problemecium

I'll give it more consideration but at present: A: I have no aurora textures aside from the ones from Astronomer's packs, and I don't want to steal other people's stuff. B: Every new texture layer I add hurts the game's performance more. C: It's been a little while since I checked but when I last did, EVE's current edition didn't properly support noctilucent features such as aurorae.

UNOBTANIUM Seriously though, any of you guys seen "The Core?" UNOBTANIUM

Yeah, that person was what I was talking about. ...are you supposed to throttle down at Max Q? I always keep full throttle until either I hit 3 Gs of acceleration or my Apoapsis breaks 50km o_O

I admit I've accidentally burned the wrong way a couple times before, but as a careful driver who keeps an eye on my map while burning, it's never cost me more than 1 or 2 m/s delta-V at most. Also, where'd the assertion about Max Q come from? In my experience it invariably happens at exactly 36km (for Kerbin anyway) and Max Q seems (based on vehicle handling) to fall somewhere between 10 and 20km.

The wheels have been driving me crazy ever since the "fix" as well. The only reliable solution seems to be making sure they're 100% absolutely and perfectly aligned forward and horizontally - no matter whether it makes your vehicle ugly - and making the vehicle heavy enough to absorb the rebound forces. One might guess that I find the situation hacky and limiting.

Was that the one where the Sun was "microwaving" Earth by way of exploiting how the writers knew nothing about how microwaves work? xD

These days I'm gonna have to say my number one peeve in space movies/shows/games is ye olde boat / fighter plane physics. The whole thing where they have the engines blasting constantly whenever the ship is "moving," and as soon as they shut off it "stops." This is exacerbated by ships almost never having any appreciable-sized fuel tanks. Even Interstellar did that! Coming in a close second is ships always having parallel decks with voodoo artificial gravity (if we have that, why can't we use it to move the ship? And what benefit are we getting out of it that offsets the cost as opposed to just spinning the thing?). I used to care a lot more about sound in space, but that part's actually surprisingly easy to "fix" in my headcanon: for one, sound actually does exist in space, albeit in most cases far below human hearing range; and perhaps the ships have radios that pick up the electromagnetic emissions from engines and explosions and they just so happen to resemble the sounds of jet planes xD

I feel your pain. For now try hitting Shift+Enter. See? Mind you it's a bit finicky though; if you hit Enter and then change your mind and backspace to try again, it'll try to double-space anyway so you have to do it twice. At least it can be made to work the way we want... xD

I'm preparing to start pre-production of a sequel to "Sights of Kidonia" with a 50% bigger ship, if you consider that impressive enough

Less than 35 Oxidizer actually seems about right for returning that sort of minimal orbital shuttle. Especially with KSP 1.2 aerodynamics, it's easy to get back down to the ground from 70km even with as little as 10 units (I do it all the time) ...although a precise landing at KSC might take a few tries before you get the timing right.

Clearly they create armies of clones of themselves evenly split between giving you each of all possible afterlives ;P

AMEN! I was actually thinking the exact same thing the other day whilst digesting the implications of the election results. Rulers both good and crappy will come and go, as they have for all of history, and as have every war, natural disaster, controversy, beloved celebrity, despised villain, revolutionary thinker, and inspirational artist. And since you guys (understandably) left it out of the OP, here's a relevant and very good rendition of the full speech (starting about five minutes in... this video was longer than I remembered xD ):

I don't think there are any. This game's kind of linear and boring.

Also have a look at the plans for NASA's Orion MTV: With the exception of the small return pods docked on the front and side, the Orion MTV is designed to be assembled in space (albeit from parts fabricated on Earth) and remain in space for the duration of its service life.

I'm so confused ._.

Please look in the EnvironmentalVisualEnhancements main thread for detailed information on how to add this mod to your game

Sorta both. EVE seems to have some limitations insofar as I can't currently find a way to control how fast the layer's opacity changes with distance (as used to be a feature), so I had to make a compromise between making it opaque enough to show up clearly from Kerbin (and end up being partially visible near the Mun) and making it transparent enough not to show up from near the Mun (and being too subtle to notice from Kerbin).

JOOL [DUH]

If you're curious: I read that the Aero FX shader used for mach and shock heating effects is based on a modified fur shader. To those who've done any dabbling in 3D animation or writing shaders, the phrase "fur shader" is practically interchangeable with "RIP graphics card, I knew you well." So by all means turn that Aero FX quality down because it might well be the single most graphics-intensive thing in the entire stock game xD

The terrain looking blocky is due to your game settings, not this pack or any mod. As for the rest it looks basically the way I made it. It's not going to be as pretty as Scatterer, and the default game has no clouds at all, so take that as an upgrade or downgrade how you will.

It's not graphics that's at fault. Plenty of people here have installed tons of graphics mods that make the game far more GPU-intensive with minimal loss of performance. Reading your post, I get the impression that you're used to games that involve a lot of work by the computer to make everything look awesome and that are well optimized for parallel processing on multiple cores. On the other hand, the individual CPU cores do relatively little calculation as far as game update loops, physics, AI, etc. Consequently most modern gaming rigs have huge souped-up graphics cards and multiple CPU cores which are individually weak. KSP is completely different on a fundamental level. The "skybox" you mentioned isn't a skybox at all but a 3D surface whose color gradient and transparency are computed in real-time based on the camera's position in space (note that the sky looks different at high altitudes, in outer space, or on other planets). Most significantly, KSP is a physics game - rather than simply emulating the motions of physical objects like vehicles or a few rigid bodies as is the norm in most games, in KSP the game is built around precisely simulating every force and interaction affecting every part in the game. In addition to a physical model, each of them has a collision mesh and a "drag cube" that determine where and how it bumps into other things and what happens when it moves through air at high speeds. KSP additionally adds in transsonic effects that affect the ship's aerodynamics as it approaches and crosses the sound barrier. When each part is freely moving on its own, it's often possible to move them all to different processing threads on different cores, but when all of them are connected, KSP is more or less forced to treat the entire ship as a compound object with hundreds of internal mechanisms. Every frame, the game has to loop through each part on the ship and perform a series of calculations involving each other part on the ship. Thus the performance ends up tied to the square of the number of parts in the ship, and every additional part exponentially increases the work that needs doing by the CPU core in question. Note that in almost every screenshot you posted, at least one dindividual CPU is working at near full capacity. There are also computations constantly being done involving changing levels of detail on the terrain, predicting the ship's orbital parameters, animating the Kerbals inside the ship, etc. I won't claim that there's no further optimization to be done, but a huge amount of optimization has already been done just to get this far, and KSP isn't going to start performing much better unless CPU clock speeds get way above 4 GHz or SQUAD hires a bunch of computer science geniuses to sit down and basically rewrite the game from the ground up.

It's a long-standing terrain bug. The capsule was saved while in contact with the terrain, and while the game was loading and the levels of terrain detail came in one after another, for at least one of them the terrain was slightly higher so that the capsule intersected it. Thus the terrain ended up reading the situation as a capsule being jammed into it really hard and pushed the capsule out into space, after which it fell back down and had the misfortune to land right on your rescue ship.

Earth. It's completely overrun by idiots.

TIL: ayan4m1's fork of Kronal Vessel Viewer loads up in KSP 1.2.1... but doesn't exactly work...

^ On that note I actually would have put them there were I in charge xD