ScramblesTD

I've taken to planting flags at KSC in career mode for fallen Kerbalnauts. This one, named after an individual if it's just a single Kerbal. And this one if it's multiple Kerbals on the same flight. A crew, for example. Though in terms of music, I had the girlfriend's spotify playlist running and this started playing once as Jeb's lifeless capsule fell into Jool. A fitting end to KASA's finest. I do miss you Jeb, you beautiful green bastard.

With the first couple of tech levels you can quite easily design ships capable of leaving Kerbin's SOI and heading to other planets. Getting them back however is a different matter entirely until nuclear engines come along. I'm talking about reaching out a little farther than Minmus or the Mun. As for there being no "need" to rescue Kerbals due to their being no gameplay justification, one could just as easily argue that there's no "need" to play career over sandbox. The only thing that needs to be done is what you, the player, wants done.

With the new limitations offered early on by the tech tree, it's safer to send probes as opposed to Kerbals, namely because you can forgo assembling an ascent stage. If Kerbals can't make it home, you have to design and plan a rescue mission. A probe can simply transmit all the data (albeit slowly) and can then be abandoned, or retrieved at later time by means of a manned mission using KAS.

Title: Guske's Landing Description: We left Kerbin as a trio. Now the others are dead. They died a horrible fiery death in the cold blackness of a crater's shadow thousands of miles from home, and all in the name of science. Totally worth it. Situation nominal. - Guske Kerman.

My horribly failed attempt at Mun base resulted in a pretty awesome crash landing. I'll just quote myself from an older thread rather than retell the whole thing.

Either the Kerbin Aerospace Sciences Administration or the Kerbin Aeronautics and Space Administration. Not the most creative names, but gives me a good reason to use my KASA flags.

Somebody needs to make a replacer for the menu music. Now. And call me crazy, but at times it reminds me of the Top Gun theme, which seems oddly fitting.

I think his point was that the science system isn't introduced properly, and no explanation is given to the player as to how the system actually works. Of course this is merely it's first iteration, so that's subject to change. The fact that they just throw parts at you and don't explain how they work or where they should be used is a bit off putting at the moment. Particularly for a new player. This can, of course, be easily remedied by a training mission or tutorial in the final game. There's a pretty big logical gap one must leap over when you equate "dumbing the game down" with "explaining basic gameplay concepts".

What makes you say that? Allowing a probe to send reports detailing it's position and status isn't asking for some groundbreaking new concept. That's kind of what they do; from Sputnik to Voyager. If anything, this should have be a default feature, so good for OP for making this.

I guess along the lines of OPs creepy abandoned ships I had...something back in 0.20 that you could consider an abandoned/destroyed ship/base. It was an ambitious project. A large Mun base that would land itself prefabricated on the moon and then drive around to reposition itself. With the help of Kethane it may have even been able to perform a rolling take off spaceplane style an return to Kerbin. Disaster (read: girlfriend aggro) struck as it ended up descending a bit too early on it's approach to the large flat area I selected. It clipped the top of a mountain range and lost two of its 3 habitation modules, killing all 12 kerbalnauts aboard. After bouncing off the ground and back up into the sky (Would it still be "sky" on the moon?) it lost a wing and yet another hab module that bounced a few times before finally exploding, killing another 6 brave crewmen. The 3 remaining pilots managed to set it down...roughly. It sat there on the mun broken into 4 pieces with a trail of debris stretching back nearly 2k to the top of the mountain. A rescue mission was launched, which ended up failing thanks to a physics bug that cause it to glitch through the ground and then rocket back into space. This brings the death toll up to 19. The second rescue vessel managed to retrieve the 3 survivors of the initial mission, but sadly its parachutes were ripped away in Kerbin's atmosphere killing them in addition to the three rescue craft operators; in the end the original mission had no survivors. The death toll now stood at 25. I ended up launching another Mun mission that was a much more mundane and and quite a bit less...deadly. The new base launched a two man rover team, which thanks to the kerbal attachment system now carried a mini autonomous rover with it. They were dispatched to look at the derelict and plant a flag at it's resting place. I stupidly used the mini rover to explore the the debris in more detail and eventually ended up driving into its open cargo bay (after trying to ramp myself over the robotic arm for 10 minutes) which somehow caused both the mini rover AND the cargo bay to explode. Which sent a flat structural panel flying and almost ended up destroying the manned rover. Never went back there again. Part of me almost thinks the place was haunted by 25 Kerbalnauts who never made it home. And of course, Kerbal ghosts would manifest themselves by making things randomly explode or fail horribly. ____ Ah, damnit. Accidental necro. :l

Damn this makes me wish for either an FPS or RTS that has KSP levels of physics simulation when it comes to vehicle damage. That part where the space plane destroyed his target and the blast sent bits and pieces of his wingmen spinning out of control was badass.

Running the game off my SSD and I'm getting the 2-3 second delay most others are mentioning. Do people really have ADD to the extent that waiting 3 seconds to play is literally worse than Hitler?

I imagine career mode will probably give you a monthly budget, as well as a list of possible assignments of varying degrees of difficulty. Obviously the easier ones will give less money but alternatively will require less advanced craft to complete. So yeah, something like the grant system. "Land an autonomous rover on Duna: 11 billion Kerbal bucks. 7 on initiating, 4 on completion." you'd have to throw together a rocket with that 7 billion or risk dipping into your bank for a possible profit loss.

I've heard quite a bit about Squad saying that aliens aren't going to be featured in KSP, and if by aliens they mean the sentient space faring kind then I agree. Or when they say "no aliens" do they mean nothing, not even microbes? Because that seems like a real missed opportunity for career mode, having to design a rover or something that can for example find algae on laythe or microorganisms on Duna.

The pioneering spirit behind spaceflight is innovation and invention. Nothing gets technology moving and drives people to invent and innovate like a good ol' fashioned war. Besides, it's fun trying to use SRBs and sepratron powered missiles to "dispose" of failed space plane designs. Or using my Mun station to launch an orbital strike on KSC (managed to get with in 500 meters of my target on that one. not bad for doing nearly 3k/s entering the atmosphere.)