tntristan12

"Dude, it's Squad!" -Regex That said: I absolutely agree. It would make designing rockets so much easier!

Couldn't "cities" be accomplished using a particularly refined form of ground scatter? If you drop a booster down in the middle of one, it wouldn't be too hard to make the scatter elements within the blast radius disappear (impacting funds and reputation accordingly).

Interesting.

NovaSilisko: I can see where you're coming from. I do kinda hope you're wrong, because it sounds like upgrading to U5 after releasing 1.0 would, at bare minimum, be a good thing. I would hope that if they do decide to go that route that they take the opportunity to heavily optimize the existing structures of the game using the new tools at their disposal.

I recently ended up in a deadly flat-spin with one of my early rocket-propelled aircraft, and Jeb was unable to recover it. At the very last second I EVA'd him and jumped out of the plane without a parachute. He bounced about 50 feet into the air, but was otherwise unscathed. The plane crashed behind him and exploded, looking very much like that picture in the OP.

You've listed several experiments that I would argue are all "returnable." I still do not think you could provide an explanation for how observations of things floating around in a chamber can be returned without destroying the experiment.

Mystery Goo and Materials Bay should absolutely NOT be recoverable for full science. In fact, recovering them should yield no science at all! Think about it. You run the experiment in zero gravity at -200 degrees Celsius and then suddenly re-enter the atmoaphere, experiencing temperatures upward of 500C and gravity of 5 Gs or more. There is no earthly way that the experiment is intact after that... Now, examining in a laboratory module on the other hand...

Why not be able to create our own categories like we can for parts in the VAB? +1, by the way.

Meh. I think that's silly. I really wish the time outside reflected the time in the game. For that matter, I think time should progress normally in the VAB. It absolutely kills my immersion.

I'm actually a big fan of interstellar travel and warp drives. I would love to see a stock implementation somewhere along the lines of what HarvesteR mentioned a long, long time ago (and probably doesn't remember). However, I do believe the scope is more in line with an expansion pack than the base game. What an expansion it would be, though!

Probably, but I hope not. These older suggestions were often ignored because of the young state the game was in. However, now there is no reason to not at least promote them. The devs have announced 1.0, so this is the time to really consider cool features like this. It's worth a look, no matter how old the OP.

I'm actually glad this got necro'd. Old suggestions like this were often left to fade into obscurity because the game was so young that it was considered "not ready yet" for this level of polish. I think, now that 1.0 is around the corner, the devs *really* need to consider code optimizations like this. I'm not holding my breath, though. To quote regex, "this is squad we're talking about."

This is something I would really like to see in KSP before 1.0. Right now, Courage and Stupidity mean absolutely nothing. They are just arbitrary values which, while they might determine what facial expressions a kerbal has, do absolutely nothing for gameplay. I can think of a few ways this could be fixed! First off, I would like to see either the stupidity bar inverted (intelligence) or the courage bar inverted (cowardice) so that the stats can be more easily compared at a glance. High bars == good (or bad), and low bars == the opposite. Furthermore, I'd like to see them add some more attributes. I'm not sure what those would be, but more attributes would be nice to round out the kerbals' personalities. If we can have something like that, I think it'd be a good idea to tie those parameters in to how kerbals perform certain tasks. For example, high intelligence kerbals get more science from experiments; high courage kerbals make better pilots; and maybe high... I dunno... resourcefulness? ingenuity? something like that would make good engineers. Now, when you hire a recruit kerbal, you should be able to specify their job for them! Bill, Bob, Jeb, and Val are all pre-assigned, but recruit kerbals can be made into whatever role you want. However, the rate at which they gain experience, or perform their tasks might be dependent on their personality parameters. This way, parameters aren't just a random bar that is of no use to players. It can be used to make decisions about hiring kerbals and assigning them to their respective roles. Thoughts?

I've never understood why renaming a craft was tied to the power it had in the first place. If I point at a thing and say "that is a television", I don't expect somebody to come smack me and shout "you can't call it that! It's not plugged in!" I agree on both counts EDIT: Then again, what is the map view but a less omnipresent version of the tracking station?

Like I said: other star systems, massive physics updates (e.g. relativity), high concept science stuff, and the ability to properly establish colonies on other planets are all things I believe would fit the scope of expansion packs that Squad is referring to.

