Greenspan

It's pretty clear what he's trying to do, he's integrating the velocity to solve for distance. Technically, it should not matter what reference frame you use, there is always a constant of integration; but you will have to subtract that out to get the answer you want for some reference frame. If you want to calculate the distance traveled relative to KSC use Surface. If you want to calculate the distance traveled relative to the center of Kerbin use Orbital. The result will be the same except Orbital will include the additional distance traveled due to the rotation of Kerbin. The key is DO NOT change the reference frame in the middle of doing your integration.

Eh, I don't live on planet Kerbin, I live on planet Earth in a place called reality. If your going to talk about a fictional reality we can assume whatever we want: the KSP asteroids are made of "Kerbonite" and are whatever density I (er well the dev's) want them to be.

Combining this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation with this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere#Enclosed_volume and assuming this https://www.google.com/search?q=density+of+rock . All combined with a little algebra gets us : a/(G*2600*4/3*pi*) = r so for 0.01 m/s^2 you'd need a 13.7km asteroid, for 0.1 you'd need a 137km asteroid.

Method 1 won't work, at least in KSP. Space is big, taking random shots with a few hundred objects means your going to miss. One in a million x1000 is still one in a thousand, your starting odds are worse than one in a million.

Instead of Harrier nozzles how about a servo, that can rotate connections 90 degrees. That way you could connect them to an engine to create the equivalent of the Harrier Nozzles or do 1000 other things with them

PSA should say - Don't use KSP as a "Screensaver" that's not what it's meant for

I think it will work if you have solar panels in the sun that are constantly delivering a small amount of charge. The Ion engines will almost instantly drain that charge, but if your able to click in that instant you can re enable the battery and turn off the engine. Still a little dicey, I see what the OP means, it would be nice if you could dedicate some electrical charge (e.g. a specific battery) dedicated to keeping the probe core alive; and make sure the Solar Panels maintain that charge before just dumping all available energy into the ion engines and killing the probe.

Yeah exactly what I was thinking, highlight the key points with bright text or something, super easy fix to make it obvious. Pictures/Graphics would help a lot too. E.g. put a picture of the desired orbit, that is incredibly more intuitive than the orbital parameters. I recently moved an existing satellite into a really challenging orbit, since the satellite was from before I accepted the contract it was not valid. How am I supposed to keep track of stuff like that? The contracts tab is really the only way but that is very limited/hard to keep track of the contracts

I think the enjoyability of KSP could be improved by making the requirements for contracts clearer and more obvious to the player. I've had a couple of missions go south after investing a lot of time/resources only to realize I forgot an antenna or something; this is extremely frustrating and usually reason enough to quit for the day. Obviously, I can only blame myself for not reading the requirements thoroughly; however I would argue KSP shouldn't be about reading requirements and is not the most enjoyable aspect of the game; I think some simple UI changes could be made to make it clearer to the player what they need to do. For example, have a tab to pull up the entire contracts in the VAB and in flight so you can easily pull up all the details of the contract in flight or when your building your ship; there is a dropdown tab right now but it lacks details. I think in general the contracts could be worded better and/or more explicitly. KSP is a game about thinking outside the box, and hacking together a unconventional design to meet some crazy objective, it's hard to do that when your unsure of what exactly the contract requires and you might get there only to realize you missed some random detail. Maybe all that information is already there, but it has been my experience that it is not made very obvious to the player; and usually a successful mission will require several trips to mission control to check, double check, triple check, and then write down the requirements of a contract just to make sure you don't forget something silly.

There are many IRL benifits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_launch_to_orbit

This, the sensors slightly shift the CoM out of alignment with the CoT causing a torque making the rocket turn. Or, use VAB to spread out the sensors evenly around the rocket.

Yes, I have noticed a definte slowdown as well. i7-4770k, 16 GB RAM, GTX760 4GB: 1 Part in the VAB and it lags like hell everytime I look at the floor.

I have a pretty strong computer, but for some reason when I look at the floor of the VAB everything lags/skips horribly. Even if I have a single part in the VAB, when I look at the floor it lags like crazy. I'd guess this is due to all the Kerbals walking on the floor. Is there a setting I can change to reduce this lag? Tried playing around with the settings but couldn't figure out what was causing it.

Yeah same exact results here. Spent a couple G's building a gaming rig earlier this year. I actually had 2 installs of KSP one on SSD and one on HDD and didn't notice a difference. I suspect if your going from Old Computer to New Computer the loading times will dramatically improve due to CPU, RAM, etc. which is probably what the OP saw. I'd suggest keeping KSP on the HDD to free up space on the SSD.

... start Matlab, press play button... You said you didn't care if it was in Matlab, it's exactly what you asked for... What exactly does "on rails" mean? I think a lot of people say that and don't really understand what it means. I interpret it to mean that KSP is not an N-body problem simulator. That is, the orbits the objects in the KSP system are not affected by the other bodies in the system (other than their parent object) but they still follow Keplers Laws. You could simplify this by figuring out a single orbit (using the soln to Keplers problem) and simply have the animation follow that path with a given Orbital period. I guess that's how you could do it in Excel. But, that's just more work for me to give a less robust solution.