nholzric

So far there are a number of interesting suggestions about how to recover more parts, but maybe recovery of *everything* won't be so important even after cost because a factor. What if the real cost of a rocket wasn't fuel tanks and boosters but the science experiments, batteries, labs, and capsules. When I'm launching, the stages that I'm ditching are fuel tanks, big boosters, a wing, a strut, a decoupler, a fuel line, maybe these aren't worth recovering. In fact their worth will be partially a function of how much each mission earns. In the later parts of career mode I can imagine getting money for shuttling tourists to a space station. Maybe these don't earn as much money as other later career mode missions so you have to choose between flying a reusable SSTO or maybe using a low cost early-career rocket ("rickety but cheap!"). I'm making assumptions about what missions will look like in career mode but the point is that there are probably ways to balance the game that are fun, challenging, AND don't require every booster and stage to be recovered.

When Aphobius says "over time", he does not mean "divided by time" he means "applied over a period of time". The less time you spend letting gravity slow you down, the less initial speed you need. I don't understand the rest of Aphobius's explanation or how it explains the Oberth effect, but you misinterpreted these equations.

Weather sounds to me like a good idea until I think about playing with (around) it; then it sounds really obnoxious. In fact, I'm not even sure I'd want weather as a visual effect; I'd rather concentrate on flying.

Yes! I think the lab feels out of place in the tech tree too. I think it should belong higher in the tree where interplanetary trips start to become more feasible, where you're likely to have docking ports, and AT LEAST where there are other 2m parts. I'm excited for when a Kerbal's attributes become part of game-play. I'll be disappointed if it turns out to just be "flavor" attributes. I think it's really neat how just rearranging the tech tree can change the whole flavor of the game. The consensus seems to be that right now the tech tree is built in a "Tutorial" mode. There are mods that aim for realism. I'll bet there are several other very distinct and recognizable flavors. It's usually a weakness to rely on the "make it an option" method of design, but maybe Squad will implement at least one more version of the Tech Tree in career mode so new players can have a tutorial and seasoned players can enjoy a slightly less patronizing version that is still "KSP Canon".

Nice! So, that took over 7800 days, how long did it take you to play? That ship undoubtedly took a lot of skill to build and fly, and the mission took a cool head to execute, I'd need several tries and some luck if I was ever going to pull it off. But isn't this also a good example of KSP's Time Problem? More power to you if you can pull of these epic missions in sandbox, but it seems to me that this type of thousand days trip circumvents enough features to be an exploit. In this case you're not exploiting the transmit button, you're exploiting timewarp and the fact that Kerbals don't need anything to survive.

I think you can solve the problem with how the three resources (Science, Money, and Reputation) are earned. Science, as we have seen, is earned by what you do on your trip and where you go. Money is earned by accepting contracts to go on various trips (take this Kerbal to the Mun and back, take this one to Duna orbit and back). And Reputation is earned by how quickly to accomplish it depending on the mission (if you take 500+ days to get to Duna and back your reputation returns are nill). This along with the alarm clock idea mentioned earlier allow for multiple missions at a time of vastly different durations while penalizing spamming the time-warp button. (Speaking of ruining immersion, I just watched this Scott Manley video http://youtu.be/HIjqvLcsz8g in which he nearly completes the tech tree in two flights... but oh yeah, the second flight takes over 2000 days. I really enjoy Scott's videos, not trying to pick a fight, but in my mind that's a big part of KSPs "Time Problem" when you talk about anything other than Sandbox)

If we're "supposed" to wait until Duna or Jool, why is it so low on the tech tree? It's a mystery to me how the Science Station is so low on the tech tree and docking ports are so high.

I'm not sure I want to spend time driving a rover to three or more biomes on Tylo. I am not a very accomplished rover designer or driver and maybe you have super awesome rovers, but doesn't that sound awfully tedious?

