cantab

.23.5 career, equivalent to .24 science, with mods. Still flying out my missions, got six on the go.

It sounds like overkill in some respects, and missing in some others. For most services, serving a small number of users is not all that demanding. Since you're running games, I'd say that's not "business critical". Ie it's not going to cost you loads of money if the server is down for a bit or there's some minor data corruption. With that in mind, I'd suggest: An internet connection with a fast upload speed. ADSL is generally terrible. Home cable/fibre/"superfast" services are better, but you might need a costly business service for truly good upload speeds. A good router. I like Draytek, they're capable and not dumbed down. A UPS. Keep the system safe from power surges and brief outages. A "standard" processor and accompanying motherboard, something like a Core i5 would be just fine. 8 or 16 GB of RAM should be plenty, but make sure you've got some spare slots for upgrading if you need it. Unless you need Windows Server for a specific service or want to learn how to use it, a Linux distribution for the OS. Ubuntu LTS, Debian, or CentOS should be good picks. More disk space. You can never have too much really. Consider a hybrid drive for faster performance, or have a solid-state drive and a regular hard drive and use caching software. If availability is not a major concern, don't bother with the RAID. Do though use volume management - LVM on Linux, dynamic disks on Windows - so you can easily add more disk space in future. The motherboard's onboard ethernet will be fine. A pair of external hard drives for backup, will be cheaper than tape. Keep one attached, one away in a different building, and swap them over every week or so. EDIT: Since you're concerned about upgradability, consider making your "main" OS a virtual machine host, and run your actual services in virtual machines. That way if your load increases beyond what your current system can take, it's relatively easy to transfer one or all of the virtual machines to new hardware, or even a commercial hosting service.

For an interplanetary trip it would indeed make some sense to give the distance taken. If you have excess delta-V you can take a shorter and quicker route than the fuel-optimal Hohmann transfer. Though I'd still favour the time. For interstellar travel, though, maybe not so much.

The Skywatcher Explorer 150 is there being sold with the Skywatcher AZ4 mount. That's a pretty good mount that by itself retails for more than the whole Astromaster setup, and accounts for the bulk of the price difference.

http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Basic_maneuvers I've found this about the most useful page on the wiki. Note particularly the recommended speeds for ascent. When I started out I slapped a load of boosters on the bottom of my rocket and wasted all their power on going at silly speeds in the lower atmosphere. Now I know better of course.

Attach one booster radially, put the tri-coupler on top, attach the other two boosters individually to the tri-coupler.

It says UT=(some number) if I remember right, and it's the time in seconds. Some players have reported bugs with very large values, equivalent to several hundred years say, for this.

If it requires a device at each end, it'll be commercialised sooner. Early on it will actually be light on security because it'll be so expensive. Multi-millionaires make unlikely terrorists. When it becomes more mass market I think the security arrangements would be lighter than for airlines, because it makes no sense to have a long security process for a short journey. Arrangements more like what train stations have would be likely. If it allows teleporting to an arbitrary location it'll remain classified military technology for a lot longer. Only well after a "jammer" is invented will it come into civilian use, and such jammer will of course prevent many criminal uses.

The Aeris 3A will do a run to the desert temple too, so long as you throttle well back for cruising, 15-20% is quite enough.

One of the F-1 engines from Apollo 11 was recovered from the bottom of the sea. So yes those ones at least could survive landing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-1_%28rocket_engine%29#Locations_of_F-1_engines

Imgur seems to be most popular, partly because you can embed whole albums. Personally I use flickr, they offer loads of space and no worries about dodgy ads there. In stock you can find the mass of your rocket by sending it to the launchpad, switching to map view, then click the i icon on the right. You can find the thrust of your engines in the VAB. You'll need thrust/weight to be at least 10 kN per ton to liftoff. As regards mods, Kerbal Engineer Redux will tell you all you need to know about your rocket. Terminal velocity in stock is the same for nearly every ship, so you can just read off the values from a table, such as here: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Basic_maneuvers

The first thing to test would be your ascent profile. When launching from an airless body you can pitchover to near horizontal very quickly, especially if you have a high thrust engine. The next thing I'd try is getting as close to orbit as possible with the lander, then EVAing the Kerbals out to circularise. It's tricky with more than one Kerbal though. Don't forget to take the science data! Without mods EVA Kerbals have limited instruments, but you can get map view by hitting M.

I'll be another to second the call for much, much more interest on the current planets. They really want bringing to life, not just visually but also linking in with the science system. For example on Duna you would be able to get different surface samples from the dust, the boulders, and the exposed bedrock.

Make a copy of the game's folder and delete the GameData/Squad and GameData/NASAMission directories, thus removing all the stock parts. Do stuff with only parts from mods you've never used before.

Like some others, I've docked on main engines once or twice and that was once or twice enough. So unless I have something that absolutely won't be docking with anything ever, I give it RCS thrusters. Though I often find just the pod suffices for monoprop.

I conceded and resorted to the Kerbal Maps website. It'll tell you where the anomalies are, though not WHAT they are. And be aware there's a chance the anomaly is either buried underground or floating high in the sky.

You can (if it's legal in your jurisdiction!) make your own larger motor though, which would be the solid-fuel equivalent of bigger tanks.

The only usb flash drives I've had fail have been extremely small and cheap giveaway ones, though I've had some with performance that's pretty pants. I've never permanently lost one either, worst I've done is unintentionally left them at the office, but I can see how they'd be easy to lose. Then again, on the external HDD front the pair of backup drives for the server at the office, that periodically swap between sites, have had no problems either. As for moving data between two PCs, I'd pick a wired network over a removable drive.

The inevitable flexing of your ship can perturb the orbit slightly. A small change now will be magnified as the projection goes further on and especially by any gravity assists such as that Mun flyby, resulting in the "spazzing out" you've seen.

I wasn't aware KSP was submitted for ESRB rating. Isn't that more a console thing?

According to MS the space usage there is illusory, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2795190 . Basically it's possible for the same file (not just two copies of the same file) to exist in more than one place. I don't know if WinDirStat reports these correctly.

I believe these only occur when you limit it to "ballistic" trajectories, and arise because of difficulties with the inclination. They go away if you choose to search for "optimal" trajectories that can include a mid-course correction to sort the inclinations out.

Use pilot probes that run a bit ahead of the main ship. You may have to work to get them ballistically matched to the main ship though.

WinDirStat will show you what's using your disk space. Can be very useful, you might be surprised at what's hogging the drive.

I'm guessing the drag is the main reason a scaled-down rocket can't perform as well as a full size one. Which then makes me think a rockoon (a rocket launched from a balloon) might do the job. I don't know if this example actually reached space, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rockoon_Van_Allen.jpg , but I'd say that a rocket you can pick up and carry (and that isn't intended as a weapon) can reasonably be called a model rocket.