What stock features are not fully developed?

[EchoLima]

Some areas in KSP feel like they were never finished and/or could use improvements.

IVAs, for instance, aren't fully usable. There aren't enough indicators to show all the needed data.

Aviation is another thing that's not fully developed. Of course, KSP is focused on spaceflight, but if we already have atmospheric flight, why not expand it? Things like fly-by-wire support and airliner type contracts could really help flesh out this area of the game.

So, what parts of KSP (if any) do you think are not fully developed?

[klesh]

Engine/Part Upgrades.  Added in 1.2, but nothing in the game has them.

[KSK]

Going to have to be careful not to use the P word here, since we've been assured on many occasions that various bits of KSP are not placeholders and are basically working as intended. With that said, some parts of the current game that felt a bit bare-bones to me:

3.75m parts (or whatever diameter the Kerbodyne parts are). Did we ever get a full set of parts including capsule, lander cabins etc?

The Space Centre minigame. Tier 1 - great if you like challenges and/or Caveman style gameplay. Tier 2 - allowed part counts move from 'almost excessively challenging' to 'no challenge at all unless you like Whackjobian constructs', gameplay functionality (EVAs, maneuver nodes) are unlocked and your kerbals learn the mystical arts of the filing cabinet, thus allowing them to accept more than two contracts at a time. Tier 3 - otherwise known as the 'okay we're bored now' Tier, in which part count allowances go to (literal) infinity and we're forced to cough up a ridiculous amount of cash to unlock the last part of the tech tree.

Courage and Stupidity. Because meaningless numbers are fun. Unless you enjoy paying attention to the minutia of kerbal facial expressions during launch.

Kerbal skills.  Felt like a checkbox exercise so we can 'level up' our kerbals. Veers between almost pointless (pilots) and over-the-top effective (engineers). I forget what scientists brought to the table.

 

Edited February 25, 2019 by KSK

[Ratwerke_Actual]

Have landing gear and wheels been mentioned yet?

Edited February 25, 2019 by Ratwerke_Actual
grammar

[Gapone]

Jool. Nuff said.

[KerbolExplorer]

52 minutes ago, Gapone said:

Jool. Nuff said.

Actually planets in genereal exept Kerbin

And space exploration,base building,space station building,carrer mode....

[Lisias]

Krakens.

[razark]

Must resist urge...

Don't say it.

It will not end well.

 

"Multiplayer!"

 

MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Time to go hide now.

[StrandedonEarth]

11 hours ago, KSK said:

Courage and Stupidity. Because meaningless numbers are fun. Unless you enjoy paying attention to the minutia of kerbal facial expressions during launch.

Kerbal skills.  Felt like a checkbox exercise so we can 'level up' our kerbals. Veers between almost pointless (pilots) and over-the-top effective (engineers). I forget what scientists brought to the table.

This. So much this. I don’t want Kerbal level ups to be a passive “now you can do this”. I want to choose what The First Four can do next, thanks, even crosstraining them if I want (for an excessive amount of XP, of course). 

And yeah, construction and research to e needs to be a thing, instead of “Oh look, the window to Moho just opened! I’m now going to build and launch three separate thousand tonne monsters to Moho within that window!”

I mean, Kerbal engineers are good, but they’re not miracle workers. I haven’t seen one named “Scotty” or “Montgomery Scott” yet!

I’d love to see factories churning out parts to be clicked together in the VAB. I’d put all of those under “”KSC not quite done yetl

1 hour ago, razark said:

Time to go hide now.

Yeah, you do that. Hide well lol

[swjr-swis]

18 hours ago, EchoLima said:

So, what parts of KSP (if any) do you think are not fully developed?

This is a trick question, yes? But I'll bite. Here's what I can think of (aside from things already mentioned above):

• Part pressure limits
• Part G-force limits
• Variant themes (the textures) - offers a lot of promise of quickly giving entire ships a specific look... but would need more consistency, and variants would need to be rolled out over many more parts
• Part variants (the models) - lot of promise here too, and it's slowly being fulfilled with the revamps, but still a lot of untapped potential
• Part variants (what they don't do but everyone hope they would) - fuel switching, the big absentee
• Most part cross-sections miss at least several types of parts (and somehow never the same) - it's like we got a few samples of each size, just to get a taste of what's available, and then we never got the rest of the sets
• Tech tree - seriously, isn't is about time to sit down and take a good hard look at letting this make just a lil more logical sense?
• Ore/Mining/Resource system - it's too slow for mid-trip refueling (unless we're all ok with wasting tens of years on 'refueling' to continue a trip), but there's no point to it for long-term stay either. It needs an overhaul or a purpose, probably both.
• Practically featureless celestial bodies - they need some more reason to (re)visit.
• The barn - Yes, I said it. Bring it back. Optional if need be, but make it happen. Facility progression really needs a step or two more to make sense.
• The mythical missing planets
• Easter egg storyline - really wish they'd write up some sort of 'ending' to this; almost anything would do at this point
• Signs of life at the KSC: we see the (optional) ground crew and vehicles when in the SPH and VAB... when do we get to see them while in the space center view or flight scene? It is still very weird to see all the activity from inside that goes completely dead when outside.
• Signs of life on Kerbin in general - all those kerbal recruits must come from somewhere, there's some dead archeological sites... it's really missing at least a couple of spread out population centers. And more landing/launch sites.

