Luckless

Why can't bases be life support supplies? Bring the right equipment and set them up to produce food and water. Include in-game fuel production on other planets/moons, and now your favourite moon around Jool becomes an actual colony with a real reason to exist: Production of food, water, and fuel for the use in further survey missions. With Kerbal Alarm Clock I have a fairly easy time running many missions at one time with small spaces between launches. While five or six probes or ships are in transit, one is at an active window in its flight path and needs a burn. The rest can carry on as they were for the few minutes the one ship needs my actual attention. When I'm done with that one I can time accelerate to the next one needing attention and so on.

Without life support and without limited Kerbals, then unmanned flights are a joke. If we add limited life support, then we need a few more tools added to the game, namely an orbit and mission planner so that users can easily step ahead and back in 'time' for their game and pre-plan their maneuver nodes for a given mission so they can generate their delta-v and time requirements before building a rocket. In my view this would greatly reduce the frustration of the game, especially for newer players (Because lets face it, it sucks a lot to get out to Jool and then find you're short 5Dv to do what you wanted), and be able to base your mission requirements off that. Plus a food requirement would be an awesome excuse to expand to building meaningful bases.

I would want at least 3 states for weather systems in a finished game. None Minor Hard Minor would be more cosmetic in nature. Maybe making in atmosphere flight a little more 'interesting' in a kerbal fashion. Hard should include dangerous hurricane scale events that could cause damage on launch or landing attempts, and maybe even cause damage to the space centre that then needs repaired.

Either you had a horrible time in grade school, or I spent far too much time building weird paper airplanes, because I could get them to do dozens of flips in both directions. But really I'm happy with aerodynamics as they are currently. They're not great, not even really good, but it gives enough of a challenge that it gives something 'air like' to fly through. It would ideally be replaced in the long term, but I'm fine with several more versions of the same crapy model.

If the apparent gender of a character matters so little, the required modifications to the head are so minor, and changes to any related code very simple, then why do so many people put so much effort into arguing against the change? This isn't a complex reworking of a physics model. This is a binary choice of whether or not to draw a character with head A or head B, and which pool of names to pick a random string from. I would do it myself, but frankly that would involve digging around in a system I've yet to play with and having to find suitable 3D modelling software (and relearn how to use it), and it would be far faster for someone on the dev team to make the adjustments instead.

No one is forcing you to play with them. If you don't like them, don't hire them from the recruitment pool. Ignore them after they're added and pretend kerbals are an advanced genderless fungus and they all happen to look vaguely male if it makes you happy. Personally, I want my little cousin to play the game, and not constantly bug me about why she can't have a female crew commander on her missions.

Given that I've restarted a career game with the latest build, I think I'm going to try and use these ideas for my initial landing missions.

I do like kredits. Not a huge fan of Kash.

Whether or not someone buys a copy of KSP for their kid is very much a real world context kind of thing. It has been noted, and there is real world displeasure among some potential customers. The issue brought up in the real world is That KSP does not have female characters. It is not a game play issue, it is a market perception issue. And frankly the opposition to it among users is by far worse than the simple lack of it having been added.

Except it is an issue that is brought up in the real world. "Why do all the players look male?" has been a question posed to me by mothers on multiple occasions when I've pitched KSP as a good game for their kids. My younger cousin wants a female crew because she wants to play a game that includes characters more like herself. Sticking your head in the sand and screaming "It doesn't matter!" doesn't change the fact that it Does matter. And it matters to a lot of people. It is not a hard fix, does not need any advanced interaction or characterization. Yes, it is purely cosmetic, and has no impact on the game play, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have an impact on how the game is perceived by many people.

She enjoys astronomy, but prefers to play a game that she feels she can relate to the characters more. I see no problem at all with her view point. She does enjoy several very geeky kids games, but always chooses a female avatar.

That, and the highly masculine facial features... If my 8 year old cousin has no interest in KSP because she doesn't want to play a game that only has boys in it, then that is a clear sign to me that something needs to be changed.

I really don't see any valid excuse to not include female kerbals. All characters have a masculine facial structure set. "But they're Aliens!!!" doesn't fly. They're male. Give a 3D printed copy of Jeb to any 5 year old, and they'll say it is a dude. Google "masculine vs feminine facial features", make notes, apply concepts to the base model. Revamp the random kerbal generator to include a gender, then make the name pool generator acknowledge masculine, feminine, and neutral names. Apply suitable names to the kerbals as needed. Why is this important? If a grade school girl wants to play and have girl pilots, then she should be able to get girl pilots. We have a hard enough time getting women interested in the sciences at a young age because they're 'obviously' suppose to play with barbies, and not rockets or microscopes.

