Lord Aurelius

I wouldn't really say there's much hate, but there is a lot of concern for the future of the game and frustration with the devs based on how they handled Curse, 0.90 and 1.0 (and now the PS4 announcement), and also with the fact that by and large the devs appear to be distant with the community and haven't done a very good job with communication and PR around these issues. The general tone of negativity likely to a large degree comes from the fact that when Squad announced their intent to go for 1.0, the community loudly voiced their concern and Squad basically ignored it. When 1.0 came out with some major bugs and a serious lack of polish and balance (i.e. another early access update, but not anything like a 1.0 release), many community members felt that Squad didn't really care what they said or really knew what they were doing, and so burned a lot of goodwill with the community. In this light, the community (understandably IMHO) is concerned with the future of the game and how the PS4 development is going to (further) affect the PC version when the game we have now still needs so much work. The recent (major) aero rebalances in 1.0-1.0.4 also haven't helped either, since the game is still in a major state of flux and craft that worked fine in 1.0 failed in 1.0.2, and the same thing happened from 1.0.2 to 1.0.4.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I HATE anything about this game (if I truly hated it I would have long since abandoned it and wouldn't even bother with the forums anymore), but there are definitely some major things that disappoint and frustrate me. The devs are sitting on top of a mountain of potential that has only partially been realized, but the whole premature 1.0 release and pushing for the PS4 before the game is really even done have really disappointed me. What we have now is still an early access beta product that still needs a lot of work, but has the potential to be something truly great. Specifically, these are main frustrations with the current state of the game: Bugs (memory leaks in particular) Poor balance and progression (most of the values still feel like placeholders, tech tree is still a mess) Very unpolished presentation (compare the textures of the new parts compared to the old ones, GUI in general, poor audio effects) Career mode doesn't feel well thought out and ultimately is just a grind to unlock the tech tree (contracts, strategies and astronaut training are ultimately meaningless, once you have a satellite you can get risk-free funds, strategies are a joke, training is pointless since probe cores give all the pilot benefits and science is easy to come by, especially with the lab) Science system needs an overhaul (a points system for science doesn't really make any sense, especially when these points are used to unlock the tech tree) Planets are quite boring in general with few exceptions Lack of EVA interactivity and things to do with bases/rovers Overall, I don't hate the game, but I am frustrated with the developers and their lack of respect for what 1.0 actually means in terms of software development. The current state of the game is fine for an early access title, but not for anything I would be proud to call 1.0.

The slow forum is likely a combination of the novelty of the whole 1.0 thing wearing off and a lot of people being on summer vacation now. For me personally, I actually haven't been playing KSP much at all recently, I'm kind of burned out on the whole thing since 1.0 didn't do anything to bring stability to the game (and actually made it worse) so I'm hesitant to do much with it until things settle down. That and I have a large backlog of other games I can play in the meantime. It's still interesting to keep an eye on the forums, but I've definitely been doing quite a bit more lurking and less posting since I'm not really invested in the game at the moment.

@Svm420 I would be willing to help out with that (with Yemo's blessing) once things stabilize a bit. It sounds like Unity 5 is going to change a lot of things on the physics side so it doesn't make sense to me to put in a bunch of effort before that point. If Yemo approves, a Github setup would be awesome and make it a lot easier for everyone to contribute and hopefully stave off modder burnout by distributing the workload. Yemo's done an amazing job with SETI, but given the circumstances I can totally understand why he's not terribly motivated to put a bunch more effort into this at this point.

@Yemo Sad to hear that SETI Balance Mod for 1.0 is postponed indefinitely at this point, but I totally understand where you're coming from. My hope is that in a few months after we get 1.1.x (I assume there will be at least a few hotfixes for an update of that magnitude) the game will be stable enough to make a full balance mod viable again. Even if you're not up to doing it, what you've done is demonstrated that there is a large group of players who desire such a mod so someone else can pick up the torch if necessary.

I wouldn't be surprised if the peaks of activity occured on Tuesday afternoon/evening right after the devnotes.

Multistage bottle rockets on the 4th of July. Tape a few together and stagger the fuses so they ignite in sequence. I got a 5 stage one to work once, but 3 usually works better. Just make sure that the last rocket burns before the first one explodes or you get rockets flying off in random directions (although it's even more kerbal when that does happen).

