cantab

I'm not fussed what it's called, so long as it's NOT credits/kredits. That's an overused sci-fi cliché that needs to die in a fire.

The lab is indeed a bit iffy. It can work out lighter to just pack multiple Goo and Materials bays. However, it does make viable an approach of run experiment, transmit, clean, run again, store. That gives you science now rather than having to wait for the mission return. The biggest benefit though IMHO is that it can store multiple runs of the same experiment in the same setting, which you need for most to max out the science. Pods can't store such repeat experiments, unless you take multiple, but then you start to get heavier than the lab. Just be careful on landing, the lab's fragile. You could also try it on a Kerballed one-way mission, but for most places the weight is probably better used to do an ultralight return mission.

Meant to just do "a couple more burns" and go to sleep about half two. It's now ten past four.

Try removing the cPch and cHdg numbers. In almost all the vessels in my file they're either absent or 0. My wild guess is they save how rapidly the ship is rotating, but whatever they're for, it's obviously uncommon to have values there. You may also need to look at the rest of the vessel, or post the whole thing here.

I assume what's been referred to is the way apopasis rises severely if you just try and do a normal/anti-normal burn. To clarify, the most fuel-efficient general way to make large inclination changes is: 1) Burn prograde to raise apoapsis as high as you like. If you're trying to rendezvous with something, make this burn at the ascending/descending node. (Target what you want to meet up with and you'll see the AN/DN markers appear). 2) At apoapsis, do a burn with a normal or antinormal component to match inclinations, and a retrograde component to lower periapsis to the desired altitude. (For aerobraking, make this in the atmosphere, but not too low! Try 40 km for Kerbin). 3) If not aerobraking, burn retrograde at periapsis to lower your apoapsis back down.

Sure it's not a hundred megametres? Dres's SOI is about 32 Mm. If you're making a flyby of somewhere else first, conic patch limit set too low? (Look in settings.cfg) Hack Gravity left on? That really messes with orbits (unsurprisingly). If none of those are the case, then there is a known game bug where SOI changes are not shown until they happen. This tends to occur with near-circular orbits just inside or just outside that of a celestial (and tends to lead to a crash after the SOI change, since you have very little speed relative to the celestial). You could try trusting that the close approach will give you the capture when you're there.

Well, you should at least be able to get the science reports working again, so you can read the proper messages when you run the experiments.

Yeah, rockets are essentially least useful at low speeds, and an Eve plane is not going to be fast. The only way I can see it working is if you can get airborne with very little thrust, but I'm not sure if KSP aerodynamics works that way. The Wiki page on Eve lists some typical delta-V figures for rocket ascents, though only from heights where there's land.

Nice job. And yes, it made me think of that US plan (Credible Sport).

As you say, those are the orbital elements. I suggest backing up the file you have, and experimenting to see what changes, if any, fix the bug. Decreasing the eccentricity would be the first thing to look at. It may not be directly related to the orbit though. "Stop and drop" is uncommon for the Sun but often done to land on planets and I've not heard of crashes like this.

No, but as mentioned, it looks like you're running a multiplayer mod. Re-entry effects on stuff that isn't re-entering is a known bug with Kerbal Multi Player.

Don't even need two pods. EVA out, right click the pod and Take Data, then Store Experiments. Then you can make a new crew report. This works because the command pod includes the separate functions of an experiment (Crew Report) and an experiment store. With any experiment, you need to remove the data before you can run it again, and can then put that data in a store. This is no different, it's just that the experiment and the store are in the same part. And no, I didn't figure this out myself, but it's a trick worth knowing. I *did* just figure out for myself that your Kerbal works the same way, and you can right-click another Kerbal and Give Data/Take Data. So if you have two Kerbals, by shunting the data around they can carry as many EVA Reports and Surface Samples as you like. This may be useful with craft using external seats. (I've not checked if the one-result-per-environment limit that applies to command pods, but not to the science lab, applies to Kerbals.)

It will result in casualties, but run your entire space program on kethane. You may need to move the small converter, small tank, and kerbal unreconstitutionator into a lower tech node.

In my experience Dell will happily sell PCs in all sorts of different configurations under the same name. And yes, they are bad for having poor upgrade potential. For example it's not uncommon to see a motherboard in a Dell that clearly has space for four RAM slots, but only two slots are present. Cheapskates. Best thing may be to pop the cover off and take a look. Spare ram slots good, all slots full not good.

Even the biggest SRB, full, is only 22 tons. That's a pretty mid-sized payload in KSP. You can stick it on top of the launcher; it's kind of a long payload, but with some struts and a bit of care in the pitchover it'll be fine. Or you could strap a pair of rockets to either side of it, or you could build a 44 ton lifter to send both SRBs up at once. As mentioned, put them at the top of the staging list so they don't fire themselves. Alternatively, since solid boosters won't be that useful for orbital manouevres anyway - you really want more control - just right-click them in the VAB and empty the fuel, using them simply for structural and aesthetic parts. As the single longest part, the big SRBs are pretty handy for structural use. That's what I did with my space station, https://flic.kr/p/nvDyw2 . Here's an example of the two boosters either side approach: https://flic.kr/p/nvmC9T These are empty SRBs, with other bits attached. I had to use some girderwork because the poles were built as subassemblies from the top, and I made sure I strutted them to each stage of the rocket. Even when it was like this in orbit, https://flic.kr/p/nvmH8F, it stayed solid thanks to the struts and handled smoothly. The principle should work for full SRBs, you'd just need a more powerful rocket.

