arq

Especially at night, using your map and instruments is important. I agree that the lighting is a tad dark on Kerbin, and a built-in marker for KSC is something that should be added to stock. For now do as other are suggesting, use a flag or two to mark the runway or get a mod to tweak the lighting. Also, even during the day, I use landing gear lights so that I can see how far away the ground is (assuming I'm at all close), since it can be rather difficult to tell without more ground clutter.

1.0.2 is the 1.0 I had hoped for. I was worried it would take them longer to get stuff sorted out, given how rushed the last few weeks of development have been, but 4 days after 1.0 is pretty good. There are still a few minor bits that may warrant tweaking, but I'm pretty happy. Good work, Squad!

I always felt that the airhogged jets that could make over 2km/s on jets alone were a little cheesy. As a person that spent a lot of time on stock and FAR SSTO planes in beta and never really got above 1500m/s without rockets, I don't notice a huge difference now in terms of range. Yes I'm currently just shy of making Minmus and returning, which I've done previously, but honestly my current models have excess thrust so a little more fuel and a better launch profile will probably get me enough. I'm not sure about this fixation with making a 10t plane that can go wherever. There are some constraints that make this really just not an option (RAPIERs are 2t and a LVN is 3t). But if you widen your scope to 20-25t, I'm sure you can get quite a bit more.

The whole point of 'lego wings' is that you can make whatever shape you want. The same goes for procedural wings, but they save on parts which reduces memory and computation. Again, as long as I have a pWings mod I really don't care if they're in stock. But the argument that pWings are not 'Kerbal' is pretty weak. The reason we don't need procedural tanks near as much is that you can make most any fuel tank you could want with 5 pieces or less, so the procedural gains would be small. But some wings can easily require 20 parts, plus the struts to support them, and this many segments makes them difficult to adjust (you can move an entire tank stack at once, but wings move in slices). 3.5m parts were added to cut down on partcount in launchers. pWings would do the same for planes.

Well actually 'delta' is Greek and 'V' is Latin. But that wasn't the point of your post so I agree.

I've had the same experience of tail connectors exploding, regardless of engine location (and on re-entry when the engines are off). Mk2-to-1.25m adapters have the same nasty habit, especially when mounted backwards. There may be a specific issue with backward-mounted parts.

I used the Procedural Wings mod for most of my pre-1.0 playtime. It saves on buildtime and partcount and strutting (a single strut can do a pretty good job of making even a large pWing behave, while lego wings tend to bend on each segment so need many struts) and the pWings we equal in terms of mass and lift when compared to equally-sized stock wings. It's a win-win in my opinion. That said, I don't have strong opinions about them becoming a stock feature. If the mod ever gets updated I'll probably go back to that and be perfectly happy. If there were a stock version, I would suggest that wings have four tweakables. Root length, tip length, span, and sweep. Let each setting be adjustable in ticks the size of the Wing Connector C (or smaller, if you want). The root and tip lengths describe the front-back length of the wing at each end and span would determine the wingspan. Sweep would determine where the tip is placed relative to the root. With these you could create almost all of the stock wing primitives, or any triangle or parallelogram of most any size, with a single piece. These sliders would save the awkwardness of the hold-and-drag used in the pWings mod, and can align things more cleanly to a grid. It would save the user the trouble of adjusting wings with four roots and twenty parts in chunks and cut down on menu clutter by merging over a dozen parts into one (the aero tab is pretty busy). There could also be a Mk3 version that would have fuel tanks.

I've also noticed they're a good bit more effective than they seem like they should be. I am expecting a bit of a nerf. I agree.

