Outlander4

Well, it's how this 'early access'-type thingie work, more or less. With most of the systems inside the game being place-holders there are bound to be some bugs and compatibility issues. After all, there are new features and under-the-hood game code changes being added. Most open-source games have the same problem, I believe, because they were operating on the same model from the very beginning. Having access to alpha allowed us to give some great feedback and brought many changes to the game; these days it's much more difficult to be heard because of all the new players who came in asking the same questions and giving the same requests over and over again. Most useful things were already said back in 2011-2012 by people who really know a lot about space exploration. Still, for such a massive project (the whole solar system to explore, and possibly quite a few others) our feedback is needed and (hopefully) appreciated. So I'm sure audio is going to get fixed, and mods are going to be updated very soon All being said, I'm not happy with the career mode, it's way too arcade for me. How possibly analysing a rock from the Mün could bring in the new parts for a rocket? What is it, a xenoarchaeology or something? Analysing münar rocks should give us information about the Mün itself (water deposits, probability of finding metals etc.) and allow to start development of say an automatic soil probe or drills or boring machines or technology for extracting water from the regolith, as well as giving some nice (and better interactive) pictures of münar geology (structure, mineral composition, etc.) in the in-game database. That'd be much more educational. Also, starting the game with solid fuel boosters and rocket engine but with no aeroplanes nor even the simplest batteries and space probes whatsoever is ridiculous even by the kerbals' safety and engineering standards. But then again, it's a first iteration of such a system, so I'll reserve my final judgement for later, while giving my opinion on the subject now.

Oh come on, people. The game is in early alpha, which means that not only the content of the game, but also a lot of under-the-hood machinery are either place-holders or partial implementations or first iterations of the system that was planned. I guess that in many cases it's not really about optimisations, it's about putting the most efficient code in place of the current implementation that will be both faster and allow for new features to be added. For example, terrain system in KSP is really gorgeous (I've seen a video from recent Unite conference I believe where devs explain how it works) but it still requires a lot of work if we are ever to see things like season variations, running water, canyons, more realistic mountains, swamps, cities, underwater stuff etc. Since KSP is (in part) an exploration game more terrain variety could give potential years of gameplay, but to make that happen some serious work on terrain system will be needed. Squad just happened to like less memory-hungry solutions which is a real blessing for the community. For example, craters were added only when Harvester figured out the way to make them without significant performance drops. Or remember how we were all moaning about docking not coming for a very long time? Well, it was because the whole content sub-system was being re-written to accommodate the new parts system which allowed for merging and splitting of vessels and allowed for many other gorgeous things we have today (like the ease of modding and creating whatever new parts and resources we need), and eventually brought us the docking system we have now. Conceiving such efficient implementations takes time and creativity and knowledge and hours of work. That being said - there is much to optimise but also a lot to actually implement in the game in a non-place-holder way, and I'd prefer developers to work on that rather than on catering for people who just can't keep their imagination in check. PhysX implementation is a Unity problem and Squad can do little to fix it. Of course using other physics engine may help, but I'm not in the position to judge how well other physics engine would work in KSP. After all, we are talking about the whole solar system to simulate...so...what about sending angry letters to Unity instead of bothering Squad?

I like the idea; in fact, some people including me have suggested something like this before.

