cantab

The Science Lab though works with "grindy" biome hopping, not against it. While it can be worthwhile to take a lab on a single landing, that pales in comparison to the stack of science you can get if you run repeated landings on the same body. Heck, that's why I put my science station in Munar orbit instead of somewhere else.

I flew something that was 1100 parts on the pad and around 700 in orbit and had no crashes. The worst lag I've ever experienced in KSP, seconds-per-frame and two hours to reach orbit, but the game was perfectly stable. (Thankfully. I might well have thrown my PC on the floor if KSP had crashed during that launch.)

I use the rocket equation in situations where Kerbal Engineer gives no or wrong values, notably to work out how much delta-V my RCS can give me. I use basic Newtonian Mechanics to get a burn time estimate if, again, KER or the game aren't helping, in particular I make a mental estimate of when I should start my landing burn on an airless body. That's about it. I've never worked out numbers in orbital mechanics myself, maybe I should some day.

The behaviour you'd described matches my experience, that the engine shroud only goes away when the engine is ignited. For single engines it shouldn't be an issue. For engine clusters my usual approach is to place a central I-Beam that holds the decoupler, and the engines go around that with nothing below them and therefore no engine shrouds, and the whole thing gets wrapped in a regular fairing.

Look for a modded tech tree that makes the starting node use a probe core. Alternatively just write a few configs to move parts around in the stock tree.

At high speeds on flat terrain it's certainly useful. If I remember rightly my supersonic car would crash without SAS.

SSDs with an adapter, and that's about it. It's common for some of the 3.5" bays in a case to be completely removable to make space for stuff like extra fans or oversized graphics cards.External 3.5" bays on the other hand can be used for all sorts of stuff you want on the front of your computer. Extra USB ports, memory card readers, fan control knobs, whatever. Hence why you still see those bays even though their original purpose, floppy drives, are obsolete.

Well I have Life Support, and I did put a fair amount of work into getting my Mun station up and running, so I don't feel "dirty". But I do think the lab is maybe a bit overpowered. Now I've put in that work I expect another thousand science without lifting a finger, and then I can stock up more data with a routine Mun landing. Then again I'm pretty experienced at KSP to consider said landing, followed by a rendezvous and docking with the station in its inclined orbit, 'routine'.

Unigine don't appear to be targeting video games at all. That's not to say it couldn't work, but it's possibly lacking in game-useful features and big on working simulator features. Also it doesn't really state how it handles aircraft mechanics and vehicle structural dynamics. Most flight simulators rely on "canned" handling values which works for fixed well-known aircraft design but won't work for a build-your-own-vessel game like KSP. KSP and X-Plane are the notable exceptions to that.

Hard drive. I don't even know which one - I have two drives and use LVM (Logical Volume Management) to make them appear as a single larger one, so KSP could be on either or even split between both and nothing would care. I do have an SSD in my system too and it would be elementary to move KSP onto it, I just haven't bothered. KSP rarely crashes for me because I run 64-bit, and the load time isn't objectionable.

So for me the zeroth thing is a new engine. Unity's done pretty well but a game engine designed for games on a planetary scale could be so much better. Then the first thing I want is much richer and more detailed celestial bodies. Now I don't realistically expect KSP 2's planets to have the same kind of detail as smaller worlds in "AAA" games, but it would be nice to be able to wander around for a bit and actually feel there's interesting detail to look at, and it to actually look like a real surface not a textured polygon. This is the main thing that I feel demands a new game engine. The familiar planets and moons. Maybe joined by new ones, maybe changed quite a bit, but still recognisable. A reconsideration of the system scale. Now I don't think real scale is good for gameplay, the chief problem is launches to orbit take a long time. But I think Kerbin and the system could stand to be enlarged somewhat. Real Science, combining a much broader range of real scientific instruments with methods of science collection that are more than just click-to-get. For example a seismometer could require sitting on a stationary platform for a few months, while a barometer should be run as the craft ascends or descends through the atmosphere. And instead of just run experiment, get points, perhaps a system that models the use of experimental data to learn about the planet and allows the player to gain by having results from different experiments combined. A more procedural approach to craft building, allowing a rocket stage to be a single tank of a player-chosen size. (Though probably with coarse, "chunky" increments compared to Procedural Parts). A logical and modest extension in terms of complexity and to an extent realism. I don't like Realism Overhaul, it's over-complicated for the gameplay benefits, but some of its ideas could have a place in the stock game. For example KSP 2 might have a few more types of rocket fuel, but not the hundred-odd fuels and tiny variations in fuel:ox ratio that RO gives. Single-player and multiplayer game modes. And finally, and perhaps above all else, a purchase price. "Free to play" needs to go die in a fire.

