KSK

OK, story elements. The big advantage I see with this is that, done right, they should enhance almost any version of Career mode whether that be the current stock implementation or any of the alternatives discussed on these forums. 'Story elements' is also quite a vague term. At one extreme it could involve setting out a bigger picture for your space program. Who are the kerbals? Why are they going to space? How did the Space Program get started? It could involve bringing in the various corporations as competitors, as a source of characters for the story or anything other than the faceless names they are at the moment. It would probably involve a reason for your space program and some kind of victory condition when you fulfil your grand mission - whatever that happens to be, Whilst, I personally would quite like that approach (and have taken a stab at writing that level of backstory myself), I can also see Kuzzter's very reasonable point that it may not sit very well with an open-ended or sandbox style game. It would also involve a metric boat-load of work (not least providing a much more rich and detailed Kerbin to play in) and probably a rewriting of the game from the ground up. So a 'big picture' approach seems like a non-starter. So instead of a big picture approach, can we go for a little picture instead? Even if we don't really know much about the background to our kerbals, can we at least give them personalities and progression and in the process, create a richer space program with characters that players care about and get attached to? On a similar note, can we do a bit of smoke-and-mirrors to give the impression that the rest of Kerbin has at least heard about the Space Program, even if gameplay limitations mean that we're not really interacting with the rest of Kerbin. I think we can do both. Possibly. It would still involve a lot of work but nowhere near the crazy amounts needed to create a bigger picture. First and foremost we need to give our kerbals their own histories. The Final Frontier mod did this after a fashion, so it should be possible. I might not care too much about Randname Kerbal if she's just another name on the roster but I would get far more involved with Tater von Kerman, first kerbal to venture into Kerbin's upper atmosphere, crewmember aboard Outbound 3, the first kerballed spacecraft to orbit Minmus and then, as commander of Duna 1, the first kerbal to walk on Duna. One way of doing this would be to populate a biography page for each kerbal on the roster as they complete flights or are involved in milestone achievements. More subtly, I would like to see a system in which the kerbalopedia or the flavour text for the tech tree used was based on the achievements of your kerbonauts, and included little quotes from them. For example, the very first node on the tech tree could include something like this: "The Space Program was founded on enthusiasm, dreams and no shortage of wild ideas. The hard realities of building any kind of working spacecraft forced us to shelve most of those ideas - but we didn't forget about them..." - Jebediah Kerman: KIS - a history of kerballed spaceflight. Now, if there was some way of tracking how the player met various goals (self imposed or contractual) and, more importantly, which kerbals were involved, then the flavour text for later nodes on the tech tree could be dynamically generated. For example, Player A's first mission to the Mun involved Bob Kerman in a single seat capsule. Player A then researches technology Y which opens up the possibility of clustered engines (this could be something as simple as the tricoupler). The flavour text for tech node Y becomes something like: "Bob's pioneering flight around the Mun was an enormous step forward that did wonders for our reputation (and bank balance). Landing on the Mun was a much bigger job that needed a much bigger rocket. Since we didn't have any larger engines to hand, we decided to try clustering lots of smaller ones together." Gene Kerman: The Early Years - a personal diary. Alternatively, if the player opts to research 2.5m tanks and engines instead, then the flavour text for the applicable tech node might look like this: "Good Kerbals. We all watched Bob Kerman's broadcast from Munar orbit with awe - but I say we can do better. The pre-production version of our new Skipper engine has just finished it's qualifying tests. All we need now is a larger rocket to put it on..." Ademone Kerman - Rockomax board meeting minutes. Finally, I would like to take a leaf out of Civ II's book and have the kerbal equivalent of the governmental palace. Lets have a Museum Screen with artifacts and possibly pictures to commemorate player milestones. If you'll forgive the self-indulgence, I picture it being something like this:

