult and the game lacks a mechanic geared towards it. Ground bases are useful, but so inconvenient to build that many players won't even bother with them. So overall, you have one type of station with lots of parts, relatively easy construction methods, but no real incentive to build; and another type of station with loads of incentive, but few parts and no convenient construction method. Luckily, mods can make both types of station a lot more bearable. Station Science and its likes gives space stations a legit gameplay purpose. KIS/KAS add fuel lines to make refuelling spacecraft from bases a lot easier. Extraplanetary Launchpads lets you launch craft off other planets with the resources you collect. There are habitat mods that add specific ground station parts, rover mods that make ground station construction more convenient, etc. But still, in stock, it's interesting that the two types of station fill each other out so nicely. One type you can conveniently build without a reason why, one type with all the reasons but none of the convenience.

May I ask a quick question? I'd like to see the Launcher Gallery, as mentioned in the OP, before I make the decision to download this (for fun and inspiration, of course). But the link seems dead. However, the Spacedock link has a full Imgur gallery in it, so I'll simply ask: Is this the album the OP intends to link to? If it is, changing the redirect link to http://imgur.com/a/ouqW5 should be easy peasy and user friendly. If not, I apologize for the inconvenience. Either way, the stuff in the album I linked looks really good, so great work CobaltWolf and, I presume, Jso and, I presume again, possibly other folks!

At this point, surely Porkjet must be the most tagged user of these forums? Anyway, great work! It also delights me seeing the KR-1B "Boar" become its own engine. Now only to go the way of SpaceY and have double, triple, quadruple and whatnot versions of the same engine. Quad Mainsail all the way!

The crux of the matter is still KSP. The game. It's currently feasible to dock parts together and make huge space stations. There are plenty of parts designed for doing exactly that. But apart from looking really cool, and providing lots of repeated docking training, you have little reason to build space stations. Even the Science Lab can be trivially launched as a single vessel and work perfectly; you don't even need to put a docking port on it. Comparisons to the real world could be helpful to the discussion, but not if we forget to keep it in the persective of KSP. Economic feasibility is hardly a hindrance in KSP, you're showered with money you don't need anyway, as rewards from other simple missions. Instead of asking "Why would anybody in the real world pay for a space station?", we should ask "Why would anybody in the real world want a space station?" Screw the economics, those aren't problems in KSP unless you specifically make it so. It's a game, and it can afford to boldly jump over most hindrances that would make solid arguments against real-life space stations. So, rattling off a few things I think it would be really cool to have in space: Construction yards for vacuum-only ships. Test facilities for engines, spacesuits, tools, hull structures or other large-scale components in zero gravity and hard vacuum. A real-world space economy would have plenty of companies making products for space usage, and the need for a certification body such as TÜV would arise. I've worked briefly in a place certifying products for the building industry, and they had plenty of work to do all year 'round. Zero-G movie studios. Zero-G sports complexes (imagine sports like handball or gymnastics without gravity). Orbital greenhouses - sunlight 'round the clock and no gravity keeping plants down. It'd be expensive food, but hey, Kerbin probably has gourmet restaurants that would cough it up. Orbital hotels, spas and conference centers (hey, might as well go the extra mile). Orbital science labs or even education facilities - face it, you'd have loved to do a few weeks as an exchange student in low Earth orbit. Biological and zoological test facilities. How do birds handle zero-G? Dogs? Cats? Fish? How do they handle vacuum? Test facilities for artificial gravity solutions. A "bus stop" atop the gravity well. Ships designed for asteroid mining, deep space exploration or interplanetary shuttles wouldn't like diving into Kerbin's atmosphere, nor would they ever get out if they tried. A shuttle would be required to cycle crews on those ships. Rather than every space company launching its own crews to ships in orbit, they could dock their ships at the space station and use the station's shuttle service to transport crew and goods between orbit and the surface. Most of these are feasible given Kerbal economics, and could provide a certain amount of fun gameplay. Don't let the conventions of real-world affordability get in the way of fun. Ask why you want a space station before considering whether you'd pay for it.

