panzer1b

I am all for better water textures, but what was in 0.7 isnt exactly what id call high qualtity either. What is implemented needs to have some reasonable levels of reflection and it CANNOT under any circumstances have major tiling issues like the current water (and over half the planet textures) have where you can see repeating textures everywhere. The easiest fix for the latter is to stretch the texture out, yeah itll make it look a bit uglier up close, but until the textures are higher res, id rather have slightly lower visual quality up close then have to see that bleh tiled crap that is all over the place, and especially prevalent in the water (laythe;s ocean is byfar the worst offender that ive been to recently). Anyways, i think im not the only one saying this, but KSP despretely needs a visual overhaul. Unity is not an excuse to have terribad textures and planet surfaces as there are plenty of other unity games that look stellar and no worse then other game engines can do. Im not saying every single aspect of KSP needs retexturing, but planets, oceans, the skybox, and some of the uglier leftover parts from early game versions (the parts im actually going to retex myself and make a mod if @SQUAD doesnt do anything about it in the next few releases as im just fed up with the utter lack of consistency between different rocket parts and to an extent the newer porkjet parts and the older rocket/misc parts). Frankly the best thing that can be done right now is to pull the planet texture assets out of those sharedassets.assets files (cant exactly edit them since no assets editor is compatible with current version of unity, used to be able though back in 1.0.5 and earlier) and let us alter/use whatever textures we desire for anything in the game without using mods like kopernicus which creates major lag problems and id rather not run just to replace a few stock textures. All things said, i doubt that anything is going to happen, as they had years to improve the visuals in the game and nothing whatsover was done in this regard. We still have broken planets (seams that cause your crafts to explode if you drive over/into them) with subpar textures, a very large subset of the stock parts are still using textures/models from like 5 years back, and nothing has been done in terms of atmospheric effects liek clouds/decent scattering. Now the last point isnt that big a deal, but we could at least get a texture overhaul of the game with a few touchups to the particle system and i dont think it would be that insanely difficult to do nor excessively time consuming, and the end result will be a game that is great looking and not reliant upon extremely laggy or glitchy mods. All i can do is hope, because running all the mods to replace planet textures (alongside eve for atmo effects) adds too much lag for me to have 1000 part count warship battles without tearing my skin off in frustration.

So, about that orbital cannon i ressurected from like 0.25 or whatever update was before the mk2 parts, although with mk2 parts the cannon mount was redone with a better looking vessel... What do you guys think, its fully stock, comes with 8 medium grade (wont 1 shot properly armored vessels but it will kill anything without a heavily reinforced core in a single hit) missiles (yeah its not a true "cannon" but its virtually impossible to actually hit something in orbit from the ground with any real cannon styled weapon so i had to settle for it firing missiles into orbit). Now to make a few more things over the weekend and ill post all my space warfare junk in the other thread...

Autostruts, as nice as they are to aleviate bugs and help after you docked something together, should not be used to build craft with since they can actually lower your armor protection when used any more then sparingly (as in less then 10 autostrutted parts total on a craft). No idea why, but using too many just ruins armor protection and causes its share of issues kraken wise. All in all, if part count even permits, proper use of regular struts offers the best armor protection, and given how lousy even the best armor is in 1.1 and 1.2, warships need every bit of performance you can get out of it. While i understand the desire to put so many weapons on something, do you REALLY need 66 bloody missiles on a single space station? Not that im trying to tell anyone how to design their stuff, but there is a point where the sheer number of weapons is so overkill you will never actually be able to use them before your ship is destroyed 10 times over and or all 20 enemy warships are history. I actually downloaded ur station just to take a look, and you have 738 parts in weapons alone, without which your station is alot less laggfesty. Personally for stations i dont really arm them that well, with around 2-6 0.6m missiles mostly for anti-fighter defense, but thats probably because i never saw stations as intended to participate in any sort of large scale combat, with the only possible exception to the rule being an asteroid base which is armed with a super heavy torpedo battery (in universe reason for that was that the asteroid "base" is like the equivalent of the pirate's homeworld since they dont own any territory on an actual planet, and for defending a homeworkd you kinda need to have at least 1 orbital cannon along with lots of smaller weapons too). Same with dedicated carriers actually, very few of them have more then a handful of point defense cannons since they arent really intended to perform combat outside of dire situations (a complete lack of armor tends to make the concept of slugging it out with anyone kinda stupid from a tactical perspective). Only assault carriers have real weapons, but even those are still no match for an actual capital ship 1 v 1.

