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I have been perusing the forums for discussions on how to improve science for weeks, and I really like the ideas presented in this thread! First, I had to decide where it is that KSP's strengths are and where it is they start to break down. I think they break down at a similar point... I think KSP's true strengths are more than just basic rocket design/flight: Engineering solutions to problems. You have a destination you want to get to and explore, and you design a means of reaching that height. You get an idea in your head of something you want to try, and then focus on making that happen. This KSP does very well. Sense of Scale and wonder: KSP has a sense of scale and perspective that never ceases to impress me. You can approach a crater and not realize just how large it is until you land in it and try to rove to the other side. Even with KSP's reduced solar system the effect still holds up. I get that bit of wonder every time I leave the Kerbin system, reminding me of Carl Sagan's pale blue dot. A good dose of fear, and a whole lot of curiosity. I always quick save before attempting landing or anything critical because I don't want to lose my Kerbals, or all the hard work I put into a design that I strongly think should work. I worry about running out of fuel a little too early, landing a little too hard and breaking something but I do it all because I want to accomplish landing on an alien world and exploring it! Then this is where we hit a bit of a snag. As soon as you touch down and cut your engines on another world all the pressure is off, the danger is gone. Along with that is the realization that there isn't much to see and explore either unless you take off and move to another spot on the planet with vastly different terrain. Now the Mun is more interesting to visit and look at with its' procedural craters, still remaining one of my favorites, but even that only goes so far. After reading so many players' thoughts on how to improve KSP's science/exploration these are some of the ideas I have on how to improve the KSP experience: Don't eliminate the sense of danger: Space is exciting, space is beautiful, but space is also dangerous. Anywhere you go in Space, you have to bring what you need with you (unless you can find some resources at your destination). As of right now, KSP doesn't convey this much at all. We have fuel and electricity as our only real limitations on travel, and while that is good for starting out, I really think they should look into expanding this. Now I'm not talking about some super detailed resource mechanic, but at least some kind of abstraction. I think some kind of Life-support is a necessity to convey this. With the new difficulty scaling being worked on this could be disabled if too challenging or scaled back. I think this would be most important on EVAs. EVA'ed Kerbals should have a limited supply of oxygen, and thus a limited amount of time available to be outside the craft.. I'll call this back again in just a little bit. Provide the player with things to explore and discover: We all have that drive to go out and explore the KSP solar system and all its' varied celestial bodies. We plan for the worst to come (or not), plan out an entire mission, we choose the most interesting landing zone and arrive at our destination excited, ready to explore and discover, only to find a lack of things to satisfy this desire. Squad needs to really focus on what I think is the major missing feature in KSP at this moment in time, the lack of anything significant to see or do once you arrive at your destination. If Squad could figure out a way to flesh out this critical phase of the Space experience, this game would be propelled way above where it already is. How?: I have seen numerous good ideas that would go a long ways towards addressing this major issue, and this is my attempt to tie some of those together. Picture this: You arrive at your destination, having mapped out or spotted for geologically significant areas ahead of time either from orbit or with a probe. You have specific scientific instruments and packages on board with you, and a few Kerbals on board your lander. Why? We really can only control one Kerbal at a time. What if the scope of the game changes to where now you can either control one Kerbal and orderthe others, or control all of them like you would in a real time strategy. WHAt?! That's nuts! Go with me on this one. You have some objectives to meet, packages that need to be deployed in specific areas, and scientific experiments that need to be setup and run. You have a limited amount of EVA time/total mission time based on your lander's supplies and your Kerbals crew rest cycles (optional with difficulty), so you work to accomplish all you can by assigning the best kerbal for the tasks that need to be done. The need to collect varied samples from a landing site or certain experiments location setup requirements would justify the use of a rover. The EVA limit would make the thing just uncomfortable enough to remind you that until you are landed safe on Kerbin, you are in a hostile environment. I know there are those against a time mechanic for science, but I think we need something like it. If we do not include some sort of setup time or something that delays your collecting of scientific data, there will never be a reason to land on a planet for more than a just few minutes before taking off again. The story of the KSP Universe could be told and expanded upon through discoveries either you, or the science team on Kerbin makes through your exploration of the solar system. For me, right now the most interesting scientific instruments are the ones that actually tell me something about the planet I am on: the thermometer, the barometric sensor, the graviolli, and the accelerometer. These instruments give you actual data relating to the world around you, and these have made me feel far more connected and interested in the universe than any other. If these types of instruments could be expanded and enhanced, we would be well on our way to a more interesting KSP.

