Jacke

I'd not depend on something that is obviously a bug and will likely be patched even in the next point release, having the EVA pack consume Monoprop when refilled. And there's another solution for post-time warp rendezvous, putting a pilot in a crewed pod (who can do Crew Reports), as the EVA Kerbal is almost always going to be Bob the Scientist.

Congratulations on completing NCD! By the numbers, the only way to avoid Interplanetary is to do EVA at Mun and/or Minmus. A lot of EVA.

They could also put in realistic mass fractions on the tankage as well as adjust the masses of many parts, because those are artificially worse in KSP. The problems start whenever you try to understand the KSP universe and how it's not possible with matter that exists here (example, calculate the average density of Kerbin, which is denser than any matter that can exist outside the core of a stellar-mass object). It's also what made making the aerodynamics hard to get right. Of course, the best solution is if the basic rescale of the system in Kopernicus and RSS/RO was stock. Then we could have both games in one.

...and if the Green Monolith unlocks a Tier 6 tech node....

Mathematics, Physics, and other Sciences get in the habit of referring to specific constants (speed of light, Pi, base of the natural logarithms, etc) or values (distance, speed, velocity, energy, etc.) by single characters, usually draw from the Latin and Greek alphabets, but also the Hebrew alphabet (different infinite values using the first character Aleph with subscript single digits from 0 up) and some special characters, or sometimes one of the previous characters reversed (Math's use of backward's E meaning "Exists", upside-down A meaning "For every") or on its side (8 on its side meaning the Infinity of Integers or Aleph0). It allows the constant or value to be referred to in simple formula. Even with all those choices, the letters get overloaded and often mean different things in different fields.

Funny you should say that. I know the Spitfires prior to getting the wingtips squared in the later Marks had for its time ridiculously good transonic performance (when the airflow at some point on the fuselage gets to the speed of sound and shock waves and serious wave drag starts building) with a high transonic onset Mach Number. It had to came from a lower drag profile in the design. So I did a bit of digging. 2017 Aug 05 Sat usual Reddit discussion on the long glide from "Dunkirk" including unsupported comments that it had a good glide ratio, 13 to 15 'Course, being a low-drag high-speed design, that best glide ratio is going to be at a high speed, likely so high the pilot would have to have a bit of confidence and good knowledge to trust that it was the best glide speed. 2017 Aug 03 Thu New Statesmen article with a bit of critique of "Dunkirk" both as a story and its physics and hopefully better supported info 2017 Aug 22 Tue AVweb article talking about how the "Dunkirk" flying scenes were made also touching on other air combat films including 1969's amazing "The Battle of Britain" 2016 "The Aerodynamics of the Spitfire" a paper with real numbers and formulae talking about the design and drag of the Hurricane and the Spitfire I think that paper had the numbers to calculate the glide ratio, but in my skim of it seemed to never touch on it. And I couldn't recall the formula nor wanted to look it up right now. I leave it as an exercise for the reader.

Saturn I's first stage (S-I) had 9 tanks, central one same diameter as Jupiter, 8 outer ones same diameter as Redstone, 4 outer ones RP-1, rest LOX; built that way to continue using same jigs and not have to master making wider tanks at that moment. Interconnect under the tanks merge all similar propellant tanks, then provided feed to the 8 H-1 engines. Had engine-out capability after certain points in the ascent and would go for a longer burn on the remaining engines. Saturn IB was the same with its S-IB.

The problem with a full stage static test is it doesn't necessarily give a lot more experience than a single engine lengthy test fire. It doesn't load and stress the vehicle as much as an actual flight, and is much more expensive than a single engine lengthy test fire. Being held on the pad with all engines firing only happens for at most a few seconds for a live flight. These are about the equivalent of a cross between boilerplate tests and the Saturn I test series, which started out with just the first stage and dummy upper stages. Saturn I had a lot of changes with respect to previous launch vehicles (much larger rocket, upgraded engines, 8 engines with cross-feed piping to 9 tanks and engine-out adaptable flight) and started off after static tests with only a live first stage and dummy upper stages. With Starship, SpaceX is following an equivalent test program as adapted to what is being developed new for it as well as its critical performance needs. The SN are not true flight articles but test flight articles made in an equivalent manner but not up to the standards required of even uncrewed launch vehicles. They can do this because the tests are focused on short flight durations, low altitude flight, flight transitions, and landings without any payload. When SpaceX gets to producing closer to the actual true flight articles, then full stage static tests are likely prior to test flights.

