MiniMatt

Feels a bit cruel to keep dunking but I gotta ask - did the "...test like crazy... huge amount of QA bandwidth..." not pick up on any of this before release? Did they not notice the KSC tagging along on orbital excursions, or rockets falling to a pile of pieces and falling through the VAB floor, or the frame rate cratering everytime the camera pointed at terrain? Because it feels disappointing that every review, every stream, every preview, couldn't help but fallover these bugs but the "huge amount of QA bandwidth" missed them?

Not sure I'm adding anything to repeat what has likely already been said a hundred times, but adding my disappointment that my computer which makes Cyberpunk & Forza 5 look amazing, can track the movements of millions of moving parts in Factorio mega factories, fly around the world in MS Flight Sim, and has provided thousands of hours of entertainment in KSP1 won't even hit the minimum specs for KSP2. Not angry about it, it just is what it is. It's turned a day one purchase (even at that ~€50 price point) into either a months-from-now purchase when minimum reqs are tuned down, or a years-from-now-on-deep-sale purchase when I next upgrade. Wish the devs and the game the very best of luck, bit sad I'll be wishing from the sidelines this time.

not sure if it's the one you're thinking of, but atomic rockets - http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/ - has huge resources kinda primarily aimed at sci-fi writers covering in great detail all sorts of propulsion techs & rocket design (as well as typical sci fi tropes of time travel paradox etc) geocities era website design is jarring, but a badge of authentic nerdiness :)

If it is a Firefly reference then KSP is going to be a very different game if Jeb risks capture by Reavers every trip to Duna

If the team are looking for some new features to pad out 1.4.4, perhaps some stock propeller/rotor functionality so we can make our own co-axial Duna-copters, just like NASA :)

https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/en/?page_id=499 - is likely to answer some of your questions edit: and now I see you linked that very page, and - well - the QA engineer listing doesn't particularly include any coding requirements in the same way other positions listed there do, so I think that may answer your question

Reaction wheels + SAS modes are another thing to try playing with - the default setting, as you note can cause the A/D keys to roll, but you can click through SAS modes and one of them (think "Pilot", can't remember) helps to maintain some stability without inducing roll or pitch. edit: some other tips - disable steering on the rear wheels as a way of restricting turning, and setting much lower braking force on the front wheels than the rear to ensure your rover tends to lock up and drag under braking rather than flip. And yeah, much lower speed - unfortunately to the point where roving any distance becomes more a chore than a joy, but yeah, 10m/s is ~22mph and already double that tried on the Moon.

Haven't checked on 1.4x but the space center rendering has long been a bit odd - i reported this two years ago, the R&D screen and Mission Control screen both being significantly, and measurably, more stressful than the VAB/SPH hangars: Now like I say, I haven't tested this in 1.4, I'm pretty sure it still existed in 1.3, but it might prove a useful technique for identifying the cause of the problem and quantifying it - ie run a GPU monitoring app and just log some data. The graph above has me sat in the VAB doing nothing, flipping halfway to sitting in the R&D doing nothing. The graphs show this imparted some quantifiable extra stress.

Find the engine upgrade interesting in the context of KSP being acquired by Take 2. Though I'm just wildly speculating business arrangements one assumes that T2, as the owner of KSP, decided an engine upgrade was worthwhile, and decided they would pay Squad to carry out that work. I assumed that the sale to T2 would contract for existing publicly pipelined work such as 1.3x and the DLC but future work on the existing game would be up in the air and subject to the hard-bitten commercial realities of a publicly traded company. That continuing development of KSP is both funded and deemed to be commercially viable is rather pleasant to hear.

It's not the laser focused streamlined option I sense you're after, but Kerbal Engineer Redux has - among its multitude of other features - a terrain altimeter. The HUD overlay can be customised to just about any requirements, including height, and vertical/horizontal velocity.

Most of my KSP designs begin life as a bad pun.... may I present: Snake from a Plane Now I just need to get it into orbit....