Duna certainly does have an atmosphere. It just doesn't have any oxygen in it.

Yup, just Kerbin and Laythe for jets (including the Rapier in air-breathing mode) in the stock game. If you want to fly on Eve, Duna, or Jool you're limited to rockets, ions, and infiniglide. (The last being considered cheaty by many). Mods of course give you more options. The kethane mod includes a jet that burns raw kethane with any air, while firespitter has propellers. Back to the rapier, one of the interesting things is it's tied with the Mark 55 for the biggest gimbal range of any engine, at 3 degrees. Should you want a strong gimbal for some reason, maybe because your ship's CoM shifts off-axis, it might be worth trying. (Rapiers for main engines on a shuttle maybe?)

I tried to remove an extraneous antenna from my ship using whack-a-kerbal. Cue an explosion that blew the command pod away from the rest of the ship. *sigh* Relaunch time.

By the way, his name is Jebediah.

Technically, there is, it's just boring. The Science Lab, on the other hand, truly has no IVA, which means you don't even see the Kerbal heads for Kerbals in the lab.

There's not much reason to use the aerospikes on Duna either, the pressure is so low at sea level that most engines will be near their vacuum Isp anyway. I suppose you could use one aerospike instead of three LV-909's to save space.

Assuming you have a basically adequate graphics card and driver, the biggest determinant of KSP's performance is the CPU's single-core performance. That might be a bit tricky to find benchmarks for, most focus on multi-core performance. RAM will not be an issue unless you're either running a lot of mods or running stuff other than KSP. If it is an issue, reducing texture resolution or using a texture management mod helps. I run KSP and Firefox (pretty RAM hungry) together on a system with 4GB, including the Kethane and NFP mods among others, but with textures set to half res I don't have any RAM issues. Also, annoyingly Microsoft won't let 32-bit Windows 7 use more than 4GB of RAM. It's been perfectly possible for a 32-bit OS to support more RAM in total for years, Linux/Unix has it and MS support it in their server OSes since Server 2003 (which is based on Windows XP) but chose to leave it out of the desktop OSes. So it really pisses me off when I read it made out that all 32-bit OSes are stuck with 4GB, a myth I believe MS have sought to spread, or at least spread by regarding their own products as the only operating systems in existence. A RAM upgrade becomes much more time consuming if you also need to install a new OS, and if you got Windows 7 with your PC rather than buying it in a store I think you have to buy it again to get 64 bit (but do check first). You're looking at about 50 bucks for the RAM, and a hundred for Windows 7 Home Premium, or 200-ish if you want 7 (or 8) Professional. Money that's arguably better spent on a new PC. A better graphics card will let you enjoy nicer graphics, but it won't do much to stop big ships lagging. Disk space is extremely unlikely to be relevant, unless you're so full that it's become severely fragmented. But if you're running low, then in the first instance give WinDirStat a go to find out what's hogging the space. Disk speed will affect loading times for the OS and software in general, but according to RIC doesn't do much for Kerbal Space Program. Still, if the game's running stably a long load time isn't too much of a problem, and if it's unstable you probably want to troubleshoot the crashing. Finally, if you're streaming you need to consider your network and internet performance. The most reliable way to get good network performance is to use cables, not wifi. For your internet connection you'll want to check the upload speed; typically it's much slower than the download speed. You may find that where you live an upgrade is either impossible or prohibitively expensive, in which case you're left to choose between poor quality real-time streaming or better quality recorded videos.

In stock career, purely considering the gameplay, probes are inferior to manned ships in science-gathering, but considerably less massive. The lightest manned command module (the Mk 1 Lander Can) is twelve times the mass of the Stayputnik, meaning it's going to need a rocket about twelve times as big to launch for the same mission. As of .23.5 the ox-stats, the radial batteries, the small science instruments, and the low- and high-gain antennae (but not the med-gain one) are all physicless, in other words their mass and drag is disregarded, which helps the probe cores preserve that mass advantage.

Even Jeb recognises that explosions on his ship aren't generally a good thing. But someone forgot to give him the memo that overheating boosters make the best decouplers.

I don't. Procedural parts and suchlike offer greater control to the expert player, but will risk bewildering the novice with possibilities. Heck, I found just the stock parts overwhelming when I first bought the full game. No, I thing the "lego-brick" construction will stay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri_Bb is debated, others like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Cygni_Bb are confirmed. They orbit the one star directly, there are yet other planets that orbit binary pairs. As it is, KSP can't really handle equal binaries. The Kerbol system would be fine, the Newstar system would be fine, but travel between them would be screwy. It would only work if the second star is considerably less massive than Kerbol, so that it's reasonable to have the primaries all orbiting Kerbol, and the Newstar system would be like a bigger and more distant Jool system. It's still only a hanfdful of important different systems. Stock, Alternis, Real Solar System, Planetfactory, Planetfactory CE defaults, Urania - I've probably covered all the ones of any note, and all of them bar RSS keep at least some of the stock planets.