mrxak

I'm definitely hoping that we will see a resource mining system in place in the final game. Obviously it's not needed to do everything in the game, so newbies can ignore it. Heck, we saw in one of the streams that somebody had managed a Grand Tour with a four part stock rocket. The docking system already gives us the ability to refuel, so there are endless possibilities for a "beginner" who doesn't want to touch resource mining. But resource mining doesn't have to be as complicated as the chart they initially showed off. I myself had some concerns about the amount of weight I'd need to launch just to get all the necessary equipment in place for even the simplest of mining operations. Perhaps, eventually, we'll see something much more simple. One module that mines liquid fuel components, and another that refines them into liquid fuel. Then another module that collects oxygen from an atmosphere and fills up the other part of the tank with oxidizer. You can take away a lot of the boxes and arrows from the chart, and still have a fully functional resource system. If that saves me from having to launch dozens of refuelers, that's really all I need. It doesn't need to be complicated to provide worthwhile functionality. Include Kethane-style scanners that can say this region of the Mun has all the materials needed for this type of resource, and land a refinery. Newbies don't have to worry about the chemical ratios of Oxium and Propelium, just that everything they need for a particular fuel type is present at a given location. Let the refinery module worry about collecting the right materials in the right proportions. Discard the rest as waste, spewing out into the ground, the atmosphere, or space. But again, none of this is necessary for beginners to play the game, until they decide to try something more advanced, just like beginners don't ever need to use nuclear or ion propulsion. But it will provide a great deal more depth to the game for more advanced players, and after all, beginner players eventually become more advanced, and it'd be nice if they had more to do.

There are things that are important, and at the very top of the list is the continued survival of the human race. Preventing a killer asteroid is part of that. So is colonizing other planets and other solar systems. I will gladly salute anyone who is working towards those goals, and Ed Lu is one of those people. He'll have my eternal gratitude once the program is up and running. In the meantime, he has my deep respect just for trying, and just for talking about it as much as he can. We should have been doing this decades ago, and I'm glad he and his colleagues are on the case. It sounds like they've got a tremendous team with serious skills and knowledge. I'm confident in their success, and the project has my full support. I agree with many others that his stream during KerbalKon was a major highlight, and I hope his talk resulted in a lot of donations. I don't care what anyone says, a real astronaut came and talked with us live, and that's a big deal. That's a very brave and incredibly talented man, who could have done anything with his life, but he's chosen to do something very important and selfless, to literally save the planet, and we should be honored that he took the time to talk to us.

I don't think that feature is dead, but what we will eventually get will be much more simplified over what they first teased. I certainly think in the short term, they'll get some backlash over that announcement, though, so I hope they clarify and hopefully that will calm everyone down.

Seems pretty self-explanatory. Scope complete means all the bare bones of the game exist, the basic engine features and so on, whereas feature complete is more of a content thing, like more planets, more biomes, better graphics/effects, new parts, every tweakable you could ever want, everything perfectly balanced and playtested etc. etc. Once the game is scope complete, they can work on all those little things that everybody wants, but aren't major priorities right now. Squad wants to get the game scope complete this next year, so basically by 2015 we'll see all the aspects of the game implemented at least at a basic level (or so they hope). So career mode will have the three currencies implemented, for example, instead of just the one, though maybe there won't be all the experiments and such that will be in the final game. Multiplayer will exist, though may not be polished. I got the impression that resources aren't dead, per say, so we might see some basic implementation of that, too.

So I've never been much of a spaceplane pilot. Building them never was very interesting to me, flying them even less so. But with Science, suddenly I see spaceplanes as very useful, particularly with conducting atmospheric studies over a variety of biomes in Kerbin's atmosphere. Perhaps in the future when we have biomes for Laythe, they'd be even more useful, since surely a long-range aircraft flying through the atmosphere of a planet so far away would be more efficient than sending multiple landers that take readings as they come down to the ground in various areas of distant worlds. Now, I understand the basics of spaceplane construction. I can absolutely build a solid, maneuverable craft capable of reaching the altitudes I want and flying around for a while. What I don't know, simply due to my inexperience, is how to tweak a craft for optimal range. To that end, I'm looking for some guidance. What makes for an extremely long-range airplane? I'm talking about around-the-world trips, here. The longer the range, the more biomes can be Science'd in a single trip. It seems to me that higher altitudes have less air resistance, and so the plane wouldn't have to work so hard to push through it all. On the other hand, higher altitudes have to cover more distance, take more fuel to reach to begin with, and may have more intake needs, which adds weight. There's also the matter of how much lift is really needed, and how big or small a plane I should be building. Or perhaps, I should build some kind of glider that does sine waves through the atmosphere with the engines off much of the time. So, anybody got a lot of experience with long-range aircraft? I'm not looking for anything that leaves the atmosphere, just something that can cover the most distance possible while conducting Science in either the upper or lower atmosphere (whichever gets the most range) or both (if the ideal elevation is somewhere around the 18km border). I'm not above copying aspects of another person's spaceplane if anyone has pictures of some range-optimized craft. Please share!

