r_rolo1

Exactly Why would anyone land on that rugged thing if we have a perfectly flat surface bigger than it literally a couple of meters to the side?

I agree with more procedurally generated maps for all bodiesthat have a surface on KSP ... and also for a new pass on the Mun craters. One of my favourite pet peeves on this issue is that the Mun crater border ridges sometimes intersect, something that simply doesn't happen in RL craters...

Well, while I agree with the devs and the modders in this thread that a reliable dV meter is not exactly the easy task some people think it is, I do not believe that is the whole story. Unreliable gauges are not exactly uncommon IRL ( say the fuel gauge on almost all cars is dreadfully innacurate when the tank is either too full or too empty ) because , for better or worse a unreliable gauge is most of the times better than no gauge. In fact we have another unreliable gauge in game, one that spits out crazy numbers when it does not simply drop a N/A on you: the burn time ( and before you say that is a completely diferent cup of tea, notice that the modder responsible by the Better Burn Times mod said in this thread that the burn time was also whoefully complicated to get right due to the issue of edge cases ) ... and yet the same dev team that had no issues dropping a burn time that works correctly maybe 80% of the times ( and that never warns you that the time it shows might actually be a bad one, mind that ) is shy of making a even moderately unreliable dV meter ... My take on this is that the main reason we don't have a dV meter nowadays is mostly "historical" : I think it is public knowledge that Harv original idea for the game required very little use for dV meter ( or in fact, any gauges besides the ones that we have in the flight/map UI ) and that Harv was initially extremely resistant to the idea of showing much of numbers in the UI. I think the devs only realized they needed to start showing numbers in the UI when planets came out and we had the absurd situation of having to put protactors against the screen to even have a chance of having a interplanetary travel and so they were forced to actually spit out the manouver nodes, that ,as a lot of people pointed out, make very little sense without a dV meter of some kind ... so I believe that the devs intended to add a dV meter somewhere after that. The issue is that IMHO they understimated the magnitude of the work behind making one and due to that, they simply focused on stuff that looked harder/ more important to do in the next updates. This obviously untill 1.0 came out and they actually looked on doing a dV meter seriously , just to discover that it was far more complicated than they thought it was, and as they had so much to do for 1.0, well, the schmelta-Vee thing could wait And now, that we are going to the consoles, the task of making a dV meter apparently got again the back seat, but this time is more likely to be just because they want to make it right and know that they can't make one for the consoles release... P.S. Most of the above is speculative, but I think that the above is the most likely scenario, given the tidbits of intel that I gathered around during the years KSP has been around. Take it with as much salt you want....

I was the first one to find the more northern Munar Arch a long, LONG time ago ( AFAIK ).

In fact , if the Oberth effect did not worked in KSP it would be both highly noticeable and a WTF in itself, because the Oberth effect is a direct consequence of the 2nd Newton law aka the Fundamental law of dynamics ( ok ,also of the first one as well ). The laws inside of the game engine would have to be seriously twisted to have no Oberth effect without some really whacky stuff appearing elsewhere

Hum, a iceberg in the sun would be quite a easter egg

Agreed ... and TBH I do not remember this kind of outrage when Steam users got hosed by Squad when the devs decided to erase the official 64bit client of all the Steam installs of KSP in 0.90, that is pretty much a mirror situation ( and in strict sense, actually worse ) of the current issues.... a more distracted person would almost think that this was just a excuse for some anti-Steam people to vent out :/

Kerbol? What is that? Some kind of sport with a ball? :/ Seriously , when does that name goes to the same bin where it's twin "Kearth" and his cousin "Kars" are for a good couple of years? Well, on topic, yeah, THE SUN is freakishly big compared with anything inside the in game planetary system, so I would agree with a slim down.

Most interesting. Must check that when I go to Laythe next time

It was more common in older days, though ... atleast it didn't got the same treatment than the rolling helmlet one :/

Please share with us , friend ...in spoiler tags, OFC

Well, and while being in full support of what regex and razark said ( and adding the glorious and glaring omission of internal combustion engines ( rather strange given the obvious love kerbals have for exploding things ) and propellers ( atleast outside jet engines bodies )), if I had to put a date in the KSP start ... I would say the late 30s. We have radio and minimally reliable solid rocket engines, but no direct signs of electronics ( in spite of the liquid crystal velocity display on the MK1 capsule ) and no jet engines. So basically we are pretty much at the point von Braun picked things up IMHO ...

I agree with this 100% ...and given that the current aero forces display is admitedly a WIP, I don't think anyone will be against it TBH

Well, I had to edit it once when the game decided to F5 on the ground with the ship still moving, a recipe for Krakenness

Well, the biggest hurdle about any engine for KSP is the literal astronomical dimensions of the measurements in game ( distances, velocities, even masses ). People that are around here for longer surely remember the Old Kraken, that was caused by the limitations of Unity ( at the time ,atleast ) regarding calculations with big numbers ( good old floating point issues ) and that Harv hacked around by forcing a change of referential everytime you change focus ( to ensure the numbers never get too big ). Given that most engines are not made to deal with big landscapes ( as a side point, nowadays I almost burst to laugh when I see a game proudly presenting their huge expansive world of 13*8 Km .KSP really broadens your horizons ), I would say that most of the premade engines would give KSP the exact same issues ,so TBH if it was to make KSP in another engine, might as well build a custom one

AFAIK FAR voxelizes the parts to get the drag cubes needed to calculate the aerodynamic variables. If the part changes shape ( like having or not tank butts ) that might give issues ...

