Corona688

Career mode places much less emphasis on planets IMO. Sure, you get tons of science for them, but when you've got missions expiring in days and things take weeks to arrive, it's hard to keep your attention focused.

It works! ...I'm not sure I actually netted any science points I couldn't have just by splashing down, but that was fun. Maybe there's a deeper ocean area or something.

I landed a probodyne with a swivel engine attached (no fuel) in the ocean for one of those stupid parts-testing missions and something popped up in achievements: I got a world record, "10 meters underwater"! Sure enough, the rocket engine made it heavy enough it was being pulled under the sea. I let it keep going, but its glacial pace started to bore me, so I cut the chute. Several world records later it hit bottom at 10m/s and blew up the engine -- reducing its weight and making it bouyant. Now I'm gonna try doing the same thing on purpose with thermometers and crap.

Again, its only tedious if you play it that way. There's ways to make it more efficient.

How about something just labelled '45'?

That's what I'm talking about. I do that all the time. Whenever it happens it goes back two steps. If you've been doing minor adjustments its easy to not realize.

There are quite a few things to find on the moon. Craters, trenches, plateaus with their own readings to report. Once you go beyond that, things get simpler... I spent a long time on Minmus trying to get different samples from the 'seas' and the heights -- either I picked all the wrong spots or there's no difference.Encouraging exploration is always a good thing.

It's not black and white. There's situations you can't return samples -- try getting anything back from Jool's core*. Transmission should be worth something, but shouldn't be as farmable as it is. Also... It's possible to get stuck. I've always worried that could happen in career mode, and the ability to make small amounts of progress helps. If you've made bad choices in the tech tree it's hard to earn more science, but not impossible. They could make creative designs and do creative missions... or just farm. In practice it becomes a bit of both. I did a lot of Kerbin exploration and found some neat things, but when you're 1 point away from earning a vital part and out of biomes to explore... Also... Making it black and white would also make research a lot less interesting. Jool is a good example actually. How to transmit enough data from Jool's atmosphere before your batteries die and/or your probe implodes? Make it bigger -- more batteries, faster transmitter. Make it bigger yet, multiple transmitters and sensors. Or make up the difference with lots of cheap probes. Or give it a rocket to generate power and slow its descent. Or more chutes and a horde of pasted-on solars. Or strap on some of those heavy, weak, but endless RTG's. Or arrive in an orbit which aerobrakes repeatedly, buying time to transmit. Or lots of things I haven't even thought of. Partial progress through transmits lets you fart around, make mistakes, have fun, blow things up, struggle and still make (slower) progress. I think this is why they made research the way they did. We're good enough at the game to have science down to a science, know all the parts we're going to get, plan and breeze our way through the tech tree, planning missions around points, not curiosity. In short it's tedious because we are. *Actually that sounds interesting now. Let me think on that.

No. No you can't, because this reminds me of another.The time I landed on the dark side of Ike and waited for a pretty sunrise...

I have never, ever seen ctrl-z go back exactly one step or exactly any other number of steps... Just two.

Yes, and what else? Mods seem to accumulate featuritis far faster than the game itself does, since they can't integrate the way a real improvement does. One cleanly integrated feature takes a dozen little knobs to replace when you have to nail it to the side.

It kind-of works... It goes back two steps, not one. Which means if you loaded your ship then accidentally dragged it into the trash, you can't ctrl-z to get it back, having only done one step.

The ones involving time should really stick to one measure, yes, and state it plainly, some of them are completely ambiguous right now. Weight is probably OK as is if they make it state a unit.

The flight planner would be more useful if it could drop you out of timewarp when the window arrives. You could slap on timewarp x 10,000 and go for coffee and not fear flying past.

I really love it, a way to plot courses without it actually flying for me. I've been able to get away with not using mods to plot courses to distant planets and back. I've never touched mechjeb. A few things would make it even better: 1) Persistence. If I save and quit, it'd be lovely to not lose my planned courses. 2) Wake-ups. All too often I've blown past my planned course corrections on high timewarp. It makes sense for the game to wake up when crossing times I've explicitly marked for it. I know there's probably mods for this but something built-in would be much simpler and more elegant. Mods tend to accumulate a lot of baggage.

... Calculators for solar cells. Cheap, promotional calculators, lots of them.

Whoops, craft link is now fixed. The J3 has 249 parts, vs the J1's 376.

Another good one I just remembered, more of a not-getting-back-from-space-today: As you can see, there was a major staging problem and all the return rockets accomplished was tumbling the station like a thrown jack. So I sent up a probe! And docked it successfully! (How, I will never know, as I had not quite grasped the concept of 'target' yet) ...the sideways coupler was seriously bugged in this version, and the little escape probe began turning in non-Ecludian directions and pushing the whole station around on a tumble that no amount of RCS could stop. So I turned on timewarp, resulting in not just one explosion but a great many. Each extra 'ship' and 'probe' in the name is a separate explosion, that's how the bug worked. I eventually just dumped the whole station onto the landscape and hoped I'd overengineered it enough. I had.

Oh god, page 6 and I've already got the hiccups! An early experiment with mainsails and the big solids... The bottom stage went up... the top stage did not...

Beautifully simple.

Introducing the J3, which looks like a can of orange soda on the ground and a stubby bomb in orbit. j3.craft It lifts 237 tons of cargo into LKO or 219 into higher orbits, and includes better amenities like heavy SAS, batteries, large RCS tank and illumination with over 125 fewer parts than the original J1. RCS thrusters are no longer included since they're not actually needed to maneuver anymore. A few breakthroughs made this possible: 1) Putting more fuel into the station section so everything behind it can use orange tanks. 2) Asparagusing everything. (You heard it here first, asparagus as a verb!) Far less engine waste and a shorter, stronger rocket. 3) Ditching the spine. No longer necessary.

I suppose you could try hyperedit. It can teleport ships but I don't know if it can manage EVA's. Though I'd be inclined to test then send a better, unmanned vehicle to rescue.

Because I totally forgot to take pictures of hauling this thing to Duna and back, you get to see it sitting on the launch pad: You might recognize my mini asparagus arrangement, to which I added twin disposable SCIENCE BOOMS with literally all the goodies. (Atmosphere analyzer, sample bay, goo, gravy, seismic, pressure, temp.) In NASA tradition the SCIENCE BOOMS are bizarrely asymmetric yet carefully balanced(since I didn't want to bring two air analyzers, two goo pods, two sample bays, etc, etc). It was unexpectedly efficient at reaching Duna orbit so I managed to bring the SCIENCE BOOMS all the way to Ike(after re-docking with the go-home unit). The SCIENCE BOOMS and landing gear were discarded there for the trip home. Which was fun to rescue Jeb from because the jerk managed to end up in a retrograde Kerbin orbit.

If you attached any probe bodies the ship should still be controllable. You should also check if its still possible to 'revert' by this point.

You are assuming I don't enjoy explosions. This is not the safest assumption.