Kerbart

Fantastic! Let me know if you need help with the icons. I like to think of myself as quite skilled in Photoshop. Fun fact: the PartOrganizer mod, with its DLL, passed the virus scanner without any problems. Yet, your zipfile with just a bunch of plaintext cfg files was flagged as "dangerous." Hahaha!

“Two degrees is the magic number, and the magic number is two degrees. Three degrees thy shalt not incline, and neither one, unless it is to proceed to two. Four is right out”

Not advertising these specifically, just as a "these look a bit like the kind I was using" reference. With a metal-body laptop I figured cooling the outside with one of those was a good way to draw the heat out of the computer (because it was too hot to touch when playing KSP). It died half a year later, still not sure if that had anything to do with KSP or the McGyver-style cooling or both. But using those as a mess-less way to cool off the air that enters the PC would be a good start without being too expensive.

Instead of a bowl of ice cubes, get two thermal packs at the local pharmacy. They're not that expensive and can be reused. One in the freezer, "charging up," the other one being used for cooling. And then just swap them.

I didn't know the water tower and coolant tanks were biomes! But it's not listing the crawlway as a biome.

They have oil! That should get a fleet sent there before the decade is out. Edit: Really, the technology to send something to a star four light years away and get probe data back in our lifetime might already be here. The biggest challenge will be to fund the project.

I think it's good. It's just that it could be better. In my book, "bad" means that the game is better off without it. Well, there's science mode and sandbox, so it can't make the game worse—just play those modes if it's that much of an abomination. could it be improved? Certainly! But I consider it a low priority item, there's more important things to fix before the game leaves beta status. “I don't know what to do in the game” “Go and collect science points” “Why? What’s the point” That’s what career and the tech tree are all about, and they do a decent job at it. Not stellar, but decent. I'd applaud improvements, but not before things like landers sliding all over the place are fixed first.

As if Marvel would have done a better job?

As others pointed out, it wasn't a poor design. It was a triumph of innovation in many ways, its poor performance more the result of unrealistic design parameters than anything else. When the initial idea for the shuttle was launched (no pun intended) our (the US, not mankind) experience regarding manned reentry was limited to Mercury and Gemini and a bit of Apollo. Safety considerations where also a bit lower during the race for the moon. As for reusability; if there is one thing KSP teaches us, it's that it's really, really costly to put anything into orbit. Every kg you don't have to bring with you counts! And now we build an STS with wings, retractable landing gear, atmospheric flight control surfaces, and a cargo bay that can be opened and closed. On paper it sounds great, and the contractors involved are not going to “no” to juicy government contracts, especially when their proposed alternatives would be “wasteful” conservative designs. And before we judge too quickly: these were decisions made in the early 1970s when running out of natural resources (not just oil, but also copper, silver and other metals) was a real concern. For me there's no discussion that the shuttle was a failed experiment. Operating it was far more costly than envisioned, the high cost let to corner-cutting that made it far more deadly than Soyuz (regardless of the metrics used). Of course, there's the 100+ missions, and some unique achievements that only the Shuttle could accomplish. But the high mission count, in my eyes, was more due to the dollar auction effect (“we’ve spent so much on it, we might as well spend a little bit extra to get more return value out of it”) than because it was such a great program. That doesn't mean the design was bad though. It was a great design. Just not a feasible concept; especially in practice. We've learned a lot since the inception of the shuttle as to why a reusable program is so tricky. Had we gone down the way of single-use craft, the US would likely have accomplished a lot more for less money. But that's water under the bridge, and hindsight. Which is always easy.

You can't if you're on a console. That's one side effect of the console editions: “there's a mod for that” is becoming less of a catch-all response.

With all respect, not really. Business rarely benefit from responding to a consumer disaster by sticking their head in the ground and pretend it didn't happen. The correct response to a failure like this would be: Admit it happened. Describe the problem accurately, so people know that the problem you're describing is their problem and not some other problem Offer a timeline. You might not know when this problem is going to be solved. But you do know something. “At this point, we’re trying to figure out what is causing the problem in the first place. In the next two weeks we’ll let you know how we’ve progressed, or earlier if we have found a cure” Explain why it will take time; manage expectations. “Even if we managed to fix the cure today, it would take at least five weeks before the code is released from the Sony/Microsoft server and will be uploaded to your console” Offer consolation. Give early adaptors a $10 refund as a “thank you for bearing with us”—it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than losing millions in revenue later on because the game and publisher have a tainted reputation. Squad is doing part of that, but not all. What's worse, the communication is not reassuring. “The patch has been doing great in our internal tests.” The same tests that missed the game-breaking bug in the first place? And the fact that a full amount of money was charged for a game that will hopefully will work properly in... weeks? months? years? No time line is given after all—without some kind of “sorry for disappointing you, here's a partial refund” is just insulting. Yes, the PC version had its share of bugs. It was also free and the price gradually increased as the number of bugs decreased. When you introduce the product at full price, you're raising the expectation of full functionality. KSP is an amazing game and offers an amount of playtime rivaled by only a few other games. Squad did an amazing job. But it's also amazing that, given the marketing history of Squad, that is the one part they consistently manage to get wrong.

