el_coyoto

"Wait, landing gears have lights on them? This is going to make night landings soooo much easier..."

Excellent, this looks promising! I love the space race period, I read everything on it I can find since I'm a kid and the re-creation of this timeline in KSP with a touch of humour made this a very enjoyable read! Good work sir! PS : funnily, after each major KSP update or after too long hiatuses, I tend to start over my space program and develop it more or less the way it was in the USA : suborbital flights, sub-system tests (guidance, parachutes, etc), Vanguard (aka "The grapefruit satellite"), Mercury (manned flights), Gemini (docking, long duration flights), Apollo (Kerbals on the Mun!). I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one though... As a space race geek, this lets me test and discover the parts that were modified in the update while still being in a "roleplay" mood.

I think this is the problem in fact. We have a great game, we have a great developer team and a great userbase. The problem is this Internet mechanic that allows a very small subset of users to act as bullies AND be very audible. KSP amazed me on several degrees when I started playing (~0.16), one of them being the friendly and globally nice community, even more than DF community. I was so pleasantly surprised by the community that for the first time in my life, I created a forum account and started posting a bit. Of course, we may have a few issues and subjects better avoided on this forum, but in my limited experience, these are unavoidable and are OK as long as they are kept at a reasonably low noise level. I also think that a strong forum moderation is the key to keep things civil, but as I've said, I'm not a big forum user. I develop C++ business apps for a living, and it can be very tough, technically and emotionally. But developing games is way tougher, because it seems that for some reason people agree to pay ridiculous amount of money for a badly designed entreprisey app at work, but can turn stark raving mad about a 20-ish$ (or free!) game they play to relax. Indie game developers need a very strong will and an ability to ignore bullies and focus on people actually helping them building a better game through constructive criticism. Sadly, this sound easier said than done and I know that it can be hard to invest a lot of your time on a project without investing a piece of your heart as well, especially if you care about the project, and this can make you quite vulnerable to people reactions (not even mentioning the down right lunatics discussed in the article). Maybe the solution would be hiring Jeb to track and "deliver" free unused SRBs to these bullies... Let's just hope that we won't need such extreme (although fun) measures and that the community and moderators will continue making these forums a cool place to hang out and show their support to the developers and their hard work.

It happened a few times to me while while building a station made of mixed parts assembled in VAB and SPH mode. I admit I don't exactly remember the process to reproduce it nor posted a bug report because every time I found a workaround by individually rotating the pieces in the "right" symmetry mode and then rebuild carefully. It's a little bit longer, but every time I ended up getting it to work the way I wanted. Sure, there may be a few quirks here and there, but I guess we should keep in mind that SQUAD never planned to handle the exotic cases introduced into the editor by this mod, and they probably kept the VAB/SPH symmetry modes separate to avoid the headaches associated with a symmetry mode toggleable on the fly. Which reminds me that initially, I also came here to thank MachXXV for his awesome job : this is the only mod that I really miss when playing a brand new release of KSP (and I rarely miss it very long, because the author usually updates it quickly). The vertical snap feature that can be toggled on the fly is at the heart of my construction techniques, especially when going the asparagus way. And the additional symmetries option allowed me to design a cool pentagon-shaped solar panel assembly for my spy sats! (I should post pictures if I can recover the craft from my recently crashed drive) Thank you MachXXV! EDIT : saves successfully recovered, here is the pic.

I see that your tests are going well, that's good. The platform looks really good and it must have been a challenge to get something like this to work with the toon physics, congratulations! Can't wait to see your base proudly sitting next to the Neil Armstrong Memorial!

Mapping lander approaching KSC from the north after it left its polar orbit at the end of its mission. After soft touchdown at 0.5 m/s... Wow, this is a beautiful Excursion Module...

Oops, I wasn't clear enough : I meant modding your game by duplicating and altering the files that describe the structural panel part to make it bigger. I never did it myself, so it's not a really good advice... I've been thinking about this during the afternoon, and it's true that it's hard to find a good "stock" solution to this problem. The "two identical rocket-packs to either side" solution could work even with a little bit of wobble, but would require you to be very careful with the thrust and the landing speed of this setup. Plus the right quantity of RCS/reaction wheels to account for any asymmetry in your base, so that would probably not be a very practical solution. The people directing you to KAS have done a much better job than me. The lifting operation should be interesting : will you post pictures of the relocation process? Good luck!

Oh yes, I remember! Launching "airplanes" vertically was fun and felt deliciously hacky. I really enjoyed designing these mutant half planes-half rockets because they gave KSP some kind of "Man in space" retro feeling to the game. At this time, I was switching from Orbiter and this was just the kind of refreshing experiences that I was looking for in KSP...

