haltux

The point is to fund the improvements of the game. The difference between KSP 1.1 and KSP 2 is that you would pay for KSP 2. This is perfectly fine for me, as long as KSP 2 is better enough. Microsoft developed 10 versions of their Flight Simulator, I don't remember that anyone argued that they should have sticked to FS 1 and spent 20 years developing the improvements for free.

Estimated burn time is not computed from rocket features, it is computed from actual acceleration and target delta-V, once this acceleration has started. Which mean that it is estimated once you have started to burn. This is expected behavior. The usual way to deal with that is, for long burn, to do a quick burn before the manoeuvre node, let's say 2 minutes before, and then you get the information required to precisely start your actual burn when you should (half the time of the burn before the node). If your burn is really too long, you can (if you want) do it in two parts. A first burn with half the required delta-V, which make you stay in elliptic orbit with a high Ap, then you do a complete orbit and burn again when you are back at your initial position to actually leave your planet.

I did not like the last one. I use to show them to my kids and for this one I was not too comfortable explaining what happened to the little green guys. And about the best use of available resources, even if they are not dev, the same people who make these videos could have spend a little bit of their time improving IVA graphic models and making new animations for EVA activities.

The problem Squad is most likely facing is that they use an engine for something it was not really made for, or at least they push it somewhere no one has pushed it before. That was a tough choice they add at the beginning : using an engine which was not entirely suitable, or build there own engine which would have been extremely complex, and would have required very specific skills they might not have in their team.

Career mode is by definition all about incentives. You have three currencies and the game is about earning these currencies in order to go deeper in the game. Finding strategies to get these points efficiently is the whole point of the game, otherwise there is really no reason to play career mode and not sandbox mode. If there exists easy and boring strategies which are more efficient than complex and interesting strategies, then it is a problem which has to be solved. That is true for any other kind of career / character based video games.

MPL is definitely overpowered. There has already been some discussion on this topic here. The problem is that even if you don't "cheat" (fast forward to get science points), when you organize interplanetary missions you get more science points during the trip with your existing(s) MPL(s) than whatever your mission can bring to you. As a corollary, return missions, which were (and should) be the main way to get science points, are now ineffective. It is much more efficient, and generally easier, to send an MPL in a one way trip. You can always claim that you can send another mission to get back your kerbals but you don't do it because they work for science more or less forever. That's a bit sad, because I really think there should be a very strong incentive to get Kerbals back. However, I like the idea of continous science points stream from MPL. I can see two way to improve this issue: - Add time cost. Kerbal salary, KSC maintenance. Maybe only for higher difficulty levels. That would change the game dramatically. That would imply new feature, like a stock alarm (to help player managing parallel missions). - Much easier approach: MPL should require support. One support mission, which should bring equipment and new scientists taking over the previous ones, every years (or whatever number of days). - - - Updated - - - Before the new MPL we could get things done. Science points were actually pretty well balanced. The new MPL is nice in principle, it gives a purpose to space stations, it just has to be balanced properly.

You should upgrade Astronaut Complex, it will unlock EVAs. EVAs are fun, and brings a lot of science points (try EVA reports at different altitude and over different biomes). You really don't want to land on Mun or Minmus without EVA. That would be insanely frustrating.

The whole point of career mode is to manage to do things with limited resources, in order to access to better resources to do more complex / difficult things. Like 80% of video games. If you find that stupid I don't get why you play career mode at all. That's absurd. If you make a game with technology evolution it has no reason to stop "early in the game". Why exactly would it stop? It makes no sense at all.

It is defintely a balance change, it clearly makes the game easier. But I don't think it is the reason why it has not been added. I think the main (bad) reason Delta-V has not been added is that it gives a number which has to be somehow processed by the player. The rest of KSP does not require that at all. You can just assemble rockets like lego and play with them, and retry if it does not work. With KER you need to make a target deltaV computation (even if it is basic) yourself, in the principle it makes a big difference, it feels more geeky. Furthermore a game has to be self-contained, you should not need to check an external deltaV map. So this map should be somehow integrated in the game. One option would be to provide some info about your mission (target, or even manoeuvre) and it would give you a warning if you don't have enough delta-V. In terms of UI it is not that straightforward.

Squad has balanced the game to make it just as difficult as it should be, at each difficulty level, to make every single game mechanism not too weak and not too powerful. Not sure they did it perfectly but at least they tried, like any other game designer. When I install plugins, I always suspect it will ruin this balance. So I think it does make sense to play stock to have the gameplay Sqaud has balanced for you. That being said, I don't want to play without KER.

No you can't. If you look upward and press space, you won't face upward. If your spaceship is "over" you (whatever that means), you cannot face it. Again, this is not by itself the main issue, the main issue is the lack of freedom in your moves, the fact that you are stuck with arbitrary notion of up and down.

You can but there is no way to rotate (around the backward-forward axis). So unlike with spaceships, you don't have 6 DoF, so you are still stuck with stupid notions of up and down which make no sense in space. Sometimes you have your spaceship just over you and you can't face it, that's so annoying. I think it kills half the fun of space EVAs. This is very frustrating considering I just want EVA controls to behave exactly like spaceship docking mode spaceship controls. No more no less. That does not look so difficult.

Eve is even more forgiving than Kerbin in terms of reentry, which sounds completely wrong to me. That would mean that it is not just a setup issue, some parameter to tweak and it will be fine, but a deeper problem.

