cantab

To clarify: The KSP files you get will be identical where-ever you buy it. A corollary is you can run it through Steam or not through Steam where-ever you buy it. (By adding KSP as a non-Steam game if needed). Advantages of Steam: * Steam integrity check is handy if you have a possible corrupted file, no need to download the whole thing again. * Already in Steam, no need to add it yourself. * Steam refund policy. Advantages of Store: * No need to install Steam. * All your money goes to Squad, there's no middle man. * Demo doesn't get clobbered by the full game. I like to have the demo available too, if only to let others know what's in it.

The OP has a good point. The 1.25m tanks look a bit odd and I'm not sure what they're based on. The others are easy - 2.5m oil drums, shuttle orange tank, 3.75m Saturn/SLS style tanks. But the 1.25 ... yeah. As for the whole "junkyard" business, as I see it Kerbals have it easy. Living on a tiny planet orbiting a tiny star it's only 3.5 km/s to orbit and then easy to fly around. As a result they can build their rockets out of cheap and rugged, and therefore heavy and low performance, parts. Some of those were adapted from other things. They don't have to engineer on the ragged edge just to get into orbit like us unfortunate humans do.

I think the KSP we have works better with a fixed solar system. Remember it's not an easy game for a novice, and having Kerbin always the same size, the Mun always in the same place, Duna always having the same atmosphere, and so on makes it practical to learn from other players. Maybe something for a KSP2, where Squad could explore a different direction. Then again procedural generation is rather common now, and a small number of quality hand-crafted planets and moons - much better than the ones we have now - could well make for a better game.

Just some routine ScanSAT work and other science gathering. I decided that 2 tons is a bit much to ask an Ant engine to push, and switched to the 48-7S for the later probes.

9/10. Well knock me down with a feathered re-entry. Outside: and inside:

See my previous posts. In simpler terms, some things are relatively easy to make use multiple cores, while other things are hard or even impossible to do that with.

I like Serran how it is, it's like a vast dry lake on the red side. Though I haven't seen its former self. As for other candidates for oceans: Modified Dres? Since everyone says it's the most boring planet in stock. If Stock!Laythe can have oceans, surely NH!Dres can too. Nolas? I'm thinking the cracks could have liquid at the bottom, kept that way by tidal forces. They could present a new challenge to reach, especially if Nolas remains airless. Entirely new body, of course.

The De Lackner HZ-1, on the contrary, looks a lot like a modern quadcopter drone that's been scaled up and has a guy standing on it. The Caproni Ca.60 is one I've heard of and actually built a KSP plane inspired by. But taking MOAR WINGS up to eleven is Horatio Phillips 1907 Multiplane, which did fly albeit not very well. And let's not forgot this one: By today's standards the Wright Flyer was weird. The rudders are at the back without a fixed tailfin, while the elevators are at the front. The landing gear is skids, which were balanced on a line of 2x4s for takeoff; I'd have thought two guys who made bicycles for a living would have used wheels. And there aren't any ailerons, roll control is instead done by bending the wings.

Errm, what? Of course the programmers will decide whether an algorithm is parallelized or not. What I've been hearing is that the physics of a connected chain of rigid bodies, which is what KSP vessels are, is difficult if not impossible to parallelize. It's also not in Squad's hands, in fact I don't even think it's in Unity's hands but rather is done by NVidia's PhysX.(And yes, technically a program could implement an entirely sequential algorithm using a whole bunch of threads. But that's just being pedantic.) Last I checked some things were fixed in terms of pixel size and ignored the "UI size" option, making them miniscule to the point of being unusable on retina-type displays. The right-click menus on parts I think. Unless Squad have fixed that now or do in 1.1.

Seriously??? Isn't that place pretty much the antithesis of family-friendly? Considering how uptight Squad's rules are on their own places, it's really at odds to then be posting stuff over there.

That does look odd. Have you been able to reproduce it in a stock install?

The fly in the ointment there is that Squad have existing customers using 32-bit OSes. sal_vager is not a Squad employee.

Awww, now I don't get to be all smug about running Linux any more

So I may have sussed out Aptur. I'd already recognised Aptur as being co-orbital with Kerbin, and specifically it's a "quasi-satellite". Wikipedia mentions that quasi-satellites appear to orbit their companion retrograde, although being outside its SOI. A bit of observing Kerbin and Aptur in the Tracking Station confirmed this. So, I launched into a retrograde Kerbin orbit! Then set up a node to just break Kerbin's SOI, fiddled around for a bit, and bingo. Departing at an arbitrarily chosen time I got just over 600 m/s to leave, although that is departing from a 350 km orbit and it would be somewhat more from a typical LKO. Aptur periapsis is about 7 hours later, projected to take 200 m/s or so to capture.

Think of a feature that would do that for any planet or moon. Well, views of others I suppose.

