Kaito

First off, congratulations to Squad for 1.0. It's been a long journey for them, and this game has been an incredible ride from the first time I bought it all the way in .12. The release has brought a ton of much needed features to the game, and while it is in a much better state than .90, I still feel it needs some polish to get that nice shiny feel that releases need. (As a note, I only dabbled in contracts once, and quit almost right away. I don't like the way it was done, so I only play sandbox. My experience with contracts and science comes with what other people tell me and with what I read.) *Solar Panels deploying in the VAB/SPH: Landing gear, service bays, cargo bays...all of these can be deployed in the VAB/SPH to see how they fold out and such. Why are solar panels left out? *Connections of control surfaces: I feel I have become complacent with this. Every time I try to place a control surface on a wing, it always defaults to an unexpected rotation, or sometimes refuses to connect in ways I expect. This is in the spaceplane hangar, not the VAB. When you grab a wing or a fuel tank or whatever, you just expect it to connect in a certain way. Control surfaces don't do this, and I imagine it will be very frustrating to new players who aren't used to it. *Heat sensors: Now that parts can heat up and explode, we need to be careful how we build things. I had a plane where the engine exhaust was accidentally heating up a tail piece, and it was exploding before other things were. This was infuriating because I had absolutely zero idea why or when it would explode. I have a solution to this problem: Heat sensors. This would be a separate part that you would attach to parts of your craft, and then based on your pilot experience, it would tell you certain information: * Pilot level 0 or 1 would allow you to right click on the heat sensor to detect it's temperature * Pilot level 2 or 3 would put a little display on your screen (maybe above the kerbals?) whether a part is at over 80% it's heat capacity or not. * Pilot level 4 or 5 would have a permanent display (above the kerbals?) of the parts temperature. This give mores use to skills, and a very real use as well. *The Delta-V readout should tell you possible destinations: Maybe once you upgrade one of your buildings more, like the tracking station and mission control, the Delta-V readout would tell you things like "If flown perfectly, you have enough Delta-V to reach Jool." This would be a purely mathematical calculation and not take into account possible inaccuracies in pilot flight (maybe as you upgrade those buildings more, you get given a little percent deviation?) *Adapters for older parts, fuel containers for newer parts?: Look at the adapter for mk2 to 1.25m: It's in the fuel category. Look at the adapter for 1.25 to 2.5: It's in the structural category. Why? Why is there this dependency between the adapter locations for "old" parts and "newer" parts? *Invisible struts connect intersecting parts: In that plane, you can clearly see how the tail pieces are clipping through some wing parts. What happens when I actually launch it? Exactly what I expected. What I propose is that when you have parts clipping through each other, some invisible struts connect the two parts together (in this example, the tail piece connects to the wings.) Why do it this way? Because this means that the part strengths are what you would expect, and it also means that you can move the tail pieces without messing up the rest of the connections. As an extension to this, I also propose that adjacent wing pieces (ones that are barely touching) should also be connected by these invisible struts. It would make building planes a lot easier and honestly, a lot more professional than having ugly, visible struts connect everything. While none of these are exactly simple to do, I feel that these changes would greatly add a lot to the game. Even a few of the "small" ones (like better logic for control surface connections and solar panel deployment) would give it a more polished feel that a 1.0 release deserves.

We've had the same editor (give or take) for the better part of KSPs history. While this editor is amazing in it's scope, I think it's missing something that would make it one-of-a-kind, and exactly the kind of thing that many artful KSP people would like: The ability to change/place the plane or axis of symmetry, and having reflection symmetry in the VAB/rotational symmetry in the SPH. Try this at home in the SPH: Lander can as your root part, then add the rockomax node to it. Now start building on one half of the node, and try to add symmetry to it. When I did this, it didn't work. (This might have been a bug.) This forced me to build one half of my plane, then copy it and bring it to the other side. This was more of an inconvenience than it may appear at first because...struts? Fuel lines? Small CoG/CoF changes? It becomes a bother QUICKLY. It'd be nice to just set my plane of reflection symmetry to the center of the node and call it a day. What about in the VAB? You have rotational symmetry on the core booster, fine. But lets say for some reason you want to place batteries on the boosters. Sure, you can place them 4 separate times, but then they might not be exactly the same height, and then it doesn't look right...Why can't I just tell the game "I want the center of my rotation symmetry to be focused on THIS part, not the root part." Back to the SPH, what if you want 4 batteries placed around the fuselage of your plane? Sure, you can guesstimate the right angles, turn your ship 180 degrees and do it again, but they might not be exactly in the right spot along the ship, and it just looks bad...wouldn't it be easier to just hit a button for "Rotational symmetry" in the SPH? Again in the VAB, you're building a space plane. Why? Because you need a launcher and it's just easier to build a launcher in the VAB. But now with the space plane, it's just so hard to get the symmetry's EXACTLY right because the VAB lacks reflection symmetry. Why is it not allowed that I have that kind of symmetry in the VAB? Here is what I'm envisioning for a solution to these problems: Next to the angle button, there's another button of that same kind: Rotational or Reflection symmetry. Click it to change mode. In the VAB, the "up" direction would be facing the camera. Problem solved. But what about changing the axis'/planes of symmetry? Maybe next to that Reflection/Rotational symmetry button, there's a smaller one that is just "set the axis" or "set the plane". This would give your mouse a part that can attach to nodes in the same fashion that we are all familiar with, except it has a few special properties: It can attach to nodes that are already consumed by connected parts It does not consume a node that it is placed on. It can only be rotated in 90 degree increments/it is restricted to the 6 regular directions (Facing/pointing away from the starting camera, pointing the left/right of the starting camera, pointing up/down when viewed from the starting camera) And boom, your new symmetry reference is set. To reset it to the root part, click a "clear symmetry" button. Obviously this will lead to some interesting possibilities for the symmetry to come up with, so I know it will take some work. In my head, i'm thinking that setting the symmetry would just treat the part that it attached to as the root part and work from there. The beauty of this feature is that it doesn't have to be implemented if it doesn't want to be, or would be a perfect idea for a mod/plugin. The VAB/SPH would continue to work exactly as it has worked for forever, and if you don't want to dabble in the these features, you wont have to. But if you are feeling artful/adventurous and want to try it out, it suddenly adds a whole new level of awesome to KSP. I do not have the skills to write this myself, which is why I'm suggesting this and not working on it.

