Specialist290

Welcome to the forums! Glad to hear you've been enjoying yourself. I'd say "Make yourself at home," but it looks like you've already done so.

Welcome to the forums! The biggest suggestion would be to pack on plenty of fuel and thrust. It might sound trivially obvious, but you'd be surprised at how heavy some of those bigger rocks can be

Welcome to the forums! Glad to hear that you're enjoying the game, despite the issues you've been having with it. It really is a testament to how enrapturing and alluring the basic concept is that so many people are willing to put up with it despite the slightly-more-than-occasional bug. Rest assured that Squad is hard at work trying to make it even better, though I'm sure you'll be happy to know that at least one of your suggestions (commercial contracts) is already slated to make an appearance in the next update, according to the information the developers have revealed thus far.

Welcome to the forums! I've taken the liberty of moving the other thread to the "Live from Mission Control!" subforum, since that's where threads for videos, video series, and livestream showcases go (much like "Mission Reports" is for written mission reports). No harm, no foul

First off: Welcome to the forums! You're certainly not the first to suggest that Squad should add an autopilot to the game; in fact, at one point, autopilot functionality suggestions were so common that we had to put them on our What Not To Suggest list to encourage people not to constantly re-suggest it over and over again. Our standard policy with items on this list is to close the thread with a reminder that the item has been heavily suggested in the past and that we want to encourage newer and more unique ideas. However, in your case, as you're being quite polite, you've obviously put a great deal of thought and passion into your original post, and your primary concern appears to be more about increasing accessibility to the game rather than strictly adding autopilot for its own sake, I feel like I personally would be doing you a disservice if I didn't try to address your concerns directly above and beyond what is usual for this sort of discussion. Before I go on, I want you to know that, although I'm a forum moderator, I'm not actually a member of Squad myself, and thus I'm not speaking in an official capacity on their behalf; like you, I'm just a fan of the game, just one that somebody saw fit to give a fancy title and extra responsibilities to. What follows is my own opinion, not some sort of official pronouncement from On High. While I believe that KSP is a game for all ages (from five to ninety-five), I do also believe that the game is targeted primarily at space enthusiasts -- the sorts of people who enjoy learning about real-world space exploration, or who tinkers with model rockets in his garage and launches them in a local open field, or who have always dreamed of becoming an astronaut themselves but, for various reasons, never got to fulfill that dream in the course of their life. In that sense, I believe that KSP is something of a niche game by its very nature, like many of the more faithful simulation games out there. I also think you're also slightly overstating how difficult it is to research and apply manually the techniques you need to get the most out of the game to suit your playstyle. You don't need to be a mathematical genius or an expert astrophysicist to play the game (though having that sort of background certainly helps to shortcut the learning process); trial-and-error works just as well. Most of the principles involved are counter-intuitive because we as humans live on the surface of a planet with an atmosphere that affects how the things we experience everyday behave, but (and I believe this is where the true magic of this game shines through) once you see them broken down into a simple procedure and see for yourself how they interact in practice, you can pick up on them much more quickly than if you just read about them. Furthermore, there is a great wealth of information available through fan-made tutorials and resources which break things down into easily-digestible procedures and principles that help the player "learn through doing," and our own Tutorials and Gameplay Questions forum and the #kspofficial IRC channel are chock-full of people who are both willing and eager to share what they have learned themselves to help others get the fullest experience out of the game. It's fully possible to learn the game simply through trial-and-error, observing what works and what doesn't, without needing to learn anything at all about things like "delta-v" and "specific impulse" and "gravity assists" and "Hohmann transfer orbits" at all. Furthermore, depending on your player preferences, there's certainly plenty of fun to be had in and around Kerbin, without even going to the Mun and other planets at all. It's entirely possible to have fun simply by building the most outlandish contraptions you can and seeing how far they'll go. I know of at least two people on Youtube who have rather successful video series focused almost entirely around doing just that. I also think you're just slightly underestimating how bright and eager to learn many children can be -- a sizable chunk of our fanbase is under 18 years old, and if anything, many of them seem to be more eager to learn about orbital mechanics than the adults are (possibly because they haven't already gotten the memo that learning rocket science is supposed to be hard ). They seem to be both learning and having fun doing it, and time spent doing that is never wasted. In conclusion: Many people certainly don't need an autopilot to enjoy the game, though I personally won't begrudge the choice of those who choose to use one. That being said, I certainly share your concerns about KSP being made more accessible -- it's part of why I personally run the Drawing Board, after all -- and if Squad's recent statements about looking over their official in-game player tutorials (which are definitely long overdue for a good revision) mean anything, so do they. Hope this helps

Welcome to the forums! To the best of my knowledge, Kerbal Space Program is only available for download.

Hate to be the one to crash the party, but we already have several threads on the forum concerning how the new engines from the ARM pack balance with existing parts. To quote one of my fellow moderators: In light of this, I'll be closing this thread. Have a nice day

Really, a public forum is probably not the best place to ask a question like this. And for the record, if you see a thread that you think needs locking, it's advised that you bring it to our attention through the "Report Post" function.

