Draft

Holy smokes, looks like my timing was apt. I just found this last night, and my hat is off to you- this is outstanding stuff. Well done!

I haven't been able to thoroughly investigate if it's the case, but I have a suspicion that aerial survey contracts aren't quite taking the terrain height into account when generating waypoints.

Yeah, looks like somebody else figured out how to fix that little niggle

Then announce a proper 'kerbal management' aspect of the game, where you CAN assign your kerbals to do tasks based on their skills and experience. Don't shoehorn magical buffs into normal manual gameplay that muddles the skill of the players.

It seems to me you haven't read the devnotes or Max's post where they outright said how they're planning on Kerbals affecting spacecraft performance.

And it's a flawed argument because, you know, vessel control actually is mapped to player control. And has been for the entirety of KSP's development. People see themselves as the pilot because they pilot the ships.

Your reasoning works for the thrust perk, if you turn your head and squint. The SSMEs were also overthrottled, if I recall correctly. Engine efficiency is the biggest, most blatant, most nonsensical magical ......... Axe it.

I still disagree that the baseline performance of perfect PLAYER input should be incompetence

So you're arguing that unresponsive controls is good game design for KSP. I disagree completely.

It's functionally equivalent, if not better.

Which would be fine if I wasn't manually controlling said ship

Except for when they've entertained the idea of training kerbals to fly missions on their own with an experience system. Do you think every time a player lands they use the same amount of fuel? Do you think that One astronaut always uses exactly the same proportion less fuel than another one? If it's minor enough to not make a difference there's no point to having it anyway. Claiming it won't be a big deal is a diversion.

KSP isn't Skyrim, nor should it be.

I've been yelling about kerbals influencing craft dV elsewhere, and I'll yell about it here. No bueno.

"RCSBuildAid "fixes" this, treating landing gear and a few other parts as massless so at least what you see in the editor is consistent with what you see in flight." Will this respect MM configs to re-enable physics for some of those parts?

What? No. This is the opposite of reasonable or appropriate.

If Squad has no faith in their ability to develop, why should we?

You're free to think that, but I believe it's the exact approach that one shouldn't take with early-access development. Building barely-functional frameworks and fleshing them out later is fine when you have a plan and nobody has to actually deal with said half-finished features in gameplay, but with early access you have players along with you at each stage of development. A half-functional framework can be appreciated as work for the future, but it also sticks out as a sore thumb of bad gameplay so long as it sits there. You also have to keep our faith that you actually have plans for these frameworks, and honestly? For all your PR training Squad seems really wishy-washy and undecided about the direction the game should head, on top of being inconsistent. If you want to develop early access in that manner, you have to take that into account.

Far more of a disappointing statement than the whole secret update, that's for sure.

There are a lot of things in KSP that open up exciting possibilities, but that doesn't mean anything if Squad doesn't pursue them. We still only have three bodies with biomes, tweakables have only been utilized to a minimal extent, that sort of thing.

Yeah. "This is underwhelming" doesn't mean it's a bad feature necessarily. Just that it isn't remotely deserving of all the hype that's been placed upon it by the community and the devs.

Hence the idea of 0g-required distilling, making it more worthwhile to source the karbonite from offworld.

I'm... not a fan of that, honestly. Just because the CRP means that every mod that bundles it can use every resource under the sun, doesn't necessarily mean it should. Installing Karbonite to extend ESLD should just do so through interaction with karbonite itself and alone, in my opinion.

Karbonite, I haven't kept up with KSPI

Maybe I'm just not using them right, but particle collectors aren't nearly productive enough around Kerbin to be remotely useful for karborundum distillation, at least not without time-warping for years at which point I'd say the exploit potential is negligible.