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Another aspect to consider in the equation is that when we talk about water on Mars, it's probably not going to be the clean, pure liquid we commonly think of. Quite possibly it will be polluted with a number of different mineral contaminants that make it quite possible to remain in a liquid form even down to -20c

I will talk about science in a later video. The foam insulation is what's on top of the orange tank, but the texture is not final.

Well, technically, Sol is a main sequence yellow star, so realistically it works either way. Most of it is going to depend the viewer's interpretation of "real" in the first place. Is it based solely on personal observation (which would be a notch for the white fans), or is it based on scientific facts that categorize its color as yellow? And to that point, how can anybody talk about realism when the discussion surrounds a fictional star that's too small to even exist in the real universe anyway? Okay, okay, I admit it: I'm just nit-picking for the sake of discussion. For my part, I think modifications look great, no matter what color they are! Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder if there's a way to change the ambient light color on individual worlds. Sure, Kerbin is earth-like, so the light is white. But what about Laythe or Eve? It might be interesting if other planets with atmospheres also had a slightly different spectrum of visible light within.

K^2, I fail to see how your pessimism is justified. First of all, the 20 km diameter was clearly stated as simply being able to resolve an Earth-sized planet as a "disk" from 50 light-years. "Resolving as a disk" is the common term used when we talk about what resolution is required before a point source first begins to resolve. It is obvious I was talking about simply a fuzzy picture of something just barely larger than a point source. Clearly, if you want a true terrestrial planet imager, you'll need something like on the order of at least 100 km across, and then, you'd only be able to get halfway decent images of the very closest planets. I had almost added that if we could make an interferometer some day with a diameter of 1000 km, we could put the equivalent of 50 pixels across an Earth-like planet 50 light years away, but I cut that part out; I thought it was too much detail and too distant of a proposition. Perhaps I should have left it in to make my meaning more clear? Perhaps I misspoke when I said we can do it with today's technology, but we should be able to do it soon, especially if more funding and study was put into it. I don't see where there are any major show-stopper issues. Perhaps I misspoke because what I really mean, when I think of "today's technology", is that it is something that we either already have, or could immediately begin research and development on, and have ready in a reasonable time span like 10 or 20 years. Clearly, if we directed NASA to build a space interferometer composed of a separately-flying, telescope constellation, we wouldn't be getting in for at least 10 years, probably more like 20- just look how long it took for just the "simple" JWST. But at least, we'd be working on it, and it would be coming. I would assuming that station keeping would be accomplished with something like small electric ion thrusters. You can probably have some small adjustable optical elements to make up for really small, fast perturbations. You can determine the precise distance between the spacecraft with laser interferometry, and it is accurate to the required precision for optical interferometry. How can this not be extended to kilometer+ distances? I would think that the lack of atmosphere, ground vibrations, the ability to smoothly change the distances between the telescopes means space is a far better environment to build an optical interferometer than the ground. I don't see what you find so worrisome about drift. In space, perterbation forces are extremely weak, as opposed to on Earth, where we have wind, Earth quakes, even the minor seismic distrubances caused by people walking around or cars passing by; temperature swings, etc. Space is empty and constant. We have the thruster and MEMS technology to precisely position the telescopes, or there is no reason to think we couldn't develop it. We have laser interferometers capable of measuring extremely precise distances, precise enough for the task. And if by some chance a visible light laser interferometer isn't good enough, why not just use a UV laser interferometer? Where do I go wrong here?

