cantab

Yet another thing to think about: maybe most civilizations stop looking outwards? Why spread among the stars in huge clunky spaceships when you can fit a hundred billion "people" in a virtual universe inside a computer?

Indeed. if you can ship fuel in from Minmus - or almost anywhere that's not Kerbin really - that can offer significant savings.

That coming from you Anyway I have one fairly quickly this time. Created to do what it now cannot, Destination unchanged yet not what it was, A decade to go, mere hours to return, Come this year's summer, things it shall discern.

If all your lifters are balanced in terms of cost per ton to orbit it shouldn't make much difference. Having the ship contribute to its own launch will let you use its engines though. A mixed approach might be good - strap some boosters to the ship so it can make orbit without using all its fuel, then send a tanker to top it up. If you have vehicles with widely varying cost per kilo, then you want to use the cheapest. If the cheapest isn't capable of lofting the ship full - for example it's a spaceplane - then you need to refuel. If you're playing without reverts you also need to consider development costs. Large lifters can be troublesome, there's a lot to go wrong, and it's a massive cost if a launch fails. Sending a series of fuelling missions with a tried-and-tested lifter or a simple development of it is a much safer option. And don't forget to factor in the IRL length of the mission. 20 spaceplane flights to refuel might not be much fun. Then again one launch taking an hour at seconds-per-frame game performance might not be much fun either.

FAR includes aerodynamic visualisation options, so you can see which parts are experiencing high drag. If redesigning the whole probe to fit in a fairing isn't practical, what about putting just the problem parts inside a cargo bay that's part of the probe?

I believe the net is, at it were, closing with WISE and other surveys. Of course there's a limit to how far out an object could orbit and not be perturbed by passing stars. As for how we'd study it, well ion drive probe. Dawn packs something like 10 km/s of delta-V and its engines have proven highly reliable. No particular reason a probe couldn't have more.

There's a lot we don't know. In particular we don't yet know how common life is. I expect that to change in the next decade or two as we start studying exoplanetary atmospheres. But what we do know is that microbial life arose relatively quickly on Earth. The pessimistic view is about a billion years after the planet formed, there's evidence for it 200 million years before that, and it could have been earlier. On the other hand, it took a further three and a half billion years for us to appear, after many many other large, complex, multicellular species had arisen and gone extinct. Consider also that humans have been around for 200 thousand years, and hominids more generally for a few million. Yet only for the last ten thousand or so has there been something we'd call civilization, at least that survived to the present. So I'd hypothesise that a rare confluence of factors is needed for an intelligent lifeform to evolve and then to develop a civilization. You need an environment that makes wasting a load of energy on an intelligent, capable, and energy-hungry brain worthwhile. It seems that most environments are not like that, most creatures do just fine being thick as two short planks. Relatedly, you need a species with a body plan that can evolve to make good use of that intelligence. Primates for example can easily use our arms to manipulate objects, signal to others in our group, and so on; most other land animals need all their limbs for standing or walking most of the time. And that intelligent, capable species needs to be able to survive in a low-technology, low-civilization world for a pretty long time, without evolutionary pressures changing to push it away from intelligence, before some other factor leads it to develop a more complex civilization. (Perhaps environmental change, given civilization is thought to have arisen in six places independently, all in the current interglacial period). It's taken half the lifespan of our Sun for that confluence of factors to happen here. It doesn't seem far fetched to think that on many worlds it never happens before life itself ends.

As for how it was formed, I don't think we'll know for any individual, but I can hypothesise for the statistics: If rogue planets are formed like stars, there ought to be a fair number of binaries, possibly even as many in percentage terms as there are binary stars. Some of these binaries may be tight, others quite wide. If rogue planets are formed by ejection from solar systems, they ought to mostly or almost all be solitary. What binaries there are ought to be tight, a planet with a close moon that were ejected together. If they can form either way, the statistics will be somewhere in between.

You'll 'ave to chop me 'ead off then, won't ya.

The young Kerbal points skywards and says "Hey, that rocket looks like it's heading right for us!". Then he scurries over the bridge while the old Kerbal is distracted

And we finally have our winner!'twas a day, like no other, - All other days happen every year. 'twas a day, there'll be another, - Obviously. 'twas a day, the routine broke, - The routine of the calendar with February having 28 days. 'twas a day, the woman spoke, - The tradition that a woman may propose to a man on the 29th February. 'twas a day, to end, it's fate, - Simply the end of the month. 'twas a day, to celebrate, - If it's your birthday. And yes that goes for other days but it's an especially big deal for Feb 29th peeps. 'twas a day, that much is plain, - Just in case you thought it wasn't. 'twas a riddle, to puzzle your brain. - Filler.