Well i think ill be making my sub soon, i have a few (like 4) new (and some old) ships im fairly happy with, a few star fighters and SSTOs, and im also working on updating an orbital defense cannon i had in 0.25 or whatever version was out before they added mk2 parts (at least the porkjet ones) since it looks like you are looking for some actual ground stuff. My latest one is actually quite good, ive finally managed to pull off workeable armor protection while keeping it under 250 parts! Still dies to anything that is designed to kill capitral ships (rt-5s, multiple long ibeams, pretty much every heavy 1.2m torp), but its like invulnurable to every single fighter weapon, i emptied 30 drones (rcs powered anti-fighter missiles) into this thing and it didnt loose any critical components... Btw, is @HatBat at all interested in stock vehicles like tanks and apcs/transports? I have a crapload of stock tanks laying around, and id be glad to submit a few of the good ones as well provided there is any use for them in the series (as in 100% stock weapons onboard, no BDA or other weapon mods).

Does anyone have any good core layouts? Im literally stuck, with pretty much every single core type ive tried unable to withstand just a few hits from basic ibeam weapons or RT-5s. Sofar my saving grace ship wise is redundancy, excessive redundancy (as in every ship is for all intents and purposed like 10+ smaller self sustaineable vessels), but i cant seem to get away from redundancy without being more or less fodder. I know from experience (believe me, ive wasted weeks trying to figure out a way to make "indestructible" cores) that the idea of an invincible ship is impossible, but does anyone here have any good armor/core layouts that actually capable of eating like 6 ibeams one after the other and not desintegrating 50% of the time?

I like it, its so simple but it looks good at the same time. I doubt that the armor is going to be as good as structural panels, but it should still hold up against anti-fighter weapons, and based on teh design, i dont think you envisioned this thing slugging it out with actual capital ships so that isnt a big deal. Kinda wish there was a 0.6m SRB so i didnt have to use sepatrons (or modded decouplers) for my weapons, 1.2m parts are just way too big and hard to carry multiple of without going with a vulnurable stacked approach...

Curious, how heavy are those torpedoes? It looks like you clipped 2 RT-5s together (they do make decent impactors alone) and have a girder there. How much fuel do you have per SRB because i think those would be bloody heavy if you used full fuel level. Anyways, with 1.1 (and now 1.2) the whole idea of a girder core is pretty much outdated. It is still ALOT better then not using structural parts, but ive come to teh conclusion that such a core layout is nolonger that great as it dies way too easily to plain ibeam weapons, and an ibeam weapon is like what, under half a ton and like 4 parts if you could the decoupler and only use 2 sepatrons. Ive also come to the conclusion that what used to be compettive torpedoes are nolonger as practical to use these days (the concept of high part count and complexity is not necessary anymore to do alot of damage). It seems to be the combination of 1.1's new engine (physics interaction between 2 objects has changed alot recently), and the fact that squad seems to have made joints alot harder to break apart (this leads to more ships dying not of being broken apart but of parts being destroyed outright). Luckily my early 1.1 ships are still viable to an extent (though id love to do something about the part count insanity), because they rely more on sheer redundancy then actual armor protection. Seems that the best armor these days is abusing cargo bays (in the correct layout it can make a ship near invincible and also very low on parts), and then making the ship inherently redundant as well so that if the thing takes a nasty hit, what is left can still fight to an extent (my newest gen ships are all based on ion/probe spam and are armed with like 10+ hardpoints with multiple weapons all over and no stacked anything (that can be shot off entirely with 1 good hit), good luck disarming/immobilizing these things without throwing at least 10 ibeams at it (even if it gets cored out you still have to deal with all the drones that are left behind, each of which can shoot you and move around on its own)... Still, im working on creating better protected ships without settling for insane redundancy (the part count goes through teh roof, its like 200 parts for the above ship). Maybee ill make some breakthrough in combat technology for KSP ...

