cantab

Stock. And to be honest, knowing how dodgy it is put me off taking planes seriously. I've never made a useful powered aircraft in KSP. Meanwhile all my rockets were built with stock in mind, and I feared (whether rightly or wrongly) that installing FAR would make them not work. But in future I intend to install FAR. Unless by the time I would the stock aero's been sorted anyway. After I've flown my current missions I'll be taking a break from KSP until I get my new PC, since I'm fed up of everything running at half speed.

So no 2869 km high launch towers?

That .23.5 bug was due to said decoupler being physicsless. It was worse on Linux, where with certain strutting arrangements past the decoupler firing it would simply crash the game. I spent a bundle of time investigating only to find out the issue was already known and the fix was to make the decoupler not bleeding physicsless dang you Squad what were you thinking argh!

On greenhouses, the advantage in principle is that the plants grow from the waste products produced by the crew - carbon dioxide in breath, nitrogen compounds in urine, and miscellaneous organics in faeces.

Delta-V is lower in atmosphere since specific impulse is lower in atmosphere, because the ambient air impedes the rocket exhaust. It's for the same physical reasons as the thrust being reduced given constant fuel flow (which is the norm in real rockets). Indeed, realistically making Isp loss in atmosphere affect thrust would make rocket design more complicated, since you would now have separate atmospheric and vacuum TWR as well as dV. Not that the complexity is reason to not do it.

Indeed. Being able to make persistent craters, well if you can do that you can write things on the celestials. It could keep you busy for a lot longer than just destroying the VAB a few times over.

I did the bail-out of a failing landing thing. That was on nice forgiving Minmus though, I ran out of fuel so I just exited the craft and RCS'd down, then had another ship on the expedition come and pick him up.

Wings work for boat hulls too, since they're reasonably low drag at modest speeds. Just be careful when entering or exiting the water since that's when their fragile impact tolerance will come into play. My Laythe boat (the Magellan in my mission albums) gets up to about 20 m/s on them, with about 150 kN of thrust. It also turns well enough just on the torque of a few reaction wheels, or by shutting down a prop on one side, though it's not advisable to take turns at full speed! As for propulsion, the go-to option in stock is the jets. I think they might even be more fuel-efficient than the ions, due to the jet engine Isp bug. For mods, Firespitter's the obvious choice with a wide choice of propellers, which seem to work equally well above or below the waterline and many can run in either forward or reverse. The electric propellers are power-hungry, and you can't use deployable solar panels when underway or they'll break. You could stud your boat with OX-STATs which is fine for a small ship but will spike the part count on a big one. A better option for a large boat could be to provide lots of batteries and plan on stopping for recharges. Or if you're prepared to consider more mods, I powered my boat with a nuclear reactor from Near Future Technologies. I couldn't fully deploy the radiators or they'd break like the solar panels, but even with the rads in the closed position I could run the reactor high enough to power the props. On land, bear in mind an option is to use thrust for drive, and run on aircraft landing gear which won't give you any drag problems in the water. For a modded electric craft this won't use any fuel. Alternatively, for a purely stock amphibian I might consider something that rolls over, so the wheels are on one side and the floats on the other.

Pay attention to the game and act quickly instead of sitting and gawping at the unfolding disaster. I usually fail to do this.

Be warned, the comic's a browser stress-test. My system failed to handle it and killed all my programs, including my VM (which is equivalent to pulling the plug on the virtual machine, something I try not to do )

The mod RCS Build Aid may help. It will show whether your main engines exert any torque when they fire, not just your RCS. That way you can add another part for balance, which could be a lighter part placed further out.

You can still make gliders in stock aero, and you can make something that looks like a lifting body, or anything else. Regardless, the challenge doesn't actually constrain ship appearance. I could make an entry that looked like a U-2 if I wanted, though it probably wouldn't score very high.

They'll mainly apply to career strategy rather than rocket design though. A ship will work fine regardless, though it might not be economical in career.Allowing physics settings that are too fine-grained will cause problems. For example "Aerodynamic Failure: On/Off" isn't going to be too much of an issue (though lots of on/off settings will rack up the combinations), but "Aerodynamic Stress Severity: 0%-100%" in 1% steps would be inadvisable IMO.

IIRC the bug is because the force is applied when the struts are still present, and only on the next frame are the struts broken. The only workaround I can think of, besides the common sepratrons, is to use quantum struts and disconnect them before you decouple.

Yeah, the SPH tends to be better for rover building. Be aware that you can't include the first part you placed in a subassembly. So rather than starting with the probe core or pod, start with say an octagonal strut and build off that. However the next part you place attaches is how it will also attach to your rocket, keep that in mind. If you're not used to subassemblies, I suggest knocking up some rough-and-ready rover designs and checking you can fix them to your launcher OK, before you spend ages on a fully polished rover.

Because the Kerbals watched Gravioli, which made it plainly clear that a safety line won't even save you if the S really hits the F.

Very nice work. I like the more metallic look on your RCS thrusters, and the 45-degree one is a clever idea.

"Under the hood" Windows 8 has some things to recommend it, and I opted for it on my new SSD over Windows 7. But the Start Screen is a big waste of time, and the UI overall is a little schizophrenic. It does make some sense on hybrids, which MS are pushing with their Surface Pro, but it has issues on a pure tablet and on a desktop. On the Linux side I'm a long-running KDE fan, but I switched to xfce for my new install to save on the RAM, since my PC "only" has 4 GB. I considered LXDE but the current Lubuntu seems to have a few niggles, and the clincher was xfce's window manager doing half-maximise by dragging to the screen edge, invaluable for working with things side-by-side.

As a rocket the RAPIER's Isp isn't that bad, a shade lower than the LV-T45 and equal to the .24-buffed Mainsail. Of course it's a lot thirstier in closed-cycle than in air-breathing mode.

I did something like that deliberately the one time. It was the first and last time I shall attempt to dock with something lacking attitude control.

I've heard rumours of Duna and Ike being spotted, but no confirmation.

What mods are the parts from?As for me, a nice gentle aerocapture into Jool orbit

So, double post for an update: the Kerbal Engineer Redux reports atmospheric density. I don't know if it's a value from the game proper or something calculated by KER, but it's there.

The game will tell you the pressure and the temperature at sea level. We also know the atmospheric scale heights independently. It has little information on composition though: we know only that Kerbin and Laythe have oxygen present (and can assume the former doesn't have so much that vegetation would all burn up), while Eve and Duna do not. You might try and estimate carbon dioxide levels by considering the greenhouse effect.

If you don't mind minor cheating you can always search through your savefile for the name of the asteroid and its mass should be there to read off. Generally speaking when talking about TWR for orbital and deep space craft the standard is Kerbin TWR. You don't actually need to fight gravity, it's just in some situations you don't want to be burning for too long. But with an E class asteroid long burns are going to be inevitable. For this mission I would stick to the LV-N's. True they're heavy, but the difference in engine weight will be peanuts compared to the mass of the asteroid. That's not to say a Mainsail-powered design can't work, but it will need an awful lot more fuel. For steering, an option with the really big asteroids is to simply unclaw, fly around the asteroid until you're facing the right direction, and reclaw. If you do try to turn it I suggest disabling SAS, then you can put a turn on and let it slowly coast.