Sounds like the usual memory usage issue. Try removing other mods, running using DX11 or OpenGL, or running on Linux.

How many atoms in a serving of guacamole? Avocado's Number. Mako fuel can't melt concrete pillars. Sector 7 was an inside job. C, E flat, and G walk into a bar. The bartender says "Hey! We don't serve minors!" The moral of TETRIS: When you fall in line, you disappear. I was making fun of hipsters before it was cool. "Comic Sans" is French for "Without Fun". This explains A Lot.

Having cause to look at the EULA for Kerbal Space Program, it refers to a company named "DEPORTED B.V", who are apparently who our contracts (that is, our KSP licenses) are with. Later on an address is given: DEPORTED B.V. Strawinskylaan 1431, 1077 XX Amsterdam Noord Holland, The Netherlands Tel: +31 20 8941 300 So who are DEPORTED B.V. , why is their name appearing in the legal documents but nowhere else in relation to the game, and what happened to Squad?

Get Squad to fix their game

That is probably referring to the 80 Plus certification scheme. Its a certification of efficiency in normal use, but says little if anything about other important aspects of a power supply.

Does the issue occur with Real Solar System only? No Realism Overhaul or anything else, just RSS.And if you're using Windows then Windows reports CPU usage as a percentage of all cores. KSP can only heavily use one core at a time so you won't see 100% usage.

"A little choppy" Understatement of the century.

Yes. The New Horizons people have written science descriptions. In any case science still works without them, you just get a boring generic message.

In any event modest changes to masses and objects of bodies should not be a problem. From what I've heard Principia does it OK. True problems will arise if you want to predict an encounter with Eeloo after going round the Sun five times but for reasonable duration journeys I don't believe it's an issue. The Principia folks state that timewarp above 100,000x, such as in RSS, is slow, but the stock game tops out at 100,000x anyway.

I doubt that article is relevant. General relativity isn't required for KSP, Newtonian mechanics would do just fine. As sal_vager said it's already possible to do n-body gravity in KSP. The question is whether it's desirable. There are advantages in terms of some interesting effects such as Lagrange points. Orbital instability could be resolved by a station-keeping feature that consumes a trickle of fuel in exchange for keeping the orbit in place. The big issue I see is that it's a lot of work for not a lot of benefit and Squad have better things to do.

Expanded my previous post, and a PS: By editing settings.cfg you can set Physics Time Delta considerably outside what the game's settings menu allows.

Well, question 1 is is that actually what the Physics Delta setting means? It's a setting I've never fully understood. EDIT: To expand, this is how I think the Physics Delta setting works. I have no idea if I'm right! The actual timestep used in the physics engine is fixed at a given physical timewarp setting, and is usually higher than the interval between frames. The Physics Delta setting then says, if the in-game time since the last frame is more than x, render another frame. In some sense it's a target framerate, and the default setting is equivalent to 25 fps. In some of my tests I've seen different behaviour in terms of frame times above and below that value, and it's of note that the debug menu framerate graph does not read correctly below that. If I'm right the Physics Delta setting will affect framerate and lag but not vessel behaviour.

If you can make a soft landing on Vall using solely automated manoeuvre nodes I'll be seriously impressed. If you can then extend your solar panels, perform science experiments, and transmit the results to Kerbin all using solely automated manoeuvre nodes I'll wonder just how insanely buggy KSP is that that's even possible.

My thought is that signal delay makes KSP, at least the probe side of it, a completely different game. It ceases to be about flying spacecraft and turns into a game about programming a robot.