The ISRU can feed a single LV-N at a 1/3 duty cycle. I dunno about you, but even in my trips to the Mun (to say nothing of other planets) I really only run my engines for a few minutes on takeoff and a few more minutes at a time after that. I have copious 'sit and wait' time during transfers or waiting for maneuver nodes where an ISRU would be more than happy to churn along. I had some analysis in the OP that suggested that with a little buffering an ISRU can feed multiple engines given this fact, meaning that you can get by with a low but workable TWR. Heat generation is a very nascent mechanic. Not only do I expect significant re-tuning over the next several patches (including 1.0.1), but it is abundantly clear that Squad needs to make parts specifically for heat management and I would be shocked if they don't come by 1.1. So I expect heat issues to diminish dramatically in the near future. The point of the OP is that the prospect of filling up your car with crude oil and hauling around a refinery in your trunk to convert it to gasoline as you drive is a silly one. Even if you could convert 100% of the crude to gasoline, the refinery is heavy and would weigh your car down unnecessarily - you'd do better to stash the refinery in your garage and just have a bigger gas tank in your car. But the mass fraction of the ore tanks actually makes this haul-the-refinery option preferable for large ships. In my mind, the refinery should be a design tradeoff where you suffer additional mass (losing dV) to enable en-route refueling. Engineering, including KSP, is all about such tradeoffs (do I use an LV-N for high ISP or an LV-T45 for higher TWR?). However at the moment the ISRU/ore combo actually allows one to design a ship that not only can refuel but also has less mass (and more dV). The tradeoff is gone.

Oh man I didn't notice they did this! This makes design so much nicer! Good find.

You missed the point. Option C is "Launch a rocket with minimal LFO and a lot of Ore and refine the ore along the way (even without mining extra later) and do even better than launching with just LFO." This is enabled by ore tanks having a better mass fraction than LFO tanks, and is the issue I address here. Yes, the whole point of ore is to be able to REFUEL your ship en-route. The issue is that it is actually more efficient to CARRY Ore+ISRU than to carry LFO (even from the launchpad on Kerbin, rather than mining it), as long as you are carrying >100t.

Yeah there is a definite need for a thermal rebalance of the parts. For example, the Mk2 Cockpit (not the inline, the nosecone version) can't help but explode from reentry heat, even on a modest descent from LKO. Meanwhile, another plane I built with a ram intake into a Mk1 Inline cockpit came in on a more aggressive descent without any serious heating.

Oh I certainly agree. I wouldn't mind stuff tapering off (even lower, maybe 16km or whatever), but it should be *somewhat* gradual. The switch suddenly happens and it's the abruptness that bothers me. The engines blast along better than ever than and then they switch off and you squeeze out the last bits on momentum alone. I'd like them to taper down and find some sense of equilibrium. My issue is that I constantly need to readjust the throttle because the thrust curves work out that you either slow down to a crawl (or stall) or accelerate until the ship breaks up from heat, at least with the turbojet and RAPIER.

My main issues with planes are currently these: Engine Stats - Jet characteristics vary stupendously with altitude/speed. A jet that provides 150kN on the runway somehow can blast 1000kN under the right conditions, then can drop to 0 as soon as you pass 20km or so. I don't usually *want* that much power out of an engine, for one. But I find the wild variability annoying to design around to fly (with most jets, if you don't throttle down as soon as you clear the runway you'll go down in a fireball). Slightly tamer curves would be a welcome change. Autopilot/SAS - I would love some more plane-oriented stability system, a keypress or HUD button would be fine for this. A pitch hold, wing leveler, and autorudder would be my biggest requests, and maybe a roll/yaw switch. It seems that it should be easy to toggle out SAS for this alternate system with a keypress. I would also love to see control inputs as inputs to the SAS controller rather than temporarily disengaging it. If you want ejection seats, there are mods that cover that and give kerbals personal parachutes. That should be sufficient. Maybe someday Squad will add something like that, but I expect it's pretty far down their list (also ejecting isn't really an option at the super-high speeds that most KSP vehicles operate). You can always turn your cockpit into an 'ejection seat' by adding decouplers and parachutes, that sounds more 'kerbal' to me anyway. Flaps already exist. Add control surfaces, set them to deploy with an action group, and invert their deployment (so that they deploy down rather than up). They don't have multiple settings like in FAR, but they still work fine for my purposes. Also, with stock aerodynamics, making them extend back from the wing on deployment wouldn't change them functionally (okay it would move their CoL by a few inches, but that wouldn't be noticeable), the pitch is what actually matters.

