cantab

Indeed Kopernicus lets you manually set the SOI. But let's say you put a star with 5 solar masses in an orbit 100 AU from the Sun. Things will be fine close to the Sun and also fine close to the other star, but a ship that's a long way from both stars will act like the more massive star doesn't exist and therefore have a very inaccurate orbit. I assume your Sigma Binary mod addresses that issue when it's used, but the central body seems to end up being a special case in KSP.

I have similar interests myself. I believe the central body wants to be the most massive, otherwise you are going to have obvious SOI issues and general inaccuracy of orbits. The Kopernicus thread mentions that KSP assumes that central body is the Sun. So if you simply have other stars orbiting, directly or indirectly, the Sun then they would seem to be constrained to be somewhat less massive and that's not ideal.

Monitor your CPU and GPU temperatures while playing your games, that will tell you if it's overheating or not. I had similar sudden shutdowns when playing KSP many moons ago, and I found the CPU was hitting 90+ Celsius with only one (of three) cores loaded. I blew out all the dust from in between the fins in the CPU heatsink and after that it stayed under 50 C even with all cores loaded.

NEAR is obsolete. The new stock aerodynamics is somewhat like the old NEAR.For what you want though, I would say go with FAR. I don't think stock takes into account wing sweep. It certainly doesn't take into account wing interactions (though even FAR won't lighten a wing that's clipped into another wing). Because newstock uses a part-by-part approach it can have issues with complex designs, whereas FAR now works out drag based on the shape of the whole vehicle. For me the biggest advantage of FAR is it gives me real, useful design and analysis tools in the SPH/VAB. I can have a good idea how my plane will fly at 30 thousand feet before I even leave the ground (though I still can and do encounter unexpected things too!) Without that I just feel like I'm designing blind.

The explosion could well be the random overheating bug that has occurred since 1.0. Hit F3 and see what reason is given.

Do you mean reducing the altitude of the blue section? At the moment it's what, 5-7 km mostly? If I suppose that the White Lands was once a deep ocean floor and the high areas were once continents then that difference in altitude makes sense to me.

The first question regarding the anomalous signal detector: Is it connected to the stock "anomalies" / "Easter Eggs", or is it unrelated?

5/10. That looks less than nominal.

If it's a "perfect reflector", any energy briefly transferred EDIT: from the light to the sphere must be returned to the light.Of course a perfect reflector is impossible. Considering real mirrors, researchers have indeed tested whether the frequency of light changes when it is reflected. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0031916366900163 Short and to the point, and an impressive level of precision. Theory and experiment agree that light does not change frequency when it is reflected.

Simple but effective mod, I plan to use it if and when I start playing with RSS, since I tried RO and didn't enjoy it. I'm not sure how much if at all engine performance needs changing. As you say, what we have is within the range of hypergolic fuels or kerolox.

Which anti-virus program are you using? See this mention of Norton Antivirus giving false positives with Ferram Aerospace Research. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/20451-1-0-4-Ferram-Aerospace-Research-v0-15-4-1-Goldstein-7-29-15?p=2128760&viewfull=1#post2128760 Essentially Norton is applying the "No credit is bad credit" principle to anti-virus.

On that kind of overall budget I would be thinking about either Skylake or Haswell-E myself. The Skylake processors are a shade faster than the Haswells but the real benefit is having the latest features on the motherboards. Haswell-E would give you six rather than four cores, though you might not get quite such a high clock frequency. Either way you'll get better dual-graphics-card support and more maximum RAM capacity.

At the moment you have the blatant loophole that solid fuel, monopropellant, and xenon all aren't considered. I would suggest changing the scoring to be by total mass of propellant expended, so people can use whatever propellants they like. (Note that not all resources have the same mass per unit, so there may be some number crunching needed).

Man this is a toughie. But I think my number one weirdest ship has to be the Nobel, a mission to deflect an asteroid using only the explosive force of decouplers. It has four "bombs" originally but two had to be jettisoned en route to save weight. The remaining two nonetheless had enough explosive force to do the job. Honourable mentions from my archives: A rocket that flies backwards: https://flic.kr/p/oPcP8s What it takes to achieve 40 km/s with a 60 ton boat as the payload: https://flic.kr/p/oGGiYs How to test a Mammoth engine in flight on Kerbin: https://flic.kr/p/s8uvFc Looks normal, but know that the outer pair of boosters was attached using KAS when the rocket was already out on the launchpad: https://flic.kr/p/rbNbpo My weirdest *plane* ever: https://flic.kr/p/qiW69v Holy Kraken, a rocket chainsaw: https://flic.kr/p/pU1poQ Building bridges: https://flic.kr/p/pAeYdV

With Kopernicus 0.2.4 Kerbol Plus fails to load as you may know. Looking at the log I get "Failed to load Body" for Keelon, Daphy, Fonso, and Potatus. I simply removed them (removing the entire Keelon system) and the remaining bodies in Kerbol Plus then load fine. (Though I've not tested any further than checking they appear in the tracking station). I've not looked into why those four bodies aren't loading but hopefully you at least know now what to look into.

Budget. 4790K. Anyway that will run KSP as well as it can be run.

I think Serran's nicer without one, the idea of its former seas having dried up is cool. But negative altitudes are never good in KSP, that should be fixed if it's over an at all extensive area.

No thrust is what one would expect because they're two vessels attracting each other and there's no overall force. Evidently something about being on the ground causes that to no longer apply.

Reduce your capture resolution and framerate, that will make the processor's job easier. For the bitrate a common recommendation is 0.1 bits per pixel, so do (width x height x fps x 0.1)/1024 to get a suitable bitrate in kbps. If you're recording at 720p, 30 fps that means 2700 kbps.

I've had my ablator boil away on a trip to Moho and back, it wasn't even exposed to any sunlight. I'm calling it a bug - I certainly doubt that was the intended behaviour when Squad worked on the heating system.

Yeah, I've had similar issues with transfer planning in RSS. The biggest problem IMHO is that Transfer Window Planner doesn't tell you the orbital elements of your transfer orbit. That is what matters, that is what defines your transfer, and how you get into it is less important. Alexmoon's website does give that info but it isn't practical to use with modded systems.

Touch wood, got my essential mods for the 100 Worlds install set up again. And have come to think the 1.0.x series are the worst KSP releases in a long time.

There are experimental versions, released to the experimentals team who are chosen and retained based on their ability to give Squad good bug reports. There's also a process to give pre-release builds to Youtubers. But KSP isn't early access any more. Squad should not be making public releases that are riddled with bugs whether they're called 'experimental', 'beta', or even '1.0 release', it just reflects badly on the game and the company.

If you design your lander so it fits in the fairing "sideways" you can get a wide lander base in a format that easily goes up on the rocket. Example. It takes a little fiddling to ensure it's balanced but it's not too hard.

Attach something like a magnet or grappling hook to the winch in the VAB/SPH, that will grab something else without needing to EVA a Kerbal. I don't know how to extend the winch range other than by editing the config files. You could try daisy-chaining two winches together but that might cause bugs.