Station Science by ethernet is my main, among those that haven't been suggested. Ever felt an urge to build a space station? Of course you have. Ever felt a need to build a space station? Uhh... there was a contract... something... Ever felt you could use your space station for anything useful? Apart from a convenient place to store your Science Lab, or as a glorified gas station? Hardly. They're nice to look at, fun to plan, and building them is good docking practise, but space stations serve sorely little purpose in Stock. Station Science is the solution. It adds a set of science experiments to be performed in orbit around the various bodies. But unlike instruments such as thermometers or barometers or gravioli detectors, you can't just send them up, click a button, and be done. No, these science experiments need infrastructure. First and foremost, a Science Lab. With the lab, you can perform basic plant growth experiments, but for more exotic stuff you need more. Want to observe certain subatomic particles in a zero-G environment? Haul a cyclotron into orbit. Animal experiments? Up you go, Zoology Bay. Add them to your station, and you'll be able to conduct more, cooler, and more rewarding experiments, with a decent reward every time a contract asks for it to be conducted. There's no need to deorbit the Zoology bay once you've conducted the zoology experiment, the contract may appear again and offer a similar reward if you repeat it. Also, those labs, cyclotrons and zoology bays use a fair amount of power. Do you think large rigs of 8-16 Gigantor XL solar arrays, like they have on the ISS, look cool? Of course you do. Have you ever felt the need to use one - or for that matter, any - of those big boys on your station in stock? Well, to run a cyclotron at full power, you need four Gigantor XL-arrays, if I recall correctly. The most exotic particle experiments require two cyclotrons running at full power for quite some time, so the mod gives you a pretty good reason to build a full ISS-style solar rig, and slap together banks of Z-1k batteries. In short, the mod turns space stations from vanity projects into good gameplay elements. It gives you reasons to build, use and revisit space stations in orbit around Kerbin, Mun, Minmus and other bodies. It adds to KSP a type of space science and research that is common in the real world; more than just "measure the temperature in orbit once and be done with it forever". I highly recommend the mod to everybody, and urge the developers to have a look at it.

I'd rather be able to offer tours, rather than the tourists picking where they want to go without consulting me. I have a perfectly fine space station in Minmus orbit, it has a few spare beds, and I send ships there relatively often for science experiments (thanks to the lovely mod StationScience). I clearly wouldn't mind sending tourists up there and back along with the shipments. However, I have no such infrastructure on Duna and I don't make regular trips there, so it's not a destination I'd advertise to tourists. Why can't I advertise "affordable charter trips to low Minmus orbit" while making it publicly clear that no (reasonable) amount of money could convince me to take a tourist to Duna or Eve? A small setting somewhere, listing destinations for tourism, could make tourist contracts a lot more fun. I specify where I want to take tourists, and they take the offer or leave it, rather than suggesting new, outlandish places for me to haul their sorry buttocks.

The mod Station Science has a very elegant approach to space stations, in my opinion: It offers you a bunch of "experiment modules", basically science parts to be activated in orbit around various bodies. They require a science lab on their vessel, plus some other infrastructure for certain types of experiments (such as a particle generator for zero-G particle experiments, or a zoology bay for animal experiments). The infrastructure for the experiments will require absolutely massive amounts of electricity, though, requiring players to build large solar arrays and power banks. Finalizing the experiment contract requires recovery of the experiment module on Kerbin, so the modules need to be able to detach from the station, fly back to Kerbin and land safely. I suppose you could do the most basic experiments with elements launched on a single rocket, but you soon discover that orbital assembly is a lot more practical, since you can re-use the infrastructure for several experiments. Just fulfilling the contracts will eventually lead you to build rather large space stations, although you're never explicitly told that you have to. It's just that, in order to do the tasks given, a space station is the most practical solution. It also helps that the infrastructure parts (Laboratory, particle generator, zoology bay) are multi-ton, 3.5 m parts, so you kind of have to launch them separately. The experiments themselves, however, are about the size and mass of a Materials Bay, so sending them up separately is a trivial matter. I'm having a blast putting together a station powered by 16 Gigantor XL arrays in Kerbin orbit, so I can perform some of the more advanced experiments in the mod. I also found a use for the heavier engines in stock and mods, since some parts are so heavy that you need the Mammoth at a minimum to even get them to Kerbin orbit. I think this approach would suit Vanilla KSP too. High-return Science experiments that require a lot of infrastructure, most notably on the power generation side. Relatively high-return contracts that ask you to perform the experiments over again, inciting you to launch several missions with more experiments to your station. Experiments that require parts that are too unwieldy to launch together, requiring you to do some orbital construction. You're not telling players directly to build a space station, but it becomes obvious that space stations are the only practical solution to the challenges presented.

