CaptRobau

I was not expecting the O-10 to be so big. It's not much smaller than the Mk55 radial, although it only provides 20 thrust. Aesthetically it barely fits well on the largest monoprop tank. I think a rescaling is in order? What do you think?

What's a namespace?

I've clicked the download link at least a hundred times. Went back to watching Shaun of the Dead. Then suddenly I see one in the download bar that went through. Sayonara world.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/36010-Introducing-the-Ability-to-Embed-Imgur-Albums!

I think you're reading too much between the lines in that post. All I'm reading is someone who is very careful not to reveal a potential Resourcegate. Career mode has been the main focus of Squad ever since 0.21 (released a year ago) and they probably thought about it during 0.20s development. Quite soon after that I remember the basic elements of career mode Tech Tree, Science, Contracts, Reputation and Budgets already being quite firm. Each update since then has been added one by one. The only exceptions to the focus on career mode have been the ARM update and multiplayer, the first being added because it was too good an opportunity (NASA collab) and the second being added because a smart modder came with a way to handle MP. Lately we've begun hearing terms like sandbox-complete and scope-complete. Those terms imply a long-term plan. They might not have had much of a plan around the time Resource was canned (0.19 aka early 2013) but I feel like they do now.

Source for "we have no ideas as to how to provide the sort of functional gameplay people seem to want" please. Also, and maybe it's just because of the different POV, I felt that the outrage over the shelving of resources was twofold, with none of these main reasons being an unclear roadmap. The first was that the announcement of the shelving was made at or around the same time as the announcement of multiplayer. Some people thought the two were connected and felt that resources were more fun than MP. They were however not connected (as multiplayer was shown to be possible around 0.23 and resources were shelved around the time of 0.19 or 0.20 when they were last heard of). The second reason was that people had a problem with resources possibly not working as a system. Squad tried out a couple of implementations but felt it was boring, but fans couldn't believe that. Possibly because of the hype/idea of resources. Compared to those, the voices saying: 'you have no plan for KSP' were quite faint as I recall.

Science will get 0 playtime from me. I welcome the arrival of budgets.

Completely realistic reaction wheels would be pretty hard to do in fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants KSP. If I understand RWs correctly, they spool up for a while and then they point to where you want. That's no issue if you have computer sending commands (yaw 5 degrees, roll 10 degrees, etc.) but wouldn't work if you want to have WASD controls.

I think it'd be a hard thing to implement. When the devs were showing off experimental things like resources, clouds, gas giant 2 and those were for one reason or another shelved it just led to widespread disappointment, a massive negative circular discussion that cluttered up the forums and for a while made the community not as fun to be a part of. When they kept their cards a little closer to their chest all that has happened has been a circular discussion between the same dozen or two dozen posters over the issue, while the rest just got on their way and didn't care. It might however be possible to be a bit more transparent about what lies ahead, but it should be made perfectly clear that stuff can change and things can fall through and the community shouldn't be so unforgiving and realize that the roadmap is indeed not set in stone. Personally I find it much more important that Squad has their internal roadmap sorted out, communicates when they fall behind (to give us an idea how they're doing on their invisible roadmap) and is transparent on the progress of already announced features, etc.

Time compression is only really an issue when stationary on the ground. In that case, the only data that can be gotten is from that one spot. If you have to wait for science here, you're just waiting for an arbitrary timer to run down. If you are moving however, this is different. A satellite in orbit that maps the surface temperature for example would require skill to get the best result. If you put it in an equatorial orbit, it'll only map a small band of the planet. If you place it in a 45 or 90 degree orbit you'll get a far more complete picture. There is skill to be had in the placement of your satellite. The same works for atmospheric science. Here the skill lies in keeping your probe powered throughout the descent. If your probe dies before it can transmit the data, it's lost and there's no way to do it over. This is different from static science, where you can just wait for the sun to come up or send a second mission that brings that missing antenna or something. With atmospheric science there's only one chance to do it right, which adds challenge. In the end, more engaging gameplay for science collection is only part of the solution. After a while the tech tree is all done and the blurbs (even with that Crowd-sourced mod) are not that interesting that they'll push you to do science. What the game needs to keep science useful for longer, is actual info gained from doing science. In the real-world scientific experiments don't just tell thingalso make future missions easier. NASA mapped the Moon, tested how thick the hull of manned craft would need to be to stop things like micrometeoroids, etc. The same thing could be done for KSP. A height map of Eve would help people with finding a high mountain to return to orbit from (especially if it ever gets a cloud deck, like so many of the visual mods do). A biome map would allow people to precisely land future missions. An atmospheric probe through Laythe's atmosphere would give an indication of how thick the atmosphere is, which would be useful for future manned missions (to plant the ascent profile).

