Specialist290

Sadly, there isn't one. A pure Apollo-style landing is going to have to mainly rely on transmitted data if you want to stay faithful to the mission profile.

Out of curiosity, what's the one country that uses mixed units on the second map? I can't find it.

Fair enough. And I can counterpoint with Master of Orion III -- a game that ruined a popular franchise by delving so far into mindless complexity that it completely turned off both new players and fans of the previous games. Granted, this was only one of a number of issues that game had, but it was a pretty major one. I'm not saying that more complexity in a game is a bad thing, but you have to find a happy medium. If you try to appeal exclusively to one extreme or another, you're going to end up with a flop. I have issues of my own with the way the current tech tree and science system works, so I can understand your concerns, but I'm hoping that Squad will find a way to integrate it into a more complete and robust campaign system that will provide sufficient measures of challenge and engagement for all players regardless of skill level.

This. On the one hand, I have the time and patience to enjoy about half of the games in Paradox Interactive's core library, which are known to lean heavily towards the simulationist aspect compared to things like Civilization and your typical RTS, as well as a number of other flight simulators and city-building / base management games. On the other hand, I also quite enjoy little games like Angry Birds when I have a little free time, and I'll also play the occasional mindless first-person shooter without any qualms whatsoever. What I'm worried about is people on these forums using labels like "casual" and "hardcore" to polarize the KSP community into two more armed camps that constantly go at one another's throats for no other reason than sheer bloody-mindedness.

I'd be fully in favor of such a thing, myself.

This seems to beg the question that Squad ever deliberately sought to cater to the hardcore crowd in the first place.

This exactly. We're the Big Man (or Woman) at the Top approving the projects in the first place, not the Lowly Project Manager worrying about whether or not what they're doing is exceeding their mandate. The best way to limit the players' options to prevent people from getting to the Mun and back with Tier 0 tech isn't to put up an arbitrary wall; it's to limit the resources they have available at the start so that it's impossible to buy all the parts you'd need to do that, which isn't properly going to happen until we get an economic system to go along with the scientific one, especially if part of that economy involves performing specific goals as part of a contract. If there's going to be any sort of "punishing the player" going on, it should be for not doing what they've agreed to do, not for "not being ready" for something they've clearly demonstrated they are perfectly ready for.

Indeed. That's the technique I've been using since 0.21 changed it in the first place; it's just the new way it works has thrown my timing completely off. Like I've mentioned before, annoying, but I'm sure I'll adjust to it eventually.

The "good" news is, once you unlock batteries and solar panels, it effectively doesn't really make a difference. As long as you have an antenna and a power source on your lander, you can transmit any report that you've stored. There's only a limited amount of science available per biome from what I've been able to determine, and it doesn't matter whether you get it all home in the pod or through transmitters -- once it's all yours, it's all yours, with the only difference between transmitting and direct recovery being how much you're able to get across at one time. In theory, you could just keep collecting samples and transmitting data back to Kerbin until the "Sample Collection" science for that biome is used up, with the only real limit being your own patience and tolerance for tedious repetition. In other words, no matter whether you're using a teaspoon or a bucket to empty the well, the amount of water you get out of the well is still the same once you've emptied it.

The Mun decides to show Bill a magic trick. Bill proves to be easily amused. (0.22 reset the legs on my landers in my Sandbox save to "folded" when I ported it over from 0.21.1. Fortunately, none of them toppled, but it did lead to a bit of chuckling on my part. Unfortunately, others haven't been so lucky.)

That's exactly what I'm referring to. It seems like it takes a few extra seconds to settle on the heading I've locked in and wobbles over a larger arc of the navball doing so.

On an unrelated note, welcome back Damion! Back to our regularly scheduled programming: I do find it slightly annoying that 0.22's SAS auto-adjustments aren't quite as aggressive as 0.21's, but I don't think it's something I won't be able to compensate for with time and practice.

I pretty much copied all of my mods straight over to my non-stock install. The only one I noticed that acted strange was the SelectRoot plugin, but that one had already been updated to 0.22 anyway, so I overwrote the old version with the new one. Other than that, apart from parts not showing up in Career Mode for older mods (which I can fix myself anyway), no problems.

