bitbucket

I've sent unmanned probes everywhere and landed on everything with them, but I've only landed Kerbals on Kerbin's moons, Duna, Ike, and Gilly.

I am obligated to post this.

Finishing the tech tree isn't the end, it's the beginning. No more grinding science, no more having to make do with lawn chairs duct taped to cans of explodium, the only limit is your imagination and budget. Unfortunately it seems a lot of people start running a deficit with the former once they catch that last carrot-on-a-stick and can't find another.

We really should be far more concerned about solar flares and EMP attacks than zombies, in the event either one occurs the aftermath would look much the same, but the way we get there would be very different. If there's a repeat of the 1859 Carrington event, that will knock out most of the world's power grids and fry most of our communication satellites. Almost immediately, industrialized civilization starts falling apart. Commerce grinds to a halt as most transactions are electronic, food distribution stops, communications cease, and water supplies that require pumps soon shut down. After 2-3 days the majority of the population who were completely unprepared for anything because they expect Mommy Government to come to the rescue might as well be zombies, as they'll start ransacking everything for food and water. Depending on the time of the year of the event, mass dieoffs might start immediately from extreme heat and cold, or might not begin for up to a month as disease and starvation begins to take its toll. The aftermath is highly variable depending on where you are in the world; in places like Europe and North America, 80-90% of the population might die within a year, in backwater undeveloped regions without ubiquitous access to electricity, there'd only be minor disruptions that most could easily cope with. This could be entirely preventable, and the power grid could be hardened to withstand such a catastrophe, but governments and the energy industry can't seem to be bothered, because money, and effort, and lazy. There are other things that might bring about a grid-down situation that would mean "game over" for industrial civilization, too, like an economic collapse that locks up most of the financial system. The world that most of us live in is far more fragile than we like to think, and the veneer of civilization is thinner than most of us suspect.

I'd like to see these added to stock in the next release, but don't see a need to rush a new release just for it.

As long as the U.S. is on the march to idiocracy, fascism, and automating everything to make humanity obsolete and unwanted, I halfway expect that in the next decade, the Russians will withdraw from support of the ISS to build their own, the station will be allowed to fall back into the atmosphere, and NASA itself will be mothballed. The first words from the next man on the moon are going to be in Mandarin.

An actual transit of Venus across Jupiter is something that nobody alive has seen, and that most of us won't live to see. The last time Venus passed directly in front of Jupiter was on January 3, 1818. It won't happen again until November 22, 2065, then again on September 14, 2123. Venus is much smaller, but much closer and more reflective. A transit would look something like: The combined light of Venus and the part of Jupiter that Venus isn't obscuring would shine at about magnitude -6, give or take.

We have more than enough war to deal with in the real world without having to add it into KSP.

The environment around Moho is about 500°K and it doesn't take much to make parts overheat.

Took some Gigantor XL panels to the Mun. Early morning landing. Midday high sun. Late evening. The last glimmers of twilight. And it's gone. Output stayed around 26 right until sunset. I think we can confirm atmospheric extinction is a thing that is.

For comparison, now we need to run a similar test on a body with no atmosphere (Mun or Minmus should do) and see if the same effect happens.

Thanks to altimetry mods like SCANsat we know pretty well how deep Laythe's oceans areâ€â€they average about 1500-2500 meters deep away from the islands, with a maximum depth of 2800 meters. My take on it is that Laythe bears a resemblance to pre-Cambrian Earth of 600 million years ago, prior to the advent of multicellular life. Sunlight penetrates down to about 150-200 meters, though it only takes a few feet of water to effectively block radiation, so there's a safe zone for photosynthetic life near the surface. The atmosphere itself is an effective radiation screen, and if there's significant free oxygen in the atmosphere (enough to have filled the chemical and geological sinks) there might even be an ozone layer. There's little reason not to suspect the presence of photosynthesizing microbial life. As for why the Kerbals can't breathe it for long, maybe there's simply not quite enough free oxygen yet and hypoxia sets in. Or it could be an excessive amount of CO2 from volcanic activityâ€â€even with an adequate partial pressure of oxygen, if the air is, say, 10% CO2, hypercapnia would set in within a few minutes. Without knowing how Kerbal biology works we have no conclusive answer. Simple life is resilient and will likely appear anywhere where it can reasonably exist; all that's required to sustain it is a fluid medium and an energy source. Simple microbial lifeforms are likely ubiquitous in the Universe. Complex life is far less resilient and it takes a very long time in a stable environment for significant biodiversity to arise. Life has demonstrated a capacity to reshape environments to better suit itself and pave the way for more advanced life, even on planetary scales.

My take on it was iodine in the soil and mercury in the oceans that gave Eve its coloration, though nobody really knows.

Excessive horizontal velocity, explosions, and tears.

I recall a post somewhere where someone did a 100-year simulation of the system with real n-body physics, and the only notable instability that manifested was that Vall and Bop got tossed out of the Jool system into solar orbits within a few years. Otherwise, nothing else got out of line.

n-body physics would basically require a rewrite of the game that would require a supercomputer from the future to run it. Regardless, you can still fake L3/L4/L5 Lagrange pointsâ€â€there's nothing stopping you from putting something 60° ahead/behind an object on a matching orbit (except your fuel supply), and it will stay there on its own just the same.

My opinion is to leave it an option, and let people play the game they want to play it.

I certainly got a lot of use out of them in .25/.90, but they've been given such a thorough tenderizing with the nerf bat that the only one I think I'll bother with is science->funds after the tech tree is done.

Once I've scienced all the science there is to science from the Mun, I usually don't go back unless a lucrative contract calls for it. Minmus is a more enticing option for offworld infrastructure anyway.

Same problem here, and I came to the same conclusion: toaster for a computer and potato for a graphics card. Kind of disappointing, but this certainly isn't the first time that games I've enjoyed have bloated beyond my system specs as the updates progress.

Every successful game inevitably suffers from a Broken Fanbase, and it becomes impossible to make any changes or additions that will appease everyone.

I'm still waiting for mods I hate to not have to get updated before I start a new career game, so I hit the sandbox to probulate Moho for temperature readings. It's rather warm.

Moho, you say? I probulated it. Eve helped a bit. Coming in for orbital insertion on four ion thrusters. It's hot. Totally made it to orbit, really. Had to go around a couple more times to get a nice circular 78 km orbit, because ions. Once the probe got a good circular orbit going, the temperatures would get up to about 465° going into the shadow... ...and drop back down to 435° by the time it re-emerged into sunlight. Landing! With actual rockets! I dumped the ion drives and giant solars, they're just dead weight. We made it! This is a spot somewhere near the equator; everywhere looks the same down here. It's also hot. This is about as cool as it ever gets at night. The temperature falls very rapidly after sunset, by over 100° in just a few minutes. Daytime is really hot. The daytime peak temperatures vary with Moho's orbital distance, from about 470° at aphelion to 580° at perihelion.

I grabbed an 1800-ton class E back in 0.25. It took an 800-ton tug and multiple airbrakes to get it into a 135km orbit. The effort involved in trying to then turn it into a fuel depot with the Karbonite mod ended in explosions and tears, and the experience has put me off the idea of trying such things again.

With the size and diversity of the fanbase, there's no way possible to come up with something that satisfies everyone. I doubt anyone is 100% happy with the end result, but the stock systems are what they are, and for those who can't live with it, there are always mods to change it.