Superfluous J

You're seriously claiming that inability to install games off of the Internet while offline is some form of DRM? Is it also DRM that people without cars can't drive to the store? I have never had Steam refuse to run a game in offline mode, so I can't speak on forced logins or anything like that. I use it frequently enough to be surprised that it happens. Like I said, some games may do it and maybe I just don't play those games. I stay away from multiplayer games, for example, and I could see those having some "must be online" requirement to start because they'd not have much to do if you weren't online. And don't make me shiver by mentioning Uplay. Or Origin. *shiver*

Not true. I play Steam games offline all the time. You can even go in "offline mode" while online and it'll act as if you're ... well ... offline I'm sure a game maker could configure their game (or ask Steam to) to not function offline, but it has never happened to me, indie and AAA games alike.

I like the multiple runways idea. I also like having runways and airports scattered around Kerbin.

Without DRM in digital distribution, AAA titles would not be sold on the Internet. Period. So Steam making DRM palatable and transparent - but still functional - has opened the door for digital distribution in a way that would just not be possible otherwise. I have no problem with Steam. I probably would have bought KSP on Steam if I'd bought it a year later. I was late to the Steam party and was still buying things elsewhere whenever possible when I bought KSP. Maybe I'm less of an idealist today than I was 3 years ago, or maybe my opinions on the whole thing have changed. Who can tell?

I am not complaining any more because I now have access to it but as a previous "whiner," I feel I have the right to answer this. I have worked with beta software, both as a volunteer tester and as part of my job. I knew what 1.1 pre would be like (and I was correct) and I WANTED to beta test it. I wanted to help. More than that, though, I wanted Squad to want me (and the other store purchasers) to help. I - and the others who CHOSE to buy from the store when they could instead have just tossed money at Steam - are the exact people who would be more likely to have the desire to actually help than install it because it's "new and awesome and omg 1.1" and then complain that it's broken and why doesn't [insert mod here] work. So yeah. I suspect "anybody who is complaining" has good reason to complain, above and beyond what you all think of as whining.

In the stock game there is no indication that the hose is flexible and I've yet to see it drain a tank in 0 seconds. The hose can be set to any length and direction (within limits) in the VAB, but that just means it's procedurally created, not flexible. Much like the strut I personally consider it more of an easy representation of the actual mechanism, presented in the way it is because this is a game, not a true Matrix-level universe simulator.

Incidentally, I can't vote on the poll because there is nothing close enough to an "I don't think the stock game has enough, but I think the Docking Port Alignment Indicator is too much" option. I personally just want a marker on the navball.

Maybe we're talking about different things. I'm talking about making sure the docking ports are aimed at each other straight on in a line, not rotated correctly relative to each other. Generally the alignment mods do both but most of the time I don't really care about rotation alignment, just getting the darn things docked together. With smaller ships, coming in 10-20 degrees off is fine but with two hulks that essentially and simply does not work. You can't align them both to some random position on the navball unless you're orbiting really high, as that random position is relative to where you are in your orbit and will change as time goes on. It is totally possible I'm mistaken in some way, but I'll need more than "just align them" to understand why.

It just requires you align your craft with the normal of your orbit, which could be less than ideal for any number of reasons.

And you already have ground altitude in IVA so why put it on the screen? And Apoapsis height is in map mode so that's fine too. You of all people arguing against more and better presented information? I don't even know anymore.

I've said my piece on it, and have access to 1.1 now which has pretty much mitigated any personal sour feelings.

I support the tweakable idea. Being able to turn off/on reaction wheels, monoprop (already available), heat shields, and even tweak crash tolerance - all at a cost of mass and money - seems a great way to allow for a massive increase in the number of effective pods without littering the parts list with dozens of near duplicates. And anything that gets me to actually use anything but the Mk1 lander can gets a gold star.

Conservation of momentum tells us that it doesn't really matter where you put them. They will apply the same torque wherever they are on the ship, even though they technically break other parts of CoM*. However, if a torque-inducing control device is too far from your command pod - and too far from other torque-inducing control devices, then your ship will tend to develop a wobble. If you're (un)lucky, this wobble could be at just the right frequency to shake your ship apart. The further apart they are, the more likely and more violent the shaking. *Reaction wheels don't exactly break the Conservation of Momentum law, but they'd eventually be spinning faster than the speed of light the way they allow you to spin around an infinite number of times.

Quick update: I realized I didn't add my "Docking Port 45" config to the mix. So I did now. I also have depreciated several of the configs as they were to correct stuff that was corrected (or at least changed) in the stock game.