Wow - thank you! And thanks to everyone else who picked up my post and ran with it. A couple of thoughts in response: I agree that exploration is fundamental. At a very basic level a randomised (or variable but curated) Kerbol system would ensure that no two games are quite the same and give players something different to go out and see every time. Even if nothing else changed that would be huge. Include fog-of-war elements, make science key to clearing some of that fog and provide something meaningful to find once the fog is clear (more on that below) and I think we'd have the foundation of a truly great game (as opposed to an already great sandbox). Doing it well would require quite a bit of effort but it would be worth it in my opinion. Combine that with expanded resource management elements and suddenly the game comes to life. I think all of the following have been extensively debated before and that opinions on all of them are divided, with both camps coming out with solid arguments. With that said, I would do the following: Include time. Include life support. Doesn't have to be excessively complex and could even just be a single 'life support' resource. Make the ISRU system a little more detailed. This doesn't (and shouldn't) be as complex as Squad's original system but it should include at least two, probably three mineable or extractable resources. Time is fundamental. If things take time to accomplish then suddenly contract time limits become a meaningful constraint that players have to plan around and work towards. Combine time with life support and suddenly logistics become a real issue. Time also introduces a much needed shot of granularity into the base-upgrade side of the game. Put simply, when things take time, making them take less time becomes an obvious reason for upgrading your facilities. Want to build rockets faster - upgrade your VAB. Want to decrease crew training times - upgrade your astronaut centre or use more experienced astronauts! Better yet, logistics and time management challenges scale quite well with mission ambition and therefore player skill. A trip to the Mun might just be a case of making sure you've packed enough life support for the journey and isn't too challenging for novice players. A crewed trip to Jool becomes a serious undertaking to challenge even veteran players. You'll need a lot of life support - how are you going to manage that? A brute force enormous spacecraft with enough capacity to get your crew there and back? A smaller ship combined with uncrewed tanker missions to resupply for the journey home. A smaller ship combined with ISRU equipment (more on that shortly). Whatever option you choose you'll need to make sure that you can build it in time for the next transfer window, make sure that you've unlocked all the right technologies before starting construction and make sure that you've upgraded your facilities in time to cope with launching whatever size of ship you have in mind. Choices and trade-offs. Choices and trade-offs. Finally - expanded ISRU. This is the meaningful stuff to find by exploration. At the moment we have Ore which is found nearly everywhere. Expand the system slightly to include two or three resources that aren't necessarily found on the same world and exploration becomes important for mission planning as well as something to do for its own sake. Probably easiest to illustrate by example: I have a contract to take x number of kerbals to Duna and bring them home. I'm thinking that ISRU is going to be a part of my mission plan. First thing I'd better do is scout out Duna and Ike and see what's out there to use. Do I have time to do this before launching the mission proper? Better read the fine print on that contract! Maybe I'll be lucky and find everything I need on Duna itself. Maybe I'll only find two resources on Duna and need to go to Ike to get the third. Maybe I'll only find 2/3 resources in total, enough to restock my life-support, monoprop and oxidant for the journey home but I'm missing that one vital resource needed to make fuel. I'd better design my Duna ship accordingly, or perhaps I'll just switch to an alternative mission plan. Combine the above sort of scenarios with a randomised or semi-randomised Kerbol system and those sort of trade-offs, choices, resource management and planning become a fresh set of challenges every time you start a new game! More on story elements later - I need to go to work.

I think that's probably one of the best summaries of Career mode that I've read. To me, Career mode is Sandbox with a couple of not very interesting constraints. We have a science point grind which drives a very basic tech tree mechanic and a mini-quest generator which lets you grind for funds. Then we have an almost entirely pointless crew experience mechanism with some not very logical rewards and a bare bones base-upgrade mechanic. The way the tech tree is set up doesn't give you a great many options for gathering science and most of those options are dependent on building upgrades or are sufficiently far down the tech tree to be essentially irrelevant. Combine those two factors and you end up with very linear gameplay that you have to try really hard to break away from. There's been a lot of effort put into simplifying the game mechanics because complex game mechanics were deemed not to be fun. The problem is that now the game mechanics are too simple to allow for many interesting decisions, trade-offs or choices. Career mode doesn't really know what it wants to be and therefore fails at being anything in particular. It's not an exploration game (which would play really well with the underlying concept of a peaceful species going to space for the sheer fun of it) because you know pretty much all there is to know about the Kerbol system right from the start. It's not any kind of story driven game - and I don't mean a tightly scripted set of missions and cutscenes because that would a) be too limiting and b) most likely be way beyond Squad's budget to do well. I'm thinking more of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri which has story elements and distinct characters woven through it whilst still remaining a pretty open ended strategy game. The kerbals on the other hand are just the same old green, googly eyed rocket fodder that they've always been. We know nothing about them, we're given no reason to care about them, either collectively or individually, there's no worldbuilding at all to speak of. We don't even know why the kerbals have a space program, which is a fairly major flaw in a game called Kerbal Space Program. It's not a character driven game or crew management game - see above. It's definitely not a tycoon or resource management game. Not when the answer to most of your problems can be boiled down to 'grind more satellite missions (or whatever your personal flavour of cheese may be)' or 'visit another Mun / Minmus biome'. Nope, Career Mode is just a sandbox (albeit a brilliant one) with constraints that feel a bit arbitrary, and progression which manages to be a bad combination of too linear, and too vague. Some folks clearly like it and that's great but for me it just falls flat.

Not a good fit for KSP. The timescales involved are completely outside the scope of the game and the stock game mechanics are far too simple (or in many cases non-existent) to implement terraforming in any sort of meaningful way. And by meaningful, I mean something more interesting and interactive than dropping a magic terraforming box on the planet of your choice and hitting the timewarp button.

Oh SТДЦЙS SШЕДТУ SФСКS, I forgot about that. Either way, that last chapter had a real melancholic, end-of-a-glorious-dream feel to it.

Well we knew things were heading that way from Shadows... but darn. Poor Bob. Bracket-maker in chief to the son-of-a-RatSquirrelFish that did for Jeb.

Don't ever change Jeb. Or Sarge. Or...dammit any of you guys. For Kerbfleet! For Science!

Hey folks, Sorry I've been incommunicado for a while - blame it on a combination of weekend guests and rather distracting domestic news, of which I will not speak here lest mods gaze in our direction. Some good comments on here and yeah - the KSA are taking a long hard look at scy's question right now...

