Torquemadus

The fact that the function of the Administration building is currently super secret suggests two things:- 1: It's a game changer. 2: The exact workings of the building haven't been finalised yet and are subject to change. The best case scenario is that the Administration building is indeed as was implied in the dev notes and is a brand new building, not a revision of an existing one. I think that if this building was in fact a revision how Building X works, then we would have been told explicitly that the devs were working on changes to Building X. Let's engage in some speculation here. What functionality needs to be added to get the game into a "feature complete" state? What new features are eagerly awaited by players? What new features require a new building? It seems obvious that the Astronaut facility will eventually do more than it does now. We know that it will eventually cost money to train astronauts. We don't need a separate building to do this. Let me add my own speculation here. Training implies levelling up and learning new skills. This could make it worthwhile to send newbie astronauts on missions to level up their skills. Do astronauts get paid a salary? Does the game punish us with high upkeep costs for recruiting too many kerbals too soon? The current rescue a stranded kerbal from orbit contract implies that gaining an extra kerbal is a reward, not a burden. Next, let's look at research. This is a very interesting area. Lots of strategy games present players with the dilemma of expending resources in the short term to gain long term benefits from research. What if my science department has a budget? Perhaps the admin building allows players to buy upgrades that improve their science output? We hear over and over again that the tech tree is too easy, that players can open up the entire tech tree in a few launches. What if the current tech tree is only a placeholder? What if the devs intend it to me vastly more difficult in 1.0? What if research became extremely slow and massively expensive without upgrades from the admin building? It might be cheaper to send ambitious low tech missions than to pay the high prices needed to unlock late tech tree parts such as the LV-N and the RAPIER. Next speculation. This is the big one. This is the game changer I don't think anybody gave proper consideration to until now...reusability...SHOCK!!!... Wait, haven't we all been dealing with reusability since 0.24?! Haven't we all been figuring out clever ways to justify the cost of air breathing SSTOs versus expendable launch vehicles?!...Actually no, we haven't. The current 100% recovery value of rocket parts that are returned to the KSC is nonsense. The reason why this is nonsense is because of processing costs. Not convinced? Let's build a Space Shuttle analogue. I sell the enormous development costs of my Space Shuttle program to the Kerbin Government on the basis that contemporary launch vehicles are too expensive and I can do the same job cheaper on a re-useable vehicle. The only drawbacks are that my re-useable vehicles will incur massive weight penalties from the enormous dry mass of the orbiter, meaning that although I've technically built a heavy lift booster, almost all of my lifting power is being used to lift the dry mass of my orbiter (wings, landing gear, thermal protection). Not to worry, I'll recover my orbiter and get 100% recovery value after each flight. Ooops! No I won't! How much processing time was required for each shuttle orbiter between launches? How much did it cost to pay the workers involved? How much did it cost to build a contemporary expendable launch vehicle and pay for it to be ready for launch without worrying about re-usability? In case you didn't know, the Space Shuttle was supposed to be cheaper than the expendable rockets it replaced. The end result was the exact opposite. It cost a lot more to pay a huge workforce to re-use the Shuttle than it would have cost to build a new vehicle for each launch. Let me guess, you're not convinced yet? What if I speculate that the Admin Building is where budgets are balanced and wages are set. What if the recovery value of spacecraft and yield from returned science depends on how much resources were expended? What if the return value from my SSTO depends on the salary for my ground crew? Low launch rates might make it cheaper to expend rockets rather than re-use them.

I'm surprised you didn't add moar boosters!

