lazarus1024

My two favorites are 1) A spent booster which had reached orbit tore straight through the solar panels on my space station about 30 orbits later right as I was about to dock the tug I had used from the space station to go get the new station module from a few kms away. Tore the station apart from the impact, even though it only hit the solar panels. 2) On one of my unconventional landers, I had "dropped" a large rover. In the process of doing that, the lander, now no longer useful, was throttled up and then the rover disengaged right before touch down (sky crane!). I rove the rover away and I guess the angle was just right with just enough fuel left. About 500m from the touch down site and maybe 2 minutes later, the sky crane crashed down ON the rover. (this was all on Dres). That makes it maybe once in 50 times I've used a sky crane where it ended badly (other than misjudging fuel, or descent velocity). EPIC! Honestly those disasters were so terrific they were wins in my book.

Thanks everyone (and sorry for taking so long to respond)!

Still early days for me, but I noticed a Kerbal rescue mission to rescue a stranded Kerbal in Kerbin orbit. What is the deal with that? If I accept it, does that mean I need to park the guy in kerbin orbit, dock and bring him home? Or if I accept the mission, he is going to appear in Kerbin orbit and I can go scoop him up? Thanks!

Which is extremely useful and helpful...but to be honest, I never bother. Only because its annoying to me to time warp (not as annoying now that I can do it in the tracking center, which I haven't really played with yet TBH). I generally just launch, then punch in manual maneuver nodes and if it takes me an orbit or three to line up, so be it. Or at least that is what I do with destinations that are not cis minmus. Other than the rare screw up, I pretty much manage within about 2 orbits, occasionally 3.

It would be nice if they antennas were made a bit more useful, or difference made them more useful I should say. Options I can think of are... Limited ranges, so the "better" the antenna, the further away it'll work Reduced power consumption for bigger antennas My personal favorite, increased science for the better antennas. Lets not make it much different, but in the real world, higher gain antennas allow you to transmit at a higher bandwidth, so more data in the same period of time. Anyway, it would be nice if there was SOMETHING to make the bigger antennas nicer (other than transmits faster).

Gods, I am sooooo far behind the times.

Okay, so who's very first mission with the asteroid add-on pack is going to be to try to LAND an asteroid? I don't mean crash it in to something, I mean land the rocky hunk somewhere. I am thinking it might be conceivable to land it on minmus, but I am thinking larger bodies will be down right terrifying (Eve asteroid landing challenge!) Other question is...would it even be possible? I assume yes on landing it, but I wonder if it would dissapear as soon as you time warped, or if it would be treated more like a ship and it was stay, if landed?

Okay, that is fricken cool. http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/26/tech/innovation/asteroid-rings/index.html?hpt=hp_t2 So Chariklo has rings, huh? So...when are Rings coming to planets, at least, in KSP ? I kid, I kid (no, I don't, no I don't). That is still funky and cool though.

I do hope one of the parts they are looking at adding is a harpoon type device, so that you can "land" on one and then lock your ship down on it. Otherwise with no gravity, it is going to be really hard to stay near one, that and no way to time warp at all, unless you do this and allow it to be "joined" for on-rails time warping. Especially because if you can "harpoon" and asteroid or have some kind of docking anchor to attach to an asteroid, do I smell "orbital asteroid base" anyone!!! THAT WOULD BE EPIC! Yes, I know smallish asteroids, but still, wouldn't it be damned cool to manuever something like a 20m diameter asteroid back to Kerbin orbit and then build a station on/with it? Epic upon epic. I just hope we aren't talking oodles of free asteroids, that or a way to control the number of them that spawn in a setting. Some of us are not on terribly high end machines, so having several hundred spawn might slow things down. That and I hope there is a resonable way to view them in map mode. Maybe a toggle to turn asteroid tracks and positioning on and off?

Can't use the fuel tank as a heat sink. You NEED the liquid hydrogen to stay super cooled there. Heating is a BAD idea. You could conceivably run the liquid hydrogen/Oxygen fuel over a thermoelectric generator heat sink, before it gets dumped in to the combustion chamber, or before it passes in to the engine bell, depending on rocket design, and in to the combustion chamber. Issues is TEG are very low efficiency, no matter the temperature difference you can get, they also tend to be a little sensitive, so you might not be able to construct one that can handle several thousand degrees.

