cantab

You can definitely get good science from unmanned interplanetary probes. Sure, each individual mission will produce less science, but it will also be cheaper and if it's a non-return mission quicker to fly. And it's arguably more interesting exploring lots of planets by probes rather than doing repeated Kerballed Mun/Minmus landings. A few pointers: The gravimeter is by far the best experiment to use in space, as it's biome-sensitive, so you may want to rush it in the tech tree. But if you don't have it yet, don't worry too much. If you don't yet have the gravimeter, I'd lean towards doing either flybys or landings. (Or impactors, if you want an excuse for booms.) You'll gain little extra science from entering orbit but not landing. Though you might want to park the sat in orbit to act as a comms relay or to snag "Science Data From" contracts. Once you have the gravimeter and ideally the big ore scanner too, then it's great to park in a polar orbit to scoop up more science. Speaking of biomes, I seem to remember the surface ore scanner's right-click menu shows the current biome. Nice to have if you're not using KER (which has a biome display) or a science alert mod. And speaking of comms relays, you don't need a super-fancy perfect coverage system. You can work with intermittent connection, just as long as you take a little care to ensure you have signal when you need it. For example check your planetary periapsis is on the side towards Kerbin (or above the poles) so you can do your capture burn. With an atmo lander, arm the chutes ahead of time so they'll deploy automatically even if you lose signal on descent. Transmitting data can take a lot of electricity, make sure you pack plenty of batteries. If you want to get into serious gravity assist use, the sky's the limit. In terms of being both fairly useful and fairly easy, the Joolian system is a great place, see if you can get Tylo to capture you into a Jool orbit.

Indeed. Sales of the expansions will help fund continued development not only of the expansions but also the base game. And I think Take Two definitely have an eye on the console version, where mods are unavailable. Hence the addition of features like a delta-V calculator and better manouvre node editor (both base game features!). Sure, PC players had and still do have mods that do the same job and arguably do it better, but the improvements are vital for console players.

There were a few demo versions around, yes, the most recent being based on KSP 1.0. The 1.0 demo has a rather poor parts selection but with a bit of work you should still be able to land on the Mun. But it got removed from Steam and the KSP website around about the release of 1.3 and has not since been replaced. Softonic has the demo available, and they seem legitimate enough.

Indeed, if you have bottomless power sources and heat rejection a la Star Wars, then photon rockets work. And you don't need anywhere near the power equivalent of a star unless you're flying something the size of a planet or moon. But so does whatever other sci-fi magic you write. Beamed power solves the onboard fuel problem in real life; at the simplest level, the spacecraft is just a giant mirror. (Which, by the way, means the beam only needs 150 MW/N, because the photons are reflected back rather than just emitted). However I suspect launching to orbit will be a problem because of heating. No mirror can reflect all radiation, but some do get impressively close. A top-tier dielectric mirror can reflect 99.999% of light, albeit for a limited frequency range and incidence angle. (So we need to shine a laser beam at the bottom of the rocket). That means that 1 Newton of thrust will heat the mirror by 150 MW * 0.0001 = 15 kW. To lift 200 tonnes against Earth's gravity requires 2 MN of thrust, and that still means 30 gigawatts of heating of the mirror. That kind of power might be manageable. It's comparable to the power produced by real-world heavy launchers like the Saturn V and Space Shuttle. But it's going to be a tall order. Chemical rocket engines circulate propellant around the chamber and nozzle which is then ultimately jetissoned away from the vehicle. If your photon rocket uses an open cycle cooling system, then dumping the coolant means you have to deal with a finite resource. If you want to handle 30 gigawatts of heating without open cycle...good luck.

Those specs are a high-end gaming PC. I'd say overkill for KSP even with visual mods, though it might be relevant if you're running a 4K or higher resolution display. Whether it's a good buy depends on the price, of course. And I second Harry's comment, try and find out if it uses a decent power supply. If you're shopping around specifically with KSP in mind, look out for a slightly faster CPU. An i7-8700 is by no means slow, considering KSP should get the Turbo Boost kicking in nicely, but an 8086K or 9700K will be about 10% faster or more with a good overclock. EDIT PS: Conversely, because KSP isn't super multithreaded, you could drop back to an i5 and providing the turbo boost speed is similar see virtually the same performance as the i7-8700.

