Rejected Spawn

Assuming career mode is in: Will there be a way to set up stuff that generates modest funding without babysitting/grinding? Example: Build a sizeable fuel refinery on Kerbin >> get a KSC discount on produced fuel types and/or periodically generate funds from automatically sold surplus fuel? I like to have limits on funds but don't much like grinding. Will any other kerbals appear that are not controlled by the player? KSP1 has career contracts to rescue kerbals from various places but they just spawn in rather than actually end up there because of a journey gone wrong, would be interesting if Rockomax actually sent up a rocket once in a while...

The more that can be done with fairings the better. What I'd like to see more than anything else though is the ability to create "internal" spaces; the game actually understanding that something is sitting in a shielded spot and should not be affected by drag and stuff - without having to specifically put it inside a fairing or prefab cargo bay. Of course I still also want the "old fashioned" fairings and bays and stuff for convenience when making those simple rockets that just go somewhere and deploy something and they're done. Why do I want to be able to build custom shielded interiors? Story time. Ever since I first threw my wallet at the screen when I found KSP on the Steam store it has been my dream to send a majestic carrier ship on a grand voyage to visit new worlds up close and have it launch a smaller ship for landing on planets with too unforgiving gravity for the carrier itself, however this smaller ship should also be powerful enough to get back off the surface and dock safely inside the motherships hangar. How close have I gotten to this in the years since? Not close at all. The first thing I learned was that a shielded interior volume is solely the privilege of cargo bays or fairings, crushing my hope of ever having a hangar actually do anything to the ships properties other than add dry mass. At least Breaking Ground added hinges so a hangar can have doors that open and close, but yeah... Another thing that fairings can be used for is to create a little more freeform geometry, something I've appreciated in colony building - you can use massive fairings as really clean and beautiful exterior walls for buildings. Unfortunately really large fairings cause severe lag and trying to clip decor into them (a colony building without some windows is.... pretty dull) has wildly unpredictable results, anything between nothing bad whatsoever happening and extremely aggressive RUD. Yet another thing that can be done with fairings is to make them open ended; "close" them around some other round thing (if you use another fairing for this you can fine tune the width) and then move that thing out of the way and you have a big protected interior space. Unfortunately accessing this space can be... unpredictable at best. Sometimes you can get other things to go in there and sometimes the end is a solid invisible wall. More freeform EVERYTHING! That would be my greatest wish today. I'll always want to build something far beyond what a game can handle but every step further down Freedom Road will bring me happiness. An array of procedural parts would be like 5 good leaps and an extra jump of joy.

This fire seems to need a bit more fuel so let me just add that the human eye has an extremely much better range of light detection than the average camera, we can still see a faint light a few degrees off from a light that is thousands of times stronger because our sight isn't a simple linear thing with a sharp start and stop point - in the context of space we ought to be able to see plenty of stars as long as we don't have the sun right in our field of view or a huge section of our field of view is covered by something reflecting a really nasty load of sunlight. Basically if a game actually 100% matches what we see in regular photos taken by regular cameras in regular situations, that's actually very noticeably unrealistic and will look wrong to human eyes in most cases. All that said, I'm totally for significantly darkening the skybox when looking directly at the sun, in other cases though I deem it a waste of CPU cycles to keep track of how many bright objects are covering how much of the screen and micro adjust the skybox to every situation. I'm no 1337 programmer though so if it can be done with less than 1% performance hit to the game sure go ahead, but I'm not expecting anything. Space is beautiful, I don't want to play Kerbal Black Backgrounds Program.

After a thousand hours in KSP I didn't even bother knowing struts had mass. I hate using them because they look super dumb on a rocket, I'm still in the camp that wants to be able to add a spot weld between parts - one that can't be seen outside the VAB. Such a part would slay a thousand Krakens and I wouldn't even complain if they lazily use the same code as for the near useless struts as long as they cut the range to 10cm and up the strength to 5X a strut. Then again I've complained about this for some time with no real hope in my heart that it will ever see the light of day, I'm betting KSP2 gets a spot weld (or "glue blob" or "nut and bolt" or "double adhesive tape" or whatever else it would be called) before KSP1 does.

