lazarus1024

Have you seen the Saturn V taking off? RP-1/LOX engines produce plenty of smoke, as do a number of other propellant types, like hydrazine/nitrogen oxide propelled rockets (or at least I think the later does). Granted, we aren't talking massive smoke plumes miles long on them, but they are not "clean burning" like LH2/LOX powered rocket engines are.

Likely an increase in performance. AMD64 instructions have twice the execution registers that x86-32 does. This is where the tendancy for 64-bit programs to run around 10-15% faster comes in. This is ONLY true for "x86 compatible" type stuff though. RISC (ARM as one example) has vastly more execution registers already available and I don't know that there is a different between ARMv7/8 and ARMv9 64-BIT stuff in terms of execution registers (there might be, I just don't know). So odds are, there would actually be a slight increase in performance depending on how stuff is excuted in the code and int vs float calcs. I'd say odds are good the way the physics calculations are performed and since they are performed within only one thread, that 64-bit would likely lead to a small but noticable gain in performance (again, in that 10-15% range).

Scratch what I said early. Reading comprehension > me. I missed the "in career" part. I haven't yet gone to Duna, but I am darned close to. I might do it tonight (I have all Tier 4 and some of Tier 5 done). I am thinking I'll send a probe carrier with an orbiter and a lander. I'll do a manned mission later. I am thinking I might do Eve first though.

After Duna was introduced, naturally, since I started playing before there was anything other than Kerbin and the Mun. Duna still owns my heart as my favorite destination. Relatively easy to get to, interesting. Its got it's own moon that can be fun to go to and can make an interesting challenge as a tripartite mission (hit up Ike, then go to Duna and then back to Kerbin).

Laptop under 200, desktop under 300. The later is more a cumbersome issue than anything, my desktop can easily handle 400+ part ships with aplumb. The laptop starts really chugging once I approach 200 parts. I've done 300 part ships, but I get around 15fps most of the time, which gets annoying. The biggest I ever did on the laptop was a Moho mission which was almost 400 parts with the satellites, unmanned rover and space station. I had to end up leaving the manned lander behind and sending it on a seperate mission when I tried to dock it with the mother ship and I was getting 2-3FPS in Kerbin orbit, making it impossible to dock (manned lander was around 80 parts...rather cumbersome). Even then at something like 350-380 parts I was chugging at around 15fps or less most of the time. Fortunately it shed parts quickly. I could have probably reduced the part count by at least 10-15% now with some of the newer parts that would aid in construction, as on orbit assembly resulted in a lot of duplicate parts when the whole thing was assembled (as each jumbo orange tank has to have an RCS tank, 8 RCS jets, a probe core, a couple of batteries and 4 solar panels and then docked up 4 of them to the core, which is 60 extra parts, at a minimum).

Easy way, introduce a 2.5m NERVA engine that weighs a bunch more and produces around 300 thrust. The 1.5m sucker is smaller than a real life NERVA engine, so it makes sense that it produces less thrust. It also weighs somewhat less than a real life NERVA engine does. So a heavier, higher thrust 2.5m NERVA engine makes complete sense. I am hoping with the revised research tree coming with the next release, engine improvements is one of the things we get. The stuff in KSP is rather good, but the engines are low in terms of ISP for everything. A good LH2-LOX engine can produce in the 410-440s range and as mentioned, the better NERVAs in testing before the program was cancelled hit 850s and in theory with some improvements based on 1970's tech, let alone 21st century stuff, probably could have hit over 1,000s, maybe even 1,100s on a solid core design. So the engines are they are, are fine...but it would be nice if you can unlock something up around tier 5 or 6, that, say, is "Fuel injection optimization - Kerbal scientists realized that if they just inserted part A in to part B backwards, the explody thingies worked so much better!" that increases ISP on all liquid fueled engines by 5% with a tier about that that increases IPS by another 5%. Have something similar in its own branch for NERVA engines. Maybe also have something that is materials advancements that reduce the base weight of engines and fuel tanks by 5% or something. That sort of thing. That way there is more than just parts that you can unlock, you can make parts better. At least slightly.

