allmappedout

Either that, or he means that when rotating the camera it doesn't rotate the kerbal automatically, which I presume is how the system works.

It does appear that a lot of odd choices have been made on the tech tree. I for one am very intruiged to see what the rationale behind it is. The idea of launching your first probe, Sputnik style though, still won't be much cop without decouplers. Perhaps the screenshot is a deliberate act of misdirection by the devs?

Indeed, there was a Moho in Manchester (not related to Montreal steak, unfortunately!) as well, but it's changed its name since..

of course it's not, but at the same time making it even less forgiving may put a significant audience off. Also, given that the main thrust of the argument is surrounding the technical impracticality of implementing this (as Kerbart says - it's not a partial opt-in), as well as a very divisive thing which a lot of people have a lack of appetite for, and it seems to be this is a non-starter.

Procedural everything! But yes, I agree also, the launch clamps, whilst they work really well for the most part, are a bit inflexible at times and the lack of lateral distance does hinder some designs.

Pleased as punch that Harv answered my questions! Shame, but I'm sure it'll work out well enough - the second point I raised in the questions seems to be much more positive news about how the experiments you can perform are dependent on where you are and what you're doing. It makes me wonder whether there is a list of possible mission types you can undertake, or whether you're free to fire something off to somewhere and run a set of experiments and get science regardless of whether you had a plan in the first place ie: I'm at moho...might as well scan for an atmosphere! Oh there isn't one, never mind! SCIENCE! I guess it's a valid experiment... And there's the question of repeatability. I was discussing in another thread about instrument quality and whether this affects the level of science you unlock. Another way of looking at it is the resolution of such discoveries; perhaps scanning the mun early on from 100km with a rubbish camera will give you some grainy photos, but you could launch a later device with higher quality instruments and make detailed readings of the trace atmosphere and take high-rest photos with 50cm resolution, etc. Particularly the latter part of that, it is essentially the same experiment, but different end result. I suppose the concern is would it be spammable (ie: is there a rate of return curve?) and even if not, are there some missions which are more valuable than others? ie: for a given mission cost can I get to Minmus and get more science than the Mun, or can I do it for cheaper, or in less time, etc etc

There are already a couple of discussions similarly themed at the moment. I am hoping for a very deep and rewarding system. Whilst I don't expect it to necessarily be in the first iteration, there's a lot of potential there and I hope that some of these ideas are taken on board.

That can only be a good thing. Plus once the infrastructure is in place, it'll be cool to see how the mod community handles it all.

Well, you say of course, but like we were mentioning above, Curiosity isn't coming back to Earth ( ), but is still providing valuable science off the back of samples, and doing all the experiments in-situ that we would do back here. Getting moon rock back to Earth was important in the 70s because we were limited by the amount of time astronauts could spend there, so doing the research into it was a time factor. But given how modern scientific investigation goes now, there's little to no difference between the scientific equipment on Earth and the top of the range stuff attached to a rover. Saying that, it gives me an idea that potentially you could have different quality bits of equipment; do you want a basic overview? Take a camera, do you want detailed analysis, mass spec, etc etc - weight/electricity become issues to build into your model as well then.

I guess we will have to wait and see. Obviously I'm very excited about the science feature, I just hope that what's delivered is just the beginning as there's so much they can do to flesh out how it works, and since ScienceTM is pretty much the overriding reason people go to space today, I'd like to see it being a full and exciting feature.

I agree, I actually made a post about this very recently here where I think that you should have difference sub-disciplines of science to help focus your research.

