CaptRobau

Just noticed you based some of this mod on my concepts. Glad someone liked my ideas. Cool mod!

I noticed that parks spark on contact in space. Don't sparks need oxygen to even happen? Maybe do a check for oxygen before the sparking effects are activated.

How do I move a stock body to one of the new stars? Also is it possible to put a planet in orbit of the black hole. I want to see what a rogue planet would mean for gameplay.

I think it helps that you made the Fuji spacecraft.

Pizzaoverhead, would this be possible to do?

It's mostly that there's no stable version of Unity out that has 64-bit support.

Your doing the work of the gods. This will lead to a whole lot of contract mods and that is a good thing. Would it be possible to add something that can disable the standard contracts, so that if you make for example a pack of contracts that resemble the Space Race, you won't have the stock contracts messing up the contracts menu.

Tried it. The sounds and spark effects work really well, like they add a lot of atmosphere to crashes. I've run into the issue that the wheels are already sparking on my initial takeoff. What this mod really needs to make crashes more spectacular is that parts that are not explosive (fuel tanks and such) won't explode unless they impact at very, very high speeds (at which point the friction forces would create temperatures so high that the non-explosive parts would vaporize). That way if you crash, most parts will just break apart, scatter and create a glorious cloud of sparks while they slide to a halt. You can see how cool that looks if you turn No Crash Damage on in the debug menu.

+1 as it makes a lot of sense.

(1) Don't that idea rely entirely on being able to get out of the water (fully loaded) without needing to use said fuel ? I wouldn't hold my breath on the devs adding electric propeller for this. Hypothetically we could have Kerbonaut setting up line, but that's speculation. Oceans are probably the hardest area to get stuff from, even without watching out for your solar panels, so it might not be the best example (2) I guess. In the scope of manned exploration of all planet I think we can do with only the "main drive" fuels. If we're talking manned, then it's indeed not important. (3) nuclear fuel is freaking durable and hard to replace, by simplification I would consider them infinite and just balance other criteria accordingly. As pointed out by Laie, it would require a new line of fuel tank unless we repurpose previous tank. (it could get confusing on screenshot if they do not differ visually) Been looking into it and I think you're right. NTRs do have limited lifetimes, because they operate at such high temperatures while thrusting. But the fuel rod doesn't need replenishing by then. Refueling them is probably not a design issue then. Also the fuel tank doesn't have to be different. I'm talking about an in-VAB switch that switches it from a tank with LF + O, to just O. That wouldn't need a new kind of tank. (4) Understand that, and I guess it could be used for said "refueling base" night time (more than probes), but once again we are talking of getting both LF/O at the same location (night trucking put aside). I believe we have a consensus in that probes (roughly smaller than a 2.5 fuel tank) should not be self-sufficient in themselves. I don't think you understand my intent. Fuel cells don't have anything to do with mining, it was just on the resource flow chart that I talked about. It's just an early game alternative to solar panels or batteries for providing electricity. They'd be cheaper to buy than solar panels, but since they consume LF and O to create the electricity they wouldn't be infinite. So for longer, more complex missions solar panels then become more ideal. Also these parts would be large in diameter, 2.5m or maybe 1.25m, as they're designed for manned vehicles. About this : for or against Kerbonaute being required in the refueling process ? Make both possible, but adding (more) Kerbonauts would increase efficiency.

It could mess up their flow. The schedule has been designed for full updates, followed by a hotfix in the week after release. Rince and repeat.

Cargo bays, probably. But I think IVAs are different. Some people care a lot, others don't care at all. Seeing as IVAs are very time consuming to make, I'd rather just have 0.90 without the IVAs, than wait another week for the IVAs to be complete. There's so much interesting stuff in 0.90 that it'd be a shame to delay those features to get access to a few, in my eyes, superfluous IVAs.

There's a mod that does this. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/61294-0-25-XT-Landertron-Smart-Retrorockets-for-Landers-and-Spaceplanes-v0-08-Oct-10

Not quite, since they'll actually hold LFO instead of the, for spacecraft generally useless, LiquidFuel. Also they'll fit to things better. I think there's a larger chance that we'll get the cargo bays and wheels in 0.90 than that we won't get them. They're just being careful with promises, as there's still chance that it won't be done in time. 16 I think they said. I agree. 16 Kerbals is far too much to carry for most missions anyway. Making it as long as a half-length slice fuel tank (so 2/3rds of what it is now) would leave room for 8-12 crew, which is more than enough. Though the Mk3 cockpit is probably going to be hold Shuttle numbers of crew, so if you want to rebuild the shuttle you'll probably only need a cockpit, a long cargobay and an LFO tank/adapter.

These parts were not the parts in development for 0.25, so it's only been Porkjet and he's only worked on it for a single update worth of time. With the amount of models and textures he's had to make, that's not a lot of time. I can see why some things might miss the deadline by an inch.

1. I see your point, although getting to mine the water and not immediately having to convert it would give some flexibility to the game. For example if you scoop up water from Laythe's oceans, you might not be able to extend your solar panels in that precarious situation. So if you can keep the water in the large converter behind the scoop then you can wait with converting until you get out of the water. 2. Xenon would be low on my priorities list, but the old flow chart gave the idea that Squad wanted every engine type to eventually be able to become self-sufficient (if you put in the money, time and effort to set up the production chain). So I kept that idea. 3. Nuclear Fuel is meant to be uranium aka nuclear fuel rods. Those are necessary for the nuclear reactor/nuclear thermal rocket to work. If those are spent, then the reactor/engine won't work. This way there'd also be a nice limit on the use of NTRs, so that their OPness can't be used forever (unless you refuel them). The nuclear fuel resource would be in the NTR/reactors so they wouldn't need special tanks (except a couple that you could use for refueling purposes). I am a proponent of ditching odizider use in the future for NTRs, but that would require a different fuel tank logic (you'd need to be able to change the entire tank to LF only). 4. A fuel cell gets electricity from liquid fuel + oxidizer, so it'd be useful from day one. They were used by Gemini and Apollo, so it's pretty low-tech stuff.

