CaptRobau

It might be interesting to take certain universal rules into account. The Roche limit for example is the boundary between a stable orbit and one that is close that the orbiting body would be ripped apart by tidal forces. Using that you could create a rule that prevents a planet's moon from orbiting unrealistically close to its parent body. Planets are likely to be gas giants at 10 Earth masses and can become brown dwarfs at 13 Jupiter masses. Basing it on the KSP equivalents (Kerbin and Jool) you could use that data to create a realistic rule governing the mass of gas giants. Another phenomenon observed in real-life is that less massive gas giants often grow quite large in radius, especially close to their sun. Gas giants more massive than Jupiter on the other hand are generally not that much bigger, because the higher gravity causes them to compress. Rocky planets are generally considered to not be more massive than 10 Earth masses (aka Kerbin masses), although there is one extrasolar rocky planet that weighs as much as Neptune (aka 17 Earth masses). At a radius of 2.35 Earths, it's the largest known rocky planet. There are also lower limits. Icy moons are generally believed to start to look round (so like the Mun and Ike) instead at around 0.03 Earth radius. Below that it's going to look more irregular àla Minmus, Pol, etc. Rocky planets with atmospheres might do with a lower limit of 0.4 Earth radius, because that's what Titan is.

The Station Cores could use some Monopropellant. Would help with sleeker designs and justify their size. EDIT: Also the radial Cupola's attachment point is too low, creating a gap when used as a stacked part. Also the docking modules (or at least the 1.25m one) would benefit from radial attachment, as adding a radial attachment point plus the docking module just makes it stick out too much.

Its not the 2 minutes of design effort per flight that counts, as you're just using subassemblies what they're for. The half hour it took you to design that SSTO was more than if you had designed an expendable launch vehicle. SSTOs are thus more difficult than expendables. You are probably too skilled at the game, which means that medium difficulty becomes trivial, hard becomes medium and only extremely hard remains a challenge. For the majority of players (according to a survey, only 23% of forumgoers had gotten to the Mun) fully reusable vehicles are (extremely) hard, while expendable vehicles are easier.

I don't really feel that SSTOs and other reusable designs aren't that overpowered. Yes, you get all or most of your money back, but those designs are also harder to make and require more work to fly. An expendable vehicle is so simple it can be designed in a minute, but an reusable vehicle will take more time (perhaps testing and tweaking based on the results). When both are designed, the expendable vehicle is also less complicated to fly. Getting up to orbit and back again only requires you to go vertically to 10 km up, then tilt to 45 degrees until around 30-40 km and then coast to apoapsis before circularizing. Returning is pointing retrograde, firing and then opening a parachute a km or so above the surface. A 100% recoverable RAPIER spaceplane requires you to take off, ascend at a certain angle of attack, level off at 20 or so km to pick up speed. When you get up to speed you need to point back up and switch to rockets until you get high enough to level off again. Then you need to circularize. Returning can require plane changes, multiple orbits, lining up with the KSC area, lining up with the runway, the actual landing, braking, etc. Expendable are balanced with reusables in terms of time and effort. Expendables are low on effort, time and recovery reward. Expendables are high on effort, time and recovery reward.

I knew it from the start. Congrats Porkjet!

We know he's remade part of the spaceplane parts, but there's never been a mention of all. Everything we've seen (Mk1 Cockpit and Mk3 parts) is just the stuff that Spaceplane Plus has not added. If Hugo only redid half the spaceplane parts, then Spaceplane Plus could make up for the other half.

If its Spaceplaneplus it'd replace most of the stock spaceplane parts, meaning there would not be any or little additional update time.

At no point have they said modder. The SomethingAwful and Twitter link all mention the word mod.

A cargo bay is still useful because you can add a probe or something and launch it using a spaceplane. Otherwise you'd have to build around it or attach it radially in a really ugly way.

