Brotoro

Nothing wrong with paying a price for coolness.

Would if work if Squad gave players some sliders to tweak the drag and lift multipliers so they could play the way they like? It could be instructive, too. I would always play on what Squad sets as the default values for their parts balance, so it wouldn't matter to me personally...but more options, more possibilities for fun.

I was under the impression that heat shields were only expected to be needed in extreme situations...not for typical reentries from low orbits on Kerbin, Laythe, or Duna.

And this makes me very sad, since it has been an ongoing and worsening problem. But I hope whoever is in charge of fixing such things at Squad IS aware of it and will finally get around to stomping it.

The kind of realism I want in KSP is for the physical laws governing its rocketry and orbital mechanics to be decent approximations of real-world physics (albeit simplified as needed to make it run fast and not melt my computer). But since KSP is set in a diminutive solar system, I don't mind that we can accomplish 'unrealistic' things like making spaceplanes and SSTOs and go to the a moon and back in time for supper. Such things would be unrealistic in our universe, but they are not unphysical in the KSP universe. If somebody wants to do unphysical things in KSP (like hop in a little X-wing and fly to a different planet), it should be easy enough to do by adding an Overpowered Unphysical Engine mod (while keeping the rest of KSP's close approximation to rocket/orbit physics)...and if they are having fun, that's great. If somebody else wants to make the reality of KSP more closely match the reality of our universe, then it should be easy to apply to appropriate changes and have fun (while still making use of KSP's rocket/orbit physics). You could only have 'unbridled creativity' if you have no rules...and that would not be fun at all. The kind if creativity I enjoy in KSP is seeing what you can accomplish within the rules of the game.

You people drink some pretty thin soup.

I am colorblind, and I would like the ability to customize all of the colors on the navball (and other parts of the interface as well...but the navball is so important to piloting that I think it's the most important thing to have this option). So a Navball Colors section in the settings menu would be great, with color selector boxes next to text identifying different parts of the navball: Sky color Ground color Text on sky color Text on ground color Target marker color Etc... (Along with some pre-set color combinations that the user could select from). There are many variations of color vision, so giving the user the option of customizing colors would be best. All that having been said, I (with my red-blindness) do fine with the standard colors of the KSP navball. ...although I may not be as efficient as I could be because I might not notice some of the markers as readily as you non-colorblind people can.

I've been learning how to do things in 1.0 (er...1.0.1... I mean 1.0.2). I was very concerned for a while there about my old Tugs being useable at all (so I was spending time trying to convince people that nuclear engines shouldn't overheat like they were doing in 1.0) ...but the decrease in the nuke overheating implemented in 1.0.1 means the old Tugs won't be totally useless. Just inefficient with only fuel in their tanks. I did quickly check out the Duna ships in 1.0.1... The Landers will survive...but the nerf hammering of the 48-7S means that the rovers have no chance of making orbit anymore. The 48-7S nerf also will seriously affect the DunaDogs...it took a lot more fuel to take off and climb, but the ions actually still worked at altitude (although not as well)...and the landing was very hard because the belly 48-7S is too weak now. But the killer may be the change to the solar panel output that was put in place in 1.0.1... I didn't check after that was applied. I really wanted to fly one of the DunaDogs all the way around Duna...so I may stick with 0.90 on Duna until I can do that before I let the 1.0.x hammer fall.

Ha ha! KSP 1.0.2 could not defeat me! I just had to go a little more svelte. I present, Crew Carrier 8, a reusable four-kerbal SSTO Rocket LKO transport ship. It launches on four RAPIERs in air-breathing mode: I'm refining the boost trajectory, but I have been able to get it going almost 1200 m/s by 25,000 meters where the RAPIERs begin to wane as air-breathers, and I kick it over to closed-cycle mode. I can get it into an 80 to 90 km orbit with enough fuel to spare for a rendezvous with my Space Station. The Crew Carrier has RCS and a shielded docking port on the nose. I still haven't got a version of KER that will give me the delta-V remaining on orbit yet. It has two round tanks of RCS fuel, so it could even deorbit using RCS if needed. The deorbit burn was one Big Crater's width West of Big Crater, with the periapsis targeted to 40 klicks. Four airbrakes are deployed prior to entry to help slow the ship...it could come in steeper, if needed. On this flight I dropped it in a ways southwest of the KSC. I had also made a mistake in the VAB adjusting the six parachutes, so this landing only had three chutes, off center. But there was plenty of fuel left to augment the landing. Note: If you accidentally come down in the water, it's important to have the SAS on and the ship pointed vertical...otherwise it will fall over and break off some of the nose pieces (but, happily, not the crew cabin anymore). And...it's down safe, ready to fly again. I prefer a Rocket SSTO to a Spaceplane SSTO for simple crew transport because it's much quicker to fly the Rocket SSTO's ascent profile.

