Landwalker

astropapi1, are you using some sort of graphics/texture mod? That Duna looks so much... prettier than I'm used to... Then again, having only been to Duna something on the order of twice, maybe I'm just not familiar with how it looks...

Perhaps. I have not watched any videos (I don't really have time to follow along with all of the released information on all of the various media, so I generally rely on the forum's community discussions to stay up to speed with what's going on). Perhaps because of that lack of exposure on my end, I'm not in any rush to pass judgment on the 0.23 science, as I haven't actually seen it yet. That said, I enjoy 0.22 science as well, so I suppose my tolerance for and/or definition of "grindy" may not be in sync with others'. And I'm okay with that; that's just how it goes sometimes.

As someone who is generally disconnected and only gets information from the forums, this is the first I've heard of a "flipping out" on the SQUAD side. Can you provide a link/source for that so I can cease residing in the dark on that?

Seems like it's a bit premature to throw science under the bus considering that 0.23 is ostensibly doing a pretty significant overhaul to how it works... (Not that I don't enjoy it even as-is.)

Start a new career, of course (it isn't like I've gotten all that far with my most recent one anyway). I am a science hoarder, so I am pretty excited about the updates to science and how it's gathered. Appropriate forum to make this statement be damned, I just want to say, Regex, how much I love your PreciseNode mod. I no longer have a hate/hate relationship with trying to fine-tune my maneuver nodes for lengthy trips. I'm selfishly glad your first order of business is making sure PreciseNode is 0.23-compatible.

That isn't necessarily true, as political polling (and, really, any purportedly official/scientific polling) is far more random. Yes, people who are contacted for those polls still have the option of declining to answer, but most people, if directly asked, will respond to a polling question. Political polling works because the sample is determined (mostly) randomly from a very large sample population, and can therefore be effectively extrapolated to the general population with a small margin of error. On the other hand, responding to this poll requires that a KSP player (1) Have a forum account, (2) Actually be active with that account, (3) Be interested enough in the thread's content to read it, and (4) Care enough about the poll question to respond to it. Consequently, the sample population is very much not randomly selected, and thus can't be effectively applied to the entire playerbase. As a result, the poll shows that, among people who meet all of the above criteria to participate in the poll, most of them favor resources over multiplayer. But it doesn't really show anything other than that. /statisticsrant As for myself, I picked Resources as well, but I'm not overly zealous in my position. I have no interest whatsoever in multiplayer, at all, period. I would like to eventually see something that opens up surface installations on other celestial bodies more engaging, whether that is resources or something else, but I am also strongly in the camp of "Whatever it is shouldn't punish players with a lower level of mastery of the game." SQUAD stated that the resource model as they had originally conceived it was proving to be, simply, not fun. I don't see any reason to include not-fun in the game. I do hope they find a model that is fun, but I'm glad to hear that they aren't shoehorning in a system that doesn't deliver what the game, and really any game, should be all about.

Thank you folks for that. It clears up a lot of confusion on my end. Oddly, I didn't hear anything outrageous at all, or anything about completely throwing out resources from the game's ultimate development goal. But I'm at least glad I now know the source of the uproar (even if I don't understand why or how it caused such an uproar...)

I feel like I've missed some significant announcement about resources... which isn't surprising, since I don't follow all of the seemingly infinite outlets of information related to KSP. I don't suppose anyone would be kind enough to link me up with whatever sparked all of this Resource Riot business?

As someone who is almost unreasonably committed to the safety of my kerbals, I'm not really a fan of the "Manned flight only" starting point. You can make whatever arguments about realistic progression versus The Kerbal Spiritâ„¢, ease of flight versus limitations, and so forth, but ultimately for me none of that really matters. All I want is to keep my kerbals safe until I'm confident that I can put them somewhere with a high probability of safety. I wouldn't make much of a kerbal, myself...

