cantab

Of course. There's not much KER does that I don't know how to do myself. I learnt how to calculate Delta-V and TWR myself before I even installed mods and know the formulas off the top of my head. The stock game gives most of the general information, just not in as clear and unified a fashion. Probably the biggest drawback to no KER is I'll be inefficient at landing without having the clear display of altitude above terrain. There are a few mods I consider virtually essential. I can't plan sophisticated gravity assists without Precise Node or another mod for proper node editing, I won't make aeroplanes without FAR, and my current main save relies on its modded solar system. KER is not on that virtually essential list for me though - while I like it and use it, I could manage without it.

Beidha. Named after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beidha_(archaeological_site) One of the oldest known human settlements. I think that's a good general criterion for Mars city names: Name them after ancient, no longer occupied, settlements on Earth. Keeps it relatively apolitical and not tied to any particular modern person or nation.

KSC is in your Europe. The deserts to the west are kind of a mix of Africa and Asia. That gives you an enclosed Medikerbinian Sea between them. The big eastern continent is your New World. As far as EUIV gameplay goes, the biggest difference is Kerbin has pretty much a continuous landmass. Unless you opt to put wastelands in strategic spots, armies can march from anywhere to anywhere, in particular directly between old and new worlds. Another major difference is if you follow my suggestion, the New World is really big, so colonisation may be very encouraged. By contrast the ocean, while continuous, is not as well connected, unless you opt to add a few strategic straits or maybe canals. Of course if you really want to go the extra mile, find a way to put the Mun in as a separate map

Of course it's possible. The question is whether there's any point. I'm inclined to think not. Even suborbital spaceflight is an involved enough business that the extra complexity of the mothership isn't a big deal.

Well you'll probably have a couple of week's leeway either side, so you should be OK. I might try and depart somewhat early in the departure window, subject to delta-V needs of course.

Wonder if Squad will do anything cool for the occasion? I suppose being a Friday counted it out as the 1.1.3 release date. Maybe a new official mod to celebrate?

Forgot the sepratrons on the boosters and clonked the tail. They should be identical. Wonder how she'll re-enter now. Fortunately this isn't an "official" mission.

Your attention please, your attention please. This is 1.1.3, where this HypeTrain terminates. All change, please, all change.

There are three "sections" for heat and temperature on KSP parts. Skin represents the surface, internal represents the bulk of the part, and core represents the working parts of things like the ISRU converter. The "headline" rating on the radiators only applies to cooling skin and internal heat, and their ability to draw away core heat is significantly less.

The very first versions of the game were shown on a Squadcast many moons ago. That "game" bore more resemblance to Flappy Bird than to the KSP we know today, with 2D graphics and mindless tap-the-buttons controls. The first release was KSP 0.7.3 in 2011, and by then KSP had developed into something we can recognise. Rocket design and flight was 3D, Kerbin was a sphere, and it had real orbital mechanics. Actually making orbit in 0.7.3 is rather difficult however, because there was no symmetry, no angle snap, no struts, and no stacking fuel tanks. The rest, as they say, is history.

Heard about the game somewhere, probably from xkcd. Downloaded the demo. A good few weeks later decided to actually play it, and it was pretty much love at first click.

On the other hand, doesn't three Kerbals in a 3-Kerb capsule have no more habitation time than one Kerbal in a 1-Kerb capsule? On an Apollo style mission USI-LS will count the lander as extra space, but even so I still wouldn't be surprised if you need to either change the timers or disable the hab feature to make it work. (I don't think living space was a high priority on the real Apollo program, and NASA probably would have gone for one-man missions if they'd thought it was safe.) It also would be warranted to sanity-check the values against what you get with a clean stock+USI-LS install, since other mods can bundle their own USI-LS configs and they could easily be overlooked.

It's done that for as long as I can remember. Isn't it a limitation in Kopernicus that planetmakers can't avoid?

This problem has led to me in the past simply not updating mods. I've got them installed and then kept on those same versions for as long as I keep playing that KSP version. And now I've decided to take a leaf out of Microsoft's book. Unless I encounter critical bugs, I'm going to check, update, and test mods once a month. If I finish my mod checking on the 15th June and Mod X releases its awesome new update on 17th June, well I'm not playing that update until July. The "and test" bit above is by the way a major reason updating mods isn't trivial for me, and still wouldn't be even if I did use CKAN. I don't just slap the updated version on because I've been burnt by that before, so now I check that my game is running properly with the updated set of mods. Obviously I can't check every fine detail, but I can and do catch gross issues. Stuff like celestial bodies going missing or being clearly bugged, unwanted severe changes to aerodynamics, and even framerate dropping to a quarter of what it was before.