I'd like to see a lot more structural parts, in general, of varying lengths and sizes and shapes. The more the merrier. If there was a KSP release with nothing but new structural parts, I'd be happy.

Presumably there would be expansion joints and ridiculously strong futuristic materials composing the entire structure. Any civilization with the energy to even get such a massive structure in orbit would surely have advanced materials as well. Would it be an engineering marvel? Heck yeah. But even large structures today on Earth are designed to be somewhat flexible, or they'd tear themselves apart too from wind or the shifting of the ground. We just need new materials that can handle greater stresses than we're used to accounting for.

They've suggested they might someday have some expansions that add significant features, with enough content that would be worthy of a whole expansion, but they're really focused on KSP for the time being, making it the best game it can be in the scope they want KSP to have. Stuff that would go beyond the scope of KSP as a game essentially about building and flying rockets, they may someday do but it's a long way off.

There are a handful of technological steps along the path of civilization that I think, broadly speaking, can apply to every species. 0. Tool building. 1. Dominion over food sources (through agriculture, aquaculture, domestication of animals, etc.), and raw materials (mining, logging, etc.), moving away from hunting and gathering. 2. Mass production of tools and machines such as with assembly lines, factories, automation. 3. Orbit achieved around planet (including landing on any moons). 4. Escape velocity achieved from planet to reach other planets, asteroids, etc. in the solar system. 5. Escape velocity from solar system to reach other solar systems. 6. Escape velocity achieved from galaxy to reach other galaxies. 7. Escape velocity achieved from the observable universe to beyond the observable universe (FTL). Roughly, 3-6 requires a certain amount of energy, and so would be comparable to the Kardashev scale. 7 is impossible... or so we think so now. 0-2 is necessary to achieve 3+ with any regularity (otherwise it's a fluke). Right now we're at 4 with our probes, and we're flirting with 5, but for humans themselves we're a fairly pathetic 3. I can't imagine any species that have achieved interstellar travel being all that interested by us, and even if we start colonizing the rest of our solar system they still probably wouldn't care too much about us unless they wanted resources from our solar system and we happened to be in the way.

The problem with images is alien beings will not have the same visible spectrum for their vision, if they even have eyes at all. They could use echolocation for all we know. Speaking of hearing, they might have a very different frequency range of hearing, too.

The new nuclear thermal engine can get there with a single tank (the biggest one) of fuel, with a reasonable lander. It'll take a very long time, but you can intercept its orbit. Here's the lander I used (click for bigger): Just stick that (or something of a similar mass) on top of the biggest fuel tank, a nuclear thermal engine, and get the whole thing up into orbit. It'll take forever, but you'll have plenty of fuel leftover to land. No promises about getting back. Here's another picture from a lower angle. That's Jeb, making his first steps on another planet. Remember, the specific impulse of the nuclear engine is pretty horrible in an atmosphere, so keep it conventional for the first 100km. Here, took another shot in the VAB of the interplanetary stage. It's really that simple (though I'm thinking I might beef it up a bit since it's so slow). The liftoff stage is rather huge, but that part is relatively easy to figure out on your own.

There are only a handful of names that survive more than a couple hundred years. Fewer still that last millennia. People will know the name Neil Armstrong probably forever. My parents were younger than I am now when man first step foot on another world. Neil Armstrong was one of the first people I ever even heard about that was famous. Growing up, I heard about where my parents were that day. About them watching those images. I wasn't around to see it, but I'll tell my kids about it, and they'll tell my grandkids. And on and on... People aren't going to remember Curiosity in a ten thousand years or even a hundred. They will remember Neil Armstrong.

I can't believe nobody's pointed out the obvious. It's the Space Kraken. Style of the photo reminds me of another creature.

I believe only L4 and L5 can be faked, but the physical model used by KSP doesn't allow true Lagrangian points.

