Mystic

During my first flight in KSP 1.02 (and also my first flight on my new computer), I was constantly having these sizable square white boxes flickering on and off extremely quickly along a row at the very top of my screen. If I changed the camera angle, I could find certain angles where this activity would stop and the top of the screen would appear normal, but from most perspectives it was constantly a light show up there. I did not see anything like this while in the main menus, Mission Center, VAB or over the Space Center ... only when I went out to the launchpad and during the whole duration of the ensuing (short) flight. The glitch stopped again when I recovered the mission and returned to the Space Center. iMac 27" late 2013 3.5 GHz Core i7 x4 16 GB RAM NVidia GeForce GTX780M 4GB graphics OS X 10.10.3

I am happy that improved aerodynamics and more biomes throughout the solar system are still coming. But there are two big eyesores on KSP in its current state that I am now worried won't be addressed before release (if ever): 1) no mention of reentry damage being incorporated (unless they consider that a part of aerodynamics). That is the single biggest flaw in KSP in my opinion ... that, with all of the effort one expends upon carefully planning orbits and engine burns, that arguably the most challenging and risky part of space flight (reentry) is not reflected at all in the game. Being able to plunge a spacecraft straight down into Kerbin's atmosphere and not have it destroyed or even damaged by that sort of careless reentry breaks the game's immersion for me in a big way. 2) no mention of adding clouds to Kerbin's atmosphere, much less any other planets. While less damaging to my game experience than the lack of any real tension associated with reentry, I am still disappointed every time I look down at Kerbin and see no visual evidence of an atmosphere. There were other things I was also hoping would eventually be a part of KSP, such as an observatory that would be used to discover and plot the orbits of astronomical objects before one could navigate to them. However I can live without those things. But the cloudless atmosphere will continue to bug me for as long as I play KSP, I am sure, while the ongoing lack of reentry damage has in fact caused me to play KSP a lot less lately and, if it is never added, could result in me losing interest in the game entirely. (P.S. - yes, I am one of those mythological creatures who play KSP with no mods at all, because I don't trust them not to impact other aspects of the core game or its performance.)

I love this idea! Imagine being able to switch to a camera instrument, pan around and then capture one or more images that would later be displayed for posterity at KSC? Probably have a "memory limit" on how many pictures can be taken and transmitted at once. The science return could be very small from such photos, but they would be able to be transmitted back to Kerbin for 100% science benefit. Presto, a science reason to do the Grand Tour ... and souvenirs to show off afterwards, too!

I agree with science being mostly good the way that it is. But I can't get on board with a message indicating when you are crossing into a new biome, because I would find that to be gamey. The way I look at it is this: in real world science you don't know in advance whether or not you are going to get a big science return from going to any given spot on Mars, for example. You just take your best educated guess, based upon what you can see from a distance, and then cross your fingers that you find what you are looking for (or better yet, what you never would have thought to look for). I think the current system provides some emulation of that, in that it doesn't tell you whether going to a given spot for science is just going to give you the same results you got halfway around the same moon on the previous mission. We just say "that area looks like a plateau ... there might be a different biome there! Let's go find out!" ... and I like it like that, including the part where you get there and find out it was for naught.

I finally left Kerbin's orbit tonight. I'm sure it seems like old hat to just about everyone in this forum, but I have only really started to spend any significant time in KSP in the last few days, and I'm doing so in Career mode and with no add-ons. I wanted a bigger chunk of science than I'd gotten on my first four or five flights, so I decided to finally try for a Munar orbit. Well, Jeb got out there more or less, with a pair of materials bays and a pair of goo canisters along to make the trip worthwhile, but my Munar insertion ended up being more of a gravity assist than an orbit, and after the one close pass by the dark side of the Mun (should have been some Pink Floyd playing for that one) it was going to catapult Jeb and the ship right out of Kerbin's orbit entirely. He burned up all of his remaining fuel in an attempt to keep that from happening, but the fuel ran out when he was still not going to get any closer to Kerbin than 2700km. So ... after a moment of despair, he and I decided to do the trick I've read about here, and Jeb proceeded to do about a dozen EVAs in which he pushed the capsule with his own thrusters until he managed to get it onto a path that would bring it and the 200+ science points on board (plus himself) back home. Mission accomplished, sort of ... didn't actually get into a stable orbit of the Mun, but collected science within about 20km of its surface at least. One more thing I did today - I learned that Jeb is a stud. Out there in the dark, over and over again, repeatedly burning up everything but the last few drops of monopropellant in his jet pack to try to get home, and never once did he stop smiling. Yeah, I get it now.