I suppose it's a good thing we have a hype train, because KSP was crashing in flight with my planes. Here's to 1.1.3 stopping that.

The V-1 "flying bombs" were winged aircraft and so were perfectly able to fly with a TWR below 1.

The DMagic part offers its science experiment and also the ScanSAT feature. The ScanSAT part only does ScanSAT.

I think Remotetech removes the stock antenna module from the stock parts and adds its own antenna module. I'd take the VAB warnings with a pinch of salt, it's probably still checking for a part with the now-absent stock module. If you have the resource scanner in a suitable orbit and with a valid Remotetech connection to KSC and it still doesn't work, then I don't know, maybe RT has a bug. A 'module' in this sense is a feature of a part. For example the OKTO probe core has a command module to control the ship, a reaction wheel module to provide torque that turns the ship around, and a SAS module that provides stability assistance to automatically stop the ship spinning.

I seem to remember that the "game over" was meant to be from severely negative reputation. That makes more sense I feel. It's kind of hard to *get* such negative reputation even playing with no reverts, because most ways to lose rep also cost money, but that's an issue of the details of the game balance.

Relating to what @luizopiloto posted, I've found that for very large lifters that might use asparagus staging, a square/rectangular arrangement of the stacks seems to work better than a hexagonal or other radial arrangement. By keeping everything at 90 degrees it all fits together well however many stacks you need.

What are the units for KAS magnet strength / breakforce? Kilonewtons? If so, the magnet isn't really strong enough for my wants. Ports require a Kerbal present and I don't think harpoons can release from their target, so any other suggestions?

The fact is several major modders are against CKAN and decline to support installations done using it. Ferram and I believe Roverdude have adopted that stance. Even with modders who don't have such an anti-CKAN stance, chances are if you have a problem and you used CKAN you'll be asked to reinstall the mod manually and see if it persists. For me this makes CKAN untenable to use. At the moment the sad reality is KSP has no good solution for mod management. Doing it manually is being stuck in the dark ages and doesn't scale. CKAN has too tainted a record I feel. KSP-AVC offers only basic and limited functionality. Modpacks are not a thing with KSP. Curse haven't moved in yet, and most of the community wouldn't really want them too. Steam Workshop is unlikely to ever be supported, and based on my experience with Cities: Skylines it has shortcomings anyway. What do I think a good solution would look like? Well I think it wouldn't use release .zips as-is like CKAN tries to. It needs a way to robustly handle things, including dependencies and conflicts between mods. I wonder if it would be possible to make use of one of the formats already used in Linux software packaging, where a lot of that kind of stuff already has solutions. A good solution also needs to be friendly to the modders - don't burden them with excessive work to create packages, and don't cause issues that aren't present with a manual install. And I would venture that it shouldn't try to rush to the update - new versions of mods warrant checking, both of themselves and where practical for compatibility. Major well-respected mods have had updated versions with serious bugs before now.

@KocLobster No 980 looks like a great idea at the moment. The new 1070 is priced around $400-450 and stomps the 980 performance-wise, although availability is an issue. The 980 Ti is also in that same price bracket, runs the 1070 close and is easier to find. @OrbitalBuzzsaw sounds reasonable for 1080p gaming, with a GPU comparable to a 750 Ti and a CPU that'll be great for KSP and just about anything else. The gotcha with laptops is often whether their cooling is up to the job.

@Kernalrom actual CPU model numbers please. "i5" and i7" are brand names that cover a vast gulf in performance. EDIT: OK, it looks like Apple themselves have taken to being evasive regarding the actual CPU models they use. *sigh* That's pretty lame and makes it very difficult to give an informed prediction of gaming performance. (It also means my own already-low opinion of Apple takes a further drop, but you've stated it's what you want.) In any case, with the iMac being practically a laptop on a stand, cooling is going to be an issue. Perhaps the only way to judge is benchmarks on the actual Apple hardware, if you can find any. @Avera9eJoe the 6600K. In my experience KSP 1.1 usually only uses the equivalent of two cores.

88 miles per hour.