Lanfranc

Don't be silly, KSP is doing fine. Stop worrying and learn to love the rocket booster.

A catapult.

Immediately after launch: "Wait… where did the main engine go?" Coming in to land on the Mun with an underpowered thruster: "Hmm… that's going a bit too fast…"

I had a Fredfred Kerman back in .20. He was pretty ace. Fredfred Kerman: Because one 'Fred' just would not suffice.

Currently, Jebediah is on EVA in a 5 million km orbit around the Sun because I needed some footage for a video. No, I have no idea how he'll get home, but he seems to be enjoying himself just fine where he is.

It's actually quite similar to how Earth's atmosphere looks from orbit. If anything, the transition should have more colour due to reflected light from the day side:

I don't really see those complaints as having that much of an impact. We don't know how many copies KSP has sold, but it's certainly in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps 7-800,000-ish. By comparison, the entire forum here has some 10,000 active members, and only a fraction of those are going to be "true hardcores". In the end, we're talking about an extremely small, if vocal part of the player base seen as a whole. Of course Squad should keep an eye on and take opinions under consideration to the extent they're valid (and I think they do), but beyond that, how much does it actually matter?

I see it as being in the middle of a process. Everything looks bad while still half-finished.

"I hear I am forgotten. I see, I remember. I understand."?

This would be fantastic combined with the Ordan telescopes. Actual science… sorry, SCIENCE!-producing space telescopes.

No, it's a real physical theory called an Alcubierre drive. The idea is instead of propelling the ship itself, the drive shift the space around it, contracting it ahead and expanding it behind. This allow the ship to circumvent relativity and effectively travel faster than light because it itself doesn't break light speed. It's used in the KSP Interstellar mod.

Because it's ugly and far too many people use it inappropriately.

More or less, yeah. Of course, the Alcubierre drive has lots of problems of its own, such as unfeasably high energy requirements, and the need for matter with negative energy density (or "exotic matter".) But it's at least theoretically possible that it could work.

They're quite different, actually. The Bergenholm drive works by removing the ship's intertia and thus the physical obstacles to accelerating to light speed. The Alcubierre is more complicated, but as I understand the principles, it creates a warp bubble in space that can move along with the ship inside it. This allows travel at FTL because the ship itself does not move – the whole area of space that contains the ship moves, and space itself is not subject to general relativity.

Times New Roman, oh please. The true connoisseur obviously uses Didot.

They wanted it to be "atomfri", by any chance? That's not meant to be directly translated, it's just shorthand for "atomkraftfri", "free of nuclear power".

Scientists aren't bound by pride issues? Sure they aren't. On a completely unrelated topic, would you be interested in this nice bridge I have for sale? Only slightly used.

Yeah, I fully expect Squad's eventual decision to declare the game Finished, no matter at which point it comes, will result in an entitlement-fuelled ****storm of previously unseen magnitude.

I would love to see the dry ice that could create something like this. The features that they're talking about here are completely different from the river valleys. The rivers are found in rock and have specific courses and outlets, whilst these are found in the sand and are just straight troughs that seem to end in nothing. That's precisely why they could not be identified as rivers, but had to be something else. So it's interesting in that sense, but it doesn't disprove any previous conclusions.

If you EVA a Kerbal over to the probe, he can extend the solar panels manually and restore power.

I don't think it's helpful to say that this or that approach is crap or not worth bothering with. Try out the different approaches and see what works best for you. For me, the breakthrough in docking was realising that the controls in docking mode are exactly the same as for controlling a Kerbal on EVA. Even though there's a lot more mass involved, since I knew how to control the EVA, I logically also had to know how to dock. I also absolutely need the chase cam to orient the different thrust vectors. I never use the navball for the actual docking, on the other hand. It also helps a lot to have the craft's RCS thrusters properly balanced to prevent unwanted pitching and yawing whilst translating, although the new SAS seems pretty good at eliminating that as well.

However, the cause of the Soviet outcome wasn't so much a flaw in their approach as it was the entire Soviet economy and civil society literally breaking down. I don't think that's very likely to happen in China – although then again, that's what everyone said about the Soviet Union right up until it actually broke down, so who knows.

Roughly speaking, the policy is that Mars is an objective, but it is not a first step; rather, it is the end of a longer process that involves e.g. various types of Moon or asteroid missions in order to gain experience and mature the necessary technology. The Augustine Report has a very comprehensive outline of the different options: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/home/ I personally think that going to Mars is a bit of a symbolic thing – while we should certainly go there eventually, developing a proper infrastrucure in space is much more important in the short to medium term.

"allow its invalids to breed"? WT actual F, mate?

"Document proof"? Sources?