TKO

But why wait for a reply? This new update is full of parts! More parts, more suits, more stuff! My most cynical take is this: Each time a new version comes out, I make a zip of it, or a copy of the directory. If we ever get to a version that's totally messed-up our ability to mod, fine, we can go back to the last good one. KSP and the community will go on, even if something bad eventually happens through updates. In the mean time, I'm just gonna throw money in and see what new parts come out at the next update lottery.

Whelp, it looks like my Steam account got the expansion automatically as I'm a long time player. But my wife's account didn't, so I've bought another expansion as a gift. May even do the same for my brother. Whatever your feelings may be on who owns who these days, and where the money goes.. I've got so so much more than my money's worth out of this game with the hours I've put into it. I'm happy to put a few more dollars in the hope that development may go on just a little bit longer. Keep up the good work guys! I'll get back to building a new plane, and a rocket .. then constructive stuff like another multi-missile launcher. hehe. (You guys should try crazy stuff like that. It's a lot of fun.)

While I do feel it's totally awesome that there is now an alternative launch-site, I too agree that the site could do with a little love. The old runway, and the Old KSC (still present in the game) have an extra building or two, and it adds so much to the immersion. A hangar or VAB, a dirt track or two, and a single radar dish would make me happy. Of course, I appreciate that this does take time to create and place well (even if parts are cloned from part of the new or old KSC) .. I'm just saying I'd like to see it there. And once it's there, I'm sure I'll start thinking "wouldn't it be nice if there were another runway or VAB or two dotted about the globe? How about some faux-cities? A mun-base? Naturally there would be a minmus-base too, why wouldn't there be .. and ..

I really wish you guys all the best there. I know what it's like to go through this kind of stuff, and I hope the worst is over now. I've been in Christchurch, New Zealand all my life, and when the quakes started hitting here in 2011 it was truly surreal. (September: 7.1M 11km deep, February: 6.3M 5km deep, June: 6.4M 7km deep, etc) ..and the many hundreds of small, and not so small, aftershocks that happened around those quakes. ..we've lost a lot of historic buildings. A lot of people left. (Thankfully, relatively few people died.) But I have stayed here. (I was always going to stay.) And it's great to be a part of the rebuild, and see people slowly returning to the city. We had truly great search-and-rescue teams that came here from our neighbours/allies. The Japanese teams were brilliant here too, (unfortunately having to go back home to the Japan earthquake/tsunami soon after.) And I hope you're receiving similarly great assistance there too. It makes all the difference. I hope the Squad crew, and all of the people in your life, remain safe. I hope the only screen-wobble you see in the near future is from those glorious overpowered rockets in KSP.

Um, wasn't my solution exactly that? Approaching the ship and making changes to it with a couple of engineers and parts you've brought up with you. (Which encourages learning orbital rendezvous .. Kerbal bonus!) I never suggested magically opening the VAB up in space. You might have got that from @blackline's original post. My suggestion is opening the VAB *interface* with the correct in-orbit background because, after all, there's going to be nothing more tedious than trying to build by directly controlling an engineer in EVA .. there does have to be a sensible building interface for it to practically work. There could be risk to it too: want to weld that fuel-tank to the existing fuel-tank with a particularly inexperienced engineer? Boom! Not sure where you got the idea of telepathy .. I suspect you mean telekinesis anyway.

Kerbin does really feel like it should have some kind of villages or cities dotted about the planet. They could be completely non-functional things, and more simplified representations rather than realistic cities .. especially at a distance. Then the demands on the graphic-card aren't too bad. Then a) Kerbin would feel more like a planet of people and societies that are *capable* of building a KSC and a Space Program, and b) it wouldn't be so much more work for modders to add some kind of airport expansions and missions. This way Squad don't have to do all the work for something that is a little tangential to the game. Adding a few cities feels like a good fit, and adding airports and missions can be left to the modders.

