Skorpion

Are you suggesting that Squad works in mysterious ways?

You think the problem is that easter eggs are too easy to find? Really? I was thinking this suggestion is a non-starter unless something like ISA MapSat is integrated to help us find the Easter eggs.

Hey now, no need to shout. You don't need synonyms for danger. You need specific examples of danger. The only one you posted was "about to crash". Even that could be more specific, such as "heading intersects with nearby terrain at high speeds". Unfortunately, computers don't understand "danger". I think the dangers that the system currently checks are "an explosion just happened nearby" and "experiencing high G forces". Do you have any others to add to that, other than "heading intersects with nearby terrain at high speeds". (That's the most fundamental problem with your question; there's also a performance penalty with checking the terrain intersections so often, which might make that suggestion not worth the extra processing for such a little but more verisimilitude.)

Oh, you naive little thing. You think we designed nuclear rockets through hard work and experimentation? Wake up man! NERVA was "designed" in Area 51!

Parts? Nah, you're thinking too small. I'd like to see the ability to build a VAB-equivalent wherever I want, including in orbit. Then I could deliver the raw materials to the orbital VAB-equivalent, and build space stations that I could never dream of launching from the surface. Thanks to the latest update, with an in-world space centre, this is sounding less crazy than it used to!

I haven't noticed this correlation myself, but I wouldn't rule out coincidence. The old system loaded a static scene whenever you went to the space centre, which meant it had a roughly constant load time, but in the new system it's just drawing part of the universe, which means caching effects should affect the load time: the space centre should load faster if you were recently in its vicinity (since it's already in memory) but load slower if you've been away for a while. This means that in a new campaign, you'll likely see fast load times as you fool around at KSC, but as you get further in the game you're more likely to see slower load times. If you started a new campaign when 0.21 came out, it's possible the longer load times you're seeing are related to your progress, rather than the patch.

Whenever possible, undo is always a better solution than a confirmation box. Undo would work perfectly here.

I'm saying you should not only be able to deorbit your space station for the heck of it, but you should be able to rewind once you're done screwing around. Actually, we can already do this with quicksaves, but the new rewind feature has the potential to be much a more natural interface, if only it was less limited. I don't get why people are complaining about the rewind feature when we've had quicksaves for ages.

Twin engines are great, but we don't need Squad to make them for us. We need Squad to give us parts so we can make our own twin engines. (Of course, that's already possible with the parts they've given us, but I certainly wouldn't turn down even more parts.) As far as the art pass goes, the real question we need to ask is, would you rather Bac9 and DanRosas spend their time on more art passes, or on new parts? I know what I would vote for, and it's not more art passes.

I completely disagree that the rewind feature is too forgiving. In fact, I don't think it's forgiving enough.

I'd be amazed if this hadn't been suggested before, but it would be real nice if SRB nozzles were separate parts from the propellant, like we have with liquid engines. That way we could build taller SRBs without requiring purpose-built parts. It would also allow for high-tech nozzles with vectoring or emergency shutdown, as you suggest.

From what you linked, the Alderson Drive posits the existence of a parallel universe with no quantum effects, and a fifth physical force that accelerates particles in this parallel universe. Unless I'm missing something important, I'm not sure I'd classify that as "somewhat plausible". Not that I'd care if KSP added implausible tech to the late stages of the game, mind you.

Discovering artifacts would be another great way to improve your science rating. Also, I hope 'gathering data' includes using mapping satellites, a la ISA MapSat.

I build my rovers in the spaceplane hangar and then copy them into the VAB folder when I'm ready to launch them. Ideally I'd like to be able to do this in-game instead of having to do file management in Windows. There's also a bug when you do this: the revert button will take you to the spaceplane hangar, even if you were just in the VAB building the rocket that goes under the rover.

It's your semantics I have a problem with. I agree it's in the realm of theory. That's not the same thing as being in the realm of fantasy. And "handwavium" means "I'm feeding you goobledeegook that I don't want you to think to heavily about", which is the exact opposite of "we have mathematical models suggesting this is possible, but we need to think about them more". Your use of "unobtanium" is more forgivable, because the Alcubierre drive requires negative energy, which is problematic. However, negative energy must exist because our universe is still expanding, and we know that quantum fluctuations can create a net negative energy. All I'm saying is that the Alcubierre drive shouldn't be lumped together with stargates and dilithium crystals. But I think the simplest solution in gameplay terms is just to let you click on your trajectory and choose "fast forward to here". That way, even if your destination is a thousand years in the future, you don't have to wait for it. However, it does assume that Kerbals are immortal. (At least, as far as age is concerned; they can clearly still die in rocket disasters. Maybe that's why they're so eager to throw caution to the wind!)