A new, ringed planet in the Kerbol system. Re-entry heat and damage. More biomes for science (I think this is already coming, but the more the merrier). And one more ... Comets!

COMETS! I Want COMETS in the Kerbol system! Why didn't I think of this before? How infinitely cool would that be? (salivates)

I named my first rocket the same way I name every first try I make at almost any computer-related task: Exper 1 (short for Experimental). My hard drives are full of Exper this and Exper that, and many of them were far more disastrous than my first KSP flight.

Lots of good ideas in this thread. I haven't yet tried any sort of space station building, but if there was a unique science benefit to be had from doing so, I'd definitely be starting to plan for one.

It's Phlebotinum. On multiple levels, even! (Reference: any Joss Whedon commentary track.)

I'm very much in the "awesome" column on this. Prior to .22 I was at best a dabbler in KSP. Now I suddenly have a reason to keep coming back to it daily, ever since .22 came out. And I'm finally learning how to do things (probably quite simple things for many of the experienced people here) that had always eluded me when I was just dabbling in Sandbox mode, because of my newfound desire to bring back more science and unlock more tech. I just hope that in future updates Squad will find ways to keep science results a thing of tangible value in Career mode even after the tech tree has been fully opened up by the player.

For me, starting Career mode has made KSP ten times as compelling as it was previously, even with just the science aspect being supported thus far. Unlike in the Sandbox, where I would just give up on flights if things weren't going perfectly, in Career I find that I have a reason to try to get my imperfect mission back to Kerbal safely ... because of all that juicy science I have on board. And the first time I managed to take Bob out for an EVA, get a report from out there, and then actually get him safely back into the capsule (which I'd never managed to do in Sandbox mode) ... oh baby, now that was a rush. Now I am trying to figure out how to get a couple of Goo canisters safely back to the surface. Currently they are always breaking off when I splash down, so I am trying to figure out how to do a soft landing on land next time (thus far I haven't had enough fuel for that). Having the goal of getting that science payload home keeps me coming back and trying different approaches to the problem on a daily basis now, whereas in the Sandbox I would have gotten bored and gone on to something else. Can you tell I'm liking Career mode thus far?

Re-entry heat damage would be my #1 wish for .23 - once that comes in, I think it will dramatically change missing planning (for the better/more interesting). Also, I recall hearing from a KSPTV broadcast last weekend that some additional performance optimizations would be coming in the version following .22 - I'm looking forward to that too.

I've never heard of a developer using version numbers as some sort of progress percentage, where a version 0.50 meant they thought they were halfway to 1.0. That would be really inflexible and hard to manage ... the need for new versions is seldom if ever that predicable. I'm not saying no one has ever done that, but any developer that does would be the very rare exception, and I feel very safe in saying Squad is not doing that here. As far as version "jumps", i.e. going directly from 0.23 to 0.28, that is far more likely to have been because the intervening versions were built internally but never released for one reason or another.

12:01 a.m. Central, and nothing yet. All the same, seeing that date under the video definitely gave me a "Squee!" moment. I suspect I'll be returning to the site pretty frequently in the coming 24 hours (or more).

Science result during an EVA: "Space appears to be big."

I suspect I'll be playing career mode almost exclusively after the release of .22, because: I don't actually have any mods yet; I absolutely love the idea of doing science; and I'm still trying to learn all of the components and their usage, and perhaps getting them in a piecemeal fashion in career mode, as opposed to all at once in the sandbox, will facilitate that process for me. I will be in no hurry to rush through the tech tree, either. On a game like this, I like to take my time, try one new thing at a time, and enjoy the journey. Otherwise, what's the point? So I hope the tech tree doesn't go by so fast as to inundate me with new components before I have figured out the old ones.

One of the science missions I am excited about trying is to send an one-way, unmanned probe into Kerbol, taking readings when it gets close and transmitting them back before it is destroyed. This is the kind of mission that wouldn't have held much appeal for me prior to the addition of science. I also would like to create a Voyager 2 type of unmanned mission to take measurements on its way out of the solar system.