It would be a very Kerbal thing to do, to be trying to make repairs/additions up in space, right? Ideally, I think there should be some kind of cargo vessel you should have to rendezvous with the vessel you want to modify. And you can only add so many parts as you can fit into the cargo vessel. (Maybe with some freedoms of restriction on struts, say .. maybe the cargo vessel automatically have 50 struts and a few fuel-lines on board?) So, if you can get up there with your cargo vessel, and maybe two engineers, who probably have some nice welding equipment with them .. or perhaps there has to be an "assembly workshop" module too .. Then you can enter a version of the VAB that shows your vehicle as it is at the moment, but with a nice slowly rotating space background. And the engineers float around it and cause sparks to fly in the vicinity of recently added parts as they weld them into place. (You place them as you normally would .. the engineers are just floating around doing some touch-up work that visually enhances the space-VAB environment.) It could be quite a cool addition to the game. Just think of the possibilities with expanding a space station if you can properly attach parts, rather than having to dock modules? Some interesting vehicles could be assembled up there with this.

I'd go one further: not only should there be water propellers, there should be a dock by the KSC with a full KSY (Kerbal Ship Yard) to build and test water-borne craft in. Then you also open the possibility of having a full space program where your rockets fly to wherever, return and splash down, and then are *recovered* by recovery-vessels of your own design. The nice thing with ships is that they're dead-easy to autopilot. You can have all these autonomous vessels out recovering your capsules, solid boosters, etc that have splashed down .. and you can also build and test other propeller-driven vehicles, then import them into the VAB to put on top of a rocket bound for some watery planet/moon. (I'm kinda thinking that, by extension, there should be some dirt obstacle course near the KSC with a KRG (Kerbal Rover Garage) where you build rovers too .. but now I'm really digressing.)

I just want to lend my voice to this suggestion too. I want this! I spent a lot of time building moon rovers .. and then driving them around kerbin for fun .. then loading them on planes and flying them to various spots (ufo/temple/old-KSC/etc) .. and honestly, flying half way around the planet without some kind of basic autopilot is so so painful. Most of the time I did it with MechJeb, which is overkill when all I want is to hold at 2000m and head at x degrees most of the time.

Wow. Paid DLC had to provoke a bit of argument. It was inevitable. It looks like I probably qualify for it for free, but honestly I'd rather pay for it. I got so many hours of entertainment out of this brilliant game that I would love to feed the KSP machine so Squad have the resources to continue to work on it. Keep up the good work guys!

I just have to say thanks for making the best game I've ever played. I've been playing it since before there were struts, when two of my workmates were raving over this rocket game I'd never heard of. Now I make rockets, I make planes, and I have awesome fun making rovers. (Most of which never make it to the Mun, or deploy in such silly ways that they end up left upside-down on the Mun as I try to get home with limited fuel because I forgot put fuel lines to one of my tanks. My favourite memory: finally touching down on the Mun for the first time .. (back in the days when there was only Kerbin and the Mun.) ..and promptly falling straight through the ground and being destroyed somewhere deep 'underground' by a subterranean Mun Kraken. Yes, there was a bug in that version. The second landing, after an update, was much more successful. (I probably didn't make it home though.)

But only if you choose to run Steam. With KSP, once you've used Steam to install it, it's quite possible to go straight to the KSP folder and run KSP without steam running. You can make a copy of your KSP game folder elsewhere, mod it differently, and then you have something that you can run without Steam, and won't get trampled by any automatic updates either. Your reply gives the impression that KSP is somehow tied to the DRM that is Steam. It is not.

I'm pro-mechjeb. MechJeb is awesome. Most of my use of it is just information-displays. I don't rely on it, but there is many an hour I would have lost to boredom in KSP without it: I make planes and fly them around Kerbin looking for points of interest and occasionally deploying a rover. Is it cheating not to want to press up-arrow, up-arrow, up-arrow, for half an hour while it flies there? SAS doesn't take the curvature or Kerbin into account, so that you'd have to monitor and adjust too. People who don't want to use it, that's just fine. People who don't want to use it, and want to label others that use it as cheats .. they just need to get over themselves. I've been to the moons and back many many times over the years, manually. And now the physics model has changed, I've done them many more times, manually again. But once I get bored with that, I'm happy to plug-in MechJeb, and sit back and have a cool drink, and browse the forums while it does the menial stuff for me.

