Eric S

Possibly, but not definitely. The amount of science you get increases the more you understand how science works, and if you're the kind of player that can do crazy things with minimal parts, that opens up even more science opportunities. As an example of the first factor, knowing how biomes on Kerbin and the Mun interact with EVA reports can dramatically increase your science generation on early missions involving either of those celestial bodies. As an example of the second factor, at least one player managed a Duna landing and return using just the parts you get from the very first tech node. Neither of these are things that someone new to the game are going to be pulling off, and the first isn't something that someone new to career mode and hasn't studied how research works will pull off. Combine both factors, and you get Scott Manley claiming to have done the entire tech tree in three flights, though that was with an earlier build, so it may not be as viable now, and since he didn't show his work it's possible that it was also hyperbole, but I have no reason to think it is. Personally, while I've done a one way trip to duna using the starting parts, my normal path (yes, I've already done the early part of the tech tree multiple times) seems to be settling into something less ambitious, though I'm sure that there's still room to improve my research methodology: 1) Initial orbital flight, 60+ points, more if I remember to grab a soil sample and do one last EVA report after I recover the craft. This unlocks decouplers (both inline and radial), goo samples, the LV-909 engine, the larger SRBs, and landing struts, all of which play a role in step 2. 2) Mission to Minmus: Minmus doesn't have biomes unless you count the normal three (surface/low orbit/high above), so this is mostly about the goo, a surface sample, and crew reports/EVA reports on the surface of Minmus. I don't remember how many points here, but it unlocks struts, fuel lines, the rockomax 48-7S (which is OP in 0.22), the first solar panel (very big thing), and the materials lab part. 3) Mission to the Mun: the Mun has six or seven biomes that increase the number of EVA reports you can do in an equatorial orbit. I radioed back all of the experiment results from the Mun, and then departed, throwing myself into an orbit that just barely left Kerbin's SoI. Once in the sun's SoI, I did the three goo reports, the materials lab, an EVA report, and a crew report. I headed back to Kerbin, and just the EVA reports and results from the sun's SoI resulted in over 800 research points, on top of over 200 points radioed back. So three missions that weren't fully optimized, and I'm already done with tiers one through three, have most of tier four researched, and about half of tier five. On the topic of the OP: Needs something between Awesome and OK. Not sure I'd call it Awesome yet, though tweaking the tree and research rates might tune that up. On the other hand, definitely better than just OK. I haven't voted yet, but given that breakdown, I'd have to go with Awesome. Last night was the second time in months that I've stayed up "way too late" playing KSP, and the other time was right after we saw the initial parts list for career mode and I decided to do a trip to Duna with just those parts (one way in my case, though at least one person has done a round trip with the same parts).

First, probes stink that early in the tech tree. Since they all draw power at all times, you basically don't get any farther than getting into orbit before it becomes an inert craft, and that's just plain hostile to new players. Second, the little green men screaming/laughing maniacally is one of the things that gets new players hooked on the game. My opinion? Leave it the way it is for the new players, and experienced players can mod the tree any way they want.

Because while it wouldn't ruin it, it would harm it. Between capsules being easier without rebalancing parts and the hook of having the kerbals in the corner, capsules first makes sense from a gameplay perspective. If you really want to start with probes, you can mod it. Most experienced players won't have a problem modding it and the gameplay differences wouldn't matter to them. This isn't necessarily true for new players, on either count.

Given that the nosecone has a lower than average drag coefficient (in 0.22, at least), that may be what they're referring to, though because of it's low mass, I can't see it being that strong.

