Hotaru

@KAL 9000 Nebula decals. Actually I'm still using the same old 0.25 version of it I've been using since 0.90, which works fine; not sure what is updated about the one on Spacedock other than the bundled dependencies, but whatever. Good to know it's being actively maintained, anyway.

Bravado 6 during its second flyby of Laythe. Bravado 6: exploring the moons of Jool. Duna flotilla: Starbus Elizabeth arrival. Crew rotations and Kerbin system ops. Bravado 5: exploring Gilly. Daring 1: test flight.

Bravado 6 during its initial encounter with Jool. Station Permanence: arrival at Duna. Bravado 6 at Jool.

I suspect this is it: when apoapsis goes over 70 kilometers you go from "flying" to "suborbital." Certainly that fits with the minimum definition of "suborbital" required for things like tourist flights--apoapsis out of atmo, periapsis in atmo (or below ground).

The sixth kerbonaut class with a prototype heavy mobile base. Left to right, back row: Ribnard, Leeuna, Barsen, Tambe, Asene, Jenra. Front row: Gergun, Daphthy, Madette, Gregger. The second Duna flotilla: station Permanence and Starbus Elizabeth. Munar ops. Bravado 3 and 4: return to Kerbin.

-250m isn't the pressure limit, that's the absolute limit even with pressure limits off, and I believe has been so since before pressure limits were implemented. With limits on the limit is the 4000 kPa mark (at least with stock parts), which somewhere just below 1800 meters according to the probe I sent into the Joolian atmosphere the other day. As far as I can tell 4000 kPa is the limit for most/all stock parts.

@DunaRocketeer Not really. Economy isn't much of a priority at the moment; the Space Program has 8.4 million spacebucks in the bank right now and plenty of income both from contracts and from science labs. In my last career save, in 1.0.2, I had fund rewards set much lower, basically to the point that everything had to be as close to fully reusable as possible. (I also used KCT, which meant turnaround time was an issue as well.) Setting up the reusable systems was a fun challenge, but actually using them in practice was pretty tedious. After a while it felt like 90% of my time was spent cycling Aqualungs between Minmus and LKO and babysitting reusable rockets back down to KSC. So I made a conscious decision for this save that my priority would be playability rather than cost-efficiency. That said, I do have some future plans that will involve recovering payloads from orbit, and those will require some sort of reusable vehicle with a payload bay, whether a shuttle, a reusable rocket, or a spaceplane. Boring stuff: TL;DR: Part welding. The crew of Bravado 3 return to Duna orbit aboard LC-2. Roley and Ordrin: more fun with asteroids. Bravado 3 and 4: departures from Duna and Ike. Lucidity 1: probing the atmosphere of Jool. Immutability and Starbus Valerie: a new Kerbin space station and tourism ops.

Resisting the urge to make snide remarks about announcing super-secret things we all already knew about and actually getting a little bit interested in the contest. Question: ...it's not really clear from the wording of that part--is the Kerbal in the figure the customized version (and the image is just an example), or will they all be generic male Kerbals with just a custom flag and name?

Cool, thanks for the answer.

Built a monument out of a magic boulder.

"Earthman" is a reasonable name for inhabitants of Earth as well, and the closest real world analog I can think of for the Kerman/Kerbal/Kerbin relationship. Personally "Kerbol" doesn't bother me, and seeing as its about as near to canon as it can be without actually being in the game anywhere I think changing it at this point would be kind of silly. That said, the similarity to the word "Kerbal" is a little awkward. And I'm not a huge fan of the K thing either, so if they were to change it I'd hope its new name was something unrelated to the whole "kerb" family of words.

Boring stuff: Finally got tired of babysitting my science labs endlessly and edited the config to increase the science buffer from 500 to 2000. Don't think this will have any gameplay effect other than not having to transmit science as often to keep them running. Bravado 5 in the lowlands of Gilly. Super Aqualung 1: next-generation unkermanned tanker. Kerbin system ops. Bravado 4: finishing up on Ike. Ordrin: asteroid retrieval. Bravado 5 at Gilly.

