Nemoricus

Considering that roughly two thirds of the votes are for the 'Adjustable' option, I think there's a larger proportion of people who do like confetti fairings. Personally? As long as the option exists to use confetti or clamshell as people want, I don't feel very strongly either way. There's room for both styles in the game.

While reading this thread, I've seen a fair bit of discussion that a simulator must be something realistic. Is that necessarily true? For example, if I designed a program that modeled a collection of masses, but with gravity being repulsive rather than attractive, haven't I created a simulation? Not a realistic simulation, no, but still a simulation, right? From what I've seen, a simulation attempts to model a process, and the accuracy of the simulation is judged by how well it matches real life observations. But its accuracy doesn't decide whether or not it's a simulation, nor its level of resolution. In that vein, KSP is a game built around a core physics simulation of thrust, aerodynamic forces, and joints. Is it entirely accurate? No, but it doesn't need to be to be called a simulation.

Without moons, there's not much to do with a gas giant, and making those would take up more time. Still, I'd like to see Squad put in the time to make at least one more gas giant for the game.

Personally, I think that these shouldn't be contracts at all, but instead a separate milestones system. You don't need to accept them, they don't take up space in your contract slots, and they're automatically rewarded when you fill the conditions for them.

First, by its nature, career mode imposes constraints on what the player may do. They can't use whatever parts they want, they have to unlock them first. They can't build whatever spacecraft they want, they need to able to afford it. And even if they can afford it, they may need to upgrade buildings to be able to launch it. For that matter, even sandbox mode imposes constraints on the player, because they have to use the parts that are available, with the stats they are given. So, I don't see limiting the player's options as inherently a problem. Second, I disagree that this limits player control. Under the time-based system, the player has an option to leave a science probe in orbit. They can choose to take and use all of the science contracts they get. But, there's a trade-off. There's up-keep to having that probe, it takes up a slot that could be used for another mission, and so on. You can choose to get some easy, more or less certain income, or forgo the probe and perform another, potentially more lucrative mission. That the RNG is an issue is a fair point. So, I'll revise my proposal. Instead of having the number of contracts offered in a certain time period be limited in number, the number you can accept is limited by the level of your mission control center. I still think that that declining missions should have some cost, even if it's a small one, so that players have to make a choice about whether to try and get a better contract or go with a less-than-perfect one they have right now. To reduce the role that the whims of the RNG play, contracts are offered in categories, including type and location. So, if you decline a Kerbin part test contract, you get another Kerbin part test contract back. Likewise with Mun survey, Minmus satellite, and so on. This should keep a broad enough variety of contracts open that there's no need to keep hunting for the particular sort of contract you want. Let me also put the problem with orbital science contracts into a single sentence: They are pay-once missions with the potential for arbitrarily large payoffs. Now, let's compare them to the aerial survey missions with increased payouts. 1. An aerial survey mission has to reach a particular location. If it's not in that location, it needs to be moved there. An orbital science mission just needs to be in orbit, and with the right parameters can be used to get high and low altitude orbital science. If it's not at the right altitude, a brief bit of time acceleration can get it into the right place. 2. An aerial survey mission has to expend fuel to reach its locations. If you want to keep using the same craft for surveys, you need to refuel it. This costs funds. An orbital science probe, on the other hand, costs exactly 0 funds to use over and over again. Assuming it doesn't intersect any atmospheres or SOI boundaries, it will remain in the exact same orbit indefinitely. 3. Flying craft to new locations is interesting. Grinding for funds with the same orbital science mission is boring. Here the advantage is to the survey missions, since they have you do new things. Now, you can offset the advantages the orbital science missions have by increasing the payouts aerial survey missions have. But...how much higher do they need to be? What is the appropriate increase over zero-effort, zero-cost missions? While the payouts for survey missions should be increased, there also shouldn't be zero-effort, zero-cost contracts. The only way I can see to balance them is to make them too trivial to bother with, and that's not a good option, either (see Note 1). I'd much rather that there be some costs involved, so that you can weigh the pros and cons of doing one over the other. Note 1: There are other zero-effort, zero-cost contracts already in the game. They're the "Test parts while landed at Kerbin" contracts. You get a 100% refund for recovering vessels on the launchpad, so they cost nothing. Similarly, it takes no particular effort to run a part test. However, the payouts are so low that most people simply don't bother with them. They do have some use in a "Drag yourself back from bankruptcy" role, though.

