Themohawkninja

If the experts aren't dictating where the money goes, then projects that could have worked will just be dropped for not meeting development quotas. If the experts to dictate where the money goes, NASA might end up dwarfing the DoD in costs.

Lock the funders from dictating where the money goes? That's just like how taxes work! Nobody would agree to that.

I don't really see much that can be done. What they've done with all the budget cuts is amazing, and the fact that they keep not finishing projects isn't so much their fault as it is Congress for cutting everything.

If my math is right, the megasuit can withstand a 128 m/s impact? If so, that has got to be one of those overpowered things that just needs to stay overpowered. Since this is oxygen, and not cryogenically frozen oxidizer, I would suggest that the suit slowly regains oxygen by being within oxygen-rich atmosphere's (i.e. Kerbin and Laythe). Plus, when re-entry heating becomes a thing, Kerbals should explode if they overheat in the atmosphere with oxygen in their suits!

In that case, why put an atmosphere there at all? You can't make it thick (for the sake of realism), so it's going to be so thin that parachutes won't really do anything at all.

The very last clip in this video (2:20).

That recent Russian one that you put up there practically mimics KSP. I've had quite a few rockets go that way.

Very tenuous. 10^-7 Pa during the day, and 10^-10 Pa at night.

I've though about thin atmospheres before, but there is a really bad side effect. You would end up with a similar problem that Gilly has, whereby you can't exceed physical time warp speeds (on Gilly it's due to altitude, and in this case it's due to the atmosphere), and the gravitational acceleration (and in this case plus atmospheric drag) makes the landing take a very long time, especially with an open parachute.

I have 16 on a colony on Laythe. It's got an SSTO with a basic space station (which is actually the orbiting remains of the ship that hauled the colony and it's components to Laythe in the first place) along with a science packed rover.

Gravity acts on objects by pulling objects towards each other. Every object with gravity causes acceleration (hence how gravitational attraction works), but not all acceleration is gravity. Unless you really want to get into a debate about how gravity is derived from density, which is related to mass, which is affected by velocity, which is similar to acceleration... all acceleration isn't gravity.

The whole "terror fear" you keep hearing about is a bit of a myth. It affected air travel, and every so often you here about a backpack full of water bottles being suspected as a bomb, but that's it. The "terror fear" pretty much starts and stops at the airport. That being said, as I understand it, anything above a D motor needs some basic license, and maybe you need a different license for things like M, or custom motors, but I wouldn't know. Anything below an E is free game to anyone (possible age limit, since I only ever bought them with my dad, but I'm not certain).

Of course it's not the "right kind", but in the end, the current navball works perfectly fine for orbital maneuvers, so why bother changing it? It will just make the game harder at first, since we will all have to figure out how to use the new one.

How many times are they going to try and fail at moderating the Internet? They've failed at least three times already, just give up...

I've been thinking about doing a manned landing-and-return mission to Eeloo, and since ksp.olex.biz doesn't take into account eccentricity, I don't think it would be accurate at all to calculate the phase angle. Therefore, can somebody either give me the phase angle, or post a screenshot of where Kerbin and Eeloo need to be in their orbits for a successful burn?

Science is a resource. Resources are by their very nature, grindy. Also, KSP is a sandbox style game, whereby the developers specifically made it so there is no set way of doing things, which means that the tech tree needs to be as customizable as possible. The only real way to do that is by having some resource that unlocks parts of the tech tree, and since resources are grindy, unlocking the tech tree becomes grindy. It's unavoidable. If you think the grindy-ness is bad now, you probably won't like when money comes in, since that will be one more resource, which means one for thing to grind.

No, that's correct.

I know, but I figure that a distortion is a sort of displacement, since you are displacing part of the space it a given area, even if it isn't a translational displacement.

You wouldn't bother weighing it with people on board then.

You'd still say 10,000 metric tonnes, it's just that you are indirectly referring to it's mass.

Wow, the JWST get's almost as much funding as the entire astrophysics division does. Also, all of these numbers are millions of dollars, right?

Why do you say that? I suppose it should be noted here that such a term is meant for a universe whereby we could accurately detect such spacetime distortions.

There wouldn't be much use to this, since a few huge solar panels solves the power issue unless you are going interstellar, but then no amount of energy transferring will aid you eventually.

I was thinking the other day about how every military sci-fi space ship that I have ever seen uses naval terms. You have the port and starboard sides, you might have torpedoes instead of missiles. The highest ranking officer is an admiral, an he may or may not command a fleet of ships. So, to keep with the motif of naval terms, I was thinking, could you get away with replacing the mass of a space ship, with its' spacetime displacement? That is to say, a ship with a spacetime displacement of x (kg/T/whatever) means that the ship distorts spacetime as if it had the mass of x (kg/T/whatever).

Well, if you just want a space station that orbits around a planet, that could be okay (minus gravitational effects on the planet), but if you wanted it on a ship designed to accelerate under power at all, you might not want something so heavy.