A nuclear thermal rocket is also a nuclear reactor and those are probably not cheap, so it's probably warranted to make the LV-N more expensive without having to resort to insurance reasons, etc. Something along the lines of the 3.75m engines is probably fair. And I have no problem with switching the last two engine/fuel tech nodes, so that 3.75m engines come before the LV-n, which will then be the last engine in the top tech tree branch.

Very cool Arsonide.

The basic idea behind that system is not bad. It just has too many superfluous steps/additions. By scrapping a few of the things on there you could get a pretty lean resource mining system: -Combine the rock and pump drill. They're used in the same spot, in the same way. No use in needing two different parts for that. -Scrap the dirt refinery. At the most make dirt something you can use as fuel for a space-based mass driver (basically a simple engine that pumps out dirt at high velocity to propel itself) -Fewer intermediate resources, especially the fake ones. Just keep water and allow it to be used to make liquid fuel/oxidizer/monopropellant. Intake air can directly (but very inefficiently) turned into xenon. -Scrap life support parts/resources A few ideas I'd keep though: -Nuclear reactors/nuclear fuel, when coupled with a more realistic solar power 'decay' would make manned missions to Jool and beyond more challenging (lots of large solar panels for a little bit of juice or a single heavy reactor that provides you with all the power you need?) -Fuel cells, as a cheaper alternative to solar panels in early career when you're still going to the Mun/Minmus

Once your production chain is up, then a single asteroid or single landing site should be able to get you the amount of parts needed to build quite a large number of parts. Just imagine what one could build if an entire Class E size metallic asteroid was hollowed out. It doesn't have to be a truly endless source like KSC to be fun.

One thing I've noticed in this thread is the focus on resource being used to create fuel. There is however another interesting use for off-planet mining and that's construction. One thing that the stock game doesn't allow is easy exploration beyond Kerbin. I've explored every inch of the vicinity of KSC, because I could build a specialized vehicle to drive or fly where I wanted to go and try again if I failed. Beyond that small bubble that sort of exploration and experimentation is not possible, because you need to a build a time-consuming mission to even get there and if something goes wrong it'll take another mission to get back to where you were. It's a shame that vast swaths of the bodies beyond Kerbin go practically unexplored, because there's a lot of interesting details to be found. Off-Kerbin construction would be a way to fix that. A construction system wouldn't need be hard to make. Abstract the resources needed to a single 'ore' resource, add an excavator part to get it out of the soil and a smelter convert it to 'metal'. Metal could then be used by the large (at least 3.75m) construction facility part. Using it would bring the player to a small VAB-like environment where they could build rovers, planes and small spacecraft. Once done, they'd be launched from a launchpad part attached or nearby. This would greatly enhance exploration of the various celestial bodies as people, after setting up a small production chain, would be able to launch all sorts of vehicle to explore and experiment in their alien surroundings.

Would it be possible to make a variable for the resource extraction module that allows you to define what it can mine. That way one could make something like a laser only extract water and other stuff that would be trapped in the ice, while an excavator would only get you more solid stuff like rock and ore.

It's impressive, but also very terrifying at the same time.

A more procedural engine fairing system would be a good way to make engine clustering on upper/landing stages easier. The decoupler would decide what size the fairing would be. So if you add a LV-909 to a 2.5m tank and a 2.5m decoupler below that the engine fairing would be 2.5m as well. Procedural fairings does it a bit hacky, so I imagine that with access to the game itself Squad could make something even better/more intuitive.

No thanks. One of KSP's strengths is that it offers a simplified approach to real-life spaceflight. Things can be abstracted (patch conics instead of n-body for trajectories, etc.), but making up resources is beyond abstraction and thus, in my mind, would remove one of the game's strengths. Real-life ISRU resources can be simplified enough to do almost anything a fake resource can do, while still teaching people how ISRU works in real-life. Space Engineer shows that inventory works for both distinct objects and amounts of resources. You can just have an water icon in your inventory with let's say 20L in the corner. Moving 'amounts' inventory can work the same as 'objects' inventory. Let's say you want to put your water in the converter. You drag the water icon to the converter part of the menu and it asks you how much water you want to put in the converter, which you can adjust using a slider. Objects would do the same, but instead of the slider changing the liters moved, it'd change the individual objects moved. Inventories can also be easily limited by an upper limit on mass. A display in the inventory would tell you how many mass you can put into and how much is already in the inventory tank. Internal subdivision will have to be abstracted for this to work, but I'd rather have an abstracted, slightly unrealistic, single set of inventory tanks than dozens of nearly identical inventory tanks for each type of resource. Sometimes gameplay needs to trump realism. The complexity of a 'chemistry minigame' is all up to the interface design. A good inventory/crafting interface can make 50 interacting resources instantly comprehendable. A bad inventory interface can make 3 interacting resources completely ungraspable. Recipes are probably the easiest way to do it. Let's say you want to build a solar panel. Right-click a 3D printer part and select solar panel you want to build from the crafting interface. It will show you what you need (1 kg of aluminium and 1 kg of silicon or something). Click on build and it will draw the two resources (if you have them) from your connected inventory tanks. Then it starts building it. Very simple. To be clear, I'm not arguing for super-realistic recipes. Monopropellant you could get from a generic ammonia resource, instead of combining 3 specific ammonia based compounds or something.