cantab

Yup. My approach to flying planes is: SAS off. Fine controls on for most planes. Use pitch trim (Alt/RShift+W/S) to maintain level(ish) flight. These two things are IMHO key to flying planes in KSP. SAS works to hold your orientation, but in manoeuvres a plane needs to smoothly and freely change orientation in response to its aerodynamics, and SAS prevents it from doing so. Then, to make a normal turn, roll so the wings are at an angle then let the plane curve round by itself. Use small rudder inputs if I like to keep the prograde marker below the direction marker (many planes don't really need this), and small pitch inputs or a little more trim to keep the nose up. To make a sharp turn, roll so the wings are nearly vertical then pitch up strongly but smoothly. Once on the desired heading, level the wings. If FAR is installed its wing leveller can help.

Wikipedia discusses it at length http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_%28aerodynamics%29 In a spin that is unrecoverable by control inputs, shifting the centre of mass forward can help. In KSP you can do this by pumping fuel providing you have multiple tanks, or by putting decouplable ballast on the rear. Or you can simply use emergency parachutes, or an ejector seat/EVA parachute mod.

As far as the stock game goes, descending to Jool's depths and returning to orbit is a demanding task. An Eve landing and return without orbital rendezvous is also pretty tough, it amounts to lifting your return ship from the surface of Eve. And of course there's 6.4x and Real Solar System to make all the numbers bigger. But frankly it sounds like you can build a craft to do anything you like, you've got that all sussed. The greater challenges might be in flight. Do an EVA landing and return to orbit, with only stock instrumentation. Then do one purely visually (ie hit F2 to hide all the displays). Jump a canyon on a wheeled vehicle. Fly a plane under the bridges at KSC as fast as possible. Then land it on the smallest structure you can. Shoot through a Mun arch at orbital speed. Dock with a rotating space station. Fly a landing and return mission entirely in IVA. Take a speedboat up one of Kerbin's rivers. Go as fast as you can without crashing. Dock two craft together in flight in atmosphere. Make Kerbin orbit - in KSP 0.7.3.

You cool your CPU with hydrogen and it doubles as a NERVA engine.

When you ask Whackjob for the Arkingthaad .craft file - because it would make the perfect sepratron for your boosters.

*gently guides deadman in the direction of the linux thread*

This topic would be better off in the main computer megathread. I concur that RAID is not backup. What RAID (discounting RAID 0 which isn't redundant at all) is for is availability. It's for systems that need to keep right on working when a drive breaks. If you want that out of your desktop PC then that's fine, heck if you're routinely working to deadlines then RAID might be a good idea, but it's no substitute for real backups.

In most cases in an otherwise bone-stock install. But if you've got things in play like life-support, time constrained contracts, or even an out-of-fuel ship on an impact course, suddenly time isn't free any more.

kerbiloid, your oversight is that Gargantua is rotating quite fast. That makes the distortion of spacetime more complicated, and allows Miller's planet to experience that extreme time dilation while being rather further from the event horizon. I don't know the maths myself, but I'll assume Kip Thorne does.

I've seen a few people use the old Swept Wings, but I think Squad were already planning on retiring them. Of course the small winglets are expected to stay, they're still good for many tasks (the delta-deluxe being excellent for tails on small aircraft). I expect that at some point we'll see an official revamp of the rocket parts, they're a bit of a mismash at the moment. I think there still ought to be some distinctiveness between parts from different manufacturers though.

It's no surprise that it's possible. Thanks to a bug the jet engines have extremely high Isp, they're actually several times as efficient as the ions, and if you want you can get pretty close to orbital velocity. The designs shown have been planes, but an alternative general approach is a jet rocket, using pure thrust without relying on aerodynamic lift. That might be suited to recreating the cargo landers.

To which I respond that if I wanted to get a hacksaw and cut up my Lego bricks, I could.

https://flic.kr/p/pLmJcL This was one of my simpler designs. It can be further simplified by omitting the rover and using an LV-909 on the lander instead of dual 48-7S. There's ample delta-V for stock and it handles OK in FAR too. It is slow off the pad, personally I don't mind that, but if you object you could swap the Skipper for a Mainsail.

My guess is that the transfer planner tells you when would be the perfect time to go. But you can't go exactly then because you'll be in the wrong place in your orbit. So the node is then set in the right position, as close as possible to the perfect time.

Granted. 8. That's a randomly chosen integer between 8 and 8. I wish the tea would make itself.

If I remember rightly docking connections in general have a greater performance penalty. I know some people have edited their saves to "fuse" them, removing the docking abilities, on ships or stations where there's no intention of undocking. Conversely the physicsless parts are thought to have less performance penalty, which is why Squad have increased their number.

I don't think they're really needed. The only use case I see apart from "big for big's sake" is as the fuel tank for a shuttle recreation, but then you'd also need bigger SRBs to look correct. I actually reckon the current Shuttle SRBs, the expected Mk3 parts, and a 3.75m external tank will look OK. (Especially if we could get a new giant orange tank too.)

It might not be an SSTO, or even at all capable of orbit, but the last picture in the gallery has a KR-2L.

Rolled my Duna rover at 70 miles per hour, it survived. Rolled it at 85, and, well It didn't. I've tried my darnedest to take off. Having KAS helps, I could move the righting engine to use it for thrust and the RCS blocks to balance. But while I can fly it up stably, I haven't got enough monopropellant. I probably wouldn't have enough fuel either. Rest in Peace, Lemuki. You shall be missed. I suppose the rover did its job well. It was built before I had TAC, so surviving crashes and rolls was worked on, but sustaining the kerbal for help to arrive was not.

Well for a constant density, surface gravity is proportional to radius. We don't know the density of Miller's planet, but it's probably about the same as Earth, there's only a certain reasonable range for rocky planets. That would make Miller's planet around 1.3 Earth radii and two Earth masses. Also, considering the work that was done in relation to Gargantua, I expect Kip Thorne checked that the planet would be safely outside the Roche limit.

M is primary mass, I'll use 100 million solar masses m is satellite mass, I'll use Earth r is satellite radius, I'll use Earth Schwarschild radius = 2GM/c^2 = 295 Gigametres. The lower bound for a stable orbit is 1.5 times that. Roche limit = 1.26r(M/m)^(1/3) = 258 Gigametres. This of course depends somewhat on the size of the satellite. It seems reasonable to conclude that Miller's planet is well outside its Roche limit.

FAR now. But I have done most of my play in stock. Also, no option for Stock Drag Fix?

I made orbit: In KSP 0.7.3! More pics: https://flic.kr/s/aHsk6wFaF4

How long did you wait when it locked? Linux is more prone than Windows to having the mouse pointer become non-responsive when the system's under heavy load. The RSS wiki mentions that the first run can take over ten minutes, and possibly on Linux this is being allowed to generally hang the system. Also, the general advice to install and check one mod at a time is good I feel, especially when complex mods like RSS are involved. On a sidenote, if a CPU-hogging program does render the GUI unusable, Ctrl+Alt+F1 will switch you to a command prompt. That can be more usable when the system's heavily loaded and you can identify and kill the offending program. Switch back to the GUI with Alt+F7.

Plenty. My .25 mucking around save includes a little probe rover on the Mun. Perfectly fine, but my AntennaRange options means it needs a relay to be controlled, and since the lander that dropped it returned home it hasn't had any such relay. In that same save I also have a broken warp drive ship on a solar escape trajectory. More interestingly, there's a cloud of a couple of dozen bits of debris from that all on extremely elliptical orbits - periapses well within Moho's and apoapses about twice as far as Eeloo.