Max Grant

You know who calls it Luna? Neil Armstrong. I figure he\'s got as much a right as anyone to give the thing a name . . . I was reading an interview with him where he talked about returning to 'Luna,' and it was fascinating. The only human being in all history who can claim such a personal relationship with that world.

Missile subs, anyone? Very valid rocketry endeavour.

I\'m going to try that right now! Very cool idea.

On a serious note, there needs to be a whole class of campaign in the finished game that is exactly this kind of thing. I\'ve been using the muon detector to search for easter eggs, and it is palpably the most interesting part of the game so far. Doing actual 'science.' Listening for the beep-beep-beep and noting the time between signals so I could map what I was looking for was so . . . scientific. It was very cool, and added to the entire vibe of the game which is re-living the coolest parts of the space program. So, there should be a whole set of hooks into the game for natural physical phenomena. Since most of those would follow the inverse-square law it would be easy to program static fields into the game for magnetism, radiation from the Kerbin sun, unusual heat signatures, ice, etcetera. Give us stuff to discover. A facility for taking in-game photos in various wavelengths would also be super-wicked. Being able to create a probe to map the surface of the Mun or a distant Kerbin just like a real NASA mission would would be so, ever bad-ass. I guess I need to make my thoughts on this topic coherent and submit some suggestions to the devs.

With a thick, fake Geman-ish accent.

I made my comment in jest, but now I\'m seriously considering the cardboard roll idea. I may have to make a whole TP-themed re-skin of parts just to be obnoxious.

Or, base it off the TCP/IP acronym, and call it KSP/TP. Kerbal Space Program / Transportation Program We could then skin parts to look as if they are made of cardboard rolls.

http://youtu.be/v5vPrrnb6tw Rush - Countdown Enough said.

Maybe you can resolve for us, finally, where the 'twin' ion engines in T.I.E. go! Very looking forward to flying too many of these at some hapless Rebel base.

I explored this object and I am trying at the moment to figure out how to create a chain or rope I can use to pull on it, and see if there is a drawer in the surface of the Mun. Or, perhaps, it could be an anchor for a space elevator.

OK I think I just decided to knock together some incidental music. I am a musician, and I have tons of recording gear and I also know how to use it. :-) I would offer it to the KSP team as a \'take it or leave it, royalty-free\' kind of deal. If I get my act together, that is!

When that happens to me I usually just mark the mission as 'long-term experiment on low-gravity environment and survivability of Kerbals' and either move on to other things, or end the flight. If you don\'t have much fuel left, you will have a mother of a time canceling your now-ridiculous velocity to get back into Kerbin orbit, let alone to your original destination.

Perhaps they are evolved perfectly for making rockets and exploring space, and thus are born in pressure suits? I betcha didn\'t think of that one, did ya? :-)

I want the T-shirt!

I have written fiction as a hobby most of my life. Some of it is actually published (though self-published only). One of my stories I actually wrote down about a year before I encountered KSP. But the story discusses a long space journey in a vessel I named The Far Probe. Not so long ago, I got inspired and created my fictional ship inside KSP (at least, as much as KSP would allow me to at this point). I have considered slightly modifying the tale to include the Kerbal universe, or just posting it as-is. It IS a tale about rockets and long journeys, and I wondered if there was any kind of objection to me just basically pasting it in here. Off the top of my head I\'m not remembering how long it was . . . maybe just six or eight pages. I don\'t know what else to do with my stories . . . any objections? Forum mods in particular?

How delightfully explosive!

Seriously, it is that awesome. There he is, Thrillmaster Jeb, literally LAUGHING as his fellow crewmember dissolves in flame and debris. That\'s all. I made a seriously imbalanced rocket, and boy was it fun.

I just figured it out! HSR has moved to Kerbin. That\'s why we haven\'t heard from him in like two freaking years!

Yea I have learned the hard way do not land on the night side.

I have a ship in orbit and it looks fantastic. Much richer texture than before. I have not been close enough to see if those rocks are still there, but it looks like Nibb31 has and there are no more rocks. They kind of looked like stubble to me . . . nice idea but it was implemented in a way that made it really obvious. So I\'m OK with them being gone. Nice job again, Kerbal devs. I love that we\'re only at release .15 and it looks so cool already.

Oh, darn! I thought I was going to read about your Un/return ission. Or, that you\'d acquired a replacement sponsor, the letter \'j.\' Nice ship, btw.

Why yes. I can imagine $8,000 falling out of my . . . pocket. But, in order for me to run out and buy one of those I think it would have to be at a time when I am completely at peace in my life and want for nothing! The really cool thing is I expect those to become as commonplace as flat-screen televisions are now, one day. That looks like a great toy to put school kids in front of . . . the possibilities are immense.

I am humbled by your generosity sir . . . now I need to actually go 'discover' something else!

It seems that planets and Muns do not truly block each others\' light. I have seen many eclipses and my ship still is showing a clear shadow. I think the only time a planet really blocks light is when you are on its surface and the Sun is on the other side of it. The camera on the dark side of the Mun also shows lens flare while the Kerbol sun is below the horizon. I don\'t know if that final level of detail would require more rendering power than is worth it. Not knowing fully how the rendering works, I do know that when I used to build Quake, Half-Life, and Jedi Knight levels years ago, you had to pre-render environments with the lighting in place, and the engine probably is saving tons of processing on the fly by eliminating all but direct shadows. My .02

I have four deep space 'probes' titled Something Awfully Stupid I-IV. I built them with the MechJeb capsule so they are basically robots. It would be ULTRA COOL to devise a way for them to record their flight data and 'send' it back to Kerbin. Maybe I need to crack one of these things open and see how the code works. At any rate, I found to my disappointment that (as far as I can tell) if I leave them entirely unattended to fly further and further into deep space, they seem to lose any progress they\'ve made if I exit and re-start the game. So I check in on them when I\'m doing other missions (such as Mun landings) and F5 just to make sure their state gets written to the savegame file. I assume this is a bug and I further cannot believe I am the only one who has noticed it, so I guess I should find the forum for posting that, and of course I need to do a real test and see if it actually is doing this, or I am just over-estimating how fast they should progress. My fastest probe is traveling around 22k/sec. It was 91,000,000 K out at the start of one of my Mun missions. After the several-day ordeal of landing a rover on the Mun (and eventually, crashing it and killing my poor crew again when I drove too fast), it was STILL at 91. When on the next mission I went in and 'poked' it, I managed to get it out to 98M. It\'s too bad that all that deep space is just a skybox. I\'ve let one mission go for something like 2,000 days in sped-up time. It would be awesome to discover something out here . . .