cantab

This is intended behaviour of the Big Awesome Coal Column booster. What did you expect the exhaust of a rocket burning space coal to look like? I'll admit that it's flying an unusual ascent profile, but that's the responsibility of the pilot not the engine.

Synthetic petroleum fuels. Made from atmospheric gases, ordinary rocks, whatever works. We have so much infrastructure for the distribution and use of petrol, diesel, and natural gas, that it's incredibly hard for anything else to break into the market. And for good reason; petrol and diesel are liquids at room temperature and pressure with good energy density by both mass and volume, making them great vehicle fuels, while natural gas is very handleable for static boilers (and ALSO a usable vehicle fuel). Where the electricity to run the synthesis plants comes from is unimportant. Fission, fusion, solar, wind, whatever. We'll probably end up with a mixture. It's keeping all the existing planes, trains, and automobiles running without needing mass replacement or a huge new infrastructure development that will count. Biofuels will have their role, but ultimately I don't think agriculture can meet our global needs for petrol and diesel as well as our needs for food and fabrics.

A couple of other ideas: The engine thrust could be just hitting some of the structure behind it. If this happened for one engine and not the other, because the ship flexes, that engine would lose thrust (with no visible change) and the ship would veer. The solution would be to add a space between parts 2 and 3. Check the thrust limiters on the engines. If they're different, there's your problem, make them the same. If they're the same, try reducing thrust on the engine that's "outside" when it veers to balance things.

If you mean the SC-9001 Science Jr. (AKA the Materials Bay) and the Mobile Processing Lab MPL-LG-2, they're two completely different things. The former is an experiment, run it to get science. The latter is used to improve the results from transmitting experiments, store repeat runs of an experiment, and allow reuse of experiments that are otherwise single-use (ie the Goo and the Sci Jr).

Since I saw this thread, I decided for laughs to throw a few hundred tons of xenon gas into orbit. No fancy fuel lines, just two stages to orbit with the ARM parts. The xenon depot is 315 tons, of which 175 is xenon, using Near Future Propulsion's octo-girder tanks. That's 1.75 million units of xenon, or the equivalent of 2,500 stock xenon tanks, or enough to run a single PB-ION for 42 days straight.

It would be a fair view with a game that's complete, that the designers have implicitly or explicitly said "This game is how we wanted it to be." But KSP is not anywhere near complete; the stock game we play today cannot be said to be how the designers intend it to be played.

Depending on how you do things you can either refuel the depot, or just send up a whole new one. Complex stations that have refuelling as just a part of their role will typically be topped up, but if your depot is just a few big tanks with docking ports stuck on you may as well deorbit/terminate it when it's empty and launch a fresh one.

The alternative would be to deorbit and land one, then the other. In your case, after getting on the return trajectory, you could have undocked and had the powered part burn to speed up its trip to Kerbin.

Approach 1: Pitch down a bit to keep your apoapsis under control while still burning to raise periapsis. Approach 2: Stop burning when you see your apoapsis starts running away, restart when you get nearer to it.

Yeah, I'll go with the birth of the space program being a good pick. In part because I can't think of any movies or TV shows off the top of my head that have covered such, whereas we've had plenty about visiting the Moon, and a fair few about going further in our solar system. I can see it building off some of the fan lore ideas, such as the Island Airfield's program previously having collapsed and left Jeb and others unemployed. The style of the movie I'm not so sure on. When you've got a cast of green bobble-heads it's never going to be a super-serious drama, but I think I'd want something more than a silly comedy. After all a space program, even a Kerbal Space Program, is a pretty impressive undertaking. Probably it would end up being a kid-friendly CG animation, with some humour and some good action and a bit of tension, and of course an inspiring message that space is awesome.

It's fair to say - we don't need a space program. But then we didn't need to research the behaviour of water and steam (which gave us the industrial revolution), or the weird anomalies in the theory of electromagnetism (which gave us general relativity and quantum mechanics, both of which along with spaceflight itself made possible GPS.)

This map suggests 27 km/s. http://i.imgur.com/SqdzxzF.png Comments thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1ktjfi/deltav_map_of_the_solar_system/ I don't know how the figure was calculated but it seems plausible. Although real atmospheres aren't as soupy as in stock KSP, Venus's surface pressure is 92 times Earth's; compare that to Eve's surface pressure which is only a few times Kerbin's. The delta-V and for that matter TWR needed to reach Venus orbit is about the same as to reach Jool orbit from its surface; I wouldn't be too surprised if this was deliberate on the part of Squad.

Savescumming in my normally-no-reverts permadeath save. Because seriously, I'm not having Bill test fly a Duna lander-rover, maintain control despite a staging error, and land safely with the parachutes and a little rocket thrust, only to die in a fricking car crash on the Space Centre's lawn.

Orbiter allows you to do anything that's within the capabilities of the craft. It's just that making more capable craft is considerably harder than in KSP, being more akin to making a parts mod for KSP.

Dead I went to launch a rocket and found it lacked sufficient struts and I'd forgotten to set up the abort action. I tried to get away by spamming space and actually managed to get the command pod detached and chutes deployed barely above the ground, but then other parts of the rocket slammed into it.

I don't think you can simply rescale Kerbin and have a very realistic experience, because the stock parts aren't just uniformly above or below real life. The rocket engines are underpowered and the tanks too heavy, but then the jets are overpowered and the fuel lines are godly. The stock aerodynamics are draggy but they let you make crazy moves without losing control or destroying your rocket, while the EVA packs can get you literally anywhere if you've enough patience.

First thing to check is that you use the same time system for the planner as you do in the game. Next thing may be that some mods confuse the angle from retrograde and the angle to retrograde (and likewise for angles from/to prograde).

Adding more makes a difference. Claw did all his runs using two reaction wheels each time, just a different two.

The big issue is what Streetwind mentioned. How do you propose to handle multiple instances of the game, that might be different game versions, different selections of mods, different versions of those mods, and some might even have manual edits made to core game files? This is something most installable programs either don't do or don't make easy for the user. How do you make managing such as easy for the user as it is in the current system of One Folder Per Instance? How much extra code is this going to introduce to maintain and debug, with three different operating systems and both Steam and direct installations possible on each?

It's already not THAT hard to change part performance, or even to rescale parts. To actually change the modules and textures on the other hand is never really going to be a simple process.

Perhaps have the unmanned gadget collect a "Soil Sample" while Kerbals can collect that and also a "Rock Sample".

Nice idea, but more something for a mod I'd say.

The OP already covered that. "Tech available for this launch: Tech Tier 3 + General Construction (for struts and the Launch Stability Enhancer), and all sensors (obviously)" (emphasis mine)

I recall the collision detection being hampered by Unity lacking a cylinder primitive. With rockets being LOADS of cylinders, they're all having to be done as meshes, which are much more CPU intensive. There's also going to be other aspects of the physics. The game has to handle forces and torques exerted on each part by the parts connected to it, and the forces those parts apply depend on the parts connected to THEM, and so on. It's easy to see how the calculations could really skyrocket if not well optimised.

Real reaction wheels are also orders of magnitude less capable than what we have in KSP. Real control moment gyros, on the other hand, are closer to what we have in KSP, and they're big and heavy enough to be stack elements for the smaller sizes. The larger radial sizes are still a bit too big, but they make for convenient construction. Not that I wouldn't like a radial CMG too.One of the ISS's CMGs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ISS_gyroscope.jpg Bit of info from Boeing: http://www.boeing.com/assets/pdf/defense-space/space/spacestation/systems/docs/ISS%20Motion%20Control%20System.pdf