The power required for a photon rocket is 300 MW/N. The total luminosity of the Sun is around 3 * 10^26 W. So that would provide 10^18 Newtons of thrust. However the mass-energy equivalent of 200 tonnes is only about 2 x 10^22 Joules. Meaning that even assuming ideal mass-to-energy conversion, the spacecraft will use up its fuel in about 60 microseconds. In any case, what you've created isn't really a rocket. It's a bomb. It's not going to lift into orbit, it's just going to be sent flying to kingdom come and leave a giant crater behind it.

A science fiction inspired DLC would be viable and popular I feel. I also wouldn't count out Squad tying up with an existing franchise, maybe not Star Wars but there are a lot of great movies, shows, and books around. The main downside I feel is the SF parts would probably want to be deliberately out-of-balance with the modern-day ones, but that's not a deal-breaker. A DLC focussed on the management aspect of the game might work. At the moment the game is called Kerbal Space Program but mostly it's just flying the rockets yourself. Adding a lot of richness to hiring and firing, business decisions, the ability to schedule routine missions and have them flown in the background, and so on would add a new dimension to the game. Marketed effectively, it could bring in new players to the game, people who are not so interested in flight sims but are fans of tycoon games. On the other hand, if it's not marketed well it'll probably fall flat. On a related note, I had an idea for a "commercial market" multiplayer. True "live" multiplayer is tricky in a game with timewarping like KSP has, but how about something where players can create craft with defined capabilities in the game and then have the option to buy and sell launches in career mode for Funds. This would probably work best with the base game offering a basic feature, but tying in to a management DLC for more options.

I agree with this. Unity is a good general-purpose game engine that's made many great games including KSP possible, but KSP is far outside what most games do. Few other games can have you walking on the ground one moment, and the next moment travelling at a thousand miles an hour mere metres above the terrain before travelling realistic interplanetary distances. Even just explorable ground area, not much is on the same scale as KSP. It's amazing Unity can handle it at all, but I feel KSP would seriously benefit from an engine built for that kind of cosmic scale, either created or licensed from somewhere (SpaceEngine perhaps). The rest is just features, some I agree with, some I don't. But a new engine is what would make KSP 2 really a new game, and not just an update with a pricetag.

With a bit of finagling with settings, and putting everything to potato quality, KSP is running surprisingly well on the family laptop with its 4GB of RAM and Skylake Core i3, running on a Linux live USB. And, well, I got distracted :-D The new lander/rover can is brilliant, one of the best parts Squad have made. Here it's in what will be a bus, once I stop clowning around and finish building it.

It's just like that KSP bug where the engines had plumes out the side in the VAB :-D

The way the Type B works seems intuitive, yeah. Normally I just use what looks best, and indeed the B is the usual choice for stuff that's going to stay attached. The A goes on boosters. The rounded cone I tend to use atop stuff that is already slanted, where the pointy cones would give an odd-looking break of slope.

It's just neighbourly. Making sure the boosters explode in the air so they don't fall on the ground.

Following the trend set since Making History, I think we're likely to see new gameplay features as well as large collections of new parts as DLC. The base game is likely to get art and visual overhauls, as well as improvements to established aspects of gameplay. The last new gameplay feature in the base game was the commnet and kerbnet back in 1.2 in 2016.

I'll have another look at a 5 metre shuttle. I considered it a couple of weeks back but decided the mass and complication of krakentech cargo bays wouldn't be worth it.

It's not. I've re-entered all sorts and I don't think I've ever had anything blow up. Unless you come in with really excessive speed you'll be fine as far as heating goes. On the other hand if you're not careful you can end up hitting the ground too fast for your chutes or landing engines to stop you, so watch out for that.

Following the lead of Flibble earlier, I too failed to break the sound barrier in my shuttle under jet power. I didn't even get close, topping out at around 130 m/s then running out of fuel. As I found out deadstick landing it, the thing is draggy. Tempting though it is to just add more power, I might give a tailcone a go first. Also sent some Kerbals to visit the mini-station.