There are a few problems with that which go a bit beyond engineering. First, I agree with the ~20km estimate, but that's just to resolve it as a point. Basically, you'd be able to confirm that it's not a point object, which we already know. If you want to image anything of its features, you'll need a significantly larger effective aperture. Just to say, "Hey, look, clouds" you'll need something like 10x larger size. Of course, if we are doing this with a swarm, it's not really a huge problem. We can build an interferometer thousands of km across. In fact, anything smaller than Earth orbit is kind of pointless. But the larger you go, the more challenging it gets with precision. So lets talk about that. Starting with there not being a terribly good way to build an optical interferometer telescope. It's easy enough in radio astronomy. We just build an array, record the actual time-dependent signal, and use computers to sort out the rest. We can't do that with a signal in optical frequencies. So we have to build an actual interferometer. And again, on ground, it's not impossible. You just have to tune everything, like you said, to nanometer precision. The fact that this is something that's been understood for many decades, and we still only have a couple of arrays that are actually capable of doing something useful, with a few more planned or under construction, should tell you how difficult a task it is. On the ground, where things don't shift around, and we can measure distances with incredible precision. Distance is still a limiting factor. Across a few hundred meters, we can use lasers to measure distances very, very precisely. As distances grow, you start having problems. Not only is it hard to measure distances, but they constantly change. And then we go to the big problem. Space. First of all, holding station with required precision is impossible. Just forget about that. Things are going to move and drift, and you'll have to find a way to deal with that. No mechanical system is going to move with sufficient precision and with little enough vibration to allow this to work. You'll have to measure precise positions of the objects and find non-mechanical ways to adjust distances that beams have to travel. Fortunately, there are electro-optical systems that can work for you, but nearly all of them require polarized light, so you'll have losses there requiring larger mirrors on telescopes. But that's ok, we can deal with that. Measurement, though... Lets start with the fact that GPS can pinpoint your position on the ground to within a few meters. You'll have to do better. Even if we forget about doing this full scale, and try to build a swarm just 200km across somewhere, you'll end up doing 200x better than GPS on timing along. So we went from error in meters, to that in centimeters. Perhaps, millimeters. We are still 4-5 orders of magnitude short. You can do improvements with the right geometry, doing some adjustments, improve timing techniques used for positioning, and you might be able to shave a couple of orders of magnitude off that. But you are still way short. Using interferometry to image exoplanets is a great idea, but we are not going to do this with modern technology. We can't. The only way we'll have chance is if we can do the same thing we do with radio interferometry and do computer processing. And to do that, we need optical computers. When that becomes a standard for computation, we can start talking about ways to build a large space array for imaging exoplanets.

I'm not thrilled with the ambiguity from the Devs, because its human nature to assume the worst when we don't have enough facts to go on. Particularly when dealing with other people, it gives us time to anticipate whatever bad news there is. Now, for what its worth, here's where I'm coming from: I played the demo a few times and liked it (around 0.20/0.21, I forget). After promising myself I wouldn't get hooked, I did my research on the game and saw that they were planning on implementing a resource system, which was a huge selling point for me. It was *the* thing that convinced me to pay for the game. Obviously, there's a risk in paying for future features, but I'm sure many of us have bought games in the confidence that they'll be better in the future. I'm not going to get all melodramatic and talk about the obligations to the paying customer or anything like that. But, when you pay money for software and the developer says that they plan on introducing a feature, and then it starts to really look like they're walking back that plan... it hurts (never mind that it was the feature that sold me on the product in the first place). And the ambiguity hurts more. Again, not to be melodramatic, but this analogy seems very appropriate: Ever been dumped? Hurts, doesn't it? Ever been dumped by someone who just didn't tell you that you've been dumped? Hurts even more. I hope this helps explain why some of us are very upset about this. Of course, the ideal situation would be for the Devs to jump in and say "Hey, guess what? We got it to work, resource mining is coming in 0.23," but I think many of us would be at least satisfied by getting some concrete answers regarding the whole thing. PS, for every person who says that the whole logistical process of extracting and refining resources is boring, many people think the same way about managing apses and docking.

Hey guys. I created a development forum discussion thread to talk about specifics. They might get more notice there.