Dang! At the risk of being too much of a fanboy, I'm really impressed by your explanations surround the latest release. The mining/resource system and now the RCS/EVA system were both altered because a cool idea turned out to not so fun. I know I enjoy thinking up elaborate features but in the end I can only speculate if they will add to the game or not. I appreciate the team's foresight in keeping enjoyment priority #1 in KSP and I especially appreciate your behind-the-scenes explanations over the last couple of days.

It sounds to me like a primary reason we all want a resource system is to extend the playability of KSP past its current end-game lull. I think it's reasonable to assume that while a resource system could be great, even with one there will still be an end-game lull - it'll just be a little further out. There are several ways to push the lull further out: new content (like planets), dynamic content (like procedurally generated environment), new dynamics (like resources or an economy), and multiplayer. The fellow I was responding to said he would like random events but not multiplayer and it occurred to me those two could go together really well. I'm with you though about multiplayer, very skeptical. I am much more excited about new content or dynamics than about multiplayer. I am worried it will break performance and I don't see how it can be fun. (which doesn't mean it won't be fun, I just mean I just can't see it) But KSP can already stand on it's own merits, that's not a reason to skip multiplayer. And many games are predicated on players interacting, your and my problem is KSP does so well as a single player we don't want to risk breaking that.

I don't know anything about how "multiplayer" will work (have they talked about what multiplayer will do?) but adding other players sounds like a great source of "random" events. Don't you think that interacting with other players cooperatively or competitively sounds like a great way to make otherwise "routine" missions new again? I'm with you on not being interested in playing with strangers, I would hope to be able to play with friends privately rather than wade through a public server. Also, Minecraft has yet to recover performance wise when they separated the client from the server; I hope KSP does not suffer the same fate.

SIGH. You just caused my little capitalist heart to grow two sizes today. I LOVE the whole Indie/In-development* game experience (based on Minecraft and KSP - yes, small sample size, maybe I just got lucky -whatever). And I loath the prospect of DLC, I want the free ride to last forever! But seriously, as you point out, $16 for how much fun? Yeah, I got WAY more than my money's worth out of KSP even if I never update again. That being said, I would feel let down if they didn't round out Career Mode before the end; add in cost-budget mechanics, probably some sort of mission generator. While resources would be cool, and would make KSP that much more sophisticated, it does sound like a good candidate for DLC. Thanks for the new perspective czokletmuss! *In-development games that are not Indie are the worst. Witness SimCity - what did that cost, $50? It's like the inverse value proposition of KSP, lots of money, little fun. Sorry for the off-topic, yes I am bitter.

Do we know where the Lab is in the Science Tree?

Nice, using the example in the screen shot I entered 800km Altitude, 2450 m/s velocity, 33 km periapsis, with an apoapsis at 290 km into the aerobraking calculator you linked to. The periapsis and apoapsis are outputs from my tool. The aerobraking calculator gives a thrust angle of 50 deg which matches the input to my tool. So, that's good evidence that my model works. Thank you! I'm still interested if anyone has a table of aerobrakes out there!

One aspect of orbital flight that remains a mystery in KSP is aerobraking. How low should my periapsis be to capture but not crash? If you get this question wrong you have the potential of spoiling hours of work which is not fun. Are there any tools out there to calculate aerobraking maneuvers? Better yet, has anyone built a table of sample aeorbrakes? I built this little tool in MATLAB for ye-olde-KSP before there were periapsis markers and time-warp. It was designed to take a snapshot of flight info and determine if you were in orbit and if so a few orbital parameters. I've modified it based on drag information from the wiki to "calculate" aerobrake maneuvers. I put "calculate" in scare quotes because aerobraking is an extremely finicky maneuver, made worse by having to read flight information out of KSP (can you pull an angle off the nav ball down to a degree, a tenth of a degree, a hundredth of a degree??) in real time. All this when some fraction of a degree can make the difference between escape and crash. So, is my drag model correct? Maybe. Is the tool so dependent on precise measurements that it will never be useful? Probably. These are things I worry about; my question for you is, do you know of a set of data with which I can test my model? Thanks for your help!

