Stargate525

Okay, let me rephrase. The lab has two functions. One of which is utterly useless, and the other is a fix to a fix to try and fix the brokenness of the first iteration. Whoop de do.

My main problems with the science system are as follows: -Not enough experiments to do: There are six. Only four of those are really sized to go on probes, and most planets don't need one of them. I'd love to be able to see about twice as many, used in different areas for different things. -Transmission. Full stop. in the first version it's exclusively useful, in the new one its almost entirely useless. There need to be experiments which are designed to be transmitted (the temperature, the barometer, etc.), and some which need to be returned. -Unlocks: The tech tree is... confusing. Makes little sense (how the hell do we unlock the 'Mainsail's little brother' before the ACTUAL mainsail?!), and quite a few of the science bits are unlocked way too late unless you rush for them. -Science lab: It's a step in the right direction, but... Sheesh. There are KERBALS ON IT. If we want to get them home, there is currently NO reason to use it! -The thing is... I mean, there's no challenge to it. Like Frost said, push button, receive bacon.

It doesn't HAVE to be an all-in-one. If you wanted to, you could launch five rockets one after the other in the same window. And by no docking, I mean no docking. EVAs aren't docking! Though KAS is... That one requires a return, mine does not. That one requires a single mission, mine does not. That one doesn't care about time, mine is a speedrun. It's an unfortunately similar name, which annoys me because I can't change it... But other than that and the goal is Jool, they're entirely different.

Except that's how a lot of technology is born: -OOH, flying bird! I want to do that! -OOH, wings! I NEED THAT! -OOH, light materials! I NEED THAT! I mean... that's a lot of times how new things are made. You want to do something and then develop the tech to make it happen. What a hidden tech tree is now is the opposite. It's 'this is where we're at, how can we futz around with what we already have?' This makes sense for some of the nodes; like the smaller probes and larger fuel tanks. Maybe reveal the skeleton of the tech tree; the ones that unlock completely new parts, and relegate the 'variations' (smaller probe bodies, more structural bits, the skipper/mainsail [whichever comes second] to hidden offshoots? That lets you chart a general course (I want these shiny nuclear engines to get to Duna), while still get the surprise of hidden nodes (oh neat, now I can get a bigger main rocket too!).

You lose a free few hundred dV of rotational motion. You're also fighting gravity for a longer time. The most efficient way is to wait until the planet's about 45 decrees off, then burning a traditional gravity turn launch and just never flattening out.

If you're going to make an inline one, I think it should be a 1.25m, but half as tall as the materials bay. A probe-sized one... eh. I don't really like the idea of being able to shove all the experiments onto a probe as it stands.

You get five, as far as I can see: The original grey, red, green, blue, and yellow. If you want to stay colorblind-friendly, there's going to be some tinting you'll need to do, but... You might be able to squeeze two or three more.

Uh guys... Couldn't you just code the game to run a check to see if the ship is capable of transmitting (which is already does on command), and then code the end screen to award a 'recovery of data from a ship crashed on X' the same way it handles determination whether you recover or scrap a vessel? To prevent it happening for landers, it only works on a 'catastrophic failure!' screen. I mean, the game is already doing everything it needs for this to work. The different aspects just need to talk to one another. As for seismometers and stuff. Yeah, that's one thing that they do. Though I think it's much more common to send the impactor, and then watch the resulting plume/crater with spectrometers and telescopes and such. Since we don't HAVE those... I think it's a fair abstraction to assume the kerbals have their big lenses trained on your kaboom.

Well, you're not going to get any of the combat-related ones in the base game (at least according to the Devs today). That being said, I like the idea of getting some more icons. I personally have wanted a ground probe, a distinction between manned and unmanned rovers, an aircraft, and hulks (abandoned objects, but not debris; I want to keep them around). That's a lot of icons... What if the different icons were split into subgroups (a lot like you've got them laid out)? They use the same icon, but their PATH COLOR changes. So for your rovers, a plain one would be grey, a specifically unmanned one would be blue, manned would be green, etc.

There's a reason I have the Kerbol rescue insignia on my badges... n.n I got to Moho. Didn't have enough juice to land properly (I had, amazingly, UNDERestimated the gravity, expecting it to be closer to the Mun), and so the thing fell over. Didn't have enough to get back anyway. Sent a rescue craft that got him off the surface and somewhere around Eve before it ran out of juice. Sent ANOTHER rescue mission, and discovered just how big a pain it is to do an orbital rendezvous around Kerbol. Finally got him home. So I feel your pain. It's very hard to get to, and even worse to get BACK.

And in the case of our worst one, the engineers going 'I wonder how we can test our last failsafe' without first going 'what do we do if the failsafe we're testing fails?' Sometimes I wonder if the kerbals are in fact better caretakers of nuclear energy than we are. >.<

If it's not the atomics, it's the 909s. In deep space, ISP is king.

I guess my biggest fear is how much the argument against a given feature is 'but there's a mod for it already so there's no point for Squad to waste their time.' That's... a really terrible argument.

A monstrostity? An eldritch vessel for the conveyance of the 5th Dimensional Squidlord?

