@Skipper how did your moded career turn out btw? Did you have any luck with that batch of mods? I think I’m starting to feel the space race itch again myself. I’m looking to go completely nuts, and do the Galileo Planets Pack, with the SETI meta mods, which makes a lot of fundamental difficulty changes to the career mode to give it more of a challenge… I wonder how far did you get with your run in September?
The mods were a bit overpowering, not so much from gameplay but the fact that I dropped a ton of them because I didn’t know what half the stuff on my screen was. That being said, I’m still not that far in. I got to Mun but not much further, as I fell off the gameplay cliff known as Subnautica.
It happens a lot, I get though a lot of things I find challenging in a game, then wander off to another game, leaving further challenges unplayed.
All this being said, I’m in search of something to leave Subnautica for, and since I have upcoming travel I’ll pick back up where I left off with Scott Manley’s vids.
Subnautica is an acceptable reason to leave KSP to be sure =) I’m trying to hold off until the official release to get back into Subnautica, but it gets harder every patch =) If you wind up back on Kerbin be sure to ask any questions. Happy to answer as best I can =)
Sounds good. For what it’s worth, I’m near the end of Subnautica too, but I find the high ramp difficulty at that point a bit off-putting.
I’ll summarize it as three phases of the game:
“Play only in your safe sandbox.”
“Go explore but avoid anything that will hurt you.”
“Confront things that will repeatedly kill you so you can learn tidbits of remaining information.”
It’s that last part where the game goes off a bit. Minecraft faced some similar challenges when Endermen led to strongholds, and the portal to The End and dragon there. Initially anyway. Later it became less challenging, but I don’t remember if it was due to balancing or familiarity, maybe both. I feel the same way about the end of Subnautica currently, it’s still too early.
That’s a pretty impressive achievement already.
Well, that is, if you get to the Mun and back, alive.
Agreed! There are really just a few more things to master once you make it that far…docking, rendezvous and planetary transfers…
I’m approaching the point where my interest in the campaign starts to really lag. Going to Duna and Ike.
I’ve landed several times on Mun and Miniumus, build orbital labs everywhere and now there is 6 months+ of grinding until finally make it to Duna.
Any suggestions?
Time acceleration? :P
The thing about Duna is that it’s actually not that much of a stretch to go there after you’ve done a Mun landing. Your typical Mun landing takes about 5500 dV to get there, and about 900 to get back, so rounding up to give us a smidge of slack, it’s about 6500 dV. To get a probe onto the surface of Duna will cost you about… 4700 dV or so with parachutes. It seems intimidating because of the planning involved in picking the right window, getting an encounter node, etc. but rocket-wise, it’s easier since Duna has an atmosphere. Now, to bring a ship to Duna and BACK takes a bit more dV, like another 2400 or so. But if you don’t have the rockets to make that happen right away, then send a crash probe, and get that science! There’s a ton of it there.
Now, if you just can’t get to Duna or are waiting for the clock to spin because you have life support mods or something, there are a few other opportunities for advancement that you should consider:
- Do you have a Keosynchronous satellite array for communicating with your Kerbals while they transition to Duna? If not, I’d suggest putting one in place. It can be a challenge in 1.3.x to setup a working com relay network. Scott Manley has a great video on how to do this in one easy launch: https://youtu.be/Z3FHOQFVV0k
- Have you captured an asteroid? Mined an asteroid? put a base on an asteroid? This usually comes up right before Duna missions do.
- Like Eric said, you can simply hit fast forward, making sure to keep your Kerbals in the field either fed or frozen if you have a modded game going. If not, then fast forward is your friend! Kerbals live forever. There is no reason to worry about time in this game if you don’t have mods.
- Have you grabbed science and experience for your Kerbals from the Sun? Many people mis this step, but just leaving the SOI of Kerbin, doing a bunch of science and some EVAs, and then returning to Kerbin gains loads of XP and science points and only take a month or two to accomplish.
- Do you have an Ore lab on Minmus? Minmus is a great staging launch site because it is very cheap to get from the surface to orbit, and then very easy to get back to a Kerbin SOI for your next hop. So, make a gas station at Minmus!
- Next, this is usually the time I get the itch to build an SSTO space plane. They aren’t very practical, but if you can design one that can reach orbit, dock with a space station, and return safely it is quite an accomplishment.
- Finally if you are really just struggling to gain science, then I would recommend a science lab around Mun or Minmus. Load it with experiments from the surface (even science you have already gathered can be used again in a lab), add a couple of scientists and have them do research. The science will come flowing in. Science labs are kind of broken OP for gaining lots of science easily in this manner.
Edited because I forgot parachutes for Duna!
Anyone have any insight as to how well KSP will run on a MacBook Air (It’s brand new)?
I’ve kinda fascinated by this game but skipped the PS4 port since it seemed like not a great place to play it.
It runs unity 5x, so if you have any experience with other unity games that might help answer your question?
Last computer game I played was Age of Empires 2 so I don’t really have much for a frame of reference.
It should play without any or much issue, as long as you accept to cut down a bit on the eye candy, to not install graphical mods, and to not build big space stations with hundreds of parts.
That being said, it will run your CPU at 80°C constantly, so it will cut down the life expectancy of your computer if you play it a lot (and who doesn’t play hundreds of hours of KSP?).
Seriously, it will really burn the computer out faster!? Might skip it then.
From my understanding, any intense gaming on laptops require you to do some periodical maintenance (cleaning of the fans, renewing the thermal paste). On Macs, those tasks tend to be quite troublesome, because Apple doesn’t want you to peek inside.
All I can share is my personal experience: the laptops I use for gaming (they are not dedicated models) usually last a little over a year, extended by a year, if afore-mentionned maintenance is a success, while my first work laptop lasted for 15 years (!), and the current one doesn’t show any sign of trouble after 5. I wouldn’t play a game like KSP on it, but maybe I have just been unlucky.
Hmm…the primary reason I bought this laptop is for work. Think I’ll skip the gaming since I’d like it to last.
Thanks for the heads up. I’m much happier burning out PS4s.
I think you have just been unlucky there @Left_Empty. Merry your computer should be safe from KSP, and the seconds that running your CPU at 80C over the life of your laptop will not make a difference. To crisp a laptop CPU today you really need to be running it at 100c+ for hours at a time to see significant damage. That being said, Macbook Airs do like to run hot.
My question would be does it work well with the intel 6000 series graphics card (assuming your Macbook Air is that new). I tried running KSP on a laptop with an intel 5k series graphics chip and it was a slideshow so my guess is no. If I was a betting man, I would say your macbook is prolly ill equipped to run KSP.
As to the PS4 port, It’s definitely second fiddle to the PC version. The interface is still mouse-ish based, so as much as I’d love to talk you into playing one of my top 5 games… well…
I checked and it is the Intel 6000 graphics in my Mac. Sounds like that won’t get the job done. Ah well, maybe on the next laptop (which will hopefully be a while). Plus I really would like this thing to last a good long time.
on a side note, is there any way to set up Steam so it doesn’t open and fill my screen with an ad every time I log into my computer? I dislike that so I ended up uninstalling Steam so I didn’t have to look at that all the time.
Yes there is a setting, I think in the interface tab.