Giskard

Well, I guess we should go and ask Robert Goddard about the point in designing a liquid fueled rocket in the first place. A possible commercial use obviously was not a feasible reason, since this would have involved too much science fiction... Whatever, I also have the feeling that you neglect the impact of space station technology on a national economy. Billions of $money spend on a high tech industry, engineers, technicians, cleaning stuff and so on and the synergy effects of all that high tech stuff in a economy that highly depends on technological personnel and know how. Of course we could have spent the money on high tech weaponry as well, but I prefer a space station. However, I think this is becoming off topic.

As I said, it starts to justify itself as soon as we start to create a reusable infrastructure in space. For example imagine satellites that do not have to be dumped in a graveyard orbit when you can service them in space, refuel them in space and all you have to launch are spare parts and fuel instead of a completely new satellite. Imagine moon shuttles and landers that stay in space instead of having to throw them away and lauch a new one every time. Imagine a fuel infrastructure that harvests fuel on the moon. Imagine a large mars transporter that is flying back and forth instead of a single use mission. This sounds like future? Yeah, but this is most of what I do in KSP. Apart from that economic is not only about money its also about science. On a space station you can do long term experiments that you can not do on a orbiter that can only stay in space for a short time. You can also do experiments that you can not do in small orbiters, because you just do not have enough space in them. And you also learn things on space stations that will be helpful for the design of long term missions deeper into the solar system.

In this game? Probably not. I have to admit that I often also just pay for another launch instead of tediously mining fuel from somewhere else. But in the real world? Yeah, sure there are reasons. And in KSP: If it is not for economic reasons, then it is because it just feels right to me to do it that way. In KSP you are defining your own goals and one of my goals is to do something that look would resonable in the real world.

That is true. But what I was trying to say was that sometimes these extreme use cases can reveal bugs that are also affecting the normal gameplay. There is no clear border between intendend and not intended use of a software. Sometimes it might help to push it to the limit to make it all more stable under more normal circumstances as well.

There are many reasons for me to build space stations. -They can give you science from the lab. -You can use them to fulfill "transmit science from space around..." missions. Ok, this can also be done with simple orbiters, but: -I want it realistic and economic. Sooner or later I start to launch reusable "space only" vessels that stay in space instead of lauching the 2983776724st Minmus shuttle/lander combo or interplanetary ship. For that I need a central hub which everything is parked at, can be refueled and where the crews can be transfered. This is also the place where I dock my modular space ship sections to adapt my ships to different mission profiles.

Well, in the company that I am working for, this is something that you have to expect from our customers: They do the most stupid things with our soft- and hardware that no one was ever thinking of. I could tell them they are using it wrong, but often it actually turns out that this helps to fix strange rare and unreproduceable bugs that other customers experience as well. As long as they can tell us what they actually did, of course. But I guess this is something that we can expect from Danny2426... And after all: I cant tell a paying customer that the solution to his problem to stop doing what he does without presenting him an alternative.

It still crashes quite a lot here. I am using the Linux version on Ubuntu 14.04 with 8GB RAM and with 68 mods. With 1.1.2 I had a lot of crashes in the VAB and also a couple during staging in flight and these seem to be fixed. With 1.1.3 it pretty much only crashes when I change scenes, going back to the Space center, switching to crafts in the Tracking station, stuff like that... This happens like maybe every 5 to 10 scene changes I would guess.