Of course. All non-mining grand tours I've seen use rendezvous and docking, so the mothership can stay in orbit and only one lander needs to descend. It's common to reuse craft, you don't need a lander per body. A typical approach would be a light vacuum lander, a heavy vacuum lander, and an extra descent stage for Tylo, and that covers all the vacuum worlds and maybe Duna too. Eve is the most challenging destination and nearly always gets a dedicated multistage lander, and Laythe often gets a spaceplane. Now something I haven't seen is a Grand Tour with no mining and no orbital rendezvous. That would be seriously challenging since it means landing on every body with all your future hardware and fuel; you can drop empty stages but you can't park something in orbit and go back to it. I expect it's doable but it'll take a monster ship.

16 Vectors in a 4x4 does nicely, with the four corner ones set on nosecones since they stick out a little. If you want to stick within the tank radius, 12 will fit (well, technically they're about 1% too large, but whatevs) in the arrangement shown here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_packing_in_a_circle Or you could opt for 8 Vectors round the edge and a bigger central engine. In general the Vector offers the highest thrust/area ratio if you're avoiding clipping engine bells. For upper stages, 7 Wolfhounds aren't bad. If that's not enough thrust then you'll probably have to use lower-ISP engines (such as more Vectors), though you might be able to make two Rhinos look good. If only we had a tankbuttless Rhino. And check out SpaceY if you want some more beefy engines.

Unless you're using FAR or you've encountered a game bug, you really should be able to make a small plane with a sensible landing speed. 160 m/s is ridiculous. Out-landings can still be tricky even at sensible speeds, but that's true to life. Back on the general topic, yeah, looks like any decent overhaul of career will be reserved for a DLC, with Breaking Ground expected to add some towards that.

Realism Overhaul (commonly known as RO) is the starting point. It's a collection of mods and configs to make everything much truer to life and add new gameplay challenges. Here's its release thread: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/155700-131-145-realism-overhaul-v1250-08-jan-2019/ Be aware that RO is currently, and usually, a few versions behind the latest KSP release. In Steam you can get previous KSP versions as "Betas". If you're using the CKAN mod manager, it will include recommended (but not strictly required) mods to use with RO, including Real Solar System and TAC Life Support. If you're not using CKAN, remember to add the ones you want.

What use is 3 tonnes to orbit? Well, that's the lifter I have at the moment in my RSS save, and it's enough for a mini-station :-) Closer to the ground, I gave the X002 Gallifrey, my shuttle atmospheric test article, its first real flight. I'm doing my shuttle development out of Woomera for a change of scenery. Didn't get very high or fast because the test revealed a strutting mistake, and because two Whiplashes actually aren't much to push an aircraft this size, but she handled well and landed nice and slow for a shuttle. I did the landing under power, I'll practice deadstick landings later. https://imgur.com/a/ud3Z8Ww

This is often a limitation of cheaper keyboards, that they are unable to properly respond to arbitrary combinations of keypresses. The ability to properly respond is known as "rollover" and better keyboards usually support n-key rollover meaning they can handle any combination of keypresses. There's nothing a game, or even Windows (or OSX or Linux) itself, can do about a keyboard that doesn't support good rollover.

I think it was 0.23, maybe 0.22. Before the NASA pack. The good old days of needing loads of struts to make anything stay together. So long ago. And sometimes it seems like a lot of my really good missions I did relatively early on and ever since I've been a bit stuck in the doldrums. (Mind you I did some good stuff last year, and haven't played much in 2019). I think the editor gizmos are a bit of a double-edged sword for me, as they encourage more time spent tweaking looks rather than focusing on function.

Well, I've caved in. I'm building a NASA-style shuttle. Took the orbiter for a little hop under OMS power (yesterday actually), she flew OK. I'll probably just slap some whiplashes on for some more thorough flight testing, I don't feel like building a 747 to do it "properly".

Another for Vall. It's a bit overlooked as a world. It's not in itself as "hard" to visit as Tylo or Laythe, but that's why you create a challenge. Bop is also fun though. Low gravity, but home to the highest mountains in the solar system, it can catch out the unwary.