I don't have the console version, but I'm under the impression that the console version has a nasty bug that corrupts all your KSP save files. Given the walled-garden approach of consoles, it's not like you can backup your saves to zip file or a usb-stick, so this is not something that can be mitigated, and in my book anything that forces you to restart a career you invested dozens, if not hundreds, of hours in, seems pretty game-breaking in my book. People are not expecting a bug free version. Heck, the “base” version of the game isn't bug free, it would be foolish to expect the console version to be superior in that respect. Of course there's the nasty aspect that some (wheel/gear) bugs are now mitigated through mods, something you can't do on the console, but the lack of mods was known upfront. And while every game has bugs, the kind of bugs that render your all your saves unplayable would get a... special kind of attention if Bethesda, Rockstar, Activision or any of the other large publisher would pull of a stunt like that.

The world is unfair, and harsh, and brutal. With the risk of repeating what @Snark said, the better solution is to be patient, get the imgur issue resolved, and then post. Asking for patience until the Imgur issue is resolved is moving the burden onto your audience. And they don't care, they don't have a stake in raising your popularity. They'll just look somewhere else. You do have a stake in your popularity; so be patient and post your ships when you can show the images with them as well.

Hello @nascarlaser1, don't let the comments (honest, but sometimes a bit unpolished) discourage you. In line/on top of what others already said: People want to see pictures. “I can't post a picture right now” is not a good substitute; resolve the imgur situation or find another way to host pictures. Just don't expect people to give up their no pics no clickspolicy(which they have adopted for very, very good reasons) just because you and imgur can't go together through one door. You're asking people for a favor: try out my craft. The golden rule of asking favors from people: make it as effortless and riskless as possible. Aside from having no clue what is being downloaded (due to no picture), saying possibly the Mun's orbit (untested) does not encourage that. Why not take the effort and try it out yourself? I have successfully taken a crew of 7 Kerbals to low Mun orbit with this vessel, and back to the surface of Kerbin, all alive (except Joofnar but we TOLD him not to EVA during re-entry) advertises the capabilities of your vessel a lot more than Maybe the Mun, I dunno. Popularity is earned, not granted. Start by posting pictures of your vessels on the forum. People will notice if they stand out one way or another (style, efficiency, capabilities, etc). If your ships are special, people will come. If people don't come... the world is hard and brutal. Perhaps you need to work on making your ships a bit more special? In short, be really critical of what you make. You only get one attempt to publish your design for the first time to the world; make it count. Test and optimize it, for hours. Playtest it. Make sure there is nothing you'd like to change at it. Post a picture of it, and see how people react. If they're asking for a craft file, then post it. That was like the second iteration of my lunar shuttle. I'm now at version four and it's a lot better, but still not perfect—until then I'm not posting it. Be critical!

If you do find life forms on a planet it turns out to be a convention of banjo players.

You youngsters have no idea how lucky you were, not having to wait 20 minutes while your game loaded from a cassette tape.

When your Gigantorosaurus rocket is 50m off the ground, you hit "T" to engage SAS and KSP tells you it can't do that because you have no pilot on board.

Getting an email when new content is posted is great, but they tend to be rather useless for mission reports: Author posts 10-screen episode (which is, don’t get me wrong, absolutely awesome) I get an email with this. I'd rather see it in all it's glory on the forum here, and of course there's a link. So far, so good. Now, scenario two: Fan posts reaction (good) Fan posts reaction, quoting the entire posted article (not good) Another reaction Another full page post Author posts new episode Now the notification has lost its function. There's no way I'm going to scroll through 20 screens of content I've already seen, so I'm not aware that there actually is new content as it's at the very bottom of that email that I'm not scrolling through. But Kerbart, surely you are jesting, it's not the forum's fault that people quote an entire post after all? Why no, but you can't stop that (annoying as it is) from happening. What the forum can do though, is provide an option where the email that I'm getting is just providing a link to the new content (and who posted it), with maybe the first two lines of text with images stripped out (the re for that shouldn't be rocket science, and if it is, well, we're here, right?) and nothing else. That would keep my updates for mission reports short and sweet, and allows me to see if there's content that is essential to be checked out now now now, or that it can wait until later in the day.

I think that the theory of the Kerbin solar system is a simulation inside a computer is way over the top. I know it's science fiction, but a simulation? What computer would be powerful enough to simulate an entire solar system with Kerbals and all. And why? Just for fun? I think they need a more sane theory!

