Rusty6899

Personally, I reckon that construction would be better done on an inventory basis rather than design-then-pay basis. Obviously, it would be set up so that craft construction would be largely identical, but you would be able to store parts from test contracts and use them as long as they were recovered. It also would make testing contracts more difficult as you could be given a small number of parts to perform a test, meaning that you only had two or three opportunities to complete the contract. Successfully completing a contract could reward you with a few of the parts to your inventory. I think this would work best if items could be bought and sold for the same price, and recovery costs were determined by mass and distance from KSC (with all parts returned to inventory), rather than a recovery value determined by distance from KSC and value of the parts on the craft. I think it would also be an improvement if you were given specialised parts for specific missions, for example you could be given some landing struts with the "Explore Mun" contract if you haven't researched them yet.

My bad... I think there are a lot of options still open. It is a sandbox game after all. The problem lies in the fact that finishing the tech tree basically means that you are back playing sandbox mode. In my opinion, career mode should offer more of a challenge than just restricting the parts available, which is effectively what we have now. The addition of finance is a bonus, but there needs to be an alternative source of income other than contracts or else you're left performing repetitive tasks to continue playing after the tech tree is finished.

That's why I think that, long term, this sort of thing needs to be implemented. http://cdn02.tmcdn.org/sites/default/files/styles/inline_stopgap/public/08hdJyj_4.png?itok=7bGS5T0w It means we would be able to create a detailed infrastructure. The problem is that it would be so difficult to balance well, so I can see why the devs don't seem so keen. I think that a more detailed budget system would help, which meant that you couldn't just time accelerate to any transfer window as your space program would be losing money from inactivity. I also think contracts for exploring new planets/moons should be time restricted to the next available transfer window. The 0.24 update is great, but the game still has a lot of potential for development.

I find the rep meter pretty bizarre. I completed a contract worth nearly 2000 rep and many contracts in the hundreds and my rep seems to be fixed at 971. Whatever I do, it doesn't increase. I'm not entirely sure how it affects gameplay either. I assume it determines the contracts that are available, but that seems to be it.

In a way, you won then! I didn't realise that you could get that much science from testing contracts. I had seen a few that gave major rewards, but they involved using solid rocket boosters on the Mun and Jet Engines on Minmus etc. I'd still much rather do what I wanted, and perform contracts where they coincided with my own plans. If a juicy part testing contract comes up, I'll probably have to think about taking it on though.

I do really like the idea of getting a part that I haven't unlocked yet for testing purposes. I do think that these missions are too common, though. I only completed a handful of testing parts missions until I could complete a Mun return mission, and now I doubt I'll do one again (unless I see a good opportunity to loan a part I haven't unlocked or I was planning on using that part in a similar fashion). The best use of contracts is to get paid to do something that you were going to do anyway, and the small rewards that you get for the testing missions doesn't really cut it. That said. New players won't be looking towards interplanetary missions after a dozen launches or so, and could really benefit from an easier and consistent influx of cash/science.

I get that, but it would be really demoralising if you lost all of the parts you had researched up to that point and all history of your achievements were lost. There's a big difference between starting a mission again and starting a career again. If there is a chance of failure then the first thing every new player will do after they fail is "quick load". Obviously I love the quick save/load functions and have used them more times that I could care to count, but I think that they shouldn't be essential for providing a "reasonable" difficulty level for newer players.

Try and remember how hard you failed when you first played the game and reconsider how difficult it should be to fail. I would love a "hard-mode" with tighter budgets and less tolerance for failure, but I think the devs are right to allow new players to ease into it rather than losing all their progress if they make a few score mistakes.

The way I look at it, asparagus staging improves thrust rather than fuel efficiency (assuming you measure fuel efficiency as delta-v/tonne of fuel). If you take away the fuel lines and simply have the radially mounted engines firing two at a time, you have the same delta-V but a much lower thrust. For this reason, asparagus staging (in my experience) only pays off for launch stages, after that your TWR is relatively unimportant. In having an asparagus stage whilst in orbit could be detrimental, as your previous stages would have had to lift up to 7x more mass into orbit. I think budgets (and a better aerodynamic model... and the improved launch engines) should put an end to asparagus staging. They aren't used in real life for technical and economic reasons, so it's probably fair that those reasons should also affect your ability to use them effectively in KSP.