The problem with making a good career is balancing challenge and grind. And also trying to engineer it too much. I saw @FlowerChild burn himself out trying to keep a tight design with Better Than Starting Manned to all the changes from KSP 0.90 to 1.0.4. And that was the end of BTSM. I think career should give a lot of options. KSP can have uncrewed and crewed rockets, aircraft, and even ships and submarines. Give more options and have ways to prevent a career from getting stalled. Have a good set of contracts that prove the cash to keep things going. Make doing those contracts for the cash a bit fun too. It's like the 3-ring circus. Have a lot to do and several ways through and make it all fun. One of the changes I'd suggest is instead of making tech tree progress based upon Science, make it based upon particular contracts to unlock the next tree nodes. That's a big shift for KSP and hard to get right, but contracts are much more flexible tool for that. However, it then begs the question: What to do with the Science? It would be a hard sell for a mod to change KSP that way. But it would be a better way to go for KSP 2.

MORE THE INITIALISM

The usage of RSS/RO is low because of the minimum number of mods needed to keep up with changes to KSP. They're always running behind the current release of KSP. And having something require mods, especially complex mods, always reduces the audience. With changes to the team supporting Kopernicus, it appears that RSS/RO can be run on 1.11.1 as some players are doing just that. Hopefully that will spread to the rest of RSS/RO. If true planetary system scale was stock, then more players could try it and see it's not harder nor really take that much longer than playing at 1/10 scale. Most of the in-game time is spent warping to the next event. There's even a lot of time warp in putting payloads in orbit.

Yes, docking with a passive target is the norm. Docking *is* the easiest part of Rendezvous and Docking--if you've build a properly RCS balanced active vehicle, use the right tools, and switch to controlling from the active Docking Port and targetted the passive Docking Port. Then it's just maneuver to align, slowly approach, and dock. It's why I laid out the details in my post above about what is needed at each stage in ship design, mod inclusion, and actions. That at least 2 mods are needed (one in the VAB to assist a balanced design, one in flight to help align) shows that base KSP is sorely lacking in proper components. I've done balanced designs and docked so many times I can get by without the mods. Even handle a slightly unbalanced spacecraft. But a proper tutorial would go through all that. It's just another area where KSP is lacking. Making it 10 times as big and allow time to pass 10 times as fast would be virtually the same. And it would allow a lot of other physics to be a lot simpler to make realistic in game.

This is bad. A space exploration game needs a career mode. Even a crappy one like KSP has at least can be modded a lot easier than trying to mod one from scratch. One active and one passive craft is standard. And sometimes the target has to be passive, because there is no control. A docking tutorial should start in the VAB, showing how to build a balanced orbital spacecraft. Two mods provide essential improvements over stock, RCS Build Aid and Editor Extensions. Balanced on-orbit spacecraft RCS is vital to avoid angle-linear coupling: when you turn the spacecraft, it also aquires a linear velocity, and when you thrust to move the spacecraft, it also turns. Then there's the 3 phases of rendezvous and docking: Far Rendezvous to get the first close approach, Near Rendezvous when at close approach target the other vehicle, null the relative velocity (that shows on the navball), then thrust gently towards the target, and repeat that until close enough for the last step, Docking. Starts with switching control to the active Docking Adaptor and selecting as the target the passive Docking Adaptor. Here another two mods add essential tools, at least one of which is needed. The simplest is Navball docking alignment indicator, which adds a simple marker on the navball to show where the passive Docking Adaptor is to align with it. The complex is Docking Port Alignment Indicator, which provides a lot of info on spacecraft alignment to aid docking. Then it's just practice. Not necessarily. Depends on how you burn to deal with the inclination issue. Best perhaps is to launch the spacecraft into an orbit matching the inclination of Minmus, but that can be challenging to achieve. Many of the launch tutorials were originally made for the old KSP aero which was crazy thick atmosphere yet minimal aerodynamic heating, which lead to some crazy launch profiles. I found it easier to learn how real rockets do them, then adapt to KSP's smaller scale and quicker times to orbit. The limited parts of rocket science and engineering modelled in KSP are still rather complex. Astrodynamics is complex. I learned this years ago reading von Braun's _The Mars Project_ and other sources like that, so I had some background. Still had a lot to learn to handle them in KSP. I just hope they don't dumb down the game. Having one physics-bending flaw like the 1/10 scale of KSP is bad enough. There are better ways to do this.