Shooting out more of my bad ideas in this thread, I'd like to see more extreme terrain features here or there. Not that there would necessarily have to be anything special about them, just more visual candy, like for instance: Vertical cliffs, several hundred metres tall. Either surrounding mountains, or like giant ridges. Like one continent suddenly decided to be half a kilometer lower than its neighbour, transitioning abruptly. Ginormous mountains towering over surrounding plains. Big enough to be major features even when seen from orbit. Either traditional, pyramid-like mountains like we know and love them from Earth, or something wilder, like huge pillars with flat tops, massive rocks like those found in the Nevada Desert, or arches several kilometres tall. More abrupt terrain colour transitions. You could play a lot with terrain colours, especially in valleys or mountain sides. One layer of soil being a completely different colour from the others might not be realistic, but very pretty. Imagine moutains on worlds with black, white, brown and even orange layers stacked over another like some sort of fancy cake. I believe there are sand dunes or canyons on Earth where this is very well represented already. Geological features and megastructures, like regions where all ridges run in the same direction, or something like the Richat Structure. Giant, dry rivers could be an option, especially on Duna where water clearly is present. Fresh asteroid craters. "Fresh" as in "could have happened just weeks before the start of the game". Country-sized craters with ejecta lying over half the planet. Mountains stripped to the bedrock on one side from the blast wave. Deeper rock layers exposed in the centre of the crater. Perhaps even lakes of liquid. Proper fjords, either on Kerbin, Eve or Laythe. Hundreds of meters deep, a couple hundred meters wide, and with mountains hundreds of meters tall on either side. Volcanoes or craters on ice planets. Imagine walking over the frozen surface of Vall when a giant vista appears before you. The ice ends abruptly, with steep slopes going hundreds of meters down towards a giant lava lake, stretching from horizon to horizon. Along the rim of the lava lake, Vall's true, rocky surface is exposed, forming a narrow strip of beach between the glacial cliff and the fiery pit. Mission control asks you if you could get to that beach, for the Science return would be immense. Even if anything goes wrong, Kerblings all over the solar system would envy your death.

Because Kerbin has that pesky atmosphere and deep gravity well. You'd get a lot more delta-V left over for interplanetary maneuvers if you launched from Minmus instead of Kerbin. No need to deal with aerodynamics or heavy lift stages, and escaping Kerbin's SOI is a trivial matter that far out. I'm a huge proponent of off-Kerbin VABs and launcpads, and would love to see the ability to construct real KSCs on other planets (or even in orbit around them). I don't like having to move parts there by myself, though. It should be possible to bring your own parts, of course, but I'd also like an option to pay some of the other space agencies to supply my parts (for ludicrious amounts of Funds, increasing the further you go from Kerbin). If those agencies can put manned capsules on the Mun and Minmus, they probably could haul rocket engines and fuel tanks there too. The cheaper option would be to launch them from Kerbin yourself, of course, but if you're willing to pay for convenience, you should be able to.

Something interesting could be done with the monoliths, at least. You can see the first one from the Space Center. It's right in your field of vision. Players will notice it and seek it out. That is already a very good set-up for something more. What if you could read inscriptions on monoliths, the same way you can read flag plaques? There could be text on the KSC Monolith, pointing to the location of another one. Reading the text would reward Science, Reputation and possibly Funds, and add a contract to seek out the next monolith. First ones on Kerbin, then on the Mun, Minmus, Duna and further out. The last one would point to the Kraken's location on Bop. Visit the Kraken to unlock the Kraken Drive, a mysterious and powerful engine capable of taking you practically wherever you want. The monolith questline requires you to master travel to and landing on every planet in the system, after all, so the Drive wouldn't be much of a game breaker. This would add incentive to visit almost every body in the system, learn precision landing, and perhaps even use rovers to analyze monolith data. It would be a neat little questline to give players the extra push to go beyond Kerbin's SOI.