If I recall correctly, there's a "mininum altitude" requirement when on rails. For Kerbin that's around 25 km, for the Mun it's 6-7km depending on inclination (higher inclination = higher minimum altitude). Go on rails and you don't have to actually hit a mountain; being on rails below minimum altitude is enough to be have your vessel destroyed.

When you look at the diagram you'll notice that the mounting spots for the srb's don't change in the various configurations. I'm sure there's value in having a single design instead of changing wiring and framing structure in between designs. if the rocket can handle the assymetry of a single srb, it surely can handle the odd arrangement (pun intended) of an even number of srb's.

Beating Skyrim, obviously.

I don't think the classes are bad per sé; if any Kerbal could be trained to do any task you'd be training two or three “Superkerbals” for a long duration mission and off you go. Now you need to make sure you have enough Kerbals of each kind needed. Given that you in career you tend to get your Kerbals from rescue missions, it provides an interesting logistical challenge to make sure you get the right mix trained on time to go places. If the tasks the Kerbals can provide are useful and an incentive to take them with you I don't see what's wrong with that. After absorbing what's been posted recently, here a few of my thoughts. They're fairly incoherent and not meant as a suggestion on how the game should be, rather on how certain improvements could be implemented SAS/Pilots Right now, advanced autopilots are superior to early game pilots, even when your pilot is Jeb or Valentina. My suggestion would be: SAS units all offer only one two gizmo's: hold course, and hold target. However, the SAS units higher up in the tech tree offer better accuracy and better PID controllers (with less overshooting) Pilots now offer the incredible advantage of additional gizmo's, making it more attractive to have them on board. Probably impossible to implement, but how awesome would it be for Pilots to have an autodrive function. Now it becomes practical to drive you rover halfway across the moon! Engineers In my mind, EVA Struts should be made stock (thank you @DMagic) First of all, it's an amazing mod; an elegant solution for wobbly space stations and compound expedition craft. Second of all, it's an amazing elegant and fluid demonstration why you'd need engineers (as only an engineer can place them). It's one of those tasks where I feel like “yeah, you'd need engineer for that.” Make repair two-star jobs, and give engineers an upgrade ability with three stars. Certain parts (solar cells, antennas, perhaps batteries) should have a high-tier upgrade function (automatically turning newly mounted parts in their high-performing version), and engineers should be able to perform such upgrades in the field (maybe it's a software upload, or a circuit-board replacement). In stock, docking baseparts together is nothign short of a sheer nightmare. Why not give an engineer a "nudge docking port" ability that can make two docking ports in close vicinity snap together? Of course you can't move the hole in the hull around but one could roleplay that a docking port is mounted on a hull adapter which allows for some limited play. But only by a skilled (3 star?) Kerbal engineer. Scientists For me this is where the game is lacking right now. Why scientists don't get better EVA reports, better surface samples, better crew reports than regular Kerbals (and going up with their skill set) is beyond me.

Interesting article & opinion. Given how much NMS was anticipated and hyped... KSP is, to dig up the age-old cliché, all about the journey, and not the destination. And on various levels; not just the actual travelling between celestial bodies, but also figuring out how to achieve orbit,dock, transfer to another planets, etc, etc. One will rarely perform hundreds of Mun landings just for the hell of it, after about a dozen (or less) most players will move on to bigger challenges. Other planets, building complex bases, utilizing SSTO's, and so on. Whenever you've mastered something in KSP to the point that it's no longer a challenge, you'll move on to something else, and the game turns out to be rich enough to offer countless challenges. From the looks of it, NMS is a souped up version of Elite. Travel seems not the be the goal, but rather the means to reach game objectives. I remember from Elite that earning enough cash for the Docking Computer was a big relief, not because it made docking so much easier (by the time you had the cash you had also mastered the art of docking) but more because you could skip the repetitive docking. A bit like launching with mechjeb (I use a kRPC script for the same reason). It feels like it comes down to something similar like “precision vs accuracy.” Perhaps now it’s “variety vs variation?” I get the impression that the procedural generation delivers a wide variety in visual content, but offers a much smaller variety in conceptual content. And that becomes apparent after visiting a dozen planets that all have feature x (in different shapes and sizes), animals y and terrain z. Which might be a good warning about wishing for procedurally generated terrain in KSP as well. Visually appealling but in the end it would just be more variety of the same features. Custom content - the arches on mun, the kraken, the ufo... That's the stuff we really need more of; true surprises.

I doubt any red tape would be caused by the EU demanding that the game has a proper user interface. I can see things like "the game should not contain flashing sequences that may trigger epileptic attacks" and alike, but demanding a proper alternative for a mouse cursor?