This I wrote up a modman config to set 45 degree orientation lock on ports. I've not implemented it into my games yet because I'm only bug hunting right now for 1.1, but it'll be "my stock" going forward from 1.1 release. I don't personally want to enforce male/female ports (and didn't even know that was a possibility) so don't have that, but assuming the option is there to turn on, a similar config should be able to enable it. @PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleDockingNode]] { @MODULE[ModuleDockingNode] { captureMinRollDot = 0.999 snapRotation = true snapOffset = 45 } } I don't remember what exactly captureMinRollDot means, but it has to do with how close the ports need to be in orientation to start trying to lock. It doesn't affect that they will only dock in one of eight 45-degree orientations.

I did. It's not "What is undeniably broken about the game and what mod fixes it?" It's "what mod can you not live without?" You cannot live without KJR. You've made that clear. The game is not broken without it though and nothing you say will convince those of us who have happily played the game for years without it - and without ever even considering it for their mod lists. As critical as KER is to my enjoyment of the game, I have never and would never insist that the game is inherently broken without it. Indeed.

It's a BETA. And not the watered-down version of "beta" that everybody's been using ever since Gmail came out (is that still in Beta?). It's an actual beta where you expect game-breaking bugs that you shouldn't mod away, but instead report. You don't "play" the pre-release. You bug test it. You found a bug, great. Now stop trying to build ships that you know will fail in that build and try to test other things. Or play 1.0.5. There is no shame in wanting to play a more stable game with all the mods that make it work the way you (but not necessarily some others) want it to.

Which is good, considering you can't accept that prereleases will have bugs that need fixing before the game is ready to be played in earnest. And let me be clear. What your video shows is a BUG. It is reported on the bug tracker and the only reason I'm not the one who reported it is because someone beat me to it. Your poorly constructed ship may snap in earlier versions, but nobody - NOBODY - would argue that many joints spontaneously disconnecting on ANY ship is a "feature."

Note that each challenge is different. Some of them ask you to do EVERYTHING (including build the ships) in stock. Others just state that the ship needs stock parts. This means to me that in the first case, KER or MechJeb in the VAB at ALL is bad. I'd even not build a ship using those tools and then copy the ship in the unmodded game, as that breaks the spirit of the challenge if not the actual wording. In the second case, using tools to help build your ships is fine as the challenge only asked that it work in stock, not be built without the benefit of the useful tools these mods provide. And of course in any case if you're not sure, ask. Most challengers know if a mod would break the spirit of their challenge, and your asking them to clarify will at worst let you know if you want to try the challenge, and at best it will prod them to make their OP more clear.

You're using a prerelease build with a known and reported bug with joints as proof? This is why we can't have nice things.

All we need (says the guy who doesn't know how hard it is) is for the game to check and say "Oh, that's a scientist. We probably don't need to warn the player here." And then be nice and auto-reset the experiment as well, preventing even more unnecessary clicks. Unless there's a (good) reason to remove the experiment from one of these containers and NOT immediately reset it after? I can't think of one and have never done it except when forgetting to.

NavHud puts the navball in the main ship view as a HUD (Hence the name of the mod). It doesn't show the trajectory line, but it does show you prograde, retrograde, radials and normals, and is very intuitive if you're used to using the stock navball. I also vaguely recall the Trajectories mod having a bug where the trajectory line would draw in ship mode. It was a bug because (IIRC at least) it blocked a lo of the view with a large line. It might be possible to take that original bugged code and - instead of removing it - modifying the way its displayed to show a more palatable line that matches the actual patched conics of the game (instead of the predictions in Trajectories based on atmosphere). I'd be down for a mod that does this, especially if it was as lightweight as (and was compatible with) NavHud.

Buy the full game. It's worth it, as you've seen in your free taste.

This is by no means the first time a KSP mod has been forked to do something that the modder expressly indicated that he did not want to happen. The most memorable of them was the whole problem with the unofficially official 64bit KSP build that caused lots of mods to fail, and so modders eventually just started coding in locks in their code so they would not work in 64 bit builds. Others recompiled those mods with the locks disabled, usually in a way similar to this without changing the name. Those workarounds sometimes got to the point of black market trading, it felt. And at best they caused confusion. I remember at the time I personally was confused when I first encountered it. That was a dark time in KSP modding. I'd prefer its like not happen again, for everybody's sake. You posted this right as I was posting. I'd like to address it directly (and thank you for posting here in a thread that may turn even more wrong for you). In my personal not-really-a-modder opinion, you only did one thing wrong: You released a forked version of an existing mod without changing the name. Anybody running your version would - upon experiencing a problem - bug not you but Ferram about it. And that is one of the biggest sins in game modding: Don't unnecessarily bug (or cause others to bug) people who work for you for free.

I've done this several times, though usually I land first to catch my breath before taking off again and then landing on the docking port. I don't think I've technically completed this challenge (same ship doing all of that in that order) but I'm comfortable enough with the idea to know I could. I wouldn't try it on Mun and surely not on Kerbin, though. It's hard enough on Minmus! Like all things in this game, it goes from impossible to how-did-I-do-that to routine (though still demanding) as you develop both the skills and methods.