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In the current system, any science transmissions are multiplied by your signal strength, reducing the science return for your experiments. Before 1.2, transmitting science only incurred a proportional penalty for transmission versus recovery, but now this proportional penalty is again divided by signal strength. This seems non-intuitive - If I collect n bits for return, I should be able to return all of n of those bits, and a weaker signal just means that the transmission will have to have more redundancy to prevent data loss. It seems silly that my data is just lost to the ether because of a poor signal-to-noise ratio, when I should be able to constantly re-broadcast the data until I have 100% of it accumulated on Kerbin. The Shannon-Hartley theorem seems to verify this, but I also don't know much about information theory and this could have exactly 0 bearing on the situation that I'm discussing. I propose that instead of a proportional science penalty, there would be a proportional time penalty, incurred by requiring more bits to be transmitted as a function of signal strength. At full strength the required bits to transmit would be that listed for the experiment, and with decreasing signal strength, a logarithmic or pseudo-logarithmic function to determine how many redundant bits should be transmitted. If the Shannon-Hartley theorem is valid here, the S/N term would be a function of signal strength, and the bandwidth the advertised bandwidth of the antenna doing the transmitting. This would require some interaction between the science dialogue window and the antenna system, as the dialogue window would require knowledge of the primary antenna onboard the spacecraft. I do realize that this would greatly reduce the penalty for having poor probe connections, however if the signal strength to S/N conversion function were curved steeply enough, it could offset this by requiring an extreme amount of time and EC to transmit data. Something that could be useful here would be a manual bandwidth limiter to ensure the probe didn't deplete its batteries right away in the event of an hours or days long transmission. At this point I'm just spitballing, but let me know what you think of this idea. EDIT: whoops, wrong forum. I need to not make posts when I'm tired.

Hey all, Shower thought for the day What would happen if your science return for an experiment was dictated not only by the number of times you'd run it in that biome, but also the number of times you done it on that body? E.g. first Mun surface sample gets 100% (of current setting), second gets 50%, third gets 25%. This would stack up with same-biome diminishment. Reason for thought These forums are full of people who maxed the tech tree in Kerbin's SoI, and I'm not convinced that's "fun"TM Sure, you can dial science gain down to 10%, but that ultimately pushes players to repeat, repeat, repeat the same thing. A diminishing return strategy would reward firsts and encourage players to get out of their comfort zone - which generally works out as a good thing. And yes, I know we can just be disciplined and promise ourselves that they'll only do n landings on any particular body, but ultimately most of us don't have that level of willpower. Sooner or later, I'll realise I need just 50 more science points for a thing I want, and I'll crack and send a cheap expedition to Mun rather than designing a massive Jool mission for it. Just because it's easier and I can Just an idea for discussion, if anyone's of a similar mind Edit; alternative as raised further down the thread: The first time a specific experiment is transmitted/recovered from a particular body would reward double, or even triple, science.

I think this is a well-known problem throughout many versions of ksp, but (I believe) because the Mk2 cockpit is a single all-in-one nosecone, it generates a monstrous amount of re-entry heat. I have trouble not exploding the thing on relatively gentle reentry angles (40km periapsis) just returning from 450k orbits (still true in 1.2 despite pointy-object aerodynamic changes). The inline Mk2 and Mk3 cockpits have separate parts as noses (like a shielded docking port) which seems to disperse the heat better and solve the issue. Just about any re-entry is quite harrowing with the Mk2. Is this the intended (rather than simply emergent) behavior of the Mk2 cockpit? I wish there was a way to add more ablative coating at the cost of increased weight, but that is perhaps getting into modding territory. It does look pretty damn good imo though, so I'd hate to have to switch to the inline Mk2.

