cantab

The only reason I can see that a lower orbit might not be better is if it means you need to make a later deorbit burn in order to not hit terrain. From a given circular orbit, the ideal approach is a deorbit burn 180° from the landing site, then a suicide burn to land. Deorbiting closer to the landing site uses more dV overall. But the lower your starting orbit, the shallower your descent, and for any given landing site there's a limit on how shallow it can be. Whether this effect is ever enough to offset the reduction in landing dV due to the lower orbit I don't know.

I've not used it yet, but I am thinking about it. After a hundred+ hours of play, launching to LKO is getting a little old. Even though I am still lousy at it (but then again, I'm flying barely-controllable rockets a lot thanks to my challenge game). And while I don't find the manouvre nodes in the stock game that bad, a numeric editor probably would fit with my thinking style. I do know that SAS is not remotely the same.

Glitches notwithstanding, it's an elegant design.

Things went better today. Did a couple of routine though not entirely trouble-free Mun landings. Both on the near side, the first ones that have been actually. The orbit predictions had glitched earlier so I didn't reach the Mun's SOI with as low a periapsis as I like, making the correction a bit expensive. I also discovered it seems more efficient to do this using a radial burn rather than a retrograde one. Then on the second landing it clearly looked like I was going to hit the hills west of the NW crater, so I ended up making a panic burn to ensure I cleared them. Still landed safely further east than planned, but a touch low on fuel. Not good when the same goes for both orbiters. Still, I should reach orbit and if I can't rendezvous that's what the jetpack's for! Closer to home, found one of the Monoliths on Kerbin, the one nearest to KSC. Which I'd had the location vaguely spoilered for, but still had a bit of looking around to spot it. Elwell's now standing entranced in front of it and will not return until dawn. (Because I need it to be light to get a proper look.)

If you won't want to rebuild, just use the navball like a compass.

Software developers often do, for any number of reasons.

Bounce off if slow, explosion of one or both if fast. On the contrary, I expect they'll be widely used. The four-engine cluster and the reinforced joints will make it possible to build much heavier lifters than before, plus you can put your choice of 5th engine in the middle. With clipping abuse, the two-engine booster can become a 4 or 6 engine one. The long SRBs will be great for large non-asparagused rockets. I may be mistaken, but I think the problem with lowering the impact tolerance is if it's too low, it'll be easy to simply ram one and destroy it. Low drag on asteroids would make sense though, meaning they'll hit the ground as fast as they "should".

The "limit" is probably on your PC performance. Lots of ships slow things down, lots of flags slows things down, so lots of tracked asteroids will slow things down. Also, unless you actually visit them I believe they'll move out of tracking range and vanish.

Not got the navball set into orbit mode by mistake have you?

Those of us who make successful rockets get a knock on the door from NASA. Those who make huge explosions get bundled into a car by the NSA.

Improved performance, though still a bit limited by unity. The main focuses of the game will be single-player career mode and multiplayer sandbox. Single-player sandbox will be thought of as somewhat secondary. Parts will be balanced mainly with career in mind; it's possible performance figures might differ between career and sandbox, at least until you fully "upgrade" everything in career. No mining or resource exploration, as they would make it feel too much like Civilization IN SPACE. More and better tutorials and scenarios. A redo of most models and textures, to give a more unified art style. A much more developed Kerbin, that actually feels somewhat like a populated planet rather than just a space centre on an empty world.

People who didn't use ion engines before may be happy - though you're still set for long burns on all but a super-light craft. People who did use ion engines before may well be annoyed that their successful craft have been broken.

While persistent craters and modifiable ground scatter would be neat, allowing realistic effects from impacts and in-atmosphere explosions, they're not really important to the game.

It's always possible the player put it in that orbit.

You have this the wrong way round. The steeper your initial ascent, the more you need to burn at apoapsis and the less efficient you are overall. On the other hand too shallow and you'll be even worse as you waste loads of fuel fighting drag.

Grab all my orbiting spent stages and make them into a Borg Cube.

I know it's not in ARM, but for a future update I'd like an engine using a Thrust Augmented Nozzle. Technical details here, but basically it's a rocket afterburner.

So the Ant engine's been buffed to 4 kN thrust. The Ion engine's had the thrust upped to 2 kN, but the ISP's been slashed to 2100-2500 atmo-vacuum. Source:

You say that, and I think others have too - but the Claw can tolerate the thrust needed to push a thousand-ton asteroid!

With any luck they'll also be available in "standalone" format.ISTR it mentioned that there's no central node on the SLS core cluster, which is a bit of a disappointment. I'm pretty sure you'll still be able to get a fifth engine in there with a cuboct strut, but it'd be nice to not have to.

