I haven’t played in ages, but I thought you can now transfer science like you can fuel? I.e. right click one command pod then alt+right click another and use the widgets?
If that doesn’t work, just do it manually with an EVA like Klaatu said.
Eric, I’m glad you posted your YouTube link. I dipped into each of the four videos and enjoyed what I saw.
I was going to wait til 1.1 to play again, but on a whim I started a 1.05 game, and I’m having fun with it. I’m using the Engineering Tech Tree, a pinwheel-shaped mod that mixes things up in a refreshing way. Also using New Horizons, so my solar system is completely different. Plus the AntennaRange mod, to enforce antenna range limits. So far I’ve got satellites around Kerbin and other bodies in the, er, Sonnah system. Only just now researched manned space flight, as this tech tree emphasizes unmanned first. I’m playing on Hard mode with quicksaves/reverts enabled, but the cash crunch has been too much of a grind, and I’ll probably cheat and award myself some funds. I don’t want to grind part tests dozens of times just to purchase a KSC upgrade. But I do like some budgetary pressure.
Right now I’ve been trying to pull off a rescue mission (of a Kerbal stranded around Kerbin) without patched conics, as I can’t afford that upgrade yet. I got within about 5 km with an unmanned rescue vessel but ran out of fuel before I could get closer. Without patched conics, I can’t target the stranded Kerbal unless I get quite close (<2 km?), so I have to guess which way to fire my engines to match orbits, and I often guess wrong. Still, it’s a fun exercise, and I’m hopeful I’ll pull it off.
Thanks! :) I’ve been putting up new ones every 2-3 days or so if you care to subscribe.
And yeah, I’m kind of an old KSP grognard at this point and I can’t imagine trying to rendezvous without the conics. You’re a crazy person haha :P Obviously it’s doable but all that fiddling around would make me crazy.
Thanks for the suggestions guys. It doesn’t appear that you can use the alt mod to transfer reports like you can fuel. (Also is there a way to transfer a specific amount of fuel it just seems to flow until you hit stop.)
The EVA is actually a perfectly reasonable way to move experiments. Unfortunately, the resupply ship chief design engineer ignored the warning that the Mk1 crew cabin hatch was blocked (by a docking port). Luckily, I remembered that before I spent too much time with Natalya Kerbin pounding on the windows telling Valentina to open the freaking hatch. The engineers excuse was it was almost a 1 ton less weight to use the crew cabin.
Well, I needed to send another supply ship with some 2-star scientist and new seismic acceleratomer. This ship will allow EVA access to the crew compartment, so back to the drawing boards.
Bah! I had this whole cool plan to build an orbiting science lab around Kerbin in my career game and then remembered I don’t have the damn parts yet! Argh! My imagination often gets ahead of my research in KSP :)
Like anything, vanilla KSP functionality is agonising to work with, but there are all sorts of fuel balance and transfer ui mods to help. (Also, transferring from large to small container and vice versa completely changes the fuel transfer speed. Argh.)
Well, it was all worth it. My supply ship finally returned home with a boat load of experiments from three different landing sites on the moon, pick up just over 1,000 science woot, I’m mostly at the 160 level. I also got slightly better at landings (only 3 tries to land and 2 to dock with a space station) and definitely got better at docking. Docking is still a challenge and pretty frustrating but then by all accounts it is in real life also. My hats off to anybody who plays career mode with no save games and reloads.
A comment on the Mobile Lab/space station. I really love the new mechanism for it. Like anything you can exploit it, but, in general, it encourages players to do somewhat realistic things like I did using landers and supply ships. The rewards is a lot of science and feels a lot less gamey than running around KSC with rover and such. My Kerbin stage has one 2 star scientist about 125 data in it, mostly stuff like EVA reports that have near zero value. It generates about .5 science per day. The one around Mun has two 2 star scientist and full 500 data, a mix of useful stuff (like the 2nd material science report from near Mun) and junk. It generates 6 science a day. So during the 100 days, it takes to get to Duna it will generate 600 science.
Also early in the thread, there was a debate about MechJeb. They made some changes that should make the purist happy. The auto landing and orbit functionality now is not unlocked until the 300 tech level. So everybody gets the joy of figuring out how to perform those tasks.
I find it to be invaluable in making a crazy hard game, merely hard.
I find KSP so intriguing due to this.
Like many other games, KSP allows players to unlock quality of life components as they progress. Somewhat unique to KSP though is that those QoL aspects are often so fundamental to the learning experience (such as patched conics) and have such an enormous impact on game play that newer players (and as Eric suggested, even some more experienced players) are almost completely lost without them.
Take for instance, the case of performing a rendezvous: a new player has almost no idea how to do it, so they don’t even try; Or they try and fail miserably at it, not really getting any closer to success because the path to success for orbital rendezvous is so counter-intuitive that repeated failures don’t really help. Then the player unlocks patched conics, plays around with it, understands how it works, and suddenly they’re able to (if forced to really think about it) perform those previously impossible maneuvers even without patched conics.
It’s a case where trying to mimic reality via an upgrade path is almost exactly the opposite of what new players actually need.
With regards to MechJeb (and Kerbal Engineer which is kinda similar) I never really regarded that stuff as cheating. Yeah, I agree that new players should learn how to do basic maneuvers on their own before letting the autopilot always do it for them, but they sorta have to know what they’re doing to use the autopilot effectively too. And they use autopilots in real life, damn it! :) Also: mods like these two give you things like DeltaV and thrust to weight ratio and other numbers that are super useful to have. I don’t feel like that’s cheating at all, and in fact should be in the base game by now.