As someone who's built Tier 1 compliant craft to play with, and out of curiosity, did the same with probe pods, I can tell you you're drastically underestimating the difference. Capsules only draw power when you're using torque, and then only in proportion to the torque that is used, whereas a probe core is always drawing power. Heck, I've had times it had chewed up 5% of my power before I had even ignited the engines, just because I took 30 seconds to double check my staging. Second, if a capsule runs out of power, you can start up a liquid engine (if you have one available) to get some electricity back. If a probe runs out of power, it is dead. The parts aren't organized by tier in their config files. There's a single line in the part.cfg file that specifies what node a part requires. If the line is missing, the part is not available to career mode. So yes, it will be trivial to make a mod using ModuleManager that changes what tech nodes each part requires. Which is also a reason why I'm fine with the tech tree being capsules first. If anyone doesn't like the tree, they can change it, so yes, the tree should keep new users in mind, as they're less likely to know that that is even possible, let alone know how to do it. EDIT: "The parts aren't organized by tier in their config files." Just to clarify, I mean the config files aren't organized by tier.

Science will not stop just because I've unlocked all of the tech tree. :-) Though if I'm reading this right, you agree.

I was thinking along these lines, but not about this specifically, so it makes sense to me as well. If you know exactly how much science comes from each activity because you ran the mission without the career mode restraints, then that's going to significantly alter your approach, allowing you to optimize your career mode play with information that isn't from career mode. While that will happen to some extent anyway, it's not the kind of thing the devs would want to encourage.

Actually, in interviews done before the movie came out, they discussed that they knew that those were normally in different orbits, but they put them in similar ones for purposes of the story. Other than that, yes, the debris trajectory is probably what bothered me the most.

If neither KER nor MJ give delta-v readings at the start of 0.22 career mode (either because of incompatibility or conscious decision on the part of the mod creators), you can build the craft in the sandbox and then copy the craft file over to your career save directory. For the record, using something like ModuleManager to put MJ or KER on stock parts will probably work barring mod creator decisions otherwise, since the research tree controls parts, but makes no effort to restrict plugins. And given the ease of designing a craft in sandbox and then moving it over to a career save, I think that disabling the VAB portion of either of those programs would be pointless at best.

Actually, this is calmer discussion than normal for this topic, I'm assuming that's why this thread hasn't been locked yet, since discussions of this sort normally are locked before they reach a second page, though since this is actually off topic, it may not have come to the mod's attention. That said, I'm going to stick to clarifying stuff. If I ever made you feel like I was attacking you, I apologize. In what regards? (not denying it, asking for specifics) The reach and intensity of the Van Allan belts changes on a constant basis. Heck, there was one solar event that actually managed to remove one of the two most concentrated regions, and it stayed that way until a second solar event restored the previous state. Then there was the artificial radiation belt caused by Starfish Prime that dissipated by itself. Fair enough, though to split hairs, "is never good" doesn't equate out to "is always bad." Below a certain amount, the body tends to repair the damage faster than it happens. Normal background radiation is well below that threshold. If it weren't, airline pilots would be dropping from cancer left and right because they get higher than normal radiation exposure just from spending so much time with less atmosphere above them. There are people living in areas that exceed the official recommended radiation exposure limits without any statistically relevant health effects (which isn't to say that this is the case in all areas that exceed said limit). Actually, I'm telling you to go read what people have said about this and check their science. I've done that for arguments on both sides of this issue. There is a distinct lack of science in what you're saying. I'm not saying you're contradicting science, but you never go into the science other than "it seems to me." To be honest, looking isn't going to mean much unless we can agree on what we should and shouldn't see. The moon is an alien world for all intents and purposes, and until you take that into account, what we see or don't see doesn't matter. You seem certain that there should be more pronounced visible effects. Others here have a different opinion. You're trying to apply common sense, they're trying to apply science (that's not a dig, they could still be wrong). Actually, I said a message or two ago that I understood why people would believe in hoax claims. Given an environment that is alien, it's very easy to make claims based on things that feel like common sense that don't stand up to scientific scrutiny. If you're not a scientist that has studied this stuff, it can very easily not make sense, and I say that as a person quite willing to admit this is not my area of expertise, nor do I consider myself any kind of authoritative opinion on the subject. It's more that science says that the change would be hard to see. Actually, on this topic, I'll suggest this article. I haven't looked around to see if there's a better article, but it should sort out this discussion a bit. It's a bit heavy on the math, but I wouldn't trust anything that wasn't on a topic like this. It wraps up with "In reality, the exhaust stream blew away very little soil because there wasn't enough energy in the gas to move a large volume of surface material." and then shows a photo where you can tell that some soil was blown away. Given that image, I'd say it would be hard to spot that amount of change on the irregular surface of the moon unless you knew exactly what to look for.

