Superfluous J

It was in the demo. "Land on Mun and return to Kerbin" was my personal goal. If I could do that, then I knew the game was for me. If I couldn't, I wanted to find out before I bought the game. I must have tried 5 times before I found out that there was this thing called quicksave. I set up a quicksave in orbit, and then - sure of myself now that I knew I could just restore that save and not start all over again back on Kerbin - proceeded to land with no problems (other than being terribly inefficient but hey I was new). I then brought the guys home, again with no problems. Then I bought the game

It's not snap. It's a limit. I can smoothly drag the radial decouplers in and out of the stack as far as I choose... so long as I only choose to have them halfway out. Seriously you don't have this problem? Put an orange tank down. Put a radial decoupler (the one that sticks way out) onto it. Hit '2', and offset it. It snaps nicely into the stack and is forever stuck there until I use normal mode to move it the old fashioned way. Until this mod, of course

Plus, it'd make that tool useful for rockets too.

I've had it happen once. Well, with one craft. I couldn't recreate it with other craft so I'm not sure what exactly caused it. I had a fuel tank below the fairing and a decoupler above it (both the same size), and the fairing (also the same size) came almost straight out for maybe .2 meters before going straight up around my payload. I've made fairings that are essentially the same before and since, and they don't have the problem. Just that one. Spinning the craft (Not even violently, just a few rotations) knocked them loose.

I love it. I HATE that if you even look at the big decouplers with the slide tool enabled, they snap halfway into the stack and refuse to come out. I'll use it for that alone.

SRBs are cheap, heavy, and inefficient. Perfect for the first stage. But you should drop them as quickly as possible. This means that you should not have 2 of them tweaked down to 50 percent, you should have 1 at 100 percent. Generally, you should use a single stage of the most SRBs you can use and not get too high TWR, then get rid of them. Tweaking them down a little is fine, that's just dealing with the coarse granularity in your options. But if you need more dV than a single first stage gives you, you should add more liquid fuel and/or LOX boosters. They're lighter, more efficient, and not having to carry those heavy inefficient SRBs any longer than necessary will save you money in the long run. IOW, SRBs are working just fine, for their intended purpose. We just got lazy because of all the unintended purposes they were good for in earlier versions.

Huh. I don't consider them either a pair or rivals. Just two pilots who - like all pilots - start out in career mode as the most important Kerbals and slowly sink into obscurity as I unlock better probe cores.

Pretty much. I haven't trusted professional game reviews since the 90s and haven't read one - except to see how bad it is - since Lets Plays on YouTube became a big thing. If I want to see if I'd like a game I try the demo and/or watch a few people playing. I can usually tell pretty quick if I want to buy the game. It's not the reviewers' fault, any more than it's a boulder's fault for rolling down a hill and over your car. If they took days, weeks, or months to review every game, by the time their review came out nobody would care and they'd have died of starvation anyway for having not made any money over that time. The system itself is broken. Let me get this straight. I love KSP and think the scores are fantastic and - for the most part - justified. I want the game to do well and am glad it is doing well in the press.

My only problem is that now instead of forgetting to fix all the problems with staging, that before Kerbals have ever invented RCS thrusters they feel the need to include their fuel in all command pods, and disabling crossfeed on docking ports, I forget to check the report before launching and have all these problems anyway. Honestly I'd like to be able to tag certain alerts as critical so I actually get a popup on every launch. I don't want it forced on me, but I'd sure appreciate the choice.

A) Who could have ever guessed, with the name "Danny" Who cares?

You just described every single first experience with EVAs (though half of those didn't eject. That only happened about half the. Now, they've fixed that bug so it only happens about 1/10th of the time). EVA packs is an essential skill in the game and really rewarding when you get it down. Also, it's the only way to really benefit from all the cool stuff in KAS and KIS. I suggest next time you're in orbit you drop a quicksave, EVA, and fiddle around.

KSP is an extremely complex game, and at its core it's hard to play. The game is SUPPOSED to be hard, and for a while the hardness is softened by explosions and teh funnay that so many forum members think is horrible. Some parts of KSP are hard because of UI problems. Right clicking parts and then having to click on buttons (that, if your ship is rotating, are very hard to click) is a core mechanic and it's needlessly hard to do. Bugs in patched conics cause you frequently to not be able to place maneuver nodes or trust what they're telling you will happen. You have to bounce around the Space Center screen, loading and unloading screens when a simple "take me to the VAB" button or menu would be far more elegant. However, most of these things do not become apparent until you have invested a significant amount of time into the game. The amount of time that reviewers simply do not invest. Some parts of KSP are hard because - well - the game is hard, especially for a beginner. You're launching freaking rockets into freaking space, after all, and any misstep along the way can sever your entire rocket stack into two (or more) pieces, explode your parachutes, land sideways, or any of dozens of other outcomes that aren't "successful mission!" And that's assuming you can even get to space, which is unlikely without - again -investing a lot of time that reviewers simply don't have. So the reviewers see this hugely complex system for building rockets. They cobble something together. Then they are presented with this hugely complex system for launching the rocket to space, and they likely fail to ever get there. They have fun, don't notice the problems, see the huge potential that we all see, assume it's actually there because hey the 90 minutes is up and they've got 5 other games to get to today, write up a glowing review, and never ever touch the game again. Really in hindsight it's inevitable.

