cantab

Took the NASA quad engine cluster up to the target speed and altitude, ran the test (with an actual, albeit brief, firing - no "testing" an engine with no fuel for me!). Then nailed the landing on the first try, really didn't think I could do that Then KSP broke my save I have backups, but will probably have to redo that flight and landing.

Building a PC does mean you take on some of the risks that would otherwise be taken by the manufacturer. It's not just possible warranty issues, it's things like incompatibility and the chance - 'easy' though a PC build may be - of making a costly mistake. But of course you pay to have someone else take those risks and the extra cost can be substantial. Take for example Custom PC magazine's budget gaming build of a Pentium G3258, Z97 motherboard, R9 270X, and 8 GB of memory, and the usual ancilliaries including "OEM" Windows 7, coming it at £550. Going on Dell's website and looking for a comparable system there, it's an Alienware X51 specced with an i3-4150 (worse for most games), GTX 750 Ti (worse), and the same 8GB of memory, costing me £700. Oh, and I'm only getting a 1-year warranty, if I want a three year warranty it's an eye-watering two hundred pounds extra. And sure, while it's in warranty Dell will fix it, great. But once that warranty expires, or if Dell refuse to fix something under it, I know from experience that some Dells use some custom components and they cost far more to replace than the generic parts I'd get from a smaller PC builder or if I did my own build. It's enough to make me at least wary, considering I expect four to six years out of my computers, with periodic upgrades. As for the OS and software, sure it might be available cheaper but that's because it's got strings attached - specifically it's only good on the PC it's sold with. If I buy a retail copy of Windows, which I grant costs a bit more than the "OEM" versions, I can use that on several computers in sequence or on one continually-upgraded system that goes through a few new motherboards. Ultimately there's a reason many enthusiasts do their own PC builds. It can offer far better value, and that's worth the exposure to a bit of extra risk. Value can also be why companies other than the massive global juggernauts do well. If I shop around I can do *far* better than that Alienware for £700, even while sticking to companies with reputations I personally trust.

I find most of the parts have their niches. I don't think I've used either inline docking port, but that's just because I've yet to make a spaceplane that I wanted one on. But the NCS adapter, now that I don't think I have ever used or will ever use. If I need a nosecone the 1.25 m one is far lighter. If I need a 1.25-.625m adapter I have alternatives I prefer. On the Poodle, I think I've used it but I rarely find much cause for it. The problem is that for the obvious use case, an Apollo-esque orbiter with the 3-Kerbal pod and a suitable sized fuel tank, a 909 or an LV-N provides ample thrust. As for the part I hate, the 48-7S. That overpowered little blighter completely messes up the balance of the small engines, I want to see Squad give it a beating with the nerf bat it will never forget in 1.0.

On that budget you're going to have a hard time finding a laptop that's competent at gaming to be honest. It's probably too low to get a decent dedicated graphics chip so you may well be looking at integrated graphics. That's an area that's advanced quite rapidly in recent years, so I would look for a pretty recent laptop (as opposed to your example that uses a processor from 2013) and do research into how it performs.

Design your spaceplane to have a small CoM shift between being full and empty. To do this means putting the CoM in the middle of the fuel tanks. Typically your heavy parts are your cockpit up front and your engines at the back, and you can use the lever principle to help. CoM too far back? Use a lightweight structural part to move the cockpit further forward. Too far forward? Use some bits to move the engines further back. This isn't a spaceplane but it shows the idea: https://flic.kr/p/r6r5r5 The cockpit is heavy while the tail is light but because the tail stretches quite far back it balances to put the CoM in the Rockomax 16 tank between the wings. (Fuel lines run from that to the wing-mounted engines). Once it's fine full and empty, you might add a fuel line setup to keep it fine as the fuel drains, or balance fuel using a mod such as TAC Fuel Balancer, or simply do manual fuel transfer as required.

Fought with a shoddy crane and annoying game bugs to put a giant engine test rig on top of a tanker aircraft in readiness for a part test. The alignment is not great, but it flies! Next stream I'll try and take this to the target height and speed. Then I have to land it...

SpaceX are contracted to supply the ISS. If it's safe to launch then they'll do so. What SpaceX want to do with the spent stages of their rocket should have no bearing on the contract.Imagine if you were expecting a parcel on Tuesday and you were then told it would be delayed until Friday because UPS want to test a new brand of tyre, you'd be pretty cheesed off wouldn't you.

Some part of the eye then, like the retina or something?

