cantab

The USSR was good at engineering, as their successes show - Soyuz, Mir, Lunokhod, Venera, and so on. They had problems with leadership and management, infighting, and to an extent ground logistics.

is in you. The Kleenex factory...

Something very simple that I've not seen: Cargo bay dividers/ends. Just flat structural pieces in Mk2 and Mk3 profile to split up or cap off the cargo bays. Something a bit more involved that I've not seen, or at least not done well: Realistic car parts. I'm thinking if you could come up with a few standard cross-sections to use and then you could have separate parts for the hood section, cabin, and trunk, something so that the player can mix parts to get various styles. There'd also be the possibility to get into coding some more realistic engine and drivetrain behaviour.

Core i3-6100, 16 GB RAM, GTX 750 Ti. Doing 'normal' stuff the game was mostly fine, except that on occasion it basically locked up when it tried to project the orbits too far. Like KSP, I can bring CoaDE to its knees if I try crazy stuff, such as a salvo of a thousand missiles.

As I see it EM-1 can be a mission to lunar orbit or a crewed mission. It should not be both. If the spacecraft fails while it's beyond LEO, there is no contingency and no backup. The astronauts on Apollo 13 survived because the Lunar Module provided redundant systems, something that had been considered in general if not in detail prior to the Apollo missions. Orion has none of that,

Oh actually, I should have remembered earlier, I still like bragging about this thing: https://flic.kr/p/yjiteS Even though it lagged like heck and needed fuelhack to make orbit. Now that KSP runs faster and I have a faster PC, I should break it out again and improve the launch system to fly it legit.

A few versions back I built a 1/4 scale replica of the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. Which made the replica 216 metres tall, twice the height of the KSP VAB. That wanted Hangar Extender to make.

Which of course means that I spend half my building time fiddling with the offset and rotate gizmos ... they've been a double-edged sword for me.

Most useful part for creativity? Am I allowed to say all the modular wings? Together they let me make pretty much any planform I like and it will look good. EDIT: A few of my more eccentric designs: A retrofuture rocket ship landed on an alien world: https://flic.kr/p/GHS2Uj A flying saucer, of sorts: https://flic.kr/p/xDv4tz A solar-electric glider with cranked wings: https://flic.kr/p/qS5SRP A 9-winged STOVL mining plane: https://flic.kr/p/wgRaGH Something that I only gave the appellation "LOLplane": https://flic.kr/p/qiW69v

Konigsberg. Of the bridges fame.

Vague guess, under 100 watts. I used to have a watt meter, but don't know where it is right now. I'll see if I can find it.

An AMD R7 240 will run you about $60. It's a pretty low-end card but more than enough for Kerbal I think. For $80 the new AMD RX 550 is worth considering. VS the R7 240 it's 33% more price for double to triple the performance. Benchmarks similar to my own 750 Ti which has done great in all the games I've wanted to play. On the other hand if you're just playing Kerbal it's kind of overkill. Both those have low power requirements so unless your HP has a truly miserable power supply it should be OK.

And uploaded: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=911272811 I connected up the Estuary Tunnel, since nobody else had. It offers a quicker route between the central towns and Bonnemotte and is reasonably well used. I also expanded Roffleworth Cove further inland. And I kept my traffic in check - 'Brunel Island' was getting clogged as a flat roundabout so I had to make it an interchange, which gave me a bit of hassle to try and make it look vaguely tolerable. Eventually all my stuff should join up in one conurbation. City population is now at its record high, although not by much.

Looking at those specs, I agree the graphics is the problem. I used to play on a Phenom II X3 with 4 GB of RAM and both those were fine. A 210 is bottom-of-the-barrel though and I don't recommend it. I once had a 610 and that struggled with KSP. You are better off not upgrading the RAM and getting a graphics card that's vaguely worthwhile. What's your budget, or is it just 'as cheap as possible'?

I have the save again. No, I've not forgotten this!

I rather thing we're a long way off that being cost-effective considering how much harder doing anything on Mars will be.

Designed a crew shuttle called Knight and took it for a test run. Found I had hardly any screenshots when I went to upload them. This keeps happening I'm starting to wonder if my keyboard's F1 key isn't broken. Still, here she is in orbit. Re-entry was hopeless, it just flew backwards. I need to work on the aerodynamics.

A spot of Simple Rockets because I wanted a game to try out on my phone. (Moto G5 3GB RAM). I learnt when I did the 'Smoon lasso' challenge that I've been doing all my launches retrograde!

Ion engine :-P But that's not always practical - it's only suitable for relatively small craft in the inner system that won't be using ISRU. Otherwise the Poodle is the most efficient chemical rocket and generally dominates for 0.33 TWR. The Terrier and Aerospike are alternatives which may be better in some cases (basically, when you'd ideally want a fractional number of Poodles). If you're looking for more like 0.5 to 1.0 TWR the Aerospike and Rhino show their advantage of having higher TWR, and the Rhino is a good choice on very large ships anyway to keep the part count down.

I've had breaks from KSP, but it's usually not so much burnout but I just want to do something different. That said, I *have* lately been feeling a bit tired of the VAB. I just wanna fly already! And sometimes it feels like I've gone backwards in some ways. A lot of my greatest KSP missions are a long time ago now. The editor gizmos have been a double-edged sword, encouraging me to waste time on details that don't affect the ship really. I sometimes but not always play no-reverts, it makes the flying more intense, but it also slows down overall progress.

I'm trying something similar in RSS. So far I have: Semi-reusable lifters. The first stage engines splashdown on parachutes, but the tanks get discarded. The upper stages can either re-enter and parachute land or be retained on-orbit and refuelled. My biggest puts 50 tons in LEO. Orbital stations. In LEO there's one with artificial gravity (by spinning) for Kerbals, one with lots of fuel storage. I'll probably do the same around other bodies. Interplanetary freighters, to take payloads from LEO to other orbits. These might not be strictly necessary, a refuelled upper stage could do the job, but the freighters are cooler. A preliminary autonomous miner on the Moon. The idea is that the initial small miner can then refuel a bigger miner in lunar orbit before it lands. I really need to get a Kerballed mining base so refuels don't take months. I still need to design: LEO crew shuttle. My plan is to integrate it to a second stage. I'll probably go for some wing for steering but parachutes for a safe final landing. Interplanetary liners. They'll be similar to the freighters but have big crew cabins instead of cargo space. Proper mining bases and landers for other worlds. More and better of everything.

Ramming speed/10. http://spaceship.wikia.com/wiki/File:Leonov.jpg

The Reliant's not bad for a 1.25m engine. More thrust and similar TWR to the aerospike, and significantly better TWR than the Swivel. Isp is a bit lousy and no gimbal requires designing for. And of course it's nothing compared to the Vector but everything is nothing compared to the Vector.

I don't even know. But landing a Kerbal on the Moon - yes, Moon, in Real Solar System - with unaltered stock parts is up there. And now I want to make that something routine I can fly any time I like - I've been slowly building up infrastructure to do that.

... has the initials EM carved on it. This treehouse in the forest ...