csiler2

I disagree. I think it's important to allow options as part of a sliding difficulty scale in the game. Yeah, it's true that Sandbox and Science make things easier than Career, but the play style for each mode can be very different because of the locked options. Maybe I want to play career, but I'm frustrated by the 'normal' career difficulty. So going from 'Normal' to 'Easy' disables comms network (maybe I don't want to go to the hassle of building that infastructure), I don't have to worry about losing money to accidentally destroyed facilities, and the difficulty sliders adjust. That means I can still have the challenge of career without it being as punishing as a normal mode. Switching toScience can't fill that, and neither can Sandbox. The Game Maker's Toolkit YouTube Channel has talked about this a couple times. Here's one of his videos that talks about purity of game maker vision vs. players playing the way they want. I think it ultimately depends on what the KSP2 developers have planned for their vision of the game. The only optional features I'm against is optional features that are not included as part of the difficulty modifiers/scale. So I'm against people arguing that KSP2 should have a life support framework pre-built for modders or life support as an option for players that want it outside of the difficulty options.

I would argue it makes sense that a probe mission is harder than a manned mission. It's a natural offset for their efficiency. Manned Mission Pros: You always have control of your craft You can get Eva and Sample science Manned Mission Cons: Require more resources to support larger craft designed to contain Kerbals Kerbals could die, depleting your kerbalnaut corps Probe Mission Pros: Lighter mission profiles and resource consumption compared to manned missions No risk of life, only afore-mentioned cheaper craft, if mission failure Probe Mission Cons: Always needs radio contact for full control More planning(?)(Included because your comment, not because I agree with it) NASA sends out more probe missions than manned, even before the retirement of the shuttle because they are cheaper and more expendable, not because they easier. About 40% of the probed missions to Mars have failed, and a few of them for really stupid reasons, such as parts installed incorrectly, program errors that should have been detected, etc. We don't even have to worry about comms delay in KSP or cosmic radiation, or part failure, or micrometeorites, or other hazards that make space travel for probes and humans even more dangerous than what risk-averse KSP players do. The idea that probe missions require significantly more planning and effort compared to a manned mission is not true as far as KSP is concerned. Just like a manned mission, they require a control device (probe body instead of command pod), science gear, propulsion and propellant enough to get home, and power/battery. The only difference between them is the requirement of either Kerbals with the weight penalty for their command pods, or a com network and coms gear, which is trivial to set up and is good practice for manned missions anyway. Even then, you've got to do additional planning to make sure your Kerbals can get back safely whereas a probe can just stay at its destination and transmit its findings home. I don't want life support for the sake of yet another thing to manage. I don't mind having to manage heat, propellant, or power because those are things that have a direct impact on the performance of the craft I design, but that's already pretty tedious IMO. I don't also need to manage the minutia of keeping a digital avatar alive. If I want that, I'll go dig up my old tamagachi. I'm not against it being a modded feature, but I don't think it should be a core feature, and I don't want the developers taking time away on core features for everyone to cater to a subset of users by setting up a framework for life support modders. I don't have to feed Master Chief, replenish his 15 minute oxygen supply, or give him potty breaks, I don't want to have to worry about that with my Kerbals either.

Sure, if you want to pay the licensing fees to New Line Cinema, Saltire Cinema, 20th Century Fox, the Irwin Allen estate, etc. No way they would let Star Theory make a paid-content add on without getting a large slice of the pie themselves.

If by very small, you mean initially propped up by Netscape/AOL during the height of their power and aided in the transition to the Mozilla Foundation by donating hardware, intellectual property and a $2 million donation? Mozilla was originally to turn Netscape Communicator into an open source project in a bid to save the Netscape company.

Yeah, because Chrome's parent company pays Mozilla lots of money to guarantee that Google is the default search engine of Firefox. Mozilla also gets a kickback for every search you perform using Google. In addition, Mozilla gets a lot through donations from other companies and individuals because Mozilla maintains a lot of other useful open source cross-platform products that are extremely useful for software development. The scope of Mozilla's products and their usefulness to the companies and individuals that donate to them makes KSP look microscopic by comparison. It's an apples and oranges comparison.

Nobody said it was problematic. OP was just excitedly pointing out that a Kerbal was cracking his knuckles while wearing gloves. Now, IRL that might be a bit tough with the size of real spacesuit gloves and their stiffness from being pressurized, but that's not really a detail that concerns me in a game where I can magically make helmets disappear.

So you don't like the style of something that's a non-development team member's quick and dirty representation of a temporary placeholder? You are really stretching for something to gripe about. I'm going to hold my complaints on UI until I actually see something that the dev team has officially released as their art direction for the UI. Maybe you should too.

SeaQuest?! Even better! I loved that show. Mycroft is the name of Sherlock Holme's older brother. His deductive reasoning skills and general knowledge base is greater than Sherlock's, but he lacks the interest in fieldwork. Mycroft is a government official for the Queen and usually acts as an oracle, giving Sherlock cases, pointing him in the right direction, and revealing information that Sherlock would not have access too. My favorite interpretation of Mycroft is by Mark Gatiss, who played Mycroft in the 2010-current BBC series. So you're acting just like Mycroft Holmes by refusing to voice your own deductions, but providing factual and rumored information for the rest of us to work off of.

Of course someone named Mycroft would be gathering facts and evidence. Do you have a Sherlock helping you? Good work. I'm a fan of objective data gathering in the face of a heated topic.

