Kerbal Space Program

[Hellraiser]

In other news. 1.0.5. will be done soon, 1.1 will be done a bit later. One of the reasons for the delay is this:

Thanks Obama!

Although granted only part of the team is going.

Did any other game developers ever get invited to the white house?

 

[Drax]

How is 18:30 night?
Do you people live in the pole or something?

 

[Hellraiser]

How is 18:30 night?
Do you people live in the pole or something?

Currently, since we have not yet switched to Daylight Savings Time, at 6 p.m. it is in fact night in my coastal corner of Potatoland. Or at least twilight.

Also according to this site the sun sets at 6:29 p.m. in Washington D.C. today.

 

[Berekän]

There's also got to be time to eat some lobster snacks and get drunk with the president before watching the stars, of course.

 

[Hellraiser]

Turns out 1.05 is going fixing one thing which massively reeked of being a place holder. Buoyancy physics. It will totally be possible to design a lander that will sink after splashdown*. Also boats, seaplanes and stuff. Hopefully this will make sea-based surface bases and landings less prone to death by liquid physics. Also sea-based mining rigs.

Also the new loading bay ramp will have a slider for determining how open it is to be, which can also be tweaked in flight. So no worries about the ramp making your parked spaceplane's rear jump.

They will also add this setting to service bays.

*note that liquid rocket fuel is in fact less dense than water.

 

[Drax]

Actual water!!!???

 

[Caim]

Oh sweet, now we'll be able to build actual floating facilities on alien planets.

 

[Hellraiser]

Watched bits from the 1.0.5 streams. Only thing of note I saw was the new water and tiny (0.65m?) jet parts.

Guy took the new stock sea plane for a spin. It uses the tiny jet fuel tanks for floatation. It is also powered by a single tiny jet engine.

He flew it to the ocean and glided down to a typical horizontal landing. It was a bit of a hard stop when he hit water, but the plane did not flip or explode into lots of tiny pieces.

He tried taking off and it actually looked as it should. That is it took a while before all of the plane finally rose out of the water, but it all looked fairly smooth and definitely not as dangerous as in the current version.

Sea planes have a bright future ahead of them on Laythe it seems. I crashed a ton of planes on those damn dunes and hills there, water landings seem like the sane thing to do there.

New tiny jet parts also give you more ways to build single kerbal jet planes or maybe even SSTO (on Laythe it should be easy). Not to mention SCIENCE drones. I just hope stock electric propellers in tiny size will also become available eventually.

 

[Drax]

Good summary of the update:

 

[dbx]

Downloading 1.05 right now...

 

[Joined on the 4th of July]

Downloading 1.05 right now...

Downloading 1.05 next week.

Spoiler

...because I bought it from GOG

 

[Hoaxmetal]

GoGnards never learn, do they? Embrace Gaben and his Hour Zero patches.

 

[Hellraiser]

Or you could have just gotten it off the KSP store and never migrated to steam

Also:

* Save and load kerbal trait in save games, trait is generated from name hash only if not specified in the save

Fucking finally! It is now totally possible to recruit codexers with their chosen class into your space program. Without resorting to adding junk text characters to get the desired class.

* Jets now use a fuel mode that draws an equal percentage from all reachable parts (no-crossfeed parts will block crossfeed).

Another welcomed change.

* Docking ports now have gendered as an option, and support limited docking angles.
* Docking ports crossfeed state is now persistent and can be toggled in the editor and by action group.
* Docking ports can have their 'decouple' mode set to stageable.

I am not sure who actually wanted gendered docking ports. If limited docking angles means that you can now perfectly align modules without as much derping, that could be good.

 

[Hellraiser]

Even in space you will be searching for signal strength

Also new orbital vector rendering, now you can finally easily see the direction of the orbit:

 

[Drax]

Aww, another pair of pants ruined.
Thank you, asshole.

 

[Ulminati]

So they're finally rolling remotetech into vanilla? Nice. That's one less mandatory mod. I approve.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

Remotetech lite from the looks of it. Which is fine by me, as the real thing is sometimes too hardcore for my tastes.

 

[Data4]

I really hope the Unity 5 upgrade will address the performance issues. All these features are nice and all, but they're bogging down performance horribly. Especially heat modelling.

 

[Ulminati]

The Linux version is fine

 

[Data4]

The Linux version is fine

I'm running it on Linux. Granted, I use a lot of mods, but it's a cumulative effect. A lot of mods pre-1.0* ran better than it does now.

 

[Hellraiser]

Inflatable heatshields, coming to stock in 1.1:

This one has a packed-up diameter of 2.5 meter, the cage structure is big enough to fit a small rover or something. Deployed it has a 10 meter diameter.

Should solve the problem of how do I aerocapture around Laythe/Jool when going from Kerbin after re-entry heat got added. If you can make a ship that uses it aerodynamically stable

 

[Hellraiser]

1.1 in QA, fairings get a new addition, they now also act as structural reinforcement:

While working on the fairings, Felipe also managed to code in a much requested feature: when the fairings are closed they now create an invisible physical joint (like a strut) that secures the payload inside to prevent the payload wobbling. Of course, once you deploy the fairing this structural support also vanishes and we’re already looking forward to all the rockets that fail as a result of this oversight. In case of interstage fairings, the joint is created against the interstage ‘cap’ part. That means fairings also get a new use as a stack-reinforcement strut of sorts. Which will eventually break off. And adds weight, and cost. But it does make stacks really solid.

Small landing gear gets redone (we still need one size smaller damn it!), new large landing gear added, the not-so-new-anymore larger landing gears got rescaled to reflect this and provide more middle ground for medium-sized planes.

In other news, one of the plans for 1.2 and beyond is overhauling the old rocket parts. Although personally, I think its mostly the 3-man pod and a couple of other parts that really need new models. Most of the stuff is solid. I would rather see them do some new planetary assets and effects. Or a few more surface station parts.

 

[Drax]

Nice.

 

[Hellraiser]

News is slow, unsurprisingly an engine switch is taking a long time to happen.

So here's another WIP mod by RoverDude. USI Submarine Pack:

FYI it is totally possible to dock underwater:

 

[Drax]

RD's mods is best mods