Your Suggestion for Smallest Change Causing Greatest Improvement

[bv1]

We all have multiple ideas and suggestions on how to make Kerbal Space Program better. However, there are some changes that would be hardly noticeable, while there are others which could vastly change the feel of the game and which have the potential to greatly improve it. In addition, some suggestions are small and should be easy to implement, while others could require wholesale rewriting of the whole game. I'd like to see what suggestions people have come up with that are on the both extremes: those that people think would bring about the most improvement, but which would not take much time and effort to implement.

So, I'd like people to answer the following question.

"If you could make one small change to KSP in order to cause the greatest improvement to the game, what would it be and why?"

[Laie]

Point-to-point ladders. You know, much like struts.

Putting the ladders on my Eve lander, getting every twist and turn just right, finding points where the ends of ladders would meet in mid-air, test-walk with kerbal, back to VAB -- that took a full two hours. Ladders are way more complicated than they have any right to.

[zxczxczbfg]

Make part multi-connections functional (like part welding mods). This would allow for ring-shaped stations and such, among many, many others.

[mattinoz]

Tethered Kerbals.

Also not sure how viewing a planet outside the craft gives more "Knowledge" than viewing inside the craft by that is the Kerbal way. So tethering to the craft would really be useful to help avoid unkerbaled craft floating around in space.

Although with upgrades to struts and fuel lines discussed in the latest dev note maybe this and ladders have been made a lot easier.

[Laie]

Make part multi-connections functional (like part welding mods). This would allow for ring-shaped stations and such, among many, many others.

Oh yes. I'd need half as many struts if wings would connect in two spots rather than one. Or most radially-attached things, really. Won't help you if there's a decoupler between them, though.

[Pthigrivi]

Delta-v stats.

[pellinor]

Generally opening/documenting interfaces, so that the content can be done by the community. New Planets for example.

Integrating stuff that already exists as a well-tested mod.

[NathanKell]

1. Unlock the joint code. KJR can no longer do the strengthening it once could due to how locked and protected the joint code currently is. If you want non-wobbling parts, ask Squad to un-hardcode the joint code.

2. Various one-line bugfixes that have been found and passed on to Squad over the last two years but not implemented. Bugged intakes, the "part blows up in the editor" bug, the "atmosphere cutoff" bug, the ModuleRCS PROPELLANT bug

[tater]

Aside from bug fixes, I think the obvious choice is really optimizing KSP, particularly memory utilization. Right now it touches just 3 GB memory use, and crashes. Not having to worry about that would allow more mods

In terms of features it's more tricky because what I might think of as a "small" change could very well be difficult to code (constant acceleration trajectories is an obvious one).

[zekes]

Point-to-point ladders. You know, much like struts.

Putting the ladders on my Eve lander, getting every twist and turn just right, finding points where the ends of ladders would meet in mid-air, test-walk with kerbal, back to VAB -- that took a full two hours. Ladders are way more complicated than they have any right to.

This And more buildings on Kerbin.

[David H]

Automated notepad.

When you enter a biome and perform a science experiment as such as log atmospheric pressure. It will take down the information on the notepad. And tell you the limits of the biome such as low medium high pressure sub orbital low medium high orbit. Ie low 0-?? Med ??-?? High ??-70,000

Later you can when your ready for next experiment or going back for more.

You know exactly how high to go. Instead of spamming and resetting until you find it.

As far as goo temp science Jr and others. It could give factual info.

Would actually teach people about space and the planets in our solar system.

For the easter eggs.

Could have their own biome. It could automatically collected.

It could have a bit of history like Apollo landing site.

[Stratzenblitz75]

Point-to-point ladders. You know, much like struts.

Putting the ladders on my Eve lander, getting every twist and turn just right, finding points where the ends of ladders would meet in mid-air, test-walk with kerbal, back to VAB -- that took a full two hours. Ladders are way more complicated than they have any right to.

^This

Ladders are a pain in the *** to set up currently. That's why I just use a KAS winch to lower my Kerbals from my Eve lander to the surface:D. Uses less parts too!

[Red Iron Crown]

Cool thread idea.

I like the procedural ladder idea, hopefully the changes to how struts and fuel lines are handled internally helps make that possible.

My glib answer would be not to release the Win64 version next time if stability doesn't improve.

My more serious answer would be to allow the same camera modes in map view as in the regular view. And have the altimeter and staging list toggle with the navball there.

[bv1]

I didn't include my one suggestion when I started the thread, since I want the thread to belong to the community. Now that it got going, though, here's mine:

Change: Make some career contracts require landing multiple kerbals at once.

Why: Right now, there is no incentive in career mode to send more than 1 kerbal when completing exploration contracts. This means that there is no incentive to use the Mk1-2 pod or Mk2 lander; these heavy parts necessitate larger, more complex, and more expensive rockets. Requiring landing multiple kerbals at once would nudge the player into designing and flying with the larger parts.