Okay, so before you guys turn the flamethrowers onto me, hear me out. KerbalKon has come and gone, and with it the announcements that set the KSP forums ablaze. I have absolutely no desire to reignite the flames and cause people to start arguing again, so if you're here to shout about why resource gathering does or does not deserve to be in the game please turn your attention elsewhere. For anybody who wants to throw the "do not suggest" list in my face, let me make abundantly clear that this is not a suggestion to add resources into the game. What I am hoping to do here is to bring the community together, to see if we as a group can hammer out some of the issues plaguing resource gathering as it has been discussed so far. I want this to be a constructive space, so again if you're just going to start conflict about whether or not resource mining is good or bad, please go elsewhere. Okay... Now that that lengthy disclaimer is out of the way let's talk some shop. Feel free to expand on what I have to say, and provide constructive input as necessary. I am one man and probably will not be able to hit every talking point that I intend to, so back me up. Anyway, I think we can all agree that the main reason resource mining has been tabled for now is because, to date, the devs do not feel they have been able to shape the mechanic in a way that is organic and fun. To me, I think the real problem is that in order for the mechanic to feel worthwhile it must be integrated well with existing mechanics and should not exist to serve itself (i.e. mining things for the sake of mining things). That said, if the mechanic becomes a rube-goldberg-esque network of relations with multiple pieces of equipment required to work to accomplish simple tasks... Well that's no good either! I was brainstorming ways in which resource mining could be implemented with some others in the [Official] KerbalKon Announcements thread in General Discussion, and with input with Regex came up with my own example / vision for how I would implement resources, if I were given the opportunity. This is not to say that my vision is perfect, and I honestly never attempted to make it perfect, but it does address some key flaws with the way in which it was outlined initially. I came up with a resource map for this description, in which I strategically added a few things to highlight the possibilities this could create. One of the problems I feel this would remedy is actually one of the most common complaints with the current implementation in the Kethane mod: the sheer amount of waiting you need to do while your satellites scan a body for resource deposits. Because my example method returns a ratio of resources based on the biome type, you can mine anywhere you want. Your level of success is determined by which type of biome you're mining in. For example, if you want fuel you should probably be mining somewhere on Eve with a fuel rich lithosphere; if you want water an ice cap would be your best bet. Furthermore, the equipment you need does not have to be exclusively separate. For example, a single prob-sized part might combine the drill, separator, and converter into one unit so that you can produce a very limited amount of a single resource in preparation for the expansion of infrastructure. For example, if you're about to bring a base to Duna, perhaps you will want a tank of Oxygen there already waiting for you to get started. Other limits could perhaps be placed on the durability of the parts you are using. For example, as your unit drills down, the friction and motor all generate a heat load on your part. Currently you never have to worry about overheating unless you're launching a ship with mainsails attached directly to orange tanks, or flying 2 inches away from the Sun. Heat load could then be removed (somehow) through EVA, or by constructing heat radiators to remove excess heat. Now, heat radiators don't need to be their own part necessarily. AFAIK KSP already has a basic conduction model, so adding some large, flat surfaces might do. Of course, there is probably still a market for a stock heat radiator part. Especially once they start developing environmental mechanics for the game. This implementation would open the door to other interesting mechanics, without simply existing for the sake of existing. For example, there's no reason your rocket can't start out with enough life support "stuff" for a return trip to Duna for example... But if you want to build a permanent base there, you're going to have to either set up resupply missions from Kerbin, or get out your mining equipment and start digging! In this way, mining is a requirement for complex or long-term stays on other worlds, but do not penalize the player who simply wants to go visit, take a few pictures, then come back again. Obviously I'm expecting other ideas to come out. I'd also like to see improvements made to my own. That's kind of the point of this discussion! I want to see where the community can take this concept, and perhaps if we get it far enough the devs will reconsider tabling it. At the very least, maybe we can make this an attractive proposition for a mod developer to start working on, and turn it into a useful alternative to Kethane. I digress now, so please post your thoughts, opinions, and concerns. Do try to be constructive though! That's all I ask. ----------------------- Sorry for the double posting, but I had some new content to add in light of some feedback I've gotten on this matter. Someone reminded me that a feature like this shouldn't be essential to gameplay. Well, I disagree somewhat (but not completely); there are some features you just can't avoid. AFAIK nobody has announced the cancellation of re-entry heat, yet once that's implemented having a heat shield attached to your craft will be as essential as parachutes, or thrusters. I do, however, think the best that anybody can do is limit the extent to which a feature is necessary. So, I'll expound: In the example I outlined above, I primarily linked resource mining with refueling and life support. Refueling anything has never been an essential feature in any context, so I'll focus on life support. Now, there are a couple proposals I would make to limit how required life support infrastructure is. First and foremost, I think that when a craft launches, there could be a certain amount of life support "stuff" loaded on board. Just like how you can choose the number of crew at launch, you can select how much life support you want. Let's say you're just running a short mission to orbit and back. You don't need a whole lot of life support "stuff." If you're running an interplanetary operation, you'd need a lot more of it. Now let's say the amount of life support "stuff" you start off with has to be bought and paid for - that provides an incentive to use as little of it as possible at the get go. Therefore, if you can mine more life support "stuff" when you get there, you can do that at a lower cost than it'd take to simply pack a larger amount on your ship at the get-go! I'll take it a step further and say that in sandbox mode, let there be an option for unlimited life support, so you don't even have to worry about it at all! That way if you're in sandbox mode you can choose to run a mission where you need to manage life support. Secondly, limiting the consequences of running out of life support. We all know KSP is a pretty family friendly game, and so watching kerbals starve or asphyxiate to death might have somewhat of a... well, traumatizing effect on the younger audience. So instead of killing them when life support runs out, what if they just passed out? Kerbals are resilient creatures! You can think of it as going into hybernation if you'd like. That way, you can always run a rescue mission to come pick them up, deliver some oxygen, water, and snacks, and have them perk right up good as new! In this way, life support becomes very similar to electricity: Just as you need electricity to run unmanned resources, so do you need life support to run the manned ones. Players don't generally have a problem attaching more solar panels and batteries to their ships if they need to, so the same logic should apply to the things you need to keep your crew up and running. In this way, mining as I have defined it above is completely optional but still provides its own benefits and incentives. Fairly elegant, yes?

