allmappedout

Gilly, where jumping for joy can leave you stranded in space. Gilly, the only place where taking a leak can throw off your tsiolkovsky rocket equation calculations Gilly, where everything flies up and the gravity don't matter (apologies to WLITA) Gilly, where having the weight of the world on your shoulders doesn't seem like such a problem.

Not going to happen - Squad have their own roadmap but they're not going to show it to us just because too many people are inclined to believe it will either a) definitely happen or definitely happen in the next release. Whilst they're happy to show off things that are nearing completion, all it does is build expectations within the community without any promise of that expectation being fulfilled. Personally I like the surprise of the changelog, but that's just me! But just as an example, imagine 100% of the community voted for 64-bit support for it, Squad mightn't be able to deliver it, but the community would be very likely to believe that Squad will work hard on getting it in. People will then be annoyed that their ideas have been 'ignored', even if Squad couldn't even implement it if they wanted to. So now you end up with an angrier community than if you said nothing!

Agree that a perfect rotation should not change your orbital energy, but translation most certainly would, since translation is a change from one orbit to another, and thus requires a delta V expenditure.

I'd love to have seen some of your designs Nova! PS: I'm probably being pretty noobish here - is there any place we can see the design submissions, or are they being privately judged by Squad?

Unfortunately, it does involve calculus to calculate both the ship's dV budget, but, there are a number of mods out there, (Mechjeb, Kerbal Engineer, VOID (I think?)), which should do all the background calculations for you. In terms of the dV requirements, again, this requires some maths to work out, but there are deltaV maps which give you very good ballpark figures to work with in terms of launch, orbit, transfer, etc. which hopefully people better than me (ie: not filtered by work firewalls!) will be able to post below.

When I bring up the pause menu, a lot of the time, I want to move from one flight to another. Currently I only have Revert Flight or Space Center as options, but I'd like Tracking Center to be added as a third option, as it's a (obviously only very small) pain to have to go to the space center first.

Surely, as OP briefly mentioned in the original post, is to instead of having the models loaded for the VAB/SPH, simply have a static button to represent each part, with a low-res picture, instead of the spinning model of the part as is currently in use? Load all the buttons up at the start and you're loading maybe 1MB of information, with a button click beginning the call procedure for the texture model.

This argument comes up a lot of times. The problem here is both playability and available data. From a playability standpoint, it makes it a hell of a lot easier for a new guy to understand that ground is always brown, regardless of what body you're floating around, so pointing away from it is a radial burn, and so on and so forth. It is just much more intuitive than the apollo system. Secondly, the apollo team had a flight computer to calculate the burns and navball position to perform them, as well as a team back on the ground feeding them data based on their telemetry. Plus the apollo team could use star charts to work out their orientation, etc in case of system failure. We don't have the same amount of information as they do, and by changing our navball to that type, we are LOSING information from the game (ie: which way to the planetary body), which is not easily gained without adding another dial, or data. So I'm a huge no.

As others have mentioned, the abuse possible from having ship input without physics makes this a no-go anyway (regardless of having to rewrite the physics methodology...), but are you telling me it's going to be cheaper to stick electronics onto my ship that control torque based on precise tracking of another celestial object, or have their own moving parts (a la Infernal Robotics) to accomplish this, than to put another couple of solar panels on? Solar panels are cheap and reliable, that's why they're used in space. Now, don't get me wrong, I totally understand why you want it, and for that purpose I think that it would be great to have it, but since physicsless calculations aren't, under the current system, possible, and kethane is a mod, there's no real reason to import this kind of functionality into the stock game.

Whilst you're right, of course, minmus is both very small and very slow, so its actual impact to your total orbital velocity (around the sun), is actually not that large (ie: you're not going to burn interplanetary and end up on a 6degree inclination, just because of minmus), plus, because it's so far out from Kerbin, a plane change maneuver correct is very cheap dV wise.