[KSK]

At the risk of being a Grinch folks, shouldn’t we stick to stuff that’s actually in the game rather than turn this into yet another Wishlist thread? I mean, those are perfectly fine and all, but there’s no shortage of them elsewhere on the forum.

[EchoLima]

24 minutes ago, KSK said:

shouldn’t we stick to stuff that’s actually in the game rather than turn this into yet another Wishlist thread?

That was the point of this thread. Instead of making wishlists of new features, we should focus on asking for things that are already in the game to be completed.

[Jacke]

18 hours ago, KSK said:

Kerbal skills.  Felt like a checkbox exercise so we can 'level up' our kerbals. Veers between almost pointless (pilots) and over-the-top effective (engineers). I forget what scientists brought to the table.

Well, Pilots are bottled SAS.  Until probe cores get manageable.

Engineers are strong.  But need to go interplanetary and return to figure out how to fix a broken wheel, which is silly.

And Scientists are for resetting Goo and Materials experiments and crewing the near-infinite wells of science the Mobile Processing Labs can be.  And the MPL breaks any challenge in the career science system.  (Career is another area needing a lot of work.)

I've thought for a while that perhaps it should have been two classes, Pilot-Engineers and Engineer-Scientists.

And there's a lot more to be gained out of Kerbals by adding mods like KIS and KAS.

[StrandedonEarth]

1 minute ago, Jacke said:

But need to go interplanetary and return to figure out how to fix a broken wheel, which is silly.

You don't actually need to go interplanetary. Orbit Mun, land on Minmus, then venture outside Kerbin's SOI for a minute or two, then return. Presto! Level 3!

But yeah, as I said before, I'd rather choose what skill my victims kerbals get when they level up. AFAIC, most of the KSC buildings need to have more content inside.

[Jacke]

2 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

You don't actually need to go interplanetary. Orbit Mun, land on Minmus, then venture outside Kerbin's SOI for a minute or two, then return. Presto! Level 3!

I took another look at it and realise it's even less than that.  I'd say the easiest would be to orbit Kerbin and land and plant a flag on Minmus, which will give 17.625 XP and good enough for 3-star rating.

 

Quote

But yeah, as I said before, I'd rather choose what skill my victims kerbals get when they level up. AFAIC, most of the KSC buildings need to have more content inside.

Certainly the order isn't quite right, especially for the Engineer.  As for the KSC buildings, more content would be good.  Also more than 3 levels--and yes, I know that can be done by the Custom Barn Kit mod,  but it should be stock.

And of course,

#BringBackTheBarn

Edited February 26, 2019 by Jacke

[Capt. Hunt]

6 hours ago, Jacke said:

Well, Pilots are bottled SAS.  Until probe cores get manageable.

Engineers are strong.  But need to go interplanetary and return to figure out how to fix a broken wheel, which is silly.

And Scientists are for resetting Goo and Materials experiments and crewing the near-infinite wells of science the Mobile Processing Labs can be.  And the MPL breaks any challenge in the career science system.  (Career is another area needing a lot of work.)

I've thought for a while that perhaps it should have been two classes, Pilot-Engineers and Engineer-Scientists.

And there's a lot more to be gained out of Kerbals by adding mods like KIS and KAS.

Honestly, I think what Kerbal levels needs is a cumulative XP system rather then an accomplishment system.  You should be able to level a Kerbal with repeated missions into LKO, rather then requiring greater and greater feats of astronautics.  Some of us aren't constantly doing missions all over the solar system.

On 2/24/2019 at 11:28 PM, KSK said:

The Space Centre minigame. Tier 1 - great if you like challenges and/or Caveman style gameplay. Tier 2 - allowed part counts move from 'almost excessively challenging' to 'no challenge at all unless you like Whackjobian constructs', gameplay functionality (EVAs, maneuver nodes) are unlocked and your kerbals learn the mystical arts of the filing cabinet, thus allowing them to accept more than two contracts at a time. Tier 3 - otherwise known as the 'okay we're bored now' Tier, in which part count allowances go to (literal) infinity and we're forced to cough up a ridiculous amount of cash to unlock the last part of the tech tree.

Just like the parts tree, the building upgrade system is geared more towards learning the game then progression.

[Superfluous J]

4 hours ago, Jacke said:

I took another look at it and realise it's even less than that.  I'd say the easiest would be to orbit Kerbin and land and plant a flag on Minmus, which will give 17.625 XP and good enough for 3-star rating.

Did that change? I've not farmed levels in a loooooooong time but last time I did, I sent a 16-kerbal ship into a Mun slingshot that then left Kerbin's SOI, turned around, rocketed back to land on Minmus, exited each. and. every. Kerbal. from. the. ship. to. plant. a. flag because they didn't give everybody credit back then, and then returned them all to Kerbin.

