Pecan

There's a pretty big hint that upgradable buildings in 0.90 will mean you, er, have to upgrade them for bigger/later missions. On the other hand I doubt you'll be able to select where KSC is actually built. If you want more bases right now look at http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/82785-0-25-Kerbin-Side-v0-37-We-re-Gonna-Need-a-Bigger-Boat

Anyone interested in a South-East UK Kerbal weekend please PM me. I have a windmill in my back garden ^^. Not that this has much to do with anything, but there's 4 acres of grounds here, a large conference room and various caravans. A lot depends on how many people want to come but should be able to accommodate 5 - 9 people, more if camping (bring your own sleeping bags and food!)

I see your question has been re-posted as 'lander help' in the gameplay questions forum so I won't go into it here. You appear to have added all sorts of things to avoid playing KSP though. My suggestion would be that you try something like the stock game before using such radical mods. Although it's possible to treat KSP as a sci-fi 'space' game where you jump into any old ship and blast away to another star that's not really it's strength. Rather, it is a game which rewards finding out how to design, build and fly spacecraft starting from pretty basic. You never know, you might even learn to get to orbit :-) 30-odd designs from a rover to interplanetary space-stations in the tutorial in my signature if it helps.

Pecan's FirstSecondThird Tutorial #1: Where to post tutorials. -> In the 'Tutorials' sub-forum, not "gameplay questions and tutorials" Which is ironic, because a lot of people make the opposite mistake and put questions in the 'tutorial' section. This is the link to Active Texture Management (in the 'Add-on Releases' forum)

SIAS (Suck It And See) You've had KSP for a while so it's free to download the latest version and try it. Failing that grab a copy of the demo version and see how that works. KSP is actually much more forgiving of weak systems (like mine) than most games so I'm pretty confident it'll be playable, but what "really big ships" means to you and whether you'll get the performance you can stand is subjective.

Doesn't have to replace anything in Fanworks Friday or be a regular weekly event, it'd just be nice to see something something written included ever! We've had cakes, paperwork (fantastic!), fancy-dress and videos, videos, videos - most of which (present company accepted, of course) are not actually well-made, narrated or edited. There is the language issue, of course, but really; who needs yet another video of someone failing to land on Mun?

Only having to put money is the swear jar? In my tutorial I note:

No idea what a Zoology Bay is but I have lots of launch vehicles. What does the total payload mass?

Twubble is - a stayputnik, FL-T200 fuel tank and 48-7S engine wins in almost all categories. Three, light, cheap, parts that will go very fast if one insists on flying it that way. The only places it doesn't win are payload mass and, in a sane world, aesthetics.

It isn't really useful at the moment, unless you want to make something that 'looks' like a shuttle but doesn't work like one. It's been around, doing nothing much, for a while but now that the Mk2 has been updated and Mk1 enhanced, Mk3 is scheduled for an overhaul in the next release.

Selectively strengthen, or make indestructible, the launchpad and runway so they don't explode as soon as you launch/land heavy craft on them?

U us md r u pr 'i' in mp

You're very welcome, thank you for commenting. (Crew Shuttle Mk2 getting a longer explanation in Saturday - only just noticed I missed half of it ^^). Next should be 'World of SSTO' in collaboration with Wanderfound - single-stage launch vehicles as 'perfect' as we can make them. Possibly; we're still discussing exactly what we want to do.

Ever seen them even mention something written? mhoram, Kashua or tavert's work, for instance? Crash a rocket and film it, you've got Video Wednesday, Twitch Thursday, quite often Fanwork Fridays. This is all part of KerbalEdu, I think, Squad want to make sure kids watch enough TV ^^. Having to pay for broadband and budget my time, I don't watch KSP videos unless they're short and teaching something very specific.

How about going everywhere, landing and returning? I've just checked - the highest part-count vehicle in the whole of my tutorial would be 112 parts (interplanetary tractor medium with 4 x engine modules) plus whatever its payload is, at most a spacestation so another 104 parts; total 216. Apart from that tractor and the spacestation itself the highest part-count vehicle is the (4 person) crew shuttle spaceplane at 54 parts. Most of the rest are in the 30-part range but, eg; 30-parts launcher, 30-parts transfer vehicle, 30-parts payload). So your 'small' spaceplane (360 parts) is almost 7 times the size of my 'big' ^^. How does your budget work!? On the question of the thread though; I start to lag around 10 parts, because my machine has never met KSP minimum specifications anyway and I run quite a few mods.

Well done on a sensible and well-presented challenge, it is nice to see. There are so many people new to the forums who post 'challenges' without even vague reference to the submission guidelines and without thinking them through. Yes, there will be questions and quibbles about the rules but you're off to a fine start.