While this is true that it adds technical stuff to the game, If the values are just numbers that have a random amount added or subtracted, then it won't interfere with gameplay at all. Those who want to mess around can do exactly that and not care about the values. Those who are concerned about the numbers will probably look them up, or they will just have to do enough flights to get numbers they feel are accurate enough. In any case, no matter what changes are made, I think this point still stands: The changes should reward people who do things but not penalize those who don't do things, no matter what those "things" are. Do you want players to just build rockets and make them explode? Great, just don't penalize people who want to take the game seriously. Want people to explore the outer moons of Jool? Awesome, just don't penalize people who want to make giant rockets and watch them explode. Squad has done this INCREDIBLY well so far, I just feel like this needed to be said

THIS. This is exactly what I had in mind, but couldn't put into words. I'd be cautious with forcing good players to resort to pointless explosions, though. You want to reward behavior you want (Making gigantic rockets explode), but not hold back those who stray in a different direction. Maybe another idea for having relevant experimentation would be an engine monitor part that you attach to your engine. Obviously the Main Sail is better in a Vacuum, but the Nuclear Engine is better than all of them, just because it's designed differently. Having a ship designed specifically for testing different engines at different altitudes would mean "discovering" the nuclear engine sooner, merely because instead of just passively observing the engine and assuming it's fine, you actively tried to make the best of your design.

Something like this, yes. I like the idea that doing something makes you better at that thing, but I've seen this system abused (For example, putting a rock on the "use magic" key and walking away.) It wouldn't be that landing hard is better, but landing on different planets, different terrains, landing speeds, etc all contribute to better over-all landing legs. The Kerbals obviously have no idea what the surface of the Mun is like until they return some samples, which requires landing on it. All they can do is take a best guess as to what the surface is like.

That was just an idea for structural science. Another example would be returning surface samples from different planets. These surface samples would be analyzed and thus unlock better landing gear for landing on certain terrain. The whole idea is to give some practical purpose for what you're doing

It seems to me like the way Science is currently, it rewards tedious grinding and doesn't offer much fun. As Scott Manley showed, you can max the tech tree in TWO flights (I know it's Scott Manley, but still). I do, however, like the idea of science. So I thought of a different kind of science: Experimental science. Instead of random goo experiments that offer arbitrary points to unlock completely unrelated things, the experiments could be offered in a few categories: Structural, Electrical, and Rocketry. The structural one is what comes to mind the easiest for me, so that will be the one I explain. Imagine having a large rocket, one prone to flexing. Put some "stress meters" on it (stress meters would be available in the utility/experiments tab), and let her loose. The stress meters would measure the flex of the rocket, and once you've done enough experimentation with it, you will have enough Structural points to purchase improved parts. But that's not all. Once you've maxed out the tech tree for structural parts, the stress meters would still have some advantages. The more you stress your rocket, the more the Kerbals learn about stress, and the stronger they can make the connections between parts. What I'm saying is that the more you use your rockets and the more you push them, the stronger they will become. This system will reward those who do the crazy and outlandish, because they would end up with overall stronger rockets. This has a much stronger feeling of "science" to me. In addition, we could put the old school experiments (Gravi-tron) to good use. Say, for example, you want to do a landing/return on the planet Eve. Obviously you want to get to the highest point, right? Since I assume KSP doesn't model different Mass Concentrations, we can assume that the highest point also has the lowest gravity on the surface. So, strap a gravi-tron and some sort of radio projector onto a basic survey sat, and put it in orbit around EVE. Now, turn on the Gravi-tron and wait...eventually you'll have a map of the gravity field on the surface of Eve, with red being areas of high gravity and blue being areas of low gravity (It would also be useful if this map could be overlayed over the planet in map mode). This may not unlock any science points, but it would provide something useful to the player: A map of the gravity field around Eve, which could be used to have more complicated missions. I know this all seems idealistic and quite difficult to implement, but I feel like this would be a much better way to do science. It rewards experimentation and encourages the design of crazy rockets.