Very cool idea. Can't help with anything but moral support, due to a lack of money or expertise on any of the practical matters. I do agreewith Sky_walker though. For a first attempt, it's better not to do to much and instead focus on doing on thing well. In this case, getting great footage of a Jeb figurine as he's floating in the upper atmosphere.

While I previously kept my orbits clean, I might now go for less careful approach. Debris really has near zero chance of colliding with something. A probe body or sepratrons on the other hand have a 100% chance of costing me money. So I might up littering my backyard quite a bit, so save on a few parts here on there. In general I'm looking forward to the prospect of getting to go frugal. Make big dumb stages full of SRBs and the cheapest rockets I can find.

The Skylon is designed to deliver other spacecraft into space. It'd start with satellites (with or without a small stage to get it to the Moon or Geosynchronous Orbit), but later on they could move on to manned craft that would be suited for operating in just the vacuum of space. That spacecraft would be rendezvous with the to be repaired object and later return to the Skylon. Also you don't need a payload bay. Hubble wasn't put back in the payload bay, just docked with and the personnel moved to it by robotic arm.

Aerodynamics are already in the game. Their crap and wholly insufficient, but they're in. Scope features means stuff that isn't in yet. Examples of this in 0.24 are Reputation, Budget and Contracts. Those were absent before 0.24.

Agree with you on the unloading, provided it doesn't hamper performance.

While realism played a part in my argument (although I used a wrong statistic, which undermines what I said), I was more concerned with gameplay balance. As ethernet above me said, its about the effort. If one can get 75% of the cost of the entire launch vehicle back by sticking on a few parachutes then very few will care to get close to 100% back by creating complex SSTOs or powered-landing stages àla SpaceX as those take a thousand-fold more time and effort to do. SSTOs and powered-landing stages are a nice challenge that present a goal to players. If nearly the same reward is given for something much simpler like automatic parachute recovery, it'll just cheapen the experience of those far more interesting designs.

The Ares I first stage is super-small compared to a Saturn V first stage. The former is 100,000 kg and the latter 2,280,000 kg. If 3 parachutes can land an Ares booster then you'd need 66 to land the weight of the Saturn V's first stage. Yet in KSP you can land that monster's equivalent with only 3 parachutes. See the problem?

The Mk2 Spaceplane mod comes to mind. Works very well for constructing planes just like B9, but it is a bit smaller. Then again some B9 parts are unrealistically big as spaceplane parts for the contemporary setting of KSP.

How do you prevent parachute spam? A KS-25x4 plus the largest tank (empty) weighs about 20 tons. 20*70 is only 1400 drag. That's only three radial parachutes. That seems very exploitable.

What's wrong with the SAS?

Unless your landing an entire rocket àla SpaceX, your measly command pod + parachute probably won't make that much of a difference for your budget whether you're close to KSC or far away. Contracts are ample and well-rewarded. Recovery costs are a bonus, but not a necessity for keeping your entire program afloat.

Exactly. Conventional rockets are cheap, easy to use and far more versatile than any SSTO or other reusable vehicle made with stock parts. And contracts give you enough money to not force reusability on people.

As others have said: probably not. It might be something for 0.25 though as this was said about the next update: The still-pending bits could be inferred to be things such as additional biomes. Personally if they are going to expand biomes, I think they should just do it all in one go and not do planet by planet. At the moment the partial implementation of biome-specific science just unbalances the entire science part of the game. The science lab is really only useful when there's biomes available, resulting in dozens of people sending science labs to Duna even though its practically useless there. And until all biomes are implemented you can't really balance the various science values (unless you want to completely redo them every time you add another biomes).

This would be brilliant.

m4v, any chance of a lite version of this mod. I loved the older version where you could just press space and it'd just did what it needed to do: show you where to place your RCS. The current version just feels too complex for me, with the toolbar and the readouts.