The amount of power robbed is tiny. The Gas generator on a Saturn V produced something like 20,000lbs of thrust. The main engine itself, was what? 700,00lbs of thrust? Each? To generate, say, 10kw of electricity, it would likely utilize something like 200-400lbs of thrust. A very, very, very tiny portion of the energy produced. The reason why such a thing isn't a good idea for anything other than ICBMs, is that those spend a lot of their time under thrust, so the battery requirements are minimal and the amount of time spent under generator is a large portion of the overall "mission" length. On something like the Apollo mission, the total amount of time spent under thrust is an infintesmal portion of the overall mission. So you'd need MASSIVE batteries to store all the charge you needed. Really gas generator powered alternators are a poor option. For something where you'd be under thrust for a large portion of a mission they are great, and significantly better for power to weight ratio compared to any other solution, which is why ICBMs use them. For space missions, not so much. They might make sense on something like a solar powered probe mission, just for the launching vehicle, since in all likelihood the launcher is going to require significantly more power than the probe itself will, between initial guidance, control surface operation, rocket motor gimbals, etc. It might be on the order of dozens of kw or more, compared to the probe which might use dozens of watts to hundreds of watts. A 50-200lb alternator might make more sense powering the thing (even one per stage) than hundreds of pounds of batteries for the 10-20 minutes that the launcher is likely going to be under thrust.

Yeah, deffinitely keyboard and mouse territory. The Asus T100 is a 2-in-1 with a pretty nice dettachable keyboard dock. I can just pop the micro USB receiver in the dock's USB3 port and use my MS arc touch mouse (folds flat to fit in the tablet bag). Same mouse I use with my laptop for everything. It isn't exactly playing ksp on a tablet at that point, pretty much netbook sized...but still very, very portable. I am still just in shock that it'll run it at playable settings and playable frame rates. I'll have to get it a bit more of a whirl with a larger ship at some point to see how it'll handle something in the 100+ part count range on a launch. I will say, the size makes it very akward to try to play with the T100 sitting in your lap, though I'd say that would likely be true of anything sub-13" in size (my 14 inch Envy 4t is already kind of pushing comfortability sitting in my lap playing games, but it will span my lap and sit comfortably. The T100 kind of sits down in my lap if I am sitting cross legged, which isn't super comfortable). On a desk though and it works perfectly. I do need to get a bluetooth game pad at some point for the thing, so that I can play some games with it as a tablet, that otherwise I'd need the dock (for instance, I have FF7 PC re-release on the thing that I am having fun with, but I have to use the keyboard dock for controls, but if I had a game pad I could easily recline back with the tablet on my legs and game pad in my hands to play). Some kind of small/thin game pad I think. Anyway, just kind of awesome to me.

I just loaded up KSP on my Asus T100 to try it out figuring there is NO way it would run in anything resembling playable fashion. Oh crap I was wrong. I set physics to .07 seconds per frame. Quarter res textures, 1280x720, no AA, simple terrain and fast aero rendering (or something like that). It doesn't look bad on the 10.1" screen. Not wonderful, but not bad. On the launch pad with a 37 part rocket (just throwing one together real fast) it runs full speed through most of the launch, with a little slow down if viewing the ocean on most of the screen. Same up in orbit. We are talking maybe 25-35fps not viewing the ocean with these settings, around 15fps or so viewing the ocean. In general it is pretty smooth. A really big rocket would probably bring the tablet to its knees, but the thing handled everything pretty well. I did get a memory error when I went back to the desktop that system memory was low and windows had closed a bunch of running programs (email client, IE window a couple of other small programs), however it ran it within the 1.9GB of system available memory space (I didn't check how much was free while running, I suspect very little). I don't know that you could run mods in this memory space. The thing still ran though and was perfectly playable. It looked fine on the tablet. Not as nice as on my HP Envy 4t, and I doubt I could build 200+ part rockets like I can on my notebook, but you could probably do 100 part rockets okay (at a guess) and still be playable and NOT be odious. I did notice it chewed battery power. In the half hour in the game it burned through about 10% of the battery life compared to a typical 4-6% in normal use. The back of the tablet was also modestly warm right over where I assume the CPU is. Overall layout and screen size wouldn't make KSP overly pleasurable, but if you need a KSP fix on the road, it'll do (with a wireless mouse anyway).

Me 2. Though I typically only use it on the ascent stage and use an LV-909 on the descent stage. Typically 2 person landers though. Single kerbal landers get one each on descent and ascent. I go for vaguely Apollo style LMs in my design, when I can.

Please, please, please. These would be really, really useful. Especially for proper application of 48-7s rocket motors. Thanks!

What the 48-7s really needs is a probe sized dual, tri and quad adapter part to fit on 1.5m rocket bodies. This is really, really needed.

I agree. I think it makes more sense that in the future the closer to KSC you land, the more you recover cost wise from the mission, or you earn more or something along those lines. I don't think it really makes sense to have a science bonus for it.

If I get that upset about resources, I can always install Kethane. I'd be suprised if the devs didn't add something like resources in at some point. It just might be far in the future and might even be part of an add-on pack/expansion someday. I can deal.