That's certainly true for a lot of it, but there are significant improvements in Materials Science, certain fuels, computing and modelling, etc. which can open up new avenues for research (Carbon Fibre being a key example) But yes, you're right, the theory behind it was very much well established very early on. Obviously new types of propulsion can appear off the back of advances, such as VASIMIR, SABRE, NERVA, etc, but even Aerospikes, which are seen as a very good solution to space flight SSTO issues, were theorised right at the beginning. Perhaps there could be two tiers of tech-tree; one for improvements of current technology, and one for advancements in propulsion as they are realised? It's a very, very large area to cover off and whatever occurs, not everyone will be completely satisifed in its implementation

That's a very good point which I hadn't considered! It would make using a skycrane even more imperative if you could then use said crane to lift the rover back to Kerbin! Although to be fair, most rovers have a lot of on-board spectrometers, magic and widgetstm to do the science there, which I suppose would preclude the samples needing to be brought back (ie: the same experiments would be run back home). I always see samples being brought back as mostly a prestige thing, and whilst I understand the gameplay benefit of rewarding a successful return mission with samples, if the science can be done in-situ, that's usually almost as good, if not as good, as having it back on Earth (particularly looking at Curiosity here, which is car sized and full to the brim with gubbins).

durr you're of course, very right. The danger of post scripting! I'll correct it now, thanks!

One thing that I'd say is that any space faring nation/race has to have a very good grasp of the mathematics and telemetry behind it before they can even consider launching a spacecraft. Things like NAV balls and maneuveur nodes are such an integral part of the game (the former more so), and are based on gyroscopes, magnetism and mathematics (all of which have been around far longer than our space program), it seems naive to suggest that someone would willingly get in a rocket without these basic things (assuming, for a second, that the maneveur nodes represent mission control, for example), even someone as crazy as Jeb! The unlocking of other things does, I believe, fall under what's going to happen with the remaining parts and obviously there will be a lot of it that will be locked at the beginning. However, removing such vital tools to navigation would just make it a very difficult entry barrier to a newbie. PS: I'd like to point out it's easier to build a simple rocket than a simple plane, which is why the Chinese had simple rockets since the 11th Century, and the first simple plane wasn't for another 900 years, so forcing someone to 'start' with planes is also counterintuitive.

After seeing Harvester's blog, I posted a couple of questions underneath, repeated below. I thought it might be worth throwing them out there for discussion. I've left the questions verbatim because I'm lazy Two questions: Presumably, different types of Biomes will provide different benefits with Science? ie: Exploring Kerbin's Icecaps may give you a better boost in understanding cryogenics which could be beneficial to improving your fuel efficiency or something (poor example, but you get my point), or exploring Eve's atmosphere would help design an improved Aerospike, etc. Or is it simply a case that they all contribute general science points and you assign them ad-hoc? It'd be nice to see you being able to focus your experiments to help gain specific advances, maybe using Kerbin desert science to advance rover wheel technology for travelling on the Mun, if you have any enjoyment of one specific area you want to focus on. Second question: Does altitude matter? It's my understanding that you can scan from orbit to get science. Is there a kind of 3D map around the planet in a similar fashion, so that if you were past geo-synchronous you could study the Kerbal equivalent of Van Allen belts, and if you were in LKO you would get science for atmospheric drag properties or somesuch? Obviously based on my first question, whether you gain just 'science' or specific aspects of science it could be more interesting to have the different aspects but an easier mechanic to have just a bulk science score..

Yeah, pretty much, it should be less obtrusive than the full-on rocket HUD, but it'd be very handy to have a little bit more information than we currently do.

Man, I wish I had that username! Head of NASA: [barney runs off drunk and wastes his chance at being an astronaut] Well, Homer, I guess that makes you the winner by default... Homer: Default? The two sweetest words in the English language! De-FAULT! De-FAULT! De-FAULT! Welcome to the forums, if you need any help with designing missions, rockets, or just want to post about something cool you've done, here's the place to do it, it's a great community and we love to support new people!

