cantab

Spot on. Transiting the planet, upper-left corner below the dark regio. Even with the camera fully zoomed in, it looks tiny.

That is Deimos, the smaller moon of Mars and the smallest and lightest body in standard RSS. Surface gravity of 0.00034 g and an escape speed of 6 - yes, six - m/s. For comparison the gravity on Gilly is 15 times stronger, and the gravity on Minmus 150 times stronger. I wasn't even sure if my probe would ever come to rest on Deimos, but with a bit of waiting and delicate reaction wheel turning it did. At least the RSS folks did give Deimos sensible timewarp limits. Bonus: See if you can spot Phobos, Mars's other moon, in the picture!

If it's stupid but it works, it isn't stupid. 71% strength on the connection to my Mars relay sat, compared to 1% via the single-dish solar orbit relay. Now I don't need to worry about my Mars probes losing signal. Well, except for when KSC is facing the other way! I'll have to be careful, but it's still better than nothing.

I don't think there is a single scale height, it's a more complex curve. (It's more complex in stock now too). The main reason the atmospheric pressure curve deviates from a simple exponential is the variation in temperature. A question myself, does RSS now buff the commnet antennas, or are they still acting like the stock ones? I looked into it and there'd been some talk but I'm not sure if any changes have actually been implemented yet. (Either way they're working fine for me so far, I'm just curious.)

Mars stuff :-) My flotilla of probes arrived at Mars going a lot faster than planned, and even the one with the most delta-V couldn't make a powered capture, so I F9ed and went for some unscheduled aerobraking! And luckily it's worked well. Kerbal parts might be made of iron but evidently that has its advantages. On the downside my comm network is being stretched to its limits with signal around 5 or 6 percent. I guess that's what a 244 Gm link does.

With a single vessel KSP cannot effectively use more than two cores. Aspects of the vessel physics simulation inherently cannot be multithreaded well, so this is unlikely to change in future. With multiple vessels KSP can use more cores effectively, but it's not common for a player to have half a dozen high-part-count ships all at once. I would still choose a CPU for KSP based primarily on its single-threaded performance. And I'll wait and see how good Ryzen is.

So, how do you remove an objectionable docking port that's blocking your hatch? Well, you go and get a spare satellite, be grateful it's got loads of delta-V because it needs to make a 90 degree turn from a polar to an equatorial orbit, you come up to your spacecraft and ramming speed! And as the smoke clears, it worked! That's an exposed hatch for a Kerbal to get in! And now Jeb has got in and can come home. Moon missions, just like NASA :-D

Yes, the very good reason is that most real world planes are Cessna 172's :-P

Reduce? Yeesh. KSP is already extremely light on graphics for a modern 3D game. Just fix your dang PC. Whatever jury rig bodge job MacGuyver you gotta do, just get those temps back down. Open the case and point a desk fan at it if you have to.

If the game supports it, my suggestion for the lower level runways would be to play with the wheel grip and friction behaviour. All runways are flat. Maybe L1 and L2 have the odd pothole or two, but generally flat. The level 1 runway gives high resistance when you're rolling. On the other hand when you brake the wheels are likely to skid. It's made of gravel after all! On the other hand it still ought to give better grip than the grass. The level 3 runway lets wheels spin easily when rolling and get loads of grip when braking. L2 somewhere between. The lower level runways can also be shorter, of course.

Legal issues with the rocket engine, or with something else? (Or is it confidential?)

I'll cross-post this here. Jeb bailed out of the lander and proceeded to make orbit then get to the orbiter on the jetpack. This was intentional by me. I forgot one small problem with the orbiter. And now Jeb is locked out. D'oh.

I just made one of my most spectacular blunders ever. I went for the second Moon landing. And whooshed over the surface on approach - 1100 m/s and within 25 m of the ground! I landed successfully and popped up a hill for a view: https://flic.kr/p/SeD3UX I launched, got nearly to orbit, and as was planned bailed out and continued on the jetpack. I rendezvoused with the orbiter no problem, and... Locked out! No external hatch on the orbiter! So now I have to figure out how the heck to solve this. Preferably a solution other than "strand Jeb in orbit and fly Bob and the science home".

@Hotaru love that retro sci-fi look! How's she handle in atmosphere, any good at gliding?

Pretty sure when it comes to spaceplanes the Whiplash is still commonly used. It faces competition from the RAPIER, but Whiplash+Nerv to go liquid fuel only is popular. As for the Wheesley, I'm not sure what could be done? Like most of the jets, it's already more efficient than the real thing. Since it's supposed to be a turbofan it shouldn't be running much past Mach 1.5 and nor should it be very good on TWR. It does have reverse thrust as its feature. Maybe it's the aero model that's giving the Panther a practical advantage? KSP Wiki mentions that because the Panther can supercruise faster, that makes the fuel efficiency better than the Wheesley per mile even if the Panther burns more fuel per minute, but if supersonic drag is wonky that could be skewing the behaviour. And maybe the Wheesley just has to be one of the small number of parts that's 'balanced' largely by its tech tree location.