I install it, realize I'm not using it, uninstall it, and then reinstall it later because I think I'm going to use it. But I don't, so I uninstall it again. Then it repeats.

Note: My goal is slightly different than the goals of others in this thread. I want to balance fairings to the other parts in the game, not to reality. That is a different discussion that IMO belongs in a different thread and I won't discus it here. Using realism to compare parts in the game to each other is fine. Comparing parts in the game to real-life parts without first completely balancing all the other parts (and physics) in the game to reality is not. This is my opinion. I won't try to change yours, don't try to change mine BASES: The Mk1 decoupler (18A) is 0.05 tons. The mk1 fairing base is 0.15 tons. It seems to me that they serve similar functions (Need to be able to explosively disconnect things and support the stack) so a first approximation seems to suggest the mk1 stack separator is somewhere around 3 times too heavy. The Mk2 decoupler (Rockomax) is 0.4 tons. The mk2 fairing base is 0.35 tons. I always thought the mk2 decoupler was too heavy but at least they are similar. The Mk3 decoupler (38D) is 0.8 tons. The mk3 fairing base is 0.95 tons. Maybe a little heavy, but again similar. Conclusion: The mk1 fairing base is way too heavy. The 2 and 3 bases are reasonable considering decoupler masses. IMO fairing bases should weigh the same as their similarly sized decouplers, so I'm going to modify them to mass .15, .4, and .8 tons respectively. FAIRINGS: The Mk1 Structural Fuselage is 0.1 tons. A similarly-sized fairing is 0.2 tons. This implies that Mk1 fairings are approximately 2 times heavier than they should be, assuming they should weigh the same as a structural fuselage, which is doubtful. I think they should weigh less. The large Mk3 cargo bay (CRG-100) is 6 tons. A similarly-sized fairing is about 5.5 tons. This implies the Mk2 fairings are about where they should be, assuming they should weigh the same as cargo bays. The small Mk3 cargo bay (CRG-25) is 6 tons. A similarly-sized fairing is 7.5 tons. This implies the Mk3 fairings are about where they should be, assuming they should weigh the same as cargo bays. Conclusion: Based on the larger parts' similar masses, I'm leaving fairings alone. However, I'd be interested in hearing arguments that fairings should mass significantly less (say, half or more) of the cargo bays. It feels to me like they possibly should, but also that they possibly shouldn't.

I don't think the problem is with: So much as:

I've not tested this, but somewhere on Reddit HarvesteR said you can (after backing up your save of course) edit your persistent.sfs file and remove the entire SCENARIO block that deals with funds. This will trick the game into letting you do everything for free while keeping the rest of the stuff.

You mean, you extend the ladder and the Kerbal can't walk down it? Two quick solutions I can think of involve the gizmos in the VAB. First, try rotating it 5 degrees so it kind of sticks out. Second, try sliding it a very small amount out of the vessel so it comes down outside the decoupler. And in case you aren't already doing it, test things on the launchpad before you fly them to Duna

Not sloppy at all. Maybe they have something they really REALLY want to get rid of, so they want you to get on a Sun-intercepting trajectory so when they toss it out the capsule, they can know it's GONE. As far as removing a single requirement, no. I don't. You could look into the Rejector mod. Its "reject by string" was pretty powerful and in .90 it allowed me to disable surveys on Kerbin and Mun while allowing them elsewhere. Similar should be doable for this one.

I'm surprised it's not 100%. As in, I'm surprised that anybody who would download this mod wouldn't already have ModuleManager installed. It was more of a quip/joke than anything else. I wasn't trying to imply anything, just that ModuleManager is so ubiquitous these days.

I'm a bit surprised that the Venn diagram of people who would be interested in this mod vs the people who have module manager installed is anything but a set of concentric circles.

Time should be in with those other 2, if it exists. I use Distance myself. It's literally the distance between you and the suicide burn. When it hits 0, you hit the gas. Or, if you're a wuss (like me) hit he gas slightly before it hits zero lest you risk exploding in a firey ball at the surface.

Cool thanks. That confirms another suspicion of mine, that the nuke is still pretty good even as low as 10km up. And it looks like the 48-7S can still be a workhorse at any altitude with its competitive Isp and low mass.

If you have a 10km periapsis at Mun, and you burn there to set up a descent and then descend and land, you use exactly the same dV as you would if you circularized at 10km, took a breath, decided where to land, and then burned down to descend. You can save a tiny little bit of fuel by getting your periapsis even lower from way out and then just burning to land when you hit it, but that savings could easily be eaten up in any inefficiencies that come from not knowing where you're going to land and having to move to a nearby location.

Yeah this is a common thing (yadda yadda left beta too soon yadda yadda). F5/F9 fixes it every time.

Hmm, the funny thing is I tend to always be deciding between the 909 and the 48-7S. Not sure what a 3rd engine would be. Maybe just add the 7S to the first graph? I don't know if it's the same now (as so much has changed) but it used to be the 7S was the go-to engine for anything you didn't use Nukes for.