Parkaboy

Vlad Tepes. Because surely KSP needs more Dracula.

So it is a feature that will be added to the game during beta, but maybe not in the next update. And apparently both this thread and the reddit one are getting close to figure it out. A few ideas that were thrown around both here and there are: - A "versus" mode in multiplayer; - An extra planet with a name starting with "V"; - Something to do with velociraptors; - Something to do with Delta-V.

Max continues tweeting on the subject:

What if "V" is for "versus"? Maybe Max will show us details about a "space race" mode in multiplayer.

Or maybe we're getting "SpaceV" as a stand in for SpaceX? New parts? MaxMaps commented saying that the "V" is the letter "vee", not the roman number 5.

Could it be the development of the technology to build mobile suits, vulgarly known as "mechas"? That's what Project V stands for in the Gundam universe. Although it would be cool if it were just a new planet with a name starting with "V". I vote for "Velociraptor".

MaxMaps tweeted today: Is it something we're going to see in the next update? What do you guys think it's going to be? Anyone cares to guess? People are already discussing it on Reddit.

They like cooking during long travel times.

However, since you are the only judge in the debate of what is opinion and what is fact, things get a little skewed. So I guess I have to be careful to phrase everything very, very carefully. For instance, if you are of the opinion that more realism equals more fun, I would conclude that you would be much more amused by the game if time warp were to be removed, since NASA can't possibly distort time to speed up their missions in real life. I, however would find that crazy - that's my subjective opinion, too. I would imagine that it couldn't possibly be the case. No one would like to do a mission to Eeloo in real time - or at least, in my opinion, they wouldn't like it for very long. So I would conclude that when you state that realism equals fun, you might not be talking about all kinds of realism. My impression, then, would be that you haven't given much thought to what you're talking about.

Let me see if I understand correctly. Whatever you say can't be considered a fallacy, because it's opinion. Whatever I say, on the other hand, is incorrect. On these terms, I guess you won the debate. Congratulations!

It was a poorly phrased statement. I oversimplified things when I implied that "fun" and "realism" were diametrically opposed, when I do think that it's more complicated than that. But the opposite idea - that increased realism automatically equals increased fun - is equally fallacious. I'm okay with people enjoying more realism - but the assumption that only complete realism is enjoyable is ridiculous. Should we remove time warp and do all missions in real time? Some of the arguments I hear imply this sort of conclusion.

I actually agree with you on this. I guess you didn't see my previous comment before posting. It's not as simple as a slider, but of course every game that deals with representative elements (which is the case of simulation games), is a compromise between a simplified mechanic with clearly defined goals and parameters, and the reality from which it takes some elements. But I've been hearing the realism advocates here defending that there's no such thing as compromising realism - one can't take a few elements from reality and leave others, they say. For them, the game can only be fun if it is realistic - when in actuality, it (or the opposite) can't possibly be that simple.

I don't think it its as simple as a slider between fun and realistic, but I do agree that there's a point where increasing realism causes fun to drop. So yes, it's a balancing act.

There are many people on the forums convinced that the key to KSP's success is that it is more realistic than other space games, which, they tend to conclude, means the game should strive to become as realistic as possible, and that would only increase its popularity. That's a fallacy, since other more realistic space sims (such as Orbiter) aren't as popular as KSP. What the devs aim for is rather a sweetspot between realism and fun (closer to realism than to "arcade"), a stylized simulation. But people cringe at the idea of a stylized simulation, as if we could only have sims that are perfectly faithful to reality, and don't really understand the difference between a simulator and a simulation game, which is a gaming genre and not a learning/research tool. For these people, anything shorter than what NASA uses to train astronauts is "arcadey", which makes me wonder if they ever played an arcade game.

In my save, I didn't have rover wheels when I got the first survey contracts, but I had rockets, so I didn't have to walk! Joking aside, the lack of a way to guide your kerbals on EVA to the mission markers (since they don't have access to the navball) is a bit annoying.

The new aerodynamic rules are probably going to be something simpler, more like NEAR than FAR. But drag is likely to become an issue to people who launch huge unprotected payloads. I hope they include stock fairings in the update, although I don't see them going the procedural route, and the larger fairing size probably won't be able to fit an entire Eve lander. Mission profiles will naturally have to change, and nosecones are going to be an obligatory item in most rockets.

