cantab

Granted. WASSUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP! I wish I didn't need the loo.

If you want to go to another planet, the most fuel-efficient way is to decide where you're going, check when there's a transfer window, and make one transfer burn in Low Kerbin Orbit to get on course to said planet. As for target suggestions, the four obvious places are Eve, Gilly, Duna, and Ike. Some pros and cons of each: Eve: + Easy to reach. + Easy to land on with parachutes. - Has oceans, you might not want to land in them. - High gravity, check your ladders and don't send a flimsy ship. - Relatively had to return to Kerbin from orbit. - Very hard to return from the surface, so plan for a one-way landing. Gilly: + Super low gravity makes landing a doddle. - Tricky to get to, it's in an inclined and eccentric orbit round Eve and has a tiny SOI. - Such low gravity that walking can be a problem, so you need to be good with the jetpack. - Can be a test of patience, orbit and descent speeds are slow. Duna: + Easy to reach. + Easy to return to Kerbin from orbit. + Practical to return from the surface. - Trickier to land on than Eve, you need either lots of chutes or engine assistance. - Jetpacking is marginally possible. Checking your ladders will make life easy. Ike: + Fairly easy to reach. (Unwanted Ike encounters are common!) + Landing and takeoff are much like the Mun. - Not quite so simple to reach as Duna itself. Overall, I rate Ike as the best pick for a first interplanetary return mission, at least for a player with a few Mun landings under their belt. For a one-way trip Eve is a great target.

Granted. But you can never obtain a detonator. I wish get-iplayer would start working again.

Engines will work when underwater, so any VTOL that floats level should be fine.

Well there's sundiving and escaping, both of which require lots of delta-V. There's anomaly hunting, IIRC most of the anomalies on Kerbin and the Mun are there in the demo. You can build a rocket plane though it may look a bit daft.

The LV-N now has a small chance, maybe one in a million per minute of running, of exploding in a nuclear fireball. When this happens it controls the PC monitor to emit a barrage of radiation that turns the player into a green-skinned superhero.

SpaceY, lol. Anyway, I mainly just spent ages timewarping. 7 Earth year wait for my Dres encounter.

To clarify, if you're building a payload that's going to be a subassembly, to start the build with a "throwaway" part like an octagonal strut, then place the first real part and build on. Save the subassembly from the first real part.

One other factor in stock aero: if the small plane has less lift-to-weight, you want to drop it. If it has more (unlikely but could happen), you want to let it fly off the top.

On that budget and with KSP in mind Intel really gets the nod over AMD. If you're prepared to reconsider overclocking, the Pentium G3258 is Intel's only budget overclockable CPU and typically does very well. If you definitely want to stick with stock speeds, get the fastest-clocked Intel CPU you can afford - probably the Pentium G3450 or maybe the Core i3-4370. Core i5's are out of your budget I think. Pair that with a decent affordable motherboard. Preferably a H97 (if you aren't OCing) or Z97 (if you are); if you're looking at something else do your homework in checking the CPU compatibility and overclocking options. As for size either a full ATX or microATX board should be fine. If you really want a compact PC consider a mini ITX board, but they tend to only have two RAM slots. For RAM, I'd want some free space for future upgrades, so two sticks if the motherboard takes four or a single stick if it takes two. 4 GB is miserly, 8 is standard, 16 falls into nice to have territory. And don't get RAM with overlarge heatsinks, they're not very useful and get in the way of big CPU coolers which are. For a graphics card, Nvidia Geforce GTX 750 Ti, or regular 750 if you need to save a few bucks. The 750 Ti will handle almost all modern games at 1080p fine. For drives, unless you're a big music and movie hoarder get yourself a solid state drive. The presence or absence of an SSD is probably the biggest impact on general PC responsiveness. One of the Crucial MX100s would be good.

What was the problem with Curiosity?

Granted. We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. I wish functional and safe sonic screwdrivers were on general sale and affordable to non-plutocrats.

This just made me think of a Chinese concept car from a while back Source: http://www.tuningnews.net/event_gallery/94/080115b/naias-2008-gallery-japan-asia/

The boat's several challenges ago anyway.

Granted. One new Kerbal is added to the potential infinity of them. I wish to visit the point at infinity.

I'm an IT professional working for a non-profit SME, a job that requires me to look after just about everything to do with the computers. I'm not really an expert in any one aspect, it's more about being able to turn my hand to any situation. Except web design. I can maintain a site and do small tweaks but I'm hopeless at design, the pros can handle that.

I'm not sure I'd call it OP. While it's massless and gives good science returns it's late in the tech tree, expensive, and requires a lot of electricity to transmit results.

Think of your science results as filling a grid something like this. The columns show the biomes, the rows show the situations. [table=width: 500, class: grid] [tr] [td][/td] [td]Biome 1[/td] [td]Biome 2[/td] [td]Biome 3[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]In Space High[/td] [td][/td][td][/td][td][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]In Space Low[/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Landed[/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Splashed[/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [td][/td] [/tr] [/table] Some of those situations might give one result merged across all biomes, and which situations that's done in depends on the experiment. The Gravioli detector happens to give different results for different biomes in all situations it can be done in.

DasValdez was doing something like this on his stream last night, breaking his rocket into three parts for recovery. If you do the breakup 2 km from the surface you will definitely be fine, just watch that your bits don't fall on top of each other. 2 km is also a sensible altitude to pre-deploy chutes, at least on Kerbin.

Mass, cost, and thrust are like extensive properties. Double the engine up and you double all of them. Isp is an intensive property. TWR and thrust per kuid are also intensive properties. Double the engine up and they stay the same. TWR per kuid is going to pop out as an extensive property, since a pair of engines would have twice the price but the same TWR. To have a level playing field between small and large engines, you need to only consider intensive properties. It's pretty simple to check - if your figure of merit changes when you consider a pair of the engine, it's not a valid figure of merit. Ultimately I think a simplified version of tavert's approach is best. Impose a required delta-V and initial TWR, assume for simplicity that you can use fractional engines, and work out the price per ton of payload for the various engines. There is though a gotcha. A multi-stage rocket where each stage is mass-optimal will be mass optimal in total, but a multi-stage rocket where each stage is price-optimal may not be price-optimal in total because if the upper stage is cheap but heavy it becomes a bigger payload for the stage below. This may limit the use of these figures.

Putting the retro into retrorockets!

Astrophotography, though, demands what in other fields would be wholly unreasonable exposure times. 5 or 10 minute single exposures ("subs") aren't uncommon. Active cooling of the sensor to reduce thermal noise also isn't uncommon. So you've no demonstration of the technique actually working for astro-imaging.At this point my thought is that if it was any good it would be far more widely used. If a "trivial" computer program could replace a several-hundred-dollar tracking mount, people would be doing that. And yet in all my time reading astronomy mags and browsing forums I've never even heard of the idea before.

Added some extra ground scatter to Eve.

The Leonardo, I think. Designed to cruise around low-gravity moons hovering on its ion engines, and mine kethane and bring it to orbit.

Indeed. Stacking is pretty much universal in astro imaging these days. But K^2 seemed to be referring to something else, some processing done on the individual frames before they're stacked.