I noticed your frame rate drops just before the shock heating effects appear, and jumps back up just after the shock heating effects disappear. I wonder if you can turn those effects off and see if it makes a difference.

Speaking of resource mining, that's been started too: it's already designed on paper, and they even started doing some modelling for it a while ago. This was put on hold until other systems are developed (such as the tech tree, as jcraft mentioned). Also, pure speculation on my part, but the recent code overhaul that allows the game to draw the space centre in-engine is going to be very important if we ever get the ability to build more space centres or orbital ship yards.

Yeah, it would be nice if we could reach the full settings menu from anywhere in the game, but if that's too difficult (changing graphics settings mid-game can be non-trivial) just adding the volume settings to the condensed settings window would be a real boon. While we're talking about volume settings, can we get a master volume slider up in here?

It seems unfair to me to refer to warp bubbles as a fantasy that requires handwavium when NASA is actively running experiments to create warp bubbles. Sure, a probe-sized warp drive may not be possible for centuries, if ever at all, but it's hardly handwavium.

This. A team at CERN is currently able to produce and store antimatter for 17 minutes. Scaling up is going to prove difficult, but at least we're doing real hands-on science with the stuff. Antimatter is miles ahead of cryogenics. Personally, I think building an Alcubierre drive is a great end-game goal. Even in sandbox mode, it would require you to build ships in orbit and scoop antimatter from Jool's magnetosphere, and you would still need conventional drives in order to change course, so it's no "click to teleport" solution. Although, personally, I would also love the ability to arbitrarily jump ahead to a certain point in time -- or a certain point on my trajectory -- rather than fussing with time acceleration. I don't think my gameplay experience is heightened by leaving my computer in time-acceleration mode for ages in order to reach Eeloo.

I've always liked the idea of having a screen to customize your own HUD. It seems only natural that if you can design your own rockets, you should be able to design your own cockpit controls. That way you could start out with the basic navball, but advanced users could swap it out for an Apollo-style navball, or maybe a docking indicator. Rovers, on the other hand, could have an entirely different HUD that's better for driving. I'm not convinced the manpower required to implement this this kind of customization is really worth it, but it world certainly be a welcome addition.

I remember ages ago Harvester asked the community about ideas for a redesign of the staging system. He eventually decided that the staging system wasn't so broken after all, so in the end not much changed (at least on the surface). However, one of the more developed ideas that came out of that discussion was an editable flow chart, so that you could say, for instance: If I'm in the second stage and I press the abort button: 1) Separate the pod. 2) Fire escape thrusters 3) Delay for three seconds 4) Open the parachutes. (You'll have to imagine that in flow-chart form to get the full effect.) I still like the sound of that, and now that we have action groups I can easily imagine an advanced interface that allows you to drag around nodes on a flow-chart, building actions the same way we build rockets. One thing I've always wanted on my tugs is to have one button that cycles between front lights and rear lights, and a second button that cycles between lights off, lights low, and lights high. That's not really possible with the action groups we have now.

The new rewind feature is great. It encourages experimentation and has the potential to be a much more natural alternative to quicksaves. But it has one glaring inconsistency: You can rewind if you fly a ship from the launch pad. You can rewind if you fly a ship from the runway. You can not rewind if you fly a ship from the tracking station. I found this quite surprising. I got a ship into orbit, returned to the space centre to "save" my progress, then decided to fool around in orbit for a while. Once I ran out of fuel, I wanted to rewind my game, but the rewind button was disabled! I couldn't figure out why. I was double-checking that my throttle was zeroed and I wasn't time accelerating or anything, and then I went online to see if a bug was reported. I was very surprised to discover that this is by design; in my opinion, rewinding should always be an option. (I noticed another thread suggesting that the rewind feature was too forgiving. If you want a "hardcore" mode that removes rewinding -- and presumably quicksaves -- that's cool, but as long as rewinding is in the game, it should be consistent.)

Wow, that's a lot of rockets. It must have been a beast to manoeuvre.

The subject says it all: your challenge is to insert three crew capsules into orbit and return home.