Here is a short album showing the jet engine effect applied to the Skipper with a few tweaks... http://imgur.com/gallery/AO7hb

I made an edit of the skipper that has this effect using the jet engine exhaust, as soon as I get home I'll message you the section to get that look. The J2 is what I think of the skipper as too I made a Saturn V based around that idea.

Cool work! I've been attempting my own such project for a while now and I haven't even started recording footage yet! Just doing a lot of pre-planning, prop building and effects gathering! I can see full well how much work this has been. Loved the staging cameras, but would have been better to see clearer footage of it--the static effect was cool I mean the footage seems to jump and its difficult to see what happened. Really cool cuts for the launch sequence.

Yes and career mode in its entirety would have almost endless possibilities. You already have some basic science experiments and sample gathering...well the next thing being worked on is contracts plus money. The possibilities with contracts... Wow you could go almost anywhere with them. A contract to collect samples from specific spots on a planet...from specific features... To collect scientific data from regions, to build a craft to certain specifications, or to build satellites. You could even have a contract for a sort of space tourism. I don't know, but it is a system that could be expanded on quite a bit along with the current science system. The tech tree unfortunately has to end at some point, but the science experiments and career more in general does not. Heck there is a whole solar system's worth of knowledge to be gleaned from experiments! At this time squad seems to be developing career mode in steps, starting with the early bit of it which of course is more about the new player. As they continue, they will be working on the mid/late game career type stuff. I mean it would have to be, because that's what comes next... The tech tree is not the whole of career mode.

Tntristan- You are right about most, but look at it this way... You can already collect samples with science, so who is to say they couldn't expand the type and quantity to fulfill the same type of element resource mining would? Having resource mining help science would be kind of redundant in that regard. Resource mining almost has to be an "end game" type of activity just because of the sheer logistics of multiple launches involved just to get the mining setup in the first place. As the original resources chart showed us, there were many single-purpose modules for the different of materials that would have needed to be deployed, then refineries, and all that just basically boiled down to making fuel. After all that it would almost be easier to just launch a giant fuel tank. Single purpose science experiments at least get to be used in multiple places and gain you science, the mining modules were for specific resources only. Don't forget the contract system along with science, both of which will allow you to earn reputation; both could be expanded to include nearly anything that resource mining might have done but not as bloated. I'm sure another solution along those lines will come up after we see how the rest of career mode works, it just needs to find a spot to fit in. Brainstorming ideas for it is about the best thing we can do.

I just had major Apollo 11 flashes after reading this! Your experience followed that almost beat for beat! Consider me sold, first thing .23 I am doing an IVA Mun Landing!