The arrival of Breaking Ground was probably the happiest surprise related to KSP1 since I started playing a few years ago, but one thing that it has soured is the contract system. The contracts were already terrible, loads of them make very little sense and if you are sick and tired of certain types of them you can't just block them - you have to manually keep declining each and every one of them forever and hope the game randomly offers something you want to do. Now that Breaking Ground introduced a number of new types of contracts this has gotten completely out of hand, I've spent up to several minutes in a row doing nothing but declining extremely undesired contracts that keep respawning just to get a dozen good contracts of the types I have any desire to deal with. I did get out ahead of this situation and posted my concerns before the DLC dropped and @St4rdust did relay the information to devs for which I am grateful, however I feel far from convinced that the issue was placed on the "urgent issues" list. I'm well aware that Career Mode is actually not as popular among players as one might expect and that such a thing might seem like a good reason to put low priority on fixing career mode issues, however there is ample indication that the contract system is one of the absolute biggest reasons -if not THE reason- why many players shun the game mode in the first place. When players call Career Mode "grindy" it is more often than not primarily because of the contracts. Across the forum there are already many suggested solutions to the multiple issues with contracts, I'll refrain from regurgitating everything I've seen and just list what I estimate to be the most useful key points below for dev conscideration: <> VASTLY increase the number of concurrent contracts that can be viewed and accepted. This should be done regardless of any other changes made to contracts, having to sit through loadscreens every few minutes just to find a new desirable contract is grindy. <> Either split the entire contract list into categories and have each generate a good number of contracts regardless of what's going on with all other categories, or make it possible to block certain types of contracts from spawning at all. <> Make the contracts sortable by location in some way, either by listing them neatly sorted by location or by having a filter function to show/hide contracts for specific regions. <> Some contracts generate horrifying numbers of messages in the log, the log needs a purge button and there needs to be an option to disable log spam. (Take 12 contracts to ferry tourists to Kerbin orbit and back, send all of them on a big cruise ship and land safely to cash in. You now have over a HUNDRED log messages from a single 10 minute trip, the message window stops working properly after a few such trips and you have to manually click to delete every single one of these messages that extremely fast can number in the thousands.) Other suggestions of lower urgency: <> Ability to clear the contract history without resorting to using a cheat menu or tampering with the save file. <> Add strategies to the Administration Building that greatly influence the contract generation; sacrifice cash or fame to generate more contracts of several user specified types while all other types generate in far lower numbers. <> Make the "active contracts" tab more user friendly, most notably there should be no reason it can't scale depending on number of active contracts.

Finally got a save file that has one of the bugged tourists and the mission hasn't been accepted yet. This site has a confusing bug report system, if anyone asks me to upload the save somewhere specific I will but don't expect me to bother with this bug any more than I already have otherwise.

As title suggests, on rare occasions (probably less than once per 100 missions) when accepting tourist missions the tourists don't all appear in the list of Kerbals to put in a craft. I've only ever accepted these missions in large packs while declining everything else, possibly related. I use no mods, ever. Happens on both 32 and 64bit. No apparent connection with CPU stress or anything else relating to hardware. Happens regardless of starting KSP 20 minutes ago or 20 hours ago. To reproduce with relative ease and speed: start new career profile, get only just far enough to start spawning tourist missions for sub orbital launches. Accept these in swarms to launch a whole bunch in the same craft and just leap out to like 71.000m and cash in, decline all other missions, sooner or later one of the missions just won't complete because a tourist hasn't spawned and could not be put in the craft. (Using existing saves also works but involves repeatedly saving and loading which could cause all manner of other issues with the game, completing the missions is the least likely to cause unrelated problems and the farther you've gone from Kerbin the farther you need to send the tourists.) The only thing I can think of to check for while trying to identify the bug is that maybe they can't spawn because their names overlap with an existing Kerbal, not much but maybe a starting point. I usually discover the problem long after already cashing in a group so haven't really seen if this is possible. EDIT: The bug appears not to happen if the missions are accepted slowly and all other missions are declined slowly, not entirely sure but this way it didn't happen even after around 500 missions in a row which is enough to suspect that it's a relevant factor.

