Rocket Witch

Ah, that makes more sense, thanks. I found the video by sorting by 'most viewed' so wasn't expecting much and I made the erroneous presumption that the video creator probably meant the docking, as landing would be much less of a "sequence" and not need to have its progress "tracked" by the spacecraft crew themselves.

Apparently the Gemini astronauts used the Eye of the Sahara as a landmark "to track the progress of their [docking] sequences". Does anyone know HOW this was done? Since one will pass over it very quickly while in low orbit, it's not immediately obvious what utility a planetary landmark has as a visual aid for docking, especially since I doubt the Agena's orbit passed directly over the Eye every time. It sounds like a myth made up to make the discovery of the Eye seem more meaningful, to be honest, but if they did actually use it I'm sure the story is interesting.

I keep G-limits on but don't typically experience enough force to have it make a difference to anyone other than 0- & 1-star non-pilots. I never enabled pressure limits for two reasons: as far as I know all the parts in the game were never given anything other than placeholder limits which are all identical, so it's basically an unfinished feature which is effectively not implemented due to how high the limits are. The other reason is that occasionally craft could potentially experience momentary physics glitches for a single frame upon loading, collisions, etc., and I'd rather not have part limits triggered by such. (Kerbals getting pinged off of the vessel hatch once their collision loads after going on EVA is an example of the kind of thing I mean.)

With regard to that, there was also a more recent thread where someone found that capping the framerate led to longer load times, since the game loads at the frequency of the framerate instead of however fast the CPU can work. I always had my game framerates capped to my monitor's refresh rate via my GPU's configuration utility, and after uncapping it for KSP, loading times (both initial game load and transitions between VAB/tracking station/vessels/etc.) seem to have been reduced by about 20%.

If you override friction control and reduce it, vehicles will skid while turning rather than grip & flip. I usually set it to half of the gravity of the body I'm driving on, ie. 0.5 for Kerbin or 0.1 for Mun.

As pictured below, something I saw once posted by @eddiew who I guess is the creator of the image. Relies on a practical minimum of 4 relays instead of the 3 required by networks whose orbits match, but it's a nice smart arrangement that takes like 70% of the setup time while working 95% as well. Emphasis on the orbital periods of each relay not matching!

That reminds me of scenarios in Children of a Dead Earth where you engage from one gas giant moon to another. It's a realistic space combat simulator with a present-day tech level, so setting up a fleet in a strong orbit (often high and eccentric) that leaves its options open for short-notice transfers to multiple bodies is very desirable. That is the most relevant situation I can think of to compare with what you're doing, and explain why someone may manoeuvre in that way — convenience and a need to react to a situational changes. By contrast, real scientific space missions are planned extensively in advance, and have not thusfar involved multiple plannet-hopping, so I don't think this kind of transit has had a chance to arise in reality yet. It's the kind of thing that will eventually get a name, but currently only a few people in very speculative and technical situations actually deal with it.

Almost every SSTO spaceplane may as well be a 2STO since there's little reason not to add SRBs for rocket-assisted takeoff.

My favourite tracks for being up in orbit are The Vast Expanse from Battletech and 08302 from X3TC. The level tracks from EXAPUNKS go great with working in the editor.

I'd like to request a reupload of the old version if you are able and willing. The introduction of part variants is a 'breaking' feature between game versions ≤1.3.1 and ≥1.4.

Looks like a byproduct of an SSAO-imitation effect from a post-process injection shader, ie. things like ReShade's MXAO.

Due to its long distance from Kerbol/the Sun, high radiation from close proximity to Jool, and high gravitational stresses from neighbouring moons, life on Laythe is most likely to be based around geothermal vents on the ocean floor. So one can expect to find the kinds of creatures found at the bottom of Earth's Mariana Trench. I don't know how the apparent salinity of Laythe's oceans might shape things; I guess non-porous exoskeletons might be preferred to better control how much salt gets inside bodies, but it might be a total non-issue for life adapted to it. The viability of life beyond the warmer waters offered by geothermals isn't so certain — as you come up from the ocean floor it gets colder, your protection from radiation diminishes, and photosynthesis isn't the most enticing idea with the low energy and frequent eclipses. Creatures that spend parts of their life cycle near the surface and return to the floor could be an uncommon strategy to avoid predation, and this could lead to the proliferation of life elsewhere on Laythe, but presumably over much longer time-scales than is predicted to have been the case for Earth.

I always set friction control to manual and set it proportional to the amount of gravity on the body (0.15 or 0.2 on Mun; 0.05 on Mimus). Lowering the value sufficiently will make you slide around everywhere instead of rolling over when you hit a bump or turn slightly at speed. It may however harm the rover's hill-climbing ability; of that I'm unsure. It also helps to have steering enabled across only one axle. Set traction control to override and set motor to 100%. There's no reason not to do this all the time with wheels on any planet unless you need to conserve power, since wheelslip is inconsequential traction-wise as far as I can tell (it appears to represent diminishing returns, not an actual drop in traction). For the same reason, adding more wheels is pretty much always going to provide some benefit, even if it starts becoming quite small. The simplest way of acquiring more traction is to add weight; most useful if you have an excessive power-weight ratio and can afford to sacrifice some of it. Given the high ore yields on Minmus in your save, it may be convenient to bring ore tanks (because ore is the densest resource) and fill them up in situ, but for this to be viable you'll probably need to be using a much larger rover in the first place. You could even have upward-facing ion engines on top of the rover to actively make it heavier. I've seen this done for a Gilly circumnavigation but with larger bodies the engines may run out of propellant long before you're done with the rover, unless you want to set up a whole supply chain for providing xenon refills. Something else that becomes possible in Mun-or-less gravity and worthwhile in Minmus-or-less gravity is ignoring traction entirely and using an ion-engined hover vehicle. Very fun! But also very dangerous given the low TWR and high speeds.

