Kerbart

Actually if he wants it pointy then what he wants is an ogive nose cone. Not a parabolic. That would be rounded at the tip; an ogive is pointy (unless you have a spherically rounded ogive).

Screaming will not result in people listening. In fact, you will achieve the opposite.

Hell no. I, sir, respectfully disagree. This should be the pre-release mode for 1.0. I think that "0.92.2" would have made an excellent version number. I'm even willing to go as far as 0.99.2 with the understanding that there are going to be five or six more "third digit" releases to get the bugs out. I will vigorously defend Squad's decision to release this version—as you mentioned, its performance is so much better, and aside from the bugs it’s clearly a leap forward. But ONE point ONE? Meneer, U schertst! (“Sir, you are jesting”). The next two digit release—once it’s stable—will be the true 1.0 release in my eyes.

But the OP mentions getting to orbit. With less drag that should be easier, no? Could it be that it's not the atmosphere that changed, but the drag coefficents of (rear facing) capsules and heat shields?

From LEO that's what it takes to get to low lunar orbit. To the surface of the moon takes over 7 (it's cheaper to go to martian orbit!). Of course, when measuring from earth surface things will cost a whole lot more. Keep Heinlein's quote in mind!

Hello Steve, what version did you upgrade from? 1.0.5? Not that much has changed in the modelling, there shouldn't be a reason things got so much harder. Like others mention, consider a clean re-install (do backup you save file if you want to keep it). The answer you don't want to hear is “either you're doing something wrong or your install is broken” but that is likely what it comes down to. If you're coming from an earlier version like 0.90 then...yeah, a couple of things have changed since Are you using any mods? You don't mention any in your post, so we're assuming not, but what if your challenges are caused by a mod that hasn't been updated yet? Finally, it always helps to post a picture of the craft this is causing you grief. Use F1 to make a screenshot (it's saved in the "screenshots" folder inside the KSP folder) and use a service like imgur to put it online for all to see (imgur is free to use). Everyone makes mistakes and maybe your problem is caused by mounting things backward, upside down, or whatnot. It happens to the best of us!

I will bypass the armor vs stealth debate. If you go for armor, go for a ball shape, as you will maximize the amount of volume you can cover for a certain amount of armor (mass). A flat rectangular shape ensures that you're using a lot more armored mass than needed. Do feel free to decorate the surface with lots of greeble though. Make sure you have one big super powerfull beam weapon. Preferably strong enough to blow up a planet. And lots of point defense, preferably concentrated in cool trenches. Be wary of reactor exhaust shafts. Make sure nothing can get in. It might surprise you from what impossible angles your enemies can drop torpedoes in it, especially when they are a bunch of religious zealots.

I'd say texture replacer. You can change the looks of kerbals on a name-by-name basis. I have it working. I think it's a 1.1.2 version but if not, it works with it anyway. Edit: and here's the release thread.

What mods are you using? I encountered the same problem after installing the SDHI service module mod (with its dependent mods like realchutes). I haven't encountered the problem since, after removing them. Not saying that one of those mods is causing the problem (they are excellent mods, after all), just saying that the problem seems to have some correlation with their presence. Or maybe some other mods. The screenshot suggests you're not running vanilla KSP.

Option (b): pushing the player to upgrade their buildings. "In the beginning, our rockets were inefficient. As we progressed, we managed to make better, leaner rockets" I think it fits very well in a career narrative. Of course you can calculate things manually. Or use an external mod. Or just use sandbox if you don't like the career model of "earning" your way to bigger, better, faster. The whole point of career mode is progression, and personally I think something like this fits very well in it. We don't have maneuver nodes right from the beginning either, after all.