Long before 0.24 came along, I did experiments with recovery of launch vehicles. At the time, I was using two stage to orbit expendable rockets, consisting of a liquid fuelled core stage and solid fuelled strap-on boosters. The idea was to recover the core stage down-range by adding a large number of parachutes that would activate on separation. I would then park the payload vehicle in orbit and switch to the core stage so I could watch it re-enter the atmosphere. The first thing I found was that I needed more parachutes that I had expected. Liquid engines and tanks have very low crash tolerances, so I added what seemed like a lot of parachutes, but as it turned out, the parachutes were frequently the only parts that survived the landing! The second problem was that a launch vehicle core stage is usually tall and thin. The first thing it wants to do after making contact with the ground or water is to tip over. Again, this does not sit well with low impact tolerances! After a lot of trial and error, I concluded that this method of recovery was unreliable and more trouble than it was worth. I switched to doing controlled landings instead, which worked much better. I eventually settled on using winged fly-back boosters that return to the runway at the KSC. There have been a number of threads on the forums asking for a feature to be added to the stock game whereby spent stages are counted as recovered simply because the player stuck an arbitrary number of parachutes on it somewhere. As I discovered, recovering liquid fuelled stages by parachute is not a trivial matter. At current prices, solid rockets are worth next to nothing when empty of fuel. Here are some "before" and "after" pictures of an SRB, showing how much it costs with and without fuel. As it turns out, most of the cost of the SRB is the fuel. The empty booster is worth very little. By contrast, here's a Rockomax "Oil Drum" tank shown both full and empty of fuel. As it turns out, most of the cost of liquid fuel tanks is the tank, not the fuel. In addition, the engines required to burn the fuel add additional cost, which I will want to recover if I can. Therefore, adding a feature that automatically recovers my "trash bins full of boom" solid rockets is an irrelevance, since their recovery value is negligible. Adding a feature that automatically recovers large liquid fuelled rockets is a way of playing the game in easy mode.

Solid rockets are cheap. Really cheap. They really are "trash bins full of boom". Take a look at how much different solid rockets and liquid fuel tanks and engines cost in the VAB. You can use tweakables to remove the fuel from fuel tanks and solid rockets to see how much they are worth when empty. Most of the cost of a liquid fuelled rocket comes from the tanks and engines, not the fuel. This gives players a good incentive to build re-useable vehicles that recover the engines and empty tanks. Solid rockets are worth a pittance once empty. This makes them ideal for a disposable first stage. I like to make my upper stages re-useable, but I prefer solids for my first stage.

Rovers are a fun way to explore the worlds you visit. It seems a shame to travel all that way just to do a quick "flags and footprints" before getting straight back into the ship and heading for home. Adding rovers adds a lot of extra challenge to a Mun landing. Firstly, you have to figure out how to attach the rover to your ship and deploy it after landing. Next, you have to figure out how to drive it. Making a lightweight rover that can handle the rough terrain, poor traction and low gravity without overturning and smashing to smithereens is quite a challenge. Prior to the 0.24 patch, I started messing around with space planes. I was mainly building them to experiment with reusability, but also ended up doing a fair amount of joyriding in them. I tried landing them on the Mun and Minmus for a bit of fun. As it turned out, they perform better as rovers than anything I built specifically for the purpose.

I prefer to use a cluster of thrust limited SRBs as my first stage. A single decoupler and a few struts are enough to hold the cluster in place.

Currently, solid rockets are very attractive for use in a disposable first stage. They are cheap "trash bins full of boom" and have very little recovery value once empty, especially when compared to the cost of parachutes. By contrast, liquid fuelled stages are worth a great deal more than the fuel they contain and are well worth trying to recover. If players want automatic recovery of their empty "trash bins" I'd say that the game already does it pretty well. The Space Shuttle SRBs were recovered after splash down, but as it turned out, the cost of recovering them wiped out any savings gained from re-using them. Automatic recovery of liquid fuelled stages is a different matter. I did a lot of experimenting prior to the 0.24 release to see whether recovery of spent stages was a viable approach. I tried attaching parachutes that activated on separation and focusing on the stage as it re-entered as uncontrolled debris. The trouble with this approach is that most engines and fuel tanks have very low crash tolerances compared to other parts. Even if the stage survived landing (on account of adding a huge number of parachutes), it usually fell over and smashed to pieces. Often, the only parts that survived were the parachutes! I did a lot of experimenting and eventually decided that this approach was unreliable and more trouble than it was worth. Plan B was to use a kerbal pilot or a probe core to make controlled landings. I found that landing by parachute was still unreliable. Adding the ability to control the stage meant that I could choose where I would land with reasonable accuracy, thus avoiding unsuitable terrain such as mountains, but most designs were still prone to falling over after landing. I eventually took to adding wings and landing gear to each stage so I could return it to the runway. The approach I ultimately adopted was to use partially re-useable designs that throw away loads of empty SRBs as a first stage and re-use all subsequent stages by returning them to the runway or refuelling them. I suspect that some players want automatic recovery so that they can carry on using asparagus pancakes without worrying about cost. With automatic recovery, an asparagus pancake would become an "I win button". Simply launch an "efficient" pancake, pay for the fuel, recover most of the cost of the launch vehicle. Profit. Automatic recovery of liquid fuelled rockets is a ticket to playing the game on easy mode. With launch costs effectively eliminated, payloads of virtually unlimited size can be lifted to LKO. Once they're in LKO, they're half way to anywhere.

