cantab

@cratercracker Love the use of the antenna to mock up a laser! I may have to copy that myself.

@100055 there is a limitation in Kerbal space program that all planets must share the same rotation axis, and the camera view is based on that axis too. With that limitation, RSS has chosen to set up Earth's orbit and rotation correctly which is why the planetary orbits appear inclined. Then for all the other planets and moons the orbits are correct* because that's what matters most for interplanetary flight, and that means the rotation axes have to be wrong. Saturn in fact has axial tilt similar to Earth, so that's why its moons can orbit its equator roughly as they do in reality. (*KSP has another limitation, it can only do simple, fixed Keplerian orbits. So in fact orbits that in reality are significantly perturbed, such as the Moon, can only be correct on one chosen date in RSS.)

At long last, the RSN Antonio Vivaldi was sufficiently fuelled up to fly back to LEO. Now to get Jeb and the lovely science down, and then start work on bigger and better stuff. The Apocalyptica mining rig remains at the Moon and that's a key part of my strategy, because I will design a bigger and better miner that can be fuelled up in lunar orbit before making its own first landing. I'll also be wanting a LEO fuel station of some sort.

The 10 day week fell because workers did not overlook the fact that 1/10 is less than 1/7 when it came to their rest days. On the other hand 3/10 is a little more than 2/7 so perhaps it could gain some popularity nowadays, but then having a longer period of consecutive work days would probably be unpopular. Perennial calendars make the same day of the year always the same day of the week, and that's not always desirable. 5 out of 7 people would always have their birthday on a weekday, for example. And then there are the religious objections which I think in most countries would really sink the idea. (EDIT: The religious issues associated with having a day that's not part of a week might be resolved by a leap week calendar, but then that has its own problems.)

The metre, gram, and second were all developed somewhat independently, with no real intention of tying them together into a system of physical units. That came later, and in fact *several* systems were used. There was CGS - centimetre, gram, second - which itself spawned numerous variants when it came to working with the new science of electromagnetism. There was MKS - metre, kilogram, second - with electromagnetic units considered easier to work with. There was MTS - metre, tonne, second. There were 'gravitational units' using kilograms-force as the force unit and deriving the mass unit. In the event the MKS system 'won' and gave rise to SI. Of note is that the MKS system defines an electrical base unit, the ampere. Doing that actually avoids some oddities of CGS units. There was a metre-gram force-second system, but I don't believe there was ever a metre-gram (mass)-second system. I'm not sure why, maybe it just wasn't regarded as useful. On a final note, the original metric units were the grave, the mass of a litre of water, and the gravet, 1/1000 a grave. But this was the French Revolution, and 'grave' was also an aristocratic title and to use that word for a weight was unacceptable! The gravet was renamed the gramme (from Latin gramma, small weight) and the grave became the kilogramme. So basically, the SI base unit of mass is the kilogram because of politics.

I was wondering this myself, backspace stopped working. I assumed the feature got removed, only now do I find out it's been remapped to ` backquote. Seems like an odd change. ` is a really obscure key. (EDIT: On a UK keyboard at least, where it's shared with ¬ and |, and ~ is a different key. Oh and just for fun | isn't always |) Maybe people were hitting backspace in flight view by mistake and setting off their abort sequences. But then we still have shift+tab for going backwards in map view and shift throttling up when the navball is showing, and that's a worse control screw than anything.

Did a few milk runs with my mining rig. Hit a couple of new biomes, and tried using Kerbnet to help with the landings, it's useful to get the ground altitude. I got some landing pics this time!

@DunaRocketeer it is cool. I take it the idea is the wings act like giant airbrakes to help shed speed, clever, and nice work fitting the whole bunch in a cargo bay. I wonder if a two-way wing rather than four-way would be acceptable aerodynamically? That way it could go up in a long cargo bay and avoid the need to assemble it on-orbit, just claw the target and go.