Before we begin, I'm going to assume a "best-case" scenario where the solid-rocket boosters run out of fuel before the liquid engines do, and are dropped as soon as they're empty. The other way around is possible, but generally less efficient for a number of reasons. The easiest way to do this is to treat both phases of the burn as two separate "stages": On one stage you're burning all of your SRBs and part of your liquid fuel, and on the second, after you've dropped the boosters, you're burning the rest of the fuel. The determining factor on the delta-v of this first "stage" is going to be the time it takes for your SRBs to finish their burn. Since you can't throttle a solid rocket, this is going to remain more or less static. (In reality, of course, changing values of Isp as your rocket rises through the atmosphere are going to make this a little wobbly.) Once you know that, you'll need to figure out the amount of fuel burnt by your liquid engines in that time. We'll call this parameter "delta-m" or "dm" (for change in propellant mass) for now. You can use: dm = (F * t) / (g0 * Isp) F = average thrust in kilonewtons provided by liquid engine for the duration of the burn (which will be full thrust if the throttle stays at max; otherwise, it gets tricky) t = burn time g0 = standard surface gravity (9.8 m/s) The value you get should be the mass of the liquid fuel (including oxidizer) burnt. You'll take this value and subtract both it and the propellant mass of the boosters from the craft's full mass to find the remaining mass of your craft. When you run the rocket equation, you'll plug the full mass into the rocket equation for m0, and the remaining mass for m1. Now we need to find the Isp for the combined system, which gets tricky when you have engines of different specific impulses. You'll need to find the total rate of propellant mass flow (mDot) to do this. You can find the mass flow rate for each engine or booster using the following equation: mDot = Fe / (g0 * Isp) Fe = The thrust provided by that engine or booster Isp = The specific impulse of that engine or booster Then you add all the mDot values together and invert the equation to find the average specific impulse for the entire stage: Isp = Ft / (g0 * mDot) Ft = Total thrust of all engines Plug the values you've derived for m0, m1, and Isp into the rocket equation. That should give you the delta-v for your "first stage." Mark that down. Now subtract the dry mass of your boosters from the remaining mass (to represent dropping your empty boosters). That is your new m0 for the "second stage." Subtracting the remaining liquid fuel in the stage to find your dry mass will give you your new m1. Again, solve the rocket equation with those values. Record that as well. Now add the two delta-v values you've gotten to find the total delta-v for both the liquid engine and the boosters. Hope this helps

Which is a problem in Career Mode, because struts are fairly high up in the tech tree.

EDIT: Bah, disregard. The above poster has better info than I do.

Yes on both counts. Each "science module" only stores one experiment at a time, and you have to either discard it or transmit it to get a new one. However, having multiple parts allows you to conduct the same experiment multiple times and store more than one piece of data.

Nicely done! There's a few typos and odd wording choices, but overall the information itself is quite solid. If you're interested, I'd like to offer my skills as a proofreader so that I can help you polish the writing up until it shines

Welcome to the forums! Feel free to make yourself at home, and don't be afraid to ask questions if you need help.

The goo tanks and Science, Jr. modules can indeed only hold one observation at a time each. Of course, there's nothing saying you can't have multiples on one craft, and gain full points for different observations from each -- it just takes a little creative engineering...

No problem. If you ever change your mind, I'm sure we'll still be willing to answer any questions you might have

Believe it or not, I'm actually taking a mostly math-free and mod-free approach to my current Career Mode save in 0.22. I've been having great fun "winging it" and just seeing what I'm capable of doing without any of the guides and plugins I usually rely on to give me information, and it's proven to be an interesting challenge. In an odd sort of way, it's even a little invigorating; I think it's because I'm not as worried about the hang-ups I usually get myself into when trying to design something to be "just right." I'd recommend everyone try it at least once.

(Disclaimer: What follows is baseless speculation, entirely generated by my own brain's often-feverish imaginations, and is more or less me "thinking out loud." Don't treat anything I say in this post as if it's anything the devs themselves have stated, because it isn't.) I'm thinking that the devs are holding off on resources until at least the following things happen: - The tech tree gets a few tweaks and rebalances, based on player feedback. - Some major, game-changing update in the near future adds an actual economy (i.e. us having to buy our own parts and fuel with money we get from some source or another) to the mix. Once those two aspects of the game are nailed down, I'd imagine that that would be the perfect time to start thinking about resources, most likely as a late-tier technological advance that allows us to locate raw materials and refine them into fuel and oxidizer.

Today I did exactly the same thing that most of the rest of the KSP community is doing: Upgraded to 0.22 and started playing around with the campaign options. Managed to unlock a few parts from Tier 3 (assuming you count the starting parts as "Tier 0"), but now I think I'm starting to spin my wheels a little... Ah well, nothing a little break can't cure.

Indeed. The closest thing that there seems to be is a little after-action review on how much science you gather when you recover a craft. In the meantime, I've just stuck with the old standby of taking screenshots to document most of the things I do on a mission (which I do anyway, but the reports have given me a bit of an added incentive for it).