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Spaceport needs a proper screenshot gallery feature, a listing of file contents, and some mandatory, enforced layout of the mod description.

That all sounds pretty ideal to me. The netherlands and the other nordic countries are basically heaven. Basically, with donations to modders, it's clearly a balancing act. I'd probably be happy, if I were squad, if there was a donation split thing in place, so if for some reason a modder was donated a ton of dosh, SQUAD got some of it too. That way squad is incentivised to support modders even more.

Looks vaguely modern-jet-ish. Not really specific enough to name a particular aircraft.

Placeholder graphics.

The point where we're at now, where the lengths are artists life + 90 years and many artists don't own the copyright to their own work, that's pretty indefensible. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the idea of IP, but how it's implemented now is laughable. The lengths should be absolutely slashed to better reward artists, incentivise publishers to fund new content, and to recognise the completely different facts of digital distribution vs physical distribution.

Making a working spaceplane is something I find pretty hard. Looking at a guide would take the fun out of it though. Landing planes can be tricky as well, or at least, a bit more skilful than landing a leggy lander. Docking was hard till I'd done it a few times and got an intuitive understanding of it. That was when orbital mechanics really clicked for me. KSP is a nice easy game to learn. You can usually tell where you've gone wrong, and use that knowledge to try again next time. Barring bugs. I can't say that using a joystick makes flying aircraft much easier, really, and I'm pretty good at flying in other games (Arma, Battlefield 1942, A New Zero). The main difficulty is that on default sensitivity settings (ludicrously high) it's very easy to get into an unrecoverable spin, or roll your wings off. Adjusting trim is never quite fine enough either, it needs to have two more decimal places of tuning available. These are mostly problems with the flight model, and the whole "one control setting used across totally different aircraft" thing. I haven't tried FAR. I just hope the flight model is better in 1.0

Well, the mod makers would probably want some compensation in exchange for their work. But besides that, the devs could implement the same features in a more polished way, because they have the source code and all modders have is kludge by comparison. So unless they were extraordinarily pressed for man-hours, (which they aren't, no deadlines to meet) no dev in his right mind would directly fold a mod into the main game.

Well, no mods will be included in the completed game. Those mods you listed are just stopgaps till the features are properly implemented by the devs. When the devs implement a feature, they do it all from scratch. Even when they hire modders, the stuff those new employees add to the game is 100% fresh, not recycled from their previous mod releases.

There was a battlefield 1942 Halo mod with a pelican carrying a detachable warthog. It was pretty neat, but I don't remember anyone playing it.

I think the main problem with the galactica would be the scale, yeah. Do one of the many other kerbal-scale sci-fi ships. How about Fireball XL-5? It has proper staging, docking and wings, and a few animated things, so it's a good fit for the KSP engine. Plus it's not very detailed so it would be quite easy to model and good for performance FPS-wise.

You're pretty good at modelling and texturing!

You know, I'm confused as to why the team is recruiting so many amazing art guys from modding. Stock KSP already has most of the parts it needs, so adding more just adds redundancies. Unless they plan to redo some of the stock parts, or add hundreds of new parts, I don't know. But I'm having a hard time imagining their post-hiring output, in the stock game, to be as large as their modding output. I suppose a few parts could be improved by a redo, and there's the pods missing IVA's, and space station/surface base parts, and resources parts. Plus the eventual DLC stuff. I guess it does make sense.

I got banned from a knife+pistol ranked server in battlefield 2 for, well, killing everyone with a tank. Ranked k+p servers were not allowed under the TOS though, I was only enforcing policy. And my personal hatred of that style of gameplay. Also from a random tiny Desert Combat Realism server for being too good for the enemy team. That's the problem with tiny servers, very easy for anyone to kick anyone else. Ah well. But generally, I don't get banned. people usually have good reasons for banning, and people do like to make it sound like they were unduly wronged.

It's a fantastic film, I've got the blu-ray. The soundtrack is amazing too, by Brian Eno, who among other things did the startup chime for windows 95. It's good music for playing KSP to, except obviously it's not written for looping. One of the blu-ray bonuses had one of the Apollo veterans exhibiting the paintings he'd made of the moon, with bits of actual moon dust in them from the mission patches on his spacesuit, and the paint was textured with the actual outsole of the spacesuits. Pretty unique.

I never liked maths either. Only have an A at GCSE with it, and didn't take the A Level. Thankfully you need almost no mathematics at all for a Chemistry degree.

It is intended to be realistic though, imo those people are not playing in the spirit of the game. If/when the aerodynamics are fixed, ludicrous launch vehicles like that will not be possible.

That's pretty good!

I think you, bac9 and Lack (and some others) strike a good balance between "stock" (mostly novasilisko+one other person, right? anyway it's not nearly as self-consistent as bac9s pack, it seems intentionally slightly mismatched) and your own personal styles, such that it all works together quite nicely in-game. It's more a matter of skill than style I think; the stuff that doesn't work well [with other stuff] in game is just made by beginners and people of lesser talent, which is fine, it's not fair to judge them by the same standards, it will put them off and we'll have less modders and less mods. And I disagree that KSP's worlds are detailed. They're not, imo, they're almost ludicrously low-res in comparison to the beautiful craft some people make, they're almost Operation Flashpoint (2001) levels of detail. I assume they're placeholders. Was someone complaining about the texturing of KOSMOS? What started this vein?

Congrats on being hired, by the way! It was inevitable given your skillz

KSP looks like most current space programs look (without so much gold foil, which is a pity, because that's awesome). Chris Foss, while clearly a talented and tasteful scifi artist, just isn't painting the same kind of stuff that will ever be in KSP. He's painting far-future spaceships-and-lasers stuff. If you want, take his drawings as a reference and make a 3d model, texture and animate it, and put it in KSP. People seem to love putting unrealistic scifi ships in an unsuitable engine, and that's fine, do what you want.

Nice work on the cockpit, it really matches the aesthetic of the rest of the parts.

Well, there's mod incompatibilities.

Yeah, the atmosphere being a set of concentric perfect spheres of different densities, that's certainly handy. It's not really possible to do at the moment, we need even more processing power. You might be able to do a simple full simulation if you had a custom-built engine that used GPU-accelerated physics, but KSP can't even multithread or use more than 3gb of ram due to using Unity. Obviously that was unavoidable, being first time devs with only tentative/prospective funding it's not realistic to expect Squad to code their engine from scratch.

I would say this is probably the most important factor. You can always rely on a KSP part, there's no worry of tiny valve #273 being installed upside down and the engine exploding, or line #7093 in the gimbal code having a runtime error and your rocket which took 7 years of planning falling into the sea.

Only if you know the density of the "liquid fuel" kerbals use. Which I guess we do, since we've got dry weight/full weight, and assuming fuel units are litres, yeah. Squad ought to state the units used in the VAB tooltips. Like, put them in there, so it doesn't say "weight: 1.1" but "weight: 1.1 tonnes"