TheOtherDave

As long as it has collision physics enabled…

I vote for procedural everything (except maybe some of the engines), with research nodes unlocking bigger (or smaller) limits. It does take away a bit of the Legoness, but it also keeps the part counts down. This helps the game run smoother and reduces the chances of both spaghetti rockets and kraken attacks.

Allowing mods to be toggled per-save? Yes, I definitely think that’s reasonable. I’m not so sure about integrating something like CKAN, though… I mean yeah it’d be nice, but I think that’s a bigger commitment than a lot of people realize.

You can fly ships from a 1st-person perspective. With sufficiently impressive visuals, even 3rd-person could be a pretty immersive experience.

That’s a reasonable way to fake it given the limitations of KSP 1.x, but it doesn’t account for the orbital perturbations that you’d get IRL.

Because it lets you do cool things with gravity assists?

I voted as if the poll said “should” instead of “will”, seeing as how I have no idea what Star Theory will do.

+1 for macOS/Linux support.

That and Linux support are my biggest questions at the moment. And system requirements, I suppose.

I could get behind this... I'd also say that the game should calculate the delivery costs for the raw materials needed to construct anything launching from off-world bases (so that you can't just build a base on Gilly or something and then have super low Δv to everywhere for free), and therefore you should have a "designated" origin point (Kerbin or an off-world "ore depot") and a designated cargo craft saved for each off-world base. That way you can update the cargo crafts and delivery mechanism ("local" ore refinery vs shipping in from off-world) for cheaper deliveries as new tech becomes available. Also, you'd have to make the cargo run manually at least once for every cargo ship, so that the game knows a) it can actually do the job and b) how much fuel it'll cost.

Thanks! I'll look into those. It might be a moot point, though. I ended up force-quiting KSP to prevent it from re-autosaving, and just loaded my game back up. I went to the tracking station, flew the craft, and it immediately spun out of control and exploded. "Well, ok, force-quit again, reload again, SAVE THE GAME, turn on unbreakable joints, go to the tracking station, etc". This time, the craft immediately spun out of control but didn't explode because of the cheat. Reloaded the save and tried turning SAS off, no improvement. Reloaded the save and tried turning off rigid attachment (something necessary to get it to launch), no improvement. I eventually gave up and figured that since I knew (well, was pretty sure) I'd have had enough fuel to complete the mission, I'd just cheat myself into the correct orbit, run the tests (pro tip: time warp to make everything calm down, select the part, then turn off time warp and the "log whatever" button will appear in the menu that's already open from when you selected the part), and called it a day. There weren't any Kerbals on board or anything, so I just left it to explode next time I try to load it without the cheats enabled. Maybe I'll try to mount a "rescue" mission for the science on-board that couldn't be transmitted back, but I completed the contract, so... I still don't know what the issue with my craft is, other than being long and skinny, so I guess what I really need is a mod that gets rid of the Kraken. I guess I just won't use that craft anymore.

Is there a mod that lets you "rewind" the last bit of gameplay? Like maybe 10-15 seconds? I'm looking for a way to undo whatever damage The Kraken does without having to figure out how to copy ships from the ship file and edit them into a save file while trying to remember how much fuel I had and whatnot.

It did that to me for a while, too. Turned out to be a keymaping collision between the procedural wings plugin and some "auto-align" plugin I'd tried to straighten out landing gear -- they were both looking for "j", so when I pressed it, the procedural wings plugin would pull up its config window and the other plugin would align the part. That was a while ago, though. There might be some other issue now.

I got KK and Kerbin-Side installed and put a 4x scaled-up runway at the top of that really tall peak just south of the Everkrest base. At least with the Sabre-M engines, it's a lot harder to get airborne. With the spaceplane I was trying, it takes about 2x the airspeed to get enough lift to actually gain altitude, and starting from that high up it takes probably 15x the distance to get that airspeed. Fortunately, being at the top of the world means you can lose a lot of altitude before crashing :-) That said, it did seem a bit easier to actually get into orbit... dunno, maybe it's just in my head.