Here's what I'm thinking: If realistic water buoyancy can be implemented, why not ground effect? It would open up a whole new avenue of designs, like ground effect vehicles. It would also make takeoff and landing in spaceplanes and aircraft easier, as the amount of lift is increased as you approach the ground. However, that could be balanced out by reducing the effectiveness of control surfaces. It should also be easy to implement as the effect kicks in at or below the length of an aircraft's wingspan; This data is easily obtained, as it is already in the engineer's report. Please feel free to give your thoughts, whether for or against this. Thanks!

When assigning Action Groups, it would be very useful if we could use a Delay within the group so we could program a series of events just with 1 button press. We could get some really neat and creative things going on with just adding this one thing. I'm sure there are countless things we can come up with, but the great thing about it is it would add so much play value to the game, for such an easy thing to insert. You'd probably want to be able to assign a value to the Delay, and all the actions would need to flow top down for it to work. Just an idea.

What if - Part 2 I was Just drinking my coffee on my monitor, while watching the Orion Rocket Getting ready for launch to duna, when this came up to my mind. -Gene Kerman- Suggestion 3 What if.. There Was Baby Kerbals?.. I know this might seem crazy Baby kerbals going to space... but it would be actually funny to see that i never saw any mod maker or person do that . so Squad if your intreseted this idea is for you Suggestion 4 What if There was a Astroied Belt in Outermost Kerbol system? that would be a pretty intresting place to go , if your reading this and your a modmaker , this is a idea because i dont think squad is going to do it Suggestion 5 What if there was a Space Elevator in the KSC in only Sandbox mode that you can put your spacecraft into and then go to space to test them? i Personally think this idea has the worst chances of getting into the game but thats just a dream, If your a modmaker , Well you guessed it , another idea Please Vote on the poll on what idea you think is the best

Picture poor Jebediah sitting inside a MK1 capsule atop an overly complex rocket (aren`t they always?) waiting on the launchpad. He is smiling despite knowing that he is being sent to Duna on a one way mission (or at least until the Space Program decides to send another vessel to collect him) all on his own, within a space suit, within a tiny capsule and with no other entertainment than a minute window that will show nothing but cold cold space for the whole 200+ days of journey. Once within Duna`s sphere of influence Jebediah can look forward to a couple of days of achieving orbit, landing and performing a couple of experiments on the surface. After that, nothingness... nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to speak to... alone in the planet, the omega kerbal. So, you guys get what is bugging me: we have great mods to deal with the lack of life support gameplay, great mods to give us more realistic aerodynamics and soon communications networks in 1.2 all fine and dandy... Kerbals however seem to have 0 mental health needs, they will happily be put into a capsule for months on end... You might say it is an acceptable break from reality, but I for one make sure that any mission that is going to go longer than 1 month HAS to have at least two kerbals in it and a some kind of crew cabin (usually the hitchikers storage container). It is not neccesary for the game mechanics, but it makes me feel like I am at least giving my little kerbalnauts the chance of leaving the cockpit and taking a shower, sitting down, just plain go somewhere else. Still, even that might be "less than enough" for missions that count their duration in years instead of months... what to do then? Well, send a robot instead! And I am not talking about those crude drone core`s than can pilot a ship and even land it, I´m talking about humanoid robots that can do everything (well, almost) a Kerbal can do without the mental breakdown that should come from being in an enclosed capsule with no company or entertainment for years. Hell, you can even send them to distant planets to set up surface bases, get them going, and then send the actual kerbals. Robots would not consume life support (great advantage) but would have no specialisation or leveling in career (big disadvantage), they wouldn´t be able to send crew or EVA reports, but they would be able to take surface samples and take experiment results from sensors just fine. They would be unlocked in career mode with one of the later drone techs. I would love to build a mod that offers precisely that as I think it would add an interesting role-playing edge to the game that, as of now, is lacking. I worked as a 3D designer for a few years so I offer myself to build the models (the idea is to use the current mesh, textures and animations from Kerbals and make some changes to make robots out of them, piece of cake!), I am however painfully ignorant when it comes to building mods and what it entails, I would need help (plenty of it) in that department. Any takers?

