cantab

My understanding is the most efficient ascent or landing is a "constant altitude" one. Take off and immediately pitchover so that you maintain zero vertical speed as you build horizontal speed. As you gain speed you will be able to pitch closer and closer to the horizons. Once you attain a ##x0 km orbit cut engines, coast to apoapsis, and circularise there. With a high TWR lander you'll be aiming quite close to the horizon from the start, but with a low TWR one you'll be aimed much more vertically. In practice you'll need to adapt this to ensure you clear any mountains. I think it would be most efficient to maintain a constant non-zero vertical speed that's just enough to clear any terrain ahead of you, then let it drop to zero when you're high enough.

This doesn't add any extra capabilities or options. It just gives you an alternative interface to the Control Panel.

Yeah, that was my thinking, that reusing the core doesn't look very practical anyway. But maybe I'm wrong. Ultimately SpaceX aren't likely to be able to re-use everything with the Falcon 9's approach though, at the very least reusing the upper stage looks completely impractical.

Those figures sound about right. They may be a bit high for the Joolian system - you can get from Laythe to Kerbin orbits for about 1100 m/s. They may be a bit low for Eeloo.

"Any planet" is a bit impractical, but it's feasible to make good general purpose landers. For airless bodies you can use the same design on a lot of them though it may be overkill for some. Build to handle somewhere like Eeloo or Vall. Atmospheric bodies are a bit trickier but a Laythe lander should also do Serran and if it's rocket-only (no jets) probably Lave and Duna too. I believe the "challenge" bodies in New Horizons, that will want special treatment, are Ernus, Eve, Titanus, Tylo, and Tidus. And maybe Arin too, and Leouch if you want to return from its crevasse.

Wouldn't the crossfeed help the reusability? It means the boosters drain their fuel more quickly which in turn means that when they decouple they have less distance to boostback. It would also mean that a payload mass that demands the boosters be expended without crossfeed might permit booster recover with it; depending on the payloads customers want to launch this could let the crossfeed pay for itself.

Eve entries are tough. The speeds are higher than at Kerbin and I believe the atmosphere doesn't tail off as neatly into space. A ship that big is going to be a real challenge to bring down fully fuelled. I can see three basic approaches: Heatshield. You'll probably need to bodge one up using multiple smaller shields arranged together to protect the whole craft. High-drag devices. You tried airbrakes but I think you'd really need to spam them. An alternative might be large wing panels, and "pancake" into the upper atmosphere shedding what speed you can, but getting to Eve in the first place with such wing panels probably won't be easy. Refuel on the surface. Preferably using ISRU, but you could instead drop a series of smaller fuel vessels that can safely enter and land.

True. I added a few extra bits to mine but it's still pretty simple. Think Skylab, not ISS. I still consider it a space station.

This highlights the way things are going for Windows 10. Complex, powerful tools will allow businesses to control their software updates to ensure there are no bugs, but home users are now denied even a modicum of such control and are essentially made unpaid beta testers whether they want it or not. Which in turn is probably one reason why MS were happy to not charge such users for Windows 10.As for the privacy stuff, well it's pretty poor how much information Windows 10 tries to take and how many different options you have to set to prevent it. More seriously, perhaps, is that Microsoft's "unified" terms and privacy policy mean they claim sweeping legal powers over people's computers. They may not be disabling your hardware or reading your files now, but they're claiming the right to do so at any time in future, and I think people are right to be wary of that.

So Jeb was on top of a Munar mountain, out of EVA fuel. I had Arnica fly down in the crew return ship, never meant as a lander, to give him a refill. The ship had a probe core so I never had any real need to send Arnica in it. She landed on target but at the cost of almost all the ship's fuel! Jeb got a jetpack refill, went back to his lander, and launched. Thanks in part to a bad ascent he only just made it back to the station, using up all his fuel and docking with the very last drop of monopropellant. Meanwhile I jetpacked Arnica to orbit, having used the last of the fuel in her ship to give her that crucial boost off the Munar surface. She didn't though have enough EVA fuel to rendezvous with the station. The station needed a new crew return ship anyway, so I launched one with an additional pilot, modified with a little extra fuel and landing legs for use as an emergency lander if I need one again. I had this ship first rendezvous with Arnica, freely floating around the Mun, then got it to the station. It's fortunate USI Life Support is a lot more forgiving than TAC, giving an EVA Kerbal 15 days rather than 1 day of survival. With my mishaps overcome I started reaping the rewards. 28 days of research gave me around 300 Science, and I reckon I'll get another thousand or so before the data drains too low. Starting to think the Science Lab is just a bit overpowered. Next thing in my station ops will be to bring up a proper solar array to replace the girders covered in ox stats I have at the moment, the lag is awful.

