Kerbart

I'm not saying they can't be done. With few exceptions (the TT-18 on extra-Kerbal locations) everything is possible. But that doesn't mean it makes sense. Testing heavy boosters in space? Staging splashed down atmostpheric engines? Testing any splashed down engine, come to think of it... One can argue "it makes for wacky configurations and that's so Kerbal LOLZ!" but I think that some sanity, even by Kerbin standards, would be nice.

Kanada! The Kanadians are known as friendly Kerbalfolk, generally liked (except for their obnoxious pop singer Justin Kieber). They have a tendency to add ", keh?" to every sentence. Kanada bankrolls their space program with the export of highly regarded Kaple Syrup, although the extraction of Kethane out of northern "Kethane Sands" grounds has added a new (environmental) dynamic to this peaceful part of Kerbin. It's one small step for a Kerbal, but it's one giant leap for Kerbalkind, keh?

As suggested earlier, career mode levels ranging from "easy" to "veteran" are an obvious tweak for new versions. I also think that Squad will gather a lot of feedback to see how career mode is played and what the community feedback is. After just a few days of playing (which makes you wonder who was playtesting this) a few shortcomings (IMHO) have come up: Temporary unlocked parts for contracts sounds cute, but is open for abuse. Instead of trying desperately to unlock Mainsail technology you just don't close out the contract that unlocks it, for instance The “gather science†contracts are way too easy. They should appear less frequent, or the science mission should be as in real life: “we want you to take this box into orbit, do stuff with it, and bring it back.†A science mission where you get an “experiment†loaded onto you craft, then have to transfer it to a lab at a specific location, process it, and then return it to Kerbin would be... awesome The procedural generation of contracts needs to be tweaked. Testing a TT-18 launch tower on the Mun or an LFB KRB 1x2 booster in orbit doesn't quite make sense The rate at which contracts are generated is way too high for CDO* people like me who never get to go to the Mun as they’re too busy cleaning out contracts But I'm sure that's where development will be for the coming versions. * Yes, some of you write it “OCD†but I can’t stand letters being out of alphabetical order.

Hello Papa_Joe, First of all, Manifest is one of my favorite mods. It's also one of the mods I regard as "core" and is used in my "vanilla" install as well. Second, I'm impressed with how fast the .24 update came out once it turned out it had broken manifest. Kudos! Third, I like the cleaner, simpler, interface where when you click on "crew" it takes you to "transfer" immediately. Kudos! So, with that out of the way I want to make clear I'm not a thankless whiner who "demands" anything as you've given us a wonderful Manifest in the first place and you owe us nothing! However, one of the features that I really liked about Manifest has gone missing... the ability to remove Kerbals from a vessel at the launch pad. "Fill crew" fills every seat available, which is not always what is wanted. Just in case this is a bug you're not aware off...

...once you have wheels you can drive the thing to the ocean...

This version should have been called Quantum Leap The impact contracting has on gameplay is amazing and reaches much, much further then science (a necessary part for contracts, I think). There were other versions that were major updates so I wouldn't call it "best update ever" but it's certainly out there. After a few days, how has it impacted game play for me (and others?): As HarvesteR pointed out, we're now experimenting with our launches instead of clinically optimizing. No worries though, there's still room for highly optimized standardized designs! I now find myself much more playing mission control then in the past. Where, even for complex missions, the paradigm was basically "plan, build, fly" contracts have added a whole new dimension in planning. "Mmmmh perhaps this experiment can hitch along, and I can test that part as well... -- planning has become a whole new game In addition to planning mission control has matured immensely for me. Now I have to create real checklists for a mission. "Stage between 15000 and 18000m - keep velocity below 800m/s", making sure everything is done in the right order and no experiments and tests are forgotten... Finally, some parts that were questionable in the past suddenly become immensely valuable. Mobile processing lab not worth dragging into space? Well, now the investment (especially with going through the trouble of retrieving the splashed down launch vehicle) is well worth it, given all those "gather science around Kerbing" contracts. Yeah, I'll send the request to the boys upstairs... They're already on it!! and cashing in $30,000 per experiment is now trivial! I can only imagine the same for bases around, and at the surface, of Mun, Minmus, etc. In the past you'd have those for the satisfaction of setting up a base. NOW you have those for cold economic reasons. Roll in the dough! The game got sooo much richer with this, unbelievable!