Personally this feels more like something that should be exposed in config files somewhere rather than in an actual in-game menu, just because I suspect a tiny minority of users would ever actually change those settings. You would, and I probably would, and it'd be great to be able to, but it's good to keep in perspective what the majority of users are likely to need.

Yes to both. (The crews rotate and the data is periodically drained and replenished, so any differences mostly average out.)

The data stored in the lab drains and needs to be replenished for it to keep producing science. Filling it up is easy. Keeping it filled can take some doing. I'm not sure how the whole science in/data/science out relationship works out, but I believe there is a benefit to sending them elsewhere. Certainly in my career save the labs I have in Munar orbit, Minmus orbit, and on the Munar surface are quite a lot more productive than the one in Kerbin orbit. Mind you, a lab anywhere except the surface of Kerbin is pretty OP. I maxed out the tech tree ages ago and thanks to the Patents Licensing strategy, these days labs are my space program's main source of income.

The successor to Bravado is Project Daring, which will be similar in general concept but built around the Brillig rocket and using more complex staging to achieve longer ranges. Daring 1 is planned to target Dres, although new kermanned missions will probably be on hiatus at least until the return of Bravado 5, if nothing else to keep my KAC window from getting too cluttered and this thread from getting too confusing.

Boring stuff: TL;DR: Fixed lag issues, updated SVE, installed SVT, fiddled with strategies. Starbus Valerie on the Mun. Starbus S-100: a new passenger rocket. Bravado 5: Gilly expedition. Bravado 6: Objective Jool and the end of an era.

When your measure of system performance goes from "frames per second" to "seconds per frame."

One way to get around insufficient power for transmission is to start the transmission and then go into high time warp (at least 100x, maybe more--if in low orbit you may need a mod that allows it). Sometimes this has allowed me to fully transmit data that couldn't normally be transmitted in real time without running out of power. I think of it as throttling the transmission rate, which the antennas should be able to do anyway. (Something a bit like this happened to the Galileo mission after its high-gain antenna failed to deploy properly.)

Presumably he bailed out and landed on his helmet.

Question @sdj64: Is part welding allowed (and if so, would it count as stock or modded)? In this day and age of autostruts it doesn't really allow you to do anything you couldn't do normally in terms of structural rigidity. My main reason for using it would be to keep part count civilized; my practical upper limit is around 250 parts, and while I could definitely do a Jool-5 mission within that limit with no welding, I might be able to do a much cooler mission if I did use it.

@NISSKEPCSIM Not that specifically, but that era of design in general. George Pal movies, Chesley Bonestell paintings, that sort of thing. And of course the Tintin Moon Rocket. @cantab It's actually not built to operate in atmo at all; it's really just a slightly fancy way to move 17 kerbals between planetary orbits and surfaces of airless bodies (although with parachutes it could probably handle Duna as well). Functionally speaking, the "wings" and side pods are there purely to give it a wider and stiffer base to stand on than stock landing legs.

Honestly this version of multiplayer sounds like it could be doable with mods pretty easily. Standardized KCT settings, plus a new mod that reads achievement dates from a file (or writes them to the file). The game already stores achievement data information in the save file anyway so all the mod would have to do would be to read and display it, then give the player appropriate rewards. Synchronizing the files online so two players could play "against" each other might be trickier for a mod, as it would undoubtedly have to be done outside KSP, but should be possible.

Went to the Mun in style.

That was a severely cool piece of engineering (and a cool video of it as well). I was especially impressed with the SSTO that carried everything up, that was a nifty solution to the problem of transporting large, bulky cargo to orbit. I don't know if the completed station had enough science labs though. Someday I hope to have a computer that can handle stuff like that without turning the game into Kerbal Space Slideshow.