cantab

KSP is the worst game ever because it doesn't have any power-ups.

I think long-distance travel would still be air. The runways could be elevated over the city, or even built into the megastructures with more living space over them. Of course it's also very possible that virtual reality would mean physical passenger transit is fairly rare anyway. You'd still need to move freight but that could be much more rigid and structured.

It will, but currently Intel processors have AMD ones trounced clock-for-clock. AMD have the stronger integrated graphics, but most gamers will get a proper graphics card anyway. The "Z" chipsets support overclocking, and the latest is Z97. Some H87 and H97 motherboards support overclocking but check the specific board for its CPU compatibility for that. And of course check the processor has an unlocked multiplier too. I wouldn't be surprised if the Xeon's are locked, they're meant for enterprise where you need rock steady reliability.For SSD size, I'd say go for around 500 GB. Something like my Crucial MX100 512 GB isn't all that expensive, certainly not in a thousand-Euro build, and it's better to have too much disk space than too little!

KSP atmospheres aren't fluids at all. They're more like forcefields, cousins of gravity where the acceleration on an object depends only on its speed and height. Except for the few things that are more or less affected by it.

I like the idea of the "power-ups". It's not like they're throwing the physics out the window, it just means you can get a few engines or tanks with a bit better performance than usual. It's obviously sensible that parts could be improved, and I don't think it's too unreasonable that the supply of improved parts is limited - the space program might not keep paying the premium price or the supplier might not retain the manufacturing capability. If you really dislike them you're free to stick to baseline performance for all your ships. I expect that will be the standard for "challenges" anyway. And Parkaboy raised a great point that it gives an incentive for actual re-use of parts rather than just landing everything for full recovery. My reservation is I'd really rather Squad improved the physics and the celestials instead of adding management-y features. But then maybe they want to do the Unity 5 port first?

More wild mass guessing: It was touched on in the squadcast when somebody said Clippy, but maybe the new feature is something like that. If your flying goes wrong, Wernher von Kerman will pop up and give the player advice. Essentially integrating tutorials into the main game. It could tie into the progress tracking too, so if you crash on the Mun on your first attempt you get the offer of the tutorial, but if you crash after having a bunch of successful landings before you don't.

I thought if you explicitly put it in free mode it wouldn't change?

Destructible something seems likely for the secret feature. Whether it's buildings, the ground itself (making permanent craters), or even ship parts (turning them into lots of fragments of debris for a real Kessler syndrome.)

Maxmaps said in the Squadcast earlier that the Magic Boulder is not still in KSP, and mentioned its origin having something to do with the ground scatter system. Of course it's easy to make your own with an asteroid and some lights.

Why would they need to make a plane change burn? They just time their launch to get the right inclination such that the Moon-relative AN/DN is at the same place as their trans-lunar ejection burn and Moon encounter.

Flying manually is easily. Flying well manually is not. I'm still iffy when it comes to efficient launches to orbit - of course my launchers have a margin that lets me be iffy. And I can't precision land in atmosphere, but then I think if Mechjeb had predicted my Laythe landing site that would have taken a lot of the excitement out.

Cool to see this up again. Reckon we'll ever get some more devices? Asteroid orbiter and asteroid lander would be good, and I wouldn't mind boat too.

The issue I see with reducing delta-V to reach orbit isn't difficulty as such, but importance of staging. At the moment SSTO or near-SSTO rockets are possible, and indeed the current career mechanics make them economical (which could be resolved by improving the ability to recover spent stages dropped earlier), but they give inferior payload fractions to staged rockets. If the delta-V needed to reach LKO is so low that staging is pointless then I think there'd be a problem.

I built a transfer stage to get a boat to Laythe. Quickly. 1500 tons of ship for a 65 ton payload, delivering in excess of 40 - yes, forty - km/s of delta-V with a TWR around 0.5. Or it would deliver that if the fuel flow wasn't going wrong for some reason. *sigh*

Launch heat. A trial implementation that's only active on an ascent.

I don't *think* it's biome-sensitive, but I may be wrong. But even if it isn't you can still get a result for "in space high" and another for "in space low", and both will be worth I think 3 or 4 times what you got for the samples in Kerbin orbit. For future asteroids, if you intercept them in solar orbit you can often arrange a gravity assist from Kerbin and get them to Duna or Eve without needing much delta V. Makes a cool mission and will give a really nice science return.

That is another thing that warrants looking at. The .23.5 changes made rockets too strong compared to their stiffness (or alternatively too flexible compared to their strength). While we don't want rockets falling apart easily, we also shouldn't be able to have a rocket bend through 90 degrees and stay intact. A little more flex than is realistic would help the player pinpoint the failure in the absence of a "highlight stress" feature, but the game currently way overdoes it.

Asteroid surface samples act like other experiments, so you get different results in different situations, with varying multipliers. So if you can get it to fly past the Mun or Minmus you can get more science from that. Unless the game's been changed landing at Kerbin won't be worth much science, land it somewhere else for bigger points.

On the station supply problem with life support: Add a "commercial supply port" part. Put it on any ship and it converts money into life support provided said ship is in a closed stable orbit or landed, cost depending on situation. (LKO pretty cheap, surface of Tylo eye-wateringly expensive.) That's just one idea. The wider point is that when a change to the game, eg life support, might have negative effects, eg needing to fly repetitive supply missions, there's always going to be plenty of ways to fix the negatives without losing the positives. It just takes a little imagination to come up with them.

Design exploration for my Laythe rescue mission. With Near Future, getting 50 km/s or more with a 65 ton payload isn't unreasonable, but then it hit me that with a low TWR the burns could literally take a day. Getting 50 km/s and a respectable TWR is a lot harder and may well require an unreasonably big rocket.

#ahypeahutahypeahutrocketryfriedkerbalsandahypeahut

Until fairly recently the problem with 64-bit on Windows was down to Unity and its developers, not Squad. At the moment Squad are in a bit of a tricky position in that long term 64-bit ought to be the focus, but right now 32-bit has fewer bugs and can't be ignored.But 64-bit computing doesn't make the task of handling a large game area any easier. I'm pretty sure double precision is the most natively supported by x86 and x86_64 alike.

I doubt getting into space is much of an issue, Star Wars ships probably have millions of m/s of delta-V before you even consider the hyperdrive, the few hundred from the planet's rotation will be moot.

If you don't mind redoing the launches and are just worried about the money, simply edit your save to have more. Otherwise, I suggest using hyperedit to return your launched satellites to KSC for recovery, and to put fixed satellites in their original orbits. Might have to manually note down the orbital parameters. Or you could figure out ways to get the satellites to fly back to Kerbin.

Regarding planet size, yes it does affect the game balance. In particular along with other factors it's important in how different staging strategies perform. However, why should KSP necessarily have the same balance as the real world?