Pineapple Frenzy

I tried using the Dev Build X4r1 yesterday but it wouldn't generate an iso map for Vall. Polar was fine though. Too bad this mod is no longer in development.

Quite the opposite. My goal here was to try and find ways to allow players of all skill levels to expand their careers at a rate that suits them, while giving them the opportunity to take risks if they like. I'm not sure I see how any of these suggestions could have the potential to make KSP any more challenging than other popular RPGs, especially given that KSP has a sandbox mode. If you remain unconvinced, these suggestions would even function nicely under a difficulty settings architecture too. Certain features like the Academy could be turned on or off. A host of variables like Benefactor benevolence, or initial start up capital could be made tweakable by the player. The variety of options is endless. Though the essential element of separating the pursuit of science and the pursuit of money so each may be acquired independently if desired is what I'm ultimately advocating. I believe you underestimate the intelligence of the average gamer.

I've flushed out a few specific suggestions which ought not be too difficult to implement given what we saw in the last release: 1. Establish a KSP bank account in the name of the player's space agency. The player begins his career with his first fiscal quarter's modest government / commercial / private (the benefactors') funding credited therein. 2. Each fiscal quarter the account is credited with funds allocated by the benefactors. The benefactors love space exploration and expect results. Fail to impress them by your lack of mission success and you can expect to see each quarter's funding stagnate, or even decrease. Wow them with your success, and you will see their checkbooks open wide. Remember, space agencies are paying staff whether they fly missions or not. So if you have no income, you will quickly move into the red. 3. In the same way science is awarded when the player achieves certain mission parameters, the player receives one-time cash bonuses for putting kerbals in different places throughout the solar system. The key here is that, unlike science where you cannot stack sensors, rewards are given on a per-kerbal basis. Manage to safely get ten colonists to their new home on Duna? Congratulations, step right up and receive your massive ceremonial check. Of course, you had better hope you sent a comms antenna with them. Otherwise the only people enjoying the warm glow of mission success will be the Kerbals you sent yonder. Bring them back to Kerbin after an extended stay in space, and collect even more cash. This is the one I like: 4. After a successful manned mission, in addition to your massive one-time bonus, expect the Benefactors to increase your periodic funding. Hey, you've proved you can deliver success. That's what a good investment smells like, right? 5. The corollary of course is that mission failure ought to bring with it devastating consequences. After the (hypothetical) costs of the vessel, accident investigation, litigation, and humiliation are tallied up, expect to see a major incident penalty debit applied to your account. The philosophy of 'vessels can be replaced, Kerbals can't (at least, not right away)' should apply here. Probes ought not cost the agency more than the cost of materials, regardless of mission outcome. However the potential loss of Kerbals, and expensive manned vessel parts, ought to strike enough fear in the player to make him sweat while landing a Mk1 pod on Minimus, no matter how much fuel is in the tank. The Benefactors' too are fickle creatures. They live by the motto "What have you done for me lately?" Fly no impressive missions for a while and expect your periodic funding to slowly dwindle. Kill Kerbals, and watch it disappear faster than a jellybean at Fat Camp. 6. Kerbals must be finite, in the sense that once they die, they are dead (i.e. forever dead). If their individual personalities aren't enough to endear us to their well-being, the money we invest in their training ought to motivate us to look after them. At the beginning of your career your have 2 fully qualified astronauts ready to go, with a number of 'cadet applicants' eagerly awaiting training at the Academy (sound familiar?). To increase your roster of qualified astronauts, not only must you invest significant capital into their training, but cadets won't be ready to fly for at least a couple of fiscal quarters, depending on how stupid they are. Courageous astronauts make better role models. Therefore when they successfully complete missions, courageous astronauts earn you greater financial respect from the Benefactors. Of course the Academy interviews only a few applicants each year, and accepts even fewer as cadets, so your pool of bodies will dwindle quickly if you like turning your asparagus stacks into pinwheels. 7. The player must have some opportunity to recover his career if he buys the farm and ends up in the red. In addition to purchasing parts during vessel construction, the player ought to be able to add parts to a 'parts bank' as funds allow. That way the player can continue his valiant (vain?) efforts to keep his job as Director by launching a hail Mary mission or two. 8. Manned command modules ought to cost significantly more that other parts. How much more is a subject of some difficulty. No mission should be cheap, but to make manned missions riskier, probe-only vessels must be significantly cheaper to launch than manned vessels. Perhaps if a command pod cost on the order of two or three times that of the booster it would need to escape Kerbin SOI would be a good place to start. The end game: Should a career end? And if so, how? 9. I can think of only two ways a space agency (real or otherwise) ought to cease operations: either it runs out of money, or it ceases to be relevant, in which case it runs out of money. A KSP career need not end automatically for any reason other than the player resigns because the agency he directs is hopelessly bankrupt. When this happens, he need only press the 'resign' button (like the 'recover' button, but way more humiliating. Don't confuse them). At this point the player sees a career summary and can explore mission stats, history, etc. I know this post covers a lot of material, but these ideas demonstrate what KSP would look like if I were Q (Booyah! Star Trek reference baby!). Let the discussion continue.

Life support is one of those things that could be added to the tech tree. At some point, Kerbals might discover how to regenerate life support resources in flight. Obviously constraints could be electricity and mass. But the key to long missions with life support would be reaching a point where enough technology can be lifted to allow life support systems to run in a steady state for the entire mission, rather than having to manage them throughout. At that point, life support becomes only a mass penalty.