Since I love TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms), I was hoping that there would be a minimalist GUI for EVA, just something to show a couple of key items so that EVA can be a little bit more useful. I'm thinking something like a radar altimeter, and a bearing/navball-type indicator and potentially a resource amount for jetpack fuel and so on. I was reading some threads about using your jetpack to get to orbit and I thought, every time I do it, I get frustrated having to constantly flick to the map view because I can't be certain where I'm actually thrusting, etc, nor how high off the ground I am (which will help when I thrust straight up and need to slow down on the way back down!).. Thoughts? I don't want a hugely cluttered GUI, but a couple of bits of info might be useful (perhaps if they were displayed in the corner as a kerbal's arm on an armband (ie: like a Quarterback)), but with electronic widgets to display the data...maybe more like a Pipboy or something but obviously it'd only be small and in the bottom corner or something. Edit: Further thinking makes me think that that kind of GUI would make more sense for a 1st person EVA GUI...which if it happened, we should also have heavy breathing noises

Also, I think that Harv's point is quite pertinent. There's 3 coders. 3 full time guys working on the code. Now, as we all know, one guy can put out a concept for a great game, and improve it over time (cf. Minecraft, etc), but there comes a point when one guy cannot do it all. So you hire another person. What has that done? It's almost doubled your overheads. So you now need to double your sales in order to maintain a salary. However, as has been explained too, the Development Asymptotes mean that as you complete more, you have to do more to get further (A bit like the Rocket equation I guess!). Having 3 guys working on KSP back in 0.8 or even 0.17 meant less bug testing, less regression testing, and more feature adding. The problem is that every feature now has to be cross tested against everything else that has been added. Externally though, people have seen you have doubled your workforce, but your output isn't increasing. People will then get frustrated saying that there's no direction, or that people can't be bothered any more. Yet that's not the case. It's a classic 20/80 rule. 20% of the work takes 80% of the time. The early stages (ie: pre-0.18, I'd say), prior to feature complete, were able to be completed quicker than now as a result, and that's just going to continue. Since Career mode is in a very nascent stage, and it's effectively being plugged into the Sandbox mode (which is almost feature complete), any addition to career mode has to be tested against a whole suite of features, as well as within and of itself. This takes time and a recent blog post explained that they have moved to longer cycle times because regression testing can't really get any faster. Either way, every time an update is released, the content is almost invariably better than what we envisaged when we find out about it, so perhaps we should cut them a little slack? Yes, the development cycle is slow, but the game they're designing is trying to be a high quality product (maybe not AAA, but certainly it's trying to develop itself into more than a lot of other half-baked games out there just made to make a quick $), and that takes time. Patience, young padawans...

Given the low height of that landing spot (897ASL), unless there happens to be a cheeky little mountain nearby, that's going to be a hell of a rescue mission; you're looking at 10-11k dV just to get an Eve orbit, which is compounded by the fact that you're unable (probably) to utilise the remaining fuel in your original rocket. Just curious, though, whether that LES might have an incredibly OP TWR (if it's the KSP X version?) which you could potentially use to maaaaaybe break orbit? It's very very doubtful, as you'd still need to get high enough using the rest of the rocket which seems a little underpowered to get it high enough to use it effectively..

Whilst I agree with the idea, I am certain people will argue that it will lose them missions - imagine an SSTO which doesn't quite get to orbit, but establishes an Ap over 70km, and an Pe above 25km; you build a quick refuelling rocket to fly up at Ap and dock and give it a quick gas and go to finish the circularisation burn, but when you launch it, and you're burning in order to rendezvous, all of a sudden your target ship just disappears after a whirl around the planet? Cue a list of angry folk who hadn't heard of this feature before.

RE: Problem 1, there are two options. You can either have a higher thrust to weight ratio which effectively 'pushes' your nose hard enough that it keeps going the way you want it to go, or, the better option, is to start your gravity turn later so that the impact of being top heavy is less pronounced as you are in a microgravity environment. Alternatively, start it much earlier, but start it much shallower, so that you don't deviate away from your prograde vector much.

Bear in mind that this is the first game SQUAD have created. They weren't formed to do this, and they probably aren't doing it the best or most efficient way, because they're learning every time they do something. There's obviously talented staff there, but you have to bear in mind their background is primarily in advertising, not game project management. Also, I remember saying that they work to the philosophy that every release is the final release (ie: the project got cancelled), so there's a lot of QA going on to make sure that at least, if the project did die for whatever reason, there's still enough of a game to let people continue to play what it is that they have put out.

SoonTM, and not a moment before.