I agree the orbit can be finicky to click and an 'impact marker' like in the Trajectories mod would be super useful. Personally, I prefer the orbit being drawn through objects. It gives you a sense of how much speed you will have and how much you may need to change your orbit to avoid an impact. The periapsis marker already disappears when there will be an impact, anyway, that's what I look for.

Alright so the Mk2 cockpit wasn't behaving (kept exploding on re-entry) so I decided to try minimal: I strung together a ram intake, Mk1 inline, 2 FL-T800 fuel tanks (minus a little oxidizer), and a RAPIER. I bolted on two delta wings and a pair of elevons, a delta deluxe winglet as a rudder, an RTG, and a landing gear. It only made around 1000-1100m/s on the jet but still had 1200m/s of dV left in the tank once it made orbit. It would have had a little more if I'd guessed the LF consumption better to balance with the O. A ship big enough to utilize an LV-N could probably make a moon landing and return if it wanted, extrapolating from here. Maybe I'll aim to do that tomorrow. The ship is a little low on lift and has poor elevator authority (a horizontal stabilizer with a proper elevator would fix that), but it flies alright. It re-entered without incident with just maybe 10deg of nose-up during descent. No stalls, airbrakes, or parachutes to kill speed. There's a lot of thermal inconsistency with parts, it seems.

In ye olden days (ie last week) I built SSTOs without airhogging. In both beta and in FAR aerodynamics. I almost never made a SSTO that could make over 1500m/s on jets (except for one time I built a pure jet that I made specifically to make 2000m/s at 40km, and that was 5 intakes for one turbojet), so now only making 1300m/s is not so bad (I can carry some thrust through 1200m/s just fine). Yes it requires another 1000m/s to get to LKO and yes jets suck more fuel than they used to (or at least the turbojet and rapier do), but I would hardly call my 200m/s lost to be gamebreaking. I repeatedly made orbit with two rapiers and some fuel, and had some to spare at the end. Honestly right now my struggle is with getting them *back* from orbit. Until the thermal model gets retuned it seems impossible without exploiting silly things like re-entry parachutes, airbrakes (which are IMO too effective at hypersonic speeds), or extra nosecones (like throwing cubic octagonal struts on the front). The Mk2 cockpit seems doomed to explode using any of the common re-entry trajectories I've tried (though actually the back of my fuselage explodes shortly before, and my engines aren't even back there. I suspect there is an issue with how I mounted the part backwards to taper to a point and/or that it's behind a cargo hold.). The key feature of an SSTO is that they are re-usable, not that they save fuel (they use more dV, though the jet ISP offsets some of this) or are more efficient at getting things to orbit. Yes they are harder in 1.0, but certainly not impossible.

1.0 has some serious issues. I'm very happy with what Squad was *trying* to do for 1.0, they just desperately needed more time to test and tweak it. Hopefully putting it in the hands of tens of thousands of players has accelerated this testing process. So I'm super excited and anticipate that 1.0.1 or 1.0.2 will be a most awesome version. I'm hoping they can get together the most glaring fixes and push 1.0.1 out within a week (or, even better, this week), with any remaining bugs getting stomped with 1.0.2 if necessary. I don't think I'll play much more in 1.0 (at least not my campaign), I'll just wait for a round of bugfixes first.

The fundamental issue at play here is that ore tanks are a lighter method of storing (unconverted) LFO than LFO tanks. A nerf to ore tanks or to conversion efficiency would solve this. I'm okay with the idea of drills 'discarding' the slag material and just storing the pure LFO ingredients, allowing a very high conversion efficiency. After all, conservation of mass and whatnot. But the ore tanks need to be heavier to discourage what was described in the OP. I would say that a reasonable solution would be to increase the dry fraction of ore tanks to 1/9, like LFO tanks, and reduce conversion efficiency to 80-90%. Or to leave them at 1/15 and reduce efficiency to 50%. Then players are incentivized to convert ore at the earliest opportunity, because it will be lighter as LFO, and this removes the exploit of the ISRU as a range extender. The ISRU would still be useful for its ability to process fuel mined along the way - which I perceive was the original intent.