I see a lot of people saying that these contracts are exploitable or abusable, but not very many talking about why they are exploits. Let's look at how the mechanics work together to encourage this sort of behavior. 1. There are no fixed costs in the game. You don't pay upkeep on the facilities, you don't pay salaries, and there's no penalty for sitting around doing nothing. Everything you need to pay for is purely discretionary. This means you can sink every fund into whatever it is you want, which is the first step. 2. There are no on-going costs for a mission. There's no limit to how many missions you can have going simultaneously, there's no need to pay the techs to track the mission, the controllers to monitor it, parts don't wear out, there's no life support, and so on. This means that, subject to the constraints of orbital mechanics, you can leave a spacecraft wherever you want and it will be there whenever you come back to it. The only costs a mission has are the ones it incurs at launch. This is the second step. 3. There's no opportunity cost for declining a contract. You can refresh the contract list however much you want until you get the contract you want. There's no reputation penalty, no financial penalty, and the contracts refresh immediately if you decline one you don't like. This is the third step. 4. Contracts can be completed by any vessel that meets its requirements, which means that the spacecraft you left in orbit can complete science missions. This is the fourth and final step. Once you have orbital science contracts, there's nothing stopping you from getting an arbitrarily large amount of money by putting a satellite into orbit. There's a few ways to fix this. The first is to introduce the dreaded time-based mechanics. This is also the one I think is preferable. 1. Upkeep gets paid on buildings per time period, Kerbals get salaries every so often, and if you run out of money, things stop working until and unless you get enough to pay the balance. 2. Every active mission takes up a slot at the tracking station. If you have too many simultaneous missions, then you can't launch anything new until an old one ends. Also, every active mission requires a certain amount of money to keep track of, possibly depending on the cost and part count of the vessel itself. 3. Contracts refresh on a timer, like every day or week. Evey contract you decline is one you don't get back until the timer elapses, so you might end up taking a less than ideal contract to ensure that you can make ends meet. 4. With the above changes, this ceases to be an issue and can be left as is. Alternatively, if time-based costs are unpalatable, the only alternative I can see being viable is mission based costs. 4. List first because it is the most important to address in this scenario, contracts have to be assigned at launch and can only be completed by the spacecraft that was launched to fulfill them. You can't park a spacecraft in orbit and have it fulfill any and all contracts you throw at it. You have to specifically launch one to fulfill it. This really renders the rest moot, but I'll look at them nonetheless. 1. Contracts have a surcharge based on the level of your facilities and how many Kerbals you have employed. This would give some pressure to accept more difficult but higher paying contracts, since they have to cover not only the cost of the vessel, but the cost of maintaining your space program. 2. On-going costs in this system don't matter. If a mission takes a long time, it takes a long time. You can't get any new contracts without launching a new mission. 3. There should be some cost to declining a contract, even if it's more or less a nominal charge of funds. Players will eventually have to pick a contract, whether or not it's ideal.

Cheating? How? It's fairly common in real life for one rocket to launch multiple payloads. In fact, a recent notable example is the Falcon 9 flight where they had that engine-out problem. They were able to deliver their primary payload to the ISS, but due to the engine failure, they were unable to deliver the secondary payload due to the increased fuel expenditure.

Is it possible that we could get this without having to open up the debug menu to view? Preferably with a requirement that you visit and do science once in a biome before it shows up...

Glad to see that someone is working on updated charts! There's a point of order, though. The 24-77, Sepratron, and Mark 55 can't be used singly, since these engines are radial mounts. Does this chart take into account that you need at least two for balanced thrust?

What game mode are you playing in?

At the present, there is no cost whatsoever to the player for waiting, provided they have no outstanding contracts. They can take new contracts now or twenty years in the future. The only thing that changes is the alignment of the planets. Given this, it seems that the question about deadlines becomes: If I launch right now, can I complete this contract? If the deadlines err on the side of generous, then its precise length doesn't matter much, since the player will be able to complete them in time. This effectively removes time as a pressure for the player. The converse, making the time limits so stringent that it's a real challenge to finish the mission in time, seems like undesirable gameplay to me. Good for a hard mode, perhaps, but a little too much for the game in general, I feel. Since I'd like time to be a gameplay factor, I think that other alternatives are needed. Here's a few I think might work. 1. Encourage players to queue contracts that they can't complete in one mission. This gets the clock ticking, since they'll have to launch a second mission within some time after the first. One way to do this would be to restrict the payout of contracts, so that players have to use the advances of several to pay for one mission. But since they shouldn't be able to complete all of those contracts in one mission, they need to complete those contracts quickly enough so that they have both the funds and times to complete their other outstanding contracts. 2. Include time-based costs. Like, say, for paying for mission control, Kerbal astronaut salaries, radar tracking facilities, so and so forth. 3. Time-based budgets, as I mentioned above. 4. Some combination of the above. What do you propose for this? That depends entirely on what you're doing with those launches. Can you do some very high prestige contracts with that one big launch? Or would it be better to spread out the launches, potentially covering a larger range of mission profiles? Big launches are also more complex and inherently riskier. There's more room for things to go wrong and the consequences more severe if they do.