Ah that wasn't quite the thing I was referring to though, I meant the general old fashioned ion engines already in use since decades ago that work by creating a huge static charge to accelerate ions to insane speed, giving a fuel efficiency nothing short of amazing. The only real downsides to them are that they take loads of energy and produce very little thrust, plus as I mentioned they degrade over time (even with ideal propellant) but other than that they are very useful and reliable. The bussard ramjet would possibly give better thrust but it seems like it's something that won't be around for a long time yet, just like fusion reactors have been "coming soon" for the past few decades, I'd think it better to avoid adding it to KSP until very real progress has been made in the form of at least a prototype. Anyway it was an interesting read, hadn't heard of that type of rocket before so thanks for the link!

Now I get you a lot better, thanks for taking the time to sort it out. I do think the options presented in the career mode are lacking, despite in a way being the complete opposite of lacking. Having a set standard that says "this is a [something] level challenge" gives a nice [something] level satisfaction when you clear a mission but the customized options now are very easily combined anywhere between making the game so easy you almost can't fail and all the way over to making it literally impossible, this has me quite confused because why would settings like that even exist? I'd think having a sort of group of standard game modes in 2-3 standard difficulties each would be more than enough to meet the majority of players wishes and then breaking out the super custom game mode as completely separate from the other modes to satisfy the rest, maybe even go so far as to make the parameters in the custom mode sharable so players wishing to challenge each other can do so easily. Of course the "super custom" mode would need to be completely configurable not just with some sliders but by completely altering how the game functions. The biggest problem would be implementing something like that at this point in time because they can't very well rip out the old system entirely since some players have spent hundreds of hours playing and savegame compatibility is important... That said I don't think creating additional modes is any more difficult than most other stuff done on a regular patching basis, assuming the underlying framework is done in a reasonably organized manner.

Since I see you constantly expressing your absolute hate for science points in multiple threads I get that you don't like it, what I don't get is your apparent lack of understanding that many players DO like the current system. If a lot of players think a system is quite fun, why can't we keep that system? What is preventing the creation of a SEPARATE game mode for players like you who want an entirely different experience, we already have several ways to play the game so what is making a new mode suited to your needs not the best way to solve this? Why not even take it a step further by having CUSTOM game modes that let the player decide how things should work? Please do explain because at this point your opinion in the matter seems so single minded to me that I find it hard to take it as constructive but I don't think you're only here because complaining is all that fun so there must be some sort of reasoning that perpetuates your stance in the matter, thus explaining it properly would be greatly appreciated.

I had 30m and fully unlocked tech tree in almost no time in career mode without even going further than Minmus, the only grind was "mid tech" because I got picky about what missions to complete but now when I want quick cash with minimal effort I take a dozen tourist missions (and possibly a few Ore and Station missions) at once, build a massive rocket capable of taking roughly 40 kerbals to Mun and Minmus and home and one such trip takes on average 35 Kerbin days. Investment: 1,5m for a slow rocket, 2m for a fast one with plenty of drills. Mission completion: 5-7m, so always making at the very least 3 million - usually closer to 5. I build atrociously massive structures with up to 1000 parts all the time and waste millions on doing fun stupid stuff, like one out of five things I launch exists to make cash. Now while I don't have anywhere near a money problem it would be nice if there was SOME way to get trickle income without having to personally oversee things, mostly for lazy players who don't want to be handed infinite funds but don't want to keep doing grindy missions all the time. Probably difficult to implement with reasonable balance and while making any sense but for instance making a special ore extraction facility on Kerbin that would constantly mine ore and sell it would be sort of cool, the only way to do something like that right now is to fuel up tanks and sell the entire tanks. Incindentally I tried that for fun, return on investment is... completely awful, but you CAN profit a tiny bit after a few months.

Don't forget the microwave drive NASA was messing around with, that thing that media thought was a warp drive and caused a whole heap of terrible misinformation... anyway since it actually works and runs on just electricity (well, enormous amounts of power for pathetic thrust of course) it could be very handy for tiny probes in KSP. Also how about tech that isn't just rockets? There has been quite a bit of stir over those things that turn thin air into oxygen and fuel to combat rising CO2 levels, having an additional type of fuel extraction for planets with atmospheres would be really cool! Another more classic thing like the ion engine has also seen some fun ideas like capturing stray gas in space (empty space isn't 100% empty really) to replenish its tank on the go, not too sure about how that works and in real life using non ideal propellant for an ion engine damages it a lot as far as I understand but hey, let's sci-fi! Guess all my suggestions today are of the sustainability variety, I feel so environmentally friendly I'm afraid my potted plants will try to hug me. Oh right they died ages ago, crisis averted.