I seem to remember there's a plastic with more benign overpressure behaviour than PVC. ABS maybe? Something that's less likely to cause shrapnel. It came up in discussions of homemade water guns, which usually include an air-filled pressure chamber.

Never got a Kerbal back from Duna. I've done round trips to Moho, Laythe, Tylo, Eeloo, even Ike, but Duna's been a bit of a blind spot. It does have ways to catch out the unwary, but mainly it's just that I only ever attempted Duna in no-reverts saves. Once broke up on parachute opening, once slammed into surface and once safely landed a Kerballed rover but then wrecked it in an 85 mile-an-hour rollover. Never built a spaceplane in stock aero in any KSP version, but I have built them in FAR. I actually feel a bit lost without FAR's analysis tools. Never played Galileo's Planet Pack. Installed but never visited Outer Planets Mod.

I generally have some sort of naming system and also try and have the names imply the order of development. In my current save my first 'wave' of craft were all named after musicians or groups and in alphabetical order, so the very first was Aerosmith, then Basshunter, and so on. Then I've reset to A but have been adding ship-style prefixes (RSN = Rocket Ship Nuclear, RL = Rocket Lander, etc) as my space program gets a bit more elaborate. Sometimes I'll name a 'program' and give individual ships numbers in it, for example Pele 1, Pele 2, etc from my New Horizons save. That's more likely if I'm playing no-reverts because that means I'll have canonical failed missions and need to do repeats, whereas if I'm playing with reverts I just hit F9 and try again with the same ship.

Old post I know, but actually KSP demonstrates the case for clusters. The game doesn't have unlimited size engines, so if you're launching big things you need to use engine clusters because that's your only choice. In real life it's not so cut and dried, but for example Falcon Heavy will use 27 engines because that's what SpaceX have. I believe that when Falcon Heavy flies, it will have more engines at liftoff than any other successful rocket in history. (N-1 had more, but went boom.)

Numerous rocket packs have been built for use on Earth, hydrogen peroxide is the most common fuel. On Earth at least the 750 C exhaust seems manageable, although it does only have to thrust one way. A 30 second flight time with such a rocket pack equates to about 300 m/s of delta-V. So if the Kerbals are willing to toss safety and common sense out the window (and it's generally accepted they are) 600 m/s doesn't seem so unbelievable, especially as thrust is lower. That said, the propellant mass would be higher than the game seems to imply.

It would be great if Hubble stays working as long as possible. It has capability JWST will not, being able to see the full visible spectrum and into the UV. Also if Hubble and JWST are operating together this allows their observations to be combined better than if Hubble is shut down sooner. And ground-based telescopes can't match Hubble's sharpness over its field - adaptive optics only sharpens a narrow part of the view - or its lack of skyglow. That said, servicing it will not be easy, and Dream Chaser is the last thing I expect to do it. Best chance is probably to work out a servicing mission using Orion. Maybe an Orion to carry crew and EVA from could be combined with a separately launched Dragon to carry the needed cargo?

Well in my view the thrust limiter is already a bit over-generous. Real rocket engines can't throttle down to 0.1% of their maximum thrust.

Well in my first 20 or so hours in the demo I made orbit, orbited the Mun, made orbit in a single stage, and did an orbital rendezvous to rescue the Kerbal who had made orbit (just) in a single stage. A Mun landing came shortly after in the full game. So I think I "got it" pretty quickly and ever since then I've just been doing more and getting better. There are still a few known weak spots in my knowledge - I can't land precisely and my spaceplanes are borderline. (I can make 'em, but not with useful payload much.)

Legitimate, probably my Sun impact probe but I don't recall the exact speed. Second place I hit Jool doing 40 km/s courtesy of Near Future. Also notable is that just leaving Earth's SOI in RSS will immediately give me about 30 km/s. With infinite fuel, 23% of light speed: This was done exploiting the old physicsless parts behaviour. It's just a single octag strut with a bunch of puff engines hanging off it and a few struts to brace it, all physicsless in that version of KSP, and that's how it can reach such extreme accelerations. No probe core - only way to control it is to turn fuelhack on or off.