There are proposals on the table in the real world for refueling probes in-situ on Europa (and probably other places). They talk about reducing launch mass requirements in terms of kilograms, so I assume we're not talking something enormous that requires infrastructure. As far as trivializing fuel use, any resource system that allows refueling will do that; it should be balanced through other means. One possible way to do that is to give the converter or drill part a "durability" that can be replenished/replaced/fixed by an EVA. You could even give larger parts a much greater durability so that the EVA task doesn't become the focus of your resource extraction, and have the tiny parts never able to be repaired (or only repaired once or twice).

Eh, just ignore all the "ram" talk anyway, people on this forum don't generally seem to understand how ram affects performance in a game. It's not a magic bullet that improves framerate. Your cpu is fine, I run a 3570k@ 4.5ghz and the game is nice and snappy, as for overclocking, here's a nice in depth guide. It's not tremendously difficult or dangerous, just follow the guide. http://www.overclock.net/t/1247413/ivy-bridge-overclocking-guide-with-ln2-guide-at-the-end

Funny thing is, though, that whenever someone says resource system, we immediately know that he is referring to ISRU, not Fuel, oxidizer, RCS, etc. When ever we talk about those things, we call them fuel, oxidizer, and rcs fuel, not the resource system, and up to now, there has never been any misunderstandings between anyone on these separate subjects, which never shared the same name. As far as I know, fuel, o2, rcs, an xenon were collectively called fuel, and we referenced electricity to charge or electric charge.

I totally agree, Aramchek. I do NOT want to have to manage air, food, etc. "Simulating all the tedious minutiae of real space flight" is not what I signed on for! JordanL, I think you've hit the nail on the head right here. I would like to know what Squad's vision for a completed game looks like. The main web page for KSP describes the game as "create and manage your own space program". With sandbox being complete, they've nailed down the "create" portion. We know science will be a part of "manage", and there's talk of missions and reputation as well. What is the vision for "manage"? Do they even have this vision yet, or are they still throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks in order to get a vision?

Ok, so the "old" ressource system wasn't fun. Fine, but why scrap it completeley? How about adapting it now that you know whats not fun about it? Even during Kerbalcon there was the talk with the astronout who told you that asteroids are still missing ingame (twink twink). Now, lets find another use for asteroids besides deflecting them from earth....hm...oh...yea...ressources! Either this is a total communication failiure on SQUADS part (=we didn't scrap ressources, just our first implementation) or they really don't see how ressources are what drives space programs (its way too expensive to build everything on earth, famous gravity well problem). p.s. you really have to get better at communication on the internet FAST, you need a certain skill at beeing precise and vague at the same time covering all your bases without talking obvious BS (= we didn't want that anyways, we always planned that anyways). When large groups of ppl start disecting what you say you better cover your ass.

