Laundry List

[bv1]

Hi there. I’ve been playing KSP for some time now. Although it’s such a fun game, it is also very obvious to me how unfinished the game is. Having played through the Career mode twice now, I’ve been thinking and taking note of ways I think the game could be dramatically improved. I've come up with so many that it would be impractical make a separate post for each; instead, I figured I might as well just post them all here and hope for the best. I’ve grouped my suggestions according to category. Within each category, I’ve listed the suggestions in order of descending importance/ease of implementation. Hopefully some of you will agree with some of my suggestions.

Gameplay

1. Make career contracts which require landing multiple Kerbals onto a celestial object. At present in career mode, there is no economic or practical sense in building rockets with the larger 3-Kerbal Mk1-2 capsule.
   
2. Allow transfer of science results between adjacent docked capsules without doing EVA.
   
3. Include a camera view from the perspective of docking ports.
   
4. Allow the altimeter to show true altitude for use in landing, without having to resort to the tiny IVA gauge.
   
5. Make interplanetary travel viable without the use of mods and third-party calculators. Trial-and-error can get you to the Mun or Minmus, but it quickly becomes frustrating for any other celestial body. At the very least, there should be a way to determine phase angles, and a reference which informs players of optimal phase angles. This capability could be unlocked in the tech tree.
   
6. Kerbal Engineer should be incorporated into the stock game. Why even bother providing players with ISP, thrust, and mass values, if you’re not going to give them the delta-V and TWR values? These features of Kerbal Engineer can easily be worked into the tech tree. It is reasonable for players just starting out in career mode to be building and flying blindly, but it is unreasonable to expect them to stumble across a Moho-capable spacecraft through tedious trial-and-error. The Kerbal Engineer part also allows one to see apoapsis and periapsis values without having to constantly switch back and forth between the staging and map screens.
   
7. Unlock a Delta-V map with the tech-tree.
   
8. With higher difficulty levels, Kerbals should die when subjected to sustained high G’s.
   
9. Implement re-entry heating and damage; enable this through difficulty settings. I thought that they were going to implement this starting back in 0.18.
   
10. Implement parts failure (i.e.Dang-it! and/or Kerbal Mechanics) as an option for higher difficulty settings.
    

Antennas

Currently in the stock career game, I’ve found that it is almost never worthwhile to send science results via antenna. The only exception I’ve found is for an unmanned rover landed on Eve, which for practical purposes, is stuck there forever. Even more useless are the Comms DTS-M1 and Communotron 88-88. Why do they use MORE electricity? The increased speed is basically irrelevant, as even the biggest science results take only seconds to transmit on the basic Communotron 16. Here are some of my suggestions to fix the useless-antenna situation.

1. Eliminate science transmission penalty for thermometer, barometer, accelerometer, and gravitometer. I cannot fathom why the transmission efficiency for these sensors should be anything other than 100%.
   
2. Make the map view (and orbital elements if Kerbal Engineer is incorporated) contingent on the availability of a functional antenna. (The tracking station would be tracking by radar and then relaying the information via antenna uplink). Then, as a fun alternative/backup, manned capsules could use optical navigation; this would not use electricity, but it would take some time.
   
3. Hard mode: make accurate altimeter and speed readings contingent on antennas.
   

Electricity

In general, the game’s electric charge system is in need of revamping. With the current near-uselessness of antennas, there is frankly little use for electric charge. Except for rovers and the Ion drive, I’ve found that I can always get by with a single OX-STAT panel and perhaps a single Z-100. (Also, because these parts are massless, they are OP.) With the above antenna suggestions, there would be more constant drain of electricity, making larger batteries and solar panels more useful in career mode.

Balancing

1. Why is the Mk2 Lander-can 4 times as heavy as the Mk1 when it holds 2 times the Kerbals? You might as well just stick two Mk-1 landers together for efficiency.
   
2. Why is the Mk1-2 pod 4.9 times as heavy as the Mk1 Command Pod when it holds 3 times the Kerbals?
   
3. The TVR-XXXL adapters should be made available much sooner in the tech tree, even sooner than the Skipper and Mainsail engines become available. Thus, clusters of smaller LV-TXX engines would be useful at some point in the game.
   
4. In general, girders are too heavy.
   

Cosmetic

1. Have option to enable small arrows showing the direction of motion along the orbit. This way, you don’t have to time-accelerate to see which way the object is orbiting.
   
2. Incorporate the Distant Object Enhancement mod into the stock game. (Players should be able to see the planets as dots in the sky. When looking at bright objects such as nearby planets or the Sun, the background stars and nebulae should be invisible.)
   
3. Have multiple sizes for engine fairings. For example, make the LV-N have a larger fairing when placed above the large Rockomax decoupler.
   
4. In graphics options, create option for crude Nintendo-64-style circular shadows to help those with crappy computers (like me) in landings. Better to have a crappy circle than to have no shadows at all.
   

