cantab

Nothing even remotely impossible about that. Back when the asteroids were new I made a spacecraft that would easily meet those conditions and put it in orbit round Ike.

I'd like it to be KSP 2, on a much better game engine for the job than Unity. I'd be OK with it being anything. I expect it will be nothing, though, and Squad will keep tinkering with KSP but never truly fixing many of its problems.

Yeah, for KSP the G2358. AMD's current processors have worse per-core performance than Intel's, and KSP isn't very good at using more than one core so that matters. Make sure you get a motherboard supporting overclocking, and I recommend a decent aftermarket air cooler. (Water cooling is probably overkill price-wise on such a cheap processor).

The much higher frequencies of visible light would demand correspondingly much higher precision in measuring and adjusting the timing of the signals. The slight variations in light travel time through the Earth's atmosphere would probably mess things up too.

Yeah, the "patcher" has been kaput for ages. I never bother with the "launcher" either, I just run the game.

Unity's game development software runs only on Windows and OSX, so anyone wanting to use that won't be developing on Linux unless they want to deal with Wine.

Finally got this to work, several of the planets look really nice especially with the clouds. It does seem a bit "neat" to me though, with all the stars in circular co-planar orbits. I suppose that makes sense if it's regarded as a scaled-down galaxy, whereas I'm thinking of it as a bunch of stars orbiting a black hole.

Both are nice mods. In a new Science or Career save I think Kerbol Plus offers more because it has bodies across the system, whereas the Outer Planets will probably only become important in the late game so might be better suited to Sandbox or to adding to an established save. On the downside, Kerbol Plus I've found to be finicky - the supplied download is fine but don't try and use it with a different Kopernicus version and don't install it through CKAN. As far as memory usage goes, if you're using the Windows 32-bit version of KSP, you will probably have memory trouble if you try and load up on planets. There are ways to reduce memory usage but there's only so much you can do, to really load up on the mods requires 64-bit KSP. The Linux 64-bit version is fully supported but performance does vary on your hardware (nVidia graphics good, AMD graphics bad on Linux); it works excellently for me and I have an install with just about every planet pack I can find at once. 64-bit on Windows is currently available by an unofficial hack and results vary, it's great for some people and hopeless for others and nobody really knows why. As far as other planet packs go: New Horizons combines a system reshuffle with a bunch of new worlds. It's a good choice if you want a new experience right from the start of a new save and you're up for a challenge. It also has configs to incorporate Kerbol Plus, OPM, and Tran-Keptunian. On the downside it's not going to work well when added to an existing save. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/114092 If you want wild, psychedelic worlds, the Boris pack fits the bill. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/70018 Asclepius is a one-off planet (plus a moon) orbiting between Kerbin and Duna. It's designed as a place to take spaceplanes to, with the not-uncommon idea of having the atmosphere mainly in deep canyons. Being just two worlds you can probably add it in alongside KerbolPlus, OPM, or another larger planet pack. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/126515 Chani is a very new one, I've not looked at it much. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/129073 And, of course, there's always Real Solar System.

Flyby of Aptur in a battery-powered probe, no solar panels yet. Aptur looks a lot like Gilly, but the surface is more contrasty, and apparently it's full of metal.

It would be a major blow to Roscosmos and NASA alike. If it was a launcher failure I expect the ISS's current crew would carry on as normal, but it's very possible they'd end up leaving the station empty if there was no vehicle ready for replacement crew to fly up in. If it was a failure with the capsule affecting the safety of re-entry things are trickier. It's quite possible the ISS's current crew would end up with an extended stay until either the Soyuz was deemed safe again or another capsule was available. Fortunately plenty of ships and rockets can handle cargo resupply. I wonder if NASA might not try and push the Orion development ahead, then launch an empty Orion to the station to take the crew down. That could be launched on a Delta IV Heavy again, since it wouldn't need to be human-rated for the ascent.

In my mind what wouldn't make much sense is for advanced ground-based communication equipment, unencumbered by size and weight limits, to have *less* performance than satellites. As I said already, satellites will still be needed to communicate with the back sides of bodies you're orbiting or landing on.