If you can get to Mun, you should be able to get to Minmus fairly easily. Sure, it may take a few orbits of Kerbin, but just fast forward and keep at it if you didn't line up the perfect Minmus shot. As long as your apoapsis is close to Minmus' orbit line, you should enter its SOI eventually, and patched conics helps a lot in showing you when that will be. The only real difficulty is the tilt, which you can try to achieve yourself with a normal or anti-normal burn (that's "north" or "south" while orbiting Kerbin at the equator). Just keep at it a bit, until you see you'll enter Minmus' SOI. When you do, just do a retrograde burn and land. Keep at it, make small adjustments and be prepared to wait. You might not be able to get the most efficient interception all that easily, but the additional fuel needed to reach Minmus, compared with the reduced fuel you'll need landing on and taking off from Minmus, means any Mun rocket should have no problem with Minmus missions. Cool communications system!

One of these rovers, I really hope they stick a big enough power source and a 1080p 30 FPS video camera on it with a powerful enough antenna to stream the video back "live" 24/7. How amazing would that be? A Martian webcam! We need to get James Cameron hooked on space instead of the ocean, so he starts building and launching his own Martian rovers instead of submarines. Then we'd get good video!

This post gives me so much hope for the future. Never be ashamed of your interest in this stuff. This is important, more important than any other Earthly concerns, and your interest in it is what makes even greater achievements possible in the future.

This is, in my opinion, the most important step in our exploration of space since the Apollo program, and our exploration of space is the most important thing we as humans can do. I am drinking champagne, and fighting back the tears. This is a night I'll remember as long as I live. Long live Curiosity, and long live curiosity!

My first rocket in 0.16 (well, second, but moments after liftoff I realized I forgot to include landing struts and quickly went back to the VAB ) barely made it to the Mun. I\'m talking not even a sliver visible left on the fuel tank meters, mere fumes left on touchdown. That\'s fine though, the view was worth it! (Full size png, which I am now using as wallpaper) Jeb naturally had the honor of the first moonwalk, but after a few minutes proving it was safe, he was joined by Bob, then finally Bill. That\'s Bill, Jeb, and Bob from left to right in the picture. A rescue mission is currently in the planning stages.

Thank you so much for making the full download available on the store. Finally was able to get this tonight, and launched my first mission. This is the most incredible update yet. Already this game feels so much more... human. Greetings from the Mun! (Click for a full sized PNG) From left to right, that\'s Bill, Jeb, and Bob, watching the sunrise. They\'ll watch quite a few, seeing as how I ran out of fuel on my poorly designed rocket, and it may be some time before I can rescue them. Thanks again!

Well it makes sense (at least to me) that IVAs and docking sort of go together. Picture it, actually building a space station, with all sorts of internal space, and then docking ships with it. Anyway, total speculation on my part, but I think we\'ll get docking and IVAs in the next release. I can\'t imagine what other big features they need to implement, in the short term, and they\'ve already done a fair bit of work on both as I understand it. Sure, there\'s more planets, more physics, more parts, and they could probably take another crack at spaceplanes, but we\'ve got actual physical Kerbals now, and all sorts of interactions with their environments. Docking and IVAs being next makes a lot of sense. Anyway, I know of at least two people who have gone and purchased a KSP license, due to 0.16 alone.

I really couldn\'t agree more, but I do think the patcher problem exacerbated the bandwidth issues they were having, and do hope there are no more patcher problems.

Well, hopefully for the next release, the patcher will work, or there will be some kind of queuing system for download, and people won\'t be downloading many multiple corrupted/failed patches. That will certainly cut down on bandwidth use, I\'m sure. And nobody will be broadcasting the first Mars landing live. Mars is far enough away from Earth that any transmitted signal will take 4-20 minutes to get here. I doubt somebody will invent FTL TV signals before we have our first manned Mars mission.

I\'m not sure how much bandwidth it is to download the patch, relative to how much a full download of 0.16 would be, but I\'m sure with all the patcher problems a lot of people are exceeding that amount already, which sort of defeats the purpose Oh well. I\'m bummed out I haven\'t gotten a chance to play this yet, and the patcher ruined my 0.15 version so I can\'t play at all now, but I\'m sure it\'ll be worth the wait.

Well, I was just playing around putting some new satellites in orbit of Mun, when 0.16 popped up! I\'m looking forward to finally walking around on the Mun, woo!