KevinTMC

This retouched image finally makes things perfectly clear to me. The Space Kraken is being replaced by Zombie Anubis.

Ooh! I didn't know it did that. Thanks for the tip. Looks like it's past time for me to actually figure out what the LazorSystem does, instead of just looking quizzically at the new parts I installed a week ago...

Bah! The Kraken's never gotten its grubby hands on me! I ain't afraid of no... *static* /end transmission

I'd recommend moving your computer approximately 170m in the general direction of your nearest Google data center.

Welcome, and may you continue to have lots of enjoyable and/or successful and/or hilarious missions! (As a Kraken, though...watch out! I hear your kind is slated to be exterminated in the next version of the game. May have to play 0.16 forever just to be safe!)

I think the reason some of us were so antsy is that we had been expecting a rapid 0.16.1 release to fix a couple of small (in lines of code to be rewritten) yet vast (in gameplay distortion--viz. the fuel consumption bug) bugs. Now that it's been confirmed that there will be no 0.16.1, I'm expecting to wait a while yet for 0.17, and will try to be patient. New features should be expected to take time.

Practice, man. Practice. (Oh, wait...you said "Minimus", not "Carnegie Hall", didn't you...)

Speaking of bounce...is it just me, or is bouncing more pronounced in 0.16? I've crash-landed (see sig below) craft that incorporated virtually-indestructible parts (e.g. landing gear, carts), and seen those parts fly a kilometer or more up and away from the crash site.

Fantastic post, Claes. Your Kerbals are lucky to have you running their program. I'd be interested to read more about how you manged to (manually!) return your first Mun mission to KSC. I've been playing for a couple of months now and the closest I've come is 45km away (in the foothills west-south-west of KSC, where the returned capsule of course rolled over on its hatch, trapping the brave Kerbonaut). I'm also fascinated by your rescue lander. More details and screenshots of that intriguing beaut would be welcome.

Obsession is not rational, and Steam has a way of creating obsessives. One set can never be completely happy playing their favorite game unless they launched it using Steam. The other set can never be completely happy playing their favorite game if they know that someone, somewhere, has bought it and launched it using Steam. Luckily, the vast majority of PC gamers fall into neither category.

Love M&B. Love it. And that would be an excellent example to follow in many ways. (They've got a clever and devoted modding community too, for instance...which appearing on Steam didn't ruin.) My point was that many prominent games force Steam registration and usage, even if you buy it through a different website or even in a box at the store. Squad should obviously resist any inducements to do likewise.

The babel fish dispenser is still one of my favorite puzzles in all of interactive fiction. Infocom games rocked. I mostly played them on the Apple II...though I go back far enough that I first played Zork on an Osborne 1 running CP/M...and before that, played the Colossal Cave Adventure on a university mainframe (you had to wait until 5:30 pm to have access; they didn't want such a resource-hogging and silly application as a text adventure game getting in the way of Important Business). They had one of the best anti-piracy schemes ever: those silly things in the box that not only helped provide key hints here and there, but were such fun (and eventually, collectible) that you happily paid for the boxed game even if your best friend was already willing to loan you his copy. Still got my Joo Janta Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, for instance.

I don't know which I find more vexing and perplexing: the Steam obsessives ("What a great game! I've purchased and downloaded it and have it running on my computer and all is well...except it bothers me somehow that it's not on Steam! If only this game...and Minecraft...and Microsoft Excel...and my web browsers...and the GIMP...and the Control Panel...were all on Steam!") or the anti-Steam crusaders ("It's evil DRM! It crashed my cousin's computer! It's insecure and unsafe to trust with any of my personal information--as I've said many times on Facebook while playing Zynga games. I must save everyone I come into contact with from the evil clutches of Steam!"). Steam is immensely successful; and while it has its faults, the good vastly outweighs the bad for most people. So someday, it would make a lot of sense to consider putting KSP on Steam. But not now, because Squad has as big of an alpha userbase as they want and dare to attract; and not exclusively, because forcing your customers to accept only one form of distribution, and to all run a particular DRM/middleware service when some very much don't want it, rarely makes any sense.

I would just like to jump in here to say that I am offended by the title of this thread, as it clearly implies that there may be large numbers of people out there who have not read The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy...and the mere thought of such a tragic state of affairs makes me despair almost to the point of volunteering to listen to Vogon poetry.

Regarding the next version...it's pointless and bad form to ask for a date, yes; but have Squad even confirmed whether they're presently working on a 0.16.1 patch, or going straight to 0.17?

