cantab

Hah! Nor did you. I wish to be standing out in the open at ground zero of the first bomb drop when global thermonuclear war breaks out.

Built a tailsitter. It takes off fine, transitions to forward flight, and flies like a dream. (In FAR, with aero failures off.) Transitioning back to vertical flight is OK but I do gain more height than I'd like, and the controlled vertical descent is fine if tricky to fly. The problem is it just won't land intact! I touch down nice and slow, 6 m/s or so, and nothing explodes right away but it simply falls apart. I strutted the tailplane and fin to the main fuel tank and reinforced the engines and wings but it still crumbles like a dry sandcastle.

Took Tjprime's Mun lander for a spin. Landed badly at night and tipped over, but got the ship back upright fairly easily. Then flew over on the jetpack to visit one of the Mun's anomalies, having previously spotted it on the landing approach. Killed Bill by crashing when flying back Though the lander carries five, playing on my TAC save meant I could only send one Kerbal.

Granted. KSP has psychokinesis. Get Jeb in a bad situation and he'll respond by slamming you against the opposite wall. If you really pee him off, you'll be blown clean through it and your charred shell will end on an Earth escape trajectory. I wish Earth actually had a new Sun each day, and the old one went away.

The ship would most likely have a general purpose workshop, and the design made so that as far as possible all components could have replacements built in such a workshop - including the shop's own tools. Compared to the scale of the whole ship it would be a fairly small impact.

My understanding of the Alcubierre drive is that it distorts spacetime to move your ship, and thus there is translation through space and a well-defined in-between position. The destination may still need setting in advance because of issues with controlling the warp bubble from inside, but I think it's acceptable to ignore that in the name of gameplay. After all, we're into speculative physics territory anyway.

I have no idea what you're even on about.

Granted. It goes Foosh!!! and sets you on fire. You die over the course of a month in untreatable agony. I wish I wasn't thristy.

Granted. You write code twice as fast as before. However, you take ten times longer to debug it. I wish I had a new dressing gown, more comfortable than my current one.

ESA should stop wasting money on rubbish like Rosetta. They screwed it up anyway.

A geostationary orbit generally helps, yes. Satellites with a view of KSC will retain that connection, and the relative positions won't change.

With SAS off, and having hit Alt+X, do you see the pitch, roll, and yaw indicators away from the centre? With RCS on, do you see any jets coming from your thrusters if you have them? If yes to that, is your craft a probe with no Kerbals? If you hit Alt+L does the staging light switch between green and purple? If you right click a part do you get the full menu - for example with a solar panel do you get the option to retract or extend it? If no to all those, you have simply lost control of your probe ship, probably due to lack of electric power. If yes to those, ie you still have power, you have either a problem with your controls or a game or windows bug. Check your keyboard as well as any joysticks or controllers. If no to the first question, ie if the pitch, roll, and yaw indicators are all centred, does your rocket have multiple engines, does it use fuel lines, or is it asymmetric? If yes, you probably have an unbalanced thrust or weight that's throwing it off course. If no, you may have a "phantom force" in your craft. This is usually caused by parts clipping into each other. Try and redesign your ship to minimise clipping.

Regarding docking, first understand that rendezvous and docking are two different things. Rendezvous is getting close to the target going the same speed in the same direction, which means you are in almost the same orbit. This is useful by itself as you can then fly kerbals across by EVA. Rendezvous is generally carried out using your main engines, with RCS optional for fine tuning. Docking is, once you're rendezvoused, actually joining the two ships. To practice docking without needing to worry about rendezvous, launch a ship that's actually a couple of ships docked together. Undock them in orbit, fly one gently around a bit the other, then redock them. Docking is generally carried out with RCS, so make sure your ships have a well-balanced arrangement of thrusters and enough monopropellant. (With practice you'll be able to do it on the command pod amount alone, but for starting I suggest one or two sensible-sized monopropellant tanks.) As for landing, well all vacuum bodies are basically the same, but the larger the body the quicker everything will go and the more capable the lander needs to be in both thrust-to-weight ratio and delta-V. A mod such as Engineer that displays the surface altitude is incredibly helpful; in the stock game you can only see this info in the IVA view. Try not to land on the dark side! If you must, pack powerful lights pointing down and extra fuel to fly with if your first landing zone is bad. The atmo bodies are more varied. Eve is pretty easy to land on, you just need parachutes, but do be sure your landing gear is solid because of its high gravity. Eve is very hard to get back into orbit again from though. Duna is more challenging to land on, the air is very thin and parachutes alone usually aren't enough, be prepared to use your engines to cushion your landing. Also try and aim for somewhere low. Taking off again isn't too hard, requiring a bit more delta-V than a Mun landing. Landing on Laythe is almost exactly like landing on Kerbin, the air is slightly thinner so you might add a couple of extra parachutes. But it's mostly ocean, so I suggest planning for a water landing. It's relatively hard to get back into orbit, though easier than a Kerbin launch. Alternatively, jet engines work on Laythe so you can take a spaceplane. Descending through Jool's atmosphere is fairly simple. There is no solid surface to land on, your craft will be destroyed when it descends below the 0 m mark. Returning to orbit from its depths is just about the hardest thing you can attempt in KSP.

Remember, the important thing is your orbital period. Nail that as precisely as you can and your satellites will hardly drift in the long term, even if the orbit is a little eccentric and inclined.

Yet another suggestion: If you lack struts to stiffen things up, don't build in 3-way or 6-way symmetry, but in 2-way or 4-way. It's been found through playing, mainly from people doing big starting tech rockets, that the 3-way symmetry results in rotations like you see. A wild guess as to why 3-way symmetry gets phantom rotational forces while 2-way and 4-way don't is that the game's physics work in rectangular co-ordinates. So with 2 or 4 way symmetry the situation truly is symmetric, but with 3 or 6 way there are small rounding errors that magnify.

Granted. It's a bowl with a hole and it's stolen by a mole to give to a vole who's friends with a foal who'll grow up hauling coal for the ol' factory where they made the bowl. I wish I was a better poet.

Granted. They obsess over Star Wars Episode VII instead, declaring it to be the best ever despite it actually being worse than Ep 1. I wish Star Wars Episode VII actually does end up good.

Granted. But they don't stop growing by themselves. You're the first known case and only after your brain is pierced by your own molars, leaving you alive but reduced to a state of incoherence, helplessness, and incontinence, is a treatment to halt tooth growth found. I wish I wasn't so imaginative.

Das was streaming about VTOL rovers, so I took my own old Wells design out, cheated it into Duna orbit, and had another go at landing it. This time in FAR+DRE.

Granted. But it turns out to be mere vapourware. I wish for stream.

To the same account, why have the altitude limit at all?The first thing I did was try and activate the drive on the pad for a laugh. When that did nothing it was a logical step to launch it into orbit and try there. If it had then not worked in my orbit it probably wouldn't have promptly occurred to me to try a higher orbit - there's no "Altitude too low" message after all. So why not just make the drive need to be clear of the atmosphere on atmo bodies, and high enough that the bubble is clear of the terrain on vacuum ones?

Granted. The Jaegers have QWOP controls. I wish PC gaming was more about gaming and less about messing with settings.

Well when would you need it? It's not going to be relevant when taxiing on the wheels, and other planes certainly shouldn't be flying so close in the air that it matters there. If the plane is being transported, eg by truck, then it's probably being partly dismantled anyway.

Vessel size is the obvious thing for building tier to affect, this all but confirms it.

Yeah, I've always assumed Eeloo is based on Europa for the surface features and Pluto for the orbit.