something

Was just assuming he went to automotive, 'cause jobs there usually are like get paid for x hours, work 1.6x hours. Oh and by the way your vacation in 10 days is cancelled, you are going to Japan, so go get a visa, good luck.

Ah ok, missed the part where it read that he now got a job in automotive....

Haven't seen any updates for an entire month now...so story suspended?

So the rules state that clipping functional parts into each other is a no go but clipping structural parts is go. Now, while these are theoretically engine parts that do clip, it is pretty obvious it's just the structural polygons of the engines that do clip, while the functional polygons do not clip. Furthermore, clipping isn't used in this case to save space in order to put this vessel into a cargo bay (show the cargo bay to me, that contains this vessel) or to gain an otherwise undesired advantage - it's just for the better looks of the aft section. Oh and just for the records: The boosters used for the launch of this vessel didn't need to be detached. So this theoretically might be launched as an SSTO ....

I have my backups. I will further backup them, make sure that a coordinated nuclear strike cannot take them out and....well did I mention that I still enjoy the original 1999 Homeworld?

Early January 2016, I think. Must have been version 1.0.5, if I am not mistaken.

Nah, I was thinking, that the devs were too lazy and simply implemented a 1200m/s plus worst case offset maximum collider speed. After all, KSP was meant to goto space, not to race on the poles at mach 4 ;) so likely they thought that nobody needed ground colliders at those speeds...

1210m/s on Minmus (see above) 1259m/s on Laythe, according to my hypothesis. If the collider's size was subject to the planet's size then the colliders probably wouldn't be squares or rectangles but have another shape since the planet is a sphere. In my opinion the size is set as a hard value which does not change. However, the surface of the planet is rendered locally, so you never have to worry about overlapping squares or other shapes. You're moving on a local tangential plane, so to speak.

I like this paper, very much actually. So here's some number crunching: Kerbin's siderial rotational velocity is nearly 175m/s. Now, let's consider the original 1365m/s which were postulated by @Stratzenblitz75 et.al. and substract the surface speed. Substracting the rotational speed of Kerbin from the maximum loading speed, we obtain a difference of 1191m/s. If we take those measured 1381m/s we get a maximum speed of 1207m/s. Postulating a constant speed at which the physics engine stops calculating the colliders it sounds reasonable that 1200m/s plus the siderial rotational velocity of the body under question might be the math behind this phenomenon. If this hypothesis is true, then other celestial bodies should yield different maximum collider speeds. In any case 1200m/s plus Kerbins siderial rotational velocity is close enough to the value @Stratzenblitz75 et.al provided (1375m/s vs 1381m/s) to test this hypothesis on Minmus. The flats there should yield enough space to perform similar maneuvers. With a siderial rotatonal velocity of just over 9m/s, the maximum speed should yield values around 1210m/s.

Bought the game in January 16 and since then I played career only, with a few sandbox exceptions in order to do some stupid stuff or challenges. That is, I still am in my very first career save which is a 9MB file in 330 iterations... Initially, I wanted to get a better feeling for the single parts, so I limited myself to the choices available in the career save. Still, I am playing that one career but there's no strict approach on how to play or not to play. I do whatever is in the range of ideas I come up with. I basically learned the game while playing that game and my craft became more and more sophisticated over time. So the entire save basically is sort of a short history of my KSP abilities. Interesting to see how you built vessels a year ago...

According to Wikipedia it was 0.7g mass equivalent which naturally equals 700mg... and well yes, 700mg is a bit on the small side for a family lunch, but dont underestimate the energy you get from it... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy

The hypothetical direct, lossless conversion of matter to energy is extremely efficient thanks to the c squared in E = m c**2. The Hiroshima nuclear bomb had a mass equivalent of 0.7g (that's g as in kg not g as in 9.81 m /s**2). That's basically the mass of your family's lunch yesterday. If we can propel some tons of spaceship to the moon using nothing but a 6few hundred tons of fuel, then using matter conversion would require only a few kg. Now for a planet, say Earth, to be put to a height of 200km above it's own surface, we do need an Energy of E = m × h × g (I am neglecting the shrinking gravitational force on purpose as it makes things difficult, so I rather overestimate the energy required). The mass of the earth is 5.97 ×10**24 kg, g is 9.81m/s**2 and h is 200×10**3m. So we need an energy of 12 ×10**28 J. Now c**2 is roughly 8.98 × 10**16 m**2/s**4. Plug that into the Einsteinian formula and you get a mass of 1.33 × 10**8 kg. Or to be precise 133 000 000 cubic meters of water. Literally a joke, if you consider that we just put the entire planet earth into LEO...