After reading both the devote-that-really-should-have-been-an-announcement and Harv's Unity 5 article that should have been the devnote, and from skimming this and the other threads, here's my perspective on things: Squad (especially Max) REALLY needs to work on communication with the forum community. The devnotes is no place for a simple picture that should have been put in the announcement section, and a lot of information was posted on other sources (reddit, twitter) that only made it to the forums via community members. The PS4 FAQ was too little too late. Communication failures from Squad aren't really a new issue, but this was an especially bad failure. Initially I wasn't happy with the PS4 announcement, but after reading Harv's article I feel a little better about it. I'm still skeptical of their choice of partners, but it sounds like they made a tech demo of KSP working on a PS4 before Squad committed to this, so maybe they have at least some coding skills. Their website and accomplishments list is still atrocious though, hopefully Squad made the right choice with them and it won't come back to bite them later. It sounds like this decision may have been linked to the mysterious deadlines around the 1.0 release. I seriously doubt Squad will comment directly on this, but as others have said the little bit of information we have on the timelines lines up. The Unity 5 update sounds like it's progressing nicely, hopefully we won't have to wait too long for 1.1, but I would rather it be delayed and stable than early and buggy. Hopefully the game will finally get a proper balance/polish pass this time since it didn't really get one for 1.0. I hope Squad backports the PS4 UI and control scheme to PC once they're done with it (as an option, definitely not as the default) for those of us with gamepads who like to connect our PCs to the TV occasionally and play on the couch. I don't have a PS4 and don't plan on getting one, so the existence of a console version doesn't really mean anything to me, but I don't have a problem if one exists so long as the integrity of the PC version is maintained. If it's optimized well, it could provide a decent low-cost alternative compared to a gaming PC. Ultimately, I wish Squad success in this endeavor, so long as the PS4 version doesn't further negatively impact the PC version (1.0 is already done, but it sounds like now it's providing some benefits for the Unity 5 update).

My favorite part of sandbox is building big rockets. Go for your Mun landing, then build a bigger lander with a rover and land that. Or build an all-in-one space station and launch it in one big launch. I've also had a lot of fun building a practical modular rover with a docking port on the back that can take a bunch of different payload modules (science, fuel, ore, etc).

The K2 Command Pod should be exactly what you're looking for. It has the same attachment nodes as the Mk1 pod, 1.25m on the bottom and 0.625m on top. It doesn't have an IVA unfortunately, but otherwise is a very good capsule.

The stuttering seems to be pretty consistent regardless of how long I leave the game running (I'm still a few hunded MB below the limit) and it didn't start until after I updated some UI/plugin mods. Note that it doesn't show up in EVA right next to a vessel, only when I'm actually focused on a vessel so all the same parts are loaded in both cases.

Those are the ones complaining about the new aero system and that nothing flies anymore. That is not my issue in the least, the new aero system is much better than before (though some of the parts still need to be balanced properly for it). I take issue with the fact that so much of the game still feels clunky, unbalanced and unpolished. As for the new features of 1.0, I'm paraphrasing what another forum member said (don't remember where or I would directly quote it): At least Kerbal Clamber is a useful new feature that hadn't been addressed by mods already.

Like many others have said, KSP is an awesome game, but it's not ready to be called 1.0 yet. I'd put it at 0.27.2 right now. It still needs a lot of polishing, balancing, and just plain finishing (especially career). I think by the time Squad told us about it, the decision had already been more or less set in stone and nothing we could have said would have really changed anything (I guess they did extend the experimentals period by two weeks, I shudder to think of the bugs that would have made it through on top of what we've had to deal with already for 1.0). We still needed to say something though, we don't want Squad getting any ideas that we approve of shoddy development practices.

I just recently updated several mods after being notified by avc (didn't pay close attention so I don't remember exactly which ones) and now the game stutters while focused on any vessel in flight. The game ran fine before and still runs fine in the VAB/SPH, in the menus, on EVA next to a craft, etc. The debug log doesn't really appear to show anything, but the game freezes about once a second for about a half second and resumes, making the game nearly unplayable. Are there some tools on the debug menu I'm overlooking that might help diagnose this, or alternatively, has anyone else recently had this issue come up (within the last few days) and identified what was causing it?

Definitely, there are many games out there that require click-spamming, but KSP isn't one of them (unless you're trying to right-click on a specific part of a rotating craft anyways).

Sounds good to me, especially if they were reasonably heat resistant and could be deployed early in the descent. I often find myself wanting something besides airbrakes I can deploy high up that will stabilize my craft through the heating phase. Maybe something as simple as heat resistant metal cables trailing out behind the craft?