For most missions, I have designed my rocket before I get to the vehicle assembly building. The odd time I will have work arounds that have to be made on the fly, but I prefer the feeling of doing my own calculations. I do think that it would help to have a readout of your ship's mass, as it can get slightly annoying to add up the mass of every single part on your ship manually. I imagine the people who don't want to see it implemented are people who have put the time and effort into developing a mathematical solution to designing their ships and would feel that the addition of a dV readout would undermine the time they spent learning about it. From personal experience, I found that learning about dV, and how to calculate it and use it in a design process, was a very rewarding challenge, although I imagine it is not something that everyone is interested in. I would say that there are a few arguments for and against; FOR... Some people aren't interested in getting too bogged down in maths and may take more interest in the many other challenges that the game has to offer. Some people are happy to learn the scientific principles behind dV, but don't want/have time to spend an hour or two, before each mission, doing calculations. AGAINST... It undermines the efforts of those of us obsessive enough to learn about the subject. It may dissuade players who would otherwise try to learn about dV, potentially limiting their enjoyment and the educational potential of the game.

The aerospike is useful for asparagus staged rockets going to Mun or Minmus, if you want to keep the weight low. It may be that with the newest engines you can achieve the same results more cheaply. It's pretty obvious from looking at it that it's strength should be ascending from atmospheric bodies, but I think that if its thrust were improved much, then it would become OP.

I spent ages trying to dock using the Snr. docking ports recently. It took about 5 minutes of rubbing the ends together until they got the message. It's happened to me twice recently, so I think they just might be a bit unresponsive in general. The Jr. ones are no trouble, they join up as soon as I get within about half a metre, even if the angle is a bit off.

Rank 2. I haven't bothered to really try spaceplanes yet. Not properly anyway. My docking recently has been inelegant, but effective (I have had problems with poorly placed RCS thrusters so I'm only using SAS and the H and N keys). Trying my first Tylo landing at the moment, I have used up a couple of quick saves, gonna refine my technique and try again fairly soon. I also had a nightmare trying to land on Laythe (aiming for the islands is tough and with a very heavy lander the ground had to be completely flat).

This is a debatable point. Firstly, it would take a long time to speed up to 0.1C (and slow down when you get there), meaning that a burn would last months or years. Secondly, I'm not sure if you can calculate time taken as simply as distance/speed = time for interstellar transfers. I think you would basically be trying to get a periapsis as close to the sun as possible and burning to raise your apoapsis until it is outside the sun's SOI. I find it a bit difficult to justify allowing ships with 30,000+km/s of delta-V.

One problem with this is that even if you could perform x1012 time acceleration, most of that time would need to be spent actually accelerating. So you would have to be able to control your burns through that length of time. Also, If you were in career mode, a mission to another Solar System could take decades (optimistically) so you would either have to time accelerate to complete the mission (neglecting your space program for years at a time) or start a mission and wait for 10... 20... 30 game years to pass to complete it. Another problem is that an entire galaxy would probably need to be created to facilitate interstellar travel as there would have to be an SOI in interstellar space. I suppose it may be possible to have a very small galaxy, with 20+ stars orbiting a massive black hole, but such an empty galaxy wouldn't be very immersive. I would say that the Alcubierre drive would be exactly "unrealistic FTL" as there is no scientific basis for claiming that it would actually work. You might as well be able to discover wormholes in the tracking station. Another option may be to have Kerbol as part of a binary or multiple star system although I am not entirely sure of how travel between the planets could be modelled in that situation. I think the devs are reluctant to include relativity into KSP anyway so I think that any interstellar travel would need to be done through conventional rockets. I doubt the devs will include interplanetary travel unless a mod is made that overcomes the challenges associated with it first and it would definitely divide opinion if it were released.

I hadn't realised it had been used extensively for interplanetary travel. I had vaguely remembered reading an article saying that there was a proposed mission which was the first to use Ion propulsion for an interplanetary transfer. I must have misremembered. I had thought they were mainly used to counter orbital decay.