The maneuver nodes/conics are a function of the tracking station, regardless of the difficulty setting. The only meaningful way that 'hard' is harder is that there are no quicksaves or reverts. Now, I most definitely agree that 'hard' should be hard in a different way. Reduced income doesn't actually make the gameplay 'harder' (who has ever gone bankrupt?), just 'grindier.' What I would prefer for higher difficulties is that the rewards stay the same but the cost of failure is higher - perhaps by making ships more expensive (or especially kerbals)? 'Hard' should make the game riskier, not grindier.

EDIT: With the release of 1.0.1, ore tanks now have the same mass fraction as fuel tanks. This discussion is no longer relevant. I expect this may be nerfed in a future version, and correct me if I'm mistaken, but with the release of 1.0: The new ore tanks are overpowered. Not because you can refill them by mining (that's the idea, right?), but because they have a higher fuel fraction than other fuel tanks. This means that it is cheaper (dV-wise) to carry ore than it is LFO (liquid fuel/oxidizer). Ore masses 10kg/unit and LFO masses 5kg per unit. The ISRU converts 1 Ore to 2 LFO, so the mass conversion ratio is 1:1. LFO tanks have a dry fraction of 1/9 (they hold 8kg of fuel for every 1kg of tank), or less for some parts. However, the ore holding tanks have a mass fraction of 1/12 for the small tank and 1/15 for the large tank. In other words, using large tanks you can store ore 67% more efficiently than you can store LFO. The mass of the ISRU and solar panels (or fuel cells), lets round that up to 5t (assuming you didn't have them already), offsets this a bit. But by the time you want around 200k LFO (100t, along with 12.5t of tank) or more, it is actually lighter to carry that mass in ore along with an ISRU and convert it along the way (carrying just enough of the heavier LFO tanks to hold the fuel before it is burned). Now this has some issues. One requires 1.7 ISRU's to continuously feed a single LV-N engine. To make the break-even point your *average* (see the next paragraph) acceleration will be around 0.3m/s at best (though it will improve as fuel is spent), or a TWR of 0.03, meaning it will take close to an hour of burning (over 20+ orbits, most likely) to transfer to Mun from Kerbin. This can be offset by having a slightly larger reserve of LFO so that you can convert it slowly and spend it in bursts. Most maneuvers in LKO last 5 minutes or less (beyond this you can't make Oberth-efficient maneuvers), so stocking ~400 fuel per LV-N should allow this and cost only 0.1t extra per LV-N (you were already paying 0.15t for 200 units of ore tank, so you just pay the difference for the LFO tank). A single ISRU provides enough fuel for at least 18 engine-minutes of LV-N thrust per orbit of Kerbin (and much more at longer, higher orbits), so now you can use 4 (or more) LV-N's to achieve a modest (but playable, for the patient) burst TWR of 0.2. But remember that you'll be in shadow for half that time (when in low orbits) so you'll need extra solar power to compensate (or just use fuel cells, or expect shorter burns until you get to high enough orbits to have enough time to fuel longer ones). Should you do this for every large ship? Not unless you are willing to make long burns. But for fueling stations (or ships that already carry an ISRU), you should store as much fuel as ore possible. Suppose a 200t LFO-only ship has mass ratios 160:20:20 for fuel:tank:misc (where misc is engines, capsules, payload, etc) and a 200t ore-based ship has a ratio of 168:12:25 for ore:tank:misc (misc now includes an ISRU). The ore ship will have 9% more dV for the same payload and TWR while possessing an ISRU (or one could remove fuel to have equal dV while being 12% lighter, offering easier launching and higher TWR). -------------- As an added bonus, the ore tanks have a smaller form-factor (the 1500 unit large holding tank holds almost as much fuel as the 3200 unit LFO tank yet is half the size) and ore is basically free (500kg/cred vs 11kg/cred for LFO), though the size and cost of the ISRU and extra power offsets some of this. Also, by cost it is cheaper to convert all your LFO on the pad and recover the ISRU than to buy the fuel in the VAB.

