merendel

While I can agree that the AC franchise is a good set of games, I've enjoyed them myself afterall, they are a different beast. As much fun as I've had with each AC title I've bought they are at best one off titles. I play through the storyline, possibly go back and try to get 100% completion if I feel like it and then shelve them indefinitely. There's just nothing that pulls me back in like KSP does. KSP is just a better value IMO as I've spent more hours on a game I picked up for $20 than all 5 of the AC titles I've got in my steam library combined. Makes full AAA price not seem so worth it.

You wana go for a double forhead slap? Ask yourself this. Why didnt you just tweek the fuel to zero? No fuss no muss and you dont even have to pay for the fuel. 100% recovery on the launchpad after the test.

Hmm its almost like they planed the launch of the new patch to coincide with the sale. Excitement of a new patch + Sale = lots of people buying. Good marketing stratagy And honestly that black flag sale is not all that good. 33% pft it will probably have a 50% or more off when the winter sale rolls around in a few months I'll pick it up then. It might also have a baseline pricedrop by then since the next one will be out in november. Its already overpriced on steam anyway and the sale is only bringing it down close to list price at other places.

Ions are fine for small craft. particularly since they got buffed a patch or two ago they are prety decent for small long range probes. Its just they are inefectual for large craft as burns can take hours even with tons of them. Still if your only pushing a craft thats a ton or so the TWR isnt horible compaired to most transfer stages so its a viable option.

Custom. Its basically hard preset with the only changes being allow quickloads (in case of kraken, wont use otherwise) and allow stock craft. I always forget to dump the craft into my save files so I almost never see them so its nice to be able to load them up and to get ideas off them. I've also had enough ships turn into kraken bait to justify quickloading on ocasion. I just only use them if a ship has an unplanned spontaneous dissassembly for no apparent reason. Clear design flaws or poor piloting I have to live with however. Look to mods for that. They add alot of content that the game simply does not have yet. Remember KSP is still alpha, they arnt adding alot of content while the game is still not feature compleat. Especialy because the moding community adds so much for them Fineprint adds a fair bit of extra contract types if you want more of a challange from contracts. Deadly reentry and FAR are good challange mods that make aspects of the game harder than stock. You could also do a life suport mod paird with remote tech for added challange. Personaly I'm not a fan of LS mods as all they do is add extra parts to my craft without significantly altering my design choices so it ends up just being busy work. Still some folks like them.

That particular one is actualy radial out. Normal is the purple triangle.

probably with Kronal Vessel Viewer. Scott Manly did a spotlight on it last week.

On the other hand if you follow a stratagy of shotguning several missions at a time and then switching on the recovery strategy you might be able to still game the system. Depends a bit on how much you are recovering. Personaly I dont think the recovery strategy will be worth it at any time. Its not all that hard to land relitively close to KSC once you get the hang of it. I can normaly get withen 100km without trying all that hard to be accurate. Also I'm not sure yet if that transponder is a flat cost or a percentage of the total ship cost increase at launch. Unless you've got alot of duplicate science devices straped to whatever your recovering a sizeable percentage of the launch cost is in the booster and I doubt you'll be able to offset any percentage based cost increase on the recovery unless your recovering from the wrong side of kerbin and its a generous recovery boost.

Erm ya the claw is glitchy but I'm not quite sure what that has to do with timewarp fails. Interpolating ships or blasting past planed manuvers/objects wont be fixed by debuging the claw. Physics timewarp can exacerbate the claw glitches but physics warp can break alot of craft that are just fine normally, with or without a claw.

I've never had a fail that caused 2 ships to colide like that. I have done it on perpous once or twice for kicks but never accidently. I normaly dont plan my intercepts for that close an approach from far out anyway. I normaly aim for half a kilometer or so closest approach and adjust it as I'm geting closer so I'm slowing down if relitive velocity is high while geting the intercept fine tuned. That said I've had plenty of other timewarp fails. Most of these are solved by runing kerbal alarm clock but the common list includes, Warping past a manuver node Warping past the intercept and haveing to burn alot or go around a few more times. Warping through a SIO transition and ending up with a wildly different orbit than I was soposed to get I also warped into a mountainside when on approach to a chosen landing site on minmus once. Didnt realize I was going to hit and timewarp didnt cut out till I was seconds from impact I've had a few other times where I tried to physics warp during a burn when I really shouldnt have and ended up with a spontaneous disassembly.

Steam itself seems to have removed the option to not update. You can tell it not to update untill you launch the game but theres no option to Never update. I'd swear there used to be that option but no longer apparently. That said you dont have to run through steam. Just go to the folder that steam installs its games and copy the KSP folder out to somewhere else. You can then launch the game from the KSP.EXE in that folder. The only thing you loose is steam cant track your hours played. Personaly I've been doing this for a while. I have a folder on my drive for KSP. Each time a new version comes out I make a new folder in there, tag it with the version number and copy the updated folder over. I also tend to keep 1 clean version and 1 modded version in there as a just in case.

depends on what they are useing as a 0 point. They could have just decided that 1 kerbin gravity is the 0 point and they are just mesuring any acceleration over that amount. I know with mesureing pressure theres a difference between gague pressure and absolute pressure. Atmospheric pressure is 1 Bar, if you mesure the presure in your tires it may read 4 bars of pressure but its actualy 5 bars absolute because the gague is reading the difference between in the tire and the atmosphere. Admitedly this explination does break down a bit as other planets should show a negitive. Either that or if it shifts to the local gravity as the 0 point the apparent TWR should show alot higher when at a low gravity area. In effect that gauge seems to ignores gravity altogeather and is just an indication of the ships acceleration in relation to its vector of travle, either from thrust or drag. Its just mesureing that acceleration in kerbin gravities.

