cantab

I don't think they give you very good prices. You can get more money on eBay - provided you're an established seller with good feedback, buyers will be wary when you're a new seller. But you get less hassle with Gamestop.

Quite easily. Time zones are referenced to UTC, which is the time in London more or less, and they range from 12 hours behind UTC to 14 hours ahead of UTC. At some point our pilot will cross from a timezone which is well behind UTC to one which is well ahead of UTC. At this point it will around midnight Wednesday/Thursday in London. The difference between for example UTC+13 and UTC-11 is the day. This is important for Pacific island countries, who might want to be generally on the same day as Australia/New Zealand or on the same day as the Americas - and either way don't want to be split within the country.

A 60 minute departure burn is seriously long. As you've found, the manoeuvre nodes might not be entirely useful there.

Regarding the aerospike being underpowered, I think it should just be made possible to put a decoupler under it, like with nearly all the other engines in the game. On paper it's not that bad, it's like a more powerful 909 that's also efficient in atmosphere, but not being able to take a decoupler makes it just plain awkward to use.

Well it is analogous to the solar system. All the planets and most of the moons have clear real-world counterparts. And I think it should be. There's room for innovation certainly, but I think the general layout should be analogous to our own solar system. For example I wouldn't add a new planet between Kerbin and Duna.

Well, I'm just starting a kethane save. I intend to stick with that no matter when 1.0 comes out. But I'll probably be less likely to use kethane or karbonite in future.

It's possible to do a rolling landing on Minmus but, as you found, tricky. RocketPilot's approach is probably better - do a fairly conventional landing on the main engines then let the plane flop forward. To take off again you can either roll - a rolling takeoff is much easier than a rolling landing - or if you have enough RCS in the nose you can point skywards first then blast off.

The 48-7S is the infamous standout. Let's look at it. TWR: 30.6. That's more than any liquid fuelled engine besides the KR-2L, the four-engine cluster, and the massless O-10. Mass: 0.1 t. That means it's viable on the smallest of spacecraft, unlike the NASA engines or even the LV-N. Isp: 300-350 s. That's low but not low enough, the TWR more than offsets the drawback. The older 24-77, on which the 48-7S is based, has 250-300 s Isp. Gimbal: 1°. It has one, essentially - if it didn't that might have been a balancing factor. Alternator: None. Well that's something the 48-7S is lacking in. So even in sandbox play it's already one of the best engines in the game. Now let's consider science/career mode aspects. Tech node: Fuel Systems, 90 pts. You can unlock the 48-7S without needing to upgrade the R&D facility, making it an early game engine. You could well do your first Mun landing with one of the game's best engines. Oh, and it's in the same node as the insanely useful fuel lines. Cost: 300 Funds. That's cheaper than any other engine besides the Sepratron. The excessive performance is bad enough, but the career aspects are just ridiculous. Yet, with all that said, the 48-7S is not game-breaking. Despite being overpowered in every respect, it's not to the point that it's forced all other engines out of use.

Agreed. I think Micha's experience is the exception. KSP takes a while to load because it's converting file formats for the game files, and that runs on the CPU. The DDSLoader mod helps with this and is probably worth a look if you want the game to load quicker and you've ruled out the networking issue mentioned here. And a question. Does the networking issue affect KSP on Linux, or is it just a Windows issue?

Fields? As in electromagnetic, Higgs, etc.

Redoing my Kethane Space Program stuff after enduring some game bugs. I scrounged up a fair bit of science from a few sounding rockets, the old rolling pin rover trick, and a couple of part tests, and have now made orbit and scanned Kerbin for Kethane. I've not got a great roll but I suppose it's not awful, the nearest usable deposit to KSC is on the desert shores but it's not very big. I've got about 9000 of my initial 16000 units of starter Kethane left. I've also found that really I'm going to have to use reverts and quickloads for this save. The fuel wasted from a failed launch is just too much in this early stage. That said, I now have the Kerbal Unreconstitutionator unlocked so I do have an option if the starter kethane runs out.

I've been running KSP on Ubuntu 14.04 for a long time and never had this problem. That's using two nVidia graphics cards (a 610 and a 750 Ti) with nVidia's proprietary drivers. I think knowing which graphics card and which driver will be important for diagnosing this. Also important is whether you run KSP from Steam or by running it directly, since Steam provides its own versions of certain libraries for games to use.

From how I've seen KSP behave, I infer that its code is a serious mess, though I don't know what bits are Unity's and what are Squad's. From my experience playing some other games, I believe that buggy spaghetti code is normal in video games.

Money? 10chars

In Episode 3 I found a bug with the contracts and so restarted the save. The sounding rocket launches were repeated successfully, then an unmanned orbiter suffered a mishap when only one booster ignited. The damaged rocket was dragged clear to save its fuel, and a launch of a new copy was a success! But I still think there are contract bugs, possible because I deleted the stock SRBs. So I'll be restarting the save again. *sigh* I'll do my next stream after I've done first orbit, so I don't keep repeating the same missions.

Because we can't. We can't create microgravity for an extended period without going at least into Earth orbit.

Just cleverer loading techniques than "Everything at once when you open the game" would work. And will be necessary if the planets ever do get made significantly more detailed.

6/10. Nice shape overall but clippy fairings aren't the best looking.

I think that really the current planets want to be more interesting and better looking. Because the detail in the textures and the terrain is fairly low, they're mostly kind of bland from the ground. Of course, making them more detailed is easier said than done. KSP's planets may be small compared to real ones, but by video game map standards they're huge. Kerbin alone dwarfs all of these claimed largest game worlds put together, barring the randomised Minecraft.

In Episode 2, the fuelling issues were resolved. The Space Program conducted two successful launches - a small 5 km Kerballed hop, and an unmanned suborbital spaceflight. It also did some science scrounging around KSC. After an interruption to watch Squadcast, an attempt at reach orbit in the Verne 1 was a failure. This is a major setback to the program. With almost half the kethane supply gone, mostly on the unsuccessful Verne 1 launch, and no sign of new kethane supplies as yet, it is imperative that the next mission be a success. It remains to be decided whether it shall be a lightened version of the Kerballed Verne 1, or a lighter-still unmanned rocket.

When I last used Near Future, the electrical engines were coded to produce almost no thrust in atmosphere. They're strictly engines for deep space. The low TWR, when you take into account the mass of the hardware needed to power them as well as the engines themselves, also makes them a dubious choice for landing on Mun-sized or larger bodies.

If I remember rightly you can't connect two different ships with KAS struts. You can with KAS pipes. Not sure about the winches and connectors. But if you haven't launched yet, it might be better to just give each building its own solar panels.

Very possible. If you're carrying fuel you don't plan on using, lock the fuel tanks so they never drain and KER doesn't expect them to drain. (To lock/unlock fuel tanks, right click on them and click the green arrow or red no sign).

Plenty of people have. More I think will have taken a drive round, since the Space Centre isn't small and Kerbals aren't quick walkers. There are assorted stairs and ladders to climb, and a few points of special interest around. There are also a few neat things to find once the buildings have been destroyed.

I agree with sal_vager. I would do things as follows: Install Linux. Install graphics drivers on Linux. Install Steam. Install KSP through Steam. Optionally, copy KSP from the Steam folders to somewhere else. Install KSP mods. Copy saves from Windows KSP into Linux KSP.