One thing I found out a few updates ago was that, while KSP's contract system is a little random and repetitive, and mostly doesn't resembles how a space program works, it does have something working for it: it's flexible enough so that we can choose to play in the way we want to play. Personally, I like to play an immersive game - I don't lauch crafts full of unneeded parts just for testing purposes, and I mostly try to accept contracts that make sense for the game I'm playing. So here I'm asking: are you doing the same? Do you choose the right contracts to make your career game feel alive, or you play for the challenge? Do you accept everything that Mission Control offers you, or do you skip contracts until you get the one you're looking for? And do you use any special strategies to twist the contract goals to your purposes? Let me give a few examples: Satellite Contracts: So you got a contract to put a sat in orbit around the Mun. A good idea is to put a thermometer or another reusable scientific instrument on board, so that sat can be used to do the "get science from space" contracts. But sats usefulness don't stop there. If your sat has an engine and fuel, you can actually move it from its orbit after completing the original contract. This means it can be used to complete a few "survey" contracts (those that require you to get a reading while flying above a certain altitude). Put the sat in a polar orbit, pick the right contracts and you can keep using it forever (though that strategy isn't very good for planets with atmosphere). And if your sat has an engine, you might even use it to do a "test part in orbit" contract! Space Station Contracts: Stations may seem useless to the untrained eye, but they're actually pretty handy to have around. Visual survey missions require a ship capable of landing or at least doing some pretty drastic plane changes. Leaving this lander in orbit of the targed planet/moon and refueling it can be more efficient (or at least cheaper) than sending a new lander for each survey mission. Also, if your station has a lab, it can be used to reset the materials bay and goo cannister, so you can have these instruments in your lander and use them for each new biome visited. "So one station's good", you might say, "but what's the point of accepting multiple station contracts for the same celestial body? I don't need more than one station!" You might be right, but keep in mind that you can dock the new station with the old (as long as you already fulfilled the contract requirements), so the new contracts can be treated as expansion contracts for an old station. It's kind of cool to have a huge station capable of housing over 30 kerbals around Minmus, trust me. Survey Contracts: The cool thing about survey contracts is that they can be done multiple ways. A simple and economic one is by using robot rovers. As long as they aren't visual surveys, a rover can do multiple survey contracts in a planet - but you should be careful to accept contracts to sites that are near the rover's position, or you'll have to drive for hours. For moons with low gravity, such as Minmus, a small ion-propelled probe can be even more effective, since it can have enough delta-v to perform dozens of surveys. So, what do you say? Do you have any special strategies to make contracts work in new ways?

This is actually a good reason agains the implementation of construction time for vessels: it would get in the way of the trial and error that is the soul of KSP. It's a better explanation than the whole "the player could just time warp" that's usually given. But it still leaves open the possibility of time based mechanics for other areas. Personally, I don't feel we need research to take time. With the current system, where we need to unlock the nodes with science, unlock the parts with funds and unlock the tiers with building upgrades, the advancement on the tech tree became much more gradual and rewarding than it used to be. But we could have a few time-based experiments, and I think at least the buildings should take some time to be built, if not the rockets. I don't think the game needs to invest too much in micro-management to make it work. I picture just leaving an experiment running or a resource being collected and while flying another ship, we get a message in the message panel saying something like "The experiment in vessel X was completed" or "Vessel Y has filled its tanks with resource z".

Kegenereku, in no way I'm defending realism for realism's sake here. I'm not interested in too much realism; perhaps you misunderstood what I meant by "disjunction". I don't mean a break between game and reality, but a break between the two temporalities of the game: the distended time of space travel and the instantaneous time of pretty much everything else. I argue for time-based mechanics (whatever form they take; the list on the OP is not a list of suggestions, just an illustration) because I feel they'd match the temporality of the game, not because they would match reality.

