Feldynn

May the 4th be with you...

I personally have found VesselViewer can cause a significant drop in framerate for me when it's on (though messing with some of the settings for it when in IVA can restore some performance) so I ended up taking it out, it's a nice addon for RPM but didn't prove as useful / necessary for me as I'd hoped. Also if you keep RPM you could try using the built in docking port camera (assuming it's still there, hadn't docked since 0.24) instead of the Navball Docking indicator mod, it made IVA docking a lot of fun for me using the camera / monitor to do the precision adjustments and final docking. I would imagine that dropping RPM, VesselViewer, ProbeControlRoom, Procedural Fairings and SCANSat would get you the best results though given the textures and such (though I could be wrong).

I threw up a few satellites for contracts (a couple as longer range comm sats for an upcoming solar probe contract and one map sat around Mun) and also completed another rover contract on Mun, the interesting / fun thing with the rover mission was puttering around in IVA / first person mode using the RasterProp and ProbeControlRoom mods for parts of it .

The greatest game ever made? No, mostly because I don't feel such a title can ever be reserved for just one single game as I've seen many games across many years that I believe to be equally great but in different ways. I do think KSP is by far one of best "Early Access" projects on Steam right now (and in it's own right as an indie game development project) thanks in part to SQUAD and how interactive they are with the community. And when it is a complete game I do believe KSP will be one of the best ever, at least in my mind .

In almost 500 hours I've yet to leave Kerbin's SOI but the time is coming soon when I will venture beyond the home world's influence . I had a neat contract pop up from FinePrint to take a probe (I think) and do some high and low altitude science around the sun, once I've made a little more tech tree progress (for construction parts) and got an interplanetary comms link established (for RemoteTech) I'll be sending out my first vessel into a solar orbit! The road to that project is peppered with some smaller missions like putting up mapping satellites around Kerbin, Mun and Minmus as well as sending out some small robotic rovers to Mun and whatever other interesting contracts arise.

I tend to modify existing launch platforms to fit whatever payload I'm sending. As an example in my current new 0.25 career game I have a fairly cheap rocket / lander that will make it to Mun and back without leaving any space junk, when it came time to deploy comms satellites for RemoteTech I used the same complete rocket but with some minor alterations (i.e. shoved some satellites on it) and it worked perfectly. Of course I've yet to venture out beyond Kerbin's SOI, though I don't see myself doing anything much different. Same basic principle of getting a vessel designed / built to go out to whatever planet then refine it as necessary for payloads .

It's pretty obvious that the current Kerbals have a lot of characteristics indicative of the typical (stereotypical even) Human male, but personally speaking I don't really care what gender they are all that much. If / when Squad adds Kerbals with more Human female characteristics I'm not going to change how I play the game, I guess I'm an equal opportunity "Rocket Scientist" insofar as I'll shove any Kerbal in one of my rickety contraptions so long as they have the right amount of Courage and Stupidity and will continue to do so regardless of gender .

Manually, I have a small text file with a list of mod version numbers and a handful of bookmarks in my browser I check when I remember. Beyond that it's a simple case of deleting / extracting the appropriate mod folder from within Gamedata.

I like the general concept of "Kerbal Experience", having tasks and functions that can be influenced by a Kerbal's "skill" or "area of expertise" (I always wondered if Squad would add a rudimentary form of autopilot based on the Kerbals themselves carrying out flight manoeuvres) and so on. I also really like having options that can be disabled and customized to each player's liking, that way if I don't like exactly how something is implemented in a preset I can change or disable it (see the recent Difficulty options). Even the idea of Kerbals with high engineering skills being able to "squeeze a little more" out of an engine doesn't bother me that much (if implemented correctly), I'm sure anyone that has watched Star Trek (and similar shows) may remember episodes where Montgomery Scott or Geordi La Forge (or other engineers) managed to reconfigure various systems on the fly to provide a slight boost of one form or another.