The current model/promise “pay once, get updates until we stop working on KSP” sounds wonderful, especially for the high school/college student demographic, which (unscientifically based on nothing except for some vague notions I get from the forum) seems to be a large part of the KSP community. When you think of it, until we stop working on KSP is a bit problematic; KSP development relies purely on new sales and nothing else to survive. I have a few uncomfortable feelings with that: New Sales will inevitably taper off at one point. KSP development has, in that sense, a limited life span There's no economic incentive for Squad to make the game deeper (more attractive to experienced players) Conversely, it does makes sense for Squad to focus on making the game more attractive (bling & tutorials) in order to entice people who are curious about it to buy the game Aside from getting the game in a stable and reasonable bug free state, if you were Squad, were would you put your development marbles: More planets (bad choice, unlikely to impact beginning players and sell more copies) Multi-player (far better choice. Even if multiplayer mode isn't that good for reasons (timewarp, grieving), it will still be a compelling selling point Tutorials (fantastic argument to draw doubting buyers over the line) Compare that to Adobe. For many years their policy was to roll out a new version of their flagship products (Photoshop, Illustrator) every 18 months. Each update would roughly offer the same, conceptually: Bug fixes Upgrading existing features with new functionality wanted by most users New features met with great enthusiasm from the community Bling features rarely used (although may by upgraded in the future to become useful) but that demo really well If it were only for the bug fixes, nobody would buy the upgrades and be liquided that Adobe charges for them. But the new functionality was always greatly appreciated. The only reason Adobe abandoned this model was because they could afford to switch to a far more profitable model; charge by the month (while more affordable, it is also incredibly expensive). I really wouldn't mind Squad charging for a 2.0, 3.0 upgrade (provided they're stable); it would mean continuous development. Not only that, but development in areas that potentially have my interest. Don't get me wrong, the game needs the KSPedia and good tutorials, and I'm happy they're there now. But I'd love to see features that deepen the game, and I also realize that there's no incentive for Squad to put much effort in that direction.

You could tie the accuracy precision of the DV to how advanced Kerbal Science is (ie. the level of the R&D building). Tier 1 gets you DV rounded down to the nearest 500 m/s; tier 2 gets you DV rounded down to the nearest 100 m/s and tier 3 gets you down to 1 m/s.

Behold the task manager, destroyer of processes...

The price we pay for civility? In the good ole' days of usenet you’d be shredded to pieces if you asked something that you clearly didn't research yourself first. And that was before Google or even Yahoo. It's nice that we're not a savage crowd but at the same time... This is what you get. I don't mind seeing LMGTFY more often. There's little gems you can learn about the game, things that aren't documented or obvious. The forum is a great place to learn about them. But they get burried under "why does my rocket flip at 10k when I make my 45° gravity turn, it never did that before" and "what is dv" questions.

This is simply amazing and should be stock. Added bonus: making engineers even more useful.

I respectfully disagree. Squad seems to respectfully disagree. After all, we're now at version 1.1.2, not at version 1.8 which, if patches were updates, we'd be at right now. And yet we're at 1.1.2. That tells me something; it's a patch, not an update. You're missing the point. Call it a patch. Call it an update. Call it a "Spongebob does a dance with Squidward." Of course Squad has no obligation to maintain backwards compatibility. In fact, Squad has no obligation to release any "Spongebob does a dance with Squidwards" at all. The point is that these dances are rushed and released prematurely. Squad comes out with the 1.1.1 dance. Fine. And within a day a 1.1.2 dance is released, changing in-game mechanics to such a point that certain mods break. I can see releasing a 1.1 with a statement "beware, there be bugs." I can see releasing a 1.1.1 with "yeah, we kinda rushed 1.1 and that was silly, here are some fixes for the issues we should have fixed first before releasing". I can even see releasing a 1.1.2 with "whoops, we mispelled the word 'premature' in the KSPedia" The problem is not 1.1.2 breaking mods. The problem is that we have a super-rushed patch to fix a rushed patch to fix a rushed release, and the fact that it's breaking things at a pretty low level does not foster a warm fuzzy feeling of Squad trying to spoil us with the best they can deliver, but rather a panicked team, clueless of what they're doing, and kicking out untested patches to the world. I don't think Squad reserves a reputation like that, and I don't think the KSP community deserves software like that.

I haven't gotten the leds to work yet, but I keep trying. Knowing how much you dislike clutter, could I still ask if a minor tweak could be taken into consideration: Add a "blinkenlight" option, that comes with a 1-5 slider. The slider indicates when the light will blink (if it's 1, on every whole second, if it's 2, on every .2 second, if it's 4 on every .4 second, etc). Implementing this should be... I don't know. Maybe it's impossible. But if it's rather trivial, think of the possibilities! Not only can you add them as navigation strobes to planes, but planting 5 or more in series opens up all kind of fancy animation properties! Alien spaceships with pulsating lights! A ford mustang with working blinkers (or a BMW but using blinkers on a BMW is unrealistic)! Those kind of things!

