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First to start of, I have been restraining myself from writing this post for over a year now, and am beginning to think that I might be just too whiney in my head, since I seldom see topics like this brought up on the forum. It feels like everyone is fine with stuff I am about to mention and only a few people bring these things up. First of in pretext I would like to say that KSP has been and still is my No 1 game, most of the time the only game I have on my PC, and it is an absolute marvel and refreshment in video game industry. There is hardly any game so rewarding and beautiful as our beloved KSP. I have not seen any developer so engaged with community and actually willing to listen to it as much as Squad is, for me they are a shining light in the ever more profit driven game development world, which more and more often provides us with gaming titles that are not even worth mentioning and remembering, let alone playing. And that is the reason why I am feeling even more obligated to throw my thoughts in, and raise questions i feel are important in a hopefully non whining, constructive way. The first question I would like to raise is, what is KSP becoming? With every update, I have a greater and greater feeling that KSP is becoming more and more of a "framework" for community mods, which are for me a more and more a necessary "evil", hell, if you want to do something in KSP in a really enjoyable way, you are going to do it with mods, and this is great that it exists, but it also creates some unavoidable "walls" which modding can't deal with or deals with in some very faint and unreliable way, due to KSP / Unity limitations. Even some mods developed by community have made it into official release, which is awesome, and I think this trend should be continued to a certain degree. I am however disappointed in Squad's focus on certain game aspects, mainly, why is so much attention given to non-flight parts of the game, there are some things which were really critical, but there are some that I cannot believe took precedence over things that are still a major issue ingame. Mainly, I want to point my finger at actual gameplay after you hit spacebar to launch a flight for the first time.I will just throw some issues out of my mind which I really cannot believe that someone in development process finds acceptable, and again someone in QA phase gives it a go for release. 1) Patched conics have been a nightmare for the entire life of the game, and they are a really critical element of any mission, they are getting fixed now, hopefully, so it took all this time, even through official release (1.0) of the game to even get into fixing of those. 2) Rocket stability / part attachment node strength. Anyone who claims that spaceships are fine should try deleting EAS-4 Strut Connector from GameData and trying to play that way, It is almost impossible to design a large rocket without that part, it is the only thing that enables construction of all those awesome huge ships everybody loves, and even that fails at larger scales, Kerbal Joint Reinforcement (KJR) becomes a necessity at this point, and again, why is it implemented by community so awesomely, and developers are not taking a similar course of action, beats me. 3) Mission and timewarp management - Again, if you have 2+ ships in a mission that are set to execute some node in future, it becomes a real real pain to manage all those, nodes are skipped, encounters missed, missions screwed because when you switch ships once you cannot revert anymore, so here again comes an intervention from community - Kerbal Alarm Clock (KAC) or similar mods that will make the game playable at this level. Also It is great that we don't have reports of epileptic seizures when timewarping at max while on launchpad / KSC view, I look away/turn off monitor every time I have to do that, it is just nauseating. 4) Planetary exploration - Now this is the part that makes me want to rage, because this is the greatest waste of potential ingame of all. There are the known planets, Moho, Eve, Kerbin, Duna, Dres and Jool, and their respective moons. And there is nothing to do on them, once you land on a body, there is almost nothing that motivates you to actually stay there and dig around, do science, try to survive, you know all the good stuff that space gives you. There are anomalies that you could visit but they don't do anything but give you the bling factor when you find them, and are almost impossible to find, even worse a lot of them were removed or buried below the surface, so they are unreachable. (Magic boulder, I will miss you forever.) And then, we are supplied with parts that would enable exploration of bodies further away than Eeloo (nuke engines, ion engines, RTG-s) which have absolutely no real use, everything within the stock Kerbol system is far inside the reach of conventional chemical rockets and solar panels, so there is no real need for high tech parts like those. Regular engines + asparagus will get you anywhere you can go in stock system. Some planets will break your ships by simply landing on them or even loading a craft on the surface (yes i am looking at you Eve)... So in order to remove all that dullness there are again some spectacular community made mods that will try and mask the overwhelming dullness of planets that are supposed to be places which should make your heart want to explode with excitement. Notable huge ones are Outer Planets Mod, Distant object enhancement, Environmental visual enhancments, and a huge selection of additional science mods, basebuilding mods, lifesupport and lately a visual candy - Scatterer, which try their best, but really cannot change the fact that there is nothing to really do in space once you left the launchpad, because of nonexistent base mechanics to expand on! Hell, the most interesting thing that happened on planets in stock game beside resources being introduced are actually biomes, which were painted by a community member! 5) Contracts and rewards - This part is really done much better than anything mentioned above, but could still use improvements, mainly things like Eve and Moho should give a ton more science/money because they are far more difficult to complete than anything else. Some are just completely stupid and impossible, but hey, its really fine compared to issues mentioned above. So, I am reluctant to say "KSP is supposed to be a space exploration game" because it is not only that, if I am correct, it should be a merger of a flight simulator, construction/engineering game, manager and space exploration, and if so, why oh why is so much attention given to a lot of trivial things and improvements that are tied to the management part of the game and there are close to none improvements in other aspects of the game, mainly things I have addressed above. So what are your thoughts, am I completely wrong and am I playing the game completely wrong, or do you resonate with things mentioned and are feeling a bit undercut on these important aspects in the way I do? Thank you all for reading, peace, out. Wall of text critically hits you for over 9000 damage. You die.