Hmmm. In 1.0 I was able to get my RAPIER-powered SSTO Rocket into orbit well (after cutting it down a bit)... but in 1.0.2 I no longer can. Squad may have nerfed jet engines (or the jet-engine aspect of the RAPIER) to the point where I might not be able to use this method anymore. That's realism for you I need to re-think. Maybe a combo of Turboramjets and rocket engines (like I used to use) is still viable. I may not be beaten yet! Anybody else use jet-based SSTO rockets? How are they doing in 1.0.2?

In 1.0, if I flew my spaceplane really badly, I could get it butting up against the transonic drag barrier, and getting nowhere fast. I had to limit its climb rate to 33°, and then it could even crack the Mach on its way up. Once over the drag hump, it sped up nicely. In 1.0.1, the spaceplane refused to push through the transonic wall in a climb. So once I got to where the air was thinner and conditions were good for the RAPIER, I leveled off and was able to blast through the transonic drag divergence and begin seriously gaining speed. Perhaps your 1.0 designs just had better thrust than mine, in which case I expect you wouldn't notice a difference. Or maybe you were already climbing to altitude before leveling off to do a speed run back in 1.0.

That change does not bode well for the viability of ion planes on Duna.

Say there, young whippersnapper...you look like a guy I knew who flew KSP two versions ago.

I thought my 1.0 spaceplane was dead in 1.0.1... but it just needed to be flown differently.

I was getting planes that oscillated in 1.0...in certain velocity/speed/altitude regimes. It seemed about the same in 1.0.1. But the automatic pointing to markers (prograde, retrograde, etc.) is still embarrassingly goofy in 1.0.1. I would put that very high on the list of things that need fixing.

I notice a definite problem trying to get a plane through Mach 1. But once you get through that drag coefficient bump, you can really start to pick up speed. "There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it the sound barrier." Anybody got a stick of Beeman's?

Happy day. I think KSP is probably ready for its 1.0 release.

1.0.2?? I just re-figured out how to get my spaceplane into orbit in 1.0.1...now I have to figure it out all over again?

I took my 1.0 spaceplane and tried to fly it the same way in 1.0.1...no dice. In 1.0 I could do a constant climb at 33° and change the RAPIERs over to closed-cycle when they flagged. In 1.0., on that flight profile the plane wasn't even breaking Mach 1. So, in 1.0.1 I had to climb at about 40° to get up to around 14 km... At 15 km I pitched to level flight, blew through the sound barrier, then started to gain speed. Once things started heating up (but it wasn't very hot) I pulled up to slowly gain altitude while piling on more speed than I had gotten in 1.0. The air-breathing RAPIERs started to wane near 24 km, and I switched over to closed cycle. Got into an 82 x 86 km obit. KER wasn't working to show me my delta-V remaining. Retro burn was west of the Big Crater, dropping the periapsis to around 38 km. Came in nose-pitched-up at 30°...no exciting flames or heating (I had put all the remaining fuel in the rearmost tank before entry). I was coming in north of KSC, so once the plane got to thicker air, I flew south to line up for landing. The landing was fine, and speedbrakes on top helped the spaceplane stop.

I ain't 'fraid of no RTGs.

PPFX was already disabled.

The period of the vibration just made it look like my ship was wobbling. A high frequency, erratic vibration would look better, I think.

This makes me smile And welcome to theFredster on the occasion of his first post!

Didn't like it at all. I have turned it off.

I'd believe that. Those engines are bimodal designs that are meant to operate in a mode for generating electrical power (in addition to being a rocket engine), and I can't see how they could accomplish that without a radiator.