Back on topic.........let's think about what the graphic is telling us Just because not everyone on the forum uses steam, you can certainly use the sample size to predict a trend amongst users. There's no evidence that people that use steam are any more or less dedicated to playing the game than people who download from the store. So, what could cause a drop? Well, a lot of things have been discussed - midterms, post-holiday blues...but what else? Well, 0.23 was released 17th of December. So that's a full 3 months ago. We can see a spike around the time that the new update came out, followed by a tapering off. This trend can be seen at other updates (0.22 October 13th, for example, produced a massive spike in users up to the main peak of over 10k users), and then it tapers off. Why? well of course there are many reasons as mentioned, but a lot of people who have played the game will have started a new save, done some new stuff, and now will have probably have done a lot of the things they want to do. There's always something new to do, but a lot of people are aware that it's an alpha and their work is temporary. 3 months ago is a fair while ago, and, even taking into account the break for the holidays, a lot of users will obviously be expecting, or anticipating, a new release in the relatively near future. Whether or not this happens is obviously based on Squad's timeline, but it's sensible to make the hypothesis. Furthermore, there are some other ephemeral assumptions we can make about the data. Since the period we are viewing it taking into account the Christmas period, and a steam sale, there's probably a fair few people who picked up the game, played it once or twice, and either didn't like it, or have other games they find more enjoyable. That's totally fine, as there will be players who don't love the game as much as others. However, from a statistical point of view, this will simply inflate the downward trend, as you have an inflated number of temporary users who all logged in in a similar timeframe, who then now aren't being accounted for. TL;DR - Everything goes in cycles, not everyone plays the game all the time, there's lots of factors at play, KSP is still going strong!

Plus, if you stick it in the tech tree...where's it going to go? After you get the normal panels, but before you get the 1x6/2x3 panels? As soon as you get the OX-STAT panels, there's really no limit on power - you can just stick more on. If you're time warping, there's not much you'd need the power for (ie: if you probe is dying from not enough light, you probably need to have a better designed probe so it can receive light from more directions anyway, rather than adding an extra part).

A stats screen to record achievements is a good idea, and as others have said, it's already in your save game. It just doesn't have a UI yet. If you want a flight recorder, I believe there is a mod called Persistent trails which can provide something very similar to what you are after.

Docking mode does unfortunately serve no purpose currently. The controls you need are all available within staging mode, so there is no benefit to switch to docking mode. What docking mode should do is provide you with the same control set up (because who wants to learn to sets of controls?), but add information like the crosshair (which of course, it already adds but doesn't tell you too much more than the Nav ball) and an alignment indicator, just like mentioned earlier. Adding something like that would definitely benefit the mode, and would personally make me want to use it, because as it stands, it's more intuitive to stay in staging and simply use ASDW IJKL HN.

I also like the idea of stickying specific parts, like you can do with important emails. As 5th Horseman says, Fuel lines are something that always gets used, and I want to be able to grab it all the time. I think filtering is the key though, being able to filter by size, fuel type (ie: LF only, LF/Ox), and various other sub-categories (Power/Legs/Engines/Fuel Tanks, etc etc etc).

What is this?! A shuttle for ants?! It has to be at least...3 times bigger than this!

^ It's as good a suggestion as any I've heard for having permanent residence built into the game. Still not sure I'm totally down with off-world launch sites (it doesn't quite seem in the spirit of the game that you can build a 500 ton ship on a Minmus just to skip Kerbin's gravity well/atmosphere), but if it was implemented, this way could work.

One of the key tenets that Harv has stuck to is that if each release was the last, is it a completely playable and workable game, in so far as had already been achieved? Because of that, they are highly focussed on providing as stable and complete a release as possible. Unfortunately, whilst your idea has good merit, the QA/Experimentals testing has a very fixed cycle length of around 2 weeks, so even if they were to produce only a small update, it would not come out much faster than what's currently available. As the game grows, this will become more and more of the case. In this sense, I think it's better they spend a little more time on getting bigger projects started and followed through than released half-baked stuff which might break.

Isn't that what the Descending/Ascending node tells you? ie: how above or below offset you are on your orbit from the target? Although, I'm totally down for extra orbital information being shown, that can only be a good thing

You know, surprisingly, I don't see this suggestion come up too often, which is a shame because I think it'd be a really nice thing to have. Even though I know many people would use it to draw ridiculous things that are viewable from space!

I love building a rover that tumbles horribly out of control! Usually i build my rovers with the most impact tolerant parts (usually the cubic struts, etc), so you can have some hilarious loss of control moments, and, like all good crashes, still walk away from them. Plus minmus is so easy to get to, that even if you do happen to crash, you can always send another!

Yes, but not stronger than Kerbal ones, I believe.

Really, docking in the dark is trivial, as long as you have a parallel position guide. Whether this is the alignment mod, or a Mechjeb or something, it's literally a case of just lining up and thrusting. You could do it without ever looking at your craft. Of course, it's not in the stock game, so it isn't trivial, YET, but it's definitely something I'd like to see incorporated into the game.

Only at low pressure above 5.1 Atm it can form a liquid, so perhaps there may be some liquid CO2 on Eve, where the atmosphere is horrifically thick. (for science!)

Even if they did (and I'm not sure they do), there are hundreds of lovely people on this forum who are more than willing to help diagnose and resolve problems, especially the mod makers who are keen to make their mods the best they can be. I agree that sounds are a little generic at the minute, but it's definitely one of those "mods-to-fill-the-gap" issues until the game is more complete.