Pulstar

Any ETA on the rover deployment?

They're posted on the tumblr blog now instead of the articles on the main site. You can find them , also stuff from the old weekly is posted on different days of the week, with devnotes on tuesday.

A science lab module for space stations is coming, however it will not generate science over time as getting science or really anything for simply time-warping until you have enough of it s not something the devs want to add.

Well Iceland is also livable, it's just that there's volcano and geyser after geyser there. Laythe's islands are volcanic in origin, with tidal forces from Jool, Tylo and Vall being the source of the volcanism (this is even confirmed via experiments in the game). The islands are already split into coastal sandy beaches and steep dark basalt (I think) mountains. Having some lava flow around those mountains wouldn't be that bad, the beaches are the safest place to land anyway. Also Laythe's livability is debatable considering how much radiation Jool is probably showering with it. I wouldn't risk taking off my EVA suit to get a tan on the beach, that's putting aside how cold laythe is.

This would actually be cool to have not just for unmanned rovers but also for manned exploration. Could also be used with missions, like say get a camera/spectrometer and make a picture from X meters of a feature somewhere on Duna. The game could spawn some unique rocks in an area of a few square kilometers then and tell you roughly where it is. You land, do the picture, send it back, get science for finishing the mission.

Flowing lava on laythe is a must, huge collums of volcanic smoke on the horizon as well. Not to mention clouds, storms, rain, lightning. Duna should have dust being kicked up, lots of dust, when you drive rovers fast, fire engines close to the ground and such. Occasional dust storms limiting visibility would be great as well. Near the poles the KSP equivalent of dry ice should sublime, creating small puffs of smoke. Procedurally generated tiny puddles or creeks on worlds with liquid on them. More and more varied scatter, especially rocks.

I think the similarities are superficial at best. Sure simcity had this nu-jazz or fusion thing going on with some ambient but besides KSP also having some jazz(y) tracks and ambient they're not that alike, just done in similar broad sub-genres.

When biomes get added on Duna and in other places rovers will be more useful. Although it will still be a long drive to get anywhere.

Worst thing that could happen, is probably you ending up with nodes that are not researched in the middle of the branch you fully researched prior to an update, basically as if you skipped a node. I wouldn't worry much about it. New parts will probably get added to current nodes or new ones with the overall structure of the tree remaining mostly the same.

If you ever tried editing a decoupler's part.cfg file to give it a lot more "oomph" and use it to launch things into orbit with the separation force, you will know that nearly nothing survives such a decoupling apart from at most one part. Don't let Jeb try it, trust me. I was thinking of delving into that to try and mode a mass driver to launch fuel tanks into Munar orbit, but I figure you would have to code something like a pushing tractor beam that gradually accelerates you "for free" until you reach a certain distance, otherwise everything will just blow up. Also electromagnets are fun in the KAS mod. I use them to assemble modular surface bases. I am wondering if they could be used to haul small metallic asteroids (like up to 10 meters wide) around. They're also pretty good for recovering capsules or satellites with no docking ports from orbit.

Right-click on a command pod, science part or a Kerbal in EVA, do science, either bring it back to Kerbin (use "recover vessel" once landed, move the mouse over the altimeter to see it) or transmit it back using an antenna (needs a lot of power). Rinse and repeat in multiple different locations. Biomes, low and high orbits, atmospheric flight and the surface around a given Planet/Moon all count as different places. Use science to unlock new nodes with parts in the R&D building back at the KSC.

I use those ports on spaceplanes I send to laythe. It would make it much, much easier to send them there if you could actually attach something to the top node, so that you could send it into LKO on a rocket. Maybe tweakables will allow us to open the shield in the VAB. Or just allow attachment below jet engines and aerospikes.

As a goal to have credits rolling and a "the end, thanks for playing" appear (after which you can still fool around)? Sending a ship to another star perhaps? The question is how to handle that from a gameplay perspective, what would the requirements for such a ship be etc. Maybe HarvesteR's old idea of going around the system, recovering "alien" artifacts, studying them and building an FTL device using that knowledge. Have the device require lots of power. Alternatively you could pull a "contact" and have to set up relays around the system to intercepts and decipher all of a signal with the details of such a device. If even hinting at off-screen aliens is too much, you could always say that Kerbal's came to Kerbin from elsewhere and forgot about it (the BSG maneuver). Still if there is to be an endgame goal other than accumulating prestige for your space program I figure it should: - be achievable via extensive exploration of the system both on the ground, in the air and in orbit, this is a game about space exploration after all - have a non-linear open way of achieving it - require SCIENCE in some way - require significant effort from the player or at least a practical understanding and usage of concepts like orbital mechanics, rendezvous, landing&return from different bodies, spacecraft design and the resource system. Not on a Scott Manley level of course. I have to say it is easier to think of endgame content than actual endgame mechanics.