I use a cluster of SRBs as a cheap throw-away first stage. Subsequent stages are returned to the runway.

This is my Kestrel-Kerbooster stack visiting the Mun with the help of an all-solid first stage. The Kerbooster mid stage had enough fuel to place both planes on a Mun intercept trajectory. Once landed, Kestrel doubles as a rover. Both planes return to the runway.

Today, I tested the LFB on a Kerbin escape trajectory.

This album shows Jeb performing the mission to orbit Kerbin at the start of a new career save. After reaching orbit, I was given a mission to rescue Patton Kerman. I then used Patton to pilot the booster back to the vicinity of the KSC for recovery. Meanwhile, Jeb headed off to Minmus.

If Squad wanted to add extra confusion, they could add a character based on "Last Man On The Moon" Gene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17. Then we would have Gene Kerman and Gene...Oh, wait?! Then they could take things a step further and add a character based on Harrison "Jack" Schmitt to advise us on Mun surface samples!

Holy cow Batman! Gene Kerman wants us to plant a flag on Minmus! Follow me Robin! TO THE MINMUSMOBILE!!!

Stranded Kerbals have been turning up so frequently that I've taken to using them as pilots for my fly-back boosters.

I use a cockpit so that I can "abandon" the part after it lands on the runway.

Here's what I'm using for my early tech tree missions.

Today I was given a mission to test a Sepratron in Kerbin orbit. Not only did I succeed in testing my Sepratrons in orbit, but I was able to return them to the KSC afterwards, therefore recovering their cost! Unfortunately, I forgot to perform a similar test on my landing gear on the way back down. I fitted them specially! Never mind, I'll test those on a later flight.

"We can pay you 2000 now, plus 15000 once we reach Alderaan."

The central idea here was I wanted a way to make a partially re-useable booster that could deliver practical payloads into orbit and return to the KSC. Stacking the payload on top made the most sense. Solid rockets are used as a cheap expendable "trash bins full of boom" first stage. My experiments with recovering spent boosters by parachute weren't a great success. They tended to "mostly" survive landing, resulting in messy plies of broken-off parts. I'd been messing about with space planes, so I decided to see if a piloted recoverable booster was a good idea. My first attempt is shown below. As before, the Kerbooster could be used to deploy different payloads as needed. In this case, I used it to deploy my Kestrel space plane as the upper stage. The Kestrel is mostly used for joyriding around Kerbin's moons. Once 0.24 arrives, I'll be testing these designs further to see how well they fit in with the economics of contracts and recovery.

The Kerbooster Super Heavy still a proof of concept atm. I'll be taking more pics once I've got it doing operational flights. My preivous effort, the Kerbooster Heavy, is hauling regular flights to Kerbin's moons atm.

Today I test flew my new stock space plane.

This album shows my Kestrel space plane visiting six Mun biomes in one mission. If you land on a part of the Mun that has varied terrain, go can visit a lot of biomes without having to drive very far.

The most obvious way for Squad to implement a Pluto Charon analogue would be to use the same method they used for Duna and Ike.

I'm expecting there to be a lot of disagreement among fans over gameplay balance issues. I fully expect there to be a lot of noise coming from vocal minorities because they feel that the game is "forcing" them to play in a way they don't like, due to the cost of certain parts. The likelihood is that even if all of the bugs that emerged during development have been found and squished, there will still be gameplay balance issues coming up during testing. At some point, Squad will decide that they've tweaked everything enough and are ready to release the patch into the wild. Despite this, I still expect threads to appear entitled "OMG Squad, Nerf Frost Mages!"

I'm always at my most active in KSP when waiting for a new patch. The anticipation makes me itch to play the game! Seriously, I lurked on these forums for a long time. I didn't feel I had anything new to say that wasn't already being said, but the upcoming patch has got me all worked up!