I certainly don't see any need to prohibit players from including science instruments on manned missions. And that certainly wasn't my intent. I'm simply saying that increasing the financial risk/reward quality of manned flights would give people a reason to launch more probes without the risk of bankrupting their space program early on in the game. I think giving the player the opportunity to conduct well planned and executed manned missions without ever having to launch a probe in order to progress the tech tree is great. For us chickens, probe-only missions would give us the option to earn just science, without risking resources and lives if we didn't need / want the cash at that moment. We thus add opportunity, without limiting choice. My focus is on separating the way we earn money from the way we earn science by making manned missions a financially high risk / high reward endeavor.

I think I figured out how Squad can balance gathering science and money, and give a reason for players to launch both probes and manned missions. Here's my idea: Pretty soon we're anticipating Squad will introduce money into KSP. When I first heard about the idea, I had mixed feelings. "That's great!" I thought, while at the same time scratching my head wondering, "So what?" Like others, I was disappointed when Squad eliminated multiple probe science transmissions as this rendered probes essentially pointless. Real probes continue to gather data for years (even decades). Why should KSP probes be tossed after their first transmission? I understand Squad's reasons for the change. I just thought it could have been implemented better. Then it hit me. We've been trying to balance collecting one resource between two different types of activities, probes vs manned. With the introduction of a second resource, we would be able to separate the activities and allow (essentially require) players to perform each kind of mission in order to collect their respective resources in a balanced way. Let me explain. If we were to leave science pretty much as it is (minus a few tweaks here and there, like bringing back multiple transmissions) but reward big money for manned missions, the player would be able to choose which kind of mission he would like to execute based on his highest priority. If the player wants to open up the tech tree a bit, he can launch a few probes and explore. But if he wants to buy any of the expensive new parts he just unlocked, he'll have to send some Kerbals off on a dangerous mission in order to drum up advertizing revenue / science grants / commercial contracts / government funding. This need not be an either / or endeavor. Lots of new science would earn some (a little) money. Conversely, while manned flights earn huge money, they could still bring in a little science too. To aid this, we could make probe oriented parts relatively cheap to purchase, essentially disposable, while making command modules (and Kerbals) very expensive. We wouldn't need to limit the abuse of probes and the endless science one may collect with them because one need only covet new parts in the tech tree for a little while before feeling the itch to earn more cash by risking a few lives. As far as money is concerned, the name of the game is 'Big risk, big reward.' Make the financial penalty for the failure of manned flights huge. But make their potential payoff equally vast. In fact, find ways to potentially bankrupt a space program with the failure of only one or two missions. KERBALS SHOULDN'T BE EXPENDABLE! THEY REALLY DO WANT TO LIVE! It should cost money to train and develop cadets into full fledged astronauts. This will add excitement to manned missions without penalizing a player's ability to explore the solar system with probes. If no mission can launch without money, and exploration cannot expand without new technology, then the player must execute both types of missions to make their space agency to grow and prosper. Then we would have the beginnings of a real space exploration strategy game. I think this would be a great topic to discuss.

What about Kwid, as in slang for British Pound? "Sir, how much for that Mainsail engine please?" "That'll be five hundred Kwid."

When I'm doing a GSO, I plan to arrive at my apogee at precisely 2868.8 Km, and then burn until the orbital period is precisely 6h 00m 00.0s. The satellite will usually alter its position slightly over the course of its orbit, but always returns to the original position after each orbit is complete. The variations in position are cyclical and negligible WRT the function of a GSO satellite. This is as close to GSO as one can get, and is quite satisfactory for my needs, for several long missions. Over time, the satellites will drift in one direction or another. Since the only reason I need GSO is for Remote Tech comms satellites, and they can maintain line of sight with one another over quite a large variation in position, I usually don't tweak their orbits until they are several hundred kilometers out of position. To reposition them, I measure the amount of time ahead, or behind, their ideal position they are. Then I adjust the orbital period in the appropriate direction by that amount, wait one orbit, and then return the orbital period to 6h 00m 00.0s. For example: If my satellite has drifted retrograde and is now five minutes behind its nominal position, I will reduce its perigee until the orbital period is 5h 55m 00.0s. Then I'll wait one orbit and burn at apogee until the orbital period in 6h 00m 00.0s. Easy peasy. Tweaking GSO satellites is one of the most satisfying activities in KSP. Seeing your comms lines form that perfect equilateral triangle around Kerbin is really cool.

I find the thrust limiter is very useful for landing on bodies with low gravity. Quite often my landers have TWRs in excess of 3:1. Reducing maximum thrust gives me finer control of the lander's descent.

No, I kept the data and returned to Kerbin.

Since upgrading to .23 I started a new career savegame. I've noticed that when I take a science Jr lab with me, I'll do the study, but when I return to Kerbin and recover the vessel, I get no credit for science from it. The lab survives the descent and shows up in the science log, but there is no credit assigned. Any thoughts?

Booyah. Fresh version. Clean and mean.

Back up. Mine downloaded in 4 minutes. Thanks Squad.

Maybe we could re-open the Waiting Room...since some of us will be waiting patiently for a little while yet.

And their server crashed.

The waiting room made it to 4th in all time replies for general KSP Discussion.

Now number six in all time reply count in General KSP discussion.

This thread is now tenth on the all time most replies list in General KSP Discussion. Well done Team.

"What did you do in KSP today?"

As of right now, this is the fifteenth most replied thread of all time in the General KSP Discussion group. Not bad for a day's work.

0.23 IS HERE!!!!! That's what I'll say when they release v0.23.

Seriously, they need to release the update. People are going nuts.

The server is sending back sporadic "too many connections" messages. Way to go guys.

Some fun to pass the time.