Koooooj

I'm personally all for changes that improve realism, but the problem there is that real-world spaceflight is *hard*. That's fine for experienced players, but KSP needs to be approachable enough for the average Joe to enjoy it. Getting a Kerbal to orbit and back is hard enough for an inexperienced player, I would hate to see how hard it would be if they had to deal with a bunch of other realism additions. To that end I personally support a difficulty/realism menu where various aspects can be turned on and off. Communication delays for unmanned vehicles? Optional. Kerbals requiring food, water, etc? Another option. This is the design approach that has been popular in submarine simulators as old as Command: Aces of the Deep and as new as Silent Hunter 5 and it works very well for them. The game can be designed around the full difficulty version while still letting less-experienced players have a fun time while learning enough to play on full difficulty. I'd even support a "realistic engine efficiency" toggle that lets new players play with much higher Isp versions of the stock engines. That said, though, I don't think KSP should go for 100% realism and I think it's on track for a good balance right now--I feel like a number of more realism changes just haven't happened because of the dev time required. Some unrealistic aspects are necessary, too. I'm glad Kerbin is much much smaller than Earth--it puts the ascent time into a better range for casual play. A real space program takes thousands of man hours per day to manage, and KSP just can't become that--it needs to not be tedious.

Looks great! A couple of observations (I'm working off of a version I downloaded a day or two ago, so apologies if these have already been addressed): 1. I built a craft using the colony hub as the main source of control with no other probe bodies on it and it defaults to debris and doesn't display on the map. Feels like this ought to be a pretty quick fix. 2. I noticed that the colony hub does not operate if it has no punch cards, but its purpose is to generate punch cards. In one of my first tests I launched with no punchcards and found myself with an inoperable base. This may be how you intended it to work, but it seems to me that the punchcard generator should be able to work without punchcards. 3. I had a hard time selecting exactly 250 parts for the construction hub--I set up a very basic bootstrapping base with just a construction hub and a colony hub and wanted to have both operational with the construction parts on board. The slider snapped to increments of 100, though, so I could only either bring 200 (too few) or 300 (50 more than I wanted). I worked around it by taking 500 in the construction hub and 0 in the colony hub, but if you can set that tweakable to snap to counts of 50 or less then that would be ideal. 4. On my map of the Mun water is *extremely* scarce, which I think is fine--the search for water is a pretty big thing in space exploration (or, at least, it is what makes it into the media--NASA mush have found water on Mars a dozen times by now). The algae tank lets you work around a lack of water just fine, but it strikes me as being unrealistic--you can generate mass with this unit. It would be within the suspension of disbelief if this module required some mundane resource, like "dirt," that was found everywhere. This prevents an orbiting algae tank from violating conservation of mass. For now I'll be self-imposing the rule that algae tanks only work when hooked up to some sort of drill. All in all, though, looks pretty fantastic. Can't wait to see a not-extremely-pre-alpha version of this mod.

Darn... thought I was being original. Oh well, still amusing.

(I don't know if there is a better place to put this, so I put it here. ) I noticed that when Kerbals enter a command capsule, their RCS fuel is refilled. Using this idea, I wondered, is it possible for a Kerbal to "Get out and push"? Now, rather than just asking the question, I went and tried it out. I put a command pod on a highly elliptic orbit with periapsis just outside of atmosphere, waited to apoapsis, then had my brave Kerbalnaut get out and rcs against the pod for a few seconds. I only managed to change the velocity by a few m/s, but I got some "free" delta V and managed to save a Kerbal that would have otherwise been doomed. Now, I don't think this is a game changer in any way. To go anywhere meaningful you would need enormous amounts of time babysitting the command pod, but I do think it's amusing, and a testament to the physics engine, even in its alpha state. Also, it means that stranded Kerbals in a pod in deep space aren't as doomed as they may have thought--they can always just push their pods to the nearest planet, and hope that the devs don't add a limit to the amount of EVA RCS fuel a pod carries.

Minmus, 18 hrs, 59 minutes, 42 seconds. No mods, cheats, or even mid-flight saves/reloads. I lost the descent stage on landing, but Danlin is alive! http://i.imgur.com/r0j77.jpg http://i.imgur.com/xrQsJ.jpg http://i.imgur.com/lCnqq.png Launch image of the same craft, on a different flight: http://i.imgur.com/qwBiz.jpg

Doesn't Aerocapture/Aerobrake altitude depend heavily on the craft's ballistic coefficient? Or do these altitudes work well for pretty much any size craft that could reasonably enter the planets' orbit? I know that the aerodynamics are not yet fleshed out in the game, so I wouldn't be surprised if this is an area where you can't apply real physics yet.