Many aircraft parts have higher-than-normal emissive constants set in their configs, which lets them radiate heat away more quickly. I think the default value is 0.6. Wing surfaces (like your canards) and radiators have 0.95; Mk3 bodies have 0.9; Mk2 bodies and rocket engines have 0.8. Mk1 bodies don't have a nonstandard emissive constant. Crewed parts have relatively low internal max temps. With all other things being equal, the overheat warning always appears earlier for them based on heat transferring to the inside of the part and reaching a higher fraction that lower max temp value. This isn't realistically a concern unless you construe a scenario that maintains a specific heat load (enough to cook the crew, but not enough to destroy the part from the outside) for a long time.

Have you seen the airships in HighFleet? They don't float or even have any control surfaces; they're giant bricks that stay airborne using the power of MOAR BOOSTERS alone. It's a very Kerbal concept, come to think of it, and KSP with BDA is the perfect game to make something like this work in. Some hotlinked (ie. may or may not appear) reference images of the Sevastopol:

Yes, the orbiter can act as relay. Other craft in the vicinity only need enough direct antenna power to reach the relay. They will need an external antenna to communicate with the local relay; the integrated internal antennae on command modules can't do this. You can also control automated vessels without relays — and indeed without any line back to the KSC at all — if you instead have a nearby crewed craft that has both an RGU (the short cylindrical 1.25m and 2.5m probe cores) and a spare pilot (ie. two pilots total, as all vanilla command pods only require one pilot for control and I've never seen a modded pod require more). In this case I presume the controller and controllee only need direct-class external antennae, though it might even work on internals, all be it at extremely short range. The probe(s) you detach will only be fully controllable while they have line-of-sight to the orbiter, which is obvious but I mention it as something to take special care with because both the probe and orbiter will be moving around quite fast at relatively close range, making the timing of your communications windows different to having a line straight to Kerbin. For example, atmospheric entry to certain places (eg. Tekto in OPM, Titan and Venus in RSS) can take a long time and the orbiter can pass over the horizon long before you land, potentially making you unable to prime chutes or landing gear if you didn't plan ahead.

Not centrifugal but possibly what you remember or at least related: Nikola Wiche jumped a car from Minmus to Kerbin.

Not technically more powerful, but I think there are actually designs for stock reduction gears, which could trade the motor's RPM for torque. If that seems relevant to your purposes, you may want to search or ask about this in the spacecraft exchange section.

I've always imagined Mystery Goo is like the visceroids from C&C Tiberian Sun. A featureless blob of Kerbal biomass that just rolls around mindlessly. Its relationship to Kerbalkind might be like that shared between squigs and orks in Warhammer; possibly Goo is grown for food, some instances are kept as pets, and so on. Nondiegetically, I've read a claim that the Goo is simply intended to be a friendly representation of the animals humans sent to space.

Probably not; there's a YouTube channel called Nexter's Lab.

The Spark is the best engine in the sense of "if you had to pick one engine to use for every situation". Good overall combination of thrust and atmo-vacuum efficiency, and its small size makes it readily scaleable (for bigger rockets you can Just Add More™). I'd like to nominate the bare variant Cheetah, because it's almost as compact and vacuum Isp matters a lot more than surface Isp (as soon as you're 20km high at Kerbin, you already have about 98% of your vacuum Isp), but Kerbin's lower atmosphere is always the first hurdle so any single engine choice absolutely needs the surface-level performance before it can focus on anything else.

I use junior ports for refuelling, usually the extending version from Flexible Docking. It has the vibe of a mid-air refuelling arm, which is a realistic way of handling routine fuel transfers between large ships (square cube law + optimisation for low mass = extremely fragile). I still also have standard-sized ports for actual crew/cargo interfaces between craft. Senior and up are generally semi-permanent structural connections for a station or ship assembled in orbit.

Piriform's Recuva is a data recovery program that is free for non-commercial users. Your save folder is probably still >80% intact after a month. Happy hunting.

A popular mod from 7-8 years ago indeed; what you remember is most likely the KW Rocketry Vesta SP5. Rightmost engine in the image below (if it appears; just hotlinked it from a search result):

Just to pop in with a quick rule-of-thumb that I find much easier to remember than any formula: your stage's wet mass ratio (including the mass of all the stages above it!) should generally not be lower than 1‰ of your exhaust velocity. For example, if your engine's exhaust velocity is 3430 m/s (~350 Isp, so it's close enough to assume a Poodle has an exhaust velocity of 3500 m/s), your 'optimal' mass ratio is 3.43 and the 'lowest acceptable' might be around 3.