Wow, this thread is old. Would you guys mind checking the dates before you resurrect a thread more than a year old next time? It's okay if you want to talk about it, but it's generally better to just make a new thread. If you feel the need, quote the important parts from the old one. Necromancy is frowned upon in most cultures I'll be locking this, guys.

Don't forget to point both dishes at each other (target the SS-1 to the comms sat, and the comms sat to the SS-1 on the Duna probe), otherwise they can't talk to each other. Mission Control is the only one you can just point at and have it work. If you're low enough (geo-Kerbin Orbit is low enough) then consider using one of the omni-directional antennas for communicating to probes in Low Kerbin Orbit. Putting these on your comm satellites will erase the need to point dishes at Mission Control and each other, so long as the satellites are within range (GKO is under 3Mm, so any antenna but the Comm-16 should work). Then you can use your dishes to point at probes and things. It took me some time to figure it out, too. If this is confusing, just ask. If you have more questions, just ask. Honestly, I don't yet know what the benefit to pointing at a planetary body is. I thought it was intended to target the closest receiving relay around that body, but I haven't seen it work that way. I could be doing it wrong, so don't take my word for it.

RE: Resources Proactive communication on major announced features: When it was clear that resources weren't going the way they intended, it's appropriate to tell the community: "Hey, this isn't working out, it's gonna take more time to develop. The design goals of the feature are X, Y, & Z, and it's not meeting the requirements". Trying to ignore the problem away breeds these problems. Further, I have seen tons of posts on here about players being upset that they have to read about major features on other sites. Responsible announcements: If the resource system was so undeveloped that a few weeks of development made it clear that the entire system was so un-fun that it had to be scrapped, then I would never have released the image of resource map in the first place. IF things happened on a time frame even remotely close to what HarvestR stated, then it was beyond premature. RE: Multiplayer announcement When members of the chat were asking "what announcement what announcement?" The community manager should have told them. The whole coy thing, "Oh, what? announcement" If multiplayer was planned the whole time as HarvestR claimed, someone should have at least removed the conflicting information. The way it's been presented, it looks like total BS. RE: HarvestR's presentations On the opening:Is a practice run too much to expect when he's opening the Kon!? I KNOW he's busy. That's not an excuse. The Kon was supposed to be the annual showcase of his project. To be professional would be to treat the showcase of the project as absolutely paramount. Even more important getting the patch out on time. It doesn't take much to get a list of features to talk about ready. Saying "I don't even have a list of features in front of me" when that's what your supposed to be talking is just god-awful presentation. Someone coach the boy for next time. And if no-one says something, it's not going to get better. On his closing statements:I would have never have made the statement RE: community expectations about resources. First, SQUAD released the chart, we didn't ask for it. Second, SQUAD had months to address it, and curtail a spiral of expectations when those expectations were way lower. On today's address: He had a chance to expand what was said with time to prepare. He provided NO expansion of what was said. That's disappointing. If the community was confused about what was said at the Kon, repeating what was said doesn't do any good. In summary, if SQUAD wants to have a good community relationship, I expect them to show the community respect by communicating in a matter that is: Direct Proactive Prepared That's what I'd do differently. I really appreciate you being direct enough to ask, Rowsdower. It's movement in the right direction. One other thing: after a portion of the community has expressed such a strong interest in resources, I would have at attempted to make it clear they were heard. It would take a statement like "After seeing how strongly the community feels about the resource system, we will do our best to revisit the system". I will reiterate that I think resources can be fun. It's easier to figure out if the focus of the system is clear. and on this: Yeah, it can be rough. But inconsistent and confusing communication with the community makes it way worse, and the onus of responsible communication lies on the developer's. The longer they avoid addressing issues, the worse the community takes it.