I did it! The Queen lander put a Kerbal on the Moon. Getting back to orbit was a close thing, I had to use most of my 15 units of monoprop to make it safe, then send the orbiter to do the rendevous. Now to get them home. Although ... I'm tempted to try for a second landing! I have enough fuel in the orbiter to fill the lander and leave just enough to get back to Earth, although the Kerbal would need to jetpack to finish getting back to the orbiter after landing. It'll be a close run thing, but fun to go for.

Completed the assembly in LEO of my very first Moon lander. Next stop: The Moon! Near to far: Queen lander, Rick Astley orbiter with two Stratovarius drop tanks, part-full upper stage from the Rick Astley launch. EDIT: @Flamingo love the part test plane! Reminds me of one I did back in the day, mounting a Mammoth with a nosecone atop a 2.5m fuselaged plane, looked so lulzy but worked great.

For capsules I've not had a problem with 100%. A Mk1 pod can re-enter safely from LEO without even needing a heatshield, and from the Moon with one. I'm guessing RSS now adjusts something to make the re-entry about right without needing to pull in DRE or similar. Spaceplanes, though, I can imagine being harder. (I'm a long way off attempting any sort of spaceplane in RSS.) On the matter of S-turns, what they let you do is maintain the draggy high angle of attack but control your descent rate independently. If you only fly the wings level then you can end up with a dilemna, keep the AoA up to keep shedding speed and you'll "skip" which you might not want, but drop the AoA to avoid skipping and you'll carry more speed deeper into the atmosphere which could end in booms. Banking the wings gets you out of that dilemna.

I'd say that actually the engine balance is on the whole reasonably good, even in sandbox. The Nerv is arguably overpowered but then it kind of has to be considering it's taking a nuke to a gun fight. There's maybe a few dubious engines, and some that don't perform like their real-world inspirations as we discussed, but there's nothing egregiously over- or underpowered. And of course in science and career there's the additional balancing tools of tech tree placement and cost. Now if you want to see terrible balance in KSP, just look at the command pods. The lengths I go to to avoid using the 2.5 m because it's just an insane boat anchor...

Yeah. I did actually hypothesise why the Mammoth is so overpowered. The real Shuttle and SLS have hydrolox core stages which are large but relatively light, and solid boosters which have much denser fuel. More than half the launch weight of the Shuttle is in the SRBs! Hence the SRBs having high thrust and the orbiter, or for SLS the core, having relatively low thrust. But KSP only has one fuel which is more like kerolox in density, which means if you make a rocket that *looks* like an SLS then after you correct for 'Kerbal scale' the rocket will be heavier and so need more powerful engines. Though still, I reckon the Mammoth would be happy around 2000kN, if the Kickback and Twin Boar were improved to compensate.

For me a gripe with upper stage engines in general is they have too much performance for their node size. I often find myself putting Sparks under 1.25 m tanks and Terriers under 2.5 m ones, but in stock aero that means either adding the extra mass of an interstage fairing which is sometimes noticeable, or having horrible drag during launch. If only the game could handle engine shrouds and decouplers better. (At least when I use FAR I can simply clip the decoupler around the engine.)

Launched my LM and docked it to the CSM. Docking is like riding a bike, you never forget it once you've learned. Despite having put the spare fuel from the LM's upper stage into the still-attached CSM's upper stage, I'm about 900 m/s short so I will need to send up some additional fuel, probably in drop tanks for the CSM.

Yeah, total mass. Ratio between fuel and payload has varied and therefore delta-V too. For upper stage use in stock probably about 1000-1500 m/s, in RSS I might go up to 3500. I'll acknowledge that towards the upper end I might consider a Nerv cluster instead (once I unlock it). Unlike a transfer stage, an upper stage really will give problems if it's much below 0.5 TWR. Lower can be done but gets extremely sensitive to the ascent profile.

For me, I tend to use the Poodle to push a lot more. 50 tonnes for an upper stage (0.5 TWR), and maybe up to 100 for deep space use (0.25 TWR). As far as chemicals go, for that kind of thing it's the right engine in my view. Four Terrier's are strictly inferior. The Reliant or Swivel have lower Isp and the reduced dry mass isn't enough to help. (It *used* to be, back when the Poodle was heavier). The Aerospike's an interesting alternative but some craft will miss not having gimbal. And four Nervs, well yes they probably will give you a lower mass stage but in career it starts to look really pricey and anyway "worse than the nuclear powered engine" isn't much of a criticism.

@Guswut 's site is offline. Does anyone else have his patches?