@Rath Well, instead of having several small labs going places in the name of science, I figured why not a giant plated dome with a dozen beautifully integrated labs, capable of refuel and relocation to anywhere with max 30% of Kerbin's gravity? Of course to power it during those long cold nights you need an atrocious amount of nuke rods and to rotate it with any speed needs about 40-50 reaction wheels I think... Had to give up on motor wheels because it weighs 1000+ tons fully fueled, too bad because it would look hilarious taking it for a drive! However after dropping the 18 mammoths on the first stage it does actually decrease to roughly 960 parts so it wasn't a full 1000 there - I promise less than 500 of them were for decoration! Probably! Almost certain. You know what it looks so cool I'm just gonna man up and take the criticism, totally worth it. @DrLicor Well those mods are surely all good and such but like I said, I just don't want to mod KSP because it feels too much like cherry picking or cheating. Pds314 and Veeltch make some excellent points there, procedural stuff sounds like a VIP ticket to happy land and those suggested parts would fill up some pretty awkward voids quite nicely. Also that rascal Oscar must be brought to justice for his crimes of breaking the laws of physics, or made to explain his dimensional warping so we can use it for the further evolution of Kerbalkind!

Well of course not every player wants to build big but those who do simply can't, while it doesn't affect you it does affect me to a huge degree. I can build minimalist things of less than 100 parts too, but that's not what I actually want to do since it gets boring after the first 200 hours. What I want to do is build giant rockets capable of going nearly anywhere, landing on small planets and moons and letting a crewed buggy roll out for some reckless fun driving while drills refuel the mothership. I want to build space stations capable of housing a hundred kerbals that don't just look like someone left a piece of tube floating. I'm not playing KSP to build tiny things that only just do a single job, if anything I want to build a dozen such small things and launch them from a carrier. You know what I did when Kerbin's antennas fell short and my poor satellite on the other side of the system was getting 40% signal? I built a gigantic 40m station covered by 60 of the most powerful antennas in the game and put it on top of Minmus like a silly hat. Everything further from Kerbin than the Mun reroutes through that thing now and I laugh every time they bounce the signal 3 times the distance they'd actually need to.

The game becomes practically unplayable when a vessel exceeds just 1000 parts, simply because there is too much to calculate in terms of collisions and such and even with improved colliders there is always going to be a limit to what the hardware can handle. Breaking this down it becomes painfully obvious that the number of "needed" parts for a vessel can be decreased vastly by injecting some actually BIG ones to choose from, I usually need 100+ nuclear rods for a large vessel on an extensive mission and this is on the edge of just being plain ridiculous. Same goes for structural wings, those tiny little sheets need to be used by the dozens to start covering any respectable area. The biggest motorized wheels in the game? I can barely see them underneath my largest creations, not to mention even 20 of them can't as much as budge a truly gigantic lander. To rotate a regular 1500 ton ship before it's on the other side of its orbit you'll need dozens of the biggest reaction wheels. Numerous things like these could possibly/hopefully be vastly improved without expending excessive manpower since many models could be largely reused by scaling and just touching up textures a bit. Another thing sorely needed would be just a bucket of glue. Using struts is typically ugly and using the invisible auto struts often comes at a staggering performance cost, instead if something is overlapping it should be possible to splash some space glue there, only visible in VAB but providing all the structural enhancement you'd need. Without a doubt I'd happily pay half of what I paid for the whole game just for an official DLC packed with loads of specialized (and actually big) parts since the hundreds of hours of fun you get out of KSP would easily be worth that much. I don't hate mods but I never mod a game unless it's a hopeless mess and I give up on the devs, simply because I want the "feeling" of accomplishing great things within the challenging frame of what the devs think is reasonable instead of cherry picking things that make the game easier. On this note I believe many truly enormous parts should cost more than a meager 1000 science points to unlock, for example the nuclear rod should have one more step for some 1500-2000 points where you get a giant upgraded core with 50 times the power for 75 times the cash. Fusion reactor would be even better, but that would need another new level for even more points and ridiculous amounts of cash, in return it had better look awesome! Oh as a final note it would be nice to be able to build a much bigger VAB and launch pad, some (actually many) of my creations poke out through the walls of the VAB...