Code is actually not as likely as you think, since plugins are designed in a different way than Squad can design its gamecode. Parts take a lot of work too and can more easily be integrated into the game and are also hard to do well. It would take one of Squad's employees quite a while to replicate the amount of parts that Spaceplane Plus adds. Integrating that excellent, stock-looking mod makes sense.

The spaceplane parts weren't the only thing that Hugo the intern did. He spent much more time on working on the various animations (with Felix I think) and made other parts for 0.24. Only later during his internship did they mention that he was redoing some of the spaceplane parts. Spaceplane parts also seemed to still be on the drawing board only a short time before he left, so I don't think he went through them all. We've only seen some Mk3 parts and the Mk1 cockpit. No Mk2 parts, wings or the other stuff that SpacePlane Plus offers. If Hugo didn't redo all parts, adding Spaceplane Plus would help replacing all the old plane parts in one go and then some.

That's what you get when you have a PR company turn game company.

I think showing any broadcast of KSP streamers, even if it's not KSP helps increase their popularity. Try it for the Minecraft, stay for the KSP.

Another suggestion if you're going to update the pack to 0.24 is that the smallest inflatable hab (PA330 I think) has its windows light upon deployment. The other hab doesn't have that, which looks weird. Maybe have the lights be a separate button, so that one can choose to have their habs lit up or not (I don't like the look so I'd keep them off)?

It's a suggestion to SQUAD to put it in the stock game, which is what this suggestion forum is about. If you weren't allowed to talk about features that a mod in some or another has implemented then you could pretty much close suggestions down.

Could we have a surface attachable version of the banana outside of its casing. A lot of could be had with that. Also not yellow enough.

I've looked at the wiki article for these kinds of aircraft, but I don't see it mentioning not needing air for combustion. Instead it seems to use the nuclear reactor to heat up the air enough to get thrust, instead of burning jet fuel.

Cannot wait to get my hands on those new parts.

Torque power. The probe will quite easily seem uncontrollable due to the low torque values. A pod responds more clearly to inputs, which is useful for newbies to understand. Anyway, a large part of the Kerbals before probes is because Squad wants players to start with the stars of the game: Kerbals. I can can understand that.

Probes and especially aircraft are more complicated than manned rockets, which makes it easier for new players to get the hang of things. It might not be realistic, but it works gameplay wise.

Because people are building this to do a lot of test runs in a single mission. If you have parts that won't work as you expect them to on such an unstable design, then the chances of such an outlandish working safely are almost zero. Thus people will stop building them. As everyone else has said, random annoyances add absolutely nothing to the game, but frustration.

If anything turbojets are overpowered compared to their real-life counterparts. The TWR and high speed performance are more akin to a ramjet, then a turbojet. It's difficult to fix though, since KSP badly models airbreathing engines (because it uses systems that only model rocket engines well). A real RAPIER (SABRE engine) is supposed to be worse than an individual airbreathing or rocket engine, but because you don't have the weight of three engines (two rockets/two airbreathing or vice versa) it is more efficient when you need both airbreathing and rocket modes.

That's different. First of they're not random, they're procedurally generated meaning they spawn according to a ruleset. You won't get Duna missions until you go to the Mun/Minmus, the payoff is based on distance and other variables, etc. Second it would completely remove crazy contraptions like this:

I don't see that work well. Adding a timer will just mean that people will stand still for ten seconds, waiting for the EVA report to work. People would hop around more if there was anything to do/see but the ground and non-interactive ground scatter, which is what needs to be changed if one wants people to do more at a landing site than getting Reports, Samples and plant a flag before returning to Kerbin.

Nuclear testing bans apply to bombs. A nuclear thermal rocket, aka the LV-N, is an engine powered by a nuclear reactor basically. Those are used in a whole bunch of sea-going vessels. NTRs are simply not used because of funding, the public being averse to nuclear power since Chernobyl/Three Mile Island and the potential risk of the NTR falling back to Earth.