XiXLLAMAXiX

Heck, yesterday my Valentina survived a 3.5km fall (into water, but still...)

It's possible that they wanted the SSTO to be full on fuel when it reached Earth Orbit (?). Also, I believe the highest gravity planet they landed on had 130% earth's gravity, but I might be remembering wrong...

I feel like one standard deck of cards could probably keep people entertained for a significant amount of time.

That would probably have to be one of the weirdest ways to discover FTL travel possible...

I'm not sure where you're getting your 2200m/s value from, in my experience a direct one way trip from kerbin to moho requires at the absolute minimum 4400m/s (not counting dv to get into kerbin orbit), and normally that value is closer to or above 5000m/s. I would doubt that anyone could beat 4.4km/s without some fancy maneuvering such as gravity assists or aerobraking around eve source: http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/

did you check issteamdown.com ? In my experience, 95% of the time when I'm connected to the internet and steam says it's not connected, it's a problem on steam's end...

I would recommend Neptune's Pride http://triton.ironhelmet.com/ The game is "real time" but it takes several hours to days for ships to go from star to star, so you have to log in periodically to make sure that you're not being backstabbed. Makes for truly epic conflict as by the end of the first week you're really invested in your empire. If you are interested in Sins of a Solar empire, I can arrange for you to get a copy of the original game (no expansions) so you can get a feel for it, I would of course ask that if you like it, you purchase a copy to support the developers. Alternatively, for the exact opposite of Neptune's Pride's absurdly long game, there is 10 Minute Space Strategy. http://www.desura.com/games/10-min-space-strategy.

Actually, it is known that Half Life 3, Portal 3, Left for Dead 3, and Team Fortress 3 are all going to be released together in The Orange Box 2, thus getting around valve's inability to publish games containing a 3 in the title...

I've played both. I would say that they are roughly equal in terms of enjoyment. If you enjoy 4x turn based games, you would enjoy both of them, though GC2 fits the bill of Civ5 in space better than endless does if that's what floats your boat. If you don't need your 4x game to be turn based, I would recommend Sins of a Solar Empire (either the original game, or the standalone expansion "SoaSE: Rebellion"). In my personal opinion, GC2 does a better job of making you feel attached to your empire, like, as you see Korath Clan ships nerve gassing your capital, you feel like you've failed your people, and like 100 turns later when you've made a comeback and grind their fleet into dust, you feel like such a boss. On the other hand, in Endless, when something similar happens, you're sort of like "well that's going to be inconvenient" (The same thing in SoaSE results in cursing. Lots and lots of cursing). So that's really the big difference in the feel of the games. The other differences are mainly technical/mechanics (though I will say that the fact that there's no clear documentation on how "weapon strength" and "defense strength" of military components impact performance in battle in Endless, other than "Larger numbers are better" which kind of bothers me, but oh well). So overall, GC2 has better flavor, Endless is slightly closer to chess on the chess->civ5 continuum (and has a slightly nicer and vaguely less cartoonish interface). Also, if this matters to you, GC2 doesn't have multiplayer, Endless's diplomacy system is (imo) stupid, and SoaSE is better overall if you're ok with real-time.

General equation for dv needed to take off from a body and reach a circular orbit of height H above the surface is: sqrt(G/(R+H))*(1-sqrt(2R/(2R+H)))+sqrt(G/R)*(sqrt(2(H+R)/(2R+H)))+sqrt(G/R) where G is the gravitational parameter of the body, R is the body's equatorial radius, H is the height you are trying to get to. Assumes no atmosphere, and that you took off from an altitude of 0. Plugging in the values for Vall, we get that an ascent takes 858.03m/s, thus with a perfect ascent and descent, your lander will need 1716.06m/s. If you want to land and take off to a minimum safe orbit (~8km), that will require 1685m/s, so no matter what, you're going to need to get out and push (the last time I checked, kerbal eva's have 600m/s dv, so your lander might work if all you need is the kerbal in orbit). Also, note that landings tend to take up a not insignificant amount more dv then they should, because a perfect landing requires a "suicide burn" which are hard to pull off properly, I normally give myself an extra 20% on landings to make up for this (more specifically, 60*(surface gravity)).

So, you'd want dv for direct transfer from (for example) Ike to Kerbin? Because that's actually pretty hard to calculate accurately. What I normally do in some situations is figure out the height of the moon above it's host's surface (for ike, this is about 3200km) and plug that height into the alexmoon calculator (ejection dv for duna(3200)->kerbin(100) is about 574), I subtract the orbital velocity of the moon (Ike's is avg 320) which lets you know that you need to leave ike's SOI traveling at about 254m/s. This gives you a lower bound for the dv required. Using orbital kinematics, we can find that a good upper bound for the dv required is (254 <known final SOI velocity>)(1049598 <height of sphere of influence of ike>)/(130000 <equatorial radius of ike> + <whatever starting height you're going from>) - ((1.857e10 <gravitational parameter of ike>)/(130000 <eqr of ike> + <start height>))^(1/2) which calculates to 1673m/s (from an orbit immediately above surface level on ike). the above formula I provided should get you rather accurate values in this case, but know that this makes several assumptions such as assuming that ike is properly lined up so that you can eject into a transfer exactly at the alexmoon launch window time, which is not necessarily very common. You can use this methodology to find moon->other body dv. I don't feel like figuring out moon->other body's moon at this point, =P

So add in a ton of cool stuff, start the thing running, go eat a sandwich and watch some GoT, come back when it's done, ???, profit.

Really? I personally stayed away from intel cores because from what I saw, I thought that for equal processing power the intels tended to be more expensive. (Also, now that everything is paid for and assembled, I really don't want to think I made a wrong choice =P )

here's a link to the part list. Note that the case I got was like 90% flashier than it needed to be, but oh well =P http://pcpartpicker.com/user/XiXLLAMAXiX/saved/3OSq

I'm not sure if OP is still considering graphics cards, but I recently built a computer that runs KSP phenomenally (highest graphics settings possible at 1920x1080 resolution). The graphics card I used was a NVidia GTX 750 Ti. It's a $150 graphics card (at most places. Some vendors are selling it for more. Don't buy from them) using NVidia's new Maxwell architecture. Also, because NVidia is preparing to roll out new graphics cards based off of this architecture which they claim is "twice as powerful at half the wattage", I would recommend against buying a more expensive GTX series graphics card for a bit as you might as well wait for the new ones. If you want, I can send you the complete parts list for the comp I built (was able to buy all the parts for $800, very proud of it =D )