Pulstar

Pretty much. Of course not just craters, although those are the ones which are obviously missing from (mostly) airless rocks. Duna and Laythe could also have dunes (Laythe has some now but they're too big), cryogeysers for Vall/Eeloo, puddle/pools of liquid, lava flow for Eve/Laythe. Surfaces with different driving characteristics, sand versus rock versus ice. Also there was talk of a procedural skybox at one point.

Depends on where in the tech tree they will be.

That arcing detector dish has to be brought back, it just looks so great. Not to mention the pump drill and rock drill. And this processor: Nova's parts are always great, they were what made KSP stock look stock back in 0.18.

Toxic rain on Eve forming puddles in the ground, heat distorting the shape of the landscape, ocean currents that glow in the dark, thick fog periodically reducing solar panel efficiency and limiting visual range. In the upper atmosphere, lightning. Cyclones and thunderstorms on Laythe, geothermal vents and geysers, volcano eruptions and lava flow (doth under water and on land). Rain, snow, hurricane winds. Giant sea waves and storm surges clashing against the cold rocky and sandy shores. Duna, dust and ice kicked up dozens of meters high, dust devils, dust storms, snow. Sandtraps where rovers get stuck and kerbals sink in.

It possibly is. The Mk3 parts are all brand new and supposedly there are still some which we are supposed to get. Like heavy landing gear. Remember that the mark 2 only got added in 0.24, with the mk1 inline clamp-o-tron being in the game since 0.18 when docking got added.

With 0.90 I am slowly opening up to the concept of space stations and surface bases. From a profit-driven career mode point of view, a small exploration vehicle with a refueling hub pays for itself easily with survey contracts. Although it depends where, some bodies are ridiculously easy to survey. Some ideas and observations I got after playing 0.90 for a long bit: Xenon refueling hubs for low gravity bodies. Minmus, Gilly, Bop, Pol, a hybrid rover/ion engine lander with a command seat, profit. Bop and Pol in particular are goldmines, you just need one ship for both. Tiny Ion Engine lander (command chair) attached to a LV-N mothership. Attach a ton of radial xenon tanks to the mothership, profit. Use the LV-N to haul everything between Bop and Pol as the need arises, ion only for excursions, refuel once in a while since you don't want too much xenon on the lander. Laythe is just asking you to make a globe-flying jet with a claw and some rover wheels. Drop a rockomax 32 tank filled only with liquid fuel on some flat low altitude island. You're set for life. A decent jet design can easily go suborbital on Laythe saving a lot of fuel and making surveys quite easy regardless of the waypoint locations. Land near the tank, drive using rover wheels and land-dock with the claw to refuel. With the exception of Kerbin and Laythe exploration contracts have best profit-margins on small bodies where waypoints, no matter how far apart, are fairly easy to reach. With in-situ fuel production added from mods, I think Duna/Vall are the biggest bodies where a reusable survey vessel is viable. Alternatively Duna becomes more viable with electric propellers.

What I would love to see, in the case of rings, is having random moonlets be generated in them. Would be cool for mining. My main question at this point is just what kind of Delta-V it would require to reach. Without aerocapture Jool is already quite difficult. Balancing will probably have to wait until after the Aerodynamics rework. Even then 90% of work with balancing is having the game playtested to hell and back to pick up the things that just looking at the changed numbers in the spreadsheet doesn't. Actual coding work is changing a value in a few lines, the main problem is knowing what and to what you need to change. Which is why playtesting is needed. It is not a much of a manpower sink taking away people from work on say planets or other content. UI tweaking possibly is, but then again it doesn't need more than one person working on that (and more people does not equal it being done proportionally faster due to how coding works). It is quite reasonable to assume a new planet, or indeed other features, can developed simultaneously with the mentioned balancing and UI tweaks being done, without a drop in productivity as far as those tweaks alone are concerned. Basically it is impossible to use all the available people on the team on just those two tasks, too many people and too varied skillet.

That and the Sagen (Oxygen -> OxSAGEN) sea on Laythe may be references to some of the resource that will come with the stock resource system. Either that or a Carl Sagan reference, or both. It makes sense why they added biomes everywhere now, since they could use those for a resource generation system. I am a bit disappointed laythe's volcanic mountains are not a separate biome.

Placing struts, fuel lines, static solar panels, small sensors or batteries in EVA would be great. They could use the old toolbox part Claira designed as a generic junk, i mean spare parts container that eventually depetes itself. Or allow kerbals to pick up those parts from one vessel and attach them to another (kerbal jury-rigging, it's fun for the whole family!). Or maybe allow kerbals to salvage small parts from old vessels to refill the toolbox (have debris flying/lying around in deep space? can't let perfectly good junk go to waste!).

I renamed quite a bit of kerbals in 0.90 and class is most certainly related to the name. Wouldn't be surprised if it is used as a random seed.