If nothing else, this thread caused me to become aware that there is such a thing as "Kerbal Joint Reinforcement," and I am downloading it now. What was the rationale behind moving the radial liquid boosters forward/upward on the rocket? I've always been operating under the impression that, when it comes to rockets, one generally wants Center of Mass and Center of Thrust to be as low as possible for any given stage, especially when you're talking about liftoff periods. Squinting at that thing as best I can, and bearing in mind that this is the pot giving the kettle advice on how to be black (I've never landed on Gilly, either, let alone put Kerbals on it), I might also hazard that you could benefit from adding a 2.5m SAS module at the top of your central Mainsail column. I might also propose that, in Fail #2, your gravity turn may have been a bit premature. Try waiting until the neighborhood of 20km and see if you get any better results from it. That method of strutting-up your radial upper stage using the decouplers and the "plate" parts as a foundation for the strut was pretty ingenious thinking. I may well adapt that for future designs of my own.

Having never been to any celestial body outside of the Kerbin-Mun-Minmus system except for one very brief fly-by of Eve in my ruined campaign, it was time in my new campaign to stretch my wings and finally go get a real encounter (and the science to go with it). Launched a probe that was supposed to travel to, orbit, and eventually crash into, Eve. Didn't pay attention to my launch windows and ended up being about a month too late for Eve. As a result, the mission was diverted. One as-yet-unvisited celestial body is as good as the next, right? And so it was the the Apollonius Zeta probe traveled to visit our red neighbor to the radial-out and its creepy satellite. We started out coming into the encounter a little... below target? <iframe class="imgur-album" width="100%" height="550" frameborder="0" src="http://imgur.com/a/43vte/embed"></iframe>

I never perform crewed landings on other celestial bodies without at least two kerbals in the landing capsule. The intent is less "ethics," though, and more "I once got an EVA kerbal killed because he jumped on Minmus while running down-hill and built up too much speed by the time he hit the ground, so I want to make sure that if I ever do something like that again, I have a backup pilot to get the lander home." That said, I do endeavor to never strand or kill any kerbals. As a result: 1) Abort procedures on all crewed craft. 2) Kerbals are not allowed on any of my plane designs. 3) Uncrewed probes precede crewed capsules to all intended locations in order to find out whether or not I can get them back to Kerbin safely.

I have found myself wishing lately that the Mk25 drogue parachutes (the orange axial ones) were also available in radial flavors, like the blue Mk16-XL/Mk2-R... Today, in my new career game since Bill blew up the universe in my last one, marked the program's first landing of a craft on the Mun, in the form of the unmanned Apollonius Alpha. Said probe promptly strip-mined the Munar Midlands of all thermometric and seismic data, as well as collecting abundant information on the behavior of goos and other various materials, before successfully returning to Kerbin. I think I'm finally getting the hang of this whole aerobraking thing.

Wrote up a spreadsheet to calculate how many instances of any given experiment at any given location (celestial body, height above said body) one needs to conduct in order to "harvest" a user-provided percentage of the maximum total science for that particular combination. E.g. If I'm doing temperature scans and want to extract 95% of the "cap" for that experiment in each location, I need to perform (and transmit) it 5 times. On the surface of Kerbin, that will give me approximately 3.8 science, and leave 0.2 science uncollected. On the surface of the Mun, however, it'll be ten times that (38 science collected and 2 science uncollected) for the same five transmissions. It really underscores just how abominable the transmission efficiency of the Science Jr. materials study is. 20% already seems bad, but when you realize that you have to perform it twenty times in order to collect 95% of the possible science...

That statement is essentially true for every game ever made with both a sandbox / skirmish / freestyle mode and a structured campaign... That's sort of the point of sandbox/freestyle vs. campaign modes.

As someone so bad at rocketry that I don't allow kerbals anywhere near my plane designs and when I grazed Eve's sphere of influence with a probe the other day I about wet myself with excitement, I'm a big fan of career mode and the gradual progression of science.