I expect to play Career more often than not in order to really experience the tangible benefits of doing science, but I agree with those that say the science experiments should at least function in Sandbox mode. I'd have no problem with the tech tree not being available in Sandbox mode to avoid people "cheating/scoping out" the tree without earning it, but if I decide to do some missions in the Sandbox, I can almost guarantee that I will still want to take along and do some science on most such missions in order to provide myself with that feeling of "having gone there for a reason" ... even when the science afterwards is nothing but a point total I can point to and say "I did that!"

It's the latter. I did figure out how to use the RCS pack (after a few minutes straight out of the movie "Gravity" ), and can get the Kerbonaut back to the capsule hatch where I get prompted to press "F" to grab it. But every time that I press "F", he bounces off into space rather than grabbing anything. I saw this happen to Scott Manley a couple of times in videos, and he seemed to say it was a flaw in his ship design, so that's my working theory as well. My Kerbal scientists are currently gathered around a table with all of the parts from the Kerbal capsule and an assignment to assemble them together in some jerry-rigged fashion that will allow my Kerbonaut access to the capsule again. Fortunately he doesn't seem to need to breathe or eat too often, and his spacesuit doubles as a Dune-style stillsuit for the other issues (By the way, any game that allows me to reference "Gravity", "Apollo 13" and "Dune" in the same paragraph has to absolutely rock.)

As a new KSP user, I'm trying to follow a somewhat NASA-like plan. After numerous failed attempts I finally got to the point where I could fairly reliably put craft into Kerbin orbit and then do orbital transfers. Now I am working (unsuccessfully thus far) at performing rendezvous and docking in Kerbin orbit, in the thought that these operations will be pretty important once I start trying to reach for the Mun, Minmus and other bodies. I'm also working on EVAs, and specifically on trying to get a Kerbal back inside at the conclusion of an EVA (which has proven to be completely impossible for me thus far ... I suspect my most recent capsule design has the side parachutes too close to the hatch or something like that). I do have one Kerbal stuck in orbit that I need to send a rescue mission after, and his ship doesn't have a docking port so I need to figure the EVA thing out in order to get him home. After I figure out all of that, I'll probably move on to attempting to send unmanned payloads to Kerbin's moons to learn how to achieve lunar (Munar?) orbital insertion and so forth. And only THEN might I be ready to actually send a Kerbal out there to walk in Neil Armstrong's footsteps.

I didn't know that! Thanks much for the tip. I'm obviously still learning my way around KSP, and will undoubtedly have more mishaps to post to this thread before I am through (hehe).

I made the all-too-common mistake of trying to fly straight up for too long, and by the time I bent my rocket's path into the horizontal I had invariably turned it into a manned ICBM. Oops. I struggled even longer trying to achieve equatorial orbits until I realized that the navigation ball does actually have little degree directional indicators on it if you look closely enough. Until then I kept asking myself "how am I supposed to know which direction EAST is?" Then it took me a few additional flights of squinting at the navigation ball before I noticed that the northerly direction actually has a red line to make it easier to see. Quite a relief, that last discovery was.

I had not seen that "planned features" wiki page before now. It was an exciting read. I know very little of it is set in stone, but I hope a lot of it will end up in KSP. One of the things I am looking forward to most is the ability to do science in space and return the data to Kerbin, and that evidently is coming in .22, so I'm a little giddy about that already. Beyond that, some other possibilities (some from the "planned features" page) that most excite me about KSP are: 1) Re-entry heating and damage 2) Additional planet details, but most especially clouds and night side city lighting for Kerbin itself 3) More planets/moons/asteroids/comets/etc. in the solar system to visit 4) An observatory where you go to actually discover such additional solar system objects - until then, they are still out there, but you can't see them on your navigational charts until you either find them with the observatory or else encounter them in an actual flight. (I can imagine flying a mission to the outer reaches of the solar system and suddenly happening upon some object I hadn't previously known was there ... exciting! Even moreso if you end up running right smack into it, hehe.)

I am literally waiting on pins and needles for the .22 update. I believe that R&D and the ability to do scientific research are going to convert KSP from a game I've had fun dabbling with occasionally, to the game I have been expecting to eventually swallow up huge amounts of my free time.