derbal

I was just coming here to say the first few levels of the tech tree should be way easier, but I guess every other player in the world is far more elite than me. Heh Particularly, I think the Stayputnik should come earlier, like level 1 or 2. That way I don't have to resign myself to killing the first few Kerbals as a matter of course. I should probably also be able to build some kind of basic rover right from the beginning. It would be nice to drive out to a landed capsule that didn't quite make it to KSC, to retrieve those precious science points early on. Oh, and maybe a boat to get floaters. That should be safe, considering boat technology pre-dates spaceships by several thousand years.

So you're saying the underlying structure already exists. That's good. But I don't like how the current version of Kethane wraps the map around the planet model without any option to display the information in another way. It obscures the terrain, and floats above it so it isn't always clear exactly what it's referring to, depending on how irregular the surface is. Displaying it on a 2D map (the way they used to do it during the space program in the 1960s!) would be a lot clearer. I'm fine with someone doing a map display as a mod. I'm using something like 30 mods, so what's one more? I also don't see a problem with "locking in" a common method. Why does everyone need to reinvent the wheel every time they want to do something map related? We just end up looking at a bicycle wheel, a wagon wheel, a steering wheel, and a cheese wheel. If someone offered a common wheel framework, it would eliminate a huge chunk of the work, and maybe we'd see that small market for mapping features expand a little bit. And it would be a lot cleaner and more consistent.

I'd like to see a common mapping infrastructure that add-ons can hook into, such as ISA MapSat, Kethane, MechJeb, etc. It would be a lot cleaner to have one window or screen to show flat maps of the various planets' surfaces that can have additional layers for the different add-on map types, and can send picked coordinates to add-ons. The maps could even start out blank until the planets are mapped by a spacecraft. It could show the positions of all landed craft and ground tracks for things in orbit, and have user-placed markers and labels. ISA MapSat partially does some of this, kind of. What I have in mind is something a lot more robust.

In the action groups, the propellers have a 'toggle Reverse' action, but it would be very very helpful to have explicit 'Normal Thrust' and 'Reverse Thrust' actions. Toggle can get messed up when you have multiple engines toggling in different ways in different actions.