Spenzor

Had the same "slippery air" issue - fixed by installing manually, rather than through ckan. Pretty clear that the issue is caused by the ckan installation, rather than FAR proper.

I was trying a gentler approach in the hope that it would help - I have not been able to get a survivable reentry on any trajectory. My current best attempt at reentry from orbit was with a periapse of 10km - I ran out of ablative material around 45km at a speed of 2150 m/s. I'm beginning to think some mod interaction has broken the heat system - engines are regularly overheat in the upper atmosphere at 50% throttle, but are fine below ~30km and in space.

I'm having an issue with Deadly Reentry - my Mk.1 capsules keep running out of shielding well before slowing down sufficiently to land safely. My last attempt was from an 80km orbit to a 50km periapse, and the capsule ran out of shielding while still traveling over 2km/s. I'm also regularly getting heat warnings on leading edge objects (fins, parachutes, nose cones) during takeoff. Like the guy who posted about a similar issue, I'm using FAR. However, I'm using the standard solar system. Regardless, some mod interaction - it seems somewhat likely that it's FAR and DRE - is cooking my spacecraft. UPDATE: I ditched FAR, downloaded a fresh version of DRE, and the problem persists. My heat shield is regularly around 30-40% before reentry effects even start, and typically fails around 45km. UPDATE 2: I'm getting reentry effects at suborbital velocity (about 1600 m/s) at an altitude of 65km. I'm genuinely not sure what the issue is - my heat settings appear to be default.

Thanks, guys! My Kerbal is home safe with her payload of science.

I'm trying to return a single-Kerbal pod to Kerbin after an extended orbit around the Mun, but I keep running into an odd issue - the capsule seems to want to settle into an offset attitude, causing it to burn up on reentry. Because the capsule itself is out of batteries, I have no capability to correct after I jettison the service module. The only things attached to the pod are a heat shield, a parachute, and an antenna. I initially thought the antenna was the source of the issue, as it's the only part offset from the center of mass, but the tilt is 90 degrees from from the location of the antenna. Anyone have any ideas as to what might be causing this? Or how I can bring my ship home safely?

A couple of my professors gave us pieces of pie today to celebrate, and a campus organization was handing out little hand pies. We take pi day very seriously around these parts.

Is there any way to make the CM and Dry CM markers smaller? My one complaint about using this is that having the markers up can make it difficult to see where you're actually placing the thrusters - or failing to place them. This is no fault of yours, mind you - the stock CM marker is ridiculously huge.

Ah yes, that's what I feared. It seemed like a good idea in my head, anyway.

I actually had the opposite reactions to those games. MWO was fun and playable, but LL was tooth-gnashingly frustrating. Of course, I don't actively play either, so that might tell you something. If it's the size and weight of a car, and has the firepower of a tank, it must have exceedingly light armor.

I'm sure there's some sort of extremophile bacteria here on Earth that would do well on Mars. Radiotrophic fungus might be another candidate, though the known varieties seem to require organic material to live on even in the presence of significant levels of radiation. Someone who knows more about the topic could probably clear that one up.

I did watch the videos you provided, and I must say that I'm unconvinced. There's a lot of forces at work on that device, and jumping to the conclusion that it invalidates our understanding of Newton's laws is a bit of a stretch, particularly as you can't explain how it works.

Yup! though not as a player. I've tried it a couple times, but the rules are just to byzantine to hold my interest. I've played a number of mechwarrior games over the years, though. As cool as giant robots are, I'm not convinced they're practical, outside of possible mountain warfare applications (and even then, why not use a helicopter?). With that being said, you could probably build a large robot, though probably as a quadruped to spread weight more effectively - a even a relatively small mech would exert an impractical amount of force on the ground under its feet, causing it to obliterate anything it walked on.

It might be possible for part of an object to achieve escape following an explosion on reentry, but I seriously doubt it would be possible for the entire object to do so. At the point that it's generating significant shock heating, it's already lost a good chunk of its energy. Might fusion caused by that heating impart energy on the object? Sure, but logically if it's applying a force on the object, that force would be more likely to oppose the object's velocity than aid it.

From page two of the article: Nowhere near enough dV. I did a little looking - according to NASA, the OMS provided the shuttle with about 1000 f/s dV when full - so Columbia couldn't have performed a plane change even with a full supply of OMS propellant.

While I'm all for making reusable spacecraft... reusable, I'm not sure how effective this method would be. I think a simpler solution might be to give the player a discount on the next launch containing that object (either complete vehicle or subassembly). This would give players an incentive to make a reusable system of launchers for various payload sizes, rather than making a bespoke rocket for everything they launch. There's another issue, though - most dropped lower stages (currently the most commonly reused rocket part, if I remember correctly) never actually touch down in KSP - they drop out of physics draw range before they touch down and are lost.