Maybe I'm being completely naive here, but why does FAR even need to touch the heating system at all?

Turn on the "Ignore Max Temperature" cheat. Not seen this myself except for with the Mk3 parts. Maybe get Kerbal Joint Reinforcement? Make a plane that can be controlled during its takeoff roll. If using a stick or controller don't forget that wheel and rudder are separate control settings, just both bound to A/D by default.

And it's been answered before. It's a ballpark figure based on a generic aircraft, rounded off to an exact hundred for convenience. With some searching you might find some of the work from Karman himself on the matter.

In real life two sorts of aerobraking/aerocapture have been used. Spacecraft orbiting Mars typically enter an initial highly-elliptical orbit using their thrusters then aerobrake down over multiple passes. Landers come straight from an interplanetary trajectory to a landing, and the returning Apollo missions did similarly. What has not been done in real life is going from an interplanetary trajectory to a closed orbit. "In principle, the exosphere covers distances where particles are still gravitationally bound to Earth, i.e. particles still have ballistic orbits that will take them back towards Earth. The upper boundary of the exosphere can be defined as the distance at which the influence of solar radiation pressure on atomic hydrogen exceeds that of Earth's gravitational pull. This happens at half the distance to the Moon." - Wikipedia Personally I don't consider the exosphere "real" atmosphere because it's not comprised of gas atoms/molecules interacting with each other, and will consider Earth's atmosphere as extending up to the exobase which is at 500-1000 km. A spacecraft in interstellar space will orbit the Milky Way, in other words the combined mass of all the stars, nebulae, and whatever that are closer to the galactic centre than the spacecraft is. The central black hole is only a small part of that mass, except for a spacecraft in the galactic core. Because the Milky Way is a disc the orbits of stars tend to wobble up and and down as well as circling the disc. The ISS's altitude varies. It can be boosted by engines, and will decay by atmospheric drag. The orientation of the solar panels is important - by putting them "edge on" to the prograde vector the orbital decay can be reduced at the cost of less solar power. A compromise is "Night Glider" mode, turning the panels edge-on at night while tracking the Sun normally during the day. In the days of the Space Shuttle the ISS was deliberately allowed to lower before a Shuttle mission to give the Shuttle an easier time, then boosted afterwards. Now the Shuttle is retired the ISS is typically kept somewhat higher to reduce the energy losses. Astronauts have certainly sneaked things on board. There have probably been arguments but no known fights. There was a strike on Skylab when the crew felt they were overworked - since then astronauts have been given shorter working days. There's no-one known to have had ... in space, but a married couple did fly together - keeping their marriage a secret from NASA! - so speculation happens.

I knew I forgot something. For the Operating System, currently Linux is best for KSP provided you have well-supported hardware. Windows is the most commonly used OS and you can expect it to be what Squad test the most on, and if it gets a stable 64-bit version of KSP it will probably become the preferred option for existing Windows users. OSX is the worst for KSP. But if you want to run OSX for other reasons, your only hassle-free option is to buy a Mac. That's the way it is.

, or one if you make a config mod.

I recommend a probe core on everything you want to keep anyway, otherwise it'll be considered debris and there's a chance the game deletes it. Probe core + RTG/OX-STAT is only two extra parts.I do recommend the over/under docking rather than the side-by-side method, because of what you found about ports not aligning.

Sure. Force = mass x acceleration. Change in velocity = acceleration x time. Solving for time, Time = (Mass x Change in velocity) / Force This simple equation is what the game uses, but the game as you've found doesn't always pick up on the value for force. Of course it's inaccurate because the mass isn't constant. Kerbal Engineer will give you accurate burn times taking changing mass, and changing thrust from staging, into account. They are displayed under the Orbit page.

The general speculation - but it is only speculation - is that Unity 5 will bring one thread per vessel, and that single vessels will still be limited by your processor's single-core performance. Therefore the ideal CPU for KSP remains the same as now - a modern fast-clocked Intel CPU. For the GPU KSP wants something competent but it doesn't need massive performance. A GT 610, which is a weak display card that's worse than good integrated graphics, clearly underperformed. A GTX 750 Ti, which is a great budget gaming card, does well. That said gaming at higher resolutions will always be demanding. For RAM, expect the stock game to continue being happy with 4 GB. But if you want to play modded and run a 64-bit build of KSP then 8 GB is probably better. There's already a 64-bit KSP for Linux, KSP 1.1 might or might not bring it for Windows and/or OSX. For the monitor, bear in mind KSP currently has poor user-interface scaling. We've no idea if that will change, but don't be surprised if you have to drop down to 1080p or thereabouts for the game wasting your "Retina" display.

Known bug, Ferram says it's not is fault and there's nothing he can do about it. A partial workaround is to turn on the "Ignore Max Temperature" cheat, but you still experience other consequences of overheating - solars stop working, ablator disappears, and your ship glows white hot ruining your screenshots.