UmbralRaptor

Presumably you get something like the oddness of 2300 AD's stutterwarp, where there are limited routes that tend towards long chains with a few hubs, and a handful of system are inaccessible. Also, for the purposes of this, it matters a fair amount of brown dwarfs etc are usable for jumps.

The dunking on hope thing is because a great deal of cynics (hi!), are people who have had the optimism metaphorically beaten out of them by various projects failing, under-delivering, or being outright scams. (relatedly, SpaceX really should scale back their claims at some point because they end up disappointing people despite doing a lot) The high risk part of Europa Clipper is the SLS rather than the payload, which makes it sort of the opposite of the space telescope we're mostly talking about.

Well, that's what the paper says. It's entirely possible that this "atmosphere" is a surface-boundary exosphere, given the low particle density.

Well, you'd need to build a mirror fabrication facility of some sort in orbit. This feels like something that might be interesting in (or after) the 22nd century, but in the present it's worth considering why mirrors for ground-based telescopes are only made in certain places and then moved via truck, train, and/or boat. Segmented mirrors are already used for several large ground-based telescopes, with the first being Keck I in 1993. It's not as simple as you describe because it turns out that you need to carefully shape and align the mirrors if you care about image quality (you do). The mirror shape thing can get you extra problems, since instead of a normal parabolid or the like, you end up with multiple weird off-axis shapes. I want to say that the Giant Magellan Telescope has 2 different shapes for its primary mirrors, and JWST has 3. @Kerbaloid I don't think your sarcasm is landing.

It's already a thing for some large telescopes. e.g.: the Kecks, JWST, GMT, TMT, HET, GTC, and SALT. I feel like this could be a situation where the mirror(s) and instruments both end up dwarfing launch costs.

It's intriguing, but could easily end up not being worthwhile compared with a telescope that's deployed once and maybe occasionally serviced. Most notably, consider how the Shuttle Infra-Red Telescope Facility ended up launched into an earth-trailing orbit on a Delta II.

Sometimes useful, but all too often the information is only "nice to have", somewhat annoying to access (ah, another panel to keep open), and there's the extra power drain to worry about...

There's no explicit lose condition, and unless you're playing at some custom high difficulty it's very hard to actually run out of resources to do anything By green bar, do you mean the reputation bar? That just means that your reputation is improving, and you'll get higher reward (if more difficult) contracts.

The outdated label is probably what's wrong with the map on the wiki -- the values have changed little if at all since around 1.1, and minimally since 1.0 (where LKO went from 4500 m/s to 3400 m/s)

In settings you can turn the music volume to 0, which should solve that.

It's a game that has decidedly realistic space combat, so might be what you're looking for. edit: Though if you just want fights between space battleships, and physics is unimportant, consider Gratuitous Space Battles.

Something like Children of a Dead Earth, maybe?

Assuming you did some on-pad collection to get the first two unlocks, Polar Kerbin orbit to get all the EVAs. Minmus can be the second launch.

IIRC, 0.7.3 in July 2011, though it might have been 0.8.something. Does that make me a Great Old One, or something?

Same. I want to say that there's ~50-100 m/s of savings in terms of getting into orbit at 70.x km vs 100 km. (In spherical cow land it's 50 m/s, but the lower orbit should have lesser gravity losses) Plus somewhat more for the transfer from the Oberth effect. If you don't care too much about where you land (or are sufficiently good at planning ahead), there's something to be said for just directly reentering from the Mün/Minmus. Duna's a bit more fraught, but for initial capture, the lowest possible periapsis still helps.

There is a Δv savings to be had by doing transfer burns as low as possible, and in some cases this means that one never has a proper orbit around Kerbin. But the difference is negligible if your parking orbits are low, and those same orbits make the transfers easier. There's also the problem that some transfers need very high TWR to minimize Δv expenditure. How high are your parking orbits, anyway?

There are a bunch of legacy parts kept around for several versions so that older craft and saves are compatible with newer versions of KSP. Note that the slightly different shapes of the RT-5 and RT-10 variants changes their drag (and therefore in-atmo performance) slightly, despite having otherwise identical characteristics.

The switch editor button should be just to the left of the craft name (assuming no bugs, or some silliness with an undersized window). The window size under the graphics part of settings from the main menu. (right side, under the Video title). Alternatively, you can edit the SCREEN_RESOLUTION_WIDTH and SCREEN_RESOLUTION_HEIGHT lines in settings.cfg edit: some screenshots that might help

Good point. Added the lat/long numbers to https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/List_of_bases_on_Kerbin, as well as some cross-links so that it's easier to get between pages.

Currently very frustrated that the main MERCURY6 website seems to have succumbed to bitrot. At least forks exist. (eg: https://github.com/4xxi/mercury)

Dres, obviously. Fortunately, it doesn't exist.

Generally x-ray mirrors use weird alternating materials, since they only work at shallow angles. A perfect mirror as you're implying is probably impossible because of conservation of momentum. (ie: photons usually lose energy very slightly when undergoing *elastic* scattering) Also, I have bad news for you about photon drive thrust.

Ideally not involving unlocking additional parts, though I suppose I could go back and get the ones that I skipped or grab another node or two. The craft layout: https://photos.app.goo.gl/sF77qEWnnG3iyMBF7 Believe it or not, the biggest stability problems are in roll. Yaw stability just doesn't show up as an issue, and it can survive having no yaw control at all. (reaction wheels are off by default). Pitch feels weird, so advice on improving that would be nice (though if it means reducing authority, I'd probably have trouble taking off?). Would swapping the pod with the aft strut or something be an effective way to reduce overall drag or increase stability? Landings also feel off, since it seems to bounce pretty easily. Advice on approaches / estimating glide ratios / when and how to best flare would be appreciated. As configured, the only instruments are a thermometer and a barometer. The aft girder could be swapped out for a materials bay, and I could just hang goo canisters off the sides if needed. Also, I suppose I could swap either or both girders out for Mk0 tanks (empty to reduce weight or full for more fuel) to increase range. Adding crew space for tourists looks easy, though I'm worried about weight when my thrust comes from a single J-20 Juno.

It's a coincidence -- the terrain started as a default perlin noise map, and has since seen various modifications (eg: the long river, the crater, etc)

In KSP, rockets are easy while compute is limited. In real life, compute is plentiful and rockets are hard. So going through a bunch of simulations to save a few hundred to a few thousand m/s actually gets you significantly more payload for little effort. There's also an upper limit to how much velocity you can gain from a single slingshot (it decreases with faster and more distant approaches to a planet), which pushes towards a handful of bodies and multiple passes. FWIW, My back of the envelope calculations are that from a 200 km Earth orbit, you need 5375 m/s for a Hohmann transfer to Venus, and 7236 m/s for a Hohmann transfer to Jupiter. But just getting to orbit tends to cost 8-9 km/s...