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.)

My first Mun landing occurred at night on a slope. I had also not completely mastered killing horizontal velocity yet, so the Kerbals got to roll their lander down a hill for almost 15km before coming to a stop under a mun arch. Then a large piece of debris rolled down and destroyed the lander. On the upside one of the kerbalnauts got out before the crash. Downside is he never made it home.

With my current save I'm trying to do a "real" space program by not randomly sending Kerbals to horrible fiery deaths. They're still dying horrible fiery deaths, but hey it's the thought that counts right? That means I start by launching a series of probes and exploratory rovers to investigate a planet, then I deploy a larger rover to scout out a landing site, and then we do a manned mission. So far I'm only up to Minimus.

Preparing to launch my first Duna UAV as a proof of concept. Talking to friend over ventrillo, push to talk key is left-ctrl. The rocket powered down just enough for the payload container to push the nose down sending us into a spin and crashing into an anchored airship. Two(Four with the UAV and airship anchor/truck) vehicles destroyed before we even left the launch pad. My Duna program is off to a great start.

Got him once. Sadly he died after trying to detach his rover from the lander while we were doing around 120 m/s. Ok so maybe I hit space bar on accident, that's not important. Point is, He did manage to glide down a slope before ramping off a rock formation and exploding on the landing. I'd like to imagine his last words were "Jeb...hold my beer" before embarking on his one man mission to get sweet air or/and die trying.

I believe it was confirmed in another thread that the new models are not resource intensive enough for you to have a notable degradation in performance. Better textures don't always equal more expensive textures. Unless of course you're running on an Apple II or something.

It's difficult to have sympathy in this case. People are playing a game that (while absolutely amazing) is still obviously a work in progress. Steam even has it listed as being early access, so they can't use the "I'm new, I didn't know" excuse. You don't play games that aren't in a release state and expect them to be completely stable nor should you expect backwards compatibility from updates. It's like asking us to have sympathy for someone who presses their hand in a fire and complain about being burned.

This.

Rover deployment is entirely up to you. Most of my designers either have the rover mounted at the bottom of the lander, and then dropped to the surface before touching down or if the lander is tall enough, dropped after landing and rolled out from underneath the main craft. Usually though, the rover and the lander are two separate parts the same original craft, with the lander deploying first as the rover waits in orbit, then it gets deployed to the landing site via skycrane.

I don't care about the broken saves. Sure I may have stations and bases, but I've also got screenshots of my work, that's all I need. Besides, now I get a clean slate to start on AND a shiny new space center to work in!

If a DLC adds content to the game thats one par with, or better than, release quality then I'm all for it. Borderlands 2, Crusader Kings, Damn near every MMO, and most Bioware RPGs are good examples off this. They make DLC packs that actually expand upon the original game in a meaningful way. I'm sure Squad will take a similar route as they seem like a great team. Now "horse armor" DLCs on the other hand....