[Jacke]

1 hour ago, 5thHorseman said:

Did that change? I've not farmed levels in a loooooooong time but last time I did, I sent a 16-kerbal ship into a Mun slingshot that then left Kerbin's SOI, turned around, rocketed back to land on Minmus, exited each. and. every. Kerbal. from. the. ship. to. plant. a. flag because they didn't give everybody credit back then, and then returned them all to Kerbin.

I'm going on what's in the Wiki articles.  I'm running a career and will soon be starting another, so I'll see what happens.  But leaving Kerbin SOI itself is more than enough for 3-star (ie. 16xp total) as Kerbol orbit alone is said to 24xp.

Woops!  Miscalculated.  Full Kerbin SOI (orbit + Mun flag + Minmus flag) is only 13.25xp.  Kerbol orbit is 6xp and cutting Mun back to a flyby loses only 3xp, so @5thHorseman's trip is 16.25xp, good enough for 3-star rating.

https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Kerbonaut

https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Experience

Edited February 26, 2019 by Jacke

[Superfluous J]

2 minutes ago, Jacke said:

I'm going on what's in the Wiki articles.  I'm running a career and will soon be starting another, so I'll see what happens.  But leaving Kerbin SOI itself is more than enough for 3-star (ie. 16xp total) as Kerbol orbit alone is said to 24xp.

https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Kerbonaut

https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Experience

Maybe that was to get 5 stars, for like engineers and ISRU. I think back in the day that was beneficial for Kethane, like it is for stock ISRU.

The big problem is that it was like 4 years ago and I can barely remember last week

[Jacke]

38 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Maybe that was to get 5 stars, for like engineers and ISRU. I think back in the day that was beneficial for Kethane, like it is for stock ISRU.

Besides G tolerance, the big thing to get out of 5-starring over 3-starring is Engineers have better Harvest/Conversion multiples and Scientists have better research speed in the MPL.

And I now realised I was reading the Experience article wrong.  Take each line for a body and those are the max for each state, with the Kerbal only getting the max for each body.

That means your trip of Kerbin orbit (2xp the max), Mun flyby (2xp), Kerbal orbit (6xp the max), and being EVA'ed in physics distance of a flag planting on Minmus (6.25xp the max) gives 16.25xp, just enough to get that critical 3-star rating.  This is a very good one to get that.

Maxxing out within the Kerbin SOI isn't enough for 3-star (Kerbin 2xp + Mun 5xp + Mimus 6.25xp = total 13.25xp, only 2-star).  Adding a Mun flag planting to your trip only gives 19.25xp, a trivial advance to even 4-star's needed 32xp.

And 5-star's 64xp....  Wow.  The "easiest" way I can see getting that is a full Kerbin SOI 19.25xp + EVE orbit 7.5xp + Gilly flag 15xp + Duna flag 12.5xp + Ike flag 12.5xp = total 66.25xp.  Could cut Mun to just orbit and still get 64.25xp and 5-star rating.

And fixed my last post too.

 

Quote

The big problem is that it was like 4 years ago and I can barely remember last week

And I apparently have a problem reading this week.

It's still silly what Kerbals have to do for their Engineers to fix rover wheels.  And it's almost an insult to the power of flight preplanning and flight simulation training and how important that is.

Edited February 26, 2019 by Jacke

[klgraham1013]

Career mode?

[mattinoz]

3 minutes ago, klgraham1013 said:

Career mode?

Yes wedged in last minute because early development notes called it a tycoon game but always hampered by the insistence that you can’t require multi tasking like all tycoon games do. 

[Whirligig Girl]

20 hours ago, Gapone said:

Jool. Nuff said.

Enough has not been said for me to understand you. The Jool system is actually pretty well developed as the planets go. How is it under-developed?

Edited February 26, 2019 by GregroxMun

[Ozymandias_the_Goat]

30 minutes ago, GregroxMun said:

Enough has not been said for me to understand you. The Jool system is actually pretty well developed as the planets go. How is it under-developed?

Truly, the Jool system is the only place that I am not bored of going (in the stock solar system). Two of the five moons are certified not boring, doing a Jool-5 mission is still somewhat difficult (for me at least!), and just in general, everything is bigger there. Jool is probably one of the least problematic features of the game, although it does pale in contrast to OPM and other superb planet packs, which truly make the game a pleasure.

[Whirligig Girl]

2 hours ago, Ozymandias_the_Goat said:

Truly, the Jool system is the only place that I am not bored of going (in the stock solar system). Two of the five moons are certified not boring, doing a Jool-5 mission is still somewhat difficult (for me at least!), and just in general, everything is bigger there. Jool is probably one of the least problematic features of the game, although it does pale in contrast to Alternis Kerbol and WhirligigWorld, which truly make the game a pleasure.

I completely agree. Jool's system is a really fantastic place to go, the only thing which could be better is Jool itself I guess, giving it layers and clouds alongside weather for other planets is the only think I could think to change, but that's a much broader problem of all planets, not Jool itself.