pellinor

Same for me, I was playing with mission controller before. Main difference is that now tanks are much more expensive and pods are much cheaper.

Building these bases would be a perfect sink for excess funds (and/or science)! Is it possible to spawn them from your code or do they need to exist from the start of the game?

Some thoughts on science and experimental parts. * Say I get a test contract for a turbojet. Then I could build a whole fleet of planes as long as the contract is active. However, afterwards I'm not even allowed to put a plane in the hangar for refueling, because the part will magically vanish. This feels strange. * When I research a new part, I typically only need a small number of them. Like the first pair of docking ports for that mun/minmus hopper. * Later at the end of the tech tree, I would be happy to spend large amounts of science for minor things. I'm equipped and motivated to do more science missions, but have nothing to spend the results on. => I suggest that a contract gives a finite number of prototype parts, which can be recovered even after the contract is finished. This could be one engine, or a pair of docking ports. When all are destroyed without doing the test, the contract fails. => Make those parts available at the time when you would research their tech node today, and make the tech more expensive so it is unlocked much later. So where today you research LVNs and then send a manned jool mission, you would instead use an experimental LVN to send it and still have plenty if things to spend the mission results on, like unlocking the LVN as a standard part. This would make the science game last longer, while introducing new parts at the same rate as today. It would be possible to build ships with all the parts in the game, and still have something useful to do with the resulting science.

What about missions that destroy parts? "splash down this tank at 50-70m/s" "overheat this engine"

I like the monthly funds idea. Best make it a constant base funding that does not scale with reputation. So it can help a broke space program to survive but does not change much for a rich player. Could be a way to make budgets tighter without excluding beginners.

A few more Options on the tiny end of the spectrum would be useful. To make this little Plane, I gave the engine a 'free' scaling type. At 25%, it has about 3kN of Thrust, still almost 10 times what the plane needs to stay in the air. What do you think about the following proposals: * introduce a 0.31m scale to stack parts, i.e. half of the current minimum, and set the minimum free scale to something like 10%. Or even less, I really like how the length for procedural parts starts at 10mm, have used this several times to align or balance things. * allow continuous scaling for all scale types, like it is done in procedural parts. So there are arrow buttons for quick selection of standard sizes, and the bar inbetween allows free scaling. Why forbid odd-sized rockets if both the code and the user interface would easily allow it? Also, stack parts are often used other than flush on a stack part of the same size.

When balancing things I often come to a point where I'd like to change the type of a procedural part. In this case make the battery structural and turn one of the structural parts into a battery. To do this I need to tweak two new parts to look like the ones I already have and rebuild pretty much the whole craft. So I thought, wouldn't it make sense to merge all the procedural containers and the structural part into one Part? The nosecone could become another part like this, with all the options in one catalog entry. After all, the different tanks have much more commonalities (the shaping abilities) than differences (the type of resource). What do you think?