DMagic

This is probably the best CPU option for KSP. The more expensive i7s or the consumer level Xeon chips won't make much difference for this game (though they shouldn't be any worse) so I would stick with the i5s. You should certainly be able to handle a 500 part craft, but you could do that anyway. It's really a question of what level of performance is acceptable. You could make a 5000 part craft if you could accept running at 5 FPS. But with that CPU you should expect at least 25 FPS with around 500 parts. As for the other components, it's like everyone else said, 8GB RAM and a decent video card (HD7850 or GTX 660) should be able to handle anything KSP can throw at them.

I guess it's probably better to take this conversation here. I've been playing around a bit and discovered a few things. The hold-to-right-click seems to be a windows control panel option and you can turn it off. Of course that means you can't right-click anymore. The Surface has the pen which still works fine for right-click, but that's a special case. Ultimately though, it's probably better to leave it on, since turning it off doesn't seem to affect the click-and-drag, or the click-and-hold function. In the VAB you can build something using just the touchscreen. You can touch the object, then let go, then touch and hold and drag the object into place. This works ok, the problem is that the part description won't disappear after touching a part in the list. The description window just follows you around wherever you touch. You can get rid of it with the pen, but again, that's a special case. I managed to get into orbit and land with the Kerbal X ok, though I did get stuck in IVA near the end. I found that touching and holding doesn't work, but if you touch then drag your finger a bit you can get the click-and-hold effect, making turning and throttling up easier. Maneuver nodes are tricky but it is possible to grab a vector and pull it out. I also found that the standard pinch-to-zoom seems to be recognized. In flight it works like normal, zooming the camera in or out, but in the VAB it moves the camera up or down. You still don't have any other way to move the camera in the VAB, but up and down is probably the most important function.

Nice work. How stable was the whole thing on liftoff?

Do you mean the combined surface area of all of the planets and moons? This is probably similar to the area in any whole-world flight sim (not counting Jool and Kerbol, which don't really have surfaces).

The only source that I'm aware of for the news about performance improvements was a Squadcast from a few weeks before 0.22 was released. I think it was with Mu and he said that he had some pretty significant part count-based improvements, and I think he said that RAM usage was improved too. A few weeks later C7 said that some of that might not make it into 0.22. That release thread is the only source that I'm aware of for the change log. It doesn't mention performance improvements, so I wasn't surprised when I saw that 0.22 was about the same as 0.21. The scene change and SOI transition improvements are nice, but those are really bug fixes; they just got us back to where we were before the 0.21.1 patch. About the touchscreen, drag is definitely an issue. I think different devices have different methods for implementing the grab-and-hold function, but they don't all work very well. For the Surface it's pretty easy to, for instance, resize a window on the desktop, or move an icon around. But KSP doesn't seem to recognize this function very well. The Surface Pro has a really nifty stylus though. It can be recognized from about an inch above the screen. So for KSP you can touch the screen to select a part, lift the stylus up a little, drag the part to where you want it, and touch the screen again to release (it sounds a little odd when I type it out, but it works really well). Precise placement is a little tricky, but otherwise the VAB is well suited to touch. The real problem is the camera, it doesn't seem to recognize any scrolling gestures so the camera is basically fixed in place without a keyboard. Alt-click is also an issue, but that could be fixed with a simple button alongside the symmetry and snap-to buttons. Your plugin works pretty well for flight though. The screen recognizes a long touch as a right click (though I think this can be changed), so it's a little tricky to continually hold on a button, but otherwise it's ok.

I like the craft design, it's nice and simple, not over-complicated by too much fluff.

Someday I'll get to this, but for now I haven't even landed anything on Eve. I seem to have been ignoring it for some unknown reason.

Thanks TUFOM. These are interesting results. If you look at the comparison on the first page you'll see that your CPU performs much lower than other AMD CPUs at the beginning of the test, but then jumps ahead of them later on. I would say that being GPU limited could cause this, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The plot of your results has the stair-step pattern typical of CPU limited performance, and your GPU should be more than enough to handle KSP. The others don't seem to be GPU limited either. Very strange.

It's worth noting that not having a 64-bit exe is not out of the ordinary. There are only a handful of games that come with 64-bit versions, and most of those are more of a technical demonstration; the original Far Cry, for example, or Half life 2 (I don't think Valve even offers the 64-bit version anymore).

Track IR is a somewhat absurd way of controlling the camera. I know that a lot of people use them for flight sims because it's important to be able to easily look around, but the appeal seems a little more limited here. It could be useful though. Here's a description of the system: http://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/02-products/product-how-TrackIR-works.html

And so does the name of the toe, the digitus minimus; I think that site is just a typo. Also, number 10, the interrobang - ?!, is an awesome name.

I'm not sure that multi monitor is a problem. I think most solutions just pretend that you have one high resolution monitor stretched out over several actual monitors. Then you can just set KSP at a very high resolution and stretch it out over multiple monitors. The multiple windows thing is a Unity limitation though. I agree it would be great, but I wouldn't hold your breath.

The issue is probably that you are turning too far. You don't have to go down to 45o, in many cases it's better to very slowly turn over. Go 5 or 10o at a time and it should be easier to control. For that particular design the heavy and unstable looking payload on top might be causing issues, too.

Wow, these are really great missions and designs. I like these kinds of intricate and unique crafts. Those Duna rovers and their landing systems are interesting. The satellite system setup by the mothership is very impressive too. And that tall, portrait screenshot of the Axiom launch, the drive section I think, is really nice. It's a good example of those kind of "launch observer" shots, a really zoomed out view that gives you a wider perspective on the launch.

