The_Rocketeer

Honestly, I'm impressed. I haven't left Kerbin atmosphere in years. Too much to do! If I had to hit Jool in an hour I'd probably spend at least 30-45 minutes in the VAB tinkering, 5-10 ascending to LKO, and the rest at high warp.

Er, I mentioned that. 6th post.

First, welcome to KSP and PC videogaming. Great choice for a first game btw, but you should definitely believe the stories you hear about the learning wall. Taking a craft with no reaction wheels and no reaction-wheel-capable command module, what you said would probably be right, you'd depend on thrust vectoring to control attitude (meaning the direction you're pointing in). This is a very inefficient way to steer though unless you are conducting a burn anyway. That's why the game also has reaction wheels (and RCS thrusters). If your craft has reaction wheels or a command module module that includes reaction wheels, this will allow you to control orientation without thrust, using only Electric Charge (you can also use RCS thrusters instead and they'll need monopropellant as fuel, but they're heavier and less efficient). If you run out of EC, it will stop working, so use batteries/solar panels/other power sources to make sure you don't. If you already have reaction wheels on your ship, I guess there's a chance you haven't figured out how to steer with them, although I think that's pretty unlikely. Assuming you've got EC and reaction wheels on the ship, if you end up in a spin, shut off the thrust and turn on SAS. This will stop the rotation as the SAS controls and holds orientation for you. Also, you can control a spin yourself. Look at the navball and see which way it's tumbling. Assume that the centre of the navball is always directly ahead of your ship, like a helicopter's artificial horizon. Steer towards the side that is emerging, and away from the side that is receding. When the navball stops tumbling, you have stopped tumbling too. Possibly because they're not buttons but sliders. I have to agree with @The Aziz though, all you really want for this game as a start is a keyboard, a mouse and maybe a joystick. Speaking from firsthand exerience, a gamepad is going to be pretty limiting unless you go for some sort of hybrid arrangement with the keys too, which is inevitably very custom.

Not to be confrontational, but bigger wings aren't necessary at those levels. If you want to share a .craft file, I'll see what I can do to demonstrate/improve (keys/mouse controls only).

In fairness I come with a certain amount of flight-sim gaming experience and I started playing KSP before airbrakes existed at all. That being said, from my perspective, if you need airbrakes to land a plane, it's not a very good plane. Stall speed is a matter of design, and approaching the runway too fast ,if the plane is designed to be capable of flying slower, is pilot error.

Regarding pilot skills, practice, practice, practice. Regarding issues simply getting a plane of the ground, I would question the design. Take off mass, thrust, rolling angle of attack, undercarriage placement, excessive drag, etc etc. A few extradesign principles and you might find all those problems go away. Regarding stopping, KSP wheel brakes are quite effective, but only if a) there are a suitable number of wheels and b) they're perpendicular to the ground. Edit : It's also worth noting that the runway being longer would create much larger or steeper ramps at the ends due to its absolute flatness compared with the curvature of Kerbin's surface. Potentially you could extend inland, but I wouldn't want to take it any futher towards the ocean for fear of creating a near-vertical drop onto the beach/into the water. It's also been discussed before that the further you go along that flat plane away from the centre, the more gravity will start to pull you back towards the centre. This could lead to planes starting to rapidly roll along the runway towards the middle when they're supposed to be at rest.

@Claw's circumnavigations. @Azimech and @klond's contraptions. @GoSlash27's ion collier trophy challenge. Many more.

I couldn't agree more, I have been around long enough to remember the disappointment when updates started to focus on improving models and textures instead of adding this much-needed content. At the time, I found myself in the minority... vOv

Agree. Also youtube below: But to tackle the point, part of the reason KSP was so successful was because it focused on gameplay and not graphics. Many of the most fun games are pretty graphically simplistic, just well-executed. It's much more important that they're supporting an immersive engaging game design, and of course it always helps that that design is also well executed and not infested with showstopping bugs - World of Warcraft and Minecraft are outstanding examples. I don't see any reason to doubt Unity is adequate to the task. On a personal note, I genuinely don't care if KSP2's effects are 2nd rate or 10-years-old as long as the game is a genuine iterative improvement on the original in various ways.

I suspect the difference is related to drag occlusion, I seriously doubt there's a more general airflow simulation. This has not been my experience when testing push-pull configs, I've spent hours trimming and re-trimming the tail prop to keep up with the nose.

