Streetwind

The notion of "permanently" disrupting the ring system is a bit odd, since the ring system isn't permanent in the first place. It's not ultimately stable and, given enough time, will disperse on its own. I suppose your question would be better worded as "would humans be able to significantly damage the ring system to the point where they stop being rings". And my answer to that is: I highly doubt it. Maybe with a concerted effort to do so, in a far future; but why would anyone make a concerted effort to do so?

You need to understand that things higher up in the technology tree are not necessarily upgrades. Not in KSP. The game only got a tech tree in 0.22, quite a short while ago. All the time before it, there was only sandbox mode. And if you have a sandbox game and you make parts for it, there is no sense in making parts that are clearly better or worse than other parts. Instead, you make sidegrades. Parts that perform a different function, that have their own niche somewhere. For nuclear rocket engines, it's amazing fuel efficiency in vacuum. For R.A.P.I.E.R.s, it's being an all-in-one spaceplane solution. Neither of the two is suited for launching rockets. You know what's suited for launching rockets? The LV-30T, for instance. You start the game with it unlocked, but as it happens, it has among the best stats in the game for lifting something off the pad. That's not a mistake; that's simply its niche. Exactly what it was designed to do.

Yeah, it doesn't really matter for control. But I generally find that I can more easily fit 4 smaller engines on the outside than 1 large one underneath. You want your lander to have a wide stance and a low center of mass so it doesn't fall over when landing on uneven surfaces in low gravity. Building outwards in 4-fold symmetry assists that.

Yeah, unless you installed a mod that loads a different, third-party tech tree, it should be impossible to not receive the goo canister right away. If this persists, try uninstalling KSP and reinstalling it fresh.

Highlands are not hard to find either. Just look for regions that look very mountainous to you. Then in those regions, see if you can find any peaks or areas that are colored a lot darker than the surrounding areas. Those are the highlands. There's actually quite a lot of such area, it's really hard to miss. It's practically exactly what Tordan is asking for - the biome has its own color texture

Which is exactly the thing he cannot do, as he stated multiple times...

Huh.... isn't Kepler crippled due to losing two of its reaction wheels? It was said it isn't able to keep itself steady while tracking a distant object over time anymore. Was it repurposed to something simpler, or did they get some data of something staying in front of it long enough by pure luck?

...Yeaaahhh I'm just going to smile and nod as I look at this math. Smile and nod.

I was actually thinking more from a slingshot-around-Kerbin perspective... if you happen to be dropping in from the ascending/descending nodes, you would be level with the planet, but otherwise you might come in at a significant angle. Can you use the slingshot maneuver itself to make a plane change in addition to getting the gravity assist? Or would you have to leave Minmus' SoI in a direction more towards the ecliptic plane, and then make a midcourse correction into the final slingshot approach after you reach it?

If you bring a 2HOT thermometer to Minmus and take a surface reading, you will notice the temperature is always roughly around 0°C, maybe one or two degrees lower. One of the science messages (dunno if it's from the thermometer or from a different report) also states that it is "just cold enough for water to freeze". So from an ingame canon standpoint, something keeps Minmus cool enough. What that something is - albedo, rotation, a giant fridge inside the core or other things entirely - that's for everyone themselves to imagine

Do the values for Kerbin slingshot already incorporate the cost of leaving the Mun's/Minmus' SoI? I'm asking because I remember my last Mun lander on a 10km circular orbit required in the neighborhood of 275 m/s dV to escape and drop its Kerbin periapsis deep enough into the atmosphere to aerobrake. Thus we'd be talking maybe ca. 270 to initiate a close-pass slingshot that skims past right outside the atmosphere. That, in turn, would imply a mere ~190 m/s burn during the maneuver to make the interplanetary transfer to EVE, which seems very small to me. Not saying it can't be true, but I just want to make sure I'm reading this right. To make this comparison even more interesting, by the way, you could add a third column with Kerbin orbit direct transfers minus an eyeballed value for getting out to the Mun/Minmus and circularizing there. This would allow a rough estimation of what you save (or pay extra) for a mission starting from a refueling depot in Mun/Minmus orbit compared to the same mission starting from a refueling depot in Kerbin orbit. Also might be worth noting that missions starting from Minmus pay more than the theoretical figure given here because they must perform an additional plane change beyond the normal ones for most missions, as Minmus itself is in an inclined orbit.

Gonna bookmark this thread...

The info can be found on the dev blog. Every tuesday there is a post that updates on last week's development efforts. All the blog posts are also replicated here on the forums. So basically... you were required to click the "Forum" button and just look at what you see - that would have been enough to find it

...Now you're making me imagine that annoying robot from the Borderlands series...

I don't think you can use that reasoning. If it came to that, the soviet N1 moonshot would be as real a launch system as the Saturn V, because at one point someone decided to order it built. But the program was canned before the rocket ever managed a single test without exploding. It never reached the edge of space, and never flew a successful mission; in other words, the theory behind it was never realized. The Energia Buran, on the other hand, is as real a launch system as the space shuttle. It was canned too, but not before managing a fully successful launch where its payload (the Buran shuttle) achieved the intended orbit. That means regardless of its cancellation, it had that one flight. It launched something into orbit. Thus it is not theoretical.