So, just spitballing ideas in my head, re: "No docking with anything that was not a part of the original launch (except asteroids )." Am I correct in thinking that a craft which disassembles itself and re-arranges around an asteroid (eg, multiple sub-sections comprised of ARM claws at each end, probe core & some RCS) to form an ever growing Asteroid SnakeTM would be: within the rules very cool entirely unpractical & unwieldy really very, extremely, cool quite explodey

Ooh, so this challenge could prompt me to search for the fabled (and almost certainly fictitious) planet of Dres and its legendary asteroid fields. Although everyone knows Dres is just a bedtime story for young Kerbals.

I know this is veering waaay too close to a question which is un-askable for entirely understandable reasons, but something to perhaps consider addressing in future dev updates: Is the Making History expansion aiming for a 2017 release? Or a 2018 release? Or a 2019 release? "When it's ready". I know. But each week I try to get a feel for whether we're looking at months away, a year away, or a couple of years away, and I can't get a feel for it at all. I know - oh god how I know - the perils of stating a target date but I don't think it entirely unreasonable to ask whether we can expect to be purchasing your product before Christmas 2017, Christmas 2018, or Christmas 2019.

Interested as to folks preferences of multi-port docking versus hacking a port part to restrict to certain angle snaps - think @5thHorseman wrote this hack into a module manager script, and I think I've seen it implemented in parts by RoverDude, Nertea, and others. Advantages/disadvantages? Strength/angle precision/aesthetics? Glad to hear multi-port is working again though, in the past it seemed to go squiffy after every other patch.

That feeling when you're quite chuffed about your page 2 entry and by page 4 people are beating it by an order of magnitude (that feeling, btw, is awesome - because these challenges are all about seeing what fantastic contraptions people come up with) Besides, I thought I had the "Cute as a Button" award all wrapped up until @Just Jim's Doodlebug

Same, though I'm still on Win7 and I think it's a default install on that. It's basic but nothing like as basic as my video editing skill.

This was a *lot* of fun Have sped up footage, so if you have a spare 85 seconds, you could spend it at 581.4m/s: (oh, and @StrandedonEarth - if you want any of the raw footage for your compilation holler & I can chop out a 10 second or so section from the 8 odd gigs of original recordings)

581.4 Will get a plain video up shortly, an orbital run through is possible - with the more famous arch at any rate, approach northerly on a largely polar orbit. Found it easiest to make a sighting run first with the main delivery craft, get a feel for the normal/anti-normal correction needed at the pole to account for rotation since last orbit, then undock your Sports Carpet and use your delivery craft as a reference point to eyeball corrections from.

Now I'm not the boss but while you wait official confirmation my hunch with these challenges is that fun comes first and the guiding principle in rule interpretation is "don't take the liquid". This probably means that when something says stock it means prettification mods are fine, information readouts are probably fine, and the odd purely cosmetic part may be fine. Mods installed but on-your-honour not used are likely also fine - fun comes first and you'd only be cheating yourself etc. edit: oops - "don't take the liquid" - more colourfully phrased than the swear filter deems prudent - is a euphemism for common sense pragmatism in interpreting the spirit of the rules against the letter of the rules.

Now this is fun, spent an hour messing about and got a 25km/5km orbit that passed within a kilometre of an arch at surface speeds of 570m/s+ Attempts to finesse further have so far resulted in something of a run on band-aid/elastoplast

(can't remember, was 1.0.5 that about the time the textures got monkeyed around with leading to easter eggs getting buried? - suppose no KerbNet scanning then though either) Take a safe copy of your 1.0.5 install, allow Steam (or the KSP store, whatever) to update to 1.3, dedicate a save to challenges and run your 1.0.5 save when you wish.

Early Kerbin based testing of the Sports Carpet in preparation for this challenge: edit: mun based testing* has revealed an additional need for a pair of massively overpowered vernor thrusters to provide delicate finesse & precision control bone crushingly violent direction adjustment * repeatedly faceplanting rock at over half a kilometre per second

I have a vision of Jeb sat cross legged aboard a wheel-less Rovemate chassis, a couple of rocket engines strapped to the back, swooping through the arch, and Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride* playing loud. * although copyright issues, etc.

Oh my So a perfectly timed ejection burn from Eeloo set so several years later the craft flys through an arch at, what - 5km/s? - before re-entry at Kerbin? Yeah, I think any attempt I make will be a little more explodey than that. f5/f9 are going to get a workout, that's for sure.