The Tier 0 runway is actually kind of amazing. It has bumps and ridges on a far smaller scale than the terrain model allows. In other words, the strip of land the Kerbals initially prepared for their aircraft take-offs and landings is the roughest land surface in the solar system.

I'm all for the idea of persistent planetary bases. Not like assembling a craft in the VAB and moving it to another body, perhaps to connect it with something else there. More like having an actual KSC on other bodies. Permanent bases where you can recruit Kerbals, design and launch spacecraft, review contracts, and generally everything else the KSC has to offer. Such bases would bridge the tremendous interplanetary gulfs in the game for newer players, and also encourage them to actually head outside Kerbin's SOI. A well-functioning web of bases would be the late-game's reward. Getting such bases up and running, however, would require some proficiency in the game's basics. I envision a "mission structure" similar to this: Plant flag on planet (usually the last thing you do with a planet, this would be where the fun starts). Contract: Orbital survey for possible base sites. Contract: Low orbit survey of a dozen or so sites found during the last mission. Pick your site for the new KSC. Plant flag on site. Return with surface samples. Perform experiments: Materials study, temperature, seismics, barometer, all that faff. Bring some awfully heavy modules to the site. When all modules are ready on site, the off-planet KSC is built. The other pieces of the craft you built to send the modules there are sold, as if retrieving them on Kerbin. Astronauts are moved to your new Astronaut Complex. The off-planet KSC would function just like the ordinary one, with a small caveat: Launching ships from there is a lot more expensive, and it gets worse the further you get from Kerbin. Upgrading facilities would set you back seven or eight figures. Even filling a fuel tank in your Vall shipyard is more expensive than a full-fledged Mun mission rocket built on Kerbin. Perhaps you could do contracts or build additional buildings to lower the costs, but operating out of even the Mun would require a lot more Funds than from Kerbin. Then again, some planets could have an abundance of one resource or another, making it an attractive destination for a base, especially in modded games with lots of exotic resources. In return, your extraplanetary Space Centers would make the Kerbol system a lot more accessible, and missions more convenient. With a permanent base on Laythe, a visit to the Joolian moons is a trivial matter, at least compared to sending ships from Kerbin all the time. Launching from the tight orbit of Moho, you get transfer windows to all the planets all the time. A newbie player dreading to take the step to Duna would have an easier time designing his ship and launching it from Minmus. After becoming familiar with Duna, the planet could be used as a stepping stone on the way to Dres. Or he could skip base building on Duna entirely, and establish one on Dres and use that as a starting point for future Duna and Jool missions. Late-game, you would get missions to move stuff and tourists from base to base, which would allow for very varied mission profiles. Good luck moving a five-ton cargo container from Bop to Moho, or Gilly to Eeloo. Or even Eve to Tylo, should you for some reason decide to build bases on both of those worlds.