The kerbal daily mentioned a lab module where I think you will be able to take samples from elsewhere for more science. My guess is that putting one in orbit of the Mun or Duna would be very beneficial.

I wouldn't say unprofitable but it really is beating the dead horse at this point. Same issues are mentioned, same opinions/examinations are made, same solutions are proposed while some of them have probably already been fixed in the current dev build. We had two weeks to do debate it after all. The "no probes at start" issue was even discussed before the update got released.

The lab and carrying around experiments sound very nice. This is probably how they want to make space stations useful, get samples on the surface from Biome X, return them to orbit, put them in the lab. Not only does it solve the problem of space stations but also gives more incentives for return missions, really great idea. My guess is they want to have them in .23 if possible since this feature has been put off for a while, probably one of the things HarvesteR vaguely referenced as being planned for 0.23 in that bigsushi interview.

It could be that they want to post it simultaneously with something else, possibly a dev blog from HarvesteR or some kind of announcement. Or everyone is simply busy busy busy, which is also good even if we may get to hear what made them so busy a bit late.

Or temperature will be biome, altitude and day/night dependent.

I think Gilly, Bop, Pol, Dres, Eeloo and maybe even Vall should be hidden when you start the game. Along with any new celestial bodies that would be added. The Voyager probes discovered a lot of moons after all.

It is a mystery, but maxmaps has been mentioning that he has big things planned from time to time. There was a Kerbalcon poll a few months back on the form it should have. So there will probably be an announcement with the details once everything on Squad's side is ready.

I think he was referring to this year's Kerbalcon. And I don't think it will be budgets, see HarvesteR in near the very end at 59 minutes and beyond. So R&D polish and probably new science mechanics with some vague unrelated to science things that were being pushed for later.

I guess it will be posted today, probably there was something important that delayed it.

Same here, wouldn't mind it being toggled off for a hard, hardcore or ironman difficulty mode but nobody should be forced to play like that against their will, this game can be rather unforgiving even with quicksaves. Just don't know about terminate flight, I think it is a non-issue really since it has little effect on gameplay (doesn't give you any advantage, has the same penalties as blowing up everything). I use it mostly to get rid off improperly flagged debris cluttering the vessel list like decouplers ending up as probes rather than debris. Also I think it would be very kerbal to have a self-destruct device on everything, just in case Jeb needs some new years fireworks and an old abandoned space station happens to be in the sky above. Also it would explain why everything explodes.

The issue isn't just multi-threading, unity does that to a degree but not in the area that is the performance bottleneck for KSP. The problem is specifically with physics being ran in a single thread on the CPU, using a very old version of physx from an ancient era before it used Nvidia GPUs for physics acceleration (I am wondering if one of the 10 people that still own a Ageia Physx PPU card experiences better performance with it in KSP). Skyrim works the way it works because it uses a much newer physics engine, a fairly recent version of havok which makes uses of all the recent technological advancements in PC hardware. The old version of physx KSP uses does not, hence the performance difference. Overall the only way to get around KSP's physics bottleneck problem would be to license a new physics engine and integrate it into the game (or write a new physics engine from scratch but that's too much for a small developer team such as squad). That is doable and one developer using Unity did do this for their game, I don't remember that game's title or the developer team's but they switched to Bullet physics, it was mentioned on the forums a few times. The issue is whether or not Squad has the resources to do that at this stage of development (or ever in the future), it may be that they rather wait for Unity to make the smart choice and upgrade the physics engine it uses, if Unity would do that it would save Squad money and probably time. I would like to see a better and newer physics engine in KSP just like probably everyone would like to see it, but I figure that if such a choice has not been made by Squad so far there must be significant technical and business issues standing in the way. That's the gist of it in my understanding of the issue, after seeing "beating the dead horse" of the KSP performance topic for over the nearly year I spent on this forum.

Well the resources will be random with random locations, so while biomes will be "biased" towards having certain kinds of them (water ice being more likely to appear at Duna's poles in larger quantities, heavy metals at impact craters and similar), it does not entirely eliminate the need for scanning. Also scanning is good for exploration, since you want know what resources you can expect where at first and even then you want know which deposit is the best. Some deposits will overlap with deposits of other resources. Sure knowledge of where the game is most likely to spawn some resources will be helpful but it won't tell you exactly where the deposit is, apart from seas, oceans and polar ice caps most biomes are defined as being primarily made of resource X or Y.