I think building your barge out of many small panels is always going to cause you trouble because of the slightly wacky physics. You may try to duplicate the part and modify its size so that you would only 2 or 3 of those to build your barge and make much less prone to spontaneous disassembly. I see that some of your modules have as Sr docking port over them and docking port on their ends : would it be possible to design a lander/relocation module with enough ground clearance to let your one of your rover/station module drive beneath it and then dock the rover to the lander module? It's basically your idea (flying to the NAM rather than driving), but with the lander above your station rather than under, thus avoiding the need to design a loading ramp.

My LKO standard parking orbit is 75x75 km. I used to put my stations at 125 km, but I now prefer 250 km : they are easier to catch in one single orbit with a Hohmann transfer from my 75x75 parking orbit.

Feedback you wanted, feedback you will have! No, I even think it could be a good addition if the "discovery" of the easter egg is nicely meshed into the missions, setting some long term goals through several missions. I think it's ok to require mods, but I personally would not download a mod just to play a mission pack. Some other people may have the same reaction as me, limiting your user base. But Kethane is a well established mod and it would make an interesting mission pack. Splitting your mission packs by addon dependencies is a smart solution to problem #2, letting people use the packs for which they have mods. People play this game the way they want, but personally, I don't like KSP reminding me too much of our real tragic life. So, while I will not scream, I would not play it because it's not my definition of 'fun'. For me, it's a game about sending cartoon guys to space, not re-creating 'weapons of vengeance'. You may avoid this problem by defining missions that are structurally the same as our RL military funded space program (first rockets, atmosphere studies, etc) but with a different context. The mail rocket idea smartly proposed by Ph34rb0t is an excellent example : technically, it would mimic the V-2 studies, while avoiding hurting people feelings... So a good solution would be some kind of common trunk to the civilian and military mission packs, where you study the high atmosphere, liquid engines and guidance systems (ie techs that were developed during WWII and the early 50's). Once people have completed this part, they may switch to the space program they prefer. Either "civilian", i.e. probes to other planets, manned flights to the Mun, space stations or "military", i.e. missile tests, precise re-entries and spy satellites for example. Just my 0.02...

LOL Well, at least, your Agena went "Angry Alligator" AFTER docking for a change...

Well, perhaps you could take a look at Mission Controller if you want a more "career-y" experience, it provided me with a good week of campaign fun.

I picked "Money and campaign stuff". Of course, I'd like to see mining and aerodynamics in the long term, but I think the best "bang for bucks" in terms of gameplay added value/time coding ratio would be adding a few features to the astronaut complex and a campaign, whereas mining and aerodynamics seem far away. Being a C++ business app dev, I tend to see things from a (value added)/(time spent) perspective and adding more campaign stuff to the game would make sense to me as it would capitalize on the previous crew handling rewrite. But hey, SQUAD is awesome and this is their game, so we can be sure that ... we're not sure of anything.

Crew Manifest I guess.

Okay, so this is not the "Mile High Club" that I already know of. XD You know, the one that involves ... docking.

I just love the Kerbal figurehead perched on the top of the ship!

Seems like Nappa is experiencing a cosmic ray visual phenomena... That, or he sampled the home made booze distilled from the contents of the "Not food" bin.

Awesome mod! Thank you guys for your work on the plugin and the skybox. The 2k version looks much crispier than the game original skybox with no performance hit. Brilliant! I'm curious to see what people will create thanks to this new tool. I'm messing around in Spacescape at the moment, but it's going to take a while, mostly because of my poor artistic sensitivity...

An overview of my space station core : Space station core casting shadows on the refueled that just topped its fuel tanks : The Skipper engine that is still attached to the station provides 3590 m/s of delta v. More fuel tanks can be easily attached to the station core to further extend its range if needed. Yeah, I like my space stations mobile, like some kind of, you know... spacecraft? Refueler touching down softly at KSC : Rest of the mission

Okay, I'm sorry for what I'm about to say, but it has to get out : "Baton Rouge De Dynamite" ("Dynamite Red Stick" in english) Yeah, I'm French, and the Louisiana capital name is just too tempting to ignore it... XD

Jet engines can be very efficient first stages, I've seen very some smart and compact jet engine designs do the same job than more traditional rocket stacks. (I think there is a video of this from a guy whose name starts with 'S' and ends with 'cott Manley' ) But I don't use them for 2 reasons : they need time to spool up on lift-off (ok, it's not really a problem, but it bothers me) I think that IRL rocket engines are cheaper than jet engines because they are simpler to build and have less moving parts [Citation needed]. It's a matter of personal preference, but I would use them only on SSTO boosters. Even if that means going to space with jet engines attached to my rocket...

I think you need to manually add '[Answered]' to your post title. Cheers!

Ah ah, true. Okay, I'll rephrase it : I have an unlimited budget, the others don't... XD

"Maneuver Planner" / "Transfer to another planet". MJ wiki : http://wiki.mechjeb.com/index.php?title=Manual/Maneuver_Planner#Transfer_to_another_planet