I swear I took screenshots of Important Things, like landing, and being landed. But they weren't in my screenshots folder. Anyone else had that, or am I just a dumb? Anyway, here's my Apocalyptica mining rig, 14 tons full with a single Nerv engine, along with the upper stage from its launcher which is also nuclear: Said launcher, built for 20 tons to LEO so I added some ballast for the launch: The nuclear upper stage helps a lot, it's let me get close to a *two* percent payload fraction And Jeb's view of the Apocalyptica from the bridge of the Vivaldi after it docked. Docking into the Vivaldi is a little tricky, it's a tight confined space: If you look carefully you can see the infamous Nerva shroud, because the ballast is still attached under it. Yes it wrecked the miner when I decoupled. I had to decouple then immediately timewarp to work around the problem. And the Vivaldi burns for the Moon. With the overweight payload it will need to steal a bit of the payload's fuel to complete the transfer, but I had plenty left over: As I mentioned, somehow I got no screenshots of the Mun landing. But the Apocalyptica landed without trouble, spent three months filling its tanks, and returned to the Vivaldi with only one F9 required. Unfortunately it could only deliver a net 350-ish units, and Vivaldi needs 2400 to fill it up. So looks like I'll be doing a lot of runs.

For what it's worth I've not noticed it in a while, not playing near-stock (only mod being RSS and its hard dependencies). As sal_vager mentioned dealing with the problem isn't just on Squad, modders need to be careful too. It's a problem that affects every Unity developer, evidently some deal with it better than others. Code that might be natural and acceptable in another application can need to be avoided in a Unity game. Game developers, mod developers, and players won't have a true 100% solution to this until Unity change their C# runtime. (My understanding is that Unity got stuck in this problem because they made their own modifications to a once-current version of Mono, which meant that when Mono improved their garbage collector Unity couldn't upgrade. Legal issues with the software licenses were also a problem for Unity.)

Wonder what would happen if it flew into Jool. https://what-if.xkcd.com/139/

Concluded that 4.5 tons isn't enough to make a useful Moon miner. I have a design that should just about land, fuel up, and reorbit, but with negligible excess fuel. And it doesn't even have RCS for docking. So I'll have to make something bigger, and then deliver extra fuel to the freighter to be able to carry it out.

Having completed my first Kerballed Moon landing, my Mars probe exploration, and my LEO space station's research program, I decided I needed a new grand vision for my RSS save. And I found one: the Spaceliner Vision. It's simple - make travel from anywhere to anywhere in the solar system as routine as air travel today. And the first step on that long road is the launch of the RSN Antonio Vivaldi, a freighter capable of 4500 m/s with a 4.5 tonne cargo. That's enough to move stuff between LEO and lunar orbit. Next step: Build a miner to fit in the 4.5 tonne limit and send it out to the Moon!

Doesn't that apply to building your own PC in general? That said I don't think I'd advise a Skylake non-K overclock build now, considering the extra cost of a Z board and aftermarket cooler combined with more uncertainty over whether it will even work, along with the Kaby Lake Pentiums basically being Skylake i3s for half the price. Such as? A few games won't run or run very badly on a 'straight' dual core but what games won't run on a dual-core with SMT/hyperthreading (ie Core i3 or Kaby Lake Pentium.) EDIT PS: And we can't go by game publisher's "minimum requirements". They are frequently bull with games running fine on lower spec hardware.

Well they did by mistake, with the Skylake non-K overclocking. Though especially now it might be difficult to get a motherboard and BIOS that support it. 4.4 GHz on my i3-6100 now, once I finally tracked down the needed BIOS for my board.

The Superdracos are the Dragon V2's launch escape system. The thing that saves the astronauts life if everything else goes horribly wrong. SpaceX won't start messing around with that lightly.