I personally only tend to get use out of the regular engines like the Skipper / Mainsail, LRBs or SRBs when they're prototype parts for contracts, anything else that requires resources other than fuel / oxidizer I treat more like science modules. So I might start with a mission to rescue Random Kerman from orbit, chain together something like a sub orbital LRB test with a mainsail / skipper in orbit test to make a rocket to rescue said kerbal. Tack on a landing gear, ion and jet engine to test on the way up / down and you'll probably net over 1.5mil Funds or more and 200-400 science points from one flight that's primary objective was to rescue a Kerbal .

I never have, never had a need to either. Given how much science you can get just from picking and choosing the right contracts it's really not worth the effort, or hasn't been for me. I started a fresh game for 0.24 but had to restart again after not too many hours as I realised I'd unlocked a very large portion of the tech tree without ever doing science beyond Kerbin's low orbit range (didn't even go to Mun or Minmus and do science). Once you start getting a little way into the tech tree the science return on certain parts test contracts is just silly, chain a few of them together at a time and you're drowning in free science.

With one of my new 0.24 saves I was presented with a "Dunny Kerman" and a "Rofal Kerman" (dunny being Australian slang for toilet and Rofal because it sounds like ROFL, they amused me ).

Started a new career mode for 0.24 and filled out a good 3/4ths of the tech tree just by doing contracts around Kerbin (didn't even get to Mun / Minmus for science), amassed 11 million in funds, felt a bit dirty so I restarted a new career mode game vowing to only do most Kerbin area high science value contracts once if at all (and manually deleting science points gained from any repeats if I needed to do them for money). In my entire KSP history I've only ever been to Mun and Minmus, I haven't even been to Duna yet. There are lots of things I want to do, missions I want to run, probes I intend to send out and so on. It's not that I don't know how in theory, I just never seem to get around to actually doing it. I still haven't actually been to an anomaly or Point of Interest, not even the monolith thing near the KSP (I think there's one not too far away from the runway right?). Haven't visited a Mun Arch or the Memorial Monument thing, nor the Face Of Duna or been to any of the other interesting places. Haven't captured my own asteroid yet, I did the tutorial for it but that doesn't count since it's a scripted event, I need to actually build my own rocket and go get one. I have so many ideas for things to build or missions to run in KSP, ranging from the sensible to the ridiculous, the majority of them never get beyond the "hey it'd be cool to build an..." stage of planning. I need to remedy that! As soon as I reach a reasonable level in the tech tree to build a fancy 3-kerbal ship station I invariably send Bill, Jeb and Bob off on an extended vacation to a safe orbit around Kerbin. High above the KSC, so they don't accidentally wind up piloting any of the potentially self-destructive ships I design and become little green skidmarks on the runway of progress .

Just wanted to stop by and say thankyou Arsonide, this is a really awesome mod . I didn't see a link to a development / suggestions type thread in the main post so I hope it's ok to post here, I really like the different crew capacity requirements for the station / base contracts but it occurred to me that the first orbital station I built for a contract didn't have anyone actually on it when I completed the contract. Would it be possible to add a "manned" requirement as well, or perhaps if it has to have room for 6 crew then it must have minimum say 2 Kerbals on board to be completed? Could that even lead to crew rotation missions, a bit like the stock rescue missions I guess but to send up new Kerbals to an existing station / base and return the ones already there instead of picking up a random orbital Kerbal? Also since you mentioned spawning POIs for future EVA contracts that got me thinking, would it be possible to use the system that spawns kerbals for the rescue missions to spawn derelict ships or probes that need to be returned either to Kerbin orbit or even landed and fully recovered? And perhaps something similar using the smallest asteroids (or a custom rock type object) that spawns on a planet / moon surface or in orbit which has to be retrieved with the Claw and brought back to Kerbin.

In keeping with Squad's desire not to go down the "K" route for naming the currency the first non-K thought I came up with is: Essarbee Because the more Essarbees we earn, the more SRBs we can buy! And everyone knows that if at first you don't succeed you add more boosters!