Lheim

A few people coming out of the woodwork with excess vitriol, but in general the gripes are pretty minor - a little bug fixing and a few numbers tweaks are all that's needed. Personally I'd follow the stock bug fix mod's tweaks pretty closely if I were on with Squad. I think KSP is like a whole new game; having to learn how to not make your rockets flip out during launch or having stock resource mining is great. One non-tweak comment I'd make is that I do wish we had non-debug menu ways to examine the heat of our craft. I mean, it'd also be neat if I knew if larger surface areas touching ground would help bleed heat more efficiently without looking at the numbers - anyway we can get an animated convection/conduction/radiation diagram over the ship? I seriously know that'd be a lot of work, I know. But it'd be cool.

Got no problem with DLC if done with respect to the costumer - as originally planned they're cheap mini expansions. The problem comes when they are not cheap or much of an expansion; i.e. not value for money. Stuff I'd be happy to pay for? More interesting planets, new mechanics.

Visual enhancements. Clouds make this game such a nicer experience it isn't funny. I'd think launching without a few good atmospheric effects would hurt first impressions. Ditto with something like chatterer. Personality is a hard to define thing. Don't shirk it when you're going for first impressions, though.

Nah, I'd totally go for a .99 version - a quick spin for player feedback with the new features, THEN off to 1.0. But I'm a cautious man. And then.. heck, how about clouds at least?

Afraid I'm not versed in the scripting language, DMagic. But I have fooled around; I found it worked to lower the terrain maximum scale in the color options - it dropped the contrast of the underlay quite nicely.

Just a quick comment here.. I'm finding the karbonite overlay difficult to 'read' visually. It's a low-contrast orange overlay semi-transparent over a high-contrast black and white altimetry map.. I can certainly discern which areas have karbonite and which don't, but telling apart higher concentrations from lower concentrations is just difficult with the underlying altimetry map affecting the coloration of the orange.

I increment alphabetically for each goal or class of ship I'm creating. Animal names for ships, bird names for satellites. First to reach the moon this save was Basilisk 1. My basic scan-sat is Albatross.

There's also the orbit details - required apoapsis, periapsis, etc, in an expandable note in the contract itself. One tip: I find it useful to time my launch. Wait till the KSC is under the target orbit, then try to launch into the correct inclination right from the start - you can watch from map view and adjust your direction north, east, south, west, whatever, till you're at least nearly matching. Once it is matching, just keep ascending in the direction of your prograde vector; just make sure it's in orbit mode. It's slightly complicated by the fact that you have some eastward velocity already, but watching the map view you can correct it pretty close to what you want.

When you're starting a game now, you can actually specify the amount of science you start off with. As well as starting funds and if unlocking new parts requires a payment.

Rockets are almost inevitably going to lean - any slight variation will get magnified by the thrust and aerodynamic forces. However: you're probably not turning on your SAS - stability assistant, sorta like a bit of an autopilot that'll use your rocket's torque and thrust vectoring and control surfaces to try to hold a heading. Just hit T - you'll see the sas light come on up at the upper right corner of your nav ball. Note, though, that like Pecan said - you want a rocket to turn. Orbit isn't about height beyond just getting above the air that'll slow you down - they're about horizontal velocity. By the time your rocket's 40 clicks up you definitely ought to have leaned it over near horizontal by yer own choice, just to be pouring on that horizontal speed. There's some great tutorial videos on getting to orbit on youtube.

Distinct lack of 'cute' flags! This one's got transparency for the white sections here.

Just use the editor to create an tank + engine combo empty of fuel, and note the height of the center of mass by eyeball. You can place yer seperatrons there in the full build later.

I seriously hope they're also looking at revamping the rover driving experience in beta..

Unusual graphics approaching Kerbin.. http://imgur.com/a/giQeK#0

Fun fact regarding 'soupy' lower atmosphere: For earth, 90% of the atmosphere by mass is below 16 km

I genuinely don't get what's wrong with the idea of spending a little extra money to improve a craft's aerodynamic profile. Surely that's.. that's like.. the definition of what Nasa does. Spend money to improve the performance of technology.

