InfinityArch

So after using the basic version of the mod for some time, I decided to try to the aggressive version, and now every model's texture looks hideous, even when I put it back to basic. Is there any way to revert back or will I have to reinstall the entire game?

So Taranis, have you looked into getting a modeler to give the TAC parts better models? IMHO that's this mod's biggest weakness; the parts look really out of place with both stock and modded stuff.

IMHO, remotetech should be stock, albeit with a few modifications to make it approachable to more casual users; 1. Remove signal delay and just focus on whether or not something is in contact. 2. Mission control an omnidirectional antenna with a starting range of about 90,000 km (out to the edge of kerbin's SOI), which can be upgraded for a sizable cost with the appropriate technologies researched; any object with line of site to Mission Control within the range of its onboard antenna can receive commands from it. The player can purchase (I'd assume this would be after money comes into play) additional ground based transmitters elsewhere on kerbin to increase the coverage and upgrade them in the same fashion, though you'd need at least some communication satellites to get coverage across the entire surface of kerbin.

You do realize, even with an asteroid belt as populated as the IRL belt, the odds of actually hitting one on a given trajectory is practically negligible. That said, I have a feeling you'd have to worry about micrometeorite impacts more passing through an asteroid belt, though if it became an issue you could just change your orbit's inclination to avoid the belt.

Does Unity 5 support multi-core physics? If so, yes, absolutely as soon as possible the developers should look into moving KSP over to Unity 5 given the massive CPU bottleneck the current state of affairs causes. Otherwise, unless it's very simple to move the game over to 5 so KSP can benefit from 64 bit support, I see no pressing reason to upgrade.

Is the overheating simulated by this distinct from the overheating caused by KSPI at high speeds due to ram pressure heating, and if not, are they compatible?

I've had round trips to Jool In under 30 days (each way, so more like 60 days+the stuff I did at Jool) using the vista, no idea what the total delta V was but it was something absurd.

^ 50+km of Delta V is a massive understatement. You can, with some effort, get a delta v of like 5% of the speed of light with some vista designs.

Eh, while the Vista is by far the best engine for interplanetary travel once its unlocked, it's not a particularly good landing engine given it has a fairly poor TWR if its not beam-powered, lacks gimbaling capacity (which is bad because any craft using a vista tends to be extremely heavy), and can't be used within 2.5 km of other craft.

On the topic of He-3 from Jool's atmosphere, I really think that, for balancing purposes, the concentrations of He-3 and Deuterium in Jool's atmosphere should be drastically increased, simply because sitting there and time warping while the resource builds up over days and days isn't an option, you'd have to actually wait real life days, and while that's realistic, in the context of KSP it's completely impractical due to the way the game works. Unless of course he can find a way to get around time warp restrictions in the atmosphere.

So I'm now fairly confident any schemes to harvest helium-3 from Jool will by necessity require >1 TWR on Jool, at least with deadly reentry and FAR, there's just no way to get enough lift from wings at hypersonic velocities to keep your vertical velocity up while trying to ascend and you'll burn up on the way out of the atmosphere anyway. Note also that even a few hundred meters above Jool's "surface", the collection rate is so low that you're getting maybe 1-2 He-3 per real life hour. And you get the best TWR by far from the AMI Fusion reactor, which requires helium-3. Also, it's 3 meters wide, and there's no 3 meter thermal turbojets yet.

Not yet, and given that I think my graphics card just died (all sorts of crazy distortions occur whenever I'm playing any sort of game, and a graphics driver update did nothing to help), I probably won't until maybe the end of the week.

I've tried almost everything short of a straight out powered descent (though granted, doing shuttle style banking to slow down high in the atmosphere isn't on that list as of yet, so I might prove myself wrong), and I'm still dying. Note that I'm using both Ferram and DR, so there's basically no lift to be had at high hypersonic speeds. It simply seems to be a matter of DR being made primarily with Kerbin reentry in mind.