KSP 1.whatever would still exist for those players. KSP 2 would be a sequel.

@UomoCapra YEEEEEEES! @SudAntares Like distant biomes on other planets, local biomes are reachable by rocket.

The Four Companions

Wow, this is a blast from the past! Amazing job! What version of KSP is this in?

I mean, you're right... but that's why the bug tracker was set up like 3 or 4 years ago. The fact that it has taken this long to get to a point where they are making noises about actually using it themselves is simply a massively unappreciative and incompetent slap in the face to the people who have actually been doing their work for them by using it. Nobody ever expected Squad to trawl through the forum for bug-related issues, but bug-hunting and especially bug-squashing are kinda basic requirements of being software developers. Even with a helluva lot of user help - 1300 unique bugs! - they just really haven't bothered.

This bothered me enough that I had to reset my password to say something - new computer, infrequent login etc. So my takeaway from this announcement (and Vanamonde's support of it) goes something like this: Squad now aim to prioritise bugfixing on the basis of a popularity contest for a minority of extremely highly motivated players who are also aware of this thread, plus a tiny number who already habitually visit the bugtracker and have figured out the upvote/downvote thing on their own. Someone please draw me a venn-diagram of exactly how marginal that group will be. I draw two conclusions from this: a) it won't matter how severe a bug is just so long as it's (un?)popular, because the dev team don't have any vision for or sense of their product's functional identity b) despite the playerbase doing all the hard work of identify, reporting, cataloging bugs and even making fix or workaround mods for years almost nothing has been done with this info, and now that they're finally thinking about it they want more of our collective unpaid labour to work out where to start. So uncool .

If it's motive technology and I can build it, I want it in the game. I'd love a real transmission system that you could stick a wheel or a drill bit or a propellor or a rotor on the end of. I have made these in stock, the only disappointment is the outrageous size and mass of the things, which really is the biggest thing that currently makes them useless for putting on top of a rocket and sending... well, anywhere.

@Snark I think you're both missing and making the point. Increasing TWR with 5 boosters instead of 4 is pointless if you no longer have enough dV to reach mission destination due to added dry mass, but if it doesn't it's clearly benefit. Designing peak performance depends on knowing how your TWR/dV balance looks, and the only most user-friendly way to know that from the editor is with a dV readout.

Hi @StarStreak2109, I invite you to read my later post where I discussed what constitutes 'improvement', it really speaks directly to everything you just said about my earlier post. I really don't think immersion is lacking in KSP, and using immersion as a justification for polish is both irrational and unnecessary. In my opinion, everything that's been added that steers into space administration and away from space exploration has been a mis-step. At its purest and best, KSP is a really good caricature of a realistic physics sim, that makes learning about physics, aerodynamics and space travel, fun. Science desperately needs an overhaul, but what it really needs is an overhaul that makes it educational and fun. Likewise for planets. Currently science and planets suffer from the same problem - they're soulless props designed to fulfil a practical need for demonstrable progress. They (with perhaps 2 exceptions) do not inspire any wonder or enrich the game experience (or even better enrich the player) in any significant way. If an overhaul or a redesign is ever on the cards, that aim must be at it's core.

I don't think you've understood me. I'm describing the character of the game, where the goal is not to reach anywhere in particular, it's simply to do better than last time by applying what you've learned. Doing better just requires another run at it, and it definitely doesn't require new parts - those are usually just gimmicks to keep people talking about the game. There are 3 kinds of 'improvements' to my mind: Aesthetic/"quality of life" improvements Features/parts that make difficult things easier Features/parts that make impossible things possible I strongly advocate 3 because this allows the player to become better at more things, and continue to derive satisfaction from applied learning. I strongly discourage 2 because this breaks the cycle of trial and error - you're not learning to walk if someone hands you a mobility scooter, so how can you take pleasure from learning how? I would not encourage 1 until there was no more 3 that could realistically be delivered. This is just polish, and as Atari taught us long ago, games can look crap but still be addictively fun. So if applied learning is the best model for KSP as the way to make planets fun, what do I see as the stumbling blocks for investing in KSP planets? The starting point is always on Kerbin at KSC, and the rinse-and-repeat learning curve is just too time intensive to be fun. To get around this, I suggest adding a way to 'send' a deployable start point to a planet as part of remote base mission. Once deployed, planetary excursion vehicles could be launched, reverted to launch, reverted to editor and recovered to this point. You still need something to learn about. Most of us expect to be able to drive a rover without too much bother, so where else could KSP take this? This is the hardest question to answer, but finding the right answers to it would be by far the bst way to make KSP addictively satisfying again for experienced players, and it's about the only DLC I can imagine actually being worth the price.