Generally, the only balance you need to worry about for your craft, at the moment, is TWR and Isp. When cost comes into it as well the parts that are OP will cease to be. In terms of gameplay, the NERVA's are overpowered because they are always a better option for interplanetary travel than any other engine, but underpowered compared to their real life counterparts. If they cost a lot more than the other engines, then they would cease to be OP and would just form a balance with the rest of the game's engines. The same can be said of ion engines and the new lifters. When cost considerations come into play then there won't be the same problem.

I think the main problem with this is that ion engines, in reality, are not meant to be used for interplanetary travel. Obviously the game is not a simulator of reality, but it seems that all the parts have real world analogues and are designed to be used in the same situations. The problem lies in the fact that no one wants to do multiple hour burns, so it makes sense to increase their thrust, but increasing it by too much means that the engines can be abused to create OP interplanetary craft. Maybe the best thing to do would be to have kept the Ion engines as they were, and add a new set, which have higher thrust (2kN) and lower Isp (~2000s). This means that you couldn't use the high thrust Ions to go interplanetary (or if you did, it wouldn't be much more efficient than nukes) and keeping the old ones would prevent anyone's existing craft from being made obsolete as well as providing a more realistic ion engine. I can understand why the devs didn't want to introduce new parts at the moment, and it isn't an issue that I'm particularly passionate about, but that would be my suggestion.

I can imagine that it will be very difficult to set reasonable prices for purchasing each part. I'm looking forward to having to plan missions more thoroughly though. At the moment it's kind of a case of interplanetary = nukes, take as many solar panels as you can be bothered to fit on your ship etc. The game will be much better if players can utilise a budget efficiently to progress faster. The budget will have to be fairly large to accommodate newcomers, but if you are clever about your budget then you should be able to get ahead.

Obviously the thrust is still pretty bad. An asparagus staged design with 6x symmetry and one "large" xenon gas container above each engine takes about 10 hours to burn through. Interestingly, asparagus staging only seems to provide about 10% extra delta-V compared with a single engine with 7 xenon gas tanks for a 3 tonne payload. I haven't ever really considered using the Ion engines, but I can see why they may be useful for adjusting orbits and the like. I haven't ever really needed that level of precision, though, and I'm pretty sure the game isn't really set up that well for establishing perfect geostationary orbits and the like. One problem with getting maximum efficiency, is that running your Ion engines at 1% power will actually increase your delta-V, considering that you would require fewer solar panels/RTG's to run it and would therefore reduce the weight. I'm looking forward to when the monetary system is in place and there will be an economic consideration to put a realistic cap on the pursuit of efficiency.

Having run my calculations, I humbly admit that you are right (with the caveat that in cases with extremely high payloads, nukes can outperform Ion engines and that the delta-V will depend on the amount of fuel, which is obviously going to make it difficult to provide a fair comparison).

There is nothing special about asparagus staging to earn extra delta-V. All it does is provide more thrust for the same amount of delta-V, when compared to a rocket with the same configuration, but only fired two radial engines at a time. Obviously it offers much more Delta-V than a ship that has 6 radially mounted tanks and engines firing consecutively, but that isn't an efficient way of designing a ship in most cases. Realistically, you should probably only be looking to use asparagus staging for launch stages (for the extra thrust) and the new parts in 0.23.5 are doing there best to make this type of staging obsolete. I don't really think that Ion engines will provide a much larger delta-V total than could be achieved with Nukes. Remember the fuel tanks for Xenon gas have a fuel/tank mass ratio of between 1.33 and 1.4, compared to liquid fuel which generally has a ratio of 8. It's possible to get a lot of delta-V on your ship, but not significantly more than can be achieved through other methods.

What happens to objects that you decouple? Technically they are "debris" immediately. Do they disappear as soon as you decouple them or only when you go back to the space centre?

It's difficult to tell what you are doing wrong without knowing what you are trying. The main difference between getting to inner planets (Eve and Moho) and outer ones (Duna, Dres, Jool and Eeloo) is that if you are on a prograde orbit you want to burn during the day to get to inner planets and at night to get to outer planets. The exact time to burn depends on which planet you want to reach, but generally it will be up to an hour before midday/midnight to encounter most planets.

I was probably missing the point of them. I hadn't really considered using them for landers, and I had figures that with rovers they were more there for aesthetics. Still, theres no point in me using them as I had planned. Makes more sense for me to use a probe core in this situation. Thanks guys.