To be honest, I'm probably going to run through the tech tree a few times before I fall into any sort of pattern. At least once, I'm going to go to the moon as my first mission, and at least once I'm not going to be leaving LKO until I'm on the verge of getting the rockomax parts if not beyond them. I'll probably even do one round of "how far can I go without leaving the ground" and "how early can I switch my space program over to a probe-centric one?" Any discussion about having craft I'm playing around with is really "what am I going to try first?" Oh, and at least once through trying to finish the tech tree with as few launches as possible. I know Scott did it in three launches, but it's possible that what he did may not work by the time the real 0.22 comes out.

FAR attempts a more realistic atmospheric model, rather than just a more realistic drag model balanced for gameplay against the current drag model. In reality, drag losses are about an order of magnitude less than we see in typical KSP launches, so of course a realistic mod is going to make it easier to get into space. I think the atmospheric drag losses on the Apollo missions were on the order of 80 delta-v, and most other launch systems were under 200 delta-v. Deadly Reentry ran into similar issues. There's just not as much reentry heat possible in KSP as in reality because our reentry velocities tend to be significantly lower than reality. As soon as they went with a reentry heat model that was realistic, they had to look for things other than heat to make reentry deadly.

I think I'm more trying to draw parallels than connect you to hoaxers, though to be honest, you claim it was a hoax at at least some level, so you do fit the definition, and I don't think that hoaxers are some kind of organization with membership and such. Every item in that list you gave has been brought up before and torn apart. I've actually gone looking for hoaxer claims that were backed up by reasonable science, and I haven't found any. I'm saying to look up the science behind the claim, then read a good, scientific writeup by someone debunking the claim, and then compare the science behind the two. Don't take either at face value. I don't know which post you're saying is treating you like a child, though I do see at least one post just telling you to go away. I'd rather you learn than just take anyone else's word for it. I can agree that there was or there wasn't, however, just because there was doesn't mean that there was the kind that would be necessary to result in your initial statement. One of the biggest problems I've found reading "hoax" claims is that people assume that all their experience here translates out to things out there following their common sense. This is where you get into the kind of thinking some of us might find annoying. You say you've never used numbers because you can't verify them. So what are you using to support your claim that whoever did go to the moon died of cancer? You're assuming a sufficient level of radiation to cause cancer, then handwaving the radiation because you can't verify it, but letting the cancer result stand. The first objection you had was the lack of radiation shielding in the capsule and space suits. Without numbers like this, you don't know how much shielding was necessary, and without knowing the type of radiation you're shielding from, you don't know what type of material to use as a shield. What were you expecting to see that you didn't, and what's science are you using to support that need? Noone's saying it isn't. On the other hand, so is critical thinking. I have no problem at all with people thinking critically about whether or not the moon landings were a hoax. The problem I find is when they stop thinking critically as soon as their initial criticism produces something they think contradicts the official story. If you're not thinking "what might I have overlooked or gotten wrong" until you're out of arguments and counterarguments, then you're not following through. And yes, when I read articles debunking hoax claims, I'm making sure I understand what's being said, verifying the science if it's something I didn't know before reading that article, etc. Believing a debunking based on bad science is just as wrong as believing a hoax claim based on bad science. I think the high point of this non-critical thinking was on a video I saw one time, with a roundtable discussion between seven people all who had their own conspiracy theories about the moon landing. Early on in the segment, one of the people made a statement about the Van Allen belts that anyone that had ever read an encyclopedia entry on them would have known was horribly wrong, and yet was a critical assumption to her theory. I expected someone to correct her, and instead, everyone just nodded and carried on with the conversation. This means that every person there either didn't know it was wrong (despite the fact that almost every one of them brought up radiation as part of their reasoning), or they knew it was wrong and chose to let a blatantly wrong fact stand in what was supposed to be scientific discourse. At that point, I stopped watching because it stopped being scientific discourse and became a hoaxer PR piece in my mind.