A user over on my stock science tweaks thread reported that the telemetry report experiment was duplicated when both stock science tweaks and SETIctt are installed. Can you do a similar tweak as what you did for the HRB for the science experiment to ensure that the science experiment isn't added twice to probe cores, or would you rather have me do that on my end?

Thanks for the detailed writeup. The experiment name change was due to another user at the end of the previous page pointing out that I was using the same name as an experiment as another mod. It was actually called telemetry report initially, and then I changed the name to probe report to try to have a common experiment definition that crowd sourced science could use and another user had similar duplication issues to what you're seeing now with SETIctt (look on the first page of this thread). I'll talk to Yemo and see if there's a simple way to disable one of these experiments if both are installed so there won't be duplicate buttons.

I've had two Logitech mice that had the switches fail. The failure manifested itself as failing to register a click, or registering a double click when I would only click once. I think they've had some ongoing quality issues for the last several years where someone high up decided that saving a few pennies on a quality switch was more important than selling a quality product. Needless to say when the second one died, all it took was a quick email to customer support and they sent me a brand new mouse, no questions asked, and said I could keep the one I had so at least they acknowledge that there was a problem with that model (G500). I still have an old MX-518 that works great though (was nice to have when the other mouse stopped working reliably and I was waiting for the replacement). So anyways, the failure of mouse buttons is actually a relatively common issue, especially for cheaper (quality wise, not necessarily price) mice.

I found out about these recently and thought they would make a good addition to KSP. Dual Thrust Motor Basically the idea is a SRB that has a layer of fast burning fuel over a layer of slow burning fuel so it starts off with high thrust but then "throttles back" once the first layer has been burned. This could be done with tweakables in the VAB to set the ratio between fast and slow burning fuel to achieve the desired thrust profile. I don't have any experience writing plugins so I wouldn't know where to start on a mod like this so I'm putting up a request in the hope that someone will pick up the idea.

One of my Apollo style builds after failed launch but successful abort. This was from around 0.25 or so, the rocket fell victim to the limp noodle syndrome. The best part is that it spontaneously disassembled once that Kerbal (don't remember which one that was) got a little closer and the physics engine kicked in.

I'm not sure what the real life HRB values would be, I just did a quick balance pass against stock to put them between SRBs and LFBs in terms of ISP. I know that some real life SRB's have thrust vectoring (Ariane 5 I think), I don't see why you couldn't put a similar gimballed nozzle on a HRB. If you find any more good information on real life HRBs, let me know.

In terms of pure dollars per hour, KSP is a great deal, but it is actually very expensive compared to pretty much any other indie game, including big-hit sandbox titles like Minecraft or Terraria which can easily offer as much playtime if you really get into them. When comparing KSP to more linear, non-sandbox games, yes there are some that are terrible with short, pathetic campaigns, but the good ones offer amazing story and/or gameplay that is necessarily limited in length because it's authored content and it's clear the developers put a lot of effort into crafting the experience. With KSP, we have a great framework that allows us to unleash our creativity, but for the most part the actual content portion of KSP isn't really that great. Poor game balance, placeholder graphics for most things, missing audio, poor UI, barren planets, not to mention that we still have significant memory leaks. Basically, we're being asked to pay full release price (and then some given the going price for indie games) for what is still really an unfinished early access game. That fact right there makes it overpriced right now IMHO. This sentiment may change after future updates, but at this moment I really can't recommend this game to others unless it was on at least a 50% sale.

In general, the #1 bug I frequently run into are those incredibly annoying memory leaks. CTDs are not fun. For non-crashing bugs, I've had some fun messing around with some of the bugs (kraken drive, claw planet destroyer), but Squad really needs to fix them at some point. Although I saw one video by Scott Manley where he summoned the Kraken trying to build a massless rover with KAS that was hilarious. Still, bugs in general should be fixed, although I could forgive them for leaving in a few extremely situational, hilarious bugs that you have to intentionally work at to activate (so long as they aren't gamebreaking). Such things tend to result in quite entertaining youtube videos and design challenges to find the most elegant/most awesome way to activate them.

It's a definitely overpriced considering that 1.0 is still really more like 0.27 and it still feels like an early access title. Once the devs actually get the game to a state that matches what a 1.0 product should be (i.e. no more placeholders (graphics and audio are still mostly placeholders), full balance/polish pass, proper career mode), then I would definitely consider it to be a reasonable price and be able to recommend it to others again. As far as cost per hour, it's very good, but there are excellent free sandbox games like Dwarf Fortress that you can easily spend just as much time on, not to mention Skyrim is available for $5 now on sale and has more mods than KSP for near infinite replayability.