Beowolf

I just got a mental image of alien visitors labeling our languages that way. Earthish, Earthese, Earthian, ...

It just hit me: I've heard that stated many times, but how does the multiple-docking-port trick work then? Once they dock and the final vessel's assembled, it can't still be a tree structure, can it?

I tend to keep Jeb around KSC as a test pilot. Beyond that, it's pretty much just making sure I have the right mix of pilots, engineers and scientists.

Been using Linux since long before Squad was founded. But no, I've never spent much time running KSP on it. Every time I've run into a memory problem, I've found a new way around it on Windows. My Windows laptop's a lot more powerful than any of my Linux boxes so, when I've tried KSP on Linux, I'm taking a big performance hit.

Prioritizing real-world robots ahead of KSP virtual robots is anti-virtual bigotry, and should not be tolerated! OTOH, it probably pays better.

Found a list of the regulations by-country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultralight_aviation#Definitions

I don't see how Batman having access to kryptonite would matter beyond the first surprise. Superman doesn't have to get close to use his heat vision, super breath, throw rail cars... Hell, get Batman away from innocent bystanders and Supe could drop meteors on him from orbit. How is this supposed to be challenging? What did you think of Batman's costume in the trailer? I thought it was looking more like powered armor than a bat-suit. How far we've come from Adam West's spandex and George Clooney's molded nipples.

You're missing the whole point of the ultralight category. They AREN'T approved by anybody. The governments have simply chosen some limits like maximum weight and horsepower, and require a low stalling speed so you are less likely to get into fatal trouble near the ground. Within those limits, in most countries nobody has approved either the aircraft's design or the pilot's competence. Between the low speed and light weight, they're no more dangerous to bystanders than a go-kart, so nobody worries about it. Next is the experimental aircraft category, where you can personally build pretty much any insane design you want, but have to have an FAA representative inspect it for "general airworthiness", which sounds awfully vague to me. Once approved, you can treat it pretty much like any private plane, but for non-commercial purposes only.

Anything that doesn't look good stuck on the outside. Also, I use them in cases where I have mismatched-diameter parts.

Agreed. In my years of playing I've created many rovers. But not a single one in a career-mode game. Started a couple, but immediately got frustrated by the ridiculous position of certain items on the tech tree. For similar reasons, I've only built a single winged aircraft in career. Finished my mission; crashed it intentionally out of disgust, and never looked back.

I did it in just the opposite order and ended up at the same place you did. I let MJ teach me to rendezvous and land on airless worlds, but considered it training wheels and was always eager to take over manually. Now, years later, it's practically an even split between using MJ, making a maneuver node, or just winging it completely by-hand, watching the MJ instruments to see what I'm doing. The main maneuver I still use MJ heavily for is launches. That's because I first built a standard booster for each weight class, and tuned them with dozens of launches until they practically fly into orbit without intervention. By the time I'm launching real payloads they're downright boring, so I just let MJ handle most of them on 2x speed. I like to build huge constructions in orbit, so for me the fun starts after the parts are up there. Oh, and almost forgot Kerbin reentry! Even when I reenter manually, I always have MJ's landing autopilot projecting my landing point, because I'm still terrible at judging that myself. Without MJ, I feel proud if I even get within 200km of my target!

I personally handle this problem via Kerbal Alarm Clock. Whenever you let KAC change ships for you, it'll create a new save. But those saves aren't convenient to use in an Ironman-style game. Loading saves is disabled so you have to close KSP entirely and rename one to persistent.sfs. That's perfect for giving me a safety net in-case the game flakes out, yet being too much hassle to use as a quickload replacement. Glitches that don't destroy a whole mission I usually treat as random mechanical failures, and my Kerbals go EVA to improvise solutions with new parts from a handy KIS container.

I believe it's because Principia isn't ready for end users to play with. It exists in the dev forum so the author can get other devs to help develop and debug it. Scroll down and read the warnings in boldface. Principia isn't ready for actual play yet, and the author intelligently has no desire to provide end-user support on an undocumented and unfinished mod that can corrupt savefiles. If you aren't a developer yourself, experienced with collaborative development, I don't think he wants you to have Principia yet. Not because he's being obnoxious or lazy, but because you'd end up unhappy, and he's saving you (and himself) a lot of wasted time and frustration. Perhaps he could consider a non-technical disclaimer at the top explaining this, assuming I've read his intentions correctly. As it stands, the first post is all in dev-speak and people like you who don't speak that language will naturally end up confused about what's going on.

Were those ladder rungs between the twin nozzles to let a Kerbal push the ship back home? If so, nice touch!

A excellent, though overdue, idea! Thanks for listening to everyone who asked for it. I used to manage a QA team, and ten people can't possibly do thorough testing on such a complex app, even disregarding a trillion possible combinations of mods! Distributing it Steam-only is kinda backwards, leaving out the most experienced players like me who bought KSP long before it was available on Steam. But the logistics are what they are, so I won't give you crap over it. Since I'll be missing out, all you Steam people please do a thorough job, and thank you!

