Terwin

Generally 4 for most non-training missions.(not counting tourists) Pilot, Engineer, 2 scientists(in lab, even after I finish the tech tree). I'm also careful to gender-balance for interplanetary missions. Using life-support I usually keep my ships down to those 4 unless I am doing the 3-star training mission(Mun, Minmus, step outside Kerbin SOI) Currently I have one with 22(8 tourists and my last 14 1 and 2 star kerbals), but that is likely to be the largest crew I have in this save unless I do some tourist cruise ships for some reason.

RT-5000 provides 237 units of resource reduction(79%*3) and raises the cap to 79% per kerbal MPL provides 250 units of resource reduction(50%*5) and will raise the cap to 50% per kerbal This means that if you have one of each(487 total units, cap of 79%), and 6 kerbals, you will get 79% on each with 13 unused units(79*6=474 units used) or with 7 kerbals, you will get 6 at 79% and 1 at 13%, with nothing left over for any additional kerbals.(saving you the full 487% of usage that your recyclers can handle) All kerbals will be covered at the best possible rate if you have enough recycling capacity on board, even if your best recyclers cannot handle all of the kerbals you have.(think of the other processors as pre-processing for the high-efficiency recycler so that it can handle more kerbals if you like) Clear as mud?

That is why the thread is titled 'playing a lot'. We all know that 'playing too much' would be ridiculous. Back on topic: You know you are playing a lot when you wake up at your computer and discover that you successfully completed a capture burn that you do not remember starting.

Thermal efficiency is all about how close the drill is to it's optimal operating temperature. It starts cold and warms up. If you have radiators, it stops at 100% efficiency. If you do not have radiators, it goes above the ideal temp and starts losing efficiency. This is true for both drills and converters in the stock game and has nothing to do with how much ore is in the ground. As far as I am aware, power required for drills is independent of ore concentration. If you run your ISRU while drilling and it catches up to the drills, then it will only refine as much ore as it gets from the drills, reducing the amount of electricity is uses because it is not running at full capacity. Drills always take 15 energy/sec to run at full capacity(3/s for the small ones), and both ISRUs use 30 energy/sec at full capacity. Either one will run at partial capacity if it does not get enough energy to run at full capacity(with ISRU having priority over drills so long as it has ore to process) In your case, it sounds like you did not have enough power to run both your drills and your ISRU at full power and when the ore concentration was high enough, the ISRU would draw enough power that it would start to deplete your energy reserves. It would have happened the same way if you filled up your ore tank and then moved to an area with low ore concentration and started both ISRU and drilling. Asteroids are more energy hungry than planets because you get more ore to feed to your ISRU. If you turn off your ISRU then your drills will take the same power regardless of the ore concentration.(and if you run your ISRU with a full ore tank, it will always take 30 energy/sec if it can get it, once it has warmed up to 100%)

That depends on your ore concentration. Engineers only help the drills, so a 3-star engineer at 1% ore concentration produces the same amount of fuel for the same amount of electricity as an unmanned probe drilling at 17% concentration. the 1.25 ISRU and small drill are *not* what you want to use when relying on fuel cells however!

Perhaps they got tired of good talent being driven off by a small vocal minority of the fan-base? It takes a certain amount of detachment to handle harsh criticism of something you have spent a great deal of time and effort working on. This means you either have developers who don't care about the product and treat it as just another pay-check(and who may not bother to interact with the community), or you need to protect the developers who really do care about the product they are developing so that they are not impacted by those users that complain loudly that this new version is 'awful' and 'unplayable'. It is hard enough to find quality developers who will really care bout your product, why deal with the anguish and turnover of the large percentage of those developers who do not have a thick enough skin to take the kind of abuse that I have seen on these forums for almost every release?(and that is *after* the moderators have removed the worst of it...) I would not be surprised at all if SQUAD was discouraging their developers from spending time on the forums in an effort to provide a more positive work environment and reduce turnover. It could also be an effort to project a more professional and uniform corporate image, like many companies do when they get to a certain size.

You could always use the unbreakable joints setting in the cheat menu if it bothers you so much, that applies to all vessels in the game with just a single click. Also, I find that autostrutting works fine if I only add it to every 4th or 5th part in a stack. You can also hold down alt in the editor and click a part to copy that part and all of it's children, including their autostrut settings. Personally, I find that I only need auto-strutting when I have lighter parts supporting heavier parts or other scenarios where a realistic part would deform or break without internal or external reinforcements. I generally only need struts in similar situations(like giving radial kickbacks or drop-pods a second connection point). Remember: Rocket fuel tanks are little more than a thin metal tube with a little bit of piping that is filled up with volatile fluids. Stacking 3 or more orange tanks without reinforcement is not very realistic and you should expect them to disintegrate one way or another. The same goes for the max-length tanks of other sizes as well.(I am not even sure that stacking 2 orange tanks with stuff on top of them and no reinforcement is realistic). Language: I tend to be technical and specific in my phrasing, this will often throw off those who tend more towards colloquial usage of the language. (If you like you can think of colloquial English as a second language I rarely use, with literary American English as my first language)