Interplanetary travel and return. Though the later I don't do much. My issue is more time related than skill related. I just don't have the play time I need anymore. That said, I've returned missions from Duna (ground) and Eve (orbit) for manned missions (not including Mun and Minmus). I've also returned probes from Dres and Jool. Pretty much there isn't a mission profile that scares me, other than, sort of, Moho return, Tylo/Laythe landing and return and Eve landing and return. Everything, but Eve, would be because my laptop would groan at the size of ship required for the mission. Eve...because, well I think Eve scares anyone whos smart. Only the geniuses and the stupid undertake an Eve landing and return (with no cheats).

Oh, and either whoever writes their articles has little background in science or else not good at math. One of their other articles talking about "sci fi weapons" when mentioning rail guns, talks about how the naval rail gun demonstrator used 10.6 million joules! Or enough electricity to power the average home for a year! Uh...except 10.6 million joules works out to about a quart of gasoline, or enough energy to power the average american home for about 3 hours. Its still a lot of energy when you consider it is being discharged in a fraction of a second, but by comparison an M60 105mm cannon has a muzzle energy on the order of 11-14MJ...or actually more than the naval rail gun demonstrator. IIRC the Navy is looking at, its either, 20MJ or 40MJ as the basic "first installation" rail gun as a future weapon system. Something about on the level of the M1A1 120mm gun up to closer to 155mm gun. Of course firing a much smaller projectile and vastly higher velocities, so that it can strike targets a hundred+ miles away. I digress. Math/science errors that bad just annoy the piss out of me.

It is, to a degree, less about the life support/supplies and more about "space" and ancillary systems. You are going to have to find a way to replenish the life support and supplies that each person would consume whether it is a shuttle, ship or the transfer ship. So you'll have to carry it on the shuttle anyway. The perks are that you can have a much larger ship, for more personal space (don't knock the merits of having more than 5m^3 to yourself for months on end). You can also build in more efficient systems, such as more efficient CO2 scrubbers, waste water reclamation, laundry facilities, etc. You could also have hydroponics/aeroponics bays which could help out significantly with both the life support and food supply issues (as well as waste water treatment/disposal). These likely wouldn't be particularly feasible in a small ship, but if mass is less of a concern because you can add on to the ship on each cycle, then you can end up with a largely self sufficient ship, even including what it takes to support passengers. It would take a huge amount of resources to do though and it would still need resupply, but there are perks (like thicker radiation shielding, because again, overtime the cost per dV goes way down since you pay once for a launch and then you get many, many, many trips out of it).

I guess I am a massive nerd then. I figured out the game back in .16 in about an hour of play time. I more or less mastered just about everything after about 3hrs of playtime (about how long it took to figure out map mode, get to the mun and put something down on it). It isn't terribly harder, other than having to unlock stuff with career mode, in .22. Also...I don't entirely understand what you mean about constantly needing to run the engine. Its an orbit, you just free fall around the planet. If you have to run the engine, I think you are doing something wrong. Only thing I can think of is you are transmitting data back and running the engine to recharge the capsule. Don't, land the capsule/ship and when you land on the top of the screen if you mouse up there is a "recover" option. Costs no power, gives you a lot more science. Granted I have a lot of play time at this point, but since .22 came out, I've only played for maybe 4hrs or so total and have all of tier 3 unlocked, most of tier 4 and I think one at tier 5. I've also tossed a capsule around the Mun and back and dropped a probe on Minmus (screwed up the descent, so it crashed in to a dozen pieces). It does take a little figuring out, but if you look at all the controls and read just one or two FAQs (or use the tutorials in Sandbox if you want) on the game, it is relatively straight forward. Learning curve is maybe a couple of hours for most people it seems. Some of the more obscure things take awhile to figure out and some skills take awhile to really hone and master (like aerobraking, landing on bodies, especially with no air, back of the napkin figuring out dV needed for rockets, etc).