I'd agree with Vanamonde that it seems a bit like busy work, and lots more pointlessly empty space, to rescale the entire solar system. Surely the easier solution - if they want to maintain a certain threshold of difficulty for getting to orbit - would be to tweak rocket performance. That's even assuming the dev-redone aerodynamic model would have a massive effect on DV anyway.

A system you won't encounter if you fly well.. that lays groundwork for a massive future update. I'm calling it right here. New kerbal stats - and if you get too low a rep, you only get psychotic screaming ones and have to attach probe cores to all your ships to even control them.

Well, just a reply to regex's list - he did do as I asked. All I'm going to do is to ask him to have patience and realize that some things have to be done in a kind of sequence, and that his personal preferences mightn't be the developer's and that's fine - that's why mods exist. In specific, though.. - not all devs are interchangeable - the 3d modelers mightn't be useful to do the code magic for clouds, for instance. One has to work within finer divisions than you seem to realize, regex; you can't necessarily assign the cinematic makers to do any particular task on the list, y'know? - Asking for more 'stuff to do' on planets is all well and good, except that the planetary surfaces might want a little work first. Likewise with the idea of multiple launch sites, if terrain is going to be revisited. - The trifecta of real solar system, deadly reentry, and TAC are personal choices and not necessarily the dev's choices, and by no means necessary to create a quality space game. Some aspects of each might be incorporated, but did it ever occur to you to consider the no-tilt kerbin system as the newbie zone, and that it has a certain importance as such? - Stopping multiplayer development would not be super-helpful for the game in it's efforts to appeal to multiple audiences. I feel this, of all your suggestions, is pure personal bias showing through. So.. look. In general, I say this: you've got a nice list, regex, but seriously, you're assuming they can do everything they want and in any order. You take no consideration whatsoever of the fact that they have different devs with different talents and that things generally have to be done in a certain kind of sequence. It's a more complex task to manage than you might think, but right now you're looking at an under-construction building and asking for the penthouse bathroom to be paved over in marble while the building is yet a steel skeleton, and all because you don't like the (temporarily necessary) port-a-potty. You're also asking for them to change the blueprint. Who cares about the concrete that's already been poured, and the architect's vision? But this is why Squad takes care to make their game moddable. And it is, indeed, a great deal of work to make that possible. So take the option if you need something sooner rather than later.

Perhaps the people complaining of the 'dev direction' of this game don't need to write their own game to have some cred.. however. They do need to be concrete, not just fatalistically vague. So I challenge Regex to post a list of the issues he'd focus on addressing first.. in prioritized order. Ten to one folks that it's a list of his personal pet peeves, and only that.

They've made a conscious choice to focus on getting the features in and solid before working on refining/adding to the assets.

1) Small taps, slow motion. Even just a tap will set you moving; you don't have to keep it held down. One tap w to start moving forward; one shift tap to adjust your course slightly upward, etc etc. 2) I do it in segments. My first piece up will usually be a core section with multiple docking ports to attach extra segments to. To manage keybinds, just make sure all like tasks are on the same keybind for each part - my tradition, f'rinstance, is '8' for solar panels. 3) Infernal Robotics isn't updated yet?

Yep, you want to approach the moon so that it is `behind` you. That way the dominant way it pulls you is retrograde to your Kerbin orbit - making you come back slowed down and into the atmosphere. Go slightly above the moon`s orbit with your maneuver node, and fiddle with the timing, and you`ll get it.

Alls I know is this: every moment you're thrusting vertically, you're paying a tax to gravity. Quicker you get horizontal, the better.

Make the first part of your 'sub assembly' something useless - like say a decoupler or a structural element. That way you can drag the whole probe off the root and save it as an assembly. There's a very useful addon called 'Select Root'. Just a quick and dirty tool for changing the root part of your ship in the VAB. Find it useful.