I think there need to be two things. One, the cap on transmissions using the lab module needs to be upped. Two, I think as biomes are added, more parts/tech tree needs to be expanded upward. I think think the values should necessarily be increased to get to every level, because if you are stuck grinding past Tier III and you've already done all of kerbin and minmus and are trying to do all the Mun biomes and still can't earn enough science to get past tier III parts, that is a problem. I think we need to start introducing cool new parts and/or enhancements to existing parts to make it worth while continuing to go after more science. I don't think you should have to explore every single spot in the kerbal solar system to unlock every single science branch and tier, but you should have to do at least a good half of everything to do it. Which you don't need to do now and especially won't with Biomes added everywhere. Neat things like VASMIR engines beyond the current top tier that take a TON of science, maybe nuclear reactors to power them (like the SNAP and TOPAZ reactors), that sort of thing. So you have the current top tier, but then you have some stuff even on top of the existing stuff that takes TONS of science. Like say, 2,000 science to unlock a fission reactor that can produce 500 units of energy per minute and weighs 2 tons. 2,000 science to unlock a VASMIR engine that produces 25 thrust, has an ISP of 1,800 and weighs 3t. Etc.

Please do, I'd be curious to know. Thanks!

Bump. Also I love the suggestions.

I do also have issues with the ocean. Occasionally the land too, but mostly the ocean. Both pre and post I am hitting around ~20FPS and no better and doesn't matter the size of my ships. I haven't done sandbox since the update and I haven't unlocked enough tech to build really ridiuclously large rockets yet, but I'd say so far it does seem faster when away from Kerbin/not looking at an ocean. With oceans around, I don't notice any speed increase. Without oceans, it does run more smoothly than before. I do deffinitely not starting the game and scene transitions seem noticably faster. I have gotten some bad lag in the VAB though.

It would be nice to see at some point. As several mention, there is a lot more science than you actually need to unlock everything right now and I assume more Biomes will be added in the future. I do assume more parts and possibly more branchs/steps will be added in the future (hopefully). It would be nice to see other options on the tree or a seperate tree for things like efficiency improvements. As mentioned, I'd keep them very small, but they could still be meaningful. For example, lightweight parts reduce mass by 2% at first level, another 2% at second level and 1% and third level. Maybe better turbocompressors increase thrust by 2% at tier 1, 2 and 3. Better nozzels increase all engine ISP by 1% at tier 1, 2 and 3. Better solar panel materials increase energy gathering by 5% at tier 1, 2 and 3. Better battery chemistry increase battery storage by 10% at tier 1, 2 and 3. They wouldn't have to be cheap to unlock, say 50 science points for tier 1, 150 for tier 2 and 450 for tier 3. It would be vaguely realistic too as materials sciences and others, like computational fluid dynamics improve designs over time.

Yes, but the biggest issue is that you have to take so much fuel to do something like that, the mission would be a bear. Considering the overall low cap on science earned by transmissions now, I think the use cases for the science lab are relatively low. They exist, sure, but they still aren't huge. I think to rebalance it, SQUAD needs to change the mechanic so that the max science earned with a lab is 60-75% of the total, instead of the same 40% cap that transmissions have. THAT would add a large benefit to having a lab. Just my 2 cents. Otherwise I don't see many instances where it makes sense to have a lab. About the only time I think it does is rather low gravity moons, like Minmus or future ones like Ike, Bop and Gilly if they ever gain Biomes, because the dV cost to get to those moons is high, but the dV cost to travel to different spots on the moons is low. So having to schlep half a dozen materials bays and goos along is much more prohibitive than a lab, one of each and then just redock with the thing several times. Something like the Mun, Duna, etc, even with Biomes, you are possibly better off just carrying everything with you, extracting the science through EVA and then returning a small craft back to Kerbin with all the experiments on-board. Overall I like the balance of science in the update, but I do wish that either transmissions could get a slightly higher percentage of the overall, especially for things like Thermometer readings, or else the lab allowed for a higher overall percentage of science by using it. As it stands, transmissions seem to only be worth while for places where return missions are very prohibitive, like Eve's surface, Tylo's surface and Laythe's surface and maybe some out of the way places like Moho and Eyloo. Which again, it would be nice to have labs allow a somewhat higher max science value for transmissions in this case, because a 40% cap is a little low when you are using a full on lab (yes, I realize that if the experiment transmits, say, 40% normally, you'll get 55% total with the labs +15% bonus, but that doesn't help things like the materials bay which is only 20% transmision to begin with, because it still caps at 40% total).

Especially with the implementation of the science archives, I think it would be cool to have a camera science part added. A) You could do science with it by taking a picture with it. You could also then store the image and look at it in the science archives as a cool snap-shot thingy(ies, assuming more than one picture). (Hey, I did science, and look, I can even see the picture that I took in the Biome!) C) I'd suggest it has static orientation based on how you affix the part to your ship and also possibly be able to look out through the camera before taking the picture D) If transmitting it, you get a low resolution image (Maybe 320x200, Kerbal technology just isn't that good), but if you return the image you get a high resolution image that provides more science points (because we can take out the film canister to develop the film instead). Magnometers. Well, because those are some of the most common science instruments on space probes. They'd be able to work anywhere and, is it a shame to have more options for doing science?