A launch system stops being theoretical the day it launches successfully for the first time, and not a moment sooner, good sir No amount of planning, advertising, failed tests and grounded parts display changes that. Too many promising projects were canned a few meters before the finish line. It must fly. And that's why the Falcon Heavy, too, must fly. Until it does, it will be theory. And SpaceX knows they can't make money off of a theory. Now, the fact that SpaceX may never turn profitable? That's genuinely new to me, and surprises me even more. It may be very altruistic of Musk to throw his fortune towards accelerating space development, but ultimately we need space development to be sustainable. Because when there's money to be made, that's when the broad public starts taking an interest, and things really accelerate. As such, I hope SpaceX can at least manage a "black zero" at the bottomline eventually.

Irrelevant. Every species destroys its own habitat when overpopulating it. Take a look at what a swarm of locusts does to a landscape it passes through. We're merely more efficient at it than most other species because our technology allows us to be so. The difference is that humankind at least makes some sort of effort to preserve deadly predators that can kill a grown man with a strike of its paw, or to replant a small fraction of the forest it has cut down. Nobody said that the balance is positive, but I've never seen a deer nurture a wolf, or a beaver dig a hole to plant a tree. Humans are fairly unique in this respect.

SpaceX is actually undercutting every other launcher anywhere near the weight classes they can support. Even Soyuz. They make an active effort to be the single most affordable option, always, even if it's by only a couple dollars out of several thousand per kg. I've wondered about this strategy before. They must be banking quite a bit on long-term income, because right now they are fielding their contracts with a launcher that's basically still in-development (it's no coincidence the Falcon 9 v1.0 got replaced by the v1.1 variant only a couple launches in) and thus, no matter how well-designed and efficient, has not come anywhere near amortization. At the same time, they're going through at least one new Merlin engine generation every year, have other engines besides that cooking up as well, are working on completely new flight systems such as the Grasshopper, and have at least two future launch vehicles in development along with a fresh-out-of-development spacecraft and its still-in-development successor. And the big cost saving mechanism they're advertising - he reusability of their launch stages - hasn't even posted a successful internal test, let alone been applied. I can only guess they're currently cannibalizing the funds they got from contracts for launches in 2015+. The mind boggles when imagining how to turn that kind of venture profitable. Elon Musk is a brave (and somewhat scary) man. In that respect, the Falcon Heavy is probably their ace in the hole. They don't need another super rocket that can beat the (still theoretical) SLS... they just need to pull off their launch demo this spring. If they can show that this rocket exists and flies... The Falcon Heavy carries twice the payload of the next-heaviest currently active launcher, the Delta IV Heavy, and SpaceX claims that launching it only costs a third of said Delta IV. Such a launch vehicle could create a whole new market, making it actually economically viable to have launch masses this large. And the Falcon Heavy's R&D costs should be reduced by the fact that it's essentially a trio of Falcon 9's strutted together. A very Kerbal solution, in my opinion

Over 20,000 space-capable nuclear warheads between USA and Russia alone would like a word with you.

You should add a special tier for those who manage to do it without the broken 48-7S

Why make a new thread about this, when this thread is literally six lines below it...?

Honestly I fear the day such a thing would become a reality. Largely because it would allow the most ruthless of us to benefit the most, as usual. See, there's a distinct problem with the notion of inviting them onto our planet and "just giving them some land". What land, may I ask you? What do we have available to give? We can choose to give them utterly inhospitable areas like Antarctica or the Sahara desert, which to them would be no different than remaining on their ship, because it would require them to live in closed biodomes. So that's not an option. Then we could offer them hospitable but currently uninhabited land, such as large swathes of Canada or Russia or Brazil... except that those areas are one of the last remaining biospheres that make our planet Earth so earth-like. Do you wish to give up more of the critically important Amazon rainforest that's already being consumed at an alarming rate? 250,000 individuals require a LOT of space if they must be quarantined for safety reasons, live completely self-sufficient because they eat different things than we do and have no industry to trade with us. It would be the equivalent of a small nation; maybe around a thousand square miles (2600 km²), the size of Luxembourg. And then the big one - giving them land that's already inhabited. And make no mistake: even the Amazon rainforest, the Australian outback, the Sahara desert and the wilds of Russia are technically inhabited to such a degree that the arrival of the aliens would displace entire villages. Maybe entire tribes and their unique cultural heritage. What about the rights of the humans in question? What if, no matter what they are offered by governments, they simply refuse? And you can't split up the alien's population either, because they can't interbreed with any earth-based beings to widen their gene pool. They need to all be together to sustain a healthy population. So this is where it gets ugly: while the UN and the democratic nations are still debating about human rights, other and less scrupulous countries will already be welcoming the aliens with open arms. I bet the Chinese government for example wouldn't even skip a beat when signing a warrant to indiscriminately deport the entirety of the population of a province in order to hand it over to the extraterrestrial guests in exchange for their technology. (Sorry China, but you know it already happens every day on a smaller scale.) The less a country cares about its human population, the more likely it will be able to make room. And who's going to stop them? The UN? Hardly. The result would be nuclear war. The UN won't do a thing besides talking. The end result is that we have a nation somewhere on earth with a government characterized by ruthlessness which suddenly becomes a hundred years more technologically advanced than the rest of the world. Do you wish to live in such a world? I certainly don't.

Mod support requests should go over here, for the record: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/forums/13-Add-on-Requests-and-Support

He didn't overlook it. He stated "disassemble on the subatomic level". That literally means it can build iron atoms out of neutrons, protons and electrons.

I watch it load, even with mods. Or especially with mods. I found that alt+tabbing out to do something else slows down the loading process by an order of magnitude.