IceGiant

I have one suggestion. I had a heat shield leak ablator, and that seemed odd. Now I'm not saying it shouldn't do that, the Space Shuttle would occasionally lose tiles after all. Just that the wording of the warning message doesn't feel right. I have no idea how hard it would be, but if it is possible maybe the message could read "heat shield is shedding ablator" or "heat shield has developed cracks" or something along those lines.

Just started a new career game in 1.4.3 and I'm trying out the BARIS mod as well. Still early days where I'm grinding the "test at launchpad" missions for credits and had Bill in a Mk I command pod with just a decoupler and something else to test. Pressed space bar to stage the decoupler and bang! Capsule exploded. A few flights later and I'm ready to try to get Jeb into orbit for the first time. Had a very simple rocket with a couple of Hammer boosters strapped on. At launch, one of the hammers failed to ignite and the entire rocket took a hard left towards the VAB. My VAB is still level one so I don't have the abort action group unlocked yet. I spammed the staging to try to get everything separated but was too late. I really like this BARIS mod.

Well, whether there is enough business to justify developing more DLC, I don't know. I'm not privy to those numbers. I was thinking along the lines of assuming more DLC was in the pipeline, what would I like to see?

DLC that duplicates something you can do with a mod isn't necessarily a bad thing. The advantage is that it now would have official support and it wouldn't break with each new update. But I agree that DLC should focus on doing things that are difficult to do with a mod. Now I'm just getting back into the game after being away for about a year so I don't know if it has changed, but I recall that storing and reusing a complete vehicle after recovery wasn't something that was easily done with a mod. So a DLC that focuses on aircraft and spaceplanes, which adds some sort of storage hanger so you can turn around, repair, and refuel the same vehicle over and over again might be a good idea.

Yes I am talking to you. You didn't answer the question. What do you have to offer that nobody else has?

Will this pack add any value to the community? We already have a number of excellent planet packs from Kopernicus experts like The White Guardian and others. Can you measure up to that level of quality? By your own admission nobody would be interested. Exactly what do you expect to accomplish?

Green Baron does have a point though. The way the media cover Planet Nine makes it seem like there's scientific consensus when there is anything but. There are only two guys that are really convinced, and they are masters of shameless self-promotion; plus a bunch of hangers on who enjoy the research money that comes along with it. But watch the news and you can be forgiven for thinking that this is a sure thing that's only awaiting a photo to officially confirm it. Edit: I don't want to imply I'm saying that Planet Nine doesn't exist, just that Brown and Batygin's hypothesis isn't proof. It's not far removed from the calculations that postulated the existence of Vulcan inside Mercury's orbit, or Planet X outside Neptune's. My gut tells me the odds are closer to 50% than 90%.

Looking good so far. I look forward to trying it out.

If you want ultimate realisim, then this mod should delete everything within Jool and replace them with one or two ocean planets. But that wouldn't make for a very good game, and I feel that gameplay should trump realisim. But FWIW that would be the most realistic.

Strictly speaking, a shepherd moon could be any size. Most shepherd moons are on the order of tens of kilometers, but Saturn's moon Mimas (a.k.a. the moon that looks like the Death Star) maintains the Cassini Gap even though it orbits about 50% farther than the gap itself, for example. Remember that the ring particles are themselves in orbit. Mimas sets up a resonance that doesn't allow anything to orbit at that specific distance. Therefore, the ring particles either move to a higher orbit, or drop to a lower one.

Fair enough. They would be recent and temporary, but plausible. The small shepherd moon would help maintain it as well. I'd make it more of a dark grey colour, because it would consist of rocky material, but it's up to you.

Let me start by saying that if this is a fantasy planet, then by all means get creative with it. This is a game after all, not a Master's thesis on Hot Jupiters. But I have more than a casual interest in planetary science, and if you want it to be realistic, here are a few tips. First, a Hot Jupiter isn't going to have rings. Radiation pressure from the star will disrupt them rather quickly. If it does have rings, then they will be dark rings of dust like those of Jupiter or Uranus. Bright Saturn-style rings are made of ice and would be boiled away. You can actually calculate the Roche limit if you want to be realistic, but the math is probably a little much for this post. Second, Hot Jupiters likely have few, if any, moons, for the reasons stated above. Stable moon orbits exist within a maximum of 30-50% of the radius of the hill sphere, depending on a number of factors. This close to Kerbol, it's probably on the smaller size. They would be Gilly-like captured asteroids, anything bigger would have been destabilized by tidal interactions. Those same tidal interactions would keep a Hot Jupiter in an orbit with a near-zero inclination and eccentricity. It would also be tidally locked, so you could make one side hot and the dark side cooler. The dark side would still be toasty because the atmosphere would be pretty effective at moving heat there. If you can figure out how to make a planet glow in the game, give the dark side a red glow. If you know the temperature you can even calculate the exact shade based on blackbody radiation. That's about it, though the migration of a Hot Jupiter from where it formed would be very disruptive to the inner planetary system. If you want to accurize the rest of the Kerbol System, at a minimum I'd delete Moho and turn Eve into an ocean planet, because the migration would drag a tremendous amount of volatiles with it. Any terrestrial planet that survived would be covered by oceans hundreds of kilometers deep. But again, this is only a game, so gameplay should rightfully take precedence over technical accuracy.

I will say that unless the DLC pack is absolute rubbish, I will most likely buy it, if only as a token of appreciation for the devs. I'm happy to throw a few quid their way to say thanks for something I play all the time. My only concern is that this pack doesn't divide the modding community. For example, if a modder uses the new contract editor to build a challenge, could that be shared with everyone?

It is a common misconception that the Uncertainty Principle is due to our inability to measure with sufficient precision. It is in fact because of the wave nature of matter and is a fundamental property of the Universe. We like to think of matter as being nice and solid and made up of tiny, discrete particles, but it's actually a bit fuzzy. More like little clouds than beads. Even theoretically perfect instrumentation can't get around that.

Whether it's realistic or not, there's probably an episode of Dr. Who in here somewhere. Maybe a TV series where they have the seed of the universe and can predict the future from the current conditions, but due to chaos theory they only have the probability of various paths. Percentages change as the episode goes on, and adventure ensues.