The latest version, Race Into Space 1.0.0, has worked without a hitch for me. It also includes a couple of sanity-enhancing (but optional!) tweaks and bugfixes. http://sourceforge.net/projects/raceintospace/

I\'ve been seeing the Original Three turn up for roughly three-fifths of missions in 0.16, with both rather new and gently-used persistence files. Smells like a bug to me. My guess is that the addition of the one-Kerbal crew option has screwed up the proper operation of the dead/assigned flags somehow. The frequency with which I use the 'Restart Flight' option (which always gives me the same crew as the last flight, even when that flight ended in a fatal fireball) may also very well have something to do with it.

This is Kerbal Space Program we\'re talking about...so it sounds more like a feature than a bug to me. =P

I was reading some forum thread somewhere about (Buzz Aldrin\'s) Race Into Space, which I was busy playing...and someone randomly mentioned KSP. Searched for it...downloaded the demo...quickly forked over $15 for access to the most recent version (then 0.15). BARIS/RIS is a really good game and at some point, I\'m going to go back and take a stab at playing as the Russians in Historical mode. But KSP is more than a really good game...it\'s the stuff happy obsessions are made of.

Is the settings file attached to the original post still usable in 0.16, or will it need updating? And any other suggestions for tweaks? I\'m not quite sure what most of the settings in the graphics screen do, so I feel like one of the dimmer Kerbonauts when attempting to adjust them myself.

My question is just what it says there on the tin: How fixed-in-concrete should we consider the geography of the planet/moons we have? I\'ve seen mention of plans to add more Kerbal-built features to the planet, such as cities. This would make explorations, treks to KSC 2, and such less tedious. But how about further tweaks to the geography to make it more realistic and/or Earthlike? Rivers would be nice of course--along with the possibility of lakes at some elevation other than sea level. And if major changes were still possible, I\'d vote for less Pangaea, smaller (and more) continents, and more large islands. (As it is now, unless KSC\'s recognizable bit of land is visible, it\'s hard to tell even what hemisphere I\'m orbiting unless I not only go to map view, but rotate the view to find KSC for reference.)

I\'m glad this thread hasn\'t yet exploded in a fiery ball (like my last half-dozen attempts at building a spaceplane...there apparently aren\'t enough struts on Kerbal to hold my designs together). All discussions where people might feel they are being told they are Doing It Wrong are in constant danger of going boom, though, and to what purpose? Before it gets locked, though, I would like to add my wholehearted support to the principle of 'learn to do it, in order to earn the privilege of automating it' that\'s been expressed several times here. The advanced mode of the final game really should operate like that--while easy mode should allow people to bypass it. (Because while I want to learn everything I can about what\'s going on, and want play aids and automation tools--MechJeb and patched conics and everything else--to feel more like rewards than crutches, other people will be turned off and quickly stop playing if they\'re forced to go through all that...and that\'s fine, I want to see everyone have their own fun their own way as much as possible.)

Thanks...but I can\'t take credit for the craft. (Am still rubbish at building my own.) Just uploaded a much better map-view screenshot. So at least you\'ll be able to better see about where the lake/sea is, even if it\'s too small to really notice from map view. (But I figure even small lakes deserve names and stories.)

Oh, yes...I forgot to even mention Koss in the el-cheapo-grande division. I use the clip-style Koss KSC75s with my laptop--they perform far better than they have any right to, while not being so sensitive and accurate that they magnify the flaws of a crummy source (the lappy\'s headphone jack doesn\'t put out a very clean signal), and they\'re nicely lightweight and portable. Anyhow--based on your apparent age, popeter123, unless you\'re precociously sophisticated when it comes to music, I think you\'d do far better to pick up a nice pair of sub-£25/sub-$30 headphones and spend what\'s left over on things to listen to. But of course it\'s your birthday. Good luck.

Naming Submission One of my first (non-explosive) missions in 0.16 was to attempt to fly the Original Three to the south pole in a Leviathan 2M (http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=16840.0). The fuel ran out a ways short of the icecap, and the Leviathan isn\'t the sort of plane that can take advantage of the indefinite-gliding exploit, so the boys needed to find a place to put her down. A little lake--too small to be visible from Map view--was spotted and appeared to be the best thing to aim for, as shoreline is often the lowest and flattest terrain around. Also, Bill and Bob were in need of baths after having soiled themselves sweated profusely throughout the flight...and Jeb was eager to discover whether he would be able to swim decently in his full flightsuit, or would instead flail around and eventually drown. (It sounded fun and exciting to him either way.) The boys got out and walked down to the beach. Since the lake is at sea level, Jeb was determined to call it a 'sea' and not a 'lake'. Also, he wanted to do something nice to honor his intrepid crewmates, who had screamed all the way displayed their customary bravery and were too freaked out to do anything had been as helpful as always on this voyage. Furthermore, since he couldn\'t possibly choose between his two friends to give one of them top billing, Jeb decided to use just their initials rather than their full first names. And so, KevinTMC and Jebediah Kerman would like to present to you...the B.B. Sea.