jwenting

It had 4 microsats loaded to deploy on reaching orbit. Those things are typically science projects for colleges and universities, tough luck if they blow up but not much money lost. And indeed, no doubt a ton of telemetry stuff as well.

The rocket (originally the Cygnus) was originally designed to make use of spare Minuteman ICBM parts, which are solid fuel rockets all the way. Thus the solid fuel design (and the launch site). Also makes for very rapid erection and launch, as there's no fueling needed. Of course you're transporting those big and heavy roman candles from the factory to your facility to your launch pad which I'm sure will make some people a bit anxious, and you can't shut down the engine and let the whole thing drift down to a more or less controlled crash in case of mishaps.

mine sure aren't. At some point the ship starts tumbling (usually around 10km up) uncontrollably and that's the end of it.

Pebble's mun series are great too. The only problems I had with it were due to Bob's piloting skills (or were those mine...). Made a soft landing, only to have the lander gently tip over on its side, trapping Bob on the Mun permanently. tried to add images but they're not working it seems.

either that or bits hit other bits they shouldn't when dropping a stage (usually boosters or struts hitting the next (central) stage rather than breaking away cleanly). Had a rather spectacular case of that yesterday where everything except the orbital stage broke away cleanly (despite proper staging) and THEN exploded a few seconds later, leaving me with Bob in his Mun lander floating around in mid air about 10km up

Friend who works as a graphics artist for another game company was lyrical about it (hi Pebble ), got hooked watching her videos.

DDOS attack apparently, somebody overloading the servers with rubbish data, causing them to crash, hard, and requiring a restore from old backups.

the newcomer forum is an exception to this, apparently

yay, back as well. Now we're all as green as Jeb and Bill