I've found the game does benefit from eschewing reverts and quickloads. In my reverts-discouraged save I felt a lot more involved in the missions. Failures were meaningful, often major blows that I had to take, and that made the successes all the sweeter. It also lead to some epic rescue missions and can also get me finding solutions to the mishaps and accidents. I feel many players are too quick to hit the F9 when a problem occurs without making any effort to resolve it. As for dealing with bugs, my approach is to have my online backup program pointed at the KSP folder, backing up the save every half hour. If I need to I can restore that backup, but of course I'll have to redo stuff so it strongly discourages trial and error gameplay. Also bugs are often mod-related. I have a low tolerance for mods causing issues and unless the mod is truly compelling I'll be quick to drop it. That said, sometimes reverts and quickloads are justified, especially if it's to avoid having to repeat a rescue mission you already showed works.

Jool's atmosphere has always suffered from being "sharp edged". It's because the top of the atmosphere is taken as a percentage of the surface pressure. Fine for Kerbin, Laythe, and Duna, but causes problems for Eve and Jool with their much higher surface pressures. It used to not matter when re-entry was harmless, but now it's destructive it really shows.

Keep in mind that RCS is an on/off system. It can actually be tricky to land on since you can't do a nice steady descent, you have to keep tapping the keys.

It makes some sense - as mentioned, a real jet engine isn't just a nozzle. But I think it could have been implemented a lot better by changing the models to be longer.

Yeah, I agree that Ec isn't very consistent. To come close to a decent figure you'd want to consider all sources of information. Some have obvious problems though. Ion engines have been tinkered with for gameplay reasons. Reaction wheels are likewise strong for gameplay reasons, though if you treat them as control moment gyroscopes they may behave more sensibly. Wheels are outright unphysical in the way they work. A commonly used value is 1 Ec = 1 kJ. Taking that you get some reasonable values. Probes consume 10-100 Watts, not including their reaction wheels. The RTG makes 750 Watts, which is about five or ten times too high. The 3x2 solar arrays are about 1.5 kW, which I think is within an order of magnitude of what it should be. The lights are 40 Watts.

Relays around other planets and moons will be valuable to give coverage of their far side. You won't have much cause for satellites around Kerbin, but then I regard the way RemoteTech pushes that as unrealistic drudgework. Look at real life - the Mars rovers communicate to one or other of the Mars orbiters which then communicates to a dish on the surface of Earth. Heck, look at Sputnik, no complicated satellite networks supporting that one! While I'd like to see life support in stock, probes still offer the advantage of being much lighter and thus much cheaper to launch, especially now that Kerbals are expensive things you don't want to send on one-way missions.

I tried the other day, nothing but trouble and pain. The Matlab Complier Runtime installs on wine-1.7.44 and not on wine 1.6, but then KSPTOT just crashes.

I think that if you scale everything up by x, the delta-V requirements multiply by the square root of x.

All things that are exactly true for C# and .NET/Mono that Unity and KSP are using at the moment

Would it though? It seems to me that astronauts move around on the ISS easily enough.

Moho like Soho Eve like eve Gilly like silly Kerbin like her-bin Mun I'm not consistent with Minmus like bin-bus, not like minus and definitely not like minim Duna like do-na(tural), not like dew or like nature Ike like like Dres like Fez, not like dress Jool like fool Laythe like lathe, not like faith Vall like pal, not like ball Tylo like tie-low Bop like bop Pol like politics, I hope I don't get an infraction for saying that Eeloo like bee-loo

Built a probe to fly by Aptur. Couldn't sort out an Aptur encounter, so flung it at Serran instead.

I did the same swimming thing on Kerbin, after splashing down somewhere I thought was real close to the airstrip island. Yeah...not so close after all. Then on land the Kerbal kept going poof.

Followed, with any luck I'll catch one of the streams. I'm interested in trying out planet-making myself so it could be nicely informative.