cantab

How many ion engines are you running? I'm pretty sure you shouldn't need a nuclear reactor to power them, unless you plan on going really far from the Sun or you've got loads of engines. Presumably there does come a point where adding more ion engines in order to increase TWR stops being worth it.

I wonder if Squad themselves didn't conflate procedural with random here. After all, they already put procedural non-random craters on the Mun.Oh, and there are plenty of ways to get true random numbers into a computer. ERNIE uses thermal noise, random.org uses atmospheric noise, radioactive decay based RNGs have been done, and though you can argue whether it's "truly" random user input such as mouse movement is commonly used.

What game is that? What game is that? How can you not know! *mock outrage* It's Final Fantasy VII. FFVIII has some pretty sweet space scenes too. The electromagnetically launched pods spring to mind, and the energy shield braking at the other end. I don't recall if the pods had sustainer rockets; realistically they'd need to otherwise the occupants would be crushed on launch.

1 and 6 are in Krag's Planet Factory, for what it's worth. 7.2 is a bit problematic. It would have to be either sufficiently inclined to keep clear of the other moons' SOIs, or somehow be in a resonance with all the ones it crosses the orbits of to ensure it never gets too close. Either way, its use as a "space elevator" is somewhat blunted because of that. On the topic of mods, my (limited) understanding is that celestials are some of the harder things to mod in, due to how they're done in the stock game. That certainly wants revising when Squad get the chance IMHO. And as we're throwing out ideas, I'll go for a couple of co-orbital planets or moons, a la Janus and Epimetheus. The planetary orbits system would need revising for this though; it doesn't require full n-body gravity, but it does need orbital perturbations over time to be coded in. Oh yes, one other thing: there should be "Edge of the solar system" and "Interstellar space" altitudes over the Sun that you can reach, with big science multipliers.

This I'm less sure of. The current biome system encourages grindy science. Until it's revised somehow so that there's more benefit to going to new places rather than just spamming missions to the old ones, biomes should not be added to more bodies.

Except Pol and Bop don't have the easy-to-land-on flats of Minmus. And Dres may not be "harder" than Ike to reach, but it's different with its inclined and somewhat eccentric orbit. (Anyway, Ike isn't there for you to reach, it's there to mess up your Duna orbits and landings )

A fair point. It might be that timewarp considerations force the multiplayer to be in small groups. If it's just a handful of people, everyone can agree "yes let's timewarp now".Said small groups would also reduce the chance of griefing. Just don't play with the people you don't know and trust. Issues of griefing - and plain carelessness - could also be dealt with by giving the host an option to "restore ship".

Better IMHO is to add a probe core to the design. The mass of the Stayputnik or OKTO2 is negligible, zero if you replace the parachute with it. By leaving the original capsule on you don't affect the torque and balance of the rocket.Just make sure you launch with the capsule actually empty. Saving your Kerbals* when the rocket beneath them starts veering out of control or disintegrating.*Saving of Kerbals not guaranteed. Also, a tip from myself. The LV-1, AKA the "ant engine" is good for course corrections on smaller interplanetary craft like probes. Slide the thrust limiters down to 5%, make sure no more powerful engines are firing, and you have exquisite precision. An RCS thruster gives 1 kN of thrust, an LV-1 can go as low as 0.00375 kN.

There already are, inasmuch as the Mk2 and Mk3 spaceplane parts don't properly match the regular rocket parts.Being in line with the mod parts may be a factor in putting the NASA parts at 3.75 m. The size also has the advantage of nicely matching a cluster of 7 1.25 m parts (and I'm a touch disappointed to not see an adapter for the purpose, though there's always the cuboct struts).

Built a little Voyager style probe and went flying around the system with it. Just over half a ton and around 380 m/s of delta-V. A transfer stage put it onto a Duna encounter, and then I flew by Duna, Kerbin, Duna, Duna, and Duna. And then ran out of fuel just short of arranging the Jool encounter. Wasn't what I'd call time efficient, I ended up making several orbits waiting for encounters a few times, but still not bad for a first go at this stuff. Despite the fuel blown when setting up the 4th Duna flyby because I didn't realise I had the navball in surface mode; if I hadn't done that, I probably would have made Jool.

I smiled when I spotted it, yeah. Not sure it really qualifies as an "easter egg" though, it's not hard to find like the anomalies say.

