cantab

The big question here is how else do you do tech unlocks? Using Funds would make those way too important and Science and Rep both rather trivial. Using contracts or using exploration "milestones" would make the game a lot more rigidly structured. Using Rep would be even harder to justify ICly than using Science.

IMHO rule 9 could be removed on the grounds "FAR means add nosecones" is an obvious and easy thing to do. Anyway, unfortunately I've only ever done planes seriously in FAR. If you were open to rocket entries I could probably come up with something. Actually, maybe you could make this real life design work in FAR? http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1907_flying_machine.jpg

Remember that Laythe, Vall, and Tylo are in a Laplace resonance. For each time Tylo makes one orbit, Vall makes two and Laythe makes four. This can limit your ability to gain or avoid flybys of the moons.

Nice guess Norpo. I'm going to go with a glacier.

That will just make the thread all Vexx riddles. Your help with B747's clearly showed - it read like one of yours.

For me that would be a dream alright - a nightmare. Unlimited power, but a choice between the rock of dreadful drivers on Linux and the hard place of running everything on Windows.

Well, some people did and still do hold beliefs about photos stealing the soul.Book seems good. Since that's guessed, I'll be more specific and say library book. You confirmed the answer anyway.

A photograph? Or a painting?

Cremated ashes?

Well, you could put something like "Forum Staff" or "Forum Boss" or "Forum Governor" or... Rather than ban all the words related to leadership, it's simpler to just ban "forum".

We have a 10 inch Acer Iconia hybrid. First up I don't recommend it because we are on our fourth charger for the thing, costing an extortionate £30 each. It runs Windows 8, and it's probably the only sort of system that the Win8 interface makes sense on. Even then, it's still a bit schizophrenic. My mum mainly uses it as a tablet and has got on reasonably well with it, when she's never been much good with using keyboard and mouse in the past. I more often use it as a laptop, and it's not great - the relatively heavy tablet and light keyboard make it liable to tip backwards, and the keyboard is inevitably cramped. Still, it does the job for basic tasks. No idea how well that thing would game. It's an Atom processor, so not much performance there. I tried the KSP demo on it and it ran like a dog.

What, you're given a router but no ability to configure it? Daheck? If my ISP had told me that I'd have cancelled the contract. It's a reasonable expectation that a home router will have user-accessible configuration.

You said gargoyle was wrong, but maybe you're being pedantic - is it a grotesque? (The difference is that a gargoyle is a rainwater spout, a grotesque is just a figure).

Mainly flying around in my drone, both on stream and afterwards. Despite lacking enough solars to run at anywhere near full throttle, the thing flies excellently. It's not fast, but it will climb to over 20,000 m and has no control problems. I've run a few temperature scanning missions with it, obtaining a bunch of science. Still need to make a Kerballed one. That will be harder considering a cockpit alone weighs about twice what the whole drone does.

Most ISPs will provide you with a wireless router for your home. They vary, some are a bit rubbish, but they'll almost always have port forwarding options, and by default will firewall all incoming traffic. If your ISP is rubbish and have only given you a pure modem - which is basically unheard of in Britain nowadays but maybe it's common in other countries - then you'll have to get your own wireless router. Check what sort you need - an ADSL router will connect directly to your phone line, while a cable router will connect to a modem by ethernet. As for what router to get, well it depends what you want. I find the "big name" hardware is often needlessly limited and dumbed down, but then I have knowledge and confidence in configuring stuff. I highly rate Draytek routers, but they aren't cheap or simple. Edimax and TP-Link are cheap brands yet they offer plenty of features. To give you some comparisons of the kind of stuff I mean: I have a Virgin Media (Isp) "Business" router will do port forwarding (eg port 80 on the web to port 80 on a certain PC) but will not do port redirection (eg port 8000 on the web to port 80 on a certain PC). It will only let you give a limited number of devices fixed IP addresses on your network. I have a Draytek router that will do port redirection, unlimited devices having fixed IP addresses, and much much more. I have a Netgear (big name) wireless range extender. It only works when connected to an existing wireless network, and then devices can connect to the range extender by either wireless or cables. I have an Edimax (cheap brand) wireless access point that will do all that, OR can be connected to an existing wired network and create a new wireless network where otherwise you have none.