...is just another symptom of when Boeing acquired McDonnel-Douglas, somehow all the bad features of both corporations, especially McD-D, became prominent in the merged mess that was produced.

I personally wish Squad had gone with a proper real-scale planetary system for KSP, even if they made it a calque of the Solar System instead of an exact copy. They reduced the space scale when the better way was to allow more scale of the time scale. I wish KSP 2 would be a real-scale planetary system.

I think if the Kerbal can stand on a floating craft, the Kerbal counds as "Landed" on "Kerbin Waters" for the EVA Report. As you've discovered. other Science is likely more tricky.

The real world papers that attempt to consider worm-holes have to assume crazy states of matter to maintain them and I don't know if any even touched upon creating them. Considering how difficult it's been to even approach good theories of quantum gravity and how hard it is for them to recreated our relatively flat spacetime, I'd say that complicated linked spacetimes like worm-holes and the like are limited to speculative mathematical physics. So if you want to put them in a game, well, simpler is likely better but more from a game stand-point. Because it's verging on magic.

Creating diamond may not even be possible by acceleration; high pressures and temperatures without oxygen are needed. However, well before 350g, depending on the surge (change in acceleration per time), there'd be fatal internal injuries.

I think you've discovered how Mystery Goo is made.

Ah, no. Old tech rocket guidance was as good as it had to be and was excellent for many vehicles. Lack of guidance wasn't the thing limiting use of air-launched rockets to orbit. What really limits it, as others have said, is the small amount of performance improvement from carrying a rocket to altitude. Needing an aircraft to carry it to altitude limits the size of the launch vehicle. And an air-launched rocket has to handle both the loads of being carried and under thrust. It also has to handle the transition from air-drop to engine-start to stabilize to pull-up to climb trajectory, which is complex (see how much design work is done on air-launched missiles just to handle that). if there are any serious faults after air-drop, like starting the rocket engine/motor (liquel fuel/solid fuel), the launch vehicle and its payload will be lost as opposed to a launch scrub.

It's important to differentiate between KSC areas, which are called mini-biomes and have the razor-thin "Flying over ..." situations, and the 5 (for Caveman) Structures micro-biomes that are buildings on the KSC and which the craft or Kerbal must be touching and can't have anything but the "Landed" situation. I did a lot of trial-and-error on these in KSP 1.6 and during my abandonned KSP 1.6.1 Caveman LCD run. All that experience is summarized into the 3rd Sheet of my Science Checklists. There are 11 KSC Areas. For Caveman they have 6 experiments (which are all per-biome for Landed): Crew Report EVA Report Mystery Goo Temperature Scan Pressure Scan Materials Study Only the 3 Experiments that are per-biome when Flying Low: Crew Report EVA Report Temperature Scan have the razor-thin "Flying over ..." situation. To get these, I find for the EVA Report a jumping Kerbal with a PAW up can get them. The Crew Report and Temperature Scan are best gotten by pushing a 2xMk1 Pod Roller. It bounces while it rolls and with a PAW up, you can click as you move it and see if you got the "Flying over ..." situation. The 5 KSC Structures are buildings the Kerbal or craft have to be touching to get. They're marked "1" on my Science Checklists as they are present on KSC Facilities Tier 1. You can get all 6 of the Caveman Experiments for them. The 5 are: Flag Pole R&D Corner Lab SPH Main Building Tracking Station Hub VAB Main Building SAFETY NOTE: DO NOT have a Kerbal go jumping on the R&D Main Building. At Tier 1 before it's a proper KSC Structure, it's a death trap. A Kerbal who lands on the steps isn't on the ground but "Shores Flying". Won't get up, can't be moved. Can't remember if they can be recovered. The KSC Extra Information on my Science Checklists mentions a number of special KSC Structures that behave weirdly, including sharing the same Science return as their Area, thus no good for extra Science.