If you have advanced tweakables turned on, you have access to both Autostrut and Rigid Attachment. While I have never used Rigid attachment, I have found that using Autostrut on any wobbly parts of my rockets(say every 3-5 units in a long stack, or even just the engines of each stage autostrutted to the root part), and I do not have any problems with rockets that lack structural integrity. (unless I clip full ore tanks into each other, but that is another matter entirely). By my understanding it is: normal: reasonable structural strength for the materials and joint sizes involved(weaker joints may partially stand in for what should be a part with a weak structure because weaker joints require less coding and less of a physics load on the game) Struts: building normal structural reinforcements into the vessel(may be stronger than realistic, but that is probably just to cut down on the number of parts needed for reinforcement) Use Girders, octagonal Struts and I beams for structural supports more complex than point to point links. Autostrut: like struts, but allow fewer struts and less aesthetic impact, also allows strutting things that would be hard to link in the editor(like strutting the engine to the cockpit). Can be considered 'internal structural supports'. Rigid Attachment: A per-part semi-cheat-mode for those who don't like the minute weight cost that supposedly goes along with autostruts*. Only attaches to connecting joints but very rigid. Unbreakable joints(in the cheat menu): your joints do not bend or break. * the devs say it is there, but I have not noticed it in the editor Perhaps you are requesting a setting to have rigid attachment on by default? Is there some reason you don't just turn on unbreakable joints? It seems like it should be almost the same thing...

Your prototype Kerbin Scan-sat just finished a high-resolution scan of Kerbin, so you send it off to Duna. After the ejection burn for Duna, you wonder if you should send it to Moho next, so you can use up the last of the drop-tanks.

I generally go with rather large Mk3 based vessels so that I can store the ISRU in a cargo bay. For the mun, I generally need 3 nuke engines, then I add a few empty fuel tanks/ore cans, slap on a couple extra nukes and head to Duna. If you get low on fuel on your way to Jool/Duna, land on a low-g body first to refuel(Pol/Bop for Jool, Ike for Duna). Several of my trips to Moho stop by Gilly(Eve) for a refuel. For anything beyond a single-target scan-sat(to scan a given planet/moon for ore and biomes) I generally take ISRU along for the ride, if it weighs less than your return fuel, then it is more weight-efficient than hauling your fuel all that way. (I always bring ISRU because I am pretty good at having enough fuel to get there, but often do not have enough to get back without a refuel)

I'm using KRnD any my heavily upgraded engines seem to work just fine. I am also happy to report that my 2.5 to Mk3 adapter that I had set to drain during launch was properly modeled. The only improvement I can think of is if you could some-how indicate how much potential d-v I have in my ore tanks. (an especially daunting task as I have both 2.5 and 1.25 converters on my vessels, due to USI-LS letting me use the small one for fertilizer production)

I always figured that any ship-less Kerbals were on a vessel with not quite enough d-v to get to orbit, so they ditched the ship to go into orbit on their jet-pack instead of crashing back into the ground with the ship. I have seen a number of postings where this was done, so it seems perfectly reasonable to me. (usually there is another vessel up there to collect the Kerbal, but not always...)

As far as I can tell, they have fixed at least some of the reasons why that would happen. They may or may not have fixed them all, but at the very least that bug should be less common than it was.

I use CTT(Community Tech tree), which tends to be fairly empty if you don't have lots of parts mods to fill all those higher tier nodes(some up to 10K science each) USI-LS and MKS is good for filling in those bottom life support/colonization nodes along with those nuclear nodes near the top, Near Future tech is good for filling many of the other nodes, Atomic age is good for filling those nuclear propulsion nodes. Many parts pack parts have specific CTT nodes that they will go into if you have CTT.

After reading the 'a degree makes a difference' thread referenced above, I started doing some real gravity turns, but as many of my payloads are pretty draggy and hard to fit into a reasonable* sized fairing, I find I am often back to only a few degrees off vertical around 35km where I pull over to 45 degrees or less off the horizon. * if the rest of the launch platform is 2.5m, I am reluctant to add the 3.5m fairing needed to encapsulate my payload, although I should probably try it at least once to see how well it would work...

