Bill Phil

Oh, you meant the Alien movie. I thought you meant the Covenant from Halo, since Halo: Reach dropped into the Master Chief Collection a few days ago... In other news, I spilled coffee on my laptop. It survived, but now some of the keys are a bit "sticky." I got real lucky.

Photon rockets aren’t that great. Photon sails on the other hand are pretty darn good in comparison but have their own issues. Mass beam sails (using either magnetic fields or some other kind of reflector) can be more efficient and thus can have higher newton per watt ratios.

"How many roads must a man walk down?" Well, if you ask the mice anyway.

Depends on how much you're willing to spend and if you can actually afford the time to play. A decent measure of how much it's worth is entertainment hours per dollar. For games this might not be a lot (though that depends... some people have played KSP for thousands of hours...). But if you added up all of your in game time and divided by the cost of the gaming PC you might find out whether or not it's worth it. If we gave your PC a lifespan of 5 years before replacement, then it's just a matter of how many hours you play in a year. For a 2000 USD gaming setup anything over 2000 hours gets you less than a dollar per hour of entertainment, taking up 4.6% of your time in that 5 year period. For a cheaper rig the cutoff would be lower, of course. Do you play games that often?

Not today but recently. An episode of NCIS featured a nine year old gamer whose help they needed to solve the case. A literal nine year old, at least in universe. That’s too perfect.

Yikes. Good thing you noticed.

Kareener, as a parody of Mariner. Combining “careen” with Mariner and adding the “k”.

Not recently, but soon. Very soon... Halo: Combat Evolved Halo 2 Halo 3 And some more.

Don't even get me started on the 412s isp engine from Making History... as a core engine you can get some serious payload up there, just don't throttle it up too high until you're at a decent altitude and strap on some solids to get you there. Crazy.

Oh yes. But it isn't necessary. I've flown missions to Duna and Vall and back to Kerbin with single rockets. Admittedly I used docking Apollo-style in orbit, but it wasn't necessary at all for the Duna mission. I just wanted to.

Docking is not necessary for interplanetary flight - patience is. Every time I thought of making a cool ship in LKO I ended up abandoning it - I've found it much easier and more practical to just launch everything I need in one go. Of course that can be tough to do by itself, but it's an extension of something you can already do. That said, docking isn't too bad. Though I do recall frustration back in like 0.19 when I first tried it out. It's tricky alright. But the hard part is the initial rendezvous, which is actually not too bad. Generally I treat it like a planetary transfer and try to go from one circular orbit to another. Setting this up makes it easier on you. A lot. Then I plot maneuvers and see what gets me close. Once you're a few km in you can cancel target relative velocity and then burn towards it, correcting as you go. Cancel relative velocity again once you're in close. Then I recommend pointing one ship "north" and the other "south" (well, the ports really, but you can use "control from here" to get that done). Then you can pretty easily dock the two even without RCS. Once you're close enough you can just tell the two ports to point at each other and then you can go in for a final approach and docking. Of course that may not have helped at all...

Cool. Could make for some interesting mass stream propulsion concepts...

Oh, I'm aware. I say the same thing about short bed pickups. A bit of an exaggeration, sure, but I just don't see the point of short bed pickups, besides maybe towing. The bed is too small to really be useful and there are better options for passenger transport. Heck, I've transported things in my minivan that are too big for a short bed truck, and I can reconfigure it to transport people as well. Actually I think some minivans can also tow small trailers as well. (Yeah I'm a bit biased towards minivans... though actual vans have even larger towing capacities rivalling trucks) If Cybertruck had a longer bed and didn't have that weird slope-down it'd look much better imo.

Looks weird. Also the bed looks microscopic...