Well played Porkjet, well played. Actually, now I realise how dangerous my rocket names have been: Big Penetrator, Big Hard Thrustmaster, Big Wobbly Pleasure Machine. There are *kids* that use this PC for gods sake! ..I will immediately go through them all and remove that overly suggestive "big" word. {sigh of releif .. no, not that kind of releif}

The castle appeared multiple times in a week? Weird. I've seen it two or three times over the years. It just occasionally pops up. Always a joy to see when it does.

Excellent stuff. Try playing around with the curves tool (the one below the paint-bucket.) If you master that one you'll be able to make just about any curved line you want, but it will be so so smooth. ..And you can mix and match the tools you use - there are so many drawing programs on the Mac. I usually just switch to the one I know best for the task at hand. Even the bult-in preview app lets you paint - hit the toolbox icon to show its tools. There's a free picture app I used to use, called Graphic Converter 9 by Lemke Software. It's shareware, but they put no limit on when you have to pay. They even advertise on their webpage that you can use it as long as you want before paying for a license. Keep an eye on Pixelmator - sometimes they have some quite nice sale prices - it's very Photoshop-like, with a little more user-friendliness. There's one I'd forgotten about called "Art Rage 2", developed by Art Rage. It's got many many paintbrush, crayon, and other real-world like brush options. If you want stuff to have a real-world painted/drawn look, that's its real strength, and it's only twenty bucks. Apparently there is even a Microsoft Paint like program called "Paint" by Soggy Waffles. Free too. (I haven't tried it, because I'm alergic to MS Paint.) And if you like having an alternative pointing-device to a mouse (especially if you use computers a lot, and sometimes get a sore mousing-wrist like me), take a look at the wee Wacom Bamboo tablets. They're a great thing to switch to for general pointing duties (not just painting), and the pressure-sensitivity means you can do awesome painting tricks in apps like Acorn and Pixelmator. You'll also be able to draw freehand parachute ropes and stuff like that amazingly easy. (And you get a free Photoshop Essentials for both PC and Mac bundled with it.)

..I don't know that many of the really capable paint programs out there are particularly easy to use. I think most replies show people are just using what they know. I've been using PhotoShop since version 3.something so, though I'm not any kind of expert, I can construct some reasonable-looking things. (And I haven't found any other software as capable with text.) IrfanView is a great (free) too for quick tweaks too. On the Mac, Pixelmator and Acorn are pretty good. I almost switched entirely to Pixelmator -- great tablet support, but I just couldn't do good enough arrows and text in it, like I could in PhotoShop. I haven't found anything free on Windows that's been good enough to grab my attention. Paint.net did look promising though. But for Windows I've just stuck with an old version of PhotoShop .. and got a newer version of PhotoShop Essentials, which comes bundled with the Wacom Bamboo tablets. I haven't made any flags from scratch. I usually looked for real flags, or sci-fi emblems, scaled and cropped them to size, and applied far more vignetting than necessary.

@veeltch I always liked to put a parachute or two on the cockpit, and a decoupler immediately behind. For some of my more experimental aircraft it can be a lifesaver. (Especially in any kind of un-recoverable tumble/spin where the ground is rushing up to greet you, and any earth-pilot would simply eject.)

Are you quite sure? Look at that bike holo-lens-gram above. That looks like they're projecting black. ..But, then again, the first look at holo-lens didn't tell us the field of view would be shrunk down to a narrow narrow un-immersive postage-stamp, so they may not have been entirely truthful about that either. {intentional_snark} The second sneak-peek at holo-lens was, by all accounts, disappointing. If I were Squad I'd want to wait and see what actually comes out -- not least because microsoft have quite a history of over-promising and under-delivering. Don't get me wrong. I love the holo-lens idea. I've just been in the technology field long enough to have seen many many badly-implemented releases of initially-awesome ideas.