But it wouldn't be 'cheating', it would be a designed in-game mechanic that functions according to a set of clear rules. Maybe even go with a 3 tier system. Current 'parts' tech tree, and a 'science and technology' tech tree for things like fuels, materials, and electronics (improved/lighter/stronger materials, smaller/faster electronic systems). Unlocking stuff in 'science and technology' then reduces the cost of unlocking stuff in 'parts' across the board. (S&T becomes an investment, while parts is 'instant' payoff. Do you invest now and keep working with the parts you have, or unlock parts now at a higher cost?) The third part to it could be 'enhanced engineering', which allows you access to a third tree that cross ties Science and Technology with Parts. This would be your overall mass reductions and performance enhancement. "Do I want the lighter faster basic engine, or do I want the bigger engine but with no bonuses?"

Replace the current engine parts with tuneable classes so you can pick the specs needed, rather than being stuck with purely preset options? Tune a second stage engine for upper atmosphere like real engines are tuned for improved ISP in its target range. Maybe even be able to adjust the actual weight/thrust of a given engine by a small margin. Less total thrust makes for a slightly lighter engine, more thrust a heavier one. But don't scale it linearly, rather have it a nice bell curve, so that thrust to weight ratio drops slightly as you go away from the default centre value for thrust. Would really let the number crunchers tinker in very fun ways. Maybe throw in a variable tuning engine (So it doesn't drop in efficiency as much based on changes in atmospheric pressures) with slightly lower thrust to weight, but could be far more effective for SSTO systems. I actually really like that idea. Not an excessively complex feature, but a nice level of polish. Include a 'camera' module that can be mounted on probes or handheld by crew members, and then include 'screen shots' along with it. Would work very well with a social media tie-in system.

I don't see unique systems changing challenges 'considerably', other than you wouldn't be able to just look up delta-v tables. Put in an observatory feature so you can track and accurately position planets to generate a data readout so that you can go plug it into a simple calculator, and then you are good to go with no real extra challenge, just different challenges.

"Recover" the SSTO craft, drag it into the hangar for checks and refit, relaunch craft. I don't think it is really all that logical to think of a craft that would de-orbit, land, top up a fuel tank and head back out without seeing the inside of a maintenance shop that was a few hundred yards away.

Go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_discovery_of_Solar_System_planets_and_their_moons Scroll down to around the time we started putting stuff in orbit around our little rock. Keep scrolling. And scroll some more,... Keep going. You'll reach this decade sooner or later. But seriously, there is a LOT of stuff that could be generated at game start time to give players something to look for and explore. Maybe make it optional due to the extra overhead such a system would involve, but there are lots of tricks that could be used to simulate it in the game as is. (Such as look-ahead-calculations on the search during lower processor usage times. Calculate out ahead of where the player actually is now and peg a 'discovery' that unlocks when the user gets there, such when the user isn't flying a space craft.)

Because we have a 'working model' that serves reasonably well as it is. Could it be better? Yes. Does it need to be better for the game to remain fun? Not really.

I would also really love to see samples as modelled objects within the game that can be transferred between craft, and various sample materials that can be collected from the various biomes with different methods. Surface materials would be easy to pick up. Various rocks, sands, fluids, etc. Then have deeper samples that would require a drill. Samples could be collected and analyzed remotely for a limited amount of science with a probe, or analyzed by a trained scientist on site for a major bonus. Actually bringing the sample back then unlocks even more science (Representing the greater number of scientist who then get to work with it.) Having a trained scientist on site as the sample is collected would give a bonus (better observations of the local conditions), so there is still the incentive to carting the manned crew all the way out, but a probe based play style should still be as completely valid as a manned based program.

There is however real world arguments against manned missions. How much mass is required for a human, the life support for them, and their return trip? How much of that mass could instead be used on more unmanned rovers? How long can a single human stay for a given payload? How many more months can a rover or probe stay on the same? For the cost of landing a single person on another planet to investigate a single location, we can drop dozens, if not hundreds of probes all over the surface and gather even more information and conduct the same experiments. Not only that, but we can gather it in an ongoing manner. Ideally I would like to see more support for unmanned missions, while manned missions unlock other things. They should work together and both be equally useful.

One of my coworkers uses them on nearly all his landers, and they serve two cases. 1. Should things go squirrelly on him, then it is deployed as a fail safe to try and safely recover the crew. 2. If it is not used during the ascent stages, then it is calculated and used as part of the decent burns to kill velocity near the very end.

Can you name a logical design element that will work well in multiplayer, but not work at all for a single player game? I would much rather have single player AND multiplayer receive strong design support from the get go, not tacking one or the other on at the end.

Some people just don't like single player games. Many of my friends are busy people with careers and such going on, which makes purely social time rather rare. If they're going to play a game, then they want to be doing it with someone else rather than sitting down in a basement all alone.

I know a dozen people who have said the game looks interesting, and that they would play it, but they're not going to buy a single-player only game. People want multi-player, and some of those people don't already own the game.