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not, so I guess I'll approach this seriously. I don't develop games, and the point in mentioning that I'm a developer was not to make it seem like I know what they should do better than they do. I mentioned that I'm a developer, because the specific point that I was being asked about (client communication) is something that is common to all development, but is very different from most other fields. I've been on the other side of this (with individual clients and companies instead of communities), and I know that sometimes it's better for Dev to simply not communicate or say something until they have a good plan in place. One thing you really don't want if you're developing anything is letting the client (or in this case community) drive the dev cycle, but if you expose a void of information, the client will always fill it with something. It's often better to not mention the void of information until you have your own plan on how to fill it. In this case, I think that this whole resource thing would actually be received a lot differently from the community if it wasn't paired with the announcement of multiplayer as a core mechanic. This has come off to many users as, "The thing we said we wouldn't do because it was impossible is part of our scope and always has been, and the thing that we said we would do and gave detailed outlines for is no longer in scope because we didn't like how it worked". I mean, they are both entirely valid things to happen, but juxtaposed it sort of sets everyone off, and makes it seem like SQUAD doesn't know what they're doing (they know what they're doing). It probably should have been something like: "Multiplayer is something that we've always wanted to put into the game, but for the longest time we didn't know if it would be possible within our development cycle. Now that we're further into alpha, it's clear that our scope can handle multiplayer, which is a feature we feel will strongly improve the experience of the game. "When it comes to the resource system that we outlined a while ago, we haven't talked about it since because we don't have anything to say. Resource mining, like other 'end-game' content, will be tackled once we have all of the core development to a state we're happy with. There's lots of things that we can do to make the core gameplay more enjoyable first, and that's a better use of our time for the immediate future. Resource mining was one concept of what end-game might look like, among many others, so once we feel comfortable getting into hard scoping of that content we'll revisit it and see what makes sense with what we've already built. That might not include resource mining, we don't know. We don't want to restrict ourselves by scoping a part of the game we aren't ready to scope yet. "The important thing is that whatever the end-game content ends up looking like, it's fun and it fits with the rest of the game. Right now we want to finish off the career mode and polish what we have before pressing on. We'll talk more about what end-game looks like once we're closer to the end of development." Such a statement is true (strictly speaking) even if they've already internally ruled out resource mining, and is something people can accept a lot better. Plus it would set people up for the eventual "we threw out resource mining" by setting up the expectations people have, wrapping all of those suggestions and features into "end-game content" which will be talked about closer to the end of dev. It also avoids committing the dev team one way or the other to a scoping session that honestly might change (yet again) by the time they are actually working on it. In short, development is all about delivering a product that your customer is happy with... but if you don't know how to manage customer expectations gracefully, it doesn't matter how awesome your product is. Look at Spore. Maxis and EA managed the expectations on that development cycle very poorly, and then rushed to try and meet some moving goalposts. And then failed at it completely. But on its own, without any context, Spore is an entertaining game. It's just not what people expected. Managing expectations is what actually separates "good" developers and companies. You under promise, you over deliver. SQUAD isn't doing terrible at that, but their product is much better than people think it is, and that's because they're communicating too much or too little (as I said I'm still not sure which). They are the ones that have taken the initiative to build an alpha community to provide feedback, and in that context I'd personally like more information about the overall vision. But goodness, if we're all having these kinds of arguments, this must be a good game. There's no way that I'd even contemplate these kinds of discussions over most games, and that's because the product that SQUAD has delivered so far has exceeded my expectations. That's hard (very hard) to do consistently.