How about some kind of rocket Jesus fish? Too on the nose?

True, but by then I would think we would be using something like an advanced version of Spaceship One or realized versions of the many canceled SSTOs rather than chemical rockets, which are coming close to reaching their maximum potential (part of the reason Space X abandoned a recoverable upper-stage). Since we can create SSTOs with space-planes in the hanger, I don't see why this is an issue. Besides, stage reuse is way more expensive and annoying than engineers care to admit. The Space Shuttle was supposed to launch once a week according to spec, but launched maybe every six months at the height of launch frequency and cost way more per refurbishment period. The Redstone rockets in Project Mercury were designed to be recoverable, but this was never implemented because the cost of refurbishing engines damaged by salt-water corrosion was more expensive than just building a new rocket. The only reason Space X may make this work is because they are sacrificing significant payload fractions to land their first stages under power on dry land rather than letting them splash down into the ocean.

Do you have a citation for that? Beyond STS Solid Rocket Boosters, STS Shuttle, Buran and Space X's current work on Falcon 9 Stage 1 recovery, I can't think of any rocket systems intentionally designed to do more than burn up on re-entry or splash into the ocean. That's barely a drop in the bucket compared to the number of rocket systems frequently used around the world. Edit: I forgot to include the Shuttles.

Ah, must be research for Kerbal parachutes.

Thumbs down, I disagree. I didn't experience any major issues on release day. There were a couple of bugs, but nothing that prevented me from enjoying the game.

I have rather enjoyed the 1.0 'official release.' Sure, it had bugs and KSP could do with a little more balancing and tweaks, but at least Squad can send us magical updates over the internet instead of leaving us with a cartridge (I'm looking at you Atari ET). Let's not forget that the difference between 'alpha,' 'beta,' and 'official' is mostly ceremonial, especially in the case of KSP. It marked the addition of all the features SQUAD originally envisioned for the project. I don't recall any promises of perfect releases or KSP being done, just that they decided to go 'official' because all the features were in. There's still work to be done and Squad was pretty clear about that. This does not mean that we shouldn't help Squad by critiquing and letting them know where things went wrong. We need constructive criticism and a lot of these threads have not been constructive at all. They whine that Squad screwed the pooch or just care about money, but I have a hard time seeing that when they put out two hot-fixes after busting $#@ to put out their first deadlined release and maintain an official community on their website. They don't have to do either of those things. Remember, it's just a game, you don't own the developers just because you paid them money to play with the fruits of their labor, they have feelings, and they don't approach problems the same way you do. Be nice and try to be helpful when things go sideways rather than upset and vengeful because its not the way you want it.

Space 1999 is calling. They want to borrow your miner. That thing is awesome!

Ah, true. Which is why the wingy-bits of the darts are at the back

Technically ablation shielding uses evaporation for cooling rather than insulation. That's why the heat-shields have a resource. The shuttle's reentry tiles were insulation. They took heat in and did not transfer it and were only replaced when damaged or missing at the end of a mission. The Apollo capsule's heat-shield was ablative and vaporized as it dealt with the heat of reentry. It was only used once and never intended for reuse. Just sandwhich an ablative shield between an LV-N and it's fuel source and you can run full-power as long as you have Ablator. I just ran a test and the LV-N will run through ablator at about 0.41 units per second at the launch pad. I wouldn't recommend it though A) because you have to route a fuel line to the LV-N and the heat-shields are heavy and the resource they provide is finite compared to the benefits of using other parts as radiator fins. I feel like the Devs may want to consider prohibiting the ablator resource from being used when both attach nodes of a heat shield are used. Partially because I don't think ablator is intended for this use, but also because it could cause people to lose ablator on parts that aren't necessarily exposed to the air-stream but have the misfortune of being in contact with parts that are getting pretty warm. That feels a bit broken.

I wonder how well the heat-shields would work for countering LV-N heat...

Assuming we only get one kind of heat sink. The Interstellar mod had several sizes of radiators to use depending on the heat-load you were expecting. Perhaps Squad may consider a similar system where bigger radiator panels are more efficient but heavier, enticing players to use smaller radiators when appropriate.

You want the CoM forward for stability. The heavier ends of objects like to lead and the lighter ends like to follow. That's why darts are heavy at the front and light at the tail.

The fairings can also be used as heat-shields. Just build something a-la the Curiosity reentry capsule and you should be fine. I was thinking about running some tests later to see if you could use a heat shield for the bottom and close-up a rover with the fairings on top. You can also used a fully enclosed fairing, though they aren't as good at dealing with the heat as the heat shields are. I just tested an up-down re-entry with a simple probe with a decoupler attached heat-shield below and fairings enclosing from the top. It made it fine down from an apoapsis of 100K straight into Kerbin.

^What he said.

Looking forward to watching your playthrough, though I believe this needs to be in Fan Works/Mission Reports and not general discussion.

I had a moment like that in early career. Launched a mk1 pod w/science Jr and goo canisters for a great sub-orbital hop. Gathered some science from low orbit and was getting ready for a slow landing in the highlands for an EVA sample when BOOM, everything below the pod exploded despite coming in at something like 4 M/S. Apparently Science Jr and the pods don't like landing on inclines :-( Next time I'll aim for a flatter landing site or transmit/recover data before landing. I should've known better. I couldn't even get an EVA sample because the pod landed hatch-down and the radial parachutes wouldn't allow it to roll over. Epic fail.