Hi KSP! I wanted to say that the aerodynamics are quite advanced, very beautifully and awesomely made! but I can't support it none the less. for two reasons: 1. "Monoplanes produce more lift than for example triplanes, having less wing bodies. that is because triplanes have wings that are so close together that their aerodynamics mix (don't have enough space)" (That is what they thought me on school) So the problem here is: In Kerbal Space Program you can cheat by putting wing(s) in each other and producing more lift, for example. You see that often in large or unrealistic crafts. If this isn't the case anymore (in 1.2) I will be very happy! And I wonder if I ask something very complicated. But for me it ruined my motivation to make aircrafts in KSP. 2. There are no proceduraly generated wings, if not using mods. This limits imagination and options drastically. PS. I really love KSP! I want to thank everyone very much for making such an awesome game!! PPS. You could check the "Gabe Flags" I made ...

Hi, I'm playing on Kerbal space program since 0.9 version, I was wondering about the futur of KSP, and I was wondering, why don't you port it into the game? I think it would be an amazing featur to add, to be able to literaly create your own part in game, thanks to some tools, with a new building. Starting with something like real fuels did in his mod. Be able to select the size and the shape of your fuel tanks. And it would be limited by the techTree, and the type of engine you are able to take. This way you would be able to implement more and more featurs without much work on part creation. Of course you would have much more work somewhere Else, but it will increase the amount of possibility. At the start you would be able to change tanks, or engines power, size, shape but at the end you could creat your own pod, the materials you want to use on such part etc. For the ones who don't want to spend so much time on it you can give basic parts. But you can change the way they work (adding parachute in the hull of your pod, adding detechable parts etc...). Something you could add is the type of material used for each parts etc.. At the end you would be able to creat a custom station with custom parts inside, science experiments etc. Create rockets the shape you want with any materials like Iron, wood whatever with there own caracteristic. Even Create your own cockpit for planes or capsuls. (with IVA mod it would be great. Thanks for reading

Sorry if this is on a no-suggest list or has been discussed to an end already, so far I've only found really old threads that got no actual answer, so I decided to try my own luck: Alright, so I just discovered NVIDIA Surround and was trying different applications with it... And who would have thought, but KSP actually works! The only "problem" I'm facing is that the UI spans over all screens, which, for my setup at least, looks really weird (having to move the mouse across two and a half screens just to exit the VAB after part selection... yeah). Is there a way to fix it? Like, have one "main" monitor and the others just for extended FOV. Native support would be great ofc, but a mod would also be cool. I do call myself a programmer, so I guess I could try hacking something together if anyone cood tell me where to start... I have never developed a mod for KSP though, and generally don't know the games code. And I suspect for something like that you would need to know at least some things about it...

I would like to have end-caps for all the sizes of fuel tank. They would not have to match the colour of the tanks. The end-caps would have an airlock with a top/bottom indicator or perhaps a built in ladder. These airlocks would not be able to hold a crewman for flight but would facilitate the logistics of the crew. By right clicking the airlock I could EVA any crew-member in the vessel. By telling a kerbal to board at the airlock, the available sections for crew would be highlighted and I could select which compartment to board. In much the same manner as transferring a crew member can be done now. The end-caps would be surface mountable so That I can place a 1.5 end-cap anywhere to use as a regular airlock. I would like this added to 1.2 so please get cracking at your earliest convenience. ( Too far?)

Can you add boat parts and make that World War 2 engines used in planes like P51-Mustang or Yakolev Yak-3?

Hello, I was trying to get into KSP in a less freestyle way, that is, throwing stuff into the air and see if it lands in a not fireball form. So I decided to try the tutorial and it is hard to follow, the text constantly jumps to the right side of the screen, the text itself is tiny and it is written in large blobs of text. All those together makes the tutorial really hard to go through. And I have a feeling it can be fixed easily by having the tutorial voiced, have somebody that is clearly and well spoken to voice act the text. Have the tutorial pause by itself whenever it teaches something mid flight and make sure this whole thing can be turned off as an option before starting a tutorial. Have a nice day!