There are several tasks in KSP that a first-time player would expect to take time, but instead are completed instantly. This is a deliberate game design decision from the developers. However, I believe that the rationale behind this decision should be discussed, if only due to the fact that many mods have adressed time-based mechanics, and in doing so were able to improve the experience of the game. What kind of time-based mechanics are we talking about? Which game tasks could improve game experience by taking time to complete? Some examples are: Ship Building: putting together a ship takes only the time you spend in the editor, and further copies of that vessel can be created as fast as clicking a button. Shouldn't we have to wait, at least in Career Mode, for our engineers and technicians to build the craft? The Mod Kerbal Construction Time adresses this (and does many other things). The fact that there's a mod indicates a demand for it, although it would make sense to have a feature such as this something that could be toggled in the difficulties/settings panel. Experiments: all the existing experiments are instantaneous. It makes sense for stuff like sample collecting, but it does leave our kerbals without much to do while waiting for the next transfer window. Some mods have experiments that are performed over time or get science points in a steady trickle, such as ScanSat or Station Science. The fact that you can leave an experiment running in a vessel and go fly another one helps creating the illusion that the entire space program is alive and dynamic, and that the kerbals in the currently active vessel aren't the only guys working in a given time. Building Upgrades: re-constructing or upgrading a building in the space center happens in the blink of an eye. This is a bit unsettling to a player familiar with RTS mechanics, or anyone who played a SimCity game. In fact, we expect building something as large as the VAB to take time more than we expect travel between planets to take time, since popular fiction has mostly disregarded the proper size of space. In this sense, it's a big break in our sense of immersion. Researching: unlocking a new node in the tech tree also happens instantly. This means we can advance our technology in huge leaps: getting the payoff from a big science collection mission, one can unlock whole tiers of the tech tree in one sweep. Wouldn't it make more sense to have this process be slower? As far as I know, no mod has adressed this, so maybe people like the system as it is. Resource Gathering: currently we don't actually have a resource collection system, or any form of deep space refueling, but we know it is in the works. Some of the most popular mods that are resource collection to the game, such as Kethane and Karbonite, make the gathering of resources something that takes time. Given how the devs have avoided time-based mechanics, will they go the same route? Before going any further, I think we should adress the motives behind the devs' decision not to have any time-based mechanics in the stock game. It's been stated several times - mostly, if I'm not mistaken, by MaxMaps in the Squadcasts - that HarvesteR chooses not to have tasks that take time to perform simply because the player can use time warp to fast forward to the task's completion. However, I'm not convinced by this justification, and I'll try to show why. Flying in space takes time. So there's one time-based mechanic that is in fact the very soul of KSP. We don't have magic hyperdrives, wormholes or warp jumps that take our ships instantly, let's say, from Kerbin to Duna. A trip between those planets takes months. And yet we can use time warp to fast forward to its end. Does that mean that the time of the trip is meaningless, and we might as well have instantaneous travel? Of course not. In fact, the time warp makes the whole experience bearable - we don't have to wait months of real life time to get our kerbals to Duna. So KSP already has its own temporality. Other time-based mechanics should contribute to create a sense of meaningful in-game time, even if the player can choose to fast-forward ahead. It causes a disjunction in the player's experience that the passage of time is so important to a side of the game while being completely irrelevant to another: in the time it took to get a ship from Kerbin to Duna, the whole KSC was rebuilt more than once and its technology advanced twenty years (if you have enough science and funds saved, you can even do it in the time it takes to get a ship from ground to orbit). It's important to disclaim that, while I'm arguing for greater player immersion, I'm not adopting a defense of realism. More realistic features do not necessarily mean a better player experience, since they may add undesirable levels of complexity (game complexity should be emergent, it should happen as the result of the interaction between simple elements that can be known by the player). A good game strives to be intuitive - which is related to how we expect the game world to work, by relating it to previous experiences (such as reality, but also movies and other games). Let's think about this issue for a moment. Leaving aside the fact that we're used to a lot of these features as they are right now, ask yourself: would the game be more interesting by having more time-based mechanics?

Here's how I design my shuttles, in a few simple steps: 1- Build the shuttle you want with a payload already on the cargo bay. You'll need two sets of engines: orbital engines pointing to the COM of the shuttle, and ascent engines pointing a bit below. It works better if you have two "layers" of ascent engines (I use two pairs of LV-T45s for MkII and three Mainsails in a triangle for MkIII); 2- Add wings to the shuttle. Make sure the center of lift is a bit behind the COM, even with the shuttle unfueled. You'll probably want to do a test launch using infinite fuel to see if the shuttle can glide well with no fuel and no cargo; 3- Add a decoupler under the shuttle and attach fuel tanks. A fuel line should take this fuel into the shuttle. If your shuttle has strong enough engines and reaction wheels, you only need a fuel tank to be discarded. Make sure to plan the fuel flow so the fuel flows toward the center of the tank. 4- Take the fuel off the drop tank to see where the COM is. Reduce the thrust from the orbital engines and the "top layer" of ascent engines to 0. We want to rotate the "bottom layer" of ascent engines (currently the only ones active) so the center of thrust points to the current COM; 4- Now we activate the "top layer" and fill the drop tank, and rotate the "top" engines so the new COT points toward the new COM. We can then use this to our advantage: we can either set up an action group to toggle the "top" engines on and off as the COM changes mid-flight, keeping the thrust roughly balanced, or we can do it by reducing the thrust of the "top" engines mid-flight as the COM moves (though the second option is trickier and works better if you have only a single engine on top); 5- Add the pair of decouplers and SRBs to the sides of the drop tank, making sure to pay attention to the shifts on the COM and COT. We want to keep those aligned. 6- Point the whole ensemble upwards, with the top of the shuttle pointing to the direction of the orbit (usually east), and launch. A good strategy is to drop the tank just before circularizing the orbit, finishing the burn with the orbital engines. Make sure to set up action groups to switch off the ascent engines and turn on the orbital ones. This set up works wonderfully with MkII parts. It's trickier with MkIII, because the parts are heavier and there's a greater chance of spontaneous disassembly during flight.

A few good tips: 1. Put a thermometer in your satellites. Previously launched sats can be moved into new orbits and used over and over again to do the "get science from space" contracts. 2. Use probes for exploration contracts. Unlike sats, these don't have to be new for each mission. An ion-propelled probe in Minmus can do dozens of contracts. 3. Try and upgrade Mission Control as early as possible. Part contracts suck, but they sometime let you have a part for testing that is from a tier in the tech tree that you'll take a long time to reach, since R&D upgrades are so expensive. Get a contract for a part you need and don't complete it until the deadline is near.

I just wish they added some decoration so the terraind didn't looked so empty around the buildings. Like a few bushes and ornamental plants. Check this out:

My logs show 5 XP for "plant flag", but that could be a sum of planting the flag, landing and flying.

To be honest, I'd really rather they didn't do that. Having the game open ended is much more appealing to me, and I believe to many other players too.