If life-support requirements are added, that may limit the ability to exploit science by time-warping for crazy long periods of time. Of course probes don't need life support, but since there is already a distinction between science that can be done with and without crew... let probes farm science via timewarp, but they will never be able to get as much science as a ship with a crew, and that needs life-support therefore no timewarp farming. Or something.

I've had this problem too. It looks to me like the antenna its self simply doesn't draw charge fast enough to transmit. It's annoying to get the Out Of Charge messages. I've also noticed this glitch. If you're transmitting during time acceleration your solar panels will produce power commensurate with the accelerated time but the transmission will draw power in non-game time. In this way your craft effectively gets more power production per unit transmit than it should.

You and I make a nice team posting vaguely remembered details which may either prove or disprove a theory. I am certain each goo reported the same value when activated on the Mun. The discounts would have had to take place afterwards when I recovered the samples, but I remember them being a single line. Maybe someone will rescue us with a better documented experiment, unfortunately I doubt I'll be able to play again for a day or so.

Other than being a little opaque to new players, I think relying on batteries and medium sized engines for power is a great way to start. Before the update the only time I ever worried about electricity is if I retracted solar panels for aerobraking and forgot about them or only had static panels on the top of my rocket and left it oriented for an inclination change. Now I have to plan to transmit data only during burns or else I'll run out of juice! It's been a lot of fun, I just unlocked batteries and I think I'm close to unlocking solar panels! Once I have solar panels I will get to reevaluate how to do missions, what kinds of missions I want to attempt given the ability to transmit science more conveniently. I'm a fan.

Here's a related question: I landed on the Mun with 3 Goo containers and as far as I could tell they each gave me the same amount of science (30 each?). I did not transmit, I returned them and from what I remember I got the full 30 science from each container for a total of 90. Does this mean it's better to do tons of experiments and then return them all at once so that each one gets maximum value? I could have misread the science report or be remembering wrong. This seemed like a relevant twist to the original question if someone wants to try to replicate my results.

I agree that the tech tree is a little bizarre, but after playing for a few hours, it's also a lot of fun! Other folks have mentioned that the tech tree looks more like the development of KSP than of "actual" technology and I agree - and it really seems to work from a game play perspective. I know this is anathema to the spirit of KSP but recently not many of my rockets have blown up, usually they just fail to reach orbit or run out of batteries, or run out of RCS, or get their docking ports on backwards. But last night when I was playing with the tech tree rocket pieces were flying everywhere again, it was great! As I am playing, and thinking about collecting science from everywhere, I am worrying that eventually all the science will be used up from Kerbin, the Mun, and Minmus. So I'm thinking about how to get every last drop of science out of the solar system and realizing I'll eventually have to land on Eve. I don't want to land a Kerbel because I don't know if I can get them back and presto - I'm really looking forward to probe technology! To me, this is why probes do not start out the tech tree. Not that I could land a probe on Eve with only a basic rocket anyway. Also, because getting to the Mun and Minmus is so "easy", and because there's such a scientific bonus of having Kerbels on board, I wouldn't send probes there anyway. It seems to me like probes are for one-way trips hence later in the tech tree. Long story short, I'm digging the new tech tree. It's lots of fun. It makes sense both in a Kerbel sort of way and game-play wise, if not scientifically.

So what I'm hear is, there's no ('practical') limit on how many liquid fuel tanks you can get into oribt even using only stock parks.

Haha - I must not be thinking large enough! That's awesome.

Try to get as much fuel into orbit with perigee >= 40km using only stock parts. Unless someone has a good conversion of solid rocket to liquid fuel, we'll only measure liquid fuel. Here's my best so far: ~5.4 tanks.

All too easy. At least Kerbosynchronous orbit is... I can't figure out who to embed a picture. :-[