Only because you insist that there should be a crater, without any scientific basis. As an FYI, that thrust you mentioned is at full thrust. That would be a TWR on the moon of 2.0 with a full fuel load, and anyone that's played KSP can tell you that if you touch down and then shut of your engines when you're under that much thrust, you're not on the ground by the time you turn off your engine. As others have pointed out, all of this has been debunked thoroughly. If you spent as much time reading the science behind the debunking as you did reading this stuff, you'd realize the same thing I did when I looked into the various claims that we didn't really go into the moon. I'm not telling you to believe the debunking without research, but trust me, the science behind every "we didn't go to the moon as reported" claim I've seen has less bearing to real science than your typical Hollywood movie hacker has to the real hackers. They use some of the right buzzwords, maybe a bit of the math, but are blissfully unaware of anything beyond that. The realization I spoke of is that it is easy to come up with a claim that sounds quite reasonable to anyone that doesn't understand the science the claim is supposed to represent, even if that realization crumbles if anyone with an introductory level understanding of the science involved. Radiation isn't anywhere near as straightforward as most people think, and you don't actually have to shield radiation to the point that it's down to normal background radiation levels. For example, the claims that you'd need feet of lead to stop radiation are ignoring how radiation works. Lead is actually a bad radiation shielding for the types of radiation they're talking about there. As has been mentioned elsewhere, the types of radiation that lead blocks can be significantly blocked by foil, let alone feet of lead, and for the types that it isn't good for, other stuff is better by far. So lead would be the worst radiation shielding going. Being on the surface of a celestial object actually shields you from a fair bit of the radiation, and even without that, a round trip to Mars which would take a lot longer than a trip to the moon would leave someone under the federal standard for radiation exposure, and even if they hit the limit, that's not "OMG you've got cancer!" it's a 5% increase in the chance of getting cancer. Going through the Van Allen belts are the peak radiation exposure, and the math on that has been done so many times with hard numbers that there's no real point to hash that out yet again. Every time I've seen someone bring up radiation exposure, they've either not provided any numbers or provided numbers that no actual scientific authority agrees with. In the absense of an atmosphere, dust is going to fall as fast as anything else, and the moon isn't microgravity. Gravity on the moon is about 1.6 m/s^2, so 80 cm of travel from a standstill in the first second, 240 cm in the second second, etc. So no, there won't be dust clouds. And unless your experiments were done in a vacuum, then they don't correlate to what you're discussing enough to matter. Solar peaks are a statistical event, not a constant flow, and even during a solar peak, the event rate of anything that would have put any radiation in our direction (they're not omnidirectional) was low enough that it was very unlikely to happen during the relatively short missions. The highest Space shuttle mission by a large margin was the Hubble telescope repair, and lowering their orbit would have meant not repairing the telescope. I think you'll have to give a reputable link if you expect anyone to consider that anything more than the space version of an urban legend. Honestly, if you want your claims to be taken seriously, you'll need to put a little more work into understanding the science behind the claims. Given how obviously wrong some of these claims are, we've got no reason to believe that they aren't all equally wrong. You say that the photography analysis isn't your forte, but as we've shown, even in the other areas, your understanding of the science is flawed.

I know the limit is at least one per capsule, so if you can get all three kerbals into different biomes, that should work out well.

Goo: as I understand it, yes. I know I saw someone reset a goo experiment during the livestream because he decided he'd rather do it someplace else. Not certain that that can be done after transmission, but I suspect it can. I don't see why the Materials Lab would be any different, but didn't see any proof of it. As for the samples from the kerbals, The impression I got is that you can store at least one in the capsule and one on the kerbal.