I'm not so sure about some of your advice for chapter 4. Using RCS to control heading during ascent is, in my opinion, the worst way of doing it. It's not very effective and requires that you carry around a bunch of extra mass in monopropellant and RCS thrusters. The torque from a command pod and maybe a few inline reaction wheels are usually enough to keep things stable and steer when you're outside of the atmosphere. But I think most of the steering comes from using thrust vectoring engines. The LVT-30s are great for extra booster rockets, but I never use them as the main engine during the first stage (clipping a single LVT-45 in the middle of four LVT-30s works really well though, if it doesn't blow up). Maybe for an upper stage they would be alright, or for a fairly small craft where reaction wheel torque and a few winglets would provide enough control. Wobbly spacecraft are usually either a sign of not enough struts or poor design. I can see why your specific design might be more well suited to using RCS, but in general I don't think it's a good idea.

What do you mean drifted off course? Like Diazo said, you stay oriented the same direction with respect to the entire Kerbol system, not just the planet/moon you're orbiting. And actually, since the planets are also orbiting the sun, you will slowly drift even further off course. The easiest way to see this is to create a maneuver node, point at the blue vector and wait. After a few orbits you should notice that you aren't pointed directly at it anymore (the same thing happens with timewarp on). This is because the maneuver node is oriented with respect to the planet/moon's SOI, while you're direction is relative to the Kerbol system. If you try this again while in orbit around the sun you'll notice that you don't drift away from the blue vector anymore.

This is something I've noticed too when playing on my 11" Macbook Air. If you really can't get to the buttons to change the settings you might have to manually do it in the settings.cfg file. It's pretty easy to change the resolution setting so that it at least fits on the screen. You can change the other settings too, but it's probably easier to do that in-game.

A good CPU does indeed increase performance, but there is no reason to avoid a quad-core CPU. In general quad-core CPUs are all-around faster than dual-cores, especially on the desktop where dual-core is limited mostly to low end options. Pretty much every modern CPU has some kind of turboboost; when you're playing KSP it usually runs at the dual-core speed unless you have heat issues. So even in laptops there is little to gain by sticking with dual-core only (high end quad-core mobile CPUs can get quite expensive, and aren't generally available in ultrabooks, but those are different issues). The graphics setting you want to turn down during launch, or really all of the time, is the terrain settings value. The best option is to use the ocean terrain setting tweak found here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/43253-Default-Terrain-Quality-Without-most-of-The-Lag%21. But if you have a weak GPU then turning down some other settings is definitely a good idea. Turning down the physics time per frame beyond the in-game limit of 0.03s/frame is probably not a good idea. You might be able to get away with 0.02 or 0.01, but this can cause issues, and in any case will make the launches of big crafts excruciatingly long. This setting defines the amount of in-game time that can pass between each frame (or really it's the max amount of time between physics steps). So at the lowest setting, 0.03 sec/frame, only 30 milliseconds of time can pass for each frame displayed on screen. Anything below 33 frames / second will result in in-game time running slower than real-world time. At the extreme ends, below 5 FPS, this can really slow things down; only 150 milliseconds of game-time for each second of real-time, making your 5 min launch more like 40 minutes.

Thanks for running these tests. I think with your HD7850 the game should be fine at those settings, that's the same resolution and GPU I used to have and I don't think it was really limiting performance. Can you send me the log file with the FPS numbers so that I can add this to the front page?

The Kethane parts have not been integrated into career mode. They might be at some point, but until then you will have to manually edit the .cfg files to use them in career mode. I'm not really sure how to do that, you'll have to ask somewhere else. But for now you can only use them in sandbox mode. You can keep up with the development of Kethane here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/23979-Kethane-Pack-0-8-Art-pass-terrain-conforming-grid-and-miscellaneous-improvements

Well, based on some benchmark numbers and my CPU performance thread, I'd say it should be somewhat similar to fairly low end notebooks from a few years ago. Which is to say, not very good. You probably won't get much above 20-25 frames / second with any size rocket and with anything more than 70-100 parts I would expect 15 FPS or below. I'm not sure about how powerful the GPU in those things is, but at the lowest settings KSP should be alright, it's the CPU that's holding you back.

Thanks, I too, consider myself one of my favorite forumers. The problem with RCS is more the weight than the ISP. The stock RCS thrusters have a bit more thrust than you need for little landers like this, that's why those mod parts come in so handy. The ISP is a little deceptive too, because RCS fuel is so much lighter than the liq fuel/oxy mix it can make more sense in very compact designs.

Definitely agree with Bluesteel, it's not going to matter much for KSP (even the initial loading time seems limited by something else; it's fast, but not as fast as it should be), but it will make just about everything else better. It really is the biggest single-component upgrade you can make, especially for older systems.

So I got a Surface Pro 2 today and what's the first thing I do, try out KSP. Ok maybe it was more like the fifth thing I did. I didn't get a chance to try out Diazo's touchscreen mod, but I do think that with proper support the VAB could be awesome on a touchscreen. I also ran some more tests on the MacBook Air on 0.21 and 0.22. This further confirmed that 0.22 did nothing for performance. But the Surface did surprisingly well considering that both the CPU and the GPU are a bit weaker. I guess these things are just too constrained by power and temp for small differences in specs to make a big difference in performance. There could also be a difference between OsX and Windows. You can see that performance is pretty much even between them. I updated the front page too so you can see the comparison to other CPUs.

I wonder if there is an upper limit to how effective this can be. I think we might need a 1000 decoupler mission.