Ah...no. I'm not at all superstitious. But to replicate what happened long ago, considering what happened after, is to tempt fate. I have somewhat mastered manual rendezvous and docking. Getting that first close encounter is the initial far rendezvous. Then you respectively null the relative velocity, then thrust towards, and wait for the next close approach. If any of those get to under 100m, be certain it's much bigger than the spacecraft or back it off. You want to be going slower on each leg of close rendezvous so that the actual encounter at a distance similar to the size of the crafts is very slow and controllable. I'd say give the rescue a try if you're will to take the challenge. Or willing to live with the consequences of additional failures. It will definitely be less mundane than just reloading and avoiding the fateful failure. And you still have the quicksave if it's just too much. I find staging close to landing so risky. You have to be cold and absolutely certain on the landing sequence. If it's a simple lander and it's dumping a breaking stage, like on the Surveyor Moon landers, that can work as you just avoid the dumped stage. Note that Surveyor had 2.5 minutes after the burnout of its breaking stage for the rest of its landing (though it's hard to design as tightly as real-world spacecraft), Mind you, the Surveyor's had a crazy trajectory, partly due to having a Centaur upper stage early in its life and uncertain of on-orbit restart. So the Atlas-Centaur launched the Surveyor straight into the Trans-Lunar Trajectory, no parking orbit. Aimed at the future location of the landing location, no Lunar parking orbit either, just a mid-course correction or two. Then close to the Lunar surface (73 down to 11km), a Star-37 solid-fuel motor fired to kill most of the relative velocity and the Surveyor landed on its 3 hydrazine+oxidizer (likely either IFRNA or N2O4) over the next 2.5 minutes. But as you showed, practice makes perfect, even for landing sequences.

While that's true, I'd not worry that KSP 2 won't be modifiable until we actually see KSP 2. TTI bought KSP not just for the game its but for its audience, the community who will buy KSP 2. That's a community that's been steeped in having a modifiable game for nearly a decade (the first version released was 0.7.3 on 2011 Jun 24). While we've seen corporations screw up sticking this sort of landing, I have hope for KSP 2 that the decision makers will continue to see both the power of expanding the game to include features of the most popular mods as well as the power of mods to extend the game where they don't think to act and make the product better with no effort they have to pay for. As for the end of any sort of Golden Age for KSP, I still see new players come into the game and new mod authors put forward their creations, as well as a healthy community of ongoing modders who keep many many mods current with the game.

Un-Kerballed pods in the Start Node: History-based. Computerized probes were the first things launched. Having verisimilitude with space exploration history would improve the game. History and reality science based. RCS was the first 3-axis control system used on spacecraft. Exhaust vanes and gimbaled engines were used for launch vehicles, along with RCS on upper stages. And KSP's reaction wheels are far overpowered. In reality they were introduced much later only used on large and long-life spacecraft. Again, verisimilitude with space exploration history. Take a look at the RCS blocks on the Apollo Lunar Lander. Note that the 2 horizontal nozzles are 90° apart and the quads are located at the 4 45°-angle spots. Those are 90° RCS blocks and how they are mounted. Means they are out of the way of the centres of the front, back, and sides. Look for them in the stock game--not found. For small spacecraft with 4x RCS blocks the small inline Monoprop tank is ideal. It's used as attitude control and the RCS is the final stage as well, doing serious maneuvers. It should be introduced at the same time as the RCS blocks in the same tech node. The radially attached tanks are useful, but don't allow the same sort of small compact designs. Minimum set of parts for features split among several tech nodes: Worse case I think is the Breaking Ground Deployable Experiments. The first one needs 3 Tier 5 Tech nodes to get the 3 parts needed for the minimum experiment. It takes a damn long time on a 10% Science Return career. After this many years, there are some things that should just be stock. All these cases I've pointed out among them. What about the KSP / KSP 2 players on console? They can't mod the game.

This is the page to start with: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Kerbol_System Which gets you this: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Mun And then this: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/File:MunBiomeMap.png Which has a link to this: Probable best way to find the Polar Lowlands is to go for the Mun's South Pole.