Beta

[Kessel_Run]

The new Beta - lots more to do but no focus.....

Most people don't have experience in astrogation and have enough problems controlling their rockets when doing simple manoeuvres. Many people resort to using 3rd party programs like Mechjeb to facilitate things and you want to make it harder by removing the Naviball tool and making players earn it piece by piece. Do you really expect new player to be able to rendavou with an astronaut stranded in orbit or plot a transfer orbit to the Mun all in their heads without instruments or conic projections.

Are you trying to drive people away from the game?

Rather than a game or a story you give random nonsensical missions, testing random pieces of equipment at random altitudes and speeds. Hundreds of hours of pointless cr*p before one gets a chance to do anything interesting.

Also enough of the sarcastic humour, an actual explanation of what various bits of equipment do would be awesome

How about a STORY or some TUTORIAL Missions to explain how things work.

Start with explaining the benefits of launching rockets from the equator in an eastwards direction in order to gain maximum benefits from MUNs rotation.

Have players launch their first sputnik style satellite and place a few low orbit communication satellites.

Introduce other Kerbal factions, cities, shipyards etc. Give a reason for launching spy satellites.

Explain the intricacies of low altitude inclined and polar orbits.

Mission: launch a satellite to map Kerbin and have it return the exposed film to the surface.

New equipment – high resolution cameras

Later on you can radio data back images to ground stations which would necessitate building additional ground stations to enable continuous communication.

Later you could have real time observation or introduce new technologies such as Synthetic aperture radar for your spy satellites. This could help the player find anomalies such as crashed flying saucers, pyramids, temples, faces etc

It would be nice if you could add something to show your orbital footprint with relation to the ground. That way you can examine the relationship between altitude and orbit period.

With this you could then introduce a few missions to place satellites into Molniya, tundra and geosynchronous orbits and the practicalities of each and why different orbit profiles are used for different applications.

Introduce players to the naviball and how to change inclination, Apogee and Perigee using Prograde, Retrograde, Normal and anti-normal markers.

Missions placing communication satellites, navigation satellites and weather satellites.

Examining the effects of space travel on Kerbles or Kogs (Kogs are 4 legged pets similar to Terran Dogs)

Science missions to test the effect of prolonged exposure to space.

Perhaps a mission to launch a skylab style vessel.

Further tutorials on how to match orbits, and use the Target prograde, target retrograde markers to close range with the target and how to dock in space.

Introduce some missions to explain orbital mechanics, Hohmann transfers or Bi-elliptical transfers.

With this we are ready to begin a space race to the moon.

We can start with simple missions sending one way probes to orbit and land on the Mun and lead up to sending a Kerbal to the moon and returning them to Kerbin safely.

Tutorials on landing on airless worlds, how to nullify your lateral velocity and land safely.

For interplanetary missions we will have to introduce the concept of gravitational spheres of influence and segmented conics and how hyperbolic transfers are required are required to escape the sphere of influence and transition to solar based hohmann transfer orbit between different orbital bodies. Eg Kerbin to Dunas

Tutorials on how to set up escape trajectories and velocities and why it’s most efficient to leave on a vector along a planets prograde or retrograde. Many people have knowledge of hohmann transfer mechanics but many tutorials fail to take into account deceleration as an object leaves a gravitational body and tend to over simplify things by ignoring this.

At this point the sky is the limit, players can now send probes, flybys, orbiters, landers and rovers to other bodies in the solar system. Some of these bodies have atmospheres so you may want to introduce concepts such as aerobraking to make landings more efficient. Frankly the hardest thing I have encountered in Kerbal in trying to land at a given location on a body with an atmosphere as drag, angle of attack, velocity are so interrelated.

Other missions

Gravitational slingshot.

Intercept a comet

Explore the ort cloud

Intercept and destroy/divert a dino killer asteroid heading towards Kerbin.

Build a giant interstellar antenna.

Solve the mystery of the monoliths.

In earlier versions of the game you had hidden monoliths, some very hidden underground or floating in the air. Hopefully you have resolved that problem and there is a means in game of finding them say via a neutrino gravimeter etc, rather than just looking up their coordinates on youtube.

And as a final climax to the game assembling in orbit an giant interstellar vessel to go to the star system which the flying sausers are thought to have originated from. A slow multigenerational ship without warp travel.

[Starwhip]

Well, a few things.

A: The game is indeed BETA. Which means it's in development. Now that scope completion has been reached (I think), the devs can focus on tuning the systems, hopefully sweeping aside the minor annoyances of the game while keeping it's feel and challenging aspects.

B: The game is sandbox. Even "career mode" is sandbox. Not everyone builds the same way, flies the same way, understands the game the same way. It's up to you to fulfill the circumstances that might be given to you.

C: Addressing the topic of "Spy Satellites": You can launch them if you wish, to spy on those guys over at the KSC2, but other than that there is not much purpose to them yet. We'll see what the devs have in mind, or modders, but I doubt that the stock game would have AI of any kind to spy on in the first place.

D: That's quite a "Welcome Aboard" post!

[Vanamonde]

Yes, there are many unfinished and unpolished aspects to this unfinished, unpolished, work-in-progress game.

[Pecan]

Sandbox, SCANSat, tutorial. See link in signature.

Beginners should tackle all the extra complications (and insane tech-tree) of career-mode once they're comfortable with how the game works.