The Story So Far: Prior to KSP v1.0, mass ratios of tanks varied wildly. For some fuel types, there was a consistent progression across tank sizes, for others, there was not; and across fuel types, there was no consistency at all. In KSP v1.0, Squad made the decision to standardize all the fuel tanks in KSP to a mass ratio of 9:1 - meaning one ton worth of tankage holds 8 tons worth of propellant. All the fuel tanks...? No! A small holdout yet remains in the northern reaches of Gaul in the form of the xenon tanks. Their mass ratio still sits at 2.2727:1 - meaning one ton of tankage holds just 1.2727 tons of propellant. It's almost a fifty-fifty split between dry mass and xenon! Why It Matters: The rocket equation consists of two parts that are multiplied with each other. One is the effective exhaust velocity, which we know in the derivative form of specific impulse (Isp). The other is the vessel's mass ratio. Therefore, the mass ratio is at least as important as Isp for the performance of a rocket. You can argue that it is even more important, because while Isp only defines the rocket's dV, the mass ratio defines the rocket's dV in the same way as Isp does, and in addition to that, also defines the rocket's TWR. A better mass ratio gives you both more dV and shorter burns. Another consequence of the mass ratio going into the rocket equation lies in the maximum dV any given rocket stage can achieve with a specific engine (more precisely, with that engine's Isp). Because even if you add the entire observable universe's mass in terms of fuel to a rocket that somehow weighs zero kg despite having an engine and other stuff, you could still not exceed the mass ratio of the tanks you are using. Therefore there's a hard limit of dV you can never exceed with any given engine, and it depends entirely on the tank's mass ratio - and the way it curves towards that limit with increasingly diminishing returns depends on it, too. Why It Should Be Addressed: In real life, the mass ratio of a fuel tank depends on a great many factors, including the physical properties of the propellant itself. So you could argument that it is realistic that different fuels have tanks with different mass ratios. However, for xenon specifically, real life tanks are not anywhere near that low. In addition to that, as mentioned above, Squad made the conscious decision to remove all tankage mass ratio differences from the game (except xenon, which as it would appear was forgotten). And there's good reasons for doing this, reasons I've experienced myself multiple times while helping out with the mod Near Future Technologies. One pack in this suite of mods introduces new engines, which run on several different new fuels. I'm doing the balancing of those engines, and over time, I've tried various different approaches. Among them were approaches that had all the fuels at different tankage mass ratios. Although this offered increased freedom in assigning stats and part niches, it also made everything a whole lot more complicated to manage and balance properly. But that's not the main reason it was a bad idea. No, the main reason is that none of the players noticed it. None whatsoever. Not a single person who hadn't followed the dev thread discussion ever admitted to being aware of these differences. And, I mean, why would they? Fuel tanks are just fuel tanks. When you build literally any other spacecraft in KSP, you plop down the payload, you plop down a number of fuel tanks, and then you sit down and start comparing engines for thrust and Isp. Engines, not tanks. So the only thing those players noticed was: some engines just had better stats than others, no matter how you turned it. And these players then came to the mod thread and complained that their favorite engine was underpowered, or that another one was really broken, and that our balancing was super bad. All in all, mucking with tank mass ratios turned out to be unnecessary complexity that didn't add any depth, only confusion. Squad, I wager, knows this full well, for they have a forum full of active users who love to discuss engine balance while equipped with many different variants of half the data. And with the