Having read the thread, may I have a ramble? It seems like the tech tree serves two purposes: It is the game's reward system, and the limited part selection at the start keeps players from being overwhelmed by choice. Progressing through it can be summed up as "unlock more parts to allow you to do more fun stuff, which again allows you to unlock more parts." At least conceptually, it seems to be a decent idea. However, it seems like the problem many people have is that the tech tree starts out identically in every playthrough, and in practise you're hampered by the same limitations every single time. I can understand and share this frustration. Having to go deep into the tech tree to find parts you need for a varied play style means you can't have that variation until certain conditions are met. Personally, I like the spirit of the beginning of the tech tree. You have a capsule, a parachute, and a rocket engine (with its own fuel, so you don't have to worry about that for your first flight). The first flight in Career is and should be a very short one, taking off from the launchpad, gaining altitude until your fuel runs out, after which you coast along on the velocity you gained (just observing this little detail is an important and effective introduction to mechanics). After a while, you stop going up and start going down. At the end of the flight, you activate the parachute to land safely, or realise you've forgotten it and watch your rocket slam into the ground. You keep unlocking more parts until you can achieve a stable orbit, and from there you can set your sights on the other bodies in the system. I think that conceptually, any tech tree or replacement solution should encourage a gameplay progression like that. Starting with ballistic, suborbital flights, progressing with more controllable flights higher up, and eventually letting you get into orbit. It represents the learning curve of new players, as well as that of real-life space agencies, so the basic jist of it should be kept in the game. I hope that opinion isn't too controversial. Now, some people dislike that you start by putting Kerbals in capsules and sending them away. Manned spaceflight took a while to develop in real life, after all. On the other hand, developing remote-controlled craft before manned craft is also not quite right. And in a game about Kerbals flying spaceships, you really ought to see the Kerbals from the get go (my suggestion to address this issue - having the Kerbal portrait screen show a Kerbal in Mission Control for unmanned flights - is off-topic, but I couldn't help but mention it here). Overall, I think it is a good idea to have multiple starting points for the tech tree. You could start manned or unmanned, and keep picking strategies from there. Want to focus on satellites or go for the Mun? Will you develop heavier lifters or vacuum engines? Build a space station or better landers? I also think a "tech web" should be considered, rather than a tree. I think I have an as-of-yet unmentioned suggestion here: have the same parts appear in multiple tech tree nodes. That means starting with the "Flea" regardless of what route you pick. Develop ladders as hand-holds for space stations or for planetary landers - or just to get back into aircraft after landing on Kerbin. Get your first probe core to assist manned flight, or have it from the beginning as an alternative to manned flight entirely. Drogue chutes to stop fighter planes or slow down probes during atmospheric descent. Developing 2.5 m fuel tanks separately because of focused research on fuel tanks, or alongside a 2.5 m engine because of focused research on a basic 2.5 m lifter? Unlocking a part in one node would remove its cost from other nodes with the same part. Maybe you would even find some nodes on the far side of the tree unlocking themselves as you get all their parts from other research paths. As for how to pay for new nodes... I think the Science system is decent enough, but it could be made clearer that you sell the fruits of your research, to get funding for other research projects. I'm not sure if specialized experiments for specialized parts is the way to go. Then again, boiling it all down to Funds isn't that realistic either, so I'm actually not sure either way. Also, I think some parts could feasibly be unlocked outside the tech tree. Upgrade the Tracking Station to get access to telescopes. Return surface samples from, say, Duna, to unlock a more efficient battery. Find all Monoliths (and/or the Kraken on Bop) to unlock the Kraken Drive. But yeah, the gist of this post: Have multiple ways to progress through the tech tree. Have those multiple ways sometimes unlock the same parts, albeit in a different order. Your first flight should generally feature the same mission profile, with or without a Kerbal in the pilot seat.

I think this could be done simple enough to work in-game: Consider a three-tier building, the Observatory (or planetarium?). With tier one, the Tracking Station will only show Kerbin and its two moons, plus Eve and Duna (and perhaps Ike, but not Gilly). It would simply look as if there were no more planets in the system. Upgrading the Observatory to tier 2 would show you Dres, Gilly and maybe Jool, but not its moons. Also, more information about the known planets would be displayed (most crucially, launch windows). An upgrade to tier 3 would show more information about the planets (such as a biome list), but not reveal the rest of them. It would, however, unlock new parts: The Space Telescope. Sending a telescope into orbit would reveal the existence of Moho, the Joolian moons, and Eeloo. That mechanic could feasibly be split in two if you like, for instance that a 2.5 m telescope reveals Tylo, Moho and Laythe, while a 3.75 m telescope shows you Vall, Pol, Bop and Eeloo. As such, the space telescopes would not require hours of manual scanning. Just plop them in a stable orbit, perhaps above a certain altitude, and the scientists will figure out the rest. It's not completely realistic, but it does add a gameplay element of exploration. Of course, sending probles to the planets would also mark them as discovered in the Tracking Station, but good luck finding them without a telescope.

If I recall correctly, the Devnotes once talked about a "discovery" system for planets. If they are still seriously considering to implement it, I can't see how it would be done without involving Hubble-esque telescopes. So you might be in luck here.