Agreed, Eric. Kerbal Engineer is a perfect example of what should already be in the game.
Somebody, I think it was Pod, earlier suggested that new players opt for science mode. I think that is probably good advice since all the building started fully upgraded and you don’t have to worry about accidently taking contract which are crazy hard. "Collect temperature sample below 8,000 meter on Duna, not in my life time I’m I going to be able to build a plane I can fly in Duna.
On the other hand, I have a grand newphew and some of my friends have really smart kids who love Minecraft. They are totally use to watching youtube video to get instructions. So give them Scott Manley video on career mode and I totally can see this kids graduating from Minecraft to KSP. Personally, I love the purpose and structure career mode give, but for learning the game it is hard.
Speaking of video, I did watch a bit of yours Eric. I probably won’t watch them cause they are rather long. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but what I like most is I felt a lot less dumb. After watching Scott Manley videos where he plays the game at 10x time acceleration, while explaining orbital mechanics, NSA hacking techniques, and cracking jokes, I’ve developed a real inferiority complex. Its nice to see even experience players mess up contracts and crash.
I just started doing videos again after not doing much for a couple years. Like, two weeks ago. So I’m still trying to get a feel for what people want to watch. I’m hoping to throw some shorter stuff in sometimes too, just still getting everything figured out and it’s easier to just upload raw Twitch streams for right now until I get the fancier editing side figured out :)
And yeah, everyone screws up. Scott Manley included :) Honestly that’s still some part of the fun of KSP for me. Obviously it’s just annoying when I forget to put something in the correct stage and it ruins a whole launch or something, but the unexpected explodey hilariousness you get out of the game sometimes keeps it from being too serious all the time :)
I can get behind this as well. KER or Mechjeb I think are pretty much required when you start talking about going anywhere other than Mun and Minmus. I mean, you can certainly get to Duna without them, but that is a lot of tedium that real spacemen don’t have to deal with… so why should we? =)
I am currently running whole hog on the mods, and getting more excited about 64 bit, now that it is in QA testing! While I am having fun with the career, I’m still not certain if adding life support, and more parts and more contracts and more skill tree are such a good thing. I do like having some more space station parts however. Here is my current mod list…
Other mods that don’t change much but are useful/fun:
Science Alert! It only takes about 3-4 science trips before you really want a mod like this…
Chatterer - Cool little mod that adds radio coms to your space frogs!
Scatterer/Environmental Visual Enhancements/Planetshine - Makes Kerbin look much nicer.
RasterPropMonitor - This awesome mod adds working monitors inside of all of your IVA’s. You can actually run a whole mission from inside the cockpit using this mod.
Docking Port Alignment Indicator - I can’t dock without this. I stink at it.
Final Frontier - Give your Kerbals medals for completing missions.
Alternate Resource Panel - A nicer UI for the fuel/battery/oxygen gauges.
KIS/KAS - Inventory and attachment systems. Many people use these to add things to do for your Kerbals in space. I haven’t messed with them much.
Transfer Windows Planner/ Kerbal Alarm Clock - If you want to run any more than one mission at a time, you should get both of these add ons. TWP helps locate the best time to transfer between your current location and a new planet, and then it will setup an alarm when that time comes. I’ve run upwards of 9 missions at once using these two apps. I had 4 flying to Duna, 1 to Dres, 1 to Jool, and a flyby to Mojo all while doing a couple local missions with space stations and moons…
The question that always comes up after posting a long list of mods is “how is that even possible in 4G of RAM? My game crashes!” And the answer is to put either -force-opengl or -force-d3d11 in your command line when launching KSP. Either of these commands will give you a noticeable amount of RAM back over the standard Unity DX version. I personally have better luck with d3d11, but YMMV.
I am never going to escape this game… I’m really looking forward to the next version, which is adding more parts, Antennae ranges and of course RAM in abundance. If you haven’t read about the Antennae ranges BTW, and are planning on continuing a current career, you should look into it. It could render some of your probes DOA…
Thanks for that list, Fozzie—I didn’t know about a lot of those, and all of them are the sort of enhancement I like in my games.
Ah so I am not the only person has trouble aligning the docking ports. I think I ditched a perfectly good spacecraft because I didn’t realize that even if your docking ports are touching if the ports don’t closely align the magnetic forces don’t work. I’ll try both NavHud and Docking Alignment.
In other news, I tried a couple of hard campaigns. It is a very different experience, I found that I paid a lot more attention to making sure my rockets were going to be stable, I used probes, and I even test ships. I almost lost a couple of Kerbals but managed to get to orbit a few times without killing anybody.
But it is another 500K more to upgrade the VAB, launchpad and tracking station and its going to be too much of challenge to trying a do missions without maneuver nodes. However, maybe if I get better I’ll try it in the future.
I’ve been watching the Giant Bomb videos for Kerbal and the game looks like heaps of fun, especially as a coop. I wish there was an iPad or PS4 version since I don’t have a gaming PC, but watching the trials and tribulations of the Giant Bomb space program is pretty fun (I’m wondering when they have to start conscripting Kerbals to “volunteer” for the space flights).
A console version is in the works :)
Huzzah!
What are the specs on the PC you do have? You don’t need anywhere near a cutting edge machine to play smoothly.