Warbird

If someone contacted me and gave me unsolicited advice on how to do my job I doubt I'd feel obliged to give them a response; especially if it was as condescending as that.

Wrong on two counts there: 1. He doesn't have the mohawk anymore, so no pointy hair. 2. The PHB was scientifically proven to add nothing. Max is Schrodinger's producer. He exists in a duality of doing something and nothing and only collapses into one or the other when people start complaining. So he sorta adds something.

It's pretty great that you're taking an active interest in game development. It's a fun pastime than can be a great way to stay sharp with development skills and lets you be extremely creative. There's nothing wrong with tinkering with an existing program/demo in order to find out how it ticks; it's a great way to learn. Keep at it and you'll be amazed at how rewarding it can be. I wouldn't really recommend showing off something like Earlybird as it is now as "your own game" as it could be viewed as disingenuous to some people. If it's just a personal project you're kicking around, that's cool. Just let us know, more power to you. If I could offer one suggestion, it would be to find a specific idea or something you are interested in and focus on it. In the case of Earlybird you have a working base program already made for you courtesy of Unity. That's great for starting out! Ask yourself, "What do I want do with this game?" and more importantly, "How will I do it?". Be specific though, things like "Make it totally rad!" are fine but hard to know how to get to where you're going. Try and find a goal that you will be able to tell when you've reached it and how you'll get to reaching it. Any problem or goal can be achieved if you break it down into manageable parts. Take what you've learned from each part and use it to make the game into something more and, more importantly, something of your own. On a side note, if you have time I'd strongly recommend reading some game postmortems. They're a great way to see how different studios and groups handle development and all manner of things.

Why let boats have all the fun? Japan has a long and proud history of throwing all sorts of nonsense into space and having it work for some reason or the other.

The methodology here seems to be that anything posted here as far as upcoming content is concerned is to be held to be a certain fact. Max tweets and posts around when stuff is less certain and he's either trying to build/maintain interest in the game or to troll. Reddit has a far larger potential audience it can reach, so it's no real surprise that he/they submit content there so often. With the recent case of him tweeting out about the inclusion of a stock DV indicator, it wasn't included within the dev update notes the next day. This is likely due to it's level of development having gone not much farther than being agreed on for including in the game. With social media, they have a degree of wiggle room that they wouldn't have posting an announcement here. That being said, users that have issue with this have valid points. Squad has been pretty lousy about maintain centralized news and should look into bringing on someone that can maintain that. As Rows has just left, they should consider bringing on someone that could fill the position and guarantee that the forums would be a legitimate location to expect all centralized news. This would ideally be done by someone with prior experience with the game and community management. What's Skunky doing these days? He has both.

Kesos, because Mexicans.

Generally you want to kill off as much of your speed as you can and still remain in the air and then come in rear wheels first. KSP's aerodynamics are weird as are FAR's in some aspects. The best way to get good at landing is to just practice it, quicksave a klick or so out and try landing until you get to where you can consistently hit your target. You are using your brakes when landing, right?

Can you post a few screenshots of your craft? Also, what antenna are you using?

Toss Kerbal Engineer on there so we can tell what we're working with if you can. That lander's pretty beefy, so it's hard to say what the capabilities are by looking at it. I would highly recommend an Apollo style lander so you can keep things light. Plus, once you finish with the lander, leave it behind and it's that much less mass to carry back home.

That is my aim for now. I may be an idiot but I'm not (completely) insane. Think of this as [WIP European Extreme Mode] or something more akin to watching a nutshot compilation set to classical music. You know exactly what's going to happen and that it's going to involved lots of pain and crying, but you watch anyway. A modding train wreck in slow motion if you will. Long term we're going to be making drag chutes, thingamajiggers to hold payloads in place, animating the whole mess, some god awful textures, and who knows what else. Assuming we even get past me modeling this thing and importing it into the game without putting a fist through my screen or or sobbing in a corner. Anyway, back to the updates, which are going to be sporadic and varying in length, so fair warning. Chapter 3: "I Reject Your Reality And Substitute My Own" Now you're likely thinking, "Warbird, now that you have a rough model worked out, surely you will make a very rough proof of concept animation or something like that?" And the answer to that would be a resounding "But doing that would make sense!" We're adding hinges to this sucker and animating the entire mess at once. I play Dwarf Fortress for fun, I am not the sort of person that responds well to rational thought processes. So we're adding some protohinges for the door. How will they work? Don't know. Am I likely wasting my time? Probably. Am I going to have to throw this out and start over anyway? Most likely. However I need to do something semiproductive. Turns our that Blender doesn't seem to have half spheres as something you can spawn by default, so we've taken full spheres and flattened them out on top of extended bits from the bottom of the bay and a duplicated bit of the same parts on the door. I threw some cylinders in there to connect the hinges for now. The plan was to have something similar to the lander legs that were first put in the game doing the moving. Heck, it seems pretty Kerbal to me to have them welded on there in typical jury rigging fashion. So we may see them show up if I figure out how to do that. Shorter update today, I got caught up watching a movie and got distracted. Audience participation is welcome in this. If I can avoid having to texture these things I think this may not end up being a monstrosity. In the meantime I'm going to be watching Youtube tutorials on how not to suck so much. EDIT: Just because I can, here's one of those nifty embedded 3D models. Looks like it didn't take in the spheres, but whatever.