*GASP* Is THAT what project development means!? Thank Jeb you were here to clear that up for me. Yeah, I get that plans change. But it's not the community's fault that the developers announced a feature, then tried to ignore it into irrelevance, then act shocked when players get upset it had been canned. I am, but it's such a weight off my mind knowing that I have your permission, now. I was concerned. No, seriously. Then why announce a feature that they hadn't thought through? Why not say multiplayer had been in the scope since the beginning instead of conflicting information on the site? Why were the community manager and someone else on the team (A dev? I srsly can't remember who) directing people to an external site during KerbalKon, when they were asking about the multi-player announcement? Why not prepare a simple list on paper about what you're going to talk about on your web-cast at the opening event of your own game? srsly, though, don't answer those points above. It's rhetorical. I'm trying to demonstrate that SQUAD has repeatedly dropped the ball on communicating with the community. If SQUAD would decide to either be forthcoming OR keep things quiet, either way would be massive improvement. Seriously, for social media/gaming company that apparently takes pride in listening to their community, they really don't seem to do a good job with communication. And don't try to claim that my statements regarding HarvestR are attacks or toxic. I haven't said anything untrue, and when the lead on project of this scope does that poor of a job of communicating, it's sufficient reason for concern. Don't wag your finger at me, wag it at SQUAD. It's their responsibility to make sure he was prepared, not mine. and finally... Until your title includes "moderator", I don't give two kerbals about your opinion of my posts' tone/content/POV etc. I've as much right as you do to present my opinion in whatever manner I please so long as I keep my posts within the forum rules. You're just going to have to suck it up and live what I write. Or totally ignore it. Your choice. I seriously could not care less. Besides, if you already think so little of my intelligence that you think your patronization explanation regarding project development or my tone would be informative, then I really don't see how you can believe that anything I say, regardless of tone, could possibly have any impact.

That's not quite right. Firstly, there's a difference between saying 'resources' and 'resource mining'. Resources already exist as Fuel, Oxy, Mono and such, but mining, more specifically in the way it was proposed in that old chart, is what got shelved. We might still come up with something better, more streamlined, to cover the 'bases' (pun not intended, just happy accident) that the resources plan was meant to take on, but it's still too early to talk about anything concrete, and that's also a good thing, considering there's a lot still to come, and all our plans are constantly being updated as the game grows. Cheers Note the underlined text, resource-mining isn't necessarily off the table, just the way that Squad wanted to implement them is.

I might have figured it out.. BioMass, even with 3 greenhouses to produce it, is permanently used up to zero by the fuel generator. That way he can't keep up and the 4 greenhouses are faster at consuming CO2 than he is producing them. That station started out with 700 Liquidfuel and already completed .. at this moment its 15th day in space. It managed to produce only 450 LF so far, CO2 is at 304. Biomass stays at 0.something, it just can't keep up producing it. Food on the other hand is up to 4055 already, using only one greenhouse. I guess I should rename it from Refuelling Station to McKerbal.. maybe you can do something about it, its really designed to produce fuel and the generator has been running at realtime for the most of the mission. Btw, I'm over in IRC if you want to talk... The Converter eats 60 BioMass per minute, each Greenhouse produces 3 per minute.

if you want some help with making something that can indicate acceleration and float in zero G, you may want to talk to Frizzank as a start for he has a floating sandwich in his IVA for big G

This is the official thread to discuss HarvesteR's latest blog post: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/content/239--KerbalKon-Announce Please keep all talk related to the KerbalKon announcements relegated to this thread. Thanks.

I'm looking forward to seeing it, but unless the Rockomax 48-7S gets nerfed, I suspect that the RAPIER will still be more mass than a turbojet plus a few of those, though it will certainly be more convenient. Those little buggers are just plain OP. I've heard a lot of talk about the RAPIER being overpowered, though at least some of that is probably due to changes that are going to benefit the regular jet and turbojet engine as well. Not at all surprising, passenger rail transit just isn't as popular here, the country is too spread out for people to take their time travelling by train. I don't mean just the size of the country, I'm talking the distance between population centers. Get out of New England/the midwest/California, and you start seeing warning signs along the lines of "Next gas, X miles." I used to regularly drive past one that was "Next Gas, 106 miles" when traveling between my parent's home and the college I was attending. As for commuting within a city, there were some rather active lobbyists a long time ago that convinced most major american cities to rip out their light rail commuter systems and replace them with busses, and that trend has only started reversing in the last decade or two.

