cantab

The earlier you can get to it, the better. So I expect the best strategy will be HOR, getting the earliest reasonable intercept possible. By "reasonable" I mean not needing a silly amount of dV to match speeds. As for absurd profiles, how about lithocapture? Rendezvous with the asteroid and connect a big block of girders or whatever to it. Then make a course correction such that the block of girders just clips a peak on an airless body. The asteroid itself needs to miss, but be decelerated by the impact forces. Hopefully this works in the physics engine. Do it right and the asteroid will be captured, only needing a small burn to raise periapsis.

Hopefully this means that ARM won't break or spoil existing career saves, while .24 can be the one that overhauls career mode.

Water's cheap, easy to handle, and stores quite densely. It has a relatively low molecular mass, though I don't know what the ISP would be. Clearly the American people need convincing that nuclear spaceships are an essential weapon to combat China and Russia and remain a global superpower.On second thoughts, maybe getting the military involved is not such a good idea.

Yup. Since any change to the actual orbital parameters, if it's large enough to be noticed as more than trivia, will be large enough to mess with the game difficulty.In fact, for the meantime you can do this yourself anyway. Start a new save and immediately exit it, then edit the time in the save to a random value. *Plans to do this on next save*. I concur with this. Part count gets to be a problem for big stuff, it's not good to essentially have a trade off between performance in the game and performance of the game. There'll still be a place for clusters for fine-tuning, and for aesthetics, but fewer bigger parts should generally be the higher performance option, for both senses of performance.

It would be a nice addon to have in map view. I don't see how the track would be useless. You'd presumably have to pick what body to show the path relative to; say you do relative to the Sun, it'll be pretty obvious when the craft has flown by Duna even if Duna's now in a different place. The game is already capable of translating between reference frames, and I assume KSP Interstellar's warp drive does too.

Yeah, there's no scientific or technological reason we can't have nuclear-powered spacecraft. The barriers are in politics and popular opinion: few people are keen on nuclear reactors on the ground, never mind launching one on a space rocket.

It's a pretty common error, especially if you're used to the Mun where it doesn't matter, or even Kerbin where you can jump higher. Though I will admit, it doesn't look like that lander would get back off Eve anyway.

We already are getting some random stuff: the asteroids. It also might be interesting to randomise the starting positions of the planets. That way career modes might play out a bit differently; sometimes you'll get an Eve window early, sometimes it's Duna, sometimes it's even a (to be added) comet in a great spot. The seed needs to be exposed to the player mind, or the stock game include launch window information.

Save scumming. My Mun lander hadn't previously given me any trouble. But I'd slightly tweaked the design, to bring the Goo Canisters back up instead of leaving them. That way I can take back two results for the experiment, putting one in each of the orbiter's command pods. This small, seemingly trivial change resulted in the landing legs knocking the engine off when they decoupled. Twice. Third time round, I got lucky. I've since changed the design again, hopefully the fault won't recur.

Can it get you from A to B faster than a pulse of light sent from A to B without the effects of your widget? If yes, it's FTL travel. Simple as.

It could be kludged so that when the asteroid hits a part, a very high impact tolerance is used, but when it hits a celestial a lower one is used.

The one you really want to avoid is an orbit that doesn't cross those of the moons, but is close enough to come into their SOIs. You get no warning of the encounters until they happen, and then they tend to lead to collisions since the ship is moving slowly relative to the moon.

Maybe it's just because I'm not used to it, but I find the SPH a right nightmare. Landing gears in particular never want to go where I want them.

Me: OK, ready for launch. Bill: Hey! Waitiwaitwait- Me: Liftoff! *Rocket takes off. Rocket starts veering off course*. Bill: Errm... Me: Relax. Let the SAS handle it. *Rocket veers more.* Bill: This isn't good. Me: ABORT! ABORT! Bill: Waitno- *Hits Backspace. Everything explodes.* Bob, back at the astronaut complex: You really should check your abort actions better, you know.

Likewise. We've seen one version of the SLS, with the twin F-1 liquid boosters, but it would be nice to have parts for other variants like the Shuttle SRB one.

Indeed. We can at least already make flexible "chains" using stacks of parts. You'd want to be lined up as well as possible, but I reckon having a little flexibility would help keep you on course. Whether it's better than simply using regular controls like reaction wheels is another matter.

I stand corrected. Well, that's good to hear.

The LV-N, unsurprisingly, is the best rocket engine in terms of fuel used per electricity unit, but of course it's heavy and late in the tech tree. Next best is the Poodle, but again that's pretty late. Early career mode, I've found that if you want to transmit you simply have to time it right, and take advantage of your scheduled engine burns to top up the electrics. Fuel cells and generators would be nice parts to have. Potentially be good on ion drive craft, presumably they'll produce more power for less weight than RTGs, but with the drawback of needing fuel of their own.

Anyone who can't find the folder where a Steam game is needs to learn more about computers.

They only needed it to stay together for a few hundred metres. There's the unbreakable joints cheat and the KJR mod, plus whatever hacking Squad want to do.In short, just because the photo op SLS holds together with hardly any struts, doesn't mean ours will.

I'll guess Eve, then, with RH standing for Return Home - quite the achievement from the purple planet.

Probe cores can't fix punctured wheels, take surface samples, repack parachutes for a second use, etc etc.

The booster lower parts definitely do look that way. Either that or the engines actually mount radially, which would look odd from below I reckon.

Yeah, everyone's going to vote for "somewhere in the middle". On the visuals, I don't think it needs to go hyper-realistic, not least because it's demanding enough on computers as it is. But equally, I wouldn't want Squad to start cel-shading everything and making it look like an episode of Looney Tunes. I think for parts to be somewhat simplified compared to their real-world analogues is about right. On the gameplay, I feel there should be as few features as possible that are present and unrealistic. As it is, compared to many space games KSP is hard realism, the only major issue at present is the aerodynamics. However, there are features that while they might be "realistic", equally might be better left out. Random part failures, residual air drag in orbits (above the current atmosphere boundaries), and axial tilt on Kerbin would all be annoying for a lot of people, for example.

I just use the graphic from this page, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/close-encounters-of-the-asteroid-kind-130000-ton-asteroid-to-make-closest-ever-flyby-of-earth-8480449.html, inverted and cropped. It seemed fitting, even before I heard of the asteroid mission update. Same as my avatar.