Read the challenge, thought intetesting. Read the rules and thought 'Erm what?' What to orbit and what to land on? Does it have to be Kerbin? What about Minmus? Gilly? Maybe Jool? No landing legs? Well, wheels are ok then? What about chutes? What is rocket power? An engine running at 1%? Or does it have to be at full power? I mean, so far, I could take a spaceplane from the K-Prize and it would be a totally valid entry.

Today, I sent an oil tanker to space... Vessel comes at 1.43M funds, the boosters to get it to LKO do cost another 240k funds - not the cheapest vessel I launched in this career safe, but I am sure that contracts will pay for it pretty fast...

Yes, exactly this. Although, I didn't download it as it did cost money, and I didn't really have the interest to purchase a game just because xkcd mentioned it. Then a year later or so a fellow colleague told me about the game and that it was somehow physically accurate and you could sink hours into it. Sounded interesting, so I downloaded the demo version, which immediately made me search wikipedia for the equations I needed...

Luckily there were no fatalities, but two injured passengers https://www.thelocal.de/20170502/high-speed-train-derails-in-dortmund-disrupting-travel-for-days

Ok, it is official dudes - the train just derailed yesterday evening UTC...

The rules state that it isn't allowed to clip engines into each other. I plan to use a craft with several parallel Mk3 fuel tanks which are propelled by KR-2L+ Rhino engines. Thing is, the engines have a slightly larger diameter than the distance of the nodes of the Mk3 fuel tanks, thanks to the planar surfaces of the Mk3 tanks. That again causes minor engine clipping. Forbidden, or allowed?

Well then, yesterday, KSP decided that it was about time to wreck my craft file. After editing and saving I continuously got a null reference error and with a 400+ part vessel, it just isn't fun to browse through the craft file in order to find out what reference is causing the problem. So, I started re-engineering the entire vessel from scratch by using two instances of KSP, one to load the craft to look at the details and one to actually rebuild the vessel. Was kind of an experience from the slideshow point of view. I mean, it was about the first time ever, I got my CPU to a 4x75% load for a continuous amount of time.... So yeah, if you really want to know what your computer /can/ do, then simply start playing KSP simultaneously in 3 or 4 instances...

Was already beginning to wonder what was (not) going on here.... Yeah, losing a computer is a pain in the R S. Nice to see, you somehow managed to recover some/most/all of that data.

The rules say that you have to stop "any given set of parts" before reaching the end of the runway. The rules do not state anything about "staging" and there are some entries here which made use of staging, so that's fine with me. Now if your vehicle collides with the runway and consequently explodes, it didn't stop in the sense of coming to a halt in the reference frame of the runway. Merely, the game engine detected that your parts moved into the terrain and decided to delete those parts instead of stopping them. That's what we commonly call an explosion. So, technically, you didn't actually stop your vehicle. Also, we might argue, that a non-existent vehicle has no defined state of movement. That is, you vehicle would be both - moving and not moving - if it completely exploded. Now since you cannot tell me where your vehicle actually is, you can't disprove that it left the runway Arguing from a classical point of view, an explosion somehow is a form of violent diffusion which basically means your parts spread over the space in the proximity which includes the terrain that is not the runway. That would mean you left the runway... So, just stage those parts away

Nice to hear you found the bug. Didn't realize the central node was a winglet in fact..

Do you have any form of yaw control? At least I can't see any yaw control on the image. That might help reducing the 'drift'. Also when coming in with a heading slightly off 090 or 270 you might want to yaw back to the correct heading in the very last moment before touchdown. (Roll usually is not an option in that phase of flight as your wing would strike the runway)

There are only 4 Kerbals, one female, three male. How do you want to hook them up? I would really like to see an effect of the stupidity and courage ratings. I mean why hiring a stupid scientist? Also some more personal traits might be nice.

The controls are right for flight sims. Almost every game I know uses the 'down' key to pitch up and the 'up' key to pitch down as this emulates the real stick movement. That's why it's called to 'pull up' - you pull the stick towards yourself in order to climb.