Please, hear what other people say. And read things carefully, not just skim them. Real-life rockets are not like that in KSP, and instead of several dozens parts they consist of many thousands of parts. Engines alone may go well over thousand. Granted, reaction chamber (where fuel burns), injector(s) (thingie that pushes fuel into the chamber), and nozzle are manufactured especially for use in space. A lot of other things (tubes where fuel and oxidiser run, vents, controls, many parts of turbomachinery/gas generators, hydraulics that drives the gimbal etc.) are either standard or something serious manufacturers produce for spaceflight but based on the existing technology (e.g. parts for steam turbines, gas generators for torpedoes and God knows what). You don't hand-made all the stuff in-house, you buy most of it. The same goes for electronics - it's pretty standard; most of it (especially for interplanetary missions) is radiation-hardened but manufacturers did it first for military and only then - for our anaemic space programs, using the same components and technologies. Fuel tanks and rocket bodies are in-house developments, but made from metal/composite sheets available for almost anyone with enough money. Fuels are pretty non-standard, but then Russians use quite standard mixtures of RP-1 and LOX, which is actually the same for Atlas V since they are using Russian RD-180 engines. Did I get my words across this time? Don't quote URSS (USSR in English) to me, I was born there and know perfectly well how things had worked. Company that did structural parts for Energia rocket also produced metal beds, most if not all engine companies did also work on aviation engines; NPO Lavochkin that did most of the Soviet interplanetary probes produced planes during the WWII and had a lot of experience integrating lots of different components together. Energia corporation itself produces a lot of things for consumers because some technologies and process are equally well applied for making both cutlery and rockets (no joking here). Basically, the company with most expertise in something was given a task to produce something they are good at for space program, and it did. If it did not, bad things happened, and no, I'm not talking about reducing of chocolate rations. Just go through Wikipedia you seem to love so much, find all companies involved in the rocket building and you'll find out from where all those parts are coming. It's fixed on Linux already. 64-bit works there fine. And I don't know about you, but Windows 8 showed me that Microsoft lost any resemblance of care for their customer, so my next big PC will feature either some Linux or PC-BSD. I prefer the latter (force of habit), but I have no idea how would KSP behave with their Linux Compatibility Layer. - There are more optimisations to be done. - The answer is 'with ease'. If you want to elaborate, more tabs and search box would be a welcome addition. - They made part module system for a reason; making a part is quite easy now since they don't code them from scratch. - We don't need an awful lot of parts, that's exactly the point you're missing. Graphics in KSP matters little, physics occupy most CPU time here. I tend to use one, maximum two fuel tanks for a stage, and pack stages in parallel. Oversized launch vehicles are for wusses anyway My landers tend to be small and use many small fuel tanks in parallel and several engines; before my PC video card broke I quite enjoyed using side-mounted Rockomax engines. It all uses a copious amount of decouplers; most stages have sepratrones and probe cores to deorbit them, and interplanetary stages have independent RCS supply and probe core with solar panels to further use them after spending fuel for the main engines. My stations usually resemble Mir space station with an addition of an awful lot of trusses forming a ring-type docking structure (usually reinforced) so incoming ships won't go anywhere near sensitive things like solar panels and habitation modules. A couple of old images, if you're interested: http://i.imgur.com/sKiF4.png http://i.imgur.com/w1h77.png So going procedural makes little sense for me, I'm perfectly fine with the current parts. EDIT: Also, I recommended Copenhagen Suborbitals because, while representing an extreme approach, they do everything more or less exactly like the big agencies did in 60s, so you may find out a lot of interesting things about designing and building rockets in real life. In general guys who build rockets using donations and volunteers and publishing everything they did under open-source licenses deserve respect, not bashing. They are living the dream we all cherish.

Err....sample return missions? What's magical about that? I thought that such ability was a planned feature or we'd do it ourselves just by strapping a small rocket to our lander like Soviets did with their Luna program. HIAD is just a fancy way to do it; a metal capsule with a parachute will serve as well. That is, I'm supporting heavily implementation of such kind of missions in the career mode!