I don't know about favorite, but Bill Kerman earned his place as "most hated Kerbal" on my roster today by collapsing the universe. In my 0.22 career mode, I was finally ready for the first manned mission to land on a celestial body other than Kerbin. Jeb and Bill were taking the "Kerbopult Minmus I" out to the mintiest of moons (bypassing a Munar landing in the order of things). I should have known Bill was trouble when, during orbit around Minmus, he decided to go on EVA and exited the Mk2 Landercan like he had been shot out of a cannon, flying off into space. Fortunately (or so I thought), I was able to rocket-pack him back to the thing, and then he and Jeb guided the lander down to the frozen surface of one of Minmus's spearmint lakes. All was going swimmingly, and the boys were having a grand time stripping the lake of science with their myriad instruments, EVA reports, and surface samples. After returning to the cabin for a brief break, Bill decided to make one last EVA before the dynamic duo headed home... When I designed the lander for the Kerbopult Minmus I, I had inadvertantly placed the "container" for one of my 1x6 photovoltaic arrays at an angle directly above the airlock door, resulting in my kerbals hitting their head on it whenever they began an EVA. This was the cause of Bill's overenthusiastic orbital EVA, and all of my surface EVAs had been stricken by the same problem. So it was no surprise when Bill exited the Lander-Can, hit his head on the overhanging solar array, and went flapping awkwardly through the low-gravity vacuum. I simply waited for him to once again land on the surface, so that he could hop up and grab some final knowledge before heading home. Instead, when Bill landed face-first on the icy surface, he destroyed the universe. The whole "display" area went blackâ€â€I still had things like my altimeter at the top, but could see nothing, and the altimeter was going insane, with all of the numbers reading 1, then 2, then 3, and so on until 9, then back to 1 to repeat. I jumped back to KSC and then went through the tracking station to resume the flight, but had the same issue. I quit out of the entire game, fired it back up, and loaded the flight via tracking station... Bill had disappeared entirelyâ€â€he wasn't in the tracking station, he wasn't listed as dead or MIA, he wasn't on the roster, nothing, nowhere. Jeb was still in the Lander-Can, but the craft was blistering through space on a solar escape trajectoryâ€â€and right behind it was the flag I had planted on Minmus earlier in the mission, careening through the nothingness a hair's length away from the capsule. Baffled beyond all belief, I felt compelled to abandon the career entirely, as it was clear Jeb was never going to come home and I didn't much care for the thought of using the Terminate Flight function to forcibly end this debacle. I strive to keep all of my kerbals alive and retrievable, but in my new career, I don't think I'm going to feel that same level of obligation towards Bill...

That still summarizes all of my Munar landings. They're hair-raising experiences.

I had to go with the Kerbin System (and specifically Minmus), simply because I haven't gotten anywhere else yet. That said, I do enjoy me some Minmus. Funky color, and so little gravity I once killed a Kerbal by jumping too high while running downhill (no jetpack necessary on that one).

Landed my first 0.22 surface probe on the Mun! Maybe underwhelming in the grand scheme of Jool Cruisers and everything else that gets thrown around here... but I'm pleased with myself.

I'm interested to hear what you think about the PF mod... I've been sticking rabidly to Stock Only with my 0.22 career thus far, but if it's really worth it, I might look into something like that. In toot-my-own-horn news, I finally landed (successfully) an unkerbed probe on the Mun and am stripping the landing site of knowledge as we speak. Hopefully I threw enough fuel on the damn thing to make it back to Kerbin...

Figuring out how to use gravity assists to get from the Mun to Minmus and back with far less fuel expenditures. Yeah, I have a low bar.

Finally took Jeb on a mission to orbit Minmus and strip its orbital altitudes of science before returning to Kerbin. Got a pair of gravity assists from the Mun (one on the way there, and a braking assist on the way back), and over 400 science for my trouble, so I was finally able to unlock the capsules I've been waiting for to put a Kerbal on the Mun.

Finally (finally, finally, finally, finally) built an atmospheric plane capable of getting off the KSC runway without flipping out of control, and took it on a couple of trips to some nearby biomes for scientific pickups. It eventually managed to get the last few points of science I needed to unlock the PresMat Barometer (moar science!) and the two Telus Mobility Enhancers, leaving me only one tech away from being ready for a manned Munar landing. I later realized I had forgotten to put half of the tail-wing on the craft, but thankfully that didn't cause too many aerobatic catastrophes. Currently it's sitting in some northern grasslands with the parking brakes enabled while I send yesterday's semi-failure probe back to Minmus continue studying for my next CPA exam section.

I confess to using the Poodle, principally because I don't know how to make engine clusters, let alone engine clusters in upper stages... >_>