I've actually had an off-and-on inclination for the past few months to write up a little tutorial on how to get the most out of the most out of the vBulletin search tools, since most of the issues people are reporting can be solved by going through the Advanced Search menu; vBulletin's basic search bar is a bit underwhelming.

Welcome to the forums, and congratulations on existing! Glad to hear you've been enjoying the game so far.

I'd recommend a fair bit of Robert Heinlein's books, mostly the earlier ones like Red Planet, Space Cadet, Citizen of the Galaxy, and their ilk. Much of his stuff is pretty hard, but for the most part he manages to weave the exposition into the story fairly seamlessly. Starship Troopers might be another one you'd enjoy, since I noticed you mentioned WH40K. As for "Mass Effect in book form": Check out a series called Lensman, by E. E. "Doc" Smith. You might find the writing to be a bit cliche'd, but keep in mind that it was written during the Thirties, and thus it made most of those cliches (like Lord of the Rings did for modern fantasy). I'd recommend starting with Galactic Patrol, the third book chronologically; the first two books are prequels written long after the rest of the series, and they're full of spoilers for the main plot and fairly slow-paced, while GP drops you pretty much right into the action.

Welcome to the forums! Glad to hear that you've been enjoying the game so far. Feel free to share any of your other accomplishments as well, or to ask questions about anything you're still trying to figure out. I run a little list of tutorials called the Drawing Board, which is conveniently linked in my signature; you might find some of those useful if you ever get stuck. Don't feel bad about your English, since it's certainly better than my Spanish On that note, we do also have a Spanish-language subforum as well, so if you ever have something you want to ask but can't quite figure out how to put it in English, feel free to ask it there. Hope this helps!

Believe it or not, it's actually possible to rename asteroids. You just have to send a ship out to them first (EDIT: And I seem to have been ninja'd, totally throwing off my comedic timing. Bah!) But seriously, I'd support something similar to OP's proposal, if only so I'm not having to bounce back and forth between my flight and the Tracking Station or take notes about each asteroid myself. It would be quite convenient.

Caps Lock toggles between Standard and Fine Controls while in flight. Micco is correct; under standard key bindings, SHIFT + rotational keys causes the part to rotate by 5 degrees instead of 90. I vaguely recall that a similar issue was posted in the past, but I don't recall if it was ever resolved. Apologies that I can't provide anything more than that, as my forum search skills seem to be failing me today.

Apologies for not keeping up with the comments and submissions lately. Other things have been on my plate recently. Thanks for the recommendation I'll try to set aside some time to take a look at his channel later this week. No problem!

Yeah, this doesn't seem to have much to do with KSP at all. Moving it to the Space Lounge. That being said, I do rather like bacon myself.

Not entirely accurate -- I've successfully docked even when I was approaching the target in the 2-3m/s range, though to be fair I was essentially almost lined up dead-on with my target. That said, the slower you approach and the more "in line" you are with the target port, the easier it will be for the magnetic attraction to close the link.

First off, welcome to the forums! To quickly address a couple of your specific questions: The shielded port and the unshielded standard Clamp-o-tron can dock together, since they're part of the same size class of docking ports. However, you have to manually uncover the shielded port using the right-click menu while the craft it's attached to is active. The same goes for the Inline Clamp-o-tron as well. No. The Clamp-o-tron Jr. is part of a smaller size class, and thus can only dock with another Jr. Likewise, the Sr. ports can only dock with other Sr. ports. Hope this helps

I don't have the list handy at the moment myself. However, if you want something different, it is customizable. You can learn all about your profile customization options here.

Duna is the popular first choice, since it's relatively easy to get there and back without too much more effort than it would normally take to reach the Mun. If you can land on and return from the Mun with a given design, you can probably at least reach, orbit, and return from Duna (though you'll probably have to add a bit of extra "oomph" for the return trip if you also do a landing). Eve is also fairly easy to reach at least, but if you put someone on the surface, don't expect to get them back any time soon without some serious engineering. Flyby / orbit should certainly be doable, though, as should a landing on Gilly.

Given this indeed seems to be inactive, I'm going to be locking the thread. Please don't revive old threads without a good reason.

The obvious next step here would be to soft-land the entire complex at KSC, asteroid and all.

I don't believe there's an option to use Imperial measures, no. Metric seems to be the standard for spaceflight operations in general, even here in the United States, and I believe the game was designed taking that into account. Speaking as someone from the States myself, though: You'll eventually get used to it

In the Tracking Station, if you select an unknown object, you should see the option to track it appear in the bottom left corner, where the "Fly / Abort" options normally are. The button should look like a blue radar dish.

As others have already stated, it's highly unlikely that this will be updated anytime soon. Thread locked; in the meantime, I hope you find a more up-to-date plugin that suits your needs.