Jimbo Jambo

This did trip me up the first time I took a polar orbit contract. The dots are actually pretty small, and while I did notice them, I thought they were just a weird visual artifact. Only after a few frustrating minutes of tweaking and refining my orbit did I realize the direction mattered and I just needed to flip it. You're never going to be able to make it clear to 100% of the people, but that doesn't automatically mean trying to improve it is wasted effort. I would bet that even a simple change like making the dots slightly larger or replacing them with arrows would greatly reduce the confusion among inexperienced players.

Indeed, using this method they could even get the base 10 system we see with the four digits they have. Count to nine using the segments of the first three fingers then count the thumb as one.

Might also work during a solar eclipse.

This has my support. I currently use goo and material experiments to identify biomes, but it seems this will no longer be possible once experiments are made non-repeatable. In fact, I think non-repeatable experiments make this even more important. Imagine failing an atmospheric skim mission because you wasted your experiment not realizing that high atmosphere still counts as "space near..." That's not much better than doing an EVA report, which is exactly the problem: not that EVAs are particularly hard or don't give enough information, just that they are time-consuming and laborious. Besides, EVA reports technically don't even require a spacecraft to perform, whereas this is is a whole extra part that needs to be attached and may or may not even be available right off the bat. I suppose you could attach something like this to a probe, but then you really might as well just give the probe a built-in "observe surroundings" ability.

It sounds interesting, but I might argue that all that space suit micro-management distracts from from the main focus of KSP, which is, of course, rocket ships, not human resources. I'd rather not have to sift through skill and equipment subscreens just to fix a broken wheel.

Silicon occupies the same column as carbon on the periodic table and can form many similar molecules, which is why it seems so promising and is so popular in sci-fi, but it's not a perfect analog to carbon. Take silicon dioxide for instance, the silicon analog to the waste gas carbon dioxide. Also known as silica, silicon dioxide is a solid at room temperature and is what makes up quartz and glass. It's basically a rock. CO2 is also soluble in water whereas SO2 doesn't dissolve at all. That, combined with the fact that silicon is like 10 times more common on Earth than carbon, yet life evolved to use carbon anyway, makes silicon-based life seem unlikely. That's not to say that it is outright impossible -- silicon might behave differently at much higher temperatures and with a solvent more alkaline than water, but we really don't know enough to say for sure whether it really could support life or not, or if there would be easier alternatives for life to use. Trust me, it's not arrogance or close-mindedness or anything of the sort. Any scientist in any field would be thrilled beyond words at the discovery of alien life with an alien biochemistry. The problem is that we only have one example of how life looks, one example we know works, and we wouldn't even know where to begin looking for anything else. Alternative biochemistries have been proposed, but most of them fall short in one way or another, so we aren't sure anything else can exist. It's much more productive to look for something of which we already have proof of concept than to reach out in the dark when we aren't even sure anything's out there.