Stargate525

Okay, this was a LOT more finicky than I thought it would be. I didn't keep track of how many tries this was, but it's nowhere near the best I can do either... I will attempt again later, I know. For now, I present you with 4,224 meters:

I don't think it's just the texture, though, that's the problem. It's the actual mesh. As far as I can tell, it's just a simple cylinder with four more cylinders sitting inside it. It doesn't look anything like any other engine we have in the game. The jet engines have texture to them, and the bells on almost all the rockets are exposed with the juicy bits for us to oogle at. I get that in a lot of the pictures the thing is a smooth cylinder in real life, but that's fairing rather than engine. If they jutted the four bells out to match the other rockets in the game, and perhaps modeled the stair-step look of the intercooler, I think we'd have a unique, awesome looking engine that doesn't look like it came from a different game.

So. Rovers. The wheels currently in the game, as far as I can tell, have 100% grip when I don't want it, and no grip when I do. Their performance is, to me, rather counterintuitive. For example, when I'm ascending a hill at an angle I find myself slipping down the slope when my wheels are moving, but not when I'm braking. I don't think it should matter when the wheels are perpendicular. Sudden turns also cause the wheels to dig in, flipping even the heaviest stuff I have built. However, at the same speed, braking head-on can let the same vessel travel an additional 200 meters before coming to a halt. None of that is new, but I've also recently noticed that my wheels' suspensions have a tendency to 'lock up.' When a rover goes over a rise, or any time the wheels reach their furthest suspension extension, they seem to be stuck there, bouncing my vessel along the surface until they get a hard enough shock to jolt it into working properly. It's this lockup that seems to kill my rovers the most often; when they're stiff like that, there is zero elasticity in the part which exaggerates any bump the vessel receives, and typically causes a fatal rollover. My question is, can this be fixed in Unity, and is there any way to let us adjust the suspension stiffness, either in the VAB or via EVA?

I like the idea of number 1. Perhaps as an easter-egg in the final version? Number 2 is basically an SAS for throttle, which I would like. A lot of the time on my landers I don't have fine enough control with the default throttle to dial in a slow descent, mainly because I'm losing weight with the fuel. That said, Mechjeb does have a mode which does this, so... And number three is basically the Kerbal Attachment System. Given how often Squad have co-opted mods into the main game, I can see it happening.

People who are saying this would be difficult... I can sort of see that, but wouldn't it be possible to store a 'max speed,' 'max incline,' and 'drain rate' on each vessel, collected when you're directly controlling it, which the program refers to when given a target coordinate? I know that one of the mapping sat programs is able to extrapolate inclines, so that's possible. When you engage the auto-rove, it checks the route for invalid inclines, ends the route if it encounters one, then divides the distance by the speed, and moves the vessel along rails at that speed? I think assuming each planet to be a sphere is close enough for everywhere but the tiniest of moons, and when you assume control again, it just moves the rover up or down to place it on land?

I landed on Moho for the first time! ...Jeddred is not my brightest kerbonaut. And I've discovered that the external seats could really do with some seat belts. Bobfred doesn't look terribly happy with his current predicament.

The first time I played in the demo, and the first few weeks after I bought the game, fun for me was making stupidly ridiculous rockets that made the biggest explosion possible (look at Zisteau's LP for the idea). An aerodynamic model didn't factor in for me. Once I got more skilled, I started playing around trying to figure out the rules, and started having fun with more regular rockets and getting to do stuff outside in space. For a new player, he won't know a difference. It'll just be the way the game is. In fact, I've played FAR, and it makes proper-looking rockets almost stupidly EASY. Airplanes become a bit more finicky, but the rules are fairly easy to get used to, and the model makes regular-looking planes work better. Without FAR, I've never been able to get an aircraft with underslung engines below the fuselage to work properly. With it, those are some of my most stable creations.

Duna. /10chars

This. And you can't partially discharge a capacitor. It's all or nothing. So unless your smallest battery is actually an array of 100 capacitors...

Nah, I get it. For instance... -Your thermometer reading shows slight fluctuations on Minmus' surface. Cross-referencing it with the results from your gravioli detector shows a correlation between temperature and gravity fluctuations. -On Duna, the specific shade of red that the goo turns can be affected by different items in the materials bay. -Tylo's gravity is unaffected by its earthquakes. -On Laythe, you discover that the barometric pressure rises with the earthquakes that cause geysers. Stuff like that.

I just thought of one. Science skill for the science lab: speeds up processing. And yeah, training kerbals to perform basic automation would be amazing. Need to run a set of supplies up to your station? Order a launch while you mess about on Duna.

I think you were a bit tired with those examples... But I get what you mean. Internally standardized yes. Real world measurements... eh, I can do without.

well, most space missions DO have a flight engineer... so efficiency and torque could be astronaut based (I fully believe that the Kerbals are silly enough to hand over richness mixture to an actual person). For scientists, maybe a bonus to science value of collected samples and EVA reports? Pilots... torque would work there too as an abstraction of piloting ability.

I would argue AGAINST putting everything into real-life units, personally. It gives too much ability for people to go 'it should weigh this because it's this in real life!' rather than what it should be, which is 'it should weigh this because it works for the game.' As for electricity... please, please don't take it out of units/sec in and out. Some of us aren't electrical engineers. I don't really want to have to weigh the pros and cons of voltages and amps and watts for each panel and light. I still have nightmares.

You were clearly not here this weekend. It's multiplayer now. Everything needs to be balanced.

I'm hoping for a reason to use the gigantor beyond those ion drives... Nothing currently has a constant power draw except probes, which can be offset by a single set of the simplest panels.

I noticed. Never spammed a whole lot (usually two or three tops), but I have definitely noticed the harder caps on transmission and recovery. I wish that transmission for the small sciencey bits (which are still just numbers) was 100%. Logically, it doesn't make sense that you could get more data from looking at the actual thermometer than just its reading. It's not so much difficult as it is annoying. I've found that I'm shooting off probes that are an antenna, probe core, and single science reader to get the one bit I'm missing from a biome, which I don't think is a good use of a player's time.

I've heard people screaming that they're OP, and others yelling that they need to be buffed before they'll even consider trying them again. Which tells me that they are probably spot on.

But the trade-off it that's it's impossible to get an asymetric flameout on the RAPIERs. You're gaining stability and ease-of-use in exchange for a performance hit. Which I think is fair. If you're comfortable using two engine types and swapping, then do that. For people like me, who hate having to monitor that (or have had no luck doing so), we can get SSTOs into orbit as well.

Which still gives us zero incentive to use multi-man landers. Can I seuggest that you scale either the maximum number of samples based on capsule size, or allow a capsule to store a number of duplicates equal to its capacity?

It's... interesting. I'm a little surprised how much of a tail it produces without making power.

Any capsule does this now. Heck, even Kerbals can be your return capsule.

Hence the tongue-in-cheek comment. But seriously... I don't see much of a call for it anywhere in the kerbin SOI. Jool, Duna, or Eve are really the only places I would use it.

Use it to clean the modules. You can take the info outta them and stuff them into your return capsule. n.n

Largest I've ever done is nine. One regular intake on the front of the thing, and then eight in a circle around it. That was mostly because I wanted it to look big and burly rather than get into space with it.