I think the problem is that science experiments are not persistent. Now, by that I mean that when you conduct an experiment anywhere in the solar system, you can lug it around wherever you want, then take it home and collect the full science reward. Well, that is fine for certain things like soil samples, but completely breaks down for other experiments. Take, for example, the science jr. parts bay. Say I take it into zero gravity and I observe its behavior. I like to imagine that my scientist kerbal up there has taken a note of what he has seen. That information may be transmitted for what it is worth, but that is it. If the scientist wanted a more in depth look at the bay, then under the current system they would have to fly it back down to Kerbin and have it looked at in the space center. Do you see the problem yet? Once I fly my parts bay down to Kerbin, it is no longer in zero gravity. How on Kerbin can I then yield more scientific value from that than I would have gotten by just transmitting the report of the experiment? The experiment was destroyed the second I applied acceleration! So let's revise this system. Say that, instead of flying it to Kerbin, I lift a laboratory module into orbit and dock it with my science jr. Now when I analyze the experiment, I have a full suite of instruments I can observe it with. I can get more science analyzing it in the laboratory module than I could have gotten by transmitting my results as my scientist saw them. In this example, the science jr. experiment has a hierarchy wherein the laboratory module is worth the most science, transmitting the data is worth less science, and returning the science bay is worth no science (unless I reconduct the experiment on Kerbin). Other experiments should have hierarchies as well! For example, returning a soil sample would obviously yield the most science. Analyzing it in a laboratory module would be worth less, and transmitting the data would be worth little (but some) science. Something like this would engage the player more, and require that they strategize to gain the most scientific value from their experiments versus just attaching a bunch of science modules onto a probe and ditching it back in the atmosphere to collect full science on each.

One time I set up an orbital rendezvous *too* well, and sent a 500 part ship crashing into my 1500 part space station... Fortunately, the explosion was so huge that the game crashed and I started the rendezvous over again.

To be fair, the revised ending to ME3 was free.

My interpretation of that plot is that it only depicts within certain tolerances. It seems that there are buttons that allow you to show the tolerances (i.e. you could see where 10% of the resources are in the areas you have scanned. I would imagine that the actual distribution is continuous.

That's a bit of a strawman, don't you think? Nobody is saying "DLC" (which it has already been stated is NOT planned) would limit your access to KSP in its final state. Furthermore, not everything that fits the scope of an expansion pack (I say expansion pack because I believe if they go that route it will add significantly new content and be able to stand alone with all of its features) is possible to create in an add on due to the limited access that modern have to the deeper code that runs the game.

If they were to release an expansion, I would love to see something involving interstellar travel to procedurally generated systems. Yeah, I know they said they don't want to procedurally generate the kerbol system because they want a universal experience that people can talk a out, but surely it is reasonable to provide some uniqueness for extrasolar planets. If they went that route, perhaps they could devote an expansion (or part of one) to high-concept science fiction ideas like space elevators, solar sails, warp drives, things like that! Relativistic effects would be cool if they had engines which could get you moving really fast like that. I would love to see an expansion devoted to colonization of the kerbol system. Perhaps including the ability to establish space centers on other planets, which function like KSC, and from which you can build and launch vessels. Maybe terraforming could be part of this?

Very fair point. I stand corrected. Still doesn't make much sense for heliocentric orbits though, since you never actually come close enough to the sun to worry about crashing into it. You're preaching to the choir on that one. Yes, it is unrealistic, and as somebody who is taking a graduate level course on spacecraft navigation I can attest to the fact that determining a spacecraft's position in space is no trivial thing. However, keep in mind that nearly everything about KSP's UI is designed to make it accessible. Hell, I don't think even Orbiter went into that level of detail - requiring you to determine your position using celestial navigation or GPS or whatnot. I think something like that is a reasonable break from reality. Besides, how exactly does pinging the Mun with a laser beam tell you where you are at relative to the datum? By that logic, the system is already broken anyway. Also, I do agree that surface mode should give you the radar altitude anyway.

I've been pulling for this feature for a long time. I think I would go one step farther and say "give the altimeter a datum toggle like the speedometer has." For example, the cycle might go: 1) distance from surface of planet. 2) distance from center of planet. 3) distance from currently selected target (for docking, since the altimeter is basically useless when you're trying to dock) For bonus points, tie it to the speedometer datum toggle, so 1 corresponds to surface mode, 2 corresponds to orbital readout, and 3 corresponds to target readout. EDIT: It'd be really nice to toggle them independently, but have them switch together when the transition is automatic (like when going from surface to orbit mode) Tangential aside: Heck, let's make the Pe and Ap readouts in the map menu measure from the center of the planet instead of sea level, because that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever!

Wait... my [bEEP] alarm just went off... computer! Scan that post! Hmmm... I see something. Computer! Enhance that last part! What was that? "So far"? Ah. With a glowing endorsement like that, clearly 95% of mod makers and the entire KSP dev team are just delusional, and perhaps trying to keep all the x64 to themselves. Please Squad! Give us our broken x64 if it means milint33w can continue to show us how amazing he is at bucking the trend and proving everyone else wrong with brilliant evidence such as "it works great so far." This can only end well.

Definitely one of my favorite mods, and an absolute must-have. SO glad to see it is being worked on again!