Axon

Does that have any effect on the dreaded right-click issue?

I'd like to see the antennas changed. I imagine it would make more sense if they operated like this: Communotron 16 Range: 50 million m (should work out to Minmus) Comms DTS-M1 Range: 10 billion m (greater than the distance between Kerbol and Moho) Communotron 88-88 Range: 75 billion m (significant fraction of distance between Kerbol and Eeloo) It would also be nice to make it so signals could be bounced between vessels in range of each other to make a path to Kerbin. I imagine the physics of having multiple vessels decrease their energy to retransmit would be difficult to do, so their energy usage could just be ignored, and only the one doing the original transmission would take the energy hit. If they could all take the energy hit, that would be even better. Lastly, make the recovered sample returns worth the full science for wherever they're recovered from, but transmitted science only earns a capped amount. Recovering a sample after transmitting should earn the rest of the available science for that area. The function of labs would then be to allow full science to be earned, but only if it can be transmitted back to Kerbin. This would incentivize players to build and launch probes into planetary orbits for building up their communication network, and make gathering science just a touch harder, while making the labs much more useful in the late game.

What I would have liked to have seen is the lowest end antenna have a limited range, and better antennas have better range with lower energy cost. It would have also been nice if you could bounce signals off other vessels, giving a reason to send probes into orbits around other planets with better antennas. To me, this makes more sense of what the antennas would be used for, rather than just a % science gain. I agree that it would make more sense to cap the science that could be gained by transmit, and require an actual recover to get the full credit. It would also make sense for the deployable labs, which would then give you 100% of the earnable science, making it so the science could be accumulated, but it wouldn't "count" towards your science earned until you had a pathway to transmit the signal all the way back to Kerbin. Wheffle is right about the actual operation of the antennas, though. The "better" antennas transmit more data per packet at higher packet energy cost and higher total energy cost, but the total data sent back is the same for any given antenna, and spamming radio returns will eventually cause as much science gain as recovering samples. Ultimately, once solar panels are equipped, it doesn't make any sense to recover samples, because you can just spam radio returns until all the science for a particular area is gathered.

I had a similar idea. Rather than even sending them back to Kerbin, why not have the lab be capable of doing the science right where it's at with the cost of heavy electricity usage, being massive, and requiring a Kerbal to be present to perform the science (perhaps making a celestial body with this station on it be a capable of recovery?).

Hi Kerbalnauts! One thing I'd love to see in the future is the ability to change hotkeys for numbers 0-9 in-flight. The reasons for this request are fairly simple: sometimes people like me forget to assign hotkeys before the mission, docking may make undesired changes to hotkey assignments, and damage to the vehicle may require in-flight reassignment to attempt to rebalance things like rocket rings that are no longer symmetrical. How it might work: I would like to see the reassignment go something like this: 1) select parts to assign a function to using mod key+R-click. 2) press and hold hotkey reassign key such as "`" or "~" and number to assign function to. The tricky part may be where a part has multiple functions, in which case selecting that part's function or multiple parts' functions to be controlled by the newly assigned hotkey may be difficult. A generic assignment might be toggled for things like engines, sensors, solar deployments, etc, and decouple for pylons, stage separations, etc. Would anyone else like to see this?

Hi all! I'm a newbie, of course. I just made my first successful moon landing, and flight back to Kerbal. I'm playing the vanilla version and would like to get some mods. Anyone have suggestions for a good mod to start out with?