It sounds like you are in an established market vertical with professional clients. As opposed to using a 3rd party platform pushing the envelope of what that platform is capable of supporting, and supporting a user base that will push and pry for any bit of information and then cry bloody murder if any of their assumptions are proven incorrect. At my current employer and my last employer we did not announce any feature that was not developed and at least in testing, other than the occasional 'yes we will support both the current and new versions of Related_Product once the new version is released' or 'yes that is a bug, we hope to have a fix for you soon' At the employer before that, they did promise new things before even telling the dev team about them, and after doing that for a while the company was in such dire financial straits that all the managers who knew what was going on jumped ship or otherwise transitioned out of leadership roles until the new CEO was a spread-sheet guy who would not promise anything not supported by his numbers(previously COO). Anyone who is on the cutting-edge and makes specific promises about the future will get burned in short order.

You know, in 1.2 you the cheat menu can hyper-edit objects into any orbit you like, so if you bring home all your kerbals, you can replace everything by just placing landing-capable bases in orbit of each body where you currently have a base.(you may need to re-scan for resources however, no idea if that will change at all)

Roverdude said that the USI mods were getting a save-breaking over-haul for KSP 1.2 I believe the recommended approaches for migrating are: 1) start a new game 2) recover or abandon all craft with USI parts and expect them to vanish due to missing parts when you upgrade 3) stay on 1.1.3 with the old version until you are ready to start a new game.

Perhaps they do not know. How many art projects have you seen where the original artist leaves and another artist picks it up without completely re-working every facet of the old work? It is pretty uncommon for an art project to be picked up by someone else, and as every artist has a different style, I think we can rest assured that if there is additional art work to be done, it will not look the same as if Porkjet were doing it. How many major Software improvement projects have you managed where you knew a) how long it would take, b) what features would be included, and c) the bug count was reduced or maintained? I can guarantee that unless you worked for NASA where millions of dollars are spent on every line of code, that number would be zero. It is a bad idea for *ANY* software company to announce any new or upcoming features before those features are packaged up and ready for delivery. If they do, then in short order they will learn the hard way that some problems are unfeasible or down-right impossible, and it is not always easy to tell the difference between those and a '5-minute fix' : http://xkcd.com/1425/ A lot of people have grown accustomed to over-sharing on things like facebook and twitter. For a person, that is their choice and they will need to live with the consequences, for a company, that needs to be a deliberate choice, and usually the potential costs far outweigh the potential benefits. That is why the more mature a company is, the less outsiders know about the internal workings of that company. It is a mater of risk management, as sharing the wrong things at the wrong time *will* have serious consequences, be they legal, financial, social, or a combination of all three. I know that as a professional developer, one of the worst things that my employer can do to me is to announce a feature that is not complete that I am responsible for. At that point, it will be taken as a promise, and if something comes up to make it take longer, make it unfeasible or even impossible, I will still be expected to deliver. This is the sort of thing that gets systems deployed in an unusable state because it is not practical to do something that was promised, but the managers refuse to go back on the promise.

I strongly suspect there will be mommy-type feelings related to that egg. Either the baby-kraken imprints on the Intrepid/one of the crew(potentially doing very bad things to anyone who tries to hurt them), or the mommy of the egg comes looking for her egg/baby. Possibly both... I actually think that Bob does not remember, at least not fully. After all, he was not sure how he got inside, then he must have realized that there was an F9, so he called off any sort of shenanigans and left ASAP.

True, it is not as ideal as refueling in LKO, but it also requires no infrastructure and no docking. Back when USI-MKS had a working orbital logistics system, I would always have a Kerbin fuel base that would fuel up anything that made it to orbit(usually including the liquid core portion of the launch vehicle), but as I no longer have a hands-off method of refueling in LKO, I refuel on Minmus as the minimum player-effort option for planning to reach orbit with a nearly dry upper stage.

I use minmus refueling as a surrogate for orbital refueling on my interplanetary vessels with ISRU. That way I can plan to have less then 2km/s left after making low orbit and still have a very comfortable safety-margin, regardless of my final destination. (my non-isru probes often require almost as much of a launch stage as my interplanetary vehicles with life support, due to the need to be fully fueled during launch)

I gave up on recover from surface missions after recovering a heat-shield from the Mun. It was quite a challenge getting it into my nose-mounted klaw.(I got it by haivng my kerbal push it up a slope where I laid down my vessel with the rear legs extended and the front legs retracted and had my kerbals kick it towards the ship until it hit the trigger of the klaw.)

@Leafbaron It maybe different for jet engines, but for rocket engines, it is just as @Renegrade said, a tank at 3 will fully drain before before a tank at 2 which will in turn fully drain before a tank at 1 and so on for any integer numbers(the only kind you can set)

Why not just increase the priority of the primary tank? So long as the number on the primary tank is higher than the number on the rocket fuel tanks, the exact values do not matter.