I cant be certain but im pretty sure that most of the mods that have gas giant cloud layers use liquify tool in photoshop. I know for a fact i did that in my mod (although its not intended to be entirely realistic, it does look cool and sorta like gas giant), and im pretty damn sure that it was used by atsronomer in his EVE packs as well as in SVE. Basically the way i did it is start with a few stripes and then manipulated them to look more flowy and natural with the liquify tool, and then ofc used that layer as a multiply atop of a cloud layer that gave the texture some breaks and such. Not sure how much help that is to you, but its more or less what i and some others ended up doing to make custom gas planet cloud textures... This is my mod if you want to take a look at it, again, its not realistic at all since i went for a more sci-fi feel, but the basic idea of how i made the texture is there and you can easily use the same concepts to make a more real world looking gas planet texture: If custom textures arent your thing, take a look at this site which has texture maps of certain planets in the solar system. http://planetscapes.com/maps/cylmaps.html This has some real world images of the planets in this solar system pieced tyogether into something that can be used directly in a game. Not my style but it may be what you are looking for...

My most painful moment had to be when i sent a 1500 part 500t warship to the jool system using nothing but ion engines... Granted there were like a hundred of them, but combining the sheer lag of that many parts (and this was in like 0.25 before the performance improvements) with the utterly abyssmal TWR (and the fact that the ship would instantly desintegrate if i tried to use any phys warp) led to the most painful 2 hour burn in history! If that wasnt worse enough i actually built it with assymetric thrust and this was in the times before i dumped RCS for reaction wheels, when i ran out of RCS to keep it stable, i had to do the braking burn at 50% ion power to keep the ship from flipping. I pretty much said screw it at that point and shift-del the entire save game and the craft file because of the sheer rage i was in. Since then ive switched to nukes for every single ship that is over 50t, because its impossible to give the things enough TWR to not tear your eyes out without going to insane part counts...

I found this in your logs: EVEManager: Issue loading CloudsManager! Error: UnityEngine.UnityException: Unable to apply node! ---> System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object at Atmosphere.CloudsManager.ApplyConfigNode (.ConfigNode node) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at EVEManager.EVEManagerBase.Apply () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at EVEManager.EVEManagerBase.Apply () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at EVEManager.EVEManagerBase.LoadConfig () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at EVEManager.GenericEVEManager`1[T].Setup () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at EVEManager.GlobalEVEManager.Setup (Boolean late) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 You need to make sure to download the 1.1.3 version of EVE from their page. Also, try to get stock EVE to work before installing my pack. Once you get stock EVE clouds to show you need to delete the entire boulderco folder (this contains the default EVE clouds and textures) and after that place sci-fivisualenchancements into gamedata from my archive. Do not override or even copy the environmentalvisualenchancements folder supplied in my archive at all because that one is for 1.2.x and not 1.1.x. Other then that, it looks like you have a massive slew of mods, and with that many there is a possibility that something is interfereing with EVE. If you have a clean backup, try to install just EVE and then get my configs to work before migrating this to your normal game. If it works there and stops working in the fully modded game then you have a conflict and you need to remove mods and place them back until you find which one is incompatible. Anyways, this is all the advice i can give you, im not a coding expert or anything but from these logs it appears that EVE itself isnt loading correctly, so look there first. The cloud configs here should be 100% compatible with the EVE version for 1.1.3, and after vacation ill make a version that works with 1.1.3 (and comes with prepackaged 1.1.3 EVE), but i just dont have time this instant since its like Christmas and i have actual real life things i need to get done. If this advice doesnt help you might want to check in the EVE thread, im pretty sure @Waz knows way better then me why EVE isnt working since all my mod is is cloud config files and textures.