@skywlker ..You're right, in that it's certainly a rare thing. So, from an educational perspective about what solar-systems look like, it could be argued that it shouldn't be included in KSP. (Though, having it there could educate people to the fact that counter-orbital planets do exist too, so it does have educational value ..until this thread I don't think I was aware such things existed.) I would argue, from the perspective of a game that teaches people orbital mechanics .. and, as a game that's presumably adding planets that are interesting and challenging to get to, it should absolutely be in there. So it could be argued either way. Exactly how much restraint (for the sake of realism) is used in designing this game is down to Squad to decide, I guess.

I like this idea. ..So far I've only been able to use mechjeb to help me out with periapsis, apoapsis, time to x.., etc, information on the main view. Not a perfect solution, but it helps.

Oh, this is a totally cool idea. It might be hard to make the main game render an extended display, but surely it would be possible to run an additional process that opens its own screen, and runs a map view, picking the necessary data from the main KSP process? (This almost sounds like MOD territory.) Even better if I could get a few of my MechJeb windows to show up over there. And, just to overcomplicate things, there could be room to add a wireframe rotating display of your rocket which visually shows fuel-levels of the active stage, overheating parts, overstressed parts, etc. ..and a bobble-head Jebediah souvenir that reacts to current gravitational and physics forces. (Yeah, I've gone too far. I know.)

I very much like the idea of more artifacts turning up around the solar system. ..I'd be much more keen to visit some of the outer bodies if there was another landmark to two on each of them for me to try to find. I love the crashed-UFO in the polar ice of Kerbin. How about some more crashed ships round about? A Blake's 7 Liberator half-buried in the ground on Eve. A Babylon 5 Shadow Ship that's been half-excavated out of the ground on Duna. Think of that derelict Star Destroyer on the Star Wars trailer -- how awesome would it be to find something like that? You could even have something floating in the sea on Eve maybe. ..I'm just throwing ideas about. I don't necessarily want the make the solar system feel like it's populated, but maybe that there were ancient beings that have visited here in the distant past. A few Easter Island, Teotihuacan Pyramid, Nazca Lines (even flattened-hilltops with Nazca 'runways'), scattered around the solar system to give the player a bit of an eerie moment. ..I would love to see one or two giant statues of creatures that are obviously not Kerbal in nature. I don't think they should be placed randomly. They can be static, like the current ones. Will make it so much easier to incorporate them into the landscape properly. And players more interested in the finding than the hunting can just go to kerbal maps dot com to see where to look. (Even if you know the general vicinity, some of them are a bit of work to land nearby and find.) I love joethebeast's idea of a derelict satellite or two about the place. And, while we're at it, a few small Kerbal settlements on Kerbin. That planet feels far to barren for a species that's achieved interplanetary flight.

I like the idea of a challenge planet that orbits in the other direction. KSP isn't necessarity supposed to be limited to being analogous to our solar system (or a 'typical' solar system.) It's a game, and games should be fun. Adding this planet would be a fun challenge. Some of the real propellor-heads out there who can bulls-eye womp rats back home on their T-16 might be able to get it first time. But I bet many players out there (me included) will have to think hard about how to achieve a good interception trajectory with this one.

I like em both. Never really used planes to try for orbit, so I've got no issue with the aerodynamics. They're more for looking for scouting out anomilies on Kerbin, and just trying out new designs. (Including rover-ferries.) Rockets are equally fun. Much of the fun is just building them, which is a good thing coz the new aero has me re-learning just about everything about getting a capsule + rover into orbit. But like all good things in KSP, it's nothing that a few more boosters can't solve. With the new, much less forgiving, aero I have to be more rigorous in my new designs, which is good. Building is half the fun. If they'd stuck with the old aero I would have just been re-using my old designs fromt the last couple of years, and probably getting bored with it by now.