I've done a few basic missions with tier-0 parts. One way, single-capsule trip to Duna (not good for science, more just to see if it could be done), a three capsule suborbital mission, and a two capsule flyby of the Mun and Minmus. Given what I've seen on the livestream, the longer trip will return more total science, but the suborbital will return more per time invested, and frankly, going beyond LKO without decouplers is a bit of a kludge. The trip to the moon is more fun, so I might still do it, but I don't see any real efficiency benefit given how easy decouplers are to unlock (5 science points, and you can get that in a few minutes without even launching a rocket, it seems). You can do science in the sandbox, but you don't get any results, so other than testing craft ideas, there's not much point, as you can't even test radio transmission of the results, since there aren't any.

As I understand it, neither explanation has been officially endorsed, they're just people's pet theories. We may find out more during the Christmas special this year.

We can be truthful in saying that every native we've discovered has as well. Isn't philosophy fun? :-) Of course, you could say the same for all native Venusians we've discovered being the god of missing socks, so we can assume that they speak whatever language they want to, as gods tend to do.

Well, so far, every sentient on the moon has, but we're talking a fairly small sample set :-) As to the other discussions, I'm glad someone is going back to the moon, I just wish that the first step down from humanity in my direction (which would be American) was still as interested in going there as they once were.

In the case where the vehicle would have to carry both the fuel and the oxidizer, feeding it into a fuel cell which then powers an electric motor is still more efficient than an internal combustion engine, even in energy density. Granted, this tends to put a cap on your available burst power and isn't as easily recharged as a battery Right up until you need to refuel, at which point the tortoise wins the race. The reason rovers move so slow isn't the limit on electricity, it's the communication delay between the rover and the driver. The Lunar rover wasn't rechargeable, but still covered the kind of distance it takes unmanned rovers years to cover. There's an annual 1700 to 2000 mile race for electric vehicles. This year, the winner finished in 5 days.

Doesn't strike me as that interesting of an idea, and not horribly practical, either. Has there ever been an internal combustion engine used for actual work in LEO, let alone on other planets? Electric motors strike me as more reliable and safer in this kind of environment. As for moving a large base, the large rover wheels already move at 36 km/hr, do you really want to move a vehicle the size of a small building faster than that over broken ground? The fact that electrical vehicles can refuel using solar panels or RTGs is just too large of a convenience to overlook in the case of any kind of extended operation where there isn't a ready supply of gasoline or similar.

Excellent, and less kludgy than my Delusions of Grandeur.

Agreed, and having to grind out the lower few tech nodes with multiple suborbital hops really isn't my idea of fun gameplay, which is why I suspect that the first few tiers of tech will go by rather fast. The average player probably won't be doing LKO missions without decouplers. As for some of the other complaints (starting with a capsule instead of a probe) gets back to gameplay vs reality, and in KSP gameplay wins. Probes do have a higher learning curve because of their power requirements, and let's face it, would this game really be as addictive to new player without the little green man (men) in the corner screaming/laughing maniacally?

And it is. A capsule, a parachute, 8 fuel tanks, and one engine will get you to LKO and back. Lack of delta-v and TWR stats in the stock VAB are the biggest hurdles to an experienced player, and inexperienced players tend to fall into the "overcomplicate it till it can't work" category, usually trying to compensate for lack of skill at piloting. I will admit that that craft doesn't have huge amounts of delta-v in reserve, so it would be harder than launching a craft in sandbox mode. As I said, it only gets complicated when you try to go farther. Even the trip to Duna was done with 47 parts. I won't say it was the most aerodynamic craft ever, but that was mostly due to the lack of decouplers. Really, the dev's idea is to provide the minimum amount of parts at the start so that new players don't get confused. Ever watched a youtube video of someone introducing someone else to KSP? The amount of time it takes new players to realize that most of the parts aren't appropriate for their first mission is probably enough time for people to decide that this game isn't for them, and if they add more stock parts, this is only going to get worse. I think that they may have gone slightly too far, but as long as you can unlock decouplers with one successful LKO mission or one or two successful suborbital missions, I don't see this as being much of a speed bump to experienced players, as decouplers are the only thing standing in the way of Munar orbits for most players. I'm also not sure how much good this will really do, as I'm not sure if normal starting players are going to head for sandbox or career mode first, and this does nothing to help sandbox players.