KevinTMC

I just tried this after landing on Minmus, and the only hitch was that Bill seemed to loosen his grip on the ladder a bit whenever I held down Shift. So I couldn't play around too much with the looking in different directions...he was sliding too steadily towards the ground. Having him take a dive backwards off the ladder was certainly fun though!

Hmm...that's odd. I'm running KSP on a Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition, and haven't had any crash issues or unreasonable load times. Maybe I'm running without Turbo Core enabled somehow? (I looked in my BIOS just now and couldn't identify any option that would turn it on or off.)

I built a rocket with an SRB-only stage and noticed that it did calculate TWR for the stage, even though the delta-v was missing. Perhaps this is a hint that the fix might turn out to be simple?

I don't know about the average Kerbal...but Jeb eats solid rocket fuel for breakfast. Ever wondered about the real reason behind the launch tower's disappearance? (Yes, yes, they said they got rid of it on purpose, simply because it was in the way...but that was just the cover story of course.) One of Jeb's favorite tricks is lighting his SRB burps on fire. They kept trying to tell him that there's a time and a place for that sort of thing, and that the launch pad is most certainly not a place or it...but did he listen? Of course not.

If banning apostrophes altogether were the only way of killing the "greengrocer's apostrophe", I might just be able to get behind that.

Sounds like you may be describing what I've been seeing...a shimmer, like heat haze, that I notice when looking at things (especially Kerbals) close up. I wasn't sure whether this was an intended or unintended effect of new lighting/shading/etc. (or if possibly it was just my machine).

Working great for me. A few quirks, yes...but certainly no quirkier overall than .19.1. And performance seems better.

I load up KSP, decide where I want to send Jeb today, slap something together, and wing it. A rescue mission inevitably ensues. And that's where the meticulous planning starts to happen.

First, figure out how to get three lions into the capsule.

An update on my stability issues...I was able to make it through the Orbital Tutorial smoothly after changing from full-screen to windowed (though it's still de facto windowed thanks to the -popupwindow switch), and setting the shortcut to run in Administrator mode. Might be worth trying for any other users who started getting crashes and freezes with 0.17.

You mean the game itself? Yup. I've played 0.16 regularly since the day it came out. Had exactly one crash over that time. Downloaded 0.17 from the store yesterday afternoon, fired it up last night...got four lockups/crashes in the space of an hour. The Orbital Tutorial especially liked locking up. (Also, there was a curious thing about Map view, looking at it from Kerbin orbit in that tutorial...I didn't spot any of the other planets, but a few of their moons were clearly visible without having to look for them or zoom at all. A tutorial thing maybe?)

Ladders. Yesterday I was building a rocket with an unmanned MechJeb capsule atop a crewtank--trying to deliver stuff to a crew I've got orbiting the Mun without a lander or rover--and of course I couldn't test-launch it without adding crew. So I installed ladders reaching all the way from the crewtank to the ground, so a crewmember could be added at the launchpad. (First I had to "launch" a regular capsule atop a cart and drive it off the pad, so there'd be Kerbonauts in the vicinity who could climb aboard. If I get really ambitious I might see if I could build something taller in the bed of the large truck so I could make the process more efficient than having to dismount the Kerbonaut from the cart, walk him up to the rocket, lower a whole bunch of ladders, have him climb a hundred meters to the crewtank, retract a bunch of ladders...bit of a pain, that procedure!)

My presumption was that the launch tower would be upgraded (I'd be excited by an upgrade that lets the crew be loaded via the tower, instead of magically appearing in the capsule) and/or made optional (if using clamps instead) at some point. But I don't recall any of this being talked about for 0.17.

I like the asteroid belt idea too. But above all, I respect that while I'm a happy player of alpha KSP and member of the community, this isn't <em>my</em> game. Squad should be free to memorialize whomever they want however they want, and skip memorializing whomever they want, without the rest of us in the peanut gallery getting our panties in a twist. It's just a game after all. Neil Armstrong would be pleased to see Nova's monument on the Mun (and I can't wait to visit it). But I'm also quite certain that if we were able to ask him, he's assure us that he wouldn't have been offended in the least if it were never put in the game.

(This post had a busted link, and was rendered unnecessary by sal_vager's intervention below. Removed by user.)

So many dozens of pages have gone by...I forget whether there's been a discussion here about whether the early stages of an interplanetary flight plan would be the same as going to the Mun. If the new flight-planning tools make it possible for us to line up our shot, would it be more efficient to skip Kerbin orbit and just keep firing rockets straight up until the flight plan shows an escape from Kerbin SoI?

These videos are beautifully, beautifully done, and a tremendous asset to the community. Thank you so much.

Until final release, that is? So we can keep on arguing about whether Mun should have umlauts? That will help pass the time between versions. (Yes, I mean that. Yes, that probably means I'm a sad human being.)

State secret. They could tell you...but then they'd have to send you on a spaceplane ride with Jeb.

Yup. I've expressed my frustration before about the fact that the current graphics make Kerbin or a moon completely unspottable over much too wide a slice of the view outside the spacecraft. Death to lens flare!

So Winston is the one I should curse under my breath when I, inevitably, have a 1997 flashback and get Hanson stuck in my head while trying to land on Bop?

I've seen that he's been updating the post, but I can't really tell what the updates might be. The same bits remain green as before, and it never reads any differently to me. Maybe I'm not reading closely enough. Not that it's his job to give us minute-by-minute updates...it'll be ready when it's ready, and I'm really really grateful to have 0.16 to play with in the meantime...but that particular post makes the waiting worse (quite unlike the frequent teases we get in this thread from NovaSilisko, which give the impression of progress and help pass the time). Eh, it'll be better once the devblog thingies are up and running on the new boards I'm sure.

Better, I think, would be to open this up to modders, and let them create models of our solar system, twists on the Kerbol system, or new fantastical systems of their own creation, any of which could be swapped in to take the place of the default system. Or, better still (though we're probably getting into advanced fantasy here): create a whole galactic structure full of slots where new systems could be inserted--possibly all occupied with generic/random/placeholder default systems at first--any or all of which could be swapped out for custom systems. Then, when creating each new user/save file, allow the user to select a "home" system other than Kerbol if desired. This could be implemented before (or in the permanent absence of) interstellar travel; but it would become extra-awesome once (if?) that were added.

Disliking things once they became popular was ever so much more fun before it became so popular to dislike things once they became popular. When liking things before they became cool is something that you start disliking because it's become too popular to like things before they became cool, I think that's a sign that pop culture is folding in on itself to the point where we're risking creating a black hole...

Hey, nothing wrong with liking what you like. And I believe that many of the popular plugins that help narrow some of the more extreme privacy breaches work on most any browser now, so using IE needn't constitute an engraved invitation to malware/pesky-ware/adware. I would suggest having a backup browser installed for testing purposes at least though. I've got IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari all installed on my PC. I have my Firefox browser stuffed with plugins and in the tightest usable lockdown mode I can devise; when it crashes or otherwise barfs on a webpage or page element, I start trying some of the others. Final resort is a plugin-less IE.