Stargate525

And we have always been at war with Eastasia. At risk of restarting this particular conflagration, that was not the given reason. The given reason was that the devs had no intention of adding the feature into the main game. That was the official line until Kerbalkon. After that, we'd always been at war with Eurasia. slightly off-point, which recent update of minecraft (except for the horses) followed this pattern? Come to think of it, which released version of KSP... Oh yea, spaceplanes, rovers... Yes it matters if it's alpha. Yes it matters that the features are underdeveloped. And it DEFINITELY changes the amount of fun we've had. It's a slight distortion to say that we can't complain unless we've had no fun. The amount of fun we could all have would be GREATER were these things fixed.

...And that time's not going to magically decrease if we can see who's paid or not. Why? How is seeing 'Paid player' underneath our usernames DRM?

Which is what my idea deftly avoids. The devs do nothing except putting in verification as to whether a forum member has the paid version. Then, that thread becomes 'you want version X, note this guy. If you're paid up, he'll send you a link.'

I... Wouldn't go that far. But I think part of the reason games like these are tending to get a lot of slack is that there are now SO MANY 'early betas' out there for the 'low price' of what we paid for full games five years ago. A lot of them show zero prospect of actually ever getting out of beta. It's slowly made the gaming populace a lot more tolerant of bugs, glitches, and unfinished products because of the 'oh we're getting them at a discount and it's still in alpha so shut up and stop complaining!'

^ That. It gives a numerical advantage besides collision bugs and part count for researching larger tanks. And as far as not being able to completely fill a tank with LOX or Fuel... I'll buy the 'they aren't built that way' when we get tanks that can hold exclusively Oxidizer, thanks.

There was a thread floating around here that collected all of the free version of the game. I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to set something like that up with a purchase-verification system. Hell, even putting a bit on our sigs that flags whether we're paid or free, and then let us as a community circulate the tapes amongst ourselves.

The biggest thing that helped me go from 'I can dock and the ships might keep all their parts after their mating dance' to 'one touch ultra' was to learn to COMPLETELY ignore everything but the navball. Now, when docking, I use the actual ship view for two things: one, to check my rotation, and two, to make sure that the navball is not obviously lying (pointing to the ship's COM instead of the docking port, for instance).

No it's not, it's their livelihood. Calling it a fun product is an excuse, nothing more. Unless I'm misreading what you mean by that, in which case, my apologies. Isn't that a little like saying that the point of a horrible vodka is the soda you put in it? Or the point of a rusted-out jalopy is the new engine you get to put into it? Yes, the mods make KSP good. But... shouldn't the game be good WITHOUT the mods?

Whoa now. I'm exactly as entitled to criticize as any person who critiques a movie, film, or game (including PCGamer, the Escapist, and IGN). Time spent is irrelevant. Lots of hours went into the design of the Titanic, the Yugo, and the Chauchat, but that's no reason to defend them. As I said before, I can't judge a game based on what people promise it's going to be someday. The game is being sold commercially, and that's how I'll judge it. As it IS, not as what it COULD BE. And I gave the thing a 7.5! Good lord! Are you one of those people who assumes that anything not a 9 or 9.5 is utter excrement? I don't ascribe to binary judgements or score inflation; there is more to games than 'OMG ITS THE BESHT!' and 'UGH ITS HORRID AND MELTS MY EYEBALLS!' More on the topic you hit before the rant, what I mean by a lack of customization is that there is nothing in the game that makes these things 'mine.' No matter how I make my rocket, it'll still be a vaguely-grey or orange thing. My career mode will look almost exactly the same as the career mode of anyone else, including the mission progression and rocket design. Unless you're faffing about, no one will make all their rockets giant cubes.

Depends on the power of my second stage. If it's got enough of a TWR to get the altitude, I turn to 45 between 8-10k. If it's underpowered, I'll wait until 15 or 20k. For super-heavy stuff, I simply go vertical until I lose my first non-booster stage.

Oh me too. But I can't judge this game on what's been promised or a theoretical finished version. I'm judging it on what it is.