Well, don't get me wrong: I agree with Harv that Real orbital mechanics ( with n-body physics and even relativistic corrections ) is hard, hard enough that pretty much every RL space mission has a scheduled correction burn somewhere even if to correct calculation errors, but the conic patched and Keplerian physics KSP uses is reachable with the use of high school maths and physics ( I know, because I've used them to ilustrate some physics in tutoring ) and some heuristics can be developed if you have acess to the right information ( like the classic "to get to the Mun, burn when it rises above the horizon" ). That said, I have to thank Harv for one of the more forgotten pieces of UI in the game for making orbital mechanics more understandable: the manouver node ( and the proximity to target marckers ). Without it , going to the planets or even docking would be excruciantingly hard tasks ( like anyone that played KSP 0.15 or SimpleRockets will tell you ) ...

You mean this one, Regex? And from the responses below, you can find this gem: Thankfully Harv changed his opinion in between

While not the most important thing in my own personal list, I would like to see this implemented. Clarity in a game UI is always a good thing IMHO

Well, I for myself, can't see why nozzle size would have much to do with performance after a certain point, but yeah, the issue with the 1,25m LFO size engines ( except the Vector, that is arguably a 2,5m engine without tankbutt ) is pretty much that, due to reasons, both the double digits LVs are designed as low tech engines for career and the rest of the LFO 1,25m engines are pretty much specialist engines ( the 909 is a 3rd stage engine, the aerospike is aimed at high pressures atmo burns and the rapier, well, it is a jet engine mashed with a rocket ). So we are lacking a higher tech 1,25m first stage engine with some slightly better specs and maybe a second stage directed 1,25m engine ... That said, the Solid fuel rockets we have in game were pretty much designed as "cans full of boom" and aimed mostly to give a small extra kick at launch until the big boys on LFO start kicking ( there is a reason people consistently call them SRB ( as in Solid rocket boosters ) instead of simply solid fuel engines :/ ). In other words simple, low tech and not very strong Roman candles. Added to that, they only come at one diameter and there is very little costumization that you can do on them because they are sold with preloaded fuel tanks attached, unlike most LF/LFO/Ion engines ( imagine if all LFO engines came in like Twin Boar ... people would love it ). Besides that there is no fuel shaping avaliable or even thrust vectoring ... Ok, I digressed a little, but atleast I would like a 2,5m diameter solid fuel engine and a 0,625m engine as well. For starters, that would be nice

Nice to know, Nathan. Feel free to add some thoughts about adding some extra solid fuel rocket engines as well , given this thread comments on that

@tater I think you're misunderstanding me. I do not think that timewarping is bad, but I do not think it is good either. It is just a necessity of a game like this one. I am also not against what you're proposing, because in there time warping would make sense. I'm just against the game encouraging timewarping just because #reasons ( that normally resume to bad UI or coding , or worse, some design decisions that were probably not intended to produce that result , but do ), because I think it is a bad design decision to encourage the player to just pass at high speed through the game by no particular good reason ...like avoiding bad contracts that the game is stuffing your not unlimited contract proposals roster with

Well, I do not think timewarping is a bad thing ... it is just that is not a good thing either in game terms. In a game like KSP timewarp is something that needs to exist, because, well, space is large even on KSP scales. But actually promoting timewarp can be interpreted like the intended way to play the game is basically not interacting with the game barring at select points, a position that I think is not the devs one.

Well, beside the fact that most contracts are still nonsensical enough ( that I can live with, since contract proposals are ... contract proposals. In RL some proposals will be downright stupid as well and you're free to acept them or not ), I think the issue behind this is, like regex points above, the fact that the devs are trying to balance the gains you have from contracts via the numbers of contracts the game offers you. Given that the game already balances ( or atleast tries to ) the contract gains via the Tier system, this is somewhat not necessary. But worse, given that rather low hard cap on the number of contracts the game is allowed to propose to you at any point ( "You can have unlimited contracts, but we'll stop proposing new ones as soon as you accept 15 ..." ), you can easily get stuck with a handful of downright bad or atleast not really feasible due to context contract proposals. And then you punish the player for wanting to clear those unwanted contracts out ... My proposal would be something like this: - Limit the number of contracts only via tier system ... if needed add more tiers or coumpound this with tech levels. And be very clear about that number: don't say unlimited when you are only going to give 15 ... leave those tricks to unscrupulous mobile phone service providers - Have atleast a couple of contract proposals at all times for every body in the game. Don't try to force me to go to Duna before giving me contracts for Moho ..you don't know if I want to go to Duna - Have a more sensical rating of the contracts. No, gathering 400 ore from the Mun and deliver it to Kerbin ( a one star contract ) is not in any sense easier than a good ol'"Explore Duna" contract ( a three star contract ). This will help the newcomers making more based decisions and will also remove some assumptions about gameplay order that might make no sense depending of gameplay style. TBH if those above were implemented, I would even understand more stringent penalties for contract rouletting. But as it is now, the devs are punishing the players for some incongruent design decisions they themselves did... BTW someone pointed out above another reason to have this made in a saner fashion: the current solution promotes timewarping. Timewarping is a necessity in this game, it is nothing that needs further encouraging ( the lack of a KAC.styled agenda in stock already promotes timewarping by promoting having a single ship in air doing anything relevant at all times ). Or the devs want to pass the message that zapping through the game in time warp is the way to play? ... That would be a strange proposition

Well, I think I'm with regex on this. IMHO the Vector itself is not that OP as that, but the fact is that the Vector as it is makes both the other 1,25m attachable engines look bad and highlights the very old deficiency KSP has in terms of Solid fuel rockets, both in terms of size ( we have only 1,25m Solid fuel engines ) and of ability ( one thing that baffles me after all this years is the lack of a single Solid Fuel engine that can do thrust vectoring, something that predates the Munar landings IIRC ), but those are another issues, and if we measure by actual performance the Vector is not that diferent from a Mainsail of a Skipper...