One of my hopes is that later on antenna type will have some impact in how lossiness of the science transmission. It makes a bit of sense, with a higher gain (higher bandwidth) antenna you can transmit more information in the same period of time. That or SOME kind of mechanic to make it really worth while to be using one of the bigger antennas other than cosmetic.

Honestly on anything lower G than the Mun, I pretty much just go with "jump rovers". Instead of wheels I slap on a few RCS jets, tankage and landing legs and hop around the place. Dres and Ike it doesn't work so great as the gravity is a bit too high to make an efficient "hopper". You can do it, but you can't get far before running out of RCS. Their gravity is also a bit too low to be great for rovers (but its managable if you are careful and go slow). Moho and the Mun are too high gravity for hoppers, but rovers will work okay if you are being careful. I do wish that the ground worked a bit better for friction and that it was a bit harder to high side a rover. Mostly I need to make bigger rovers, but they just seem unrealistically large compared to my landers then if I am not using the smallest wheels and rover body with a seat on it (I know, personal problem). That generally limits me to about 5m/sec safe speed on the Mun with 7-8 okay on flat stretchs and 9-10m/sec pretty much just asking for disaster. Dres and Ike its more like 3-4m/sec to be safe and maybe brief spurts up to around 5 or 6. Any lower gravity bodies I find roving impossible. Duna is pretty good for roving though. Its gravity is high enough to make ~10m/sec roving resonably safe so long as you are being a little careful with the type of rovers I usually make, which is fast enough for me, I typically want to be able to rove within about 15km of a landing site, which at 10m/sec is about an hour round trip, depending on anything I might have to drive around. It would be nice if ion engines worked a little better to power rovers as a fun project, but oh well. Especially for pointing down on low grav bodies.

Oh and I LOOOOOOOVVVVVEEEE the EVA pickups of science experiments from modules. It'll allow recovery from crashed ships and it also makes surface science a lot "better" with landed missions. Send a lander with a lab module and use it as a base camp with a rover. Return the rover and have your Kerbal hop off, grab the experiments and then board the lander and transmit the data back. Hop out and jump on your rover again to take off somewhere else to do some more science. On orbit, build a space station with it and you can launch and retrieve probes, or even have a kerbal on board the station who EVAs to retrieve science experiments from probes so you don't have to worry about redocking with the space station. Love, love love love love love love. PS It would also be neat to have Kerbals on EVA be able to both grab the science out of a module AND be able to somehow recondition the module to be able to do science again for those modules that have a one use limit.

I do also hope that there are at least a handful of science experiments where transmitting them has the same value as returning it, and transmitting can produce the same final amount of science as returning it. I'd actually prefer crew reports and EVA reports to be slightly less than 100% with transmissions (like 90%) simply becase you can debrief the kerbal in more detail later than you could in a written/verbal/video report. Some things though, like temperature, gravity, acceleration, etc sensors shouldn't have any difference in value between a transmitted oberservation and returning it. Mystery goo, science lab, surface samples should all have much higher return values than transmision values. Also, with mystery goo and science lab being one time use would also be nice. I also like that there is a limit on how much science you can get transmitting with somethings. Again, I hope some experiments are changed to be 100% transmision value (like temp, gravity, etc) as it makes no sense that they aren't now. Some should stay unlimited use. Some should be one shot use for that module...possibly being able to recondition with a science lab (because you analyze the experiment with the science lab, and then reload the experiment module) and anything with less than 100% transmission value should have a limit on how much science it can earn you, lower than return value science (say being able to earn 400 science with transmissions of soil samples from a spot on the Mun maybe, but a limit of 600 for return missions, so you could get the 400 science from a bunch of transmissions, but it would still leave 200 science on the table that you could get with a return mission or three down the road).