A full stop/period?

I expect wings and maybe fuselages will be quite heat resistant. The structural panels probably will be too. Indeed I think it's quite plausible that *most* parts will be heat resistant enough to survive non-stupid re-entries, and only a minority of parts such as lander cans, parachutes, and science instruments will be vulnerable. Simply keep them on the back side of the craft or put them safely in a fairing or cargo bay.

Asteroids have finite, well-defined masses. That naturally puts an upper limit on how much ore can be extracted from one. Even if a big E class was entirely ore, 3,000 tons isn't that much, you could use that much fuel in a handful of sensibly sized Kerbin launches.

On the other hand, that kind of bug where taking one action breaks something that by rights should be totally unrelated worries me most. It points to a tangled spaghetti codebase, which itself increases the likelihood of bizarre bugs and makes it harder for Squad's developers to add features and fix bugs. I've heard plenty about optimising and bugfixing but I've not heard any talk about refactoring. Depending on how long Squad plan to keep developing KSP for that could be worth them doing.

Is it the beach?

True...but pedantic and irrelevant IMHO. It's perfectly straightforward to make things that look quite round enough. Ie 90% of parts in the game.

I hope there's some sort of snapping when building the fairings. If it's literally you click and the exact pixel is used to define the fairing shape then they will basically be non-reproducible. I don't think that would be great.

On the contrary it's perfectly possible for that to be the case on other worlds, if the orbit is elliptical enough, the axial tilt is small enough, and the day short compared to the year. Seasons dominated by the shape of the orbit will be the same across the whole planet, whereas seasons dominated by the tilt of the spin axis are opposite in northern and southern hemispheres, and if the day is very long then the daily changes mask the yearly ones.I don't think any large object in the solar system qualifies. Mars is a borderline case - while its seasons are dominated by axial tilt they're significantly affected by the distance from the Sun which also affects the speed of the planet in its orbit. Mars' southern hemisphere has a long cold winter with a short hot summer, while the northern hemisphere has a short mild winter and a long but cool summer.

How do you "fire" the cables?

Haha. I gave up on the asset editor after my giant stack interchange turned out to be unusable because it said "slope too steep" virtually everywhere. Since I try and avoid rampant demolition I usually end up wanting to hand-craft interchanges to fit into the available space too. That's one reason for the complexity of the Giant's Hair, limited space on the south side of the interchange meant the exit from the interstate heading southbound had to go from the north side of the roundabout and loop round. Though I do use the stock "Large Roundabout" as a starting point for roundabout interchanges, typically lopping off the supplied stubs and adding my own. Maybe I should just save the circle by itself.

Lights, cameras, action speakers, microphones?

Well, what do you want to do with it? And what kind of money do you have. If you have the budget for a new build I would do one, your current system is all outdated. A new build probably won't be able to re-use much besides the case and maybe the optical drive, and I'd prefer to go all-new so the old system can still be used, sold, or donated. If not, well you're in the same boat as my current system, with 2 slots for the obsolete DDR2 memory limiting you to a realistic maximum of 4 GB of memory. That's low but it would at least be enough for many uses, whereas 2 GB just isn't. For gaming you will need a decent graphics card, I'd say GT 740 or R7 250 at the least; I have a 750 Ti myself which I plan on moving to a newly built system later in the year. You're probably looking at £100-150 for the memory and graphics upgrade, so way cheaper than any new build, and you'll get a system that while firmly budget will at least be capable of playing KSP and a reasonable range of other games but not the latest 'AAA' stuff, and be a vast improvement on where you are now. I wouldn't bother upgrading the processor. While you could get something comparable to a modern i3 or A10 the inability to go above 4 GB of memory makes it not worth it in my view.

To the original question: From Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, you can work out that in the case of two point masses orbiting each other with negligible outside influence the orbits will be conic sections - circles, ellipses, parabloae, or hyperbolae. All of those are symmetric.

One more for Estes. KSP's genesis was in model rockets, it's time we reconnected with that. Lego is cool but it doesn't shoot up into the sky. Either Vladimir Romanyuk (Space Engine) or Giant Army (Universe Sandbox). I feel either one of those programs would make an excellent basis for KSP2's game engine.

Eyes? Or ears?

A pen?

Squad also have a policy of making both the current KSP version - which for all the 1.0 hype is still 0.90! - and the *previous* KSP version available. They haven't made any statement or warning that they'll be changing this, let alone discontinuing architectures of the current KSP version.