On the other hand kerbals seem to like seeing things blown up (with a few baddass crazies seeming to like it when the explosions are attached to their vehicle) There's nothing saying a bomber needs to be a tool of war. They could build and utilize them just for the boom factor applied to various areas of the terrain.

164/20 8.2 often use all the mods except RSS. I've landed something everywhere landable and only eve has not had a manned return to date. Done some test runs of various designes but never launched a legit mission to do it. as to remakeing the quiz I'd honestly rate moho return as higher than gilly on the difficulty scale. Eve and duna are comperable in difficulty to reach their orbits and gilly isnt even remotely difficult to land on once you get there, at best I'd rate it on par with ike. Moho on the other hand is rather difficult to achieve orbit around and has a surface gravity similar to duna without the atmosphere to aid landing. I think it should be at least worth as much as the random 10pt jool moons if not more considering jool is a much easier target to reach. I also think your optional questions need work, #2 in particular was rather confuseing.

I'd put my money on those helmets being far more flexible than they look. Why you ask? ever seen a kerbal deorbit without a craft and survive because he landed helmet first and bounced instead of poofed? Those things have to be crazy durable and springy to handle that kind of impact with no visable deformation after the fact and yet still dampen the impact to survivable levels.

With standard DR setings you can prety much fly strait up to an 80km AP and then drop strait back down and be perfectly fine (baring unplaned lithobreaking) KSP might show some reentry flames but your not likely to have any parts even get close to overheating. The ship just wont have anywhere near the same amount of kenetic energy as something at orbital velocity.

I honestly didnt find it all that hard to land on tylo. Designing a ship for the landing was prety easy as was geting it out there. the only somewhat tricky bit was the landing itself. Getting just the right throttle to keep speed down to safe velocities while also needing to touchdown ASAP before fuel reserve was depleated was the only hairy bit.

ya Whackjob is a forum user thats somewhat famous on the forums for launching obsurdly massive things into space. and by massive I mean 2-3 SPF (seconds per frame) monstrocities that apparently melted at least one computer to date. If anybody could design a launcher that could lift an E back into orbit it would be him.

you'd be surprised what odd shapes you can lift even in FAR as long as they are symetrical. the obsurd pancake asparagus launchers can be flown you just need sufficent deltaV to brute force your way to orbit while keeping speed low. no exploits required your just going to have crazy high gravity an drag losses till you get into the upper atmo. Go too fast though and youll either flip out or break up.

it can be done. the hard part is finding a good way to attach it to a launch system. Small ones landed at KSC wouldnt be all that difficult with a good design but a D or an E would require a vehicle of wackjob proportions. even a small one could be hard if it wasnt near KSC.

Um arnt they tidaly locked to eachother? Shouldnt be able to get a duna or Ike rise while landed (unless you ment seeing it rise while your orbiting ike)

Ya Eve is amazing for gravity assists to cut down on dV requirements to prety much anywhere but duna. The downside is time. unfortunatly your looking at a year or two between launch windows to eve (kerbin years) and you can be waiting several windows for a convenient alignment for the AN/DN. I frequently dont have the patience to wait for that perfect slingshot alignment and just build a bigger ship. Takes less time to farm money for that than it does to wait for the launch window. Sunskimmers are about the only missions I regularly slingshot off eve and thats asumeing I dont use Jool instead (depends on if I'm aiming for low circular orbit or just wana zoom close.)

Last ship I designed for Moho had about 5200 dv between the transfer and deceleration stages. Left kerbin when it was at the AN/DN to get down to a moho crossing orbit and then a retrograde burn at solar PE to get a Moho intercept on the next orbit. Depending on which node I left at I'd either spend more leaving kerbin or more slowing down once at moho but they both had enough to achieve orbit with the same craft. Normaly ran out of fuel before geting compleatly low circular but got fairly close (10k by 100k or so) the lander/return stage had enough extra to finish the mission from there.

Most of my ships are fine with simple escape systems. shut down engiens, decouple pod, rock it off if there are SRB's still burning and the situation can not wait for them to burn out. I have made more elaborate systems on a few craft. One notable one to moho had the pod situated on top of the transfer/lander stages (and the launcher under that) with a return stage attached above the pod. That one had an abort sequence that didnt even cut engiens. pod would decouple from both sides and seperatrons would blast the thing out sideways before it could get crushed. Very violent ejection sequence but it worked. The explosion caused by the launch system pancakeing through the return stage was glorious as well when I tested it. Dont generaly have extra pods for my kerbin stations although I do frequently have one of my rescue clusters in orbit. Each cluster has 9 rescue pods (8 syemetry with an extra built into the core) each pod has 1kdv on seperation. If anything went wrong on a station the crew could EVA and could be picked up withen an orbit or two. Not really any different than what the cluster was designed for, kerbal rescue missions.

I normaly start geting minor slowdowns (ticks into the yellow) at 350-400 ish parts. Things are normaly tolerable up to about 800-1000 parts or so(depends on the ship). Beyond that framerate and physics rate are just too slow to be bothered with.