Every time I launch with the main three. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/jZJczZ6gbVU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

For the last time, NO ONE is calling a 'when it's done' production schedule laziness. However the two do tend to go hand-in-hand, especially when you have no one to hold you accountable for a final product. Go to wikipedia, give me a link to the fallacy I'm using, because I don't see it. As for the rest of your... paragraph; Valve has a consistent track record of making excellent games. Squad does not. They have not released a single finished game. None of the developers, as far as I am aware, have released a single finished game. We have zero reason to trust anything but what we see right now. That's where the main divide is. There are some people who, justifiably, believe they bought .13 (or .15 or .18.1 or whichever) and the promise of future updates. There are others who, also quite justifiably, believe that they pre-ordered 1.0 with the bonus of an ongoing alpha to play. To the former group, anything else they get is gravy. To the latter, every update is a step closer to them getting the actual thing they paid for and were promised. This discrepancy is impossible to reconcile without an official clarification from the developers, which we're never going to get. It's also a byproduct of this trend in the indie industry to completely fund their endeavor with early purchases. Like so many things in the games and tech world, this has completely blown past corporate and legal precedent. Until one of the companies actually gets a class-action, buyers will continue to have this argument over any game of this model whose devs haven't explicitly said one way or the other.

Small point of order there Kasper. Pointing out a logical fallacy in an opponent's argument is not, itself, a fallacy. Unless that's not what you were saying at all, in which case I'm far too tired for my own good.

And YOU are strawmanning. Nowhere does he say that Squad is lazy. You said it, then proceeded to yell at him with a verbose equivalent of 'HOW DARE YOU!?' We paid money to them. We are entitled to complain AS MUCH AS WE WANT, just as you are entitled to defend them as much as you want. And how does their wealth or former occupation make a lick of difference? Just because portal took two and a half years does not mean that it wasn't scheduled. It was. It was scheduled to release with the Orange Box, and that was their deadline. They made it. It was NOT a 'when-it's-done' game. Yes, but I (and Gordon Ramesey and Robert Irvine and pretty much any other successful chef) will be very, very angry if it spends thirty minutes being futzed over in the kitchen and arrives at the table without the sides that were promised on the menu.

When have any of us said anything about what we've said is blatant fact? 'This game is taking too long' is exactly as valid as 'this movie is an unwatchable piece of garbage.'

Where does this fallacy come from? I don't need to be a president to tell if one is doing a bad job, I don't need to be a gourmet to not like food. I don't need to be an architect or an engineer to say that a bridge doesn't look like it's going to hold. I don't need to be able to paint a picasso to dislike his art. There is a reason movie critics and book reviewers aren't producers or writers. It lends outside perspective and impartiality.

No, the line is pretty clear. We apparently have no say in what squad does. If we were their patrons, then we would have exclusive say in it. We commissioned it, after all. You cant have it both ways. as for the second part... I'll just say that a patronage system is incompatible with capitalism and any semblance of economic equality, and that a lack of schedules and deadlines will not suddenly spawn more great artists. That's really far off topic, so if you wish to continue this aspect of the discussion, pm me.

Simple answer: there won't be any. Too much work.

That's sort of my point. Squad is not a patroned artist, they are a business. You're arguing that DaVinci could overpromise and underdeliver, and I'm telling you that doesn't fly any more, even if they were the best of their kind. and i doubt even the rabid fanboys will try and argue that squad is the DaVinci of game devs.

Squad is not DaVinci. And good or not, he was a notoriously atrocious *illegitimate son* when it came to payment and delivery. He refused to turn over the mona lisa to the guy who commissioned it, never completed jobs he'd taken payment on... if he lived in today's society he would have been sued into oblivion for fraud and breach of contract. He's probably not the best comparison you can make to tell us to trust the devs.

Whelp, I'm the king of opinions... I've been roleplaying additional living space for long missions as a ratio of kerbals to total seats. Anything inside Kerbin's SOI is 1:1, Duna and eve is 2:1, etcetera. Would you be able to do something like that? Assign each pod a 'minimum flight time' where any kerbal is guaranteed to not lose sanity (a day or two for the Mk1, a week for the MK1-2, a month for the hitchhiker, whatever), but then Divide that out by the number of kerbals in the pod? So, as an example, I could send my hitchhiker out for Duna fully loaded, and my kerbals begin to go a bit batty after two weeks. But if I sent only two guys, it would take a month, and a single dude, while lonely, wouldn't be climbing the walls for two months. ...Are you going to simulate loneliness in this? I'd imagine no matter the living space, a kerbal would go a little nuts flying out all on his own. As for the math behind it... I'm not a programmer, so I'm talking out my butt on this. I would imagine each pod to have a sort of 'resource' of sanity; a duration that's multiplied by the number of seats in the thing, and then evenly distributed amongst the passengers. That takes care of the ratio bit, and you should be able to fine-tune it for each pod (personally, from shortest duration to longest I would go Mk1 command, the Mk 1 and 2 cockpits, the Mk1 landercan, the Mk3 cockpit, the Mk1-2, the cupola, the Mk2 lander, and the hitchhiker). Then as a modifier to that degradation, I'd apply the bravery bit (average of the crew should be enough, though you could consider multiplying it by 1.X, were X is the total crew. Strength in numbers and all that) with a straight bonus for any badass flags (if you wanted to), and a flat penalty if the kerbal is alone. As for stupidity... not sure how or if you should model that. I mean, sure, idiots might panic more, but they might be too stupid to realize the danger and thereby increase morale with their brave, ignorant little face. Again, not a programmer, so no idea if this actually helped... :/