Here we go again. Unlike you, I actually know what I'm talking about; that's the whole reason why I opened my mouth in the first place. Making a rocket involves striking a fine balance between using parts you can just buy from manufacturers and use them with little or no modification and creating parts in-house, which involves a lot of work and costs a lot of money. And you'll have to test it quite extensively as well. The current low-cost trend is to use as many standard, off-the-shelf components as possible; even JAXA which would rather craft the rocket from the finest carbon-fibre-reinforced sakura wood (that was a joke) starts adopting this approach in full, as evidenced by their Epsilon rocket (http://www.jaxa.jp/projects/rockets/epsilon/index_e.html). SpaceX buys most of the small parts from other manufacturers; they do fuel tanks themselves I believe, and many parts of the engine are also developed and produced in-house. Even Soviet/Russian space program relies on this approach. The only Space Agency that seems to develop everything in-house is North Korean Space Agency (and look where it got them!); and I sincerely believe that even they prefer to disassemble old Russian and Chinese equipment in search of fitting parts rather than manufacturing everything themselves. Now, back on topic - I said that snapping to the fixed sizes is ok, and your table even makes sense (by the way, it's written 'spherical', not 'espherical', no matter how you pronounce it, English is not Castellano). The problem is that we already have parts that we like, and making e.g. fuel tanks procedural will give little benefit when using complicated parallel-staging designs. It would decrease part count here and there but it won't reduce any of my rockets to 5-10 parts as promised. So I see little sense in that. There are plenty of other optimisations that could be done to the game and game engine; and when Unity resolves its 64-bit problems and goes more multi-threaded we'll surely see an increased performance. Also, stock parts can be optimised as well in the manner B9 parts are optimised to be more memory-friendly.

Rockets and space ships are made from a huge number of parts; some spaceship systems are fairly conventional (electronics, much of the hydraulics, some parts of the turbomachinery and/or gas generators). Many parts are created and manufactured with the sole purpose of being used for the space flight; but many are either fairly standard details used in the rocketry-unrelated heavy machinery or based upon standard parts. Building everything from scratch is very expensive. If you want an extreme example of that, check Copenhagen Suborbitals, especially their YouTube videos. NASA is on the other end of the scale; that's why their projects are so expensive.

I think going all procedural is a bad idea; it changes KSP completely, up to the point of taking away what I personally like about it. The design challenge in real space programs is to use as many standard components as possible to reduce cost after all, so a greatly simplified version of it we have in game is just the right thing. Also, going all procedural may have some really nasty effects on Challenges that many people enjoy doing. What's the point of fiddling with your designs, trying all sorts of crazy contraptions and questionably sane set-ups if you can just hand-craft the rocket to suit your needs? Creativity should have some limits else it degenerates into something trivial or something completely incomprehensible, and limited number of parts is a good limitation to have. Procedural parts that 'snap' to certain forms and sizes sounds better I suppose; it's all about performance in this case. However, I'd still prefer a current model with 'manufacturers' offering different parts; and contracts and relations with those manufacturers may be a cornerstone of the budgetary system in the career mode if done in a simple and intuitive way. That's just liberal thinking, though.

I've seen the screenshots of the new Space Centre with the R&D building added, and of course the quality of the models is simply awesome. However, there is one thing that bothers me - Space Centre becomes cluttered with objects, roads and walkways, which spoils its look a bit in my opinion. Would it be possible to move quite low-rise R&D centre to the other side of the runway, and change the default viewing angle so it'd cover it a bit more? Because, you know, Artyom's wizardy is best enjoyed by crashing into it, not by looking at the details in the Space Centre scene anyway, but we'll get a much cleaner look. Another little and mostly irrelevant thing - we always see great space views on the loading screen, but we all know that getting into space is only a part of the process! I've enjoyed the Selection Process video Dan Rosas did for 0.21; why not have e.g. a kerbal leisurely running on the treadmill or just standing near it as a loading screen as well? Animation is already here. Thanks!

I understand all the excitement, but even in real life Moon's atmosphere is so thin it's more or less equivalent to Earth's atmosphere at the height where ISS orbits. Most people define that as 'space' anyway; such atmosphere would surely have some effect on spacecraft (some drag), but you'll only notice it after many thousands of orbits. Well, actually, in KSP you'll notice it immediately because you won't be able to use time warp in very low münar orbit. What I want to say - such an atmosphere in KSP is mostly useless, very inconvenient, and hard to implement (engine dislikes thin atmospheres). I'd rather have a very thin atmosphere above the lakes of Minmus that is only several hundred meters high (so it does not reach mountaintops), produced by geysers or something

I think inability to handle Kerbin's gravity when standing at the launchpad will be a sure reason for unplanned rocket disassembly when under acceleration.

