Monger

I think SQUAD should separate the experiments: there should be experiments that need to be recovered, and there should be experiments that need to be transmitted. Period. If you are able to land the lab and a rover, you can easily (and without further resources except electricity) collect experiments from all over the moon/planet and process them in the lab. Actually, you could go one step further, and define that some experiments can't be transmitted until they were processed in the lab. Hm... yeah, I guess science will need another refactoring at some point.

Actually, the simplest rocket is just a manned pod. Period. Go EVA, take a sample from the launch pad, make an EVA report, get back in, make a crew report, and recover the pod. If you want to go wild (which you obviously should), add a goo canister and start the experiment.This gives you enough science points to unlock at least one or two technology nodes. Soil samples give an enormous amount of science points, so make sure to land on another different biome every time you launch and don't forget to take samples before recovering the craft.

When you use the nuclear engine you still need an air breather. The SABRE replaces both engines. Although air breathing engines have quite low Isps, they are still way more efficient than any space engine. I don't remember the right fuel mix, but at least 80% of the fuel mix is air - so, more or less, you only carry 20% of the fuel you are actually using. As long as you are in the atmosphere (which SSTOs are most of the burn time), air breathing engines are far more efficient than anything else, including atomic engines. Btw. , the corresponding Wikipedia page is really worth reading.

I disagree. I think, smaller SSTOs profit much more from SABRE than bigger ones. With a really big plane you can afford to mount multiple engine types without risking your balance or payload efficiency. But for a small ship a single engine that works as well in space as within the atmosphere sounds quite perfect.

A real SABRE can basically fill up fuel while flying. It separates O² from the breathing air and compresses it in its own tanks. So in theory, you launch with just a full fuel tank, and while you accelerate in the atmosphere you fill up your gas tanks. Once you have built up enough speed you can switch to "rocket engine mode", and gain the missing momentum you need for space. For several reasons this is incredibly fuel-efficient. The most fuel is always burned in the lower atmosphere. Air breathing engines so far are insanely fuel-efficient, because most of the weight is carried by the wings, and not by thrust, and most of the fuel is gained directly from the atmosphere, but they are dead weight once you scratch the stratosphere. Vice versa, rocket engines are only really efficient once you leave the atmosphere, and until then are dead weight. This is why you usually need multiple stages to achieve orbit. Even the Aeris IV is insanely fuel efficient. You can reach orbit, and land everywhere on Kerbin with just a single stage and some fuel tanks. And this is without SABRE.

I regularly got a bluescreen from this driver some months ago. As it turned out, it was caused by Adobe Flash Player. Every time I had multiple tabs including flash plugins (which I regularly had in the background while gaming), chances were that the video driver would crash at some point. This not only happened with KSP but with multiple games, and actually in pure Desktop mode as well. If you can't get rid of flash, try uninstalling and reinstalling Adobe Flash Player. Since I'm using Windows 8, there is no custom Adobe Flash installation anymore, since Internet Explorer includes them since a few months. And so far no more crashes.

I barely makes it into Orbit, without any mentionable payload. I tried to build on the Aeris 4A to include a second seat, but as it turns out you need a very different design for this. The biggest problem currently is that all available air breathing engines are that big and heavy, and therefore are really hard to balance. Integrating everything into one engine should make things considerably easier, especially for small planes.

So is "Mun", and SQUAD adopted the name. I was pretty sure that the Sun is actually named "Kerbol" in-game, need to look that up when I'm home...

Well, this will quickly go off-Topic, but regarding Egosoft: it's not like they did just a minor mistake, and suddenly everyone considers them as evil. They achieved to maintain a very loyal fanbase over the years, but totally failed to open up to new players. Also, quality and usability were always big issues, with every single major release. X2 and X3 were horribly flawed at the beginning. So it's not like they suddenly decided to jump to consoles, and failed horribly. They were not particularly successful on the PC market, either. So, lessons to be learned from this are: don't forget your most loyal fans, but don't ignore new customers, either. Never release a game with bad quality - not only regarding bugs, but also UI design and gameplay. And: don't enter markets you don't understand.

A lot of KSP Players tend to think "bigger is better". Also: "if it doesn't work, add moar boosters". But I guess the more the game progresses, the more you will see such designs. Small space probes are insanely effective: you can easily launch with a medium sized rocket from Kerbin, and reach and land on any planet with an atmosphere in the system. Once there are biomes for Duna and Eve, this will be by far the easiest and most effective way to gather science from other planets. You just need to hit the atmosphere somehow. (Then again, the time consuming acceleration phases are really annoying. There needs to be a way to deal with this)

Actually, no. None of the parts are sized or balanced like any real part. Also: we don't have any yellow fuel lines (actually, no fuel lines at all). With current technology, this would be far too dangerous.

There are a couple of different legs, some softer, some sturdier. Also: design your ship in a way so that leg compression won't hurt you. If you are able to land on Eve, this should be the smallest issue.