introduction of such things as the monoprop engine, and the move of the LV-N to be liquid fuel only, KSP moved rapidly towards a situation where engines could not be directly compared to each other anymore. So they made LF/Ox, LF-solo and Monoprop tanks all have the same mass ratios. Voila, engines could now be compared again! Except, you know, the often-forgotten Dawn ion engine. What The Actual Effects Are: The Dawn has so wildly different stats from all other engines, both in thrust and Isp, that comparing it to other engines is fairly straightforward on the surface: the dV you get is simply just "higher", and the thrust you get is simply just "lower". It clearly gives the Dawn its niche. However, if you sat down and compared the actual stats, you'd quickly discover that this engine doesn't perform the way you think it does. Namely, it always significantly underperforms compared to what your on-paper math says it should do. And the more fuel you add, the worse it gets. To illustrate, I've done some math on a vessel that is comprised of 10 tons of dry mass, including a Dawn engine. I've added enough fuel to hit several different propellant fraction targets (percentage of vessel mass that is fuel). At each of those targets, I determined how much more dV and TWR the vessel would get if its tank mass ratio was 9:1 instead of 2.2727:1... and then converted that into how much less "effective Isp" and "effective thrust" the Dawn gets compared to a hypothetical LF/Ox engine with the same stats. I also calculated the difference in total mass between the vessel with the LF/Ox tanks and the vessel with the xenon tanks. Spacecraft mass is important when designing your lifter, after all... and that difference is the extra mass you have to lift just because you're using xenon (in addition to being responsible for the drop in effective thrust). Base Stats 4200 s 2.00 kN n/a Propellant Fraction Effective Isp Effective Thrust Vessel Mass Difference 15% 3739 s 1.80 kN 1.38 tons 20% 3564 s 1.73 kN 2.09 tons 25% 3378 s 1.66 kN 3.04 tons 30% 3175 s 1.59 kN 4.36 tons 35% 2952 s 1.53 kN 6.29 tons 40% 2703 s 1.46 kN 9.44 tons 45% 2417 s 1.39 kN 15.45 tons 50% 2072 s 1.33 kN 31.50 tons As you can see, the Dawn effectively drops to barely half the performance a player would infer from looking at its stats alone by the time the propellant fraction hits 50%. This is not the Dawn engine's fault. It's the xenon tank's fault. What I Propose: Simply put, adjust the dry masses of the xenon tanks to fall in line with all the other fuel tanks in KSP. I've even gone ahead and calculated the numbers - you just need to put them into the configs: - PB-X50R: 0.03143 becomes 0.005 - PB-X150: 0.055 becomes 0.00875 - PB-X750: 0.4125 becomes 0.065625 Meanwhile, doing this obviously results in a massive buff to the Dawn engine. But consider the following: because of the poor xenon tanks currently in the game, the Dawn engine needs to have artificially inflated stats (in both thrust and Isp) in order to deliver the performance that it is designed to have in typical usage scenarios. As such, there should be no problem with adjusting those stats down once the tanks are no longer killing it. Since the Dawn engine is a direct nod to the NSTAR ion thrusters on NASA's Dawn spacecraft, currently in orbit of Ceres, why not take the Isp directly from that? Instead of 4200s, it would now have 3120s. Looking at the table above, that falls pretty much straight in the middle of what you effectively get right now anyway, on average... a perfect fit. The thrust could be set at 1.5 kN, a nice round number that's also reasonably near the average effective performance today. 1.6 kN would also be valid, but from my gut, I'd choose the lower value. Xenon-fueled spacecraft are already getting another stealth buff in requiring less lifting power to put them into orbit. In Closing: From my amateur viewpoint, I consider this change to be simple, straightforward and requiring only little testing - it doesn't affect many game systems, and the required changes are so few and simple, a ModuleManager script could do it. I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts and comments on it!