I am a glider pilot. When landing the standard practice is to run 50% spoilers during approach and landing. That way you can let the spoilers in or pull them out to change your rate of descent so that you hit your landing (and if you are still too high you can do more dramatic maneuvers like a sideslip). While this same procedure would work as you describe for re-entry, without additional controls to help steer the craft you're pretty much stuck on a ballistic trajectory. You can change your rate of deceleration, but you will have a hard time aiming if you're just using this one control. In general the best way to get the re-entry you want is to modify your re-entry speed and angle before you hit atmo. In general I expect you'll be fine using just 0% and 100% brakes, though it still might be neat if there were a toggle to switch your throttle control to a brake control. The usefulness of all of this will very much depend on the details of the 1.0 aerodynamics.

-It is possible to travel anywhere in the system (or to leave it) without mods, once you get the hang of orbital mechanics. -This game is based on contemporary technology with a few stretches (such as ion engines and combination jet/rocket engines), so there is no warp drive. Personally, I don't use warp drives because I find that it takes away from "the journey." But the beautiful thing about this game is that you can get whatever mods you want to tailor the experience for just you, and nobody else can do anything more than whine on the forums about your decisions (and most don't). I would get the game and play it for at least 5 hours stock (without mods) to avoid overwhelming yourself and to get a basics of it (though gaining a true intuition for the game takes tens or hundreds of hours), then start looking into the many excellent mods that the community has developed if you want to go from there. I would strongly recommend this game. I have played it for well over 500 hours, and many players have done much more. It will probably be on sale on Steam for $18 or so during the holiday sale, or worst-case it is on sale now for $22.50.

If you want a "stock-ish" way of getting a larger landing gear, do the following (note that I use quotes to denote what I'm talking about, but don't actually put them in the .cfg file): 1) Find the folder "GameData\Squad\Parts\Wheel\SmallGearBay\" in your KSP directory. 2) Copy \SmallGearBay\ and its contents into "GameData\mycustomparts\" or some other directory of your choosing (under Gamedata). 3) Open "smallGearBay.cfg" with any text editor (Notepad is fine). 5) Change the line that says "name = SmallGearBay" to any other name that isn't used by the game, ie "name = BigStockGearBay" 4) Underneath the line that says "scale = 1" add a line that says "rescaleFactor = 2.5" 5) Change the line "title = ..." to some other name. This is the name that will appear in the VAB, so it is useful to be able to identify your new part (it will have the same icon as the old one). Though this isn't technically necessary. You may also tweak the "cost = ..." field, if you care about that. You could change the "mass = ..." and other parameters too, but since this specific part is physics-less it won't matter. 6) Save your changes and load up the game. This should create a double-sized version of the stock landing gear. The default for rescaleFactor is 1.25, so 0.625 would create a half-size and 3.75 would create a triple-size. 1.25 would be identical to the current version. I used this technique to create a half-sized landing gear and 0.625m jet engines and air intakes (with much less mass, thrust, and intake, of course) because the regular jet engines are overkill for small aircraft. Note that if you forget to change the "name = ..." field, the game will confuse this part with the default one and can tend to mix them up, so don't skip that part.

23km and 1400m/s is plenty to get to space. What rockets are you using? Don't use aerospikes, their too heavy and even at 15km you're basically at vacuum ISP, so the low-altitude efficiency is wasted. LV-T30s work great. If you are carrying any LV-N, use them too (but LV-N's alone won't be enough to get you to orbit unless you airhog pretty hard). When you fire the rockets, pitch up to 45deg until you get apo above 50km, then you can moderate that a bit.