I keep seeing this assumption that resources have been "dropped", "scrapped", or "indefinitely postponed" etc. I have been wondering where this keeps coming from because I did not get that impresssion from the KKon statement at all. Rough quote(s) from HarvesteR's own words: "We put it on the backburner for a long time...It's been sitting there while we focus on scope complete."... "We ended up redesigning it because we felt that it was over-complicated...but still we weren't very happy with it. It just felt too complicated and too frustrating, because it's a feature that requires you to master the game before you can appreciate that it exists.... It was becoming very much unfun, top-heavy, and not what we wanted exactly." "Resources the way we had it planned back in .19 just isn't going to happen like that. We tried it, and it wasn't fun."... "I know it's not what a lot of you guys wanted to hear, especially since many of you have been very much in love with that chart."... "It ended up not being what we wanted with the game." "Its not saying there wont be any new resources at all. There are still kind of plans for other ideas that involve being able to extract things, maybe not from the surface...but this is all kind of theoretical..." That last line it would be nice to have cleared up because I don't know how you extract things without doing it from the surface, but I just write that off as a slip or nerves or whatever. So Squad very much wanted to include resources, they tried what they had originally, redesigned it, and decided it still wasn't working right. Bummer. Harv then talks about wanting to have mechanics that would allow you to do what resources would have allowed...like fixing things while on missions and to do problem solving Apollo 13 style. When I think Apollo 13, I think along the lines of life-support problem solving, which was on their original list but that's just me. Of course, no one should read into any of his statement too much. To me it seems like Squad will be trying to design something that would be more inline with what their overall vision is while they work on bringing KSP to "scope complete". I see nothing wrong with that, and I see nothing indicating it will be scrapped indefinitely. Could they have communicated this sooner and more clearly? Absolutely, but it seems they really did not want to just stop the attempt and say so until they had tried it as much as they could. I know some can argue that those that want this feature are the ones who have mastered the game, so it wouldn't be complicated and would be appreciated! Yes that is true, but stop for a second and take into account all that they are proposing with career mode. In a previous video, HarvesteR talks about wanting to add contracts next which give you cash and reputation. There will be three main 'currencies': science, money, and reputation points, which will all be convertible with one another. Then they go on to say this will be the core of the tycoon part of KSP. With 3 different currencies, I am not sure I see where resources as it was originally designed could fit. Not to mention the ability to mine resources and take them back to sell seems like it would be hard to balance with the science and contracts. Balance issues aside, if you were to progress through career mode taking contracts and doing science etc., by the time you got around to having the capability of setting up a mining operation on an alien body you would have gone beyond 'mastering the game'. Not just skill wise, but you would probably have enough cash and capability that mining resources wouldn't have much of a point other than just something else to do. Plus who's to say you couldn't put some of those elements into either science or the contracts systems? Contracts alone you could probably do almost anything with. Now don't get me wrong, I think resources would be a cool idea. It might even be the way to make include 'end game goal' of sorts, but I just don't know that the whole crafting system as they had set up before is the way to go. Looking at that flow chart everything led to basically a fuel, monoprop, or a small bit of life support. I suppose they could simplify all the superfluous stuff and let you get just that, fuel resources and some means of life support; I just don't know. In a way resources have already begun to be (very) partially implemented with solar energy and electricity, taken straight from that flow chart no less. Who knows what bits future updates will bring along. I think the best thing the community can do is start up some brainstorming threads in the suggestions & development forum on this very subject; how to implement resources in general and have it work well with the other systems. How to implement life-support, which almost seems like it would be to kerbals what the power is to probes right now. It would be cool to have, but how do you do it right? How do you keep it in line with the theme of game? I think all the energy in this forum needs to be turned towards this instead of the back and forth I have been reading for 29 pages.

I don't know why that one is so tall compared to the others, but it looks to me like a Kerbal with his helmet off. Plus I see what looks like a helmet silhouette at the bottom. As for what these all are? Kerbal plastic figures!

That... that was beautiful. Hearing that audio clip of "the Eagle has landed" was awesome, gives me a shiver every time.

In honor of the Apollo 11 anniversary I have been watching a bunch of NASA mission videos. I have a new Mun landing planned but will probably wait until .21. I stumbled on this video that not only shows how Lunar Orbit Rendezvous was performed with the ascent stage of the LM, but is also a clear demonstration of how to achieve it! I am going to try this maneuver in ksp with my next rendezvous attempt! It really is explained better here in this old clip than what I have seen anywhere. I just had to share this with someone, I hope it helps. If anything it provides info for a more accurate reenactment.

Since the anniversary of Mankinds' first steps on the Moon has come around, I have been going through an Apollo mission videos kick. During my searching I have come across some awesome Youtube documentary videos NASA put together back then. Makes for a good time passer during my breaks at work. Here is an Apollo 11 video documenting the whole mission: This channel has a specific NASA section that has the other Apollo missions in there as well as some of the space shuttle missions: Now here is something very interesting. This two part clip shows a pretty thorough explanation of how the Apollo missions went about rendezvousing in Lunar orbit with the LM ascent stage. The explanation here of how to rendezvous and dock has got to be the clearest and simplest example I have seen yet. The next time I try to performing docking maneuvers I am going to attempt this method. I know I'll find people here just as interested in this crap as I am, so enjoy!! Oh and happy 44th!!!