1. KSP was better when it was less complicated, with fewer parts and fewer reasons why to do anything. Intuitively learning how to do something hard (and the subsequent incremental success) was its own reward. 2. Planets will only become properly interesting if they start to teach us things we didn't already know, but the cost of not knowing things in KSP is usually mission critical. When one has invested hours of planning, design, testing, launching, manoeuvering and transferring just to discover that Eve's atmosphere is all-but-inescapable, this is an exponentially greater cost than discovering 20m above the launchpad that your parachutes have deployed because you forgot to set your staging properly, or even 100km up that you didn't attach any RCS thrusters. 3. Teaching us things about planets that we don't already know is kinda hard - we've lived on a planet our whole lives, and we kinda get it. The variables that make planets different sit somewhere on a scale of mundane (atmosphere/no atmosphere, water/no water) to cataclysmic (extreme pressure/temperature, toxic/corrosive atmospheric chemicals, inescapable gravity wells), with most of the more interesting being very difficult to implement because they require engine improvements (e.g. tectonic activity, cave networks). A less intensive workaround would be to introduce surface science minigames, but frankly nobody wants that at all.

I simultaneously disagree and agree with this statement. For me, making VTOLs and stock propellorcraft has been an exercise in self-education, and a way of better understanding RL engineering. My dad passed away in February, he was formerly an aerospace engineer for Rolls-Royce, but I never really discussed his work with him and the closest my career has brought me to his was tuning in a friend's Spitfire (Triumph, not Supermarine). Building engines in KSP hasn't taught me any more about what he did, but it has made me appreciate more the skills he had. For me, that's more than funsies and bragging rights. But when it comes to a stock bearing part, or even a motorised bearing part for propellors, well I can't say that would have had anything like the same effect. Firespitter gives a range of propellor parts, if that's your goal. Build-a-burger propellor engines don't interest me much at all.

Probably deliberate secondary intention of the banner. Primary intention being to hire talented and experienced staff, secondary being to suggest to the playerbase that the game is still in active development without explicitly saying so. Both the banner and this message are teeming with implications, so I'll deliberately state at this stage that I mean only what I've said and nothing further.

Landing from a prograde orbit is more efficient, for the same reason that taking off into a prograde orbit is more efficient - there is less difference between your starting energy state and your goal energy state, i.e. you need less delta-V to match actual velocity and altitude with desired velocity and altitude (or in layman's talk, your starting motion is more similar to your finishing motion if you're flying round the planet the same way it's turning than if you're going the other way). For a frame of reference, let's take a planet that isn't rotating noticeably at all. To land you need to match speed with the surface, or in other words, by the time you've descended to the ground, you need to have come to a dead horizontal stop. If the planet is spinning in the same direction as you are orbiting, you don't need to slow down that much - you still need some horizontal motion, enough to equal the speed of the surface's rotation. If the planet is spinning in the opposite direction to your orbit, you need to slow down more - in fact, you need to pass a dead stop and gain motion in the opposite direction. The only time it ever really makes sense to go retrograde is when you want to cash in your orbital speed for a big payout in altitude, and even then only if altitude is the only desired criteria.

Having given this some thought, in the majority of cases I'm gonna go with any height at all. I should set out my stall by saying that to start with stock Career grinds my gears a lot, but by far the worst thing about it is how much I want it to work. So I'm trying mod/career combinations to try and make it a more compelling, more rewarding and all-round more satisfying experience. The mods I use/that I'm talking about aren't supposed to be shortcuts to anywhere or anything, they're supposed to add depth - in many cases actually utilising their parts ought to make the game a little harder by increasing your payload costs. As such locking that depth away up the tech tree is just frustrating. The broader, underlying point is I just don't like how stock Career plays out. Goodbye imagination, hello budgetary constraint and dictatorial mission parameters. Adding mods ought to help, but when they're keyed into the same system of constraint it just doesn't work. And just to clarify, I've been around long enough to know that there are a lot of ways I could try to help myself (I know this because down the years I've tried many of them). My question here is deliberately narrow.