I've not come across those guidelines, but I'd say that in stock aero they're bad. Yes, you can use the rotation and offset gizmos to make it work that way, but it's a lot of complication and someone not knowing the importance of wing orientation or not being very careful about it will end up carrying useless white boards.As for the big plane, the CoL does look slightly ahead of the CoM. The numerous intakes aft of the CoM will help stabilise it, and I'd expect a twitchy but controllable plane. If you want to shift the CoM forward a little, the easiest way is probably to put a locked fuel or RCS tank in the nose as ballast.

The orientation effect you note has been found before. The stock wings and aero model generate full lift if rotated either 0 or 180 degrees from their default orientation, but zero lift if rotated 90 degrees. Your experiment is confounded because you're using the Mk2 fuselages that generate lift of their own - build a small plane using regular fuel tanks to see the effect much more clearly. There are subtle cues to the orientation - the front and back edges look different to the side ones. But the general rule is to build your wings in bands sideways outwards from the fuselage, then strut the bands together. Don't attach wing pieces to the front or back of other wing pieces or get fancy with the rotation tools, unless it's for looks and you're happy with not having the lift. As for the centre of lift appearing to shift, in stock aerodynamics I don't think it will. However what will happen is the control surfaces will have less control authority at higher altitudes because of the thinner air. All stable planes are nose-heavy to some extent, so when you get high enough that the control surfaces can't compensate the plane will dive. The solution is to provide more or alternative control. If it's a spaceplane you'll want decent reaction wheel torque and/or RCS to maintain control in the upper atmosphere (and in space). If it's a high-altitude aeroplane consider more/bigger control surfaces, or ensuring the centre of lift is quite close behind the centre of mass to reduce the control authority needed.

It is rather heavy, but if you want the definite attachment of a real node rather than putting stuff on radially it's useful. This is less of an issue now we have the gizmos, but previously it was hard to line up radial attachements precisely. I've used it for small rovers - start with a micronode with its main nodes oriented up-down and build off it, then you can easily attach it to a ship either wheels-inwards or wheels-outwards as you choose. A bit of weight is generally a good thing on a rover too, build too light and you'll have poor grip. Example: https://flic.kr/p/pLpF2d Or you can just make Tetris blocks with it

Well, the short answer is don't build an over-long ship. Build outwards instead. A central tank, with four or six tanks round it, will do well.

Honestly? I think PB-ION was better. It's the only one of its kind, so it was and still will be known just as "the ion engine". Superfluous letter-number combinations, even if there's a hidden Easter Egg meaning, don't add much.

At the moment Science>Funds or Science>Rep. The former one feels really rubbish to me, but if you've got no use for the science points anyway it could be worthwhile. Remember, a lot of these issues should be fixed in the rebalance. We can definitely expect all costs and revenues to change. As for stuff beyond that, I'd like to see diminishing returns - first Mun biome gets lots of science, later ones get much less - to encourage exploration. I also think it would be useful to have strategies that affect the amount of sciece/rep/funds you have now, rather than just what you earn in future. Ultimately though I think there should be a surfeit of science on normal difficulty to give the player freedom. Do you want to do a series of tried-and-tested Mun and Duna landings in the different biomes? Would you rather put space probes all over the system? Is ignoring the experiments and doing contracts your thing? For any one approach to give sufficient science, they must offer an excess in total.

Not always. Distances from the surface are used in KSP and are often used for real satellites in Earth orbit. Distances between the centres of mass are usually used when talking about planets orbiting the Sun.For the presentation, I would stick to using the distances from the centres of mass, with maybe a passing reference "Sometimes people measure from the surface of the planet, in that case you need to add the radius of the planet into the formulas."

Yeah, I'd never heard of it either, I just looked up "hum" on Wikipedia wondering if there were some specific hums it was talking about. It's pretty much impossible to know what other people know though. Presumably you thought of it as reasonably well known.

2/10 Even more useless wings

Da heck???So it's worldwide, but it's named after one particular place. Is it this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hum