Can you set the Kerbal as a target? I assume you can since you only need mission control upgraded, not the tracking station which allows that IIRC. Also that should show you your intersection and AN/DN nodes. The hard part is getting close to the target. If you see intersections and target position at intersection this one is easy. Put the intersection at your apoapsis or periapsis. Burn retrograde (if the target will be in front of you at the intersection) or prograde (if it will be behind you) at that point until closest approach at intersection is close enough for final approach. This is fast orbital rendezvous for the impatient 101. If you do not have intersection indicators it gets hard, you need enough delta-v and thrust, the solution is to get as close as you can (can be even 50km). I recommend going from a lower orbit and "catching up" to the Kerbal. See the pink marker showing the target's prograde vector? Burn so that your prograde and the kerbals overlap, not too much. When it does it means you will intersect the kerbal's orbit eventually, oat a point which should be closer to the target than your current distance. Depending on the distance/impatience burn prograde some more if you are far away to catch up a bit faster. Just don't burn too much or you'll find yourself needing to seriously decelerate or on a suborbital trajectory. You wait until you get closest again and repeat. I recommend using KAC's "closest approach/rendezvous" alarm feature unless you are playing all stock. Eventually by repeating that you should get close enough that all you need to do is match orbits by killing all velocity relative to the target and going on final approach. If you can't set the kerbal as a target though, I have no clue.

Same problem, it definitely is related to the contents of the persitent.sfs file, as copying its contents to a file of a different save also causes it.

You know what, SkyRender has a point. Engineers and Scientists could use some level 0 bonuses. Early game is biased towards pilots mostly due to smaller pods and crafts. Though I figure that with bigger and more complex missions you will want one of each Kerbal type. Engineers at this point are a "don't need them unless you fail" role (with the exception of parachute repacking), which makes them more situational, where as pilots make your life easier and prevent failing, while scientists are just "get more stuff". Still, if you look at spaceflight history, it was pilots first, scientists started flying later on IIRC (feel free to correct me if I am wrong). Overall I was hoping the classes would be more open in skill development. As in I could have a Pilot with some science skill or an Engineer that is also a backup pilot. Jack of all trades master of none would still apply, but some skill diversification would be a good idea.

Doesn't the tooltip inside the astronaut complex list the log of the kerbal when you hover over him? It listed how much XP and from what mine got.

Weather would be awesome, but even skilled players would see it happen. Still, lightning on Laythe or Eve, killer winds, dust storms.... Weather would be great, so long as we'd get a lightning rod part or something to protect from the worst of it. However I think it could be destructible buildings, with KSC base construction being the big .26 feature.

There was an old concept for a solar powered Mars plane over or near a decade ago (I remember seeing some CGI of it on the discovery channel), concepts of Titan aerial craft using electric power have also been floating around. I think it is safe to say we'll get them one day. It was even mentioned once, I don't remember by whom from Squad (though possibly C7 who is no longer with squad), that they would be one of those "nice to have/add, but not right now" parts. They'd be great if Eve or Duna got Biomes. Or if we got a low-g high pressure Titan-analogue.

Ideally an endgame contract triggering a credit and perhaps even a score/stats screen should involve: - lots of exploration with visits to multiple celestial bodies - lots of freedom in how the player chooses to approach it - varied kinds of challenge, requiring you to deal with different types of problems/obstacles Personally I think it should be something along the lines of "find X things" where the things are scattered in different random places around the system and there's actually more of them than just X not to railroad the player too much and allows him choice in what obstacles he wants to tackle. Whether those things are supposed to be 2001: A Space Odyssey style Monoliths, evidence of Kerbal life originating from outside the Kerbal system or Unobtanium for a warp drive is irrelevant. Overall what I mean by varied challenge is that it shouldn't be doable by just building airless body landers or just by rovers or just by manned missions.

I wonder if that shader or whatever map code that was being done for resource mining can be adapted to show biomes from map view instead. One more thing biomes could be used for, at least by the devs, would be to spawn specific procedural terrain features in them. Scatter is already based on biomes (cacti in Kerbin's deserts). Why not make a crater field on Duna inside those bigger craters? What about spawning volcanic shafts, lava flow etc around Laythe's mountainy islands? Sandtraps on Duna getting rovers stuck perhaps? More rocks or less rocks per biome?

The tech tree will need serious re-balancing eventually, that much is obvious. Between contracts, more biomes, hopefully more planets/moons and new types of science experiments it will gradually become easier to max out the tech tree sooner. Biomes can serve more than one purpose. There's really no reason why you can't have contracts to explore/study specific biomes or explore multiple ones. Also biomes can be used by modders for resource generation or modding in things like ice-only kethane drills.

Primary problem with this is the same as with science over time, you can just timewarp until you get more money without doing anything requiring effort.

This is one of the utility features I rather see unlocked via using a Kerbal with a high piloting skill or with an unlocked ability to do so through experience.

I'm not sure I agree with this, landing heavier things on Tylo would no doubt require a skipper which is more or less as big as a mainsail. Then there's the issue of recovering stages SpaceX style, you can use the ARM pack's HUGE size parts to build fairly good and simple SSTO lifters, only issue is working around the limitations for landing leg length.

RAPIERs can be stacked IIRC.

Electric propellers are a possibility, just like airbags for lithobraking they're on the "it would be nice to add them but not a priority ATM" list. Solar sails would probably have to be even more ridiculously overpowered compared to real life than ion engines are to not be a pain to use.

A very very ancient and probably no longer planned idea for an endgame that was thrown around by somebody on the dev team involved scouring bodies of the Kerbal solar system for alien artifacts or some other fantastical macguffin, allowing you to eventually build a warp drive. From a sandbox game perspective it kind of makes sense, there's stuff out there, go find it however you wish in whatever order you wish. The basic idea for any endgame goal in KSP should be to make the player explore most of the system. The alternative for a game like KSP would be something equivalent to Civilization's Science Victory. Basically advance far enough in the tech tree and get enough money to assemble a nuclear/antimatter pulse engine powered interstellar ship. Problem with that would be that it's rather grindy.