Why the hate for the micronode guys? It makes a decent low level impact weapon (yeah its not exactly a conventional use) that can be stacked incredibly efficiently and a triple node cannon is roughly the same size and shape as a single short ibeam cannon. Now granted i dont use it that often since its relatively heavy and doesnt make any sense firepower to mass wise (a set of regular ibeams if you dont have space issues or are willing to sacrifice ammunition quantity will work much better), but it is still useful since 15m/s impact isnt that lousy and its heavy enough to damage stuff too. Anyways, for parts i never use: Vector, used it a few times to try it when it came out, made 1 shuttle replica, didnt touch since. It makes no sense for me since its overpowered for every space vessel i use (given i rarely go above 200t there is just no place for it), and its underpowered as a lifter engine. Given 99% of my lifters are at least semi stable, the gimbaling is pointless and a quadruple 3.5m will do much better if and when i actually need massive thrust. Thumper and Hammer SRBs, not that they are bad or anything, but for almost every situation i want a SRB its either the massive one to launch payloads, or the smallest one when im making weapons that actually use SRBs at all (technically the hammer is stronger then the flea, but its much bigger which means massive ship or crap ammo capacity and its lethality increase over the flea is questionable at best in 1.1 and up where sheer mass seems to nolonger be the deciding factor in firepower but how you design the warhead moreso. Ant/Spider, anemic thrust and i generally dont make anything small enough to warrant their useage (they get good dV but only with super light things, which i dont build aside from missiles, and the thrust is so bad you can forget about weapons). Technically you can still make macey dean esque torpedoes with em, but those seem to have been nerfed into oblivion recently since they almost always do absolutely no damage period with the joint strength increases in the not so distant past (no idea what update did that, 1.0 or 1.1 i think). In other words, aside from extremely niche applications like intentionally terrible weapons for roleplay purposes or something, no reason to use it for me. mainsail, it used to be my go-to lifter but after the nasa parts came out there is absolutely no reason to use them as lifter engines, and they are beyond overkill for any other use. Notable mention goes to my Malevolence replica that did actually use a pair of them as a mass drive cannon in the mid section firing sideways (yeah it was supposed to be a ion cannon but we cant quite model those in stock KSP), but aside from that one somewhat unorthodox use, never touch the things Launch escape system, while a nice concept and something i do implement on my starships to some extent (escape pods), the stock one is way to damn heavy and isnt in a very user friendly shape (1-2 sepatrons will do the same job and is much easier to actually fit somewhere). No reason to use the stock one unless you are trying to replicate a real life rocket (which i have never actually done in KSP as when i want to experience reality ill walk away from teh computer and go watch the airplanes/ufos flying above my house ). Mega rover wheel, just too large and unpractical not to mention low top speed. Only possible use i can even think of for them is a mobile base, but given that the smaller wheels work fine for that application i just dont see the point. The super tiny wheels are also ones that probably fit the category of unused, but given i have at least 2 micro-tanks that take advantage of them, i cant entirely dis them. Hex-II, too big and bulky for actual probes, and why would i have such a heavy probe core as a control unit on a fighter or starship when i can strap a Octo-II or even a regular Hex to it and get the desired control with no pilot present and not loose that much dV. The stayputnik would have also been here if not for its occasional use in lightly armored tank turrets and other stock bearings (its the only part with a spherical collider that works beautifully as a rotating member). Most other parts i use at least sometimes even if they go into a very niche role or are used on extremely few craft. There may be a few i missed but these are my standout never use because reasons parts...

V-1.2 is released in preliminary form. Its very likely that i will be making a few alterations and tweaks over the next few days but not too much will change. All planets get 4096x2048 textures (kerbin gets 8192x4096) for the best combo of performance to lag (doesnt eat too much ram either from my experience). All planets have unique custom made textures for the clouds (no 2 planets are the same with the possible exception of being a sphere). Detail textures are all 1024x1024 for good variety and a lack of tiling issues with using smaller textures. I also tried to minimize horizon artefacting with EVE by avoiding too thick solid layers, but given a few planets kinda needed solid layering (such as Eve) there is only so much i could do. Please give me a day or 2 to update the screenies since im not just gonna snap one like that, but set up a few ships (mostly battles) in orbit and on the ground before doing so and that takes time. Enjoy and try not to crash into planets too much because you forget to look down since the clouds are so pretty...