Lesson to be learned: don't accept contracts blindly

Only when you combine it with zero other missions. And who'd do that? On my latest rescue mission I tested four or five parts resulting in a pile of science. If anything, it's way to easy to collect science on any mission and I suspect that they'll rebalance it either with a patch or in the next version. I've done maybe a dozen or two of science experiments and I've already unlocked most of the science tree. No more grinding, but unlocking science is not really a challenge right now.

After rescueing the Kerbal you're being told that he's now on the roster of your program. “We saved you. You are ours now. Muhahahahaha!†*puts pinky against chin* Is it me or is that just a bit creepy?

Think starting players. Having to get within 30m of a class A object will be a major achievement for them and very hard at first. And then they have to RCS the Kerbal to the cockpit. Yes, it's easy if you have a couple of hundred docking maneuvers under your belt. Not so much when you're just starting out.

What you're missing is the simple fact that you could mount the decoupler upside down under your capsule so that it stays attached after triggering it.

On many uneventful missions... Kerbal re-entry... all going well.. hey, where are the chutes?

You can actually see the ocean from the launch pad; getting there requires an apoapsis of 200m, max. From there it's just a matter of using parachutes to slow down the impact. Also, no one ever said that it's possible to get a 100% recovery rate on every mission.

It's called delta-V for a reason, not delta-H. The real "killer" is speed. With a circumference of 40,000 km and a rotation period of roughly 24h, launching at the equator gives you 463 m/s for free. At a latitude of 45° that would be reduced to 327 m/s and reduce rapidly as you move closer to the poles. Conversely, when at a 45° latitude, moving to the equator for a launch fill get you around 140 m/s extra for free. On the other hand, moving to Mt. Everest (around 9000m above sea level) will only get you about 0.008 % further away from the center of the earth, resulting (starting at 45° latitude) in a measly 0.25 m/s extra speed. Add the logistic nightmare of lugging everything up the mountain and it's obvious why a tropical location is preferred over high up in the mountains.

The contest rules clearly stated that the winners would have their names added to the list of kerbonaut names. It didn't say anything along the likes of promising riches and fame. I doubt any of the submitters had expectations beyond that. It's quite the contrary from exploitation. Instead of seeing their user base as passive wallet carriers, Squad engaged with its community to put a piece of the user's identity into the game. I can assure you that if Electronic Arts were to do something like it, having "your" custom flag included in the distributed game would be something you'd have to pay for. As for Squad raising the price... the closer the product gets to completion, the lower the risk that you're stuck with an incomplete game (or at least the more complete the game is that you're stuck with) in case development, for whatever reason, stalls. Consider it a discount you're getting on full retail price (say $60) and obviously with each new version the discount gets less and less. Nothing dirty about that. Dirty would be that all users have to pay for an update.

Not to rain on your parade, but they're marked as class A objects, with Class A designated for the smallest size objects. And objects can be... well, anything, obviously! I'm more amazed that there's a one year deadline on those contracts. “Yeah, poor Melfin is in orbit around Kerbin right now... just pick him up somewhere around Thanksgiving or Kristmas, that'd be great. He'll be quite hungry by thenâ€Â

But it wouldn't fit, would it?

"Landed at" should be rephrased in the game, because you can basically test those components on the launch pad. Unless that's a bug (I would think you'd like to test those items after a landing to see if they're still working?)