Also there has been discussion of life support, so once that is implemented, it might be that probe stuff gets uncovered earlier. Combine that with "moar fun" ways to play (I guess) and that SQUAD has mentioned it is just a first cut of the tech tree and how to do science/research. I think we'll find things shuffled around a fair amount by the time the dust settles. Whatever the next release is .22.1 or .23, it looks like there will be a lot of changes to science/research and some tech tree changes. Probably be the biggest change after the initial release. That said, I have almost no doubt that the tech tree will continue to be tweaked in a number of subsequent releases (both as new parts are added to the game, for balance, for new game play types, etc). Money is coming. It might not be in the next release, but it isn't far away based on what HarvsteR was saying shortly before .22 was released.

I agree. I'd just stick to these, but I really, REALLY like the idead behind both. I'd use either 500m or 1,000m for the altitude alarm. I'd only have one for fuel (not RCS or anything else), and I'd set the threshold at 10% remaining. Neither of them I'd have too loud or "alarming". Maybe a "beep, beep, beep" repeating for altitude and the same for fuel, but different pitch to differentiate between them. Alarm shuts off if your velocity is zero or positive in the direction away from the ground.

I think it would be interesting if at some point for transmitting science data distance to KSC as well as the type of antenna being used is taken in to account for how much science is earned. Something like an orbital camera around the Mun should have very high transmission potential, but get around Jool using only the most basic omni antenna should have a lot of loss (because it would transmit very, very slowly). Use a high gain antenna and the transmission value should be higher, further from the KSC. Just a thought to tweak transmission and the antennas a little.

It has some merit. No. KSP I think has the perfect balance of realism and challenge already. I don't want an actual simulator. Yes. It would be interesting, depending on what future additions KSP has, to have something vaguely like Mechjeb as an option/unlockable part. I could see it with especially probes if SQUAD ever adds remote control and light speed time lag to the game (even at 1/10th scale for the solar system that it is now, Kerbin to Duna is still, what? About a minute time delay?). You can control probes and rovers and stuff directly, but at greater distances that'll be hard, so you can just program them to do something instead. I'd only really see it IF remote control WITH delays are added. I do kind of hope at least remote control is added for probes down the line. IE you MUST have a working antenna of some sort, with different ones having different ranges. You can relay through satellites if you want to extend range.

My hope with this is, if you are transfering an experiment to a lab module, that it'll free up the science container, instead of rendering it "used". I do like the idea that some science containers are only usable once, and once you transmit, it is "game over". However, there should be some method to "recondition" those modules. For example, if you have or dock with a ship/station that has a lab module, then you can reuse it. Just a thought on that. Also...NICE! Sounds like a very nice and worthwhile upgrade to research and science is a coming. I do wonder if this is the .23 release, or if it'll be a .22.1 release. Based on where it sounds like they might be, it sounds like a .22.1 release. That or .23 will be a short turn around, or they are getting the research and science tweaking and balancing done first and then will be adding more content to make for the full .23 release. I do wonder in subsequent releases if career saves will always be reset, or if it'll preserve progress.

Okay, I didn't read every single post, because DAMN! But, any ideas on server specs to run just the server? I am looking at super low utilization here. In the near term we are talking one player at a time, me. The thing is, I have KSP running on multiple machines (desktop and laptop), but I almost only play on my laptop, because it is annoying to synch my save between machines. Easily doable, but I am lazy and I don't always remember to do it after I am done with a play session. That means if I switch machines I am playing on, I might have to boot up the other machine, grab the save, toss it on my server, shut it down and then hop on my other machine to play. This sounds like it could be PERFECT to run effectively a synchronized play world. Oh, sure I might not be able to hop in to something I just launched, but the fact that I could be building the same world between the two machines, just generally controlling different missions at any given time is fine with me (and hey, I can board a station launched from my other machine and "take it over!") My server is a dual core G1520 Celeron Ivy bridge based machine with 8GB of memory (its mostly there for storage/file sharing). Bandwidth shouldn't be much of an issue internal to my network, nor ping time. So that is the machine I'd be running it on. Some future date if I keep the KSP bug, and KSP continues being developed, etc, etc I probably would play true multiplayer. My oldest son is only 5 1/2, but he loves watching me play and has played a couple of times himself (mostly launching rockets I've built for him). I could see him able to really get in to the game in another year or two. So playing multiplayer with him would be a lot of fun.