There's potential legal barriers to doing so. I expect that if Squad were to bring any mod into the stock game, they'd want or sometimes need to be able to distribute the mod under the main game's license not the mod's original license. That requires all the copyright holders of the mod to agree, and lawyers to make sure the agreement is watertight.

Now you've made me want to recreate the complete Shinra No 26 mission. Lift off briefly and settle back down. Then put an E class asteroid on a Kerbin collision course, have the No 26 lift off again, and set on a collision course with the asteroid, the crew bailing out at the last possible moment.

The moons could still be put in highly-inclined orbits, even if the planet - which after all you aren't going to land on - isn't. That would create a really unique system to visit. Its moons would likely be smaller than Laythe's big ones; I'm thinking 50 to 100 km size range. Also, a moon based on Miranda would be awesome. Something with low gravity but exceptionally rugged terrain would be a nice landing challenge, and later on perhaps Enceladus-like jets could push your lander around making it even trickier to touch down safely.

Kryxal said the controls. I'll add a few pointers: F5 quicksaves. Unless you object to save scumming, do that first, since chances are you'll take a few goes to get your EVAing right. Holding F9 quickloads so you can have another go. The jetpacks are quite punchy, you just want to make little taps on the keys, don't hold them down. Generally you want to take EVAs slow and steady, rushing will send you flying off. You can switch to the map view with M. Then click the icon for your ship and choose "Set as target". Switch back to normal view again and you'll see a marker with the distance to your ship. This will also tell you if you're getting close or further. Set yourself heading gently towards your ship, and watch how the marker seems to drift; slowly up, down, left, or right. You want it to NOT drift, so use gentle taps to stop the motion when you see it. Hitting L will turn on the headlights on your kerbal's jetpack. This can help you see when you're close, especially if you're on the night side of the planet.

Except we didn't. We knew all the planets existed, but not much about them. Many things we're now familiar with, like the extreme heat on Venus or that the Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a giant storm, were first discovered by space probes. Even the far side of the Moon was not just unknown but unknowable without sending a spacecraft past it to have a look.

Or the real world Anyway, I've not attempted it, but real aerial refuellers tend to have the refuelled craft fly somewhat below the refueller, which would take it out of the jet blast.

More than anything else, it's that preventing the claw from allowing manual fuel transfer would require extra coding. Possibly significant extra coding, since I believe that at present the manual fuel transfer doesn't do any sort of route checking at all. It'd be nice to see in future, but IMHO not essential for the ARM.On another note, I hope the mass fractions on the fuel tanks get fixed. IMHO I shouldn't have to end up clustering smaller tanks to power my big engines if I want good performance.

The thing is that never mind details of orbital mechanics, just not having to keep thrusting to keep moving is alien to most people, living our whole lives as we do on frictiony, drag-central Earth. For games focussed on spaceflight, unrealism can fairly be criticised though I'd say it's a perfectly fair artistic and gameplay choice to go unrealistic. For minigames and one-off missions though, like the Halo example, realistic spaceflight will probably annoy the players.In far-future settings where spacecraft presumably have insane amounts of delta-v, I reckon a viable approach would be a sort of linear SAS. By default it slows you down when you lift off the gas, lets you glide when you're at half throttle, and all the usual "errors", but the behaviour is framed as the computer assisting the pilot, and players who want to can turn it off and fly with true handling.

Knocked up a Voyager-style probe and launched it to LKO. Also discovered that the thrust limiter on engines works like a multiplier to the throttle setting. For example: LV-909 Maximum thrust: 50 kN Thrust limiter: 80% Throttle: 50% Result: 20 kN of thrust, not 25 kN. It makes sense in hindsight, but wasn't what I'd expected.

If you're still early in the game calendar, the first Duna window is around day 60. There are transfer windows for several other planets around that same time too. The first Eve window though isn't until day 150. So, for most mission types, I'd plump for Duna first.

Kingdom Heart's Gummi Ships. You build them to your liking out of parts and fly them in space, but that's where the similarities to KSP stop. Fun minigame though.

I expect MP will have player-run servers, and it's up to the server admins to police conduct. Some servers might actively encourage warfare, others might kickban you for littering LKO.

We don't know how cost will be implemented. It might be that per-rocket costs are often trivial, and the expensive stuff is researching new tech. Or it could be the exact opposite. In any case, chances are that when money is first introduced, it's pretty easy to get. Too easy is generally better than too hard in games.

We know the dry mass and fully fuelled mass from the game at least. And we can break it down into fuel and oxidizer masses with the tweakables. The only thing we can't get is any more detail on the dry mass.