It may surprise people, but I've never believed they would introduce the "ship building" type of resources, and I sincerely don't think KSP have any use for that. (edit : aside from fuel making I mean) Space Exploration is a matter way to serious, hard, and dangerous to just be a matter of mining and selling stuff. (there's no way to make it economically viable anyway) So I really wouldn't be surprised if the "Tycoon" things was only a way to attract more people than if they sold the game as "secure a budget to explore hard to reachother planet with unmanned rover without meeting a single alien". Considering your list. I think we should just talk of "Progression" rather than "empire building". Put aside the 2 others planned mechanic "Money" and "Reputation" the game is primarily driven by what technology you dispose of, and the "end of the game" even if there isn't any could be considered as the point where you got enough science to get all technology and managed to at least send probes to the surface of all planets and moons. The way you do it may lead you to "build an empire"... of support ship and space station, but ultimately they were only a mean to a goal. It's not a matter of exploiting planets. It's not a matter of claiming planets as ours, even if we do plant flag as old conqueror. It's unlikely to be a riveting plot of action, romance and adventure leading to the saving of the world from asteroid then the alien conspiracy who pushed the asteroid, culminating to a final battle against a Kardashev Type II Civilization (google that). So at best it's a question of pride and exploration (or maybe the other way around). Myself I'm an Engineer so I couldn't care less about amassing untold wealth as long as I'm given new technology to toy with and objective to challenge me.

All of the angst about resources is not, I expect, strictly about resources as such. Consider... what is it, exactly that people like about the idea of resources? Speaking for myself, and several other regular posters who have explicitly stated this, and perhaps the forum in general, the thing that we liked about resources was that it gave us some kind of "objective", or goal. But what exactly do we mean by that? Does the science system do the same thing? That's also a goal... but several players, including myself, see a difference. In fact, given that the squad statements are to the effect that resources were turning out to be grindy, I suspect that squad was discovering that resources worked too much like science points, and we have already experienced the "grindy" problems with science points. So, here's the dealL KSP is, at its core, a sandbox. So when we talk about goals and rewards, what would we mean? Here are some common objective-reward types. 1) Plot advancement. This one is obvious, but KSP does not, and will not, be a game based around a plot, so the objective-reward system in KSP can't be to advance the plot with the reward of seeing how that plot unfolds. 2) An alternative to a plot based game is an empire building game. Terraria is such a game. While there is no plot, there are a number of stages of progression through the game, from basic mining, to crafting, boss fights, a transition to a whole new mode with interactions between various parts of the environment, and so on. 3) An extension to empire building games is to see how the "total system" you have built behaves under the various automatic processes that occur within it. The canonical example here would be Sim City. There are certain processes occurring... traffic, population movement, etc, and as you build your empire your challenge is to optimize these processes, with the reward being a well functioning, elegant system where, say, traffic flows perfectly, the population is happy, and so on. Tycoon games would fall into this category. 4) There are other kinds of objective-reward systems as well that are, conceptually, simpler. For example, an entertaining little pre rendered video when the player achieves something is an objective with a reward. A lot of older games fall into this category - simple shoot-em-up games with a little cutscene once you have won the game. I think what most people expected from resources would be a conversion from a pure sandbox into a type 2 or possibly type 3 game, in which your space program is a form of empire you would be building, because that is the kind of thing that people who have done a lot in the game tend to do by default. They have bases everywhere, satellites everywhere, fuel stations, big intersterllar motherships in various places, and so on. What they are missing right now is something that connects all of those disparate things together into some kind of unified whole... an empire if you will. It's easy to see why resources would play a role in a game like that (analogously, ores in Terraria). And so the fact that Squad has dropped resources may suggest to some people that they have dropped the concept of making that transition. But there are a couple of problems with that expectation. First, as far as I know Squad has not said whether or not that kind of shift in gametype was something that they intended to develop, so assuming that resources was leading up to that might be mistaken. Second, if Squad do intend to make that transition, there may well be other ways to implement it that do not require resources in the way that we have been discussing them. So I put the question to the readers out there: What kind of objective-reward gametype would you ultimately like to see? Type 0 - strict sandbox, just what we have now. No change. Type 1 - Plot based (this seems unlikely) Type 2 - Empire building Type 3 - Empire building with systemic interactions. Type 4 - Identical to type 0 but with "cute" rewards, like little cutscenes on certain achievements. Type x - Something else! Describe your own (but I don't think I've left much out here, so be clear about why it's a different category)