It would be really cool to be able to sort our contracts by expiration date. That way, I don't have to check every contract before a long flight. I could just look at the closest one. Right now, the list seems completely random, and far off contracts muddle up the list for more immediate things.

I know this has been suggested but my search fu is weak. Can we get the ability to move. All UI elements around the screen? Especially the ones that once were horizontal and now are vertical?

Perhaps the game needs some new wheels! Roller wheels! You know! They could help out with tons of stuff! They would look like such: Shorter than the ones on the U2, no need for that extension, but they should serve a similar purpose. More like this, but aircraft quality, not shopping cart quality. Something like this to assist craft as they land, or to help people making turboprops and such!

This suggestion is for a new item in The Daily Kerbal, Spacecraft Saturday. It would showcase stuff from the Spacecraft Exchange, there's some really cool *cough*This*cough* stuff there.

Not a big one at least, I can be small. You see some mods think the whole "battle" between the "krakenist's"(see the " ?) and dres lovers is a massive set up for role playing, but in actuality it's a forum war. You may think "but role playing gets too aggressive." Actually... No, role playing may be a tiny bit aggressive, but that aggression is quickly resolved. So please, KSP forum staff. Add a role playing forum so those who want roleplaying can get it, and they will leave the rest of the forums 99.9% untouched. Please...

Hi, i have multiple playback devices i use. Headphones, speakers in my monitor and a hifi-system. To change the playback device, i use a tool named SSD (SetSoundDevice) wich is doing nothing else as changing the preferred playback device. Most games can handle this and allow to change the output device while the game is running. But with KSP, i have to exit the game, change the device and restart the game each time i want to swap from speakers to headphones for instance. Would it be possible to change this behaviour in a future release ? Thx & greetz, ezfox

I have an idea, maybe Squad can make that we can buy whole rockets design (akin stock rockets) for in game money. I just think maybe dev or we players can collects all best rockets design from Curse and other such website and than segregate them for potential mission plan (like MOR\Direct Ascent Munar Landing, best rocket for Duna Rover landing etc. And than allow buy such whole design trough in game money, because some of us are thrill seeking space Daredevil and are not so bright like Bob It would also be nice if we had something like the US Congress or the Kremlin, where a bunch of ignorant morons torpedoes our efforts conquest of space

The recent releases of 1.1 to 1.1.2 have created a lot of problems for some people, including crashes, bugs, etc. Many mods are, obviously, incompatible for now, and many others are themselves coming up with new bugs and problems. There's been some complaining on these forums and other KSP related forums because of this. Would it be possible for Squad to make old versions of KSP still available so that Steam customers could choose when to to upgrade to a new version? Europa Universalis does this by making old versions available on Steam via the beta menu options. Such a system would allow players to hold off on updating until they felt it was stable enough, or until their favourite mods were compatible, etc. It would also greatly reduce negative posts from people in the immediate aftermath of new releases and hopefully spare the developers from what I imagine can be very disheartening feedback right after they've worked really hard to get a release out of the door.

At the moment, players can take contracts to get satellites etc into exacting orbits/inclinations, and this creates (in the map view) a visible orbital reference with tolerances for AP, PE and inclination And it would be useful if players could use the mission control at KSC to plan missions similarly utilising the same system, being able to create an orbital target like the current contracts provide to get spacing, altitude, inclinations etc spot on

A plugin that maybe uses Hypedit functionality to prevent satellite networks from drifting without having to constantly go back and fix them. It's impossible to get orbits truly close without a lot of luck, since KSP doesn't have the most stable trajectories... So frustrating to see my AP/PE bouncing about 50-100 meters while my satellite is just sitting there. It would need to have a single satellite selected, and match all other satellites in its network to its orbital period/inclination/ what have you. It would need some kind of limitation, such as the AP/PE being within 500 meters of the main satellite, and its inclination suitably close. Maybe require RCS ports on the satellite, and consume very small amounts of monoprop for adjustments. I wouldn't mind having to refuel satellites every ~6 years, it would feel very nice. I have no words for the amount of tears that have been shed as I watch my 10 satellite network ever so slowly drift into chaos as I await transfer windows for years

Please, for the love of all that is holy, remove the needless mandatory WYSIWYG editor for forum posts. Or give us a button to switch it to plain text or something. Quoting someone, especially multi-quoting or removing centered text, things like that, is needlessly complicated by this ridiculous editor. Please, a plain text option. That's it. Mobile users will love you. Thank you.