For what it's worth, it's likely to be the claw used to attach the asteroid that got you, that claw is infamously buggy. If you don't have a backup save before disaster struck there's probably not much you can do. One day I'm sure you'll make an even better station. On the contrary, 1.0's new Science Lab mechanic gives stations and bases new use. I have a station in Mun orbit, and stocked the Science Lab with data from Mun orbit and two Mun landings. It took a bit of work to get everything set up, but I'm now expecting something like 1500 extra Science out of it compared to if I'd just run simple landing-and-return missions. That said I will admit said station is pretty utilitarian and functional, it's not built to look fancy.

I'd say 8 GB is sufficient. For KSP to use more than 4 GB you need to run a 64-bit version and a stable 64-bit KSP is currently available for Linux only. Even then you're rather unlikely to need more than 8 GB. 8 GB is also generally regarded as standard for gaming nowadays, few games want more, in part because of the influence of the consoles.

Do you feel there's evidence to the contrary? Do you believe that the models and textures in KSP are all the work of excellent artists? Do you believe the game's performance and number of bugs is the work of excellent developers? One cannot be helpful without first recognising the problems. I'm not hating on Squad specifically, I acknowledge that in pretty much all fields of work mediocrity - or if you prefer "averageness" - is the norm and excellence a rarity.

Ah, the old stock argument to shut down any criticism of creative works. It never has and never will be remotely convincing.

I suspect a factor there is that KSP payloads often are pretty aerodynamic themselves. A Kerballed spacecraft is usually a round capsule atop a round fuel tank. There might be some bits on the side but overall it's pretty streamlined. Even the one-Kerbal lander can is at least symmetric. Probes are similarly as often as not basically cylindrical. Compare that to many real life payloads. The LEM had some seriously irregular angles and wasn't axisymmetric. New Horizons has a boxy triangular shape with the RTGs sticking out of one side.

Even if I wanted to learn C# (which I don't really), there's only so much modders can do. For me top on Linux routinely reports KSP as using 120% of a CPU core or the equivalent thereof. Sometimes as much as 150%, notably when loading the game. In other words KSP is using more than one core simultaneously. (And I have a Phenom II X3 so there's no worrying about stuff like hyperthreading messing the figures up, it's just a straight tri-core CPU.)

I expect you can pull off the plane change using a Jool gravity assist, but you're likely to still need a big slice of delta-V to tune the orbit to match.

What matters is how your transfer orbit compares to Dres's orbit. If your transfer apoapsis just touches Dres's orbit and the planes match up you'll have a relatively low delta-V capture burn. If your transfer has an apoapsis way further out or/and there's a big inclination difference you'll have a much higher delta-V capture burn.

I don't much like either. The stock fairing system lacks reproducibility - if I delete my fairing I can never put it back the same way again. Procedural Fairings is too "automagic" for my liking. The one I liked was Zero Point fairings, they were simple to use and gave me the constraint of a fixed fairing diameter, but in 1.0.x I've found them glitch and they don't work with newstock aero.

Unless the programmer either does pointless multithreading of a non-parallel algorithm, or does something really weird and stupid with forcing core affinity or similar, a multithreaded application will run on multiple cores at once. And KSP is already multithreaded and will use more than one core, but the single physics thread dominates the CPU load. Because we see potential that isn't happening, and that's just frustrating and disappointing. It's the same as watching a film and thinking it was OK but it could have been so much better.And "Better than Electronic Arts" is the height of damning with faint praise.

If current trends continue, the loss of materiel - and materiel that wasn't even yours in the first place - will be unimportant compared to loss of life. A boarding action would be incredibly dangerous, you're sending your troops into an environment entirely under hostile control, with countless ways for the defender to slaughter the would-be boarding party.

Honestly? Ditch career, go for Sandbox or maybe Science. With all the parts available and no stupid cost limits you can make the great missions.

I've been told that the lines do not show aerodynamic forces, but rather the results of a completely separate calculation that's run *only* to work out what the lines should show. Which means the aerodynamic overlay can be wrong. I cannot see this as anything other than *completely idiotic", but that's KSP for you.

Carrying on with my "100 Worlds" science save as usual. I expect 1.1 to be buggy and for mod updates to take time, and in any case when mods are updated I can just migrate my save.

Stranded Jeb on top of a Munar mountain with no EVA fuel left. His lander is only about 8 km away and has plenty of delta-V to get back to orbit - but between Jeb and his lander is a 2 km high cliff, and I doubt he'll survive falling down it.