It is a day I expect everyone on the forum, whatever their country, will know about and acknowledge is unusual. Though I can't guarantee the references in the lines will be culturally-universal (I don't think it would be possible to write a riddle that entirely was), I just go for stuff I think is reasonably well-known from my English point of view. And not election day. Not any election day.

I've yet to really try and pin it down, but DRE appears to be making my framerate tank in certain conditions during launch. And it's no more than a hunch, but I suspect the chute alert text. EDIT: Confirmed that removing the DRE DLL removes the issue. If this isn't already a known issue I can look into it more.

I expect that with the new aerodynamics being integral to the game, structural failure will be structural failure. They'll be no separate "aerodynamic failure" system like FAR has, but unless you turn on the unbreakable joints cheat excessive violence can still rip your craft apart. In fact that can happen in the current stock aero in extreme conditions.Aside from re-entry heat, which I'd say isn't a core aspect of aero really, I don't really see anything about an aerodynamic model that can obviously be changed for an easy/normal/hard mode. Ferram tried some simplifications in NEAR, and the result is a model that many players argue is actually harder than FAR.

Nope. Did we have that guessed already?

That's apples and oranges though, since you're counting the lifter as payload. In some cases that's relevant, for example if you use the same stage for circularising and for trans-Munar-injection (a la the Saturn V), but it's not really fair to compare the figures to a "pure" lifter and payload design.

It was not. And when would the next one be? Well, unless you count 11/11/11111

Attempted on a whim to make a Dreamchaser-style shuttle. Failed epicly. It had vicious handling characteristics at low speed - pulling up a little too much would "snap" it into crazy wild oscillations. And I couldn't even get it into orbit, seems that light but bulky payloads are a fair challenge in FAR. Clearly a shuttle of any sort is not something I can just knock up in an hour.

Nope. 10chars.

Keep in mind the OX-STATs, being fixed, generally will not reach their theoretical maximum. With that in mind the figures for the 1x6 panels seem reasonable. The Gigantor is too heavy though. IMHO considering how much part count is a performance issue, it should be a rule in the balance process that larger parts are a bit better than clusters of smaller ones. If the reverse is the case the player is forced to trade performance of the game for performance in the game.

Neither of those.

Visit an asteroid. No redirecting it, no dragging it into orbit somewhere, just go and check it out. Do a multi-planet flyby probe, a la the Voyagers. Put a boat on Eve or Laythe. Land a Kerbal on the Mun and bring him back to Kerbin - within the 18 ton 30 part limit you start with in career.

Did that on my old space station. It's the longest single part and not prohibitively heavy. Pity attaching stuff to it is weird sometimes.As for other stuff: Wings for floats. Like intakes they have relatively low drag so you can get a decent speed on the water. Firespitter electric propellers for boat propulsion. They don't seem to care whether they're above or below the waterline, and with an NFT/KSPI/similar nuclear reactor you can sail for as long as you like.

KSP started out as freeware, and made good progress and gained popularity before Squad decided to commercialise it. That's a strong contrast to the modern trend of seeking money when the game is still very early in development. KSP has its share of bugs, but as far as features go it's been pretty solid for many updates now.

The ion engines are an interesting example I feel. The original ion engine was already massively unrealistic, delivering 500 Newtons of thrust off a modest solar array or a bunch of RTGs. It was also generally regarded as un-fun because burns were too long. Squad had a few options: A) Make the ions realistic, and make the game handle them in a fun way. This would require some sort of thrust-on-rails system, revision to the map mode to project the trajectories, and so on. Ignore realism and make them fun within the game's then-current state. This required simply boosting the thrust. (I suppose there was C) Do Nothing, and D) Remove the ions outright, too.) In the case of the ions, a single relatively rarely used engine, taking option B was obvious, even though option A, in giving a qualitatively different way to fly, may be more fun - certainly more interesting. In the case of aerodynamics, the situation isn't exactly analogous. But I would say option A is adding a realistic aerodynamic model and the tools to make designing and flying in that model fun. Option B is fudging the aerodynamic model so it's fun in the game as it otherwise stands. Since aerodynamics, unlike ion engines, are something that every single craft in the game has to deal with, I think option A is justified.