This sounds almost exactly like in Germany. Private waste is getting less and less, and we still pay more and more for garbage disposal. You could argue that this is a way to create awareness for avoiding waste, but I guess the main reason is rather that it is a convenient way of additional income for the city.

The problem is not throwing away garbage, but how to obtain resources. Recycling is a very lucrative industry. Prices for copper, silver, gold and steel have skyrocketed in the last decade. Plastic material is highly dependent on oil. And other resources are getting short which we are currently not always aware of, like groundwater. Think of it this way: for an astronaut, recycling is not an option, it is self-evident. On a space station you have to recycle air, water, food and spare parts. And although the earth is a lot bigger than a space station, in the end all resources on earth are finite, as well. Recycling is not an option, it is a necessity to survive.

The LHC is probably the modern equivalent to a world wonder. Not only it's dimensions, but most technology in it is custom-made, and probably there was never a project where so many scientists from different cultures worked quite flawlessly together. The LHC is, without a doubt, the biggest machine ever built.

I agree with the TS. Just add a label to display the name of the current biome. It won't take anything away from the discovery aspect of the game, it just makes it more intuitive how the game works. Unless you read the forum and developer blogs, there is no way to know that i.e. lower and higher atmosphere are separate biomes, but the ocean shores are no separate biome, and Minmus currently only contains one Biome. There is no reason why it should remain a mystery through what kind of biomes you are travelling. The thing about displaying discovered biomes and experiments was already discussed thoroughly in other threads, so no need to repeat it here.

You can easily get to the moon without mods with a single normal sized rocket, with about three stages. No docking required. You can actually reach Eve or Duna with such a configuration as well, although it requires a little more planning, and you won't probably return. Make sure that you can reach orbit comfortably, because actually then you are almost there. You need about 2300 m/s to gain a stable orbit, and about 500 m/s more to reach the moon. Add another 100 m/s and you can reach Minmus, and because Minmus' low gravity, it is actually simpler to land on Minmus than on Mun.

I don't think an empty question mark is that much of a spoiler. And there are players out there that might be interested in finding all available experiments, just for fun. Knowing that, let's say, Eve has the double amount of experiments like the Mun might motivate players to design missions they would ignore otherwise. But I guess we all agree that we should be able to review all finished experiments. At some point, you just forget what you already did, and the only hint you get that you already did that is via the reduced science points.

I think one of the goals of research should be to force the player to try something new. So, performing the same experiment multiple times under identical circumstances should be discouraged. However, at least from what I can see now, for a beginner (and unless you regularly read the developer comments on this site) it might be hard to understand what exactly you have to do to find new experiments. I think you should give the player a better feeling of what he currently might have missed. Let's say: make the list of all experiments public, but hide their details, and group them according to category. You may want to hide the categories as well, until certain criterias are met. For example: hide moon experiments until the first vehicle actually reaches the moon's sphere of influence. The list might look like this (obviously not in this layout, but you get the idea): Kerbin Surface - Ocean biome sample - ??? (Not yet discovered) - ??? - Kerbin Launch Center biome sample - ??? - Kerbin Launch Center Crew Report Kerbin Orbit - Low Orbit Crew Report - ??? Moon Orbit (Hidden, because not reached yet) - ??? - ??? etc. etc. ... This is probably a big list, but it would help players to understand where and how much experiments there are to discover. Think of it as an achievement system. Understanding that there is still so much that you don't know is always good for long-time motivation.

True, but at least the scope where you have to look is significantly narrowed. You only need to look at a handful of parts to discover how experiments and collecting samples work. Browsing through the whole catalog of parts to discover what each of them is meant to do would be much more tedious. And obviously, every new part that is unlocked is a hint at what to do next.

Maybe I am doing something wrong, but even though I am a moderately experienced player (playing KSP since 0.08, although not regularly), I am not progressing that fast. In the first three tiers, I unlocked two technology in each flight - mainly because electricity is quite limited without batteries, and the amount of data you can store before transmitting it is limited as well (or isn't it?). Also, visiting all biomes without air plane parts usually needs a few missions, and this is where the most science points can be found. So, although flying around Kerbin isn't really a complex task to do, it still should keep new players busy for a while. I think, especially for the first version, it is really well done. It is a sophisticated tutorial, and working with very limited parts is an interesting experience.

When I say "other projects", this might also include addons. And let's face it: no matter how good KSP is selling currently, at some point the sells will dry up, and they need to think about how to progress as a company. At some point in the distant future, other projects will become more important than KSP.

Well, I think this is pretty much well defined in the Wiki. A Beta is defined as "Feature complete", so I assume we will enter Beta test as soon as the rest of the list is there - at least basically. So, there are quite a few things that are still planned, like tweakables, cities, resources and weather. And probably other features will turn up that we are not aware of currently, but are more important (like the new save system, which lays the foundation for checkpoints). So, still a lot to do. Which isn't bad, other games like Minecraft also took a lot of time in closed Alpha and Beta. In the end, from Squads perspective the final release isn't that important - at least as long as they don't plan other projects besides KSP.