I think the original poster means 'magnetic levitation' or something. I see the reason we may want it, but it's not a primary focus of the game. Like, asking to change the behaviour of docking ports it order to be able to build a magnetic accelerator from them? It sound just like asking to change pushing force of the flaps to be able to throw objects with them. It's breaking the game for making one crazy contraption that can't even be useful in any meaningfull way.

No, it's not working that way. Observation and experiment are just the means, they do not make the whole body of science. Anyone with mind keen enough can observe and come to conclusions; it is not science, it's something like 'common knowledge'. If you do not have some rules, it becomes just a research. You can measure hitting force of the stick however you want, but unless you're doing it within the scientific method and using agreed-upon measures and rules it will be just your personal research using rules set by yourself; it may be fairly scientific in nature but other people would not be able to use your results in a consistent manner. There is whole brunch of philosophy dealing with such problems, really; science is a system of agreed-upon terms for orderly gathering, reusability, preservation and consistency of knowledge, without it it degrades into chaos (as if it's not troubled enough due to humans being subjective and selfish...). Cavemen, men in general and (I think; many disagree) even some animals (elephants) have/had the ability to analysis and synthesis. It's two functions of the brain - first deals with breaking down the problem into a set of smaller problems you can actually solve; second deals with extracting general principles from a set of different problems. It's a common way of thinking both in everyday life and science; it helped us to understand that stick hits hard; that different sticks hit differently, and that the force of the hit depends on the size of the stick. It does not require science; it does not require even language, I believe. To summarise: not all gathering of knowledge can be called science. But you know, it's just a technical thing; you words about people obtaining knowledge and applying it in practice from the very begining of our existence are essentially true, because it's how our brains work. If by science you meant gathering knowledge in general, than you were absolutely correct in your statement.

Does anyone actually knows anything about science? Like, are there any actual scientists around? Science = technology - this is just ridiculous. Really. History is a science; is there any historical technology? Science is a system of methods and rules used to gather new information in an orderly fasion. Technology is how you make stuff. Science is about making abstract rules and/or explanations of cause and effect from the set of experimental and observational data. Technology in its high for does the opposite - it takes abstract knowledge, and implements some parts of it with specific aim in mind. You can't say that cavemen observing how a wooden club brakes stuff were doing science. Observing the impact of the wooden club on certain types of surfaces and measuring the effect and comparing it to something used as a frame of reference in order to cunstruct a reliable model of the club's behaviour is science (almost). I mean, you can make wheels without understanding a damn about friction. Animals using science? Oh yeah, it gets even stranger. They don't.

Just add sepratrons angled to direct pieces of rocket inwards, and tie them to the action group together with decoupling everything. It works miracles, I tell you!

Yeah, I think that procedurally generated universe is way over-the-top. It can be done decently without any loss of detail, like it's done in Space Engine, but it's just moving away from the core part of the game. Easy FTL and easy really fast STL are both 'game-breaking' unless you impose some strange game-play limitations on them. We'll need some really good propulsion systems to get big ships to outer planets when they are added (three more gas giants, I believe) or develop FTL that works in-system for that. Otherwise it's hours of waiting at maximum time warp... Regarding ipad sensors and stuff - it's just pathetic when it comes to accuracy, unless you use specialised accessories. Which kind of defeats the purpose - I can get my PC and hook all kinds of interesting stuff to it (a fluorescent microscope...man! those were the times!) as well. So, Star Trek-like sensors are probably impossible. Especially when it comes to analysing DNA of unknown creatures...