I don't think PP can match up with any of the non-cylinderical hull profiles (mk2, s2, etc), but for everything else, that's a really good idea.

Great, thanks!

I recently came across an article (http://www.citylab.com/design/2012/08/there-limit-how-tall-buildings-can-get/2963/) which claims that, theoretically, it should be possible to construct a building around 59km tall (for reference, that's way taller than Mt Everest). On Earth. Assuming the article is correct, this means that we could theoretically build a building that reaches into the mesosphere (which starts at 50-60km, depending on atmospheric conditions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth). Obviously, the first thing that popped into my mind when I read that was "I wonder how much easier it'd be to get to orbit if you could start from that high up?" To find out, I want to make a KSP mod that puts an alternate launch location on some mountain at whatever Kerbin's equivalent altitude is. I'd probably have to lengthen the runway, too, so that planes have time to build up enough speed to offset the reduced lift from the thinner air. Is this a plausible first mod? Also, what would the equivalent altitude be on Kerbin? I've heard it's anywhere from 1/10th Earth scale to 1/3rd, depending on how you measure things. Or should I just build it off of Realism Overhaul and not worry about it?

I've often want to build my craft with a fuel tank or something in place of a cargo bay because I don't necessarily have the satellite/rover/"generic payload" ready yet, and using something heavy as a substitute lets me prove the design works. The problem is that if the placeholder part is in the middle, or has any precisely-placed components attached to it, there can be some difficulty in getting the craft reassembled correctly (and even if it's relatively easy to get at, it's still annoying). A mod that lets you swap any part with another that's the same shape and size would be great.

Why is #1 impossible? Aren't the planets & moons on rails? There was a mod that had a moon kinda like what you want. It's surface at the equator moved faster than EV, so you had to land near the poles. I can't remember what it was called... It's in one of Scott Manley's videos (which really narrows it down, I know).

Yes, I'd like more launch sites, but there are already mods for that. What I need is longer runways. At least, I think that's what I need.

I can't figure it out either... I mean, I've done it, but only by using rockets (and usually infinite fuel) to get my plane up to speed. Without cheating, if I'm at normal air-breathing altitudes ( < 22ish km), 1500 ms will quickly cause my nose to overheat & explode the cockpit. By the time I'm high enough to go fast enough and survive the atmospheric heating (around 30 km), every other air-breathing engine I've tried has flamed out from lack of oxygen. Is there some mod you're using to give you parts which can withstand skin temps in excess of 2500 K? The only time I've achieved prolonged significant thrust from the Hyperblast engines, I had to use an inline cockpit with just a blunt heat shield on the front (and two rockets w/ infinite fuel to overcome the drag on the way to 1500 m/s). FWIW, I'm using 3x Mk2 Pre-Coolers and 2x Mk2 Shock Cones for air intakes.

Same here.

That's a fantastic idea! What I came here to post, though: 1) Procedural tanks/wings. It'd *really* simplify the parts list... just pick a size, drop it in, and set the details. To go along with that, if adaptors could be auto-generated, it'd make it much easier to work with multiple plugins with their own body shapes (in theory, all you have to do is create a part with one shape at each end and interpolate between them... dunno how hard that'd be in practice). Plus, since this would let us lower the parts count, it'd help with planes and rockets being all floppy, and it'd simplify the physics. 2) (This mostly applies to planes) Custom control surface response curves based on airspeed and/or air pressure, so that, say, you could have a large control surface that moderately responds to pitch commands when you're moving slowly (like on a take-off run), then the response tapers off as you gain speed (so that stability control doesn't tear your plane apart because it can't figure out that it's causing the very oscillations that its so frantically trying to dampen), and then responds hugely in the upper atmosphere where the air in thin and you need all the control you can get. Also, it'd be handy to have different regimes, so that different control surfaces could behave differently on ascent (where you want low drag) and re-entry (where you want higher drag). 3) An autopilot with a altitude/airspeed holds and heading/attitude holds that can be relative to either the planet or to a nav-ball vector. Say, so you can tell it to hold the heading at 90° east (which would be relative to the planet) and hold the attitude at 15° above prograde.