I've not proven it, but my feeling is it's probably better to intercept early. After all, it takes 4500 m/s of delta-V just to get to low Kerbin orbit. You'll only need another thousand or so to get out of Kerbin's SOI and to the asteroid encounter.

Regardless of budget, I feel the best way to start in astronomy is with a decent pair of binoculars. It's how I started, with a pair of Bresser 10x50 bins costing about £35 (though I suggest spending more like £50 to assure quality), Phillips' "Stargazing with Binoculars", and Taki's Star Atlas. On portability, quick set-up, and ease of use binoculars are going to beat just about any telescope hands down. The wide field of view shows more of the sky at once, meaning it's easier to find things and navigate the sky. Heck, just point them in the general direction of the Milky Way and you'll be rewarded. As for specific views, there's plenty to see. Just on my first two nights I viewed Uranus, the moons of Jupiter, the Pleiades and Hyades clusters, and the Andromeda Galaxy. True, some of them took me a bit of time and patience to find. In general, whatever instrument you get there are going to be two types of things to see. There's a smaller number of things I think of as things for looking at: Big, bright, lots of detail. With binoculars, these include the Moon, and bright open clusters and asterisms like the Pleiades or the Coathanger. Then there's a much larger number of things I call things for looking for: "Faint fuzzies", small things that look like stars, or both. With binoculars, these include Uranus, Neptune, asteroids, and most of the Messier catalogue. The challenge is in seeing them in the first place; I might easily spend ten minutes or more looking in one place before I'm confident that yes, I am seeing that faint nebula or distant galaxy, and when I do it's quite the feeling of achievement. (Or checking back and forth between chart and view to pick out which of the "stars" is actually Uranus.) Getting a bigger and better scope is of course going to turn many of the things that used to be "looking fors" into "looking ats", and in turn will make many more things barely visible. The upshot is that binoculars or a small scope will give you just as much of the feel and flavour of observing as a big one. If you run out of things you want to view in a small instrument, that's fine, consider upgrading, but if you don't enjoy it at all then you probably still wouldn't enjoy using something with 10 times the price and capability. As far as telescopes go, I own the Skywatcher Heritage 76 that's been mentioned. It's the third I've bought, and the first I've really got on with. Mechanically I can hardly fault it; it moves when I want it to, and doesn't when I don't, with minimal wobble. (Though it's only as steady as the table you put it on!). For ease of use it's good too; like binoculars, it's got a wide view. (Tip with the small magnifying finders: look through with both eyes open, and align a bright star or planet seen through the finder with what you see with your other eye). Optically it's not so strong, a 3 inch scope with a spherical (rather than parabolic) mirror is always going to be limited, but it's not atrocious. It does nicely on widefield views and open clusters, with the option for higher magnification turning clusters like M35, fuzzy blobs in binoculars, into the groups of stars that they are. It's also good for faint fuzzy hunting, and decent on the Moon (but then practically everything makes the Moon look good). Where it's pretty pants is on planets, especially with the supplied eyepieces giving a maximum of just 30x magnification; Jupiter's two main belts (and its moons) and Saturn's rings can be spotted, but don't expect much more. I also own a second-hand Celestron Powerseeker 114EQ, again one that's been mentioned. That was the second scope I bought. The few views I've had through it were good, but the equatorial mount just drove me up the creek, and I seemed to spend more time futzing around (and hunting for dropped small parts in the dark...) than actually observing. It's now off its original mount, and shoved away in a corner on the Dobsonian mount I started and never finished building for it. In summary: Get a decent guidebook, and 10x50 binoculars or the Skywatcher Heritage 76. And print out Taki's Star Atlas. Oh, and download Stellarium. Oh, and one final note. Whatever you get, buy from retailer with a proper reputation for astro gear such as First Light Optics, Wex Photographic, the Widescreen Centre, Green Witch Cambridge, etc. You can expect better service. Don't buy from Amazon, eBay, Jessops, Curry's, places like that where there's no real knowledge of what they're selling. See http://stargazerslounge.com/forum/90-supplier-reviews/ for reviews.

It's a benefit, not a penalty. The journey to alpha centauri would take about 4 years as measured from Earth, but considerably shorter for those on the ship.

Yeah, prograde is the same way the planet spins. If you're not sure, quicksave then timewarp and it'll be obvious.

The other key thing is that your ejection speed and your ejection angle matter. So you can swing your ejection burn round your orbit however you like, change how much dV you apply however you like - but you need to get both right for the intercept. Hence, a calculator helps.