Wouldn't there then evolve a metagame of harvesting Science off KSC the quickest, to unlock parts you can do fun things with? People would work out an optimal path through the tech tree to get the most useable parts quicker. In a game with as few strategical decisions as KSP, everything but the flying would quickly delve into "execute the optimal maneuver the fastest". Also, contracts would be a bit of a wrench in the machinery. Some player could be lucky and get a contract with a high advance early on, allowing him to upgrade his facilities quickly and then skip around the system collecting achievements while other players struggle to lay down the money for a launchpad upgrade or something. Just pointing it out, though. If KSP added competitive multiplayer, I wouldn't complain. I'd just choose not to play it. But it seems evident that there are some challenges to overcome before competitive multiplayer can thrive.

The names themselves aren't problematic, they're rather... symptomatic. It's the whole thing with having a Mercury analog near the Sun, followed by a Venus analog, followed by an Earth with a large, Moon-like moon, then a Mars analog further out, followed by Ceres and Jupiter... once you start thinking about it, the Kerbal solar system is an awful lot like the real one. Sure, there are a few extra moons here and there, but the overall trends are very similar to what we know from real life. I can understand that some players would like this fantasy solar system to differ a bit more from real life. Not having roughly the same planets in the same order. There are good outliers, though. I applaud Eve for being very little like Venus, so technically my comparison isn't all that accurate. The purple is a nice touch too. Duna having a huge moon like Ike is cool too, I like Minmus very much, and Laythe is awesome. But I feel it wouldn't have hurt to be a little less conservative with KSP's planets. There could be rocky worlds with rings, planets of strange colours (again, kudos to Eve), worlds with extreme mountains, gas giants with a solid core you can land on, planets going the other way around the sun, planets in extremely elliptical orbits, or tons of other little quirks, many of which are explored in mods already. Instead, we have a system that is very Sol-like, with a Kerbal analog for most of the inner bodies. It's not a 1-to-1 likeness, but close enough for us to long for a little more creativity.

Just popping by to add my name to the list of people whose day this tool saved. Great work! For those wondering, I had the "undock but nothing happens" bug, which glued a completed Station Science experiment to my Kerbin Orbital Station. Although the station is a little out of date compared to my tech tree progress, I wouldn't have liked to deorbit it all to get the experiment back to base. Thanks a lot again!

We already sort of have one of these, but not really. The LFB KR-1x2 "Twin Boar" Liquid Fuel Engine is a mid-game mainstay for me, with more thrust than the Mainsail and useable Isp. But it keeps me pondering where the LFB KR-1 "Boar" engine is to be found. Although the Twin Boar produces twice as much force as the Vector, and half of it thus doesn't really fulfill your objective, I think it'd be nice to see a Single Boar engine too. Just let it produce slightly less than half the thrust of the Twin Boar for... reasons (less overhead losses when multiple engine bells are fed with the same fuel system or something?), and it'd be a good 1.25 m bridge between the Reliant and the Vector. That, or the Boar could be a 1.25 m engine with an integrated fuel tank. Either way, I'd like to see the Boar engine in the game, if only for completions' sake.

For some reason, the huge bay by the desert always reminds me of the Gulf of Mexico. There's neither a Mexico nor a Florida to be seen, and the bay is not a gulf, but the bay is the Gulf regardless. When doing LKO rescue missions, I always do my deorbit burn over the landmass east of the bay, for a fairly accurate landing within 10-50 km of the KSC site. By the way, has there ever been a fan project to assign names to the various places on Kerbin or the other planets?

First and foremost: Legs and wheels (need not be impact tolerant) whose height can be adjusted with a slider. It'd revolutionize planetary base building. A rover cockpit would be nice too. But first and foremost, height-adjustable legs and wheels. Also, Station Science in Stock. Something, anything, that rewards you in the long term for building space stations, which at the moment only exist to fulfill contracts.

In my opinion (and seemingly that of many others on these forums too), planets have more fundamental problems than "there aren't enough of them". Adding more planets add some variety to the game, true, but fact still remains that the majority of KSP players - even the "pro" ones - rarely leave Kerbin's SOI. With a proper reason to visit or even settle on most planets, and a clear and permanent benefit from doing so, I think the game would benefit a lot more than it would from just adding more, but essentially more of the same, planets.