Wheehaw Kerman

So I’m the kind of guy who insists on putting NERVAs behind Rockomax adapters to simulate radiation shielding because the game inexplicably omits a radiation mechanic. “Necessary to preserve some semblance of verisimilitude because the devs listened to people who think hard isn’t fun” is still necessary to some of us. Just like maintaining a 3:1 seat:Kerbal ratio on missions to simulate LS, for the same reason.

We’re re basically old men yelling at clouds in a children’s game, yes :). But there is a bit of a difference between putting stale overused bad SF tropes in a game for discerning adults and exposing kids to the stuff…. I console myself with the fact that I was obsessed with UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle as a small kid, but on the gripping hand some people still believe in that stuff as adults, and have the vote. The plaque should read “she came in short and really hot, but never dropped the mic”.

I thought I would be a lot angrier about the ancient aliens [lengthy string of expletives deleted]. It’s an old stale lazy trope that usually makes for bad SF unless really well done, but after the first three monuments (and a heroic long range brief glimpse of the Tylo monument by Whatsername Kerman who is definitely getting her crater named after her) I think I hold my nose and not complain too much. I mean, Kerbals explore because it’s there but some humans might need something more…

Also, trusses will be really useful if they add radiation for all those big nuclear drives and reactors. Heavy shielding vs simply distancing via a long truss would make for some interesting design decisions.

You can use the rotate and translate tool to slide a round truss over a radiation detector instrument and hang batteries and an antenna off it. It’s more length efficient…

You sound surprised?

You can manage this in some cases by subtracting the planned delta v from the delta v remaining shown in the staging stack in lower right, and stopping the burn when the delta v remaining hits the resulting number.

First time I got to Duna I turned the UI off and just savoured the view and the soundtrack for a long time. Mostrom hammered it out of the park.

Hm. Frankly not surprised to read this - I would have been surprised if you’d been doing something whacky. Maybe you’re running into some sort of bug? I’ve got less than a dozen re-entries from the Mun and Minmus so far, but aside from some broken parachutes have not had any issues.

Not to pick a fight with or belittle anybody to whom $50 is a lot of money, but if it’s a basic truth that the price tag triggered a lot of people, another basic truth is that to a lot of people $50 isn’t as big a deal as it is to some. $50 for the EA plus the extremely high likelihood of a feature complete v.1.0 for free eventually and the ability to tag along for the game’s development (with bonus arguments on the forums!) was and remains a perfectly acceptable deal to a lot of us, and one that’s looking better following For Science!.

I try to avoid that. Not sure whether this is standard, but on approach to Kerbin, I’ll burn any remaining fuel at an angle between retrograde and radial out, to slow myself down while retaining a nice comfy safe periapsis of at least 30 kilometres, and jettison the last stage as soon as I hit 70 kilometres or when it runs dry. I never really liked this - NASA wouldn’t have built that much margin for error into a craft, but at least it makes for a gentler re-entry for the crews.

I’m a don’t care. I think that For Science! did more to dispel the, um, anxiety around here about the future of the game than any number of updates and dev blogs and what nots. I think I’m quite comfortable with IG’s current comms strategy, and would rather they emphasized hammering the next roadmap items out of the park, like they did with For Science! Deeds not words, or Roadmap releases not comms, IMHO.

It was part of the first game until Contracts came in. After that we at least took Reputation hits for, say, roasting a bunch of tourist shots on re-entry. KSP is definitely not NASA. Iterative failure until success isn’t just an option, it’s part of the game’s DNA. But I think I like having stronger disincentives for failure, though. And I definitely get more attached to my Kerbals than many - I’m still cheesed off that I killed Val and Tim C. before I even left Kerbin SOI in my first Exploration save. I like a game where failure hurts - it’s a better incentive to do better, IMHO. I think we’ve discussed my views on life support and how rescue missions and how they shouldn’t be a thing unless you packed enough life support :)?

It’s exactly the same deal, but for ludicrous profits in Contracts mode, basically. Really opens up the mid game fast, by reducing grind for money.

It’s not quite as appalling as sticking nine command chairs in a 2.5 M service bay, stacking two of those in a Mün lander, and doing a mass tourist mission - I felt worse about doing that, and differently bad about feeling so smug about it :).

Something that bugged me with KSP1 was how you could launch a simple early game craft into a polar orbit and get an EVA report from each biome in a single very profitable launch - it was a bit OP and I felt a bit guilty about exploiting it. Hopefully we’ll get some sort of scanning functionality that does incentivize polar orbits, though…

So earlier this evening, I dropped a prob into Jool behind a medium heatshield and wrapped in a fairing - overall it was proportioned rather like a rifle bullet. The thing promptly tumbled and stabilized point first, and when I tried to orient it properly it re-stabilized sideways on. Imagine my surprise when it didn’t burn up - everything was still intact when the re-entry effects stopped and I jettisoned the fairing. Given past experience I was expecting rapid overheating inside the fairing, but apparently not on Jool…

I’m not terribly fussed about the science mechanics - they’re a bit basic ATM but I expect some development, expansion and refinement as the game is developed. It’s a draft - there will be progress. What is annoying me a wee bit is the complete lack of consequences that you point out. You can build wasteful designs and kill or maroon Kerbals with wild abandon and no gameplay impact - there’s no incentive to build good craft and fly them well, and no downside to messing up. So far, at least. And there really isn’t much by way of constraints, either. The constraints in KSP1 were kind of artificial, unrealistic, and gamey, but working within them to hone down a lean, mean, and efficient design was a lot of fun. There’s nothing preventing us from spamming parts and brute forcing things. Yet, anyhow. I do think, though, that this game is not meant for people like us - older, fairly well educated, intelligent adult space nerds. It’s meant for kids. Intelligent kids, so hopefully the end result will not be dumbed down to a point where people like us won’t enjoy it, but building a game tailored too closely to us is probably going to leave a lot of audience members and sales on the table.

I will happily drop the discussion pending the Resources drop… maybe I’m reading too much into it, but Resources might be an abstracted economics system. Or it could be merely logistics. Quite curious…

Amen, brother. My take on Commnet in KSP1 went from “confused and annoyed” to “constellation architecture is fun and I wish it had realistic antenna orientation constraints!” really quickly. A constellation of comsats adds very little weight and bulk to a lander/small station/return vehicle launch. You can go from zero to orbital station and communications constellation in one go.

I’m going to point out that we’ve seen rockets reach space launched by nations across the ideological spectrum - from literally fascist, a couple of flavours of Communist, various liberal democracies, at least one fundamentalist theocracy, and whatever North Korea is. They’ve all used money. From this I conclude that the game needs to emphasize accounting as much as it does life support and advances in financial systems need to be reflected in the tech tree as much as bigger rockets :).

It’s not an ideological conversation - it’s a technological and organizational one :).

Sort of like what we just did over the past few days, or are you talking more “how much more difficult this is going to get” than “how wrong some of us were”, or both?

I avoided using the Lander Can for re-entry in KSP1 for exactly that reason - the sides overhanging the heatshield just looked like a recipe for flaming catastrophic disaster. I’m glad it doesn’t work anymore.

Hopefully, Colonies, Interstellar, and Resources are going to bring the challenge back. The devs have planned more systems to work with, and they may have opted to have early game easier - For Pedagogy?. Also, something that occurs to me is that the incredibly short shrift our old buddies the Mün and Minmus get is because we have seen the resource extraction and colonization content yet. We may not be heading to Duna for the third quest in the chain in the full game.