cantab

Playing through Steam? You may need to disable the Steam Overlay and Steam Screenshots for KSP.

I'm using Kerbol Plus, so when I find the occasion I'll look at testing and if possible fixing some of the planets. I can't guarantee any schedules though because I'll just be doing it in the course of my playthrough.

My solution to that problem is not to use SAS for planes FAR's Flight Assistance tools are very useful, or there are things like Pilot Assistant or Mechjeb's SmartASS that are better for planes. Stock SAS is really designed for spacecraft, and I will turn it on when my spaceplanes are the spacecraft-aircraft transition or in space.

The monolith is on Minmus now? Last I heard it was bugged and hovered a dozen miles above the surface!

I always thought it was named after the tool that makes round things.

From some quick experiments with the engine charts app it looks like engine clusters are now rarely better than fewer more powerful engines. The most notable exception I found is Aerospike clusters sometimes doing better than KR-2Ls because you can't have half a KR-2L. Even then KR-2L(s) plus aerospikes is probably better than aerospikes alone.

Planes can be unstable in roll. In FAR that instability can change with speed, not sure about stock. A little dihedral on the wings usually helps, and wing sweep can also be important. As for why it always rolls right, that might be a subtle bias due to floating point error.

KIS - Kerbal Inventory System - will let you replace a broken panel with a spare one.

I don't know of any delta-V maps for Kerbol Plus. Perhaps someone could make one. And yes, the planets and moons are nice to look at from space but expect bugs on landing. The one I had is touching down but being considered as flying still. Workaround for that is to quicksave, edit it to landed, and load again.

Sounds pretty awesome. I've done a bit of the same myself, because I'm using mod planets and don't have the same readily-available wiki as I do for the stock ones. It's really a new journey of discovery, even simple things like delta-V to orbit need to be found out. (Though I do have Transfer Windows Planner to magically tell me my transfers). Here's one of my atmosphere curves for example, https://www.flickr.com/photos/52548818@N05/19879120658/in/photostream/ . That is then useful data to help work out how many parachutes a lander there will need.

The stock game has plenty of bugs. But naturally adding mods gives the chance for more bugs. What I've not seen mentioned is the impact of mods on game performance. You can easily have your game hobbled by a bunch of mods or one problem mod if you aren't careful.

Heightmaps are not textures. They're not being rendered on the surface of a model by the graphics card, they're being used to determine the terrain of a planet or moon. Therefore no DDS. At least that's how I understand it.

Well, my g-force record is 327 thousand gees. So yes, I'm blowing away the Swordfish, Project Orion, and even the TIE Fighter. Though I'd have needed to wait a bit to get to multiple times the speed of light. That ship probably wouldn't work any more because of changes to physicsless parts, mind you. Meanwhile, http://www.merzo.net/ is an excellent website for scale of spacecraft. KSP has seen some pretty big builds, but few would rank truly high on those pages.

Two possible approaches. Tall and narrow is fine if you're good at landing and at finding flat ground. If you'll need to land on a slope consider instead a lander that lands "sideways", but balance can take a bit of work. Either way keep in mind the cargo bay is somewhat wider than a 1.25m part but not a lot higher. This means that you can have things stuck on in two-way symmetry but not three or four-way. Don't be afraid to narrow parts of the lander to fit things on. The Mk1 pod will fit comfortably if you don't want to use lawn chairs.

Serran is proving tougher than I expected I'm trying to land a probe there and return it to Kerbin in preparation for a Kerballed mission and I've had plenty of safe landings but still not gotten back into orbit afterwards. My last one I lost control during the ascent, so now I'm doing a whole new design that's more rocket-shaped.

Serran again. Carts 5 by cantab314, on Flickr Yet another safe landing, yet another failure to make it back into orbit afterwards, I flipped out on the ascent. This place is proving a challenge, and I'm now going with a whole new design.

Yeah. Sorry I keep leaving this, I meant to think up a riddle but then forgot. Someone else can go ahead.

Yeah...that's still about 390 miles per hour! The Space Shuttle landed at 215 mph, most airliners land at about 160 mph. It sounds like you may have simply built something unlandable.

Sorry, maybe I was a bit behind, I was still thinking of how you said you didn't want to reparent the Sun.

Yeah, I feel the new demo was a bit *too* stingy on the range of parts. Having only non-gimballing engines makes the controlling rockets harder and having only tiny fuel tanks makes them over-wobbly and potentially shows up lag. Those are both things that make the demo play worse than the full game which I can't see as being a good thing.

This is an extensive discussion on the topic of binaries, http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/39620 It's mostly about possible extensions to the game, as well as discussing methods that don't work well. As far as what you can do easily in KSP at present goes, this method Works OK provided the larger body is at least four times the mass of the smaller one. However it causes serious errors if the masses are equal. The difficulty though is still how you would apply this in a situation where "Moon" is the Sun and "Planet" is a more massive star you've added. As you discussed the Barycentre SOI will want to be applied over the Sun SOI instead of the other way round.

How does Precise Node do its version check? It looks like a Mini AVC window, but I have the full KSP-AVC installed and Precise Node doesn't appear under it.

Mousepad, it's just a default editor on Linux, really basic like Notepad.

That looks normal. If you want a more realistic look you'll probably need to get some other mods.

If I may interject, all landers can tip over.