AlexMBrennan

Actually, I don't think rotation ought to be a problem at all - if I have my ksp constants right, dropping from 50m or less should have your plane land with 7m/s so killing vertical velocity at 50m should give you plenty of time to make sure the wheels are pointing down when you hit the ground at survivable speed.

Since Minmus lacks the atmosphere needed to convert forward thrust to upward lift via the use of wings, I am not even sure what you hope to gain by doing this. Not really - you are thinking too much of Earth-like planes. The reason typical airliners land at relatively high speed is that the aircraft will stall and wings will lose lift if you go below a certain speed (which is also why they tend to have thrust reversal to allow them to "brake" with the big engines, or parachutes, etc). In space, that's not really a concern - you can reduce your horizontal velocity as much as you like before touching down (this is how "traditional" rockets land, after all). And unlike flying a plane on Earth, high horizontal speed does not help you because you cannot convert the speed to lift by pulling the nose up.

That seems like a massive red herring - as long as the game simulates mechanics/physics consistently, it's a simulator; it just happens to simulate a hypothetical solar system with superheavy elements and short distances.

Yes, for tests that need to be done in space and for mistakes in design (sorry, but I'm not gonna repeat a launch if I accidentally put on a docking port facing the wrong way)

I'm gonna say "simulator", since the main draw of the game is coming up with rocket designs and sending them off into space, with career/science mode being somewhat tacked on to explain why you are sending up rockets. [note the use of quotes - I don't think ksp is a hyper realistic simulation, but I think that this is what he meant in the poll] Realism is a somewhat orthogonal question

Rotation (sometimes you want to rotate a part without moving it) and changing root part (saves you continually rebuilding your plane from scratch if you are working on something like Spaceship Two) are occasionally useful, but offset is useful every time you build a plane (to make up for the lack of bigger landing gear)

Assuming you are referring to the stabojet: no, you really don't. By angling the engines you gain the ability to generate torque by throttling one of them down, but the price you pay is that the component of thrust normal to the vertical axis is wasted (e.g. with two way symmetry, part of the left engine's thrust is used to turn the craft anticlockwise, and part of the right engine's thrust to counter this rotation... so you get less lift whilst burning the same amount of fuel...)

Or, you know, they could be referring to the moon called Mun.

That will let you attach four turbojets when the cross sectional area of mk3 fuselage easily has space for 9 (but requires 9 extra small fuel tanks or structural fuselages instead of one huge>9x1m adapter). At best, you end up using ten times more parts instead of a single larger wing (no need for kerbodyne tanks because could just glue 100s of a FL-T100s together, right?) At best, "limited" structural integrity means you will ned struts, which limits the maximum wingspan to about three long rectangular structural wings because struts have a maximum length and can't be used to connect adjacent wing segments (biplanes would allow for larger wings since you can criss-cross struts instead of having to connect every part to the main fuselage).

I have been playing 0.90.0.705, and thus far it looks like SPH symmetry is rather temperamental, with symmetry getting stuck in rotational mode (i.e. VAB mode) earlier (left wing with landing gear facing down, right wing with landing gear facing up and the option to place 3-8 copies of the wing) and when I tried to copy a wing earlier it seemed to to place a third copy as well: Symmetry disabled: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=357259679 Symmetry enabled: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=357259782 All I did was press X once I cannot provide a craft file because by the time I had switched back to KSP after taking the screenshot the game had gone back to the normal behaviour.

I was trying to build a rocket with a large base and 4x nuclear engines (attached via a quad adapter), and noticed that I can't have any stages attached below them because the unique lateral ejection of the launch covers tends to blow at least two of LV-Ns. I figured that the easiest solution would be to take the bottom half of the intended rocket design, flip it around, mount it on a lifter and dock it with the top half of the rocket in orbit... however, I noticed that this results in the docking ports very noticeably compressing/expanding when adjusting the throttle. The relevant section (with infinite fuel to reproduce the state) looks like this: I never noticed this behaviour before with docked modules - is that the intended behaviour? Barring mods (quantum struts?), is there any solution other than not using docking ports in this way? [i ended up taking out all the docking ports and launching in one go - I got 1600t monster to get a 160t rocket to orbit) Lander will be docked to the nose later (because it will be facing the opposite way it tends to screw up staging and instruments/navball)]

Since the area in that case is infinite I don't think that's a good way of going about proving the law. You have proven two trivial cases (well, maybe), and then simply assert that all other cases are similar. By the same logic, 9 is a prime because 7 and 11 are primes. As for a derivation, this is the first hit I got on Google.

I find the complete lack of probes (what kind of space program starts with manned mission before doing an unmanned test launch?) and docking ports (e.g. barring landing leg trickery there is no way to refuel/save early craft if they get stranded somewhere) early on rather limiting

Well, you can get 372 in your so you're not the best yet

The mobile seems mostly useless for two reasons: 1) it is a manned module, so I feel that you have to include capabilities to return the crew to Kerbin... in which case you could have just stored the experiments in the command pod with zero transmission loss. A simple fix would be limiting science carried in command pods or adding a decay to science (the longer you wait before retrieving or transmitting data, the less valuable it becomes). 2) it is extremely heavy compared to the science experiment, so you could instead have used the rocket to launch a dozen science modules and a dozen goo containers instead The only use I think of is as a service module for a small lander (where multiple science experiments would be too heavy) making multiple trips to the surface on distant planets, or if they added heavier experiments.