cantab

In the image editor. In GIMP you may first need to right-click the layer and select "Add Alpha Channel", then all you need to do is select stuff and delete it and you'll get transparency.

The stability of the outer stacks is a concern. You can only attach them in one place since you don't have struts, and towards the bottom is the place to do it, but those girders will add flexibility and weight. If you want to drop the outer stacks, use the radial decouplers. If you don't, just attach the lowest fuel tank to the central stack directly. (Whether to drop them or not mainly depends on whether they have enough thrust for the launch themselves, in which case you drop them then ignite the centre engine, or if you need all the engines burning from the start in which case you just drop them all together.) I'd also shorten them to three FL-T400s or three FL-T400s and an FL-T200 each. 5 FL-T400s is probably too long to be stable. If you're left without enough fuel, make it six outer stacks instead of four. If you want an easy extra few hundred m/s of delta-v, slap stack decouplers under each first stage engine and an SRB under that.

The low terminal velocity is down to KSP's simple aerodynamic model, in which part drag is proportional to mass. The consequence is that almost all objects have the same terminal velocity. (There's a drag coefficient, but that's the same for almost everything except semi- or fully-deployed parachutes.)

Metres! As mentioned, remember the idea is these are small asteroids we can move around, just as NASA are planning on doing. And a class E certainly won't look "rather puny" when your ship is clawed to it! (Well, unless your name is Whackjob.)

I felt a bit of that just in my first stock career save. Unlocking tech and quickly became overwhelmed by all the parts. So then I switched to the "do all the science before unlocking new tech" save. That went too far the other way though.

The sort order is a bit of a mess, indeed. But IMHO like Varses says the way Squad should solve this is not by filename kludges but by having sort and filter logic in the VAB. Of course, for the time being a file renaming script could be maintained as a tool.

If you bought them all from Tigerdirect, then they are in law responsible. After all, they chose to use drop shipping.That said, you're unlikely to get anything more than the shipping costs back. Chances are the T&Cs say they're not liable for consequential losses from unmet deliveries.

The new long SRBs stand out. They're about equal to the Skipper in both thrust and price, but come with a bunch of fuel into the bargain. Or to look it another way, they're the same price as the BACC solid boosters but have twice the thrust and a few times the fuel. These alone may make it hard to be competitive in .23. I've checked several of the experiments and they give the same science values. No idea if any multipliers for different worlds have changed, but probably not. EDIT: A couple of things I need clarifying: Can we transmit science, or do we only get to count what's brought back to Kerbin? (The amount of transmitted science can be found by before and after screenshots of the tech tree screen.) Do we have to count the cost of launch clamps?

In KSP, probably not in most cases. You can set the Abort group to instantly shut down the lower engines, fire up the upper one, and decouple, and know it will work every single time. In the real world there are part failures to think about.

As I understand it it's a collaboration, not an explicit endorsement.

I imagine a switch between stock and FAR aerodynamics - either way - is going to take some adapting to, they are very different. But otherwise, meh. Plenty of people have been playing stock or mostly stock for a long time.

Well, it's not a NASA rocket but the Falcon Heavy is going to use asparagus staging. Albeit with just one pair of boosters feeding the core, but every journey starts with a single step.

I did nothing with asteroids today First I spent a long time testing how the settings affected performance, until I got something I was happy with. (Everything down low, basically. I want a better computer...) Then I knocked up a science probe based on the stock Z-Map satellite, adding science kit and more fuel to the probe itself and replacing the boosters on the launcher with the new big long ones. I confirmed that the science values haven't changed, at least for the experiments that work in space. Now to get back to designing my cheap science mission for the challenge. The new SRBs are certainly going to help with that, 800 kuid is ridiculously cheap.

Indeed. Those pumps, however, can be regarded as part of the engine's own mass.As for fuel flow between tanks in a stack, I sort of handwave that away as an abstraction, the rocket "really" has one tank the full length.

The overall structure of the tree has been kept the same. In order to fit the new parts in, some of the older ones have been moved down.

Now the release of .23.5 has given us a choice of two time systems, what does the launch window planner use?

Oddly, this is somewhere I still have severe lag. With the default graphics settings, trying to move the camera on the space centre screen could completely lock up the whole desktop environment. "Cross-feed capable" only applies to automatic fuel flow. You can always transfer fuel manually about a ship - and a kerbal or an asteroid that's been clawed counts as part of the ship.Something else I noticed when clicking through the tech tree: all the parts have an "Entry Price" (or something) listed, that's different to the regular part cost. I don't know if that was the case in .23, but it definitely points to a future system where you'll need money to research new technology, not just to put a part on a rocket.

Seems to be fixed to me. It used to be very noticeable in lagging the mouse pointer, but no more.

I just found the new version has automatic conic mode switching Focussed on Kerbin - or on the ship, or on just about anything else - we see the conics drawn in Kerbin's frame of reference (the old mode 3) Focussed on the Mun, we now see the Mun pass in the Mun's frame of reference so we can zoom in and fine-tune our pass. (the old mode 0)

There's no reason you can't keep your .23.5 install around. Even if you bought on Steam, just copy the game folder before updating.

Simply putting a significant mass on the fuel lines, essentially assuming their mass includes the fuel pumps needed as well, would nerf asparagusing.

The Shuttle is NASA's past. NASA, I expect, will want to focus on their present and future. So, some ideas: InSight parts. These would mainly be geophysical experiments, including a drill, for landers. Not flashy like the SLS stuff, but some interesting little things. "Curiosity II" parts. I'd like to see a rocker-bogie suspension system, which would really come into its own if we get more small-scale terrain roughness, say if ground scatters are made solid. I'd also like a camera part or two, which can be used for first-person driving as well as for science, and of course the rock-zapping laser. Space telescope stuff. Hubble's still going strong, Kepler was a massive success, JWST is set for launch in a couple of years and looks like nothing else in space. ISS stuff. We're pretty well set there already, but the "railway" and the robot arm would be nice to have.

Once we have more realistic aerodynamics, we probably will need fairings. But before then, I'll say we're better off without them. No fairings means you can look at a picture of a stock rocket and typically see everything, tell what parts are used and how it works. A rocket with fairings becomes in many ways a "black box", it looks pretty but you can't so easily appreciate the full workings.

If this is the model, then I think to make it interesting the under-test parts should be given unknown stats, and for some contracts made to be the only parts in their "class" you can use. So say you've got a contract to test some company's engine, you really are testing their engine. Until you launch, you don't know if it's going to put the NASA parts to shame or make the Skipper look good. If it's bad, you could be in for an interesting time: hope you remembered your abort system!This could then tie in nicely if part performance is made upgradeable. Completing the contract would give a bit of a buff to the corresponding regular part.

To my knowledge .23.5 was going to be asteroids and new parts, but in development they realised they had to do more stuff (such as strengthening the joints) in order to make the asteroid redirections playable. .24 is expected to bring big changes to career mode.