*stares right back, slowly blinking one eye at a time to maintain contact lens lubrcation* I can keep this up all day long. But...uh...yeah, I wants my weekly update! Inquiring minds want to know what might be up for .23. I wonder if it was delayed as the devs are doing some last minute planning to figure out exactly that. I'll grant, .22 is awesome, but SQUAD has just been so good at giving us wonderful things that it is hard to not know what wonderful things they'll be doing next. I really, really, really need to get off my butt and play tonight. A solid week of being sick or my kids being sick has really taken it out of me on having the time and energy to play.

Yeah I just stink at making SSTOs. So I pretty much don't try anymore. I want to try to get decent at them at some point. The other is just generally having time and motivation to play KSP. I love the game, but just lots of time I am too tired once I get the kids to bed and would rather just stare blankly at my TV screen for an hour or two before giving up and passing out in bed. That or I have to do something in the evenings. Over the course of the last 6 months I have been lucky if I averaged 1 play session a week and it might be 3 hours long (sometimes 4, sometimes 2). I'd really like to get back to a place where I can be playing at least two evenings a week, but I just don't know.

Yeah a mid grade video card is pretty much going to allow you to max out the graphics and have no graphically based limitations on your frame rates. Your limitation will be on the CPU side. There is probably no actual maximum where you'd see no return, but the question would be, how big? I can easily push 300+ part ships and stations with no evidence of slow down (IE never see under 30FPS) on my i5-3570 running at 4/4.2Ghz (4Ghz quad and 4.2ghz single core turbos) and 5570 (graphics aren't turned all the way up as my low end card can't handle them, but I do run at 1080p and medium settings, no AA). I can't recall a time I've ever had a ship over 400 parts on my desktop as I play almost exclusively on my laptop (i5-3317u). The laptop is high enough spec to handle most of what I want to do in the game and lounging on the couch or the easy chair in my living room with my wife is more important to me than sitting in my basement office. That'll probably change some in a year or two once we've finished renovating our basement (just finishing touches now) and we also have the spare change to get a nice new TV (until then, the 42" in the upstairs family/playroom and the 32" is in the basement). Then the basement will be the main entertaining room and I'll probably use my desktop a heck of a lot more. So all that said, my laptop can regularly run 200 part ships at over 30fps through most of game play. I do get a bit of launch lag and a bit of orbital horizon view and looking down on oceans lag on larger ships, but it probably still hits over 15fps most of the time and regular play is over 30fps (granted, 768p). The last few releases I haven't done much other than stuff right around Kerbin, Mun and Minmus with a couple of quick probe forays to Eve and Duna as I just haven't had much spare time the last few months (and a back injury over the summer). Earlier on, I did have a bit of a frustrating time with some really big ships in the 300+ part range for Moho and Jool missions, but I am a lot more efficient in design now, so I tend not to need them that big. I won't mind (hopefully) a couple of years from now getting a new laptop and fingers crossed, CPU performance will have gone up a moderate amount (at least 20-30%, preferable 25-35%) over what I have now.

If the planet had an atmosphere it actually might be thaattttt hard to do. It would be real tricky, but you could use the atmosphere for capture, or a straight descent and then for return to Kerbin you could do the same. It would be VERY tricky, but you could do significantly lower dV designs by utilizing aerocapture. Honestly I think that would be really cool to do.

Oh. When was this added, because I never noticed it before? I kind of wish it was closer to just the inverse-square law. That way for things Duna in, you can easily use solar panels. For stuff further out, you either have to go big with solar panels or switch to RTGs (supposing you want to do much). That said, I'd guess for Jool and especially Eeloo you would want to either go dense with solar panels or just use RTGs. This'll get more interesting as there are more things that require electrical power (and before that happens, please allow batteries to store more juice! They last an unrealistically short period of time for basically any load).