It is not about my play style it is about the play style that can be expected, with a little bit of common sense, from people who do career mode for the first time. KSP is a trial and error game, I can't imagine people sending ten rockets at the same time before realizing they forgot power source or communication device in all of them. Anyway, you won't be convinced anyway and that is not a major problem. What I would suggest would not be to make MPL slower or even less efficient, but that some kind of support would be required for the MPL to work during long periods. For example, scientists should be replaced after a given amount of time spent in space, for example one year, just like in real life. In real life, 1 $ invested in space exploration with probes brings you way more "science points" than 1$ invested in space exploration with human being. In KSP it is the opposite. That's the problem. And in real life probe take photos, too. And analyze samples.

If the most obvious (in terms of how you play the game when you still don't know it) AND efficient (in terms of career advancement vs. player time spent) way to play the game makes MPL overpowered, then MPL is overpowered, it is not more complicated than that. I acknowledge the fact that pressing fast forward during years without active missions until MPL has finished his job is a wrong way to play the game, but if your Minmus lab has generated more science than your Jool mission during the 2 or 3 hours you spent playing your Jool mission, then something is broken. I don't understand why it is so hard to admit. And by the way, you say you use mainly probe cores, do you think as well that the ridiculous amount of science points that probe cores can generate is fairly balanced as well ?

Sounds great, but KSP makes your life harder when you want to do that: - No incentive to do parallel missions (just having some maitnenance cost would make sense) - No stock "alarm" - No more than 7 Kerbals in level 1 and 2 - No flight planning tool that would help you to decide when to launch a mission to some given planet in order to minimize time or fuel. - And the worst : strong incentive in using always the same Kerbals: XP points. So theway the gameplay has been though is to do missions one by one. And if you do missions one by one, it is likely that every mission to Jool or Moho or wherever is far away will bring you much less science points that your Minmus orbital lab with a one star scientist just during the time of the mission. Therefore I still think MPL is overpowered.

One single way mission to Minmus, with single lab and multiple landing brings you more than 10000 science points. It allows you to uncover most of the science tree. In one single no-return mission, without requiring a multi-part vessel or even a really massive rocket. You do the same with Mun (which requires slightly more fuel, I have not done it but I guess it is doable as well in one mission), and you have finished the tech tree, entirely. Compared to that, one mission to Moho with landing and trip back, immensely more complex, will bring you less than 1000 science points. MPL are insanely overpowered. Squad got good ideas with the new MPL but they really have to balance it now, because clearly it kills the career mode.

Yes I did. I admit it is rather stupid. Still, volume does matter, in particular for the rocket stability at launch, and I find it a bit annoying to require twice the tank volume for the same weight. Ability to fill any tanks with fuel is really a must have for the next KSP version.

I don't know how you can reach this conclusion. Terrier is way better in terms of pure Delta-V for any ship except massive ones, unless Kerbal Engineering is completely wrong in its computation. - - - Updated - - - About your ship, I think the main issue is that you have only one stage under your interplanetary spaceship, which is unlikely to be optimal. You save the weight of one engine, but I guess that once in orbit you have already burnt a significant part of the fuel of your interplanetary ship. That might explain as well why you need so much nukes, you use them to go to orbit. You might want to have a smaller interplanetary ship but a larger, two-stage launcher, so that you use only the launcher's fuel to get to orbit. Another suggestion: as you plan to have your spaceship in two parts (spaceship + lander), which is a good idea, I suggest to have more balanced parts. For example, you could have engine + fuel in one part and everything else (hitchiker + lander + some fuel?) in the other. They will be easier to put in orbit (without burning fuel dedicated to interplanetary trip).

Imagine you are new to KSP, what feature would you think are required to make the game "finished", to give the feeling that it is not some work in progress but a real, finished, game? There is only a single one : aero. No one would argue that the game is not finished without MP or resources. But a decent modeling of aero is a must.

You should consider the number of Axis. In particular, stick rotation is extremely convenient in KSP because you can assign it to ship rotation. This exclude some of the joysticks adviced in this thread, in particular CH joysticks I think.

I loved my first rescue mission on Duna, I had a stranded Kerbalsitting close to its half-destroyed, lying spaceship. I sent a 3 kerbal mission to save him, it was epic. However, I am bored with rescuing Kerbals in space that had just not enough fuel to come back home, and are stuck orbiting around the sun close the the Kerbin orbit. It happened to me three time and it is boring. It gives you the unsatisfying feeling that you almost did it the right way but not fully. And when the mission takes 3 hours, the "try it and try again" paradigm which seems to be pushed by stock KSP quickly gets on your nerves. So just get yourself Kerbal Engineering and a delta-V map and make predictable missions. And don't worry, it will still fail often.

That would be true if all KSP player were active member of this forum, were installing mods, would know about FAR. I have no figure but I would bet it is very far from being the case, and it will be even further from the truth when the final version will be released and hopefully a new sales pick will occur. Furthermore, as it has been stated many times, rationnaly Squad should care about future players, not current players that have already paid anyway. Once the game will be officially released, it will get reviewed by many newspapers and blogs, and its sales will highly depend on these reviews. I expect at least some reviewers to be disappointed when they will realize that the performances of a rocket does not depend on its shape, and that nothing wrong can happen at reentry.

I guess it has been discussed millions of times, but: The only reason why anyone could find playing without FAR/NEAR less enjoyable than with FAR/NEAR is that their usual rocket do not work anymore. People got use to ludicrous rocket design, and they don't want to get rid of them. If you make a rocket which look like a rocket, FAR/NEAR does not increase difficulty at all, I don't see how it could be "less fun". Reentry and aerobraking should be stressfull and sometimes epic (you should watch Gravity :-) ). And currently they are just boring. That is a massive issue. I have to say I love KSP but I have been disappointed by it due to the aerodynamics model the first hour I played it.

Lateral decoupling without separatron during ascending phase still (more or less randomly) destroy the rocket, because the bottom of separated parts collide.This appeared with 0.24 and is still not resolved.