SecondGuessing

I shoved him in some hitchhiker capsule on a space-station just to get him out of the way.

I still don't understand why everyone thinks this is a positive...

What? Almost all of my space-planes have the CoL on the back edge of sphere of CoM. That's not very nose heavy. Plus, I don't think I've ever seen a good, efficient space-plane that doesn't leave the runway before the end.

Set your sites on Duna (Minmus is fun, but it's easier to land on than the Mun).

Not having women is counted as a benefit? And none of the science the Kerbals do is of any value.

If the heating is going to be so little that you don't even need a heat shield unless you're doing ridiculous 10,000m/s re-entries then what's the point?

Which, like I said in my first post, simply means it's adding a tedium aspect. If all you have to do in order to survive the re-entry is equip and heat shield, drop your periapsis to 40k and then angle your ship the right way then what have you really added to the game? Because that's all you have to do for deadly re-entry. And if using the same re-entry profile every time saves your ship (and it would have to, given the current atmosphere modelling of KSP) then there's still no added challenge. Re-entry might be challenging and interesting if Kerbin had weather systems that you would have to navigate, but given a static atmosphere I fail to see how it does anything other than add another thing to get bored of (in the same way launches become boring after your 100th). I understand the difference, but I fail to understand why one is railed at by people and the other is praised, despite the fact both are equally as realistic.

SSTOs are pretty easy, though.

Realism is never a good reason to add a gameplay mechanic. Which, I think it's safe to say, nobody does. Right, so what you're saying is that it adds no difficulty, and so is pointless. And there's absolutely no point to implement it, as there's already a mod that does it nicely. I don't see why re-entry heat is any different to mechjeb: mechjeb arguably makes the game more realistic, like re-entry heating, and certainly many more people enjoy mechjeb than re-entry heating, and yet Squad have outright said they won't be adding mechjeb-esque features to the game. Why add deadly re-entry-esque features?

What on Earth is a 'true' gamer?

I don't see the point of re-entry heating; if all it will require to survive re-entry is equipping an inflatable shield and spending a few orbits decreasing your speed more slowly then literally all re-entry heating will do is make the game more tedious and time-consuming. If it's not toggleable, or a mod doesn't remove it, then tbh I'll probably just end all my missions once I have a return trajectory.

You do have a solar panel (which is in the light) or an RTG?

If you had a Babel fish you'd know they were saying 'So long, and thanks for all the fish'.

I think the main problem people are having with this patch come from the fact they're stupidly trying to run the game with all their old mods installed, not their system specs. After all, if system specs were the issue they would have been complaining much earlier.

Don't be silly, the game is still in alpha, many of the crashes are due to bad coding. Luckily, it seems there aren't that many crashes (I think I can count on the fingers of one finger how many times I've had a full crash to desktop).