Corona688

What if you only heard sounds with live cockpits, not probe cores?

Get the staging right and you don't even need a probe core for seprotrons.

Are they solids or something? Get a brave kerbal to spacewalk and they might be able to ignite them.

I did my first in-cockpit docking with a special craft that staples the station to its forehead:

I know, but there's not much point making a huge lander without it. You could have a big orbiter perhaps, carrying enough fuel to send the "boat" down several times, plus facilities for scientists.

How about a big, reusable miner as a lander? The monster in your image doesn't look quite so silly when it keeps all its tanks, and it'd have plenty of use for a big crew. Six-to-ten big, not forty-big. Send your pilots out on crawlers to gather data. Engineers will be busy running mining equipment. Some scientists will be busy in the lab, and more will be needed to reset instruments when the crawler comes back. Then once it's refueled itself, the whole thing lifts off and lands at another mineral patch. Rinse and repeat until you've extracted enough scientific value from the moon to justify sending that bloody huge thing.

I took a contract to retrieve a part from the moon! On the first touch of grabber, the part fell into the mun, down through it, and away at solar escape velocity.

My stations accumulate empty stages and useless return craft like noses accumulate hair: I greatly regret not taking a screenshot of my most messed up station while I had the chance. It looked like a hedgehog of mainsails...

By popular request they added a three-man pod with splendid durability. Then they had to jack its weight up until "re-entry without parachute" stopped being the smartest option.

It's not always possible to make it tip-heavy when 90,000 tons of engines and fuel are below the payload, so a skipper engine may not be enough control authority on a rocket that big. Either some swivel fins or some thuds may help.

...and by official IRC, they mean Official IRC. I saw Nova active there once.

In all my years of playing KSP I've been to Eve, Duna, and Jool. Most of the rest don't look too interesting. Moho's a hot lump, eeloo's a cold lump, etc.

@KSK remember, this isn't about making KSP more realistic! It's about making it more awesome. People depend on map view sound, knowingly or not. (...Did I just run out of fuel? *revert*) I fully support the idea of better sounds in general! I don't think its as easy as it seems though. I've taken a few cracks at it, but just try and find a good, clean recording of a rocket engine test that isn't saturated, and isn't full of rushing wind, scattering debris, or alarms. If I try again, I'll start small - the Ant sound especially bugs me, it sounds like a crappy bearing. Part of that "raspberry all the way to orbit" sound is unintended resonance, I'm pretty sure, from running the same 7 sounds in a loop on top of each other.

Sound interesting, I hope for pictures!

I agree, launch ASAP. The closer it gets, the more delta-V it takes to match it (lots of energy is wasted leaping sideways). Don't go outside Duna, though. Right location, wrong speed, wrong time. The asteroid will be zooming far past its periapsis before you get close. The asteroid will be going like a bat out of hell by the time it hits the inner system, you see. To catch up, you need to go even faster. Instead of heading out for duna, fall towards the sun. Your own periapsis around the sun will be the best time to effect changes on your course. Disclaimer: That was just mocked up in a paint program, not a real course, just my vivid imagination of how it would go.

I'm thankful the devs have kept it open-sandbox and resisted the urge to dumb down things for the average player. I think people underestimate the average player. My own theory, just because the goo dissolves in water, is that they're dye packs for life rafts a la Gemini 4. Someone in planning bought 500 surplus as they looked like space parts.

Hear me out -- this is not about pointless realism. There's situations in KSP where the sound is rather poor: Violent splashdowns. We've all heard that weird echo chamber that happens when 19 parts splashdown near-simultaneously. Large takeoffs. Igniting twelve engines simultaneously doesn't sound like twelve engines, it sounds like one big one plus an echo effect. Complicated staging. Twelve decouplers don't sound like twelve decouplers, just one big one. Violent impacts. Ditto. You get the idea. There's lots of situations where KSP piles on 7 identical sounds to poor effect. Variation needs to be thrown in somehow. I propose playing sound effects for sources far from the camera POV a touch later than sources nearby. Not for realism's sake - if anything, an exaggerated effect might sound better. Just to break those awful echo effects up into distinct sounds. Imagine a splashdown that sounds like several impacts, twelve decouplers detaching with a z-z-z-z-zip, jet engines winding up with that high-pitched resonance... Stuff like that.

Game mods push required system specs up up up up up. That's the biggest attraction of a stock game to me, that it actually works..

No matter what units you put on it, electricity's not going to make sense right now. I don't know if we really need to worry about volts, amps and watt-hours. If you take voltage out of the equation - which you mostly do with chemical cells, where 1.2v is full and 1.1v is flat -- everything's just energy in the end.

Realistically speaking, I have no idea how you'd deinflate something like that. You can make it leak, sag and go flat, but it won't politely fold back up the way it started. And re-inflate? Space balloons are inflated by tiny, special-purpose solid-fuel engines. Once they're burned, they're burned. Perhaps they could be repacked and refurbished by an engineer like parachutes are.

They've been continuously updating KSP for how many years? It's far, far too late to DLC it apart like a thanksgiving turkey and they know it. The word you're looking for is "expansion pack". It might be good or might suck. How well it sells will determine the future of the game.

Macintosh here. I was a PC user, but my PC died and I had a mac handy for work reasons. It turned out to be surprisingly comfortable and capable. Still I will probably go PC again someday so I can use my better video card.

Jeb has horrible luck in my games. He strands himself, breaks everything (see also: strands himself), somehow misses training points, and ends up lingering in space while others make the records. Val on the other hand is a good luck charm. Even as a test pilot for dangerous low-tier airplanes, things go right more often than not. Neither of them are first on the moon, though. That's usually Bob. Got to send a scientist to reset the materials bay twice or thrice enroute.

When you hear of a "wicked burn" or "savage burn" you wonder what the TWR was.

Realism overhaul did not exist when they made that one, it was done for giggles. When I told the author of the problem, he told me to fix it myself and leave him alone. Most KSP rockets get similar performance to RL hypergolics like hydrazine/nitrogen tetroxide mixes. This also explains how they can be restarted so trivially.