There is a good chance you're missing the point here. The post is primarily about the paying customers requesting Squad to take its time and not rush. Instead we get rushed software that seems to have more and more bugs per release. Maybe for reasons, but more bugs nevertheless. I don't think anyone will expect a mod to work after an update. The point here though is that some mods stopped working after a patch. Patches should fix things; not break them. If patches require such game-structure changing adjustments that it breaks mods, then there's an issue. The issue is not that mods break. The issue is that the release was so broken that it requires draconic patching.

I can understand your frustration, but it is very easy for the outsider to interpret your post as “overreacting.” The game is not totally broken; if there are issues in the VAB there might be something wrong with your install; I haven't seen a lot of posts about it in the forum and for me personally the VAB works fine (aside from a few minor issues, but good enough for gameplay). The Squad team has been working virtually non stop for at least half a year to get this update out (the initial expectation was Christmas, but the switch to Unity 5 turned out to be a lot more laborious than expected). I absolutely think they deserve a vacation, and they should be commended for pushing out these last minute patches before they take their well deserved rest, instead of saying right after 1.1 “we'll look at the bugs with fresh eyes once we’re back from our break” There’s been plenty of QA, but a lot of issues simply cannot be discovered by systematic testing, only by live playing. That’s why we had the pre-release, and that’s why we’re having patches. The alternative is six months of QA testing and an update occuring only once every two years. Nobody gains from that; not Squad, and not the players. It’s kind of par for the course that each release comes with a number of patches. I’m sure Squad whishes it weren’t, but their product is built on top of an engine that they have little control over and that uses it in ways not a lot of other games do. Hence, they run into unexpected challenges and unexpected behaviour. C’est la vie. In a way, it’s a beautiful rendition of the challenges one faces when going to space. Look at it just that way We will probably need two or three more rounds of patches before the game is back in a stable form. A piece of advice; don’t upgrade to the latest version if you dislike these kind of challenges; just wait until the current release is stable. These problems will be fixed.

Make that copy while you have the chance!

Of course there's no "approved" way of playing the game, but in the end KSP is a "friendly" space ship simulator. Certain changes have been made to make the game easier to play: The Kerbal universe is scaled down. Launching rockets and traveling within the Kerbol system happens a lot quicker than it would take on a Solar scale (remember, it took New Horizons ten years to reach Pluto, and it did so much faster than any other craft that went to the outer planets) Ion engines are overpowered. Because nothing says “fun” like burning your ion thrusters for days, right? SAS is magic! For reasons Now the fun thing is, if you think things are wrong and detract from the game, you can actually play around it. Ion thrusters overpowered? Gizmo them down to 1% For some remedies you'll have to use mods, but nothing stops you from not using SAS for attitude control if you think it's unrealistic. Requesting the game to enforce all these kind of “realisms” (you wouldn’t be so silly to think it should be just SAS, right? If we want realism we have to go the full Monty!) upon every single player would be silly, I think. The current system where one can opt to play in a realistic way makes much more sense.

Me? You must have quoted the wrong dude!

Module manager requires an update. If your modded parts require MM then they will not work until you've updated Module Manager. On a side note, never mod your "native" download. Always use that as a quarantine version. Instead, make a copy, mod that one and play career from there. That insulates you against updates that break things.

That could be an amazing subplot for a science fiction movie! Image the heroes landing on planet (maybe all water), and then they have to scramble away because of some massive tidal tsunami wave!

I've been playing the game just fine. So it's not totally broken. The issue is not “forking over the cash.” Why does everyone seem to think that any of the prolonged issues we’re encountering (hurting the reputation of KSP/Squad in the process) are caused by Squad nickeling and diming us (yet providing updates for free) or by some sinister conspiracy theory? Switching to a new Unity version will break things, and require code to be rewritten. I’ll be 1.1.0 all over again, albeit at a smaller scale. But switching over to a new engine (one that’s not even available yet, from what I understand) is not a matter of waving a magic wand and sprinkling some pixie dust. It will take a lot of hard work, and most of all, a lot of time. Oh. Thank goodness. I was waiting for this. Because so far, Squad figured “meh, why bother.” But this request will most certainly spur them into action! Thank you!