Some optional advertisement for in-game companies would be acceptable. We totally have to put something on the shrouds/fairings - real-life space programs have flags and logos, but since kerbals are kind of united it would make sense to put some manufacturers' or sponsors' logos along with stuff like 'Kerbal Astronomical Society' or something like it; it won't ruin the game at all, it would even give more immersion if done nicely. Regarding the real-world in-game ads - it's evil. It's unacceptable. It ruins everything, especially when dealing with a fictional universe. It's like buying a house only to discover that manufacturer engraved a Coca-Cola logo on the roof so it would be seen in Google Earth. It's just low and unfair; and self-respecting and respectable developers like Squad won't do this.

Oh my God, it keeps on growing! I think we should all calm down a bit. Also, I'd like to say that this discussion is futile: 1. People arguing for and against FTL have very different visions of what this game should be. Some people want a bit more realism and engineering challenge, even if at cost of less places to explore; others want lots of star systems to visit. So physics is not really a topic here; it's our vision of the game that differs. I'd be perfectly fine with 20 or so stars around, if planetary systems are detailed - and I mean it - if Mün would be able to keep me exploring it for days or weeks, then discovering another star system would occupy me for God knows how long, with all the science (geology, climatology, physics, astronomy...some feeble attempts at astrobiology, and generally seeing exotic places) to be done and loads of locations to visit 2. We can find strong points both for FTL and for STL propulsion, and hand-wave some game mechanics to tie it in. There is no sense arguing about it; I can see the point of FTL system as well as viability of STL travel. Humanity never achieved any of it, so we don't know how it actually looks. We can imagine how it would be, but most likely it will be entirely different in so many ways... We all can dream or get inspired by Star Trek or Clark (which is a really bad idea, I'd say, and no, ipad and iphone are NOT communicators and pads we've seen in the science fiction; just try to analyse your room's atmosphere composition with your ipad) 3. People having different visions of the game most likely have different understanding of 'fun'. Tastes differ; it's only logical; if so many people want to have and FTL it's ok, let them have it; but since it would require writing a really good procedural generation engine to make an entire new galaxy why not have it at a later stage as an expansion? I am pretty sure that even the most fervent FTL supporters won't really mind exploring some (around 20) nearby (0.8-10 ly) star systems with really fast (0.5 c or so) STL propulsion and if it takes reasonable amount of time. Time your missions, assign a tedious task of accelerating your ship to your brave little green friends (which is a planned feature), and spend some time mining asteroids, producing fuel and building another interstellar ship to reach the other star or transport many thousands of kerbals to Laythe or Duna or dump all criminals on Eve or whatever your space program is doing, and then get back to the interstellar ship, plot your trajectory, launch the probes and explore stuff. Adding lots of procedurally generated systems will make the game huge and limitless, but won't it be logical to add aliens as well then? They should be somewhere out there, on one of the many billions of planets we are to find, right? Where is the thin line that separates KSP as we know it from a totally different game? Where are we to stop expanding our vision and say that it's enough? We should allow Squad to make another game about kerbals!

I actually would agree with Sean Mirrsen that examples of 'causality violation' are somehow not convincing at all. I've never managed to become convinced that FTL equals time travel. Surely, violating timing at which events can trigger each other will make this universe a very strange place; things will happen or not happen seemingly without a cause, maybe that's what 'causality violation' is all about? Considering how disturbingly little sense this world makes, FTL must be already widely in use However, current theories are quite good at explaining stuff, so if c is said to be a limit at which events can propagate from the place of their origin I would rather agree with that unless there is sufficient body of evidence that there are ways around it. It's a wonder we are not having a flame war here; pro-FTL and anti-FTL sentiments are strong in this community

Woah, a day away from PC, and such an assault Ok, I see all the points. They make sense if there will be many star systems around or even the whole galaxy, that's true, I can't deny that. My vision is limited to a couple of systems close to Kerbol and doing stuff mostly in kerbolar system, because I expect current planets and moons to become much more interesting as the development goes further. We'll see. As of now I'm limited to two ion probes in solar orbit that I managed to put there despite the horrendous lag caused by using Intel graphics (my other video card burned a while ago, so I had to switch to the integrated graphics...top-of-the-line Sony laptops - you just can't kill them completely without resorting to kinetic means of destruction...). I've discovered a whole new meaning of patience, moving ships to stars will be a piece of cake for me End of discussion, I guess.