Cloud shadows are an option i knowingly decided to disable for 2 reasons: One, it does come with some performance hits (not huge but i just decided to take the slightly less authentic look over the extra lag). They are easy to enable if you want to give em a shot though. Two, it comes with artefacting on transparent surfaces which drives me up the wall. Not a big deal if you never use landing gear or are anywhere near the runway, but its something that im waiting on EVE to fix before i even consider shadows as something that will be enabled with this mod. If you are interested in trying shadows out, open the EVE control panel (default key is alt+0) navigate to the cloud editor, slect the "clouds.cfg" for editing (the file with cloud layers), then scroll to the very bottom and there is a check for shadows somewhere on the 2D layer panel. Just check it and alter the shadow multiplier until you get the prefered level of darkness behind the clouds. From what im aware of, there is no way to optimize shadows, it is just a on/off thing that can be selected per layer. Also, new screenie of WIP V-1.2 edition's kerbin cloud thing

Well now that finals are done (managed to finish a project earlier then expected so i get tuesday off :D), i can FINALLY enjoy myself and finish working on this mod. Im taking a look at the cloud textures and i have to say i dont know what the hell i was thinking by calling this mod release worthy in the current state? Currently working on making every single texture from ground up since EVE's defaults, while functional, are plain and simply ugly looking without heavy particle density and low alpha (im not willing to jack up the particle densities since lag is bad enough as is). Id like some imput on what you guys think of kerbin and laythe's new cloud textures. Suggestions are welcome, id love to know what you guys think and whether i should alter this in any way (cloud layers arent done, particles are done if you guys approve)? Also, since im currently doing the cloud maps as well from scratch, what level of cloud coverage do you guys want in the game? Im leaning towards relatively low coverage especially on kerbin and duna, with somewhat thicker on laythe and very thick on eve with a few gaps here and there to allow one to see the planet, but before i finalize my plans id like some feedback if possible. Also worth noting is that im redoing the planetary dust from ground up as well, im gonan have a few planets be foggy like now, but im actually gonna have the dust particles on most planets have visiable particles floating around and not just a massive opaque cloud of smoke. And finally, i made MUCH better looking snow particles so that will be upgraded as well in V1.2 which should be out by the end of the week (if i dont come across any issues that is).

If i am correct (i dont use kopernicus myself so i cant be certain) kopernicus actually modifies the planet names and thus you need to change the names in the .cfgs located in the atmospheres folder to correspond to whatever name the kopernicus mod uses. Every EVE based mod needs this to be done for each custom solar system, but considering how many different kopernicus packs there are, it doesnt make sense for me to release versions of SciFiVE to work with all of em (i just dont have the time to download all the different planet packs and make custom configs for em). That said, once finals are over on tuesday and i can actually spend more then a few hours a day on non work related crap, and i actually get the base mod finished to a state im happy with i might look into configuring this for a few of the popular koipernicus mods like OPM or Galileios planet pack (not that what i have now is bad or anything, but some of the textures arent quite up to my standards and will all be overhauled eventually). Anyways, under a week until finals are over and you guys can expect some more development with this... Lite version doesnt have any cloud textures or layers (and doesnt come with the corresponding textures to save ram). Use it when you either dont like the clouds for whatever reason, or cant handle the slight performance decrease they come with. Newest standard version is 1.1, lite version is only the glow layers, atmo scatter, and some ground effects (personal thing, i just dont find planets anywhere near as interesting or pretty without a good amount of dust/fog/whatnot).

You can "sortof" do this by using procedural fuel tanks. Set one of the tanks to entirely oxidizer and another to entirely LF (or if you use a realism mod i believe those tanks can be filled with realistic fuel types too) and stack them ontop of each other. It wont give you the exact effect you want, but its a little more realistic then the current LFO integrated into everything tanks. As for stock rockets being boring, i can agree and disagree with that. I generally use rockets as a means and not an end and mostly only care about the payload (capital ships, carriers, starfighters, tanks, buildings, ect), so for me most rockets are just simple 3.5m parts with the biggest engines and fuel tank options since i could care less about what they look like or how the work. That said, a few of the rockets i use are actually engineering marvels since you cant always cram something the size of the VAB into a fairing and expect it to work properly. So it defenetely doesnt end up as a normal looking or easy to build rocket when it has to lift things akin to macey dean's carrier into orbit... Anyways, if rockets arent your thing there is plenty of other stuff to do in KSP. I suggest you give spaceplanes/SSTOs a shot, they are way more complicated to build then rockets. Caring more about sci-fi, the first ever thing i actually got into orbit in KSP was a SSTO (very few cool sci-fi movies actually use cylindrical rockets as anything but weapons on fighters). Its much more challenging and while its not entirely realistic (it seems you annoyance with stock rockets being they are less realistic because dont have individual fuel tanks for each propellant section), give it a shot if you are being bored by the stock rockets which i can totally agree, are way to simple to make (especially if you use 3.5m parts and your payload isnt in excess of 500t)...