Regex: Yearly budgets are far too long, I'll agree with that. But I think that a time-based budget has merits if they're run on a shorter time frame, like weeks or months. Specifically, I'm interested in the tradeoffs they could present for launch windows. "Do I launch a mission to satisfy a potentially important contract? Or do I pass it up so that I can afford my Duna mission?" It can also add time pressures. "I want to do a Duna mission, but I'll need a budget of 500k to do so. Can I bring mine up high enough in time for the launch window?" These examples are somewhat arbitrary, but they give an idea of what I'd like to see from them. At the moment, time is essentially meaningless, since you can accumulate funds as quickly as you can launch missions. I'd like to have to take into account how long a mission will take, how long the span between transfer windows is, and so on, rather than simply time warping whenever it's convenient.

Arguably the part testing contracts advance the player's skills in different ways, since they have to figure out how to use a part in a situation that they might not otherwise even consider.

If you're on Windows, Alt-F4 works.

For those calling for greater complexity in the resource system, I have to ask: To what end? I don't view complexity as being fun in and of itself. Building a rocket is a fun complexity, since there are lots of meaningful choices to be made in the process. But what about converting raw resources to end products? While I, personally, might find the details of what goes into rocket fuel interesting, I don't think it would necessarily make for good gameplay. Ultimately, the purpose of a resource system is to provide the means to move a rocket from Point A to Point B, and possibly to keep Kerbals alive if life support is ever introduced. Maybe to build rockets off of Kerbin, if we're lucky. There are several questions a resource system needs to address: 1. How do I find resources? 2. What parts do I need to extract them? 3. What parts do I need to convert them? 4. Does a single site have all the resources needed, or do I have to fly between locations? 5. How many steps must I take to convert raw resources to end products? Keep in mind that KSP suffers from part clutter as it is, with no amelioration in sight, and interacting with those parts is primarily through the atrocious right-click system. These help bias me to simplicity in a resource system, but if either is improved, then I'm more willing to accept complexity.

There's a lot of good thought in this thread, and I'm just going to add my thoughts on the matter.. I want a resource system in the game. Why? So that I can resupply missions out at Jool, for example, without having to bring fuel there from Kerbin all of the time. Since I view resources as a means to an end, it should be fairly straightforward and painless to use. In this light, the devs were right to scrap the overly complex model they had. Having one resource you could mine for liquid fuel, oxidizer, monopropellant, and xenon gas, along with one part to mine and convert it, would satisfy what I want from a resource system. Now, if there were also fuel lines you could make to transfer resources between landed vessels, that would just be icing on the cake. Some sort of mapping system would also likely be needed, but as long as it can run in high time warps and while focused elsewhere, it can be relatively painless. And so long as your miners can run without you being focused on them, you can just set them up and leave them. With a system like this, the challenges are: getting a probe in place to map the body you want to mine from. Landing on a deposit. Landing very close to a miner/bringing that miner up to meet an orbiting supply depot or vessel needing to be refueled. Since these challenges are all about flight, the focus remains on KSP's core gameplay of flying spaceships around. Now, a more complex model may be more interesting in and of itself, but I'm not sure it would contribute as well to the ultimate goal of letting you keep flying your missions around.

This is very well said, and I'm afraid that I don't have much to add to it besides noting that it sums up my own feelings on those matters very well.

I'd like to see a stock life support system at some point, but there's at least one issue that should be addressed. What do you do with space stations? Having to resupply stations with life support time and again could get quite tedious after a while, and so there should be some mechanism to have those flights handwaved or automated.

Yes, please! However, it should be off by default, since it's something that players don't need at first. Also, much of the information Kerbal Engineer shows, like Apoapsis, Periapsis, time to both of those, altitude from *terrain*, et cetera, should be something shown in the base game, too. They're immensely useful to have, and honestly? I want to watch my rocket fly, not constantly flip to map mode where I can't do that.

Liquid fuel/oxidizer tanks, liquid fuel tanks, engines, and such would also be nice categories to have. It's getting to be hard to find the parts you're looking for now...

I'd really appreciate this as well. Since we can shift our velocity indicator from orbital to surface-relative modes, why not the altitude meter?

There is a link to the code, yes, but I'm afraid that I don't have Matlab. As for taking into account partially filled tanks, the LFB is the only case where it might make sense to do so. How often would a player fiddle with the fuel tanks to get exactly the amount of fuel they want in the tanks? Though, it might make the difference between an engine narrowly failing on a TWR constraint and passing with less fuel...

Mission elapsed time would have more use if there were more consumables in the game, like food, water, and oxygen. But yes, it would be nice if the game remembered which setting you were on.

This part isn't true. The new tanks have a worse wet/dry mass ratio than the old tanks at 8.2. The old engines have a wet/dry mass ratio of 9.

There are many measures to judge what a 'good rocket is. In no particular order... 1. Part count 2. Mass efficiency 3. Fuel efficiency 4. TWR 5. Delta-v 6. Cost (eventually) 7. Aesthetics Which of these is most important depends on the purpose of the rocket and one's personal preferences. Delta-v and TWR are the most important in determining where a rocket can go, but all of the others have their own value. Fuel efficiency is important for reasonable rockets, for example, since it means that they need to be refueled less often, while mass efficiency means your boosters can be smaller.