Heh, fair enough. I never said it wasn't fun, don't get me wrong. But it is, in its current state, very much a sandbox game. I still have two of the Jool moons to visit, but... I don't have any incentive to do so. It's basically 'land on this blue rock' and 'land on this bumpy rock.' I agree; few games have kept me for more than a hundred hours or so. ButI guess my big complaint is that right now KSP doesn't have enough of a sandbox to really support long-term freeplay (those suggestions are all, essentially, the same. 90% of each of those missions is the same, and that gets boring quickly), but it doesn't have enough flesh on its career mode to be a linear game either. That, and it has the luxury of being the only game of its kind. It is, simultaneously, the best space rocket sim and the worst space rocket sim.

You're right about it being a poor analogy. It was late, and I was tired. Though I REALLY don't understand where you're coming from on this; I prefer my games' challenge to come from the gameplay, not fighting with the interface. I also really don't appreciate games that assume you have a net connection and a desire to go online and search out proper documentation. To me, your argument is like saying that you're glad your car didn't come with symbols on the control stick, because it leads you to find a good mechanic. Me, I would have just returned the car. Too bad. I agree some of those I listed were small, but a lot of small problems adds up to something big. The art style...It's bland. All greys and whites, very little detail... I preferred the old-style tanks. And I argue that once you get into orbit and onto a planet, there is zero reason to go back there. There's nothing different to do, no new goal to achieve, it's routine. Once you visit every planet, you can shut the game off (I've done so before that). Everything is 'you can land. Can you land on this brown thing? How about this blue thing?'

No. Just like minecraft, a need to use outside sources to get information on basic controls and gameplay is a failure of the game's design. Can you imagine the flak that CoD would have gotten if you had to go to an outside wiki to know the keybind to crouch?

I'll play devil's advocate. It's got more praise than I think it deserves. Yes, it's a pretty decent game, especially for alpha, but it's not the best game I've ever played. Some of the UI is annoying, the lack of keybind documentation is annoying, that the game doesn't tell you how far back your quicksave is is VERY annoying. The amount of customization available for your program is almost nil, and the replayability is woefully lacking. While it's gotten better, the art style is... meh. The parts don't really have very much flavor to them. And speaking as a jaded player of abandoned alphas, this Dev team has zero track record for me to trust that any of the above will be fixed in any meaningful way. If I had to rate the game objectively... I'd give it a seven or eight. Fun, worth the money... But could still be better.

No you won't. As it stands right now, vessel proximity does not disallow time-warp. Simply hit 5x and phase through it.

Can I throw a simple tweak into this? I would love to be able to take an engine/decoupler completely out of the staging order. This is especially true of things like abort systems. I don't want those anywhere in my main-line staging, only in an action group. Right now that is not possible.

Do me a favor: Keep your eye trained on this improvised little target here ( O ) and then jiggle your head around. Your neck and eyes have thousands of years of design behind them to keep your vision trained and steady when being knocked around, like when running or in a shaking seat. You feel the shake, but your vision doesn't slide around as much as you might think.

Appearance and aesthetics is a thing. Also, there are designs that risk the panels snapping off if they rotate ninety degrees... Or they would, if they cared about that while rotating...

I'd throw in for a 2.5 nuclear engine. I'd also like to see a 2.5 engine with something in the 800-1000 range. Radial ions would also be nice. Getting off of engines, I'd like to see a solar panel about the size of the gigantor that, instead of rotating 160 degrees around a vertical axis, rotated 90-180 around its point of attachment, or was deployable and didn't rotate at all. Or make sun tracking a tweakable.

I'd like to see the anomalies be their own biome, similar to the way 'runway,' 'launchpad,' and 'KSC' are now.

Yes, the push pipes are exactly how they work now. Though I'd also like a balance pipe that doesn't care about percentages, but real numbers.

An easier way to run that testing rig is to put two in the center, and one at each pole. Flip them on and off in patterns until results occur.

I haven't done extensive maths on this, but personal experiences tell me even that's not a good enough reason. I've found I'm usually better off going around the mun and slingshotting out rather than fighting the gravity well the whole way up. The extra benefit of this is, if you're low enough on fuel to make this a real issue of anything other than speed, is that the horizontal approach allows you to abort to orbit and await a rescue. If you go straight up, and you're low, you either crash back down into the Mun, or (only slightly better) wind up in a high kerbin orbit that WILL get recaptured by the Mun and impact, or get flung off into deep space.

I think that before re-entry heat is added, there needs to be some sort of in-game mechanism to gauge how the hell we're going in. Right now, it's complete guesswork, and adding a re-entry corridor is going to need a visual representation.