Small Tweaks

1. Make the Navball default to visible while on the Map Screen.
   
2. Require refilling of EVA jetpacks from capsule monopropellant stores.
   
3. When via Alt+F5 or at the Kerbal Space Center, make it so that pressing Enter/Return is the same as pressing OK. This has been a user interface standard in computing for decades now.
   
4. Has anyone stopped to realize how threateningly close Alt+F5 is to Alt+F4?
   
5. As an alternative to the obscure Alt+L command, allow stage lock by clicking on the little green light next to the stage counter.
   
6. When Caps-Lock is set as the binding for the precise-control toggle, it should be pegged to the Caps-Lock keyboard state. This way, the keyboard’s light is a nice little indicator. Currently, the two get out of sync when typing a save name, etc.
   
7. When planting flag, make it go in the direction the Kerbal is facing. This makes it more predictable, facilitating picturesque selfies.
   
8. The dialogue when doing an EVA report while on Gilly’s surface contains a misspelling of “an†as “and.â€Â
   
9. The Clamp-O-Tron Jr. description should say that it allows transfer of Kerbals.
   
10. The basic struts should be manufactured by StrutCo.
    
11. The Mk1 Lander Can should be manufactured by Sean’s Cannery.
    

Alright, that's it for now. What do you guys think? Do you agree with any of my suggestions?

[BudgetHedgehog]

Agree with everything except Gameplay 8 and 10, Antennas 2-3 and Balancing 4. Rather than Small Tweaks 9, I'd rather that it disallowed crew transfer than changing the description to say it allows it, but that's just me.

Personally, I've downloaded mods to fix some of these suggestions - AntennaRange does a great job with your Antenna section, there's KSPStockTweaks for map navball, RPM for Gameplay 3 and Diazos LandingHeight for Gameplay 4. The girders are supposed to be heavy considering their insane impact tolerance and oh how I wish Cosmetic 3 was a thing.. make the fairing dependent on the thing placed beneath it.. or include simple interstages that work the same way.

[bv1]

Rather than Small Tweaks 9, I'd rather that it disallowed crew transfer than changing the description to say it allows it, but that's just me.

Considering how big Kerbal's heads are, you're probably right that they shouldn't be able to fit through the Clamp-o-tron Jr. However, I very much enjoy doing 1-Kerbal Apollo-type missions with a Mk1 pod and Mk1 lander.... I'd be okay if Squad disallowed Clamp-o-tron Jr. crew transfer only if they made 3-Kerbal missions more practical. Then I could still fly those fun lander missions without doing any deep-space EVA crew transfers

Personally, I've downloaded mods to fix some of these suggestions

I have too, but really, there are mods that Squad should just incorporate into the game to make it clearly better. For instance, I used to have the NavBall Enhancement mod, since that is such an obvious fix--Squad has since incorporated the changes and everyone is happy. Likewise, I think they should certainly incorporate the cosmetic enhancements of Distant Object Enhancement. In both of these instances, there is a clear improvement, with little room for complaint from any reasonable person. Although I can imagine someone arguing that Kerbal Engineer goes against the spirit of the game by providing extra information, I would counter by pointing out that the provision of extra NavBall vectors has already done just that, and nobody is complaining.

Basically, KSP needs to achieve a balance between (A) too little help, leaving players blind and helpless; and ( too much help, making the game too easy and routine. (MechJeb can lean to the ( side IMO). I think that in the case of spacecraft construction, players of the stock game are definitely on the (A) side right now, and that Kerbal Engineer provides a great balance. After all, it can tell you your vessel's delta-V and TWR, but it doesn't raise either of them without the player concocting clever rocket designs. Like I said before, K.E. could be unlocked in the tech tree, leaving players designing blindly until they get to orbit or the Mun, for instance.

In my opinion, there are three mods which should without fail be incorporated into the stock game: Kerbal Engineer, Kerbal Alarm Clock, and Distant Object Enhancement. For me, the game is clearly impoverished without them.

[tater]

For what you have as gameplay 5, I've suggested that they could keep "trial and error" while still letting the player know when a good time to go is by using a launch window planner to pitch contracts. Say 60 days before a window opens, you get a contract to explore Duna, Dres, whatever. The mission description would state when the low DV window is to launch.

[Luis]

I agree with just about all of these suggestions and I am increasingly perplexed about how long some of these basic and obvious changes have been ignored.

[ringerc]

It's a time and resources thing. Personally I'm amazed at how much they've done and continue to do.

Then again, I develop software professionally so I know how much work it takes.

[bv1]

I thought of another suggestion while at work today. In the difficulty settings, there should be a setting which greatly nerfs reaction wheels' torque and makes them dependent on angular momentum. In other words, once a certain axis gets spun up to some maximum speed, it will be unable to provide any more torque in that certain direction. This way, in higher difficulty settings, you'd have to rely much more on gimballing, control surfaces, and RCS. It would also give the option for some more realism, since real reaction wheels provide much smaller torques and do not violate the conservation of momentum.