I wouldnt say that its not going well, but at least on a personal level im quite a bit less excited about KSP because, it seems that many of the things i kinda value in KSP these days arent really being developed much if at all (at least cant get any hints to it in the very obscure recent PR). Now im not saying the game isnt great as is, but its utter lack of decent visuals (and even mods like EVE and scatterer, lag aside, are too buggy to really call em finished and 100% solid, but at least they work and exist :D) really annoys me. It also seems that many visual bugs that have been around for ages seem to be not cared for because they arent exactly making the game unplayeable (not that any bugs that popped up recently did, but it seems that visual anything is very low on the priority list), such as the absolutely broken terrain shadows (sun shines through the ground, totally realistic if you ask me). Also the absolutely stupid looking tree shadow bug with black squares showing up below trees with scatter enabled, despite not being a major deal but id really love to see it fixed after it was broken around 1.1 or so. Playing without some scattering makes the land look even worse then it already does with the terrible textures, tiling syndrome (take a look at oceans, gilly, and a few other places, its super obvious they are just reusing teh exact same texture to cover half a planet and it looks awful when you can see the obvious squares). All in all, im still gonna play the game probably as much as ive been up to this point, and i still really enjoy it, but unless the devs start to focus at least some of their effort towards improving visuals i could care less about new features since the stock game has 90% of everything i ever want in stock except for KIS and the robotics mod for the repairing/building outside of IVA and mech suits respectively. Those mods open up a completely new doorway instead of most of the recent additions that were either new parts or a new feature that i didnt really take much advantage of (its not that i dislike the new remote tech clone but it just does not work when 90% of what i do in KSP is build spacecraft/vehicles/buildings and it has no way to distinguish teams so i can have satelites be separate for each faction i play with). Finally, it seems (at least from what ive seen on forums/whatnot) that alot more attention is being spent on promotional crap (yes i am a proud driver of the anti-plushie band wagon) when the game isnt even in a state that i can consider solid. The latest gamebreaking bug being the terrain texture seams that still havent been fixed to this day and make exploring certain areas on certain planets impossible. Yeah i know sales are critical to the well being of squad, but can we get some more bugfixing before having the team spend lots of time time designing plushies or cardboard boxes? Im obviously the minority (how many people play this as a sci-fi combat game with custom designed armor/weapons made of stock parts?), but yeah... KSP development just isnt as great as i was hoping ATM... is that not Wish they spent some more time and effort with at least some of the stuff i really care about (neither visual improvements like landscape overhauls, texture upgrades, or atmo scattering effects nor the few mods i really would want to see stock being KIS and infernal robots seem to be on the table of to-dos). Ofc that doesnt mean the game is anywhere near dead, but unless the devs pull a true surprise out in the next few updates, i dont think i can be all that optimistic...

I fully support the concept of weather and clouds, under the condition that its toggleable and very preferably customizeable (if KSP ever gets a stock cloud mod i want to be able to use my own textures in the event i dont like the stock ones without the lagfest that is texture replacer) as to the level of effect things like winds and rain have. Id love to go swimming in duna dust storms that actually had some adverse effects on ships, and like they did in that recent martian movie, throw kerbals around when they are trying to board their ships (yes i know that was absolute BS since the atmo density isnt enough to actually do such damage as it did in movie but it looked cool). Doesnt need to be that detailed like with seasons and axial tilt or anything of the sort (being a habitual interplanetary traveler things like inclination/eccentiricity isnt a big deal for me to work with), but weather that defaults to off in normal game mode (lets face it, most of the new players have a hard enough time with the concept of getting to orbit without any weather concerns). Also, id like to see some sliders for the amount of an effect things like wind sheer would have on you, i dont want to be flying in hurricane force winds every single time i launch something ...

