cantab

You've made life harder for yourself by not standardising on one docking port. Attached to the hab section you have three-way symmetry on the docking ports and only two landers to use it. Maybe send up a drop tank to attach to a third docking port on the hab section. It'll act as ballast on the way out, then you could transfer the fuel to the main tanks and use it for the return trip.

It's an option. Advantage is you may find it easier with everything in one SOI. Drawbacks include the need to get your timing right, and if you want to capture the asteroid you lose the opportunity to course correct it and especially to aerocapture it.

Have you thought about adding bigger fertilizer tanks? At the moment if I want a station or base that can be occupied for a long time I'll have to spam minipaks, not good for the part count.

It's not meaningful to compare processors by core count and clock speed, you need benchmarks. Which are hard to come by for the Wii U's chip, whereas PS4 and XBone performance can be extrapolated from similar PC chips. The whole OS thing isn't what it used to be. As recently as the PS2 consoles had basically no "operating system", the game would start up and be all that was running. But now the consoles have a whole bunch of stuff going on in the background just like PCs do. The majority of KSP players will I hope not have malware on their computers.

Yes, by a long margin.

We're not even that. We're former customers. Squad's current and future customers are almost all the people who haven't yet bought KSP. Those are the people Squad want to sell the game to, not us who've long since handed over our money. Of course Squad know that a good fanbase helps sell the game. They're unlikely to do anything seriously obnoxious.

Nice. I wonder if Cities: Skylines supports Vulkan? That's a game where similar to the gnome demo you can zoom out and suddenly be seeing lots of things at once, and I have noticed fps drops when panning or rotating the camera.

Not five times worse, but certainly worse in a vast array of benchmarks.I'd say that up to £150 or so - FX-8370, Core i5 4460 - the processor market is pretty competitive, with Intel and AMD offerings at any price point being pretty close overall, though KSP in particular will always do better on Intel. Above that price point though AMD just don't have anything that really matches fast Core i5's and i7's on performance, still less the "extreme" Intel processors. That allows Intel to charge what they think will get them the most profit. A fun bit of history in the area. Back in mid 2013 AMD launched their FX-9590, "the world's first 5 GHz CPU", and asked around $800 for it putting it squarely against Intel's $1000 6-core i7 4960X. Within a few months the FX-9590's price was slashed to something like $250, while the Intel processor was still a grand. That says volumes about how AMD just couldn't, and still can't, compete at the high end.

Vanguard EVA Parachutes. You can bail out and grab one (or use an extra plugin to always have a chute when you EVA) or get a full-on ejection seat. Unfortunately they don't currently work with the latest FAR.

There are two basic approaches to asteroid rendezvous. Meet it in Kerbin's SOI, or meet it in solar orbit. I prefer to meet them in solar orbit, and there's a simple trick to getting a close encounter: leave Kerbin's SOI in the direction the asteroid is projected to enter. Doing that puts you on a course good for intercepting the asteroid. Once in solar orbit it's much like a normal orbital rendezvous except everything's bigger; whereas around Kerbin you'd want to get within a few km then match speeds, around the Sun you can get within a few hundred km then match speeds then approach straight.

If your centre of mass and centre of thrust aren't aligned then you'll veer off course when thrusting. Engines can generate quite a lot of torque, enough to overcome reaction wheels. If you have Kerbal Engineer installed it can tell you "Thrust Torque". Try and get that to zero. If you don't have KER just watch the way the craft veers. In future if you use a cluster of engines you can individually thrust limit them to compensate for small mass offsets. Note that while it's called a "limiter" it's actually a multiplier - for example with throttle at 60% an engine with 40% thrust limit will deliver 24% of its normal maximum thrust. To save this ship you could simply go everywhere at low thrust. If you don't want to do that the first thing I'd try is to move fuel to get the centre of mass in line with the main engines. The next thing is to reposition the landers if possible. The next thing I might try is using the lander engines, appropriately thrust limited, to help keep things in line

I suspect that's a minor error on the website, and you should take the second option - set up a manoeuvre and burn it like you normally would. "Transfer Windows" are necessarily fuzzy. You'll generally be fine within a few days, maybe even a few tens of days, for anywhere but Moho (which requires special treatment to get an efficient transfer anyway). Just bear in mind that a transfer that deviates from the fuel-ideal Hohmann Transfer may require not only a bigger departure burn but also a bigger capture burn or harsher aerobrake. The further your apoapsis (or for Eve periapsis) is beyond your destination planet's orbit the bigger the capture burn will be.

Performance-wise I think it could actually be done to target the flagship phones and tablets of 2016, but a lot would depend on what Unity do.

There used to be tricks using intakes to store air. But in any case everything in this thread is obsolete. The jet engines now have a "hard" altitude limit that can't be overcome by air hogging.

Flying Tiger are a game development studio, right? For a game to be successful it's required that it be released. I was under the impression development studios generally want credit on released games they have worked on.

The term "VTOL" generally implies that we're talking about aircraft though. Most will have the fuselage horizontal when taking off or landing which implies either separate lift and thrust engines or some means of rotating the engine's thrust, tailsitters are the exception. For rockets the abbreviation VTVL (Vertical Takeoff, Vertical Landing) is used instead.

It depends on the aircraft. Making a regular plane VTOL shouldn't be that hard. For SSTO spaceplanes it's another matter because such spaceplanes are often on the margins of what's possible, the extra weight of lift equipment could well stop you getting into orbit.

I'll call KSP 90% done. Basically all the essential features are in, though I'd like to see better info and instruments (a la KER) and life support added. What's left though is mainly bugfixes and optimizations. But there's a catch. "The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time."

Ladder placement. To be honest the position we've see is *also* likely to be a nuisance for ladder placement - though redesigning the ladders would solve that.

That's a really nice idea. The finiteness of Kethane seemed to put a lot of people off, something that instead replenishes at a finite rate might be more appealing. Especially when used with a life support mod that will give the player a raft of choice.

Reading this made me realise HOTAS was an acronym and what it stands for. I'd always assumed it was a brand name for joysticks! /tangent

1.0 was quite probably a commercial success, but in my view it (counting the whole 1.0.x series) has been the worst KSP release in a long time. The only reason I haven't gone back to 0.90 is mods, notably Kopernicus.

The small nosecones can be radially attached. They make a nice "blister pod" to hold a probe core in a streamlined fashion.

Probably landings. In quickloads-allowed saves I pulled off Moho and Tylo on the second try, but that was still after crashes first time. In a no-revert save I crashed on Duna twice and still consider that my nemesis. I've even killed a Kerbal crashing into Minmus. I have my share of launch failures too, but I usually provide some sort of contingency to save the Kerbals.

Wildly varying. But often, including in my latest save, I'll give a name to a program - a series of missions with a defined goal - and then number the individual missions within that. Typically the range of ship designs won't be as much as the number of missions in the program, because a successful design probably gets used again, so there are gaps in my numbering as seen in the VAB. Program names come from a wide variety of sources, though names of real people are probably most common. (Names of Kerbals I've generally reserved for naming asteroids I track and plan on doing something with, for example 1 Jebediah or 4 Wernher.)