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The space shuttle was not capable of deploying its landing gear remotely; needed a human to do that. Even after the Columbia breakup, it still needed a human to connect an umbilical between two patch bays before it could be done remotely.

Some people might find this article easy to follow. A Physical Description of Flight (pdf) David Anderson, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Ret. Scott Eberhardt, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, University of Washington https://www.evernote.com/shard/s203/sh/118b9c30-313d-49b5-b8f8-ce77b0019e7b/990691c5fdaaca44

http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Airfoil

Best of luck in comes what may, Rowsdower. You were the best red shirt ever! What? Isn't that the official job title of community managers at Squad?

I was told there's cake at the end.

You might have a point if it weren't a bunch of geeks discussing this in the science subforum on a board for a highly realistic (for some bounded definition of realism) spaceflight simulator game. Clearly the people discussing it were interested. Look, I'm not going to debate you on this because I don't want to divert the discussion even more, but you might want to check your assumption in the quoted passage. I think you might find it hasn't really been true since sometime in the late 1980s. In short, it's one of those zombie ideas that isn't really right, but it sounds so good people won't let it die.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/super_bowl.png

And even then you'd need to rate the simulation (the "verisimilitude" scale? ) for each different system since KSP incorporates so many different types of simulations -- flight sim, mechanical engineering sim, astrodynamics sim, planetary science sim, economics sim... To get an accurate picture, you'd probably want to rate each system for degree of fun too. Now that might be an interesting survey if you could get a representative sampling of current players.

Give the whole thread a read. People are critiquing (in the nicest possible way) HarvesteR's assumptions about what players might be capable of understanding, or define as fun, right from the very start. Then compare his original vision with what he announced a mere six months later -- it's pretty much the KSP we know and love today, albeit in its infant state. So obviously HarvesteR took those initial critiques and commentary very seriously. Consequently the scope of his vision for KSP underwent rapid expansion.

Yes. It's both. KSP started out as almost purely game, and then by necessity of HarvesteR's evolving vision required a custom simulated universe. In fact, it turned out quite a bit more realistic than he had originally intended.

I'd say that most sf spacecraft prior to Star Wars were either classic rockets, or were had other aesthetics to rely on than wings (Star Trek, Silent Running). And of course, one of the first sf ships was just a sphere -- E.E. "Doc" Smith started writing the Skylark stories in the early 1920s.

Are you asking for an altitude hold autopilot? Mechjeb has a pretty good spaceplane autopilot capable of holding altitude if that's what you're asking for. If you don't want the rest of Mechjeb, just disable the other modules in the config file and they won't even be loaded. You could also install kOS and script your own altitude hold too.

Reentry heating! Thank you. More realistic stock aerodynamics and reentry heating have been the features I've been longing for the most since I started playing. Also, I'm thrilled you're finally working on Kerbals with female appearances. Like Jeb said on Facebook earlier, "I'm just happy the gooheads in management finally realized that excluding half of kermanity from the space program only made us half as awesome as we could be." ;-) Seriously, it means a lot to young women to see themselves reflected in the media they consume.

I think that's too cynical a reading of the state of indie game development. At least my overall impression of Squad is counter to that opinion. Of course they want to make money, but I think Squad, and HarvesteR in particular, really are trying very hard to create something unique which represents their singular vision of what games can and should be. I don't always agree with their decisions, or their way of accomplishing their goals, yet I don't feel betrayed, or as if I've been taken for a chump. I don't feel used. Considering how many hours of enjoyment I've gotten from KSP, and how little of my money Squad has gotten in exchange, if anything it's we who have been using them. And really, I think that's true of most indie game developers generally. $12 is what I paid way back when, and if I have it to spare after 1.0 is released I'll buy the game again. Perhaps multiple times for use as gifts.

"Hi! I'm Boosty [the booster]! It looks like you're trying to go to space today. Can I put a parachute on that reentry stage for you?"

See my blog post: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/entries/3258-How-to-solve-the-too-many-heap-sections-crash-with-32-bit-ATM-Aggressive-version-4-4-beta rynak in particular, see wreckreation's comment on my blog post.

Just to add to what everybody else has said, remember to install the Optional Mechjeb Module for FAR. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/60933-Optional-MechJeb-Modules

Note the ;-) at the end of my question.

I honestly think a lot of the problems KSP has performance wise have to do with how poorly Mono/Unity handles memory allocation and garbage collection. For instance, one of the things I noticed was that running KSP with no command line switches, thus using DirectX 9, none of my GPU memory was being used. Once I figured out the right command line switches, I got KSP running using DirectX 11, and suddenly my GPU memory is being used correctly; KSP is no longer acting like I have onboard graphics utilizing shared system memory. And then Windows itself sometimes gets in the way. Like I mentioned, I only have 2GB of system memory and even with ATM Aggressive I couldn't get KSP to run for more than an hour before crashing. After that it wouldn't run at all, crashing on load with a "too many heap sections" error. Eventually I discovered that Windows automatically takes half of allocatable memory for itself but this can be overridden. Once I did that I was able to get KSP 0.90 plus all those mostly non-parts mods I consider essential working with pretty good performance, although I still have to run at half-res.

If you have a rocket which accelerates at 1G (so our hypothetical astronauts don't get crushed), can you marginally lower your delta-v cost to orbit by having the astronauts do jumping jacks? They're exerting downward force on both the jump and "landing" after all. ;-)

Wait... This is like that problem with trolleys and fat men, right? I know this. You put a penny on the tracks so the trolley can squash it. Now that's fun!

I'm running KSP 0.90 with FAR, Deadly Reentry, Real Chute, Procedural Fairings, Kerbal Joint Reinforcement, ScanSat, and many more mods on an AMD Athlon Dual Core 4850e 2.5GHz machine with 2GB of memory and Windows Vista Business 32 bit. It's a Dell Optiplex 740 to be specific. FAR has next to no effect on my install's framerate or other performance. The Trajectories mod however results in lots of 1-2 second freezes. Go figure. Ferram isn't doing computational fluid dynamics in FAR. It's not exactly taxing.

There is? Wow. So I shouldn't be having any fun when doing anything in real life because it's 100% realistic?

Arcade styled? You were expecting powerups, maybe? For me FAR, Deadly Reentry, Real Chute, and ScanSat are essential.

Not enough? Damn real life.