Haha, well phrased, sir!

Yes, I've done it, though not initially for stability during ascent. I built a family of vertical launch/recovery SSTOs that used airbrakes (modded to have a higher maxtemp) for trajectory control during reentry. It was just serendipity that I later noticed the airbrakes gave me unparalleled steering authority during launch, and could put absurdly wide, even unbalanced, payloads into orbit easily. Despite what the other players here have claimed based on their prodigious common-sense, when I actually measured airbrakes vs fins* there was no difference in efficiency. That makes sense when you watch an airbrake-stabilized launch. With a normal, balanced payload, the airbrakes rarely move with anything more than the tiniest twitches. A proper gravity turn is, after all, aerodynamically just going straight. ----- *5 trials with each, 20t payload, MJ ascent with 40% curve, 1.4 TWR at launch. Conclusions based on remaining dV upon reaching 100km circular orbit. Results were scattered randomly within a 2% band. First stage was a single huge Procedural Parts tank. edit: Crap, these tests might have been done before 1.0.5. I didn't include the KSP version in my spreadsheet.

What, you mean NASA doesn't finish rendezvous with a 100 m/s main engine burn a few meters from the station? And I thought I was running a realistic space program!

Ah, so no SRBs needed when you're using the crew module? I like that!

If I had a dollar for every time I stop by to see if 1.1's out yet, it's getting a bit embarrassing to think of how many dollars I'd have. So I'd donate them to the authors of my favorite mods, and make them really happy. Checking in more than once a day's perhaps a bit excessive, and I think I'm averaging around three. But see, once, there was a new release and I'd been sick and sleeping a lot and so didn't find out for like twelve hours! NEVER AGAIN!

Agreed, though I don't think "why didn't they use the 1B?" is a question that can have a meaningful answer. NASA wanted small and very cheap to operate. Congress are the ones who said to give the shuttle a 30 ton capacity, because the Air Force needed a new rocket too, so let's combine them! It was a 100% political decision by a bunch of dumbasses who apparently couldn't see the reasons not to build a minivan that had to drag a semi-trailer everywhere it goes, so you aren't going to find a lot of logic here. :/

I got spoiled by the Dragon V2 in Laztek's SpaceX kit, and since it isn't currently working in 1.0.5, have been using the Super 67 pod which also comes with built-in engines for escape/landing.

That's a gorgeous design, but I don't believe in your landing. I don't think you can angle a linear aerospike's thrust like that without pivoting the whole engine assembly, and RCS thrust is orders of magnitude too tiny to hold the nose up. But add some SuperDraco-style engines on the underside for final deceleration and landing, and you have a sweet ship. You will still need landing gear, IMO. It can be pretty simple and lightweight but without it ground handling seems like it'd be a nightmare.

I don't like combining cargo-carrying with crew. Yes, the shuttle did that, but with today's hindsight it was clearly a bad idea that forced them into an inherently unsafe design. What about all those times you just want to swap a few ISS astronauts? You're wasting the costly launch of a heavy-lifter, unless you just happen to also have a new space station module or 50 tons of satellites ready to lift as well. My support would go to dual programs. The smaller crewed craft would be >99% reusable, and nothing lost but fairings and SRBs on the cargo craft. Both should have simple enough support requirements that they could theoretically reposition to, and operate from, any simple spaceport worldwide with a single custom-built support building. The idea being to sell or lease them, rather than the manufacturer operating them. The crew version, if winged, could perhaps be something like Faget's DC-3 shuttle. Yes, wings are wasteful but my goal isn't to be the most efficient, but to have the highest safety and lowest operating costs. Half a dozen astronauts and their gear don't mass very much, and being able to land either under power or with a shuttle-style glide is one heck of a safety feature. For vertical launch systems, the 2016 version of Falcon 9 gets impressively close to qualifying. They're already assembled horizontally in a hangar, and have pretty simple support requirements, so no trouble there. But it isn't reusable enough yet. I'd want to see 2nd stages recovered and reused, and we'd have to do something about that trunk. Musk's said their internal analysis concluded recovering the 2nd stage was possible but not economically practical right now, so maybe the next generation. He clearly wants a fully-reusable system and is moving in that direction as fast as possible. As for the cargo carrier, didn't you pretty much just describe what a Falcon Heavy's supposed to do? It's rated at 53 tons instead of 60, and we don't yet know about the maintenance costs or longevity, but otherwise your specs seem dead on target. Or, for a traditionally-Kerbal solution, we could tie four Skylons together with struts and lift 60 tons. Certainly it can! I've done that in KSP using Laztek's Falcon 9, so obviously it works IRL, right?