People are saying those things. Does FTL drive require a piece of Kraken to function? It's all about energy. If you disagree, please share your vision, not just tell that 'things are different' What exactly prevents me from using FTL in-system? Gravity wells? Isn't getting into the solar orbit enough to get rid of them? Again, share your vision, not just criticise, please. Well, maybe, maybe not. Compared to the magic of FTL building something huge and powering it with explosions seems almost doable. And we can reasonably exaggerate pulse drive efficiency as it's done with ion engine and pretty much all engines in KSP, there is no harm in doing that. I kind of stuck with accepting it in real life. KSP is a bit more relaxed; and if I want FTL and other stuff there are other games. The theme of KSP is to go with generally valid physical principles. And I like it that way.

In case FTL would require only a gentle tap to the shoulder in order to work and not energies on a wast (say, planetary) scale - yes, sure, by all means, it won't affect development of any conventional means of propulsion in any significant way. A pure speculation at this point it is Scientists are also people and possess all set of natural human traits. It's natural for some scientists to defend classical dogmas and for others - to make outrageous claims. Fragmentation of knowledge isn't helping either - fields of research are narrowing, and people lose all connections with reality. It's not the best of worlds we are living in. P.S. Love, absolutely love space decompression drive idea!

At higher speeds it would take less, and it's higher speeds we're talking about. Nobody asks for travelling to the nearest stars at 11 meters per second; more like 0.1-0.5 c. Acceleration would be a problem; actually, everything about interstellar travel is a problem, no matter if it's conventional ways or magic.

The same with sub-light propulsion methods! With limited fuel reserves on your interstellar ship you'll have to do the same thing (if you want to get your astronauts back home). Of course nothing prevents you from over-engineering your ship and carrying extra fuel, but it's between you and the rocket equation. FTL (as many people see it) also has a lot of potential for abuse - if it's energy-dependent you'll just hop from system to system a-la Star Trek, recharging batteries and boldly going and exploring the galaxy with just one ship, mining asteroids for fuel as you go along. Nuclear pulse drive would require setting up production facilities first, thus more time and more challenge. Actually, the more we discuss stuff, the more it starts looking as if difference between FTL and STL is in the name and travel time: FTL - you get into position (far away from gravity wells in some strange point of space; it may get a while to get there), you activate FTL, magic happens, and after some (little) time you're near another planetary system where you have to use conventional engines to do stuff. STL - nuclear pulse, Z-pinch, whatever - you get into position (anywhere in space, essentially), you activate the engine, advanced physics happens, and after the initial burn you wait (quite a while), and then you're near the other planetary system, where you decelerate and do stuff. Because of really long acceleration/deceleration times it might have to be scripted/pre-calculated/whatever - it'd be just pushing the button and waiting doing other stuff, unless anybody fancies sitting in front of their PC for 3 months waiting their ship to accelerate to 25% of c at 1 g. Realistic constraints can be made for both of them, it's just that people like me ideologically abhor the mere idea of having such a huge hole in the body of physics. Besides, developing FTL without developing some form of advanced propulsion (say, thermonuclear) first is a bit like developing an aeroplane in order to get to the town 20 miles away because it would take you so long to walk there. Of course, it's a game and logic does not need to be applied, but still.

Oh, I see now. Sorry for not getting it earlier. Actually, I'll be able to tour any planetary system even with FTL - I'd just put myself into elliptic orbit after arriving. With little patience and good planning I'll visit everything dropping probes and landers everywhere, with some corrective burns and some gravity assists helping me to move around.