Bad pilot Bob would need to be trained and gain experience. Your mechanic for that - spending reputation and/or funds on training - is a good one. In addition I may well let him gain by experience in a trainer aircraft or flying a SSTO to orbit, but take over myself (or use a better pilot already in the cockpit) for the landing. Certainly any (auto/Kerbal)pilot features must not be forced upon the player, but you get the option to use its features/their experience by clicking a button. You still have the option to cancel that if you don't like the results the computer/Kerbals produce. Incidentally, I'm not saying autopilot features have to be the only feature added, just that it makes sense, provides a function that a lot of people (including me) do want and use and it doesn't require any new game mechanics apart from the experience itself to be added. Separately, I'm also using 'stupid' Bill as an example because courage and stupidity are the traits already specified for Kerbals so they might as well be used. @kahlzun Nealry everyone likes the idea of individualising Kerbals and letting them get better at their job(s) with experience. This whole thread is because/about the fact that a better pilot, for instance, doesn't make the engine work better though, he FLIES it better.

Random's what I'm after, but only if You choose to hand-off to the crew rather than flying yourself. So, for instance, I'll ask intelligent Bob the navigator to plot a manoeuvre-node for me. If I don't like it I'll adjust it in map mode. Now, will I ask exuberant Jeb to execute it for me or is he likely to just max the throttle as soon as he's within 5-degrees of the node? Hmm, I'll chance it ... Meanwhile stupid Bill was really messing-up the science reports so I'll do those myself. etc. etc. In each case it's how the Kerbals use what they've got, not buffing it by magic. Cpt. Kipard obviously wouldn't trust Bob or Jeb so, for him, they are just passengers and the whole experience thing is moot. Just as science and funds are for sandbox players anyway, or can be adjusted using strategies. I'm totally with you on the science-type buffs but strategies already do that so I think experience should add something different.

No, nothing else has really happened. I think nearly everyone (with a few vocal exceptions) agrees experience is a nice idea but that the planned implementation was not. The discussion then boiled down to what's a better alternative and it's more or less between the 'scientist/engineer' repairs and transmission type skills you and others advocated (apologies if I'm simplifying so much as to misrepresent you) and the 'navigator/pilot' node/flying type that I and others prefer. Since that's a matter of taste (mainly whether you always want to fly vehicles yourself) there's no real debate happening on that, just agreeing to differ. ETA: I would like to say that it's hard to imagine another game where 60-odd pages of argument on such a strongly-felt and contentious issue could have been conducted without, as far as I've seen, a single insult.

More specifically - in the tracking station click on the ship itself or its name on the left of the screen, which is easier. Then at the bottom-left of the screen there are three buttons with a crane, an 'X' and a rocket symbol respectively. From left to right those are 'recover' (only available landed/splashed down on Kerbin), 'terminate' (not a good idea unless it's just discarded debris) and 'fly'. Click 'fly' and you'll be taken back to your ship in space (or wherever).

Congratulations on all that. Squad won't put the numbers in-game because they say it's "maths, not fun" but most of us who actually play it (~80% in a fairly recent forum poll) think, as you say "its great to have a figure to aim for without having to trial-and-error it." Now you can check your vehicles' deltaV you will almost certainly want a deltaV map (others are available), which tells you how much deltaV you need to move between different bodies in KSP. There is a discussion of all this in the tutorial in my signature (especially Chapter 4, section 8) and right at the end, Appendix 2, is a summary of deltaV requirements in case you prefer thatto adding them all up on the deltaV maps.

In flight mode (looking at a vehicle) you can rename it by right-clicking a command pod or probe core. In map mode (looking at all those orbits) you can rename the vehicle you're controlling by clicking the 'i'nformation button on the right of the screen, then clicking the vehicle's name. In either case, while/instead of renaming it you can change the ship-type by clicking one of the buttons beneath the name. I hardly ever have any rovers, for example, so I use that as a 'spare' type for when I want to see just a few specific objects, such as you are trying to do :-) Broadly, I also call all the vehicles that don't need attention 'probes' and all those that do/will 'ships'.

Well clearly they aren't listening to me and the others that said the same thing then. We are saying experience as suggested was wrong. We are also saying that Kerbals being the pilots and navigators (ie; providing MechJeb functionality). People who hate the experience idea are emphatically not the same group as those that hate autopilot.

You may like to look at tavert's Mass-optimal engine thread some time. It's a little out of date at the moment but the spreadsheet version is easy to update*. In a lot of cases the aerospike (still) out-performs any other launch-engine for light to moderate payloads, as long as you ignore costs! If your optimisation of choice is for payload-ratio/mass-efficiency then you'll be throwing away a lot of stages (=expensive engines) but you want to get the most from them before you do; that's where the aerospike comes into its own. Getting into orbit from Eve is sufficiently difficult that mass-efficiency has to be your first priority, regardless of cost, which is why it's particularly popular for missions there. [*I'm playing with SSTOs (rockets that go to orbit and back without staging) at the moment so haven't bothered to update that spreadsheet myself. In the previous version of KSP (0.24.x) it was still true, however, that with staging for efficiency there were only three engines worth considering for almost any mission - LV-Ns, 48-7Ss or aerospikes. 909s were, except in a small exceptional set of circumstances, the 'wrong answer' every time.]

I should probably apologise to Nahim for derailing what was a perfectly sensible question though. Sorry, Nahim. In answer to your OP; the only difference between modes is currently whether science and funds/reputation are enabled. Rather than have a plethora of modes I'd prefer to simply see these as configuration options.