cantab

Do you need or want to take it into lectures and other classes? If you do, well it's gotta be a laptop. If you don't, a reasonably compact desktop will offer better performance and flexibility for your money. Transporting it between home and college a few times a year shouldn't be a problem by train, coach, or car. (If you have to fly, you might want a laptop to keep the weight down). A desktop will also be significantly cheaper to repair if it breaks and the costs aren't covered by warranty or insurance. If you don't know, find out what other people in the courses do and what the professors expect. If you really want to run OSX, buy a Mac. If you don't, don't. Personally as an experienced Windows and Linux user, last time I tried OSX I found it hard to use. I'm also ideologically opposed to the way Apple locks down iOS, and while OSX is more open I'm still put off buying Apple stuff. Windows 10 Pro includes "downgrade rights", permitting you to install Windows 7 or 8.1 Pro at no extra cost. If your new PC ships with Windows 10 non-pro, you will need to buy Windows 7 separately if you want to use that. You might well feel it's worth sucking up the cost. For laptops, model-specific reviews in a reputable print or online publication are worth having. Specs only go so far, and in particular screen quality, battery life, and adequacy of cooling can only be judged by reviews. And user reviews on shopping websites don't mean poop, most people are clueless. For desktops components tend to be more standard and there are fewer pitfalls, it's hard to make a standard sized desktop PC with atrocious cooling for example, so you can reasonably judge based on comprehensive specs. If your accommodation has ethernet ports, try and get a PC that has ethernet (most do, but some laptops don't), it'll be much better than dealing with wireless in crowded student halls of residence. Whatever you get, get something with an SSD, seriously. Mechanical hard drives cripple the everyday responsiveness of even basic PCs nowadays, but they're depressingly common in cheap laptops and desktops still. If running Windows, install a good antivirus. Windows Defender and Microsoft Security Essentials are poop.

Granted. In COBOL. I wish to flood Hell.

Assuming your planet pack relies on Kopernicus like all other modern KSP planet mods do, then no. The Kopernicus folks will deal with any changes they need to make, and work to keep the format of the planet pack files virtually the same.

*Kicks football into carriage and follows it* What happened to the footballs mod anyway? Does it still work? Or was it abandoned.

On the contrary, for some types of black hole you wouldn't even notice crossing the event horizon. You just aren't coming back out, based on known physics. But the whole point of the ending of Interstellar is the same as the ending of 2001 - it's unknown physics beyond what 20th/21st century humanity has developed.

Sonnah in the skies of Kerbin (or Serran) just never gets old.

You mean bump drafting isn't a thing on the railways?

Might be some tricky conditions. But with the mood on the train I think we'll have plenty of salt to put in the sandbox.

Remind me what this patch was going to fix again? Because I seem to remember it won't fix the wheels. Is there any chance of it fixing the seemingly-random crashes on Linux, or is that being kicked back to 1.2.x?

Well, I switched to USI-LS partly because TAC development looked a bit shaky. But I'd say that USI-LS has developed to be much more complex and challenging than TAC ever was. With the wide array of possible penalties, the slightly-confusing "recycler" vs "converter" distinction, the habitation mechanic, the wear mechanic, the plan for radiation, and I believe the considerably higher baseline supply consumption rate, 'simple' isn't a description of USI-LS any more. TAC-LS is the simple easy mode one.

@Aleksey Pschenichnikov please don't pester. And like KillAshley said, have you installed Kopernicus itself? It's the mod that makes planet mods work. If you have Kopernicus and you still get no change to your solar system, try removing Kerbal Galaxy

By the way, the OP currently has two STS-9's listed.

There is no 2.0 release of KillAshley's Kerbol Plus Remade. So double-check which mod and which version you have installed. There are three mods that are pertinent: The original Kerbol Plus maintained by Amaruis1. Development stopped on that several months ago, and it was full of bugs and issues even before then. I advise against running the original Kerbol Plus on KSP 1.1.2. KillAshley's Kerbol Plus Remade. This one. KillAshley's recreation of Kerbol Plus. Amarius1's Kerbol Origins. His continuation of Kerbol Plus development.

Kopernicus no longer supports manually setting flightglobal IDs, it generates them automatically. That means that they usually end up changing if you add or remove planet packs. What I do is Take screenshots of the Tracking Station before changing planet mods, which show each vessel and the world it is on. Install/remove/whatever planet mods. Start game but do *not* open save. Open Kopernicus log file to find out the new IDs. Back up persistent.sfs Open persistent.sfs and go through each vessel and set its ID to the correct number. Open save and check everything is alright. Kerbin is always ID 1 and Mun always ID 2, those are fixed, so you can skip over those vessels. Sun is always ID 0, but remember that "galaxy" mods usually make the Sun a central black hole and put Kerbin orbiting a different star.

@StanK I love it Totally mad, and it evidently works. Though I wonder what her yaw and roll stability is like, what with having no tail. Meanwhile, I flew the first test flight of the next orbiter in my Shuttle fleet, Victory. She flew fine, but I wanted to land near El Kapitan north of the