[tater]

Instead of having contract artificially require X kerbals (or any other arbitrary requirement), it would be better if there was some reason for them. The best mechanism, IMO, would be AI kerbals. If they could do science tasks on the surface, and instead of the current, land, plant flag, EVA report, surface sample, DONE---in only slightly more time than it took me to type that---then the collection science might take a while. You EVA, and can control a guy, meanwhile the other climbs down and starts setting up experiments, takes samples, etc. Doesn't have to be fancy, it can be fairly scripted. If there are certain experiments on the side of the lander, the AI goes to them, fiddles, some might be removed, and placed on the ground, etc. New experiments could be added just for something to do for the AI. Set it up such that 2 do work faster, and collect more science. Lower the "instant" science, and extend it over time. If you have a base, and it is manned, they do experiments X hours a day as EVA. It would add "life" things, and might make bases, stations, etc more useful (not just science per day generated, but science per day iff there are X kerbals present, then more science per Y additional guys.

[prophet_01]

I would like maps in the science archives with biomes on them. If you haven't visited it yet the area could be displayed in grey, but once you were there it show it's name. If you click on it you would see the experiments you've done there.

the current archive system isn't that user friendly and it's also flooded with doubled reports... I am currently using the ksp wikis biome map and mark visited biomes with an x using paint :/

Edited November 6, 2014 by prophet_01

[Joonatan1998]

Tiny constant cost for running the space center.

Just to make time actually matter and give a use for the less fuel efficient but faster transfer orbits.

This should depend on difficulty. (Easy, no cost Medium,tiny cost Hard, medium cost.)

[p1t1o]

A reason to fully explore the system.

Currently, you can max out research and reputation not long after you get past minmus.

I know I can motor around the system to my hearts content, I can do whatever I want in sandboxbut in career mode I'd like a game-world reason to, for example, put a station round Dres.

Not like a money or research reward - i may not need either - but...something.

Maybe contract related like contracts that unlock other contracts, or contracts with a mandatory failure cost (as in, if you do not even accept the contract, there will be a penalty). Or something more imaginative.

Get what I mean?

[ratchet freak]

recompile the Unity engine so it never truncates pointers by assigning to long -> will probably fix the win64 stability issues

[OhioBob]

I want an easier way to compute the delta-v of my rockets and spaceships. Right now I have to manually add up the masses of all the individual parts and manually calculate the delta-v. I've created a spreadsheet to assist me in this, but it's still way more work than it needs to be. There should be some way for the game to automatically compute delta-v. I know this might be difficult to do because of the many different staging schemes that are possible. At a minimum, I'd like to have the VAB display the total mass of the vehicle, perhaps broken down between dry mass, propellant mass, and RCS fuel mass. If I need to know the mass of an individual assemblage, such as the first stage, I could just click and detach that assemblage and the mass would update to show the mass of what remains. In this way we could effectively disassemble our vehicles as they would do in flight and easily determine the mass of each stage. This would make manual computation of delta-v much easier.

[Fail-Man 3D]

As a temporary (until the Unity3D people get around to fixing it) workaround, apply the well-known binary patch to KSP.x86_64 as part of the automated build process.

Given the following:

1. An automated build system running on a *n?xy host (Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, Windows with Cygwin or SFU/Interix, etc.)
   
2. bash
   
3. xxd
   
4. a lack of future changes that cause the magic byte sequence to appear more than once in the compiled binary
   
5. (maybe) Perl
   

it should be fairly easy to patch automatically.

Once the coffee kicks in, I'll see what sort of shambling horror I can improvise.

[Red Iron Crown]

I want an easier way to compute the delta-v of my rockets and spaceships. Right now I have to manually add up the masses of all the individual parts and manually calculate the delta-v. I've created a spreadsheet to assist me in this, but it's still way more work than it needs to be. There should be some way for the game to automatically compute delta-v. I know this might be difficult to do because of the many different staging schemes that are possible. At a minimum, I'd like to have the VAB display the total mass of the vehicle, perhaps broken down between dry mass, propellant mass, and RCS fuel mass. If I need to know the mass of an individual assemblage, such as the first stage, I could just click and detach that assemblage and the mass would update to show the mass of what remains. In this way we could effectively disassemble our vehicles as they would do in flight and easily determine the mass of each stage. This would make manual computation of delta-v much easier.

Those are good points, and it would be nice if it accurately reported the lack of mass from physically insignificant parts, too.

Have you looked into mods that add a delta-V calculator? I calculated it the same way you do for a long time, once I started using the information mods I never looked back. (Good on you for learning to do it manually though. )

[J.Random]

Free camera.

(Inside current position/velocity frame, of course)

Edited November 6, 2014 by J.Random

[OhioBob]

Have you looked into mods that add a delta-V calculator?

I'm pretty new to KSP so I don't know much about mods yet. Calculating the delta-V it the easy part, the tedious part is adding up the mass of all the parts.

[Kegereneku]

- showing what biome you are flying over without doing a research

or

- deltaV indicator tools in the VAB (as an upgrade if you want, everybody need one if they want to do real design)