Its quite possible this guy doesnt even own KSP for all we know, everything this guy has been saying seems to be more or less trolling and flame baiting... Anyways, im out for today, no idea why the hell im actually contributing to a troll thread ...

Guys, i think we need to stop feeding the troll. Normally id consider a person not understanding something to be new or whatnot, but im pretty damn sure its just a troll that is trying to cause a flame war on here. Constantly disagreeing with people is not a productive discussion nor does that actually make the OP look any less like a troll... Please, just STOP and think everyone, and dont feed the troll any more then you are legally required by the laws of your planet of origin.

Im happy with the jumo as is. Its a bit more powerful then a real jet engine used on a business jet, but considering that everything else in KSP is way heavier then IRL, it compensates for that nicely. It only dies when you try to carry excessively heavy/draggy stuff with it, or if you try to make military craft with it (believe me, ive tried a few times, dont work well even in a triple engine cluster pushing a 5t starfighter with minimal drag inducing surfaces). That said, i wouldnt mind a 0.6m and a 2.5m rapier style engine. Yeah 2.5m would make large SSTOs easier, but if you consider that nothing is stopping us from spamming massive quantities of tiny engines, why not? Same thing with the large jet engine, yeah i CAN make a plane that will get similar performance with a triple 1.2m jet (or like 20 jumos), but why should i bother with that many more parts just to do the same thing (honetly id prolly settle for the triple engine because of looks, but personal obsession with 3 way symmetry aside, there is no reason you ever want 3 wheesleys instead of 1 of those massive jets). As for the mini-rapier, who can deny how useful a 1t SSTO would be... That and i could finally make my new micro-scale starfighters (or at least the ones that are anywher enear aerodynamically stable) SSTO capable without abusing huge amounts of 48-7s-jumo hybrid engines.

If you want to be technical it cant ever die because it is (from my experience) not a sentient computer program and thus the terminology "dead" or "alive" doesnt apply the same way it doesnt apply to my laptop. Anyways, jokes aside, i think its safe to say that development of KSP is going down the drain, not to say there is no progress, but it seems that after the recent dev meltdown alot less effort is put into bugfixing and new features. Im not a pessimist or anything, but based on what ive seen and facts, KSP is past its prime and while it may remain updated for quite a while into teh future, i dont exactly expect much more major features to be developed. Kinda hoping im wrong, but at the lease im quite happy with what we have right now, and if they fix that absolutely atrocious ground seam bug that sends tanks/cars/rovers to their doom, ill at least consider KSP in a state im content with and wont have any complaints left (everything you cant do stock i'd even want to do can be done with mods).

While i can understand the anticipation, the console releases have sofar been a complete disaster with a broken version being released (its really not fun to have your saves corrupted constantly) with recently, a complete blackout on future goals/current development. Now im not saying it wont ever be done on the WII, but the best advice i can offer to you (and anyone else considering buying it on console) is to be patient and cautious, sofar it looks like the development of the console versions is dead in the water or at the least proceeding extremely slowly.

Just a quick tip, you might want to try a shallower ascent next time. You should (ideally) have a AP of ~80km with a fairly circular trajectory that wraps most of the way around the planet (you might even see some PE before you start to circularize). It takes WAY less fuel to launch a shallower trajectory then blasting upwardsish and then circularizing for a very long time.

pretty much stuff that most of my bases are composed of: Command bunker that has good visibility and is usually both armored (structural panels) and placed in the middle of the entire colony/outpost. A couple of living spaced, in a variety of shapes and sizes to make it look like an actual city or something (use alot of large parts to save on part count but give the impression of a vast settlement). At least 2 missile batteries on the edge of the settlement to defend against hostiles (there is a reason i call this game kerbal sci-fi-combat program). A hangar for a few tanks or other land vehicles. Landing pad for dropships. Solar array or reactor to power the place. A few fuel tanks (so the dropships can refuel), usually mounted on wheels and with klaws so they can be moved and directly attached to whatever needs/has fuel. Refinery with at least 2 drills and 1 of the larger IRSUs (self explanatory, i dont exactly want to rely on fuel deliveries from kerbin when im camping out on Eeloo or something remote). A few light posts for looks and immersion. Pretty much anything else that i feel will add to the atmosphere of a base because it either looks cool or performs some purpose.