Man the graphics for Doom 4 aren't bad at all. Geek joy is when reality starts looking like a set from a sci-fi film! Great picture Cuky - thanks for sharing.

Yeah, I wouldn't even bother poking fun at this guy. I doubt he's going to be satisfied by any high-level rocket design or answer to his challenge, and will keep on requesting more and more details to the point where he either can't or won't understand them. He'll then use that lack of understanding as 'proof' that your design or answer is flawed. Seriously, I'd bet that a bit of digging through the NASA Apollo archives and/or the plans for Mars Direct would answer his challenge quite handily. If he really wanted to understand this stuff, all the information he needs is out there already. Therefore, the fact that he's offering this challenge at all, suggests to me that he's more interested in pushing his own agenda than a serious answer to his questions.

On a related note, NewScientist ran an article on something similar recently, i.e. that the space-time curvature caused by large scale cosmological structures could account for the apparent expansion of space between those structures without needing to resort to dark energy as an explanation (I think). The article was based on work done by Thomas Buchert (amongst others) who does appear to be a bona-fide researcher in the field, or at least has a relevant looking publication list.The paper is here and a follow up paper, responding to a rebuttal of the original by other researchers, is here.

I think I understand where OP is coming from, which doesn't mean that I think he's correct. With apologies to all the actual physicists on this thread, I think it's time for a..... *drumroll* Rubber Sheet Analogy! Take one standard 'popular science' grade rubber sheet and make two marks on it, somewhere near the edge. Place a weight in the middle of the sheet. Watch the marks move apart as the sheet stretches. Presto - expanding space caused by the constant tug of gravity.

Looks like it. I think YNM put his finger on the problem though - persuading this guy that the rocket equation is actually valid is going to be the real challenge. Given that the sidebar on his website states that 'humans cannot travel to the Moon' is a proven fact, I think communication rather than physics is the problem here.

Nope. The $100 per order price is just for the guide RNA. You'll pay rather more for the cas9 nuclease needed to do the actual editing (or whatever variant of that they're selling). Incidentally - all of the top three links are to companies offering much the same reagents. There's nothing particularly new here either. Ever since genetic engineering was a thing, there have been companies selling reagents or kits for it. CRISPR/Cas9 is just a very big advance over previous techniques which has thus attracted more attention than usual outside of academic and biotech circles.

If it was the Kraken it was being remarkably short-sighted. Leland + Jeb would have gotten to Jool a lot faster - and with a lot more kerbals in tow, than Leland managed. If I recall rightly, the swamp creatures (RatSquirrelFish??) have already been covered.

OK - thanks.

If that's aimed at me I'm not getting it.

Where do you think the KSP community got the phrase from? We borrowed it from the real world, not the other way around.

I understand that the view from 100 miles up is quite nice too.

I'm reading this as enthusiasm rather than grumbling , but even so - nope, there isn't. As a comparison point, the chapters in my own story tend to be around 4-5K words with no pictures. According to the program that I'm writing them on, they normally take about 10-12 minutes each to read. If I'm really on a roll and have a couple of quiet weekends in a row to spend writing, I can knock out a chapter in about two weeks. The maths isn't difficult. Or think about professional writers. It takes them months to years to write a book which takes hours to days to read. Jim's work isn't always particularly text-heavy but those craft don't build themselves and those screenshots don't compose themselves. I figure the exact format of a story doesn't make a lot of difference. Writing just takes time. No real way around that, especially when you're doing it in your spare time.

Ahhh - I always did figure Chadvey as a whisky drinker. Sounds like he just lost his taste for Laphroaig though. He's also spot on about the skirt. Did I just think out loud again. On a serious note - great back story, even if it's inexplicably blown all the dust off my monitor. That's what I'm blaming the damp eyes on anyway. Yeah. Oh and I did like:

Ludicrous speed. Whilst watching Mr Radar. And drinking Mr Coffee.

If you figure out how to get ESA more money, be sure to tell NASA too. The problems are the same in both cases - many competing priorities, relatively little public interest and no clear economic argument for really going all-out into space. Edit - solve either of the latter two problems and there's your way of getting more money for ESA. The competing priorities are unlikely to go away no matter what you do, short of... <insert forum unfriendly political rant here>. Both agencies are also obligated to spread the work around amongst multiple stakeholders which is politically understandable but not terribly efficient. The European economy may well be be greater than many other spacefaring nations but ESA's 2016 budget is relatively small at €5.25B ($5.9). For comparison, NASA's budget for the same period is about $19.3B. The biggest item on ESA's budget is also Earth observation which is highly laudable but doesn't really make for attention grabbing headlines compared to some of NASA's deep space missions. I would love both agencies to be doing more (edit - and I'm sure they would too) independently or cooperatively. But without a clear and sellable public justification for doing it, it's not happening any time soon sadly.

Nah - you just have a (medically sound) dosage shortfall in your creativity booster.

Meh - they were running out of room in that hangar anyway. Oh well - more data is always good, launch rate is stepping up nicely, minimal reschedules to this launch and they got both satellites where they needed to go. Still a win in my book.