Specialist290

Well, yes, but does it stay completely vertical when it flips, or does it tend to want to settle so that its nose is offset in one direction or another?

What I feel like: Buck Rogers, Chuck Yeager, and Neil Armstrong all rolled into one. What I look like: A man with a mustache staring at a computer screen.

Given that the loading distance for a craft is much shorter than that, I'd imagine that trying this could cause problems.

Hmm... Taking a closer look at your screenshots, it doesn't seem to be a problem with your center of mass and center of thrust being misaligned. However, judging from both what I'm seeing and what you're describing, I think the big problem is that your CoM is off-center on the craft itself, and thus whenever you tilt it towards horizontal, it naturally tends to want to lean further in the direction of the imbalance. Tell me one thing about how it flops over: Does it want to turn over so that the cabin on the rover itself is always on the side closest to the ground?

I like it. Even with just one chapter (so far), it condenses a lot of useful rocket building advice into one helpful post. There are a couple of typos you might want to fix, especially one in the very first sentence on the site I'll certainly be watching this with interest

You know, it's funny that you mention that, given some of the comments I've seen on some of his older videos.

Nicely done! I'm glad you've included a few remarks to serve as guidelines for the rest of us, as well. Certainly food for thought when I start to consider Tylo missions of my own.

It's a delicate balancing act, though. While it might certainly be possible for us to unlock the tech tree "in a few missions" because we're already familiar with how all the parts work, it's probably less so for a completely new player who has nothing to go on except "common knowledge" and his own intuition. Make it too hard for him, and you've probably lost a sale or two (as he'll certainly tell his friends not to buy it even if he already has). And money does address that if you keep the starting funds low enough, the part costs high enough, and tie income to a mission objectives system. You can unlock as much of the tech tree as you want to in a few missions, but if you don't actually complete your assigned task, all those shiny new parts are worthless if you can't actually buy them because you blew all your money doing other things. I agree that there should be varying levels of difficulty -- any game gets boring when it's "too easy" -- but I think the career system as a whole is going to need to be more fleshed out before the devs can realistically think about determining how to set the limits for different difficulty settings. Keep in mind that this is the first update with any real Career Mode content at all; if anything ends up being problematic for the player base as a whole, the devs can adjust fire on a future update.

Welcome to the forums! I think you'll find that a lot of us are excited for what's to come as well, especially with 0.22 just around the corner. Anyway, feel free to make yourself at home.

Another thing that strikes me is that you don't seem to have any sort of reaction wheels on what must undoubtedly be a very massive rocket. That might help with some of the control issues. For that matter: Do you have SAS enabled during your ascent? For that matter, taking a closer look at what I'm assuming is the final payload, your rocket might be slightly off-balance, which definitely can't be good. Do you think you could take another set of screenshots with the center of mass and center of thrust icons turned on, as well as one of the payload by itself, without the launcher? Both of those might help with making more specific diagnoses.

I've said it before elsewhere, but I'll say it again now: I'm certain that, further on down the line, a lot of the "grindy" or "cheaty" aspects of metagaming the research system are going to be mitigated once we have an actual economic system in place that limits the number and quality of parts we can use on one rocket. Yes, a lot of experienced top-tier players are probably going to try to find ways to break the system wide open, but that's really no different from how some people play every other game out there, video / computer or otherwise.

I'm sorry, but none of the fonts y'all are proposing quite has the proper Impact.

Really, I couldn't care less about the "science points" aspect of it. I'm not in this game for any sort of "high score," explicit or otherwise. I just want to still see the flavor texts for running experiments regardless of whether I'm playing Sandbox or Career Mode, even if running those experiments has no actual effect from a gameplay perspective.

Something that was on my mind when reading this discussion: How will the new system work with plugin-based "partless" mods like Kerbal Alarm Clock and FAR? I think it's been asked before, but I didn't see anything that addressed it earlier in the thread.

The very first computer I remember our family having is an old Tandy 1100-series laptop with a monochrome green LCD screen. I think it's still around somewhere, although it's been out of use for a long time -- probably still tucked away in a moving box somewhere. I think it's older than I am. I don't have the exact system specs, but I remember the hard drive on that thing was tiny, and (from my dim recollections) was entirely devoted to the OS. You had to save all your actual data on those little 3.5" floppy disks. You also had to type command prompts in order to access any programs that didn't ship with the computer, since the GUI was rudimentary at best. I still have the users' guide for the DeskMate operating system, incidentally. It has an appendix with instructions on how to use a wonderful new third-party peripheral called a "mouse," since not every computer actually shipped with one back then.

I'm thinking this as well. Manned pods don't require any resources like an electrical source to keep them operating. From a story perspective, my own personal theory is that kerbals were just so excited about getting themselves into space that they focused all of their R&D before the game's start into rocketry so that they could get up there as quickly as possible rather than bothering with such silly things as "aerofoils" and "remotely-controlled computer cores"

I have it on good authority that both of these are the names of dates on the ancient Mayan calendar.

Impressive work. Looking forward to seeing more

You do realize that every time someone speculates on a release date, the devs move it back a day, right?

Sorry about that. Don't mean to start any arguments, so I've stricken my little wisecrack from the record.

<slightly irrelevant and irreverent remark removed by poster> Slightly more relevant to the topic at hand: I do believe that, even if doing science itself doesn't have any tangible benefits in Sandbox, you should still be able to view the flavor texts for the different experiments when you have the science parts attached. It would add a nice bit of flavor to those who like to roleplay even in Sandbox.

While I don't have much experience with spaceplanes myself, from the way you've described how the intakes appear to work, I'd venture to guess that air intake performance is somehow connected with atmospheric pressure at a given altitude, which is something I've looked into before. In particular, the 10-15km range you gave happens to neatly line up with the altitudes at which air pressure is between 0.1-0.01 that of sea level pressure, which is indeed quite a drastic change. The chart at that link might serve as a helpful reference for more extensive testing.

Welcome to the forums! A few more tips I can think of: Before you go for a landing, circularize in a low orbit around the Mun first. Trying to land while coming straight in from Kerbin is a great way to lose entirely too much fuel and smash into the surface at high speed or strand your kerbonauts there for a while if you do make it down safely. Getting into a stable orbit also gives you much more control over where the final landing site can be as well. Also, bring landing lights, just in case you need them. Hope this helps!

Welcome to the forums! The others have already made fantastic suggestions, but if you still feel like you need more, feel free to check out the Drawing Board, which is linked in my signature, for links to additional tutorials as well.

Welcome to the forums! Feel free to make yourself at home. Ask questions, answer other people's questions, share more screenshots of your craft, or jump into the nearest discussion that interests you.