cantab

The ion engine is like Marmite: You either love it or hate it. (I'm in the love it camp on both counts.)

7/10 looks deadly.

*Presses*. Now I'm gonna have to build a bathyscaphe. Dang it. Push button, receive bacon.

Right click the RCS port, choose Show Actuation Toggles, then one of the options is "Fore by Throttle" which does what it says - makes the RCS port act like an engine, by firing forwards when you throttle up. Not sure if it can be turned on in flight or needs to be set up in the VAB.

Flying Tiger Entertainment broke the game when signing a contract with Squad I last got banned from the forums because of ______

Yeah, that got fixed a version or two back.

Another one flees the ship. Probably just as well for Ted with the looming icebergs emblazoned "PS4" and "XBox One". KSP might sail smoothly between them. Might.

The Reliant's use is to teach you the importance of thrust vectoring

It won't, no. Jupiter's should be larger in that respect.

As an engine, yes, the Sepratron is kind of rubbish. Although I did use three on my recent micro-launcher to get it going off the pad. But as a separation motor, it's nigh-essential.

Because the wheels still aren't properly fixed. That's expected in KSP 1.2. I know someone's going to chime in and say that they made it work, and they're right. But my opinion is that the hardest part of designing a drone that weighs under a ton should not be the freaking landing gear. Yet I ended up with one that's unlandable except by using a chute.

I think this behaviour is an aspect of the jets, "Drains fuel evenly, stage by stage." You can only block them taking fuel by putting a decoupler in the way. (Make sure you don't actually fire that decoupler!) Orbital mini-shuttle, that can steer during re-entry and glide reasonably in descent to get to the target. Something along the lines of the X-37B or the Dream Chaser. Alternatively, if you can make a plane with decent range and aren't struggling for cash flow, then after one survey contract that was near-ish to KSC you just land out and leave the plane there, it might be well placed for another contract in future. Mods for electric propellers help of course, but a jet plane can still cover you for a fair few hops.

And yet it's the smallest "Sphere of influence" of the gas giants, barely half the diameter of Neptune's. Neptune's vastly greater distance from the Sun more than makes up for its much lower mass in the 'tug of war' between star and planet.

TheReadPanda Pandering, as in the burning wake of the first Tues of November will approach stranding a hundred Kerbals on Eve. A KSP Youtuber formerly known for playing stock started using mods because of ______

More Krakens: I wish I had remembered to put this wish in my original post instead of having to edit it. "Jeb, if you light one more rocket inside the VAB I'll ______ " - Gene. (Kerbals against Humanity)

Rocket SSTO is 100% doable in KSP. (It's 100% doable in real life too). In order to pack as much fuel as possible in the stage you want a high TWR engine and a low overall liftoff TWR. With a 200+ ton payload look at the Twin Boar, Mammoth, and Vector. Do not expect good payload fractions. In career mode, unless you can land it afterwards, it's probably not worth it. Re-entry with a large light booster is generally fairly easy, but touchdown is likely to require either chute spam or a precisely timed Falcon 9 style burn. Both those options eat into your already slim payload fraction. As for the idea of orbital assembly, I can say from experience that a high part count single launch is vastly less painful than a high part count docking.

Least useful, Flea. Apart from the first launch in a career, what are you going to do with it? It's too short and fat to look right as a booster on 1.25m rockets and doesn't perform well in that role either. It lacks the specific impulse to be an upper stage. I suppose it has a limited niche as a giant sepratron on huge boosters, or as a RATO engine as shown above. I'd like to see it rebalanced to be oriented as an upper stage SRB, with lower thrust and good vacuum efficiency, similar to the STAR motors in real life. Something that's a cheap way to push to orbit when you aren't picky about the exact apo and peri, or to kick-start an ejection burn on a probe. But still capable of useful thrust on the ground too. Biggest letdown, Kickback. Considering it's supposed to be based on the most powerful rocket engine ever, period, the Kickback is pathetically small and wimpy. I guess it's stuck as it is, but I think the game should add a 2.5m SRB.

"What are the wheels in KSP made of?" That is the question you should be asking. They're infamously riddled with bugs and issues since KSP version 1.1

I agreed with what Alshain, Red Iron Crown, and some others have said or alluded to: KSP will stand or fall on consoles based on its own merits, based on what the core game is like. The presence or absence of mods doesn't matter, except to the extent that Squad may not have developed useful or beautiful stock features because there are mods for them. Very little is known publicly about the console releases, but apparently one thing we do know is that the controls are a lazy port job. I did not want to see a mouse pointer anywhere in console KSP, unless the user happens to connect a mouse to their console. In my opinion all aspects of the game could have been done without resorting to a pointer. The evidence is that Flying Tiger have taken the easy way out, instead of developing a real controller-oriented UI. (I find a 'controller-native' VAB easy to imagine. Dual analog sticks give you 3D movement. Buttons flip through a menu of parts. Other buttons do stuff like put you in rotate mode.)

Nah. I like the car I have. Press the button and you will forget the solutions to every puzzle in your favourite puzzle game, allowing you to experience them fresh again. (Has to be a game with distinct puzzles. Portal, Chromagun, Professor Layton, etc count. Tetris, Bubble Bobble, Dr Mario, etc do not.)

Calculate twice, fly once. The maths isn't that hard, provided you know how to use and rearrange formulas. That's like year 7 stuff, learn it when you're about 12, but I suppose you might have forgotten it. Depending on my rocket design, thrust limiting SRBs may be called for. In particular if I use a core stage that's already low TWR, and boosters to get it going off the pad, lighting all engines from the start, then when the boosters drop I need the core TWR to have risen enough thanks to fuel burnoff and the higher altitude, and that may mean running the boosters at lower than max thrust so they last longer.

More recently I know insane speeds have been reached courtesy of glitches. But I assume it's implicit that the 200 km/s should be "legitimate". The tyranny of the rocket equation really starts to bite. Assuming ion engines 100 km/s of delta-V is fairly easy, requiring a wet mass 12 times the dry mass. That's already beyond what a single stage can do though, you'll need stages or drop tanks. But 150 km/s requires a wet mass 39 times the dry mass. And for 200 km/s you need wet mass 128 times dry mass. On the other hand, if you get Jool to fling you nearly into the Sun, you'll already be doing 80-90 km/s at your solar periapsis. So maybe 200 km/s can be feasibly reached on the stock parts after all.

Well my basebuilding is up in the air at the moment because I know the UKS update changes some stuff but there are other mods that have problems in 1.1.3. So I decided to just see if some interplanetary probes are feasible. And a (relatively) quick trip to Urlum is, but it'll need 4 km/s for a flyby and another 6 to capture when I'm there. Not unreasonable, but gonna need a decent multi-stage ship to do it. To help plan things, I launched a baby satellite into an equatorial MKO. Possibly the smallest useful orbital launcher I've made

Granted, but you're banned from owning or using a smartphone. I wish Juno would find an enigmatic monolith.

Over in the New Horizons thread several users who upgraded to KSP 1.1.3 and Kopernicus 1.1 or later are having issues with orbits around Kerbin being shifted. Similar issues were reported in older versions around the Mun. In New Horizons both Mun and Kerbin are reparented to orbit a new gas giant. Before I spend a bunch of time trying to characterise the bug in detail, @Thomas P. and others does this look like any Kopernicus issue you already know about and plan on fixing or have a workaround suggestion for?