Mainly because the big problem isn't getting back out; the spaceplane uses a hybrid fusion powered thermal turbojet, and since said rocket can run on liquid fuel, which can be harvested from Jool's atmoshpere, it can just refuel itself in flight, and it probably could make it out of the atmosphere from ~60 km (random guess) even without taking that into consideration. The big problem is that I also have deadly reentry installed, which means anything I try to send down there inevitably burns up on the way down. I think it might be possible to make a powered descent, and an LFO fueled fusion-thermal-rocket can manage a high enough TWR for that, but there's no way to get oxidizer directly from Jool, which means I'll have to have bases on Vall or Laythe to support my He-3 extraction operation, and while I was planning to do that eventually anyway, "get helium 3 so I can run the antimatter initiated reactor (mainly due to its amazing power to weigh ratio compared to the other non-antimatter based reactors)" was the first part of my plan to colonize the Joolian moons.

Out of curiosity, how low into Jool's atmosphere does one need to get to effectively harvest Helium-3? I haven't been able to get significantly below 90 km in my testbed vehicles without burning up due to deadly reentry, and even down there the atmospheric scoops still read a flow of 0.0 and don't seem to be adding He-3 to the tanks no matter how long I leave it there.

I think what Jewel is saying is that having to put the telescope at such a high altitude, while doable with KSPI tech and probably even stock, is somewhat out of scale with the rest of the game, where most distances are 1/11 of the real world.

Regarding the Helium-3 Question: Ah, I see. I hadn't tried yet, and it doesn't say that in the wiki. It would definitely be helpful to note that in the wiki.

@Fractal: Another thing I've recently noticed is that when attempting to use beamed power off of fusion reactor power, or indeed, doing pretty much anything with high but variable power demands (including antimatter production), the reactors' power requirements aren't properly prioritized above everything else; while it says in the display that they're top priority, they seem to inevitably run out of power and shut off due to the power sink putting the ship into a power deficit. Also, I think you might have missed the question I asked last page, so I'll post it again: "As things stand, there's no way to get helium 3 in KSPI other than leaving tritium around to decay. Are there any plans to eventually make it so Helium-3 can be harvested from say the Mun and Jool's atmosphere?"

As I understand it, it's because Kethane's creator won't let Fractal package the kethane plugin with KSPI because of reasons related to the license he uses for Kethane.

Hey fractal, are there any plans to add helium 3 mining on the Mun and through aeroscooping Jool's atmosphere? It's honestly harder to get than anti-matter as things currently stand, given that there's no way to get it other than leaving tons of breeder reactors lying around and waiting for the tritium to decay into helium 3.

So I've been playing around with designs using KSPI tech, and managed to built something that, on paper, would appear to be capable of reaching around 7.8% of the (real world) speed of light without warp drives. Assuming this mission was intended to deliver a probe to a KSP analogue to Proxima Centurai and thus had to slow down on the other end, it would be capable of reaching another star system (at kerbal scales meaning 1/11 of real life) in about 10 years, not taking into account the speed up/slow down time and the (still quite small but not, IIRC, negligible) effects of relativity at those speeds. Given that there's no other star systems to travel to at this point, the biggest use I can see for it would be for missions using Brachistochrone rather than Hohman transfers. Would anyone happen to know of a good way to plan a Brachistochrone transfer in Kerbal Space Program? I've seen the math for calculating transit times, but how would I figure out the ejection angle I'd want?

I'm hoping to do this at one point with deadly reentry installed.

If you're interested, KSP interstellar makes it so solar panels obey the inverse-square law, more realistic than how it works now.

Regarding the curvature of the universe, weren't there some recent results that implied the curvature constant was very, very close to being exactly 0, which would correspond to no curvature.

IIRC, interstellar travel is still on the table, but as things stand, a black hole wouldn't be very different from another star. I'm not even sure if it would be possible to model the more interesting stuff about a black hole such as the wildly non-Keplerian orbits when your up close.