The way I see it is that if your ascent gets screwed up because of interfacing issues there's no "cheating" in reversing a launch. Yes, you can't do that "in real life" but we're talking about mistakes that wouldn't happen in real life either. Staging trees that get shuffled because you exchange a part, extra parts or missing parts affecting balance because symmetry mode was activated or deactivated when you didn't expect, etc.

From a gameplay perspective, contracting is introduced to make the game more challenging. Part of that challenge will be to come up with cost efficient designs. MOAR BOOSTERS! is obviously the opposite of that. Automatic recovery of anything with armed parachutes would largely bypass the incentive. “Ok I can continue to use my 30-jumbo tank/15 Mainsail lifter stage, I just attach one parachute to it that gets armed when I jettison the first stage at 4000m. I know that unlikely to be how you intend the parachute recovery to work but it seems to me that, given the way everything works right now, it would be. That means that there's all kind of complexity to be added, people looking for loopholes, extra code that can contain bugs, etc. Or it's done the way it's done now; if you want to recover it, it has to be part of a controlled vessel. A much simpler solution. What might happen is that in the future certain parts (the boosters like the BACC and the S1 SRB come to mind) have built-in chutes and will be recovered automatically under certain circumstances.

Absolute delightfull package! I like the stock-feeling and the super small size. This gives everyone a wonderful small orbital shuttle vehicle. I like how you gave the parts a very Kerbalesque description as well.

There are many responses possible to this post and I'm sure there will be many responses, as the question suggests a complete misunderstanding of many, many, many concepts. But I'll keep it short. 1) Moving space around the ship was introducted to prevent the Kraken from appearing, it wasn't done to introduce it. Why do you think they picked this method in the first place? Just for fun? 2) You're talking about what happens under the hood. Simulations get judges by what happens above the table. Nobody cares if space moves around the ship or the other way around (which is modern physics by the way: google "frame of reference" which you might or might not want to combine with "Einstein" and "relativity") or if the motion is simulated by studying the trajectories of balls on a pool table by a set of hamsters playing eight-ball. It's the result that we judge a simulation on.

I was going to say well that is useful for EVA's but then I realized that you could just bang a Mk2 Landercan behind the adapter as an airlock.

You should see her younger sister Penny!

That is a challenge for any large company, but I don't think it's possible to not run a company "by the numbers" once you hit a certain size. Of course, the question remains what numbers. But sadly, going for the short-term dollar grab and eroding customer value for short term "shareholder value" gets rewarded by Wall Street. Micropayments are a relatively new phenomenon and "the market" will have to learn how to cope with it. Personally I think they offer great opportunities for both publishers and players. Yes, I'd rather pay nothing but in the end developers want to make a living too and bills need to get paid. A system where you pay "up front" and hope for the best can, in general, not possibly deliver as much value as a system where I only pay when I like the game. We're now in a phase though were CEO's just get dollar signs in their eyes and think that "micropayment" means "boatloads of money" while ignoring the "you really have to earn it unlike the #### titles you've been selling for years" factor. They'll figure that out, eventually. A few things to note: Micropayments are... microscopic. You make money on volume. Huge volume As a result, micropayments only work when your game is really popular (as in "the people") Popularity will dwindle when people feel they're being nickled and dimed. Only a very small percentage of the players will sink serious dough into the game but they will spend it big time. It seems that the more successful publishers of these games seem to grasp that. Forcing players to pay to advance limits the audience, and as a subsequence, limits the participation of "whales" where the money comes from. To me this seems good news: yes, to be at the top of a game you probably have to spend money, but the vendor will have to work really hard to make sure it's worth it for everyone, including those who do not pay for it. It's fun to fantasize how KSP could have been implemented as a fremium game. Would you have to pay to unlock certain planets or components? Or maybe charge for time accelleration (up to 100x - free; 1 gold coin for one day at 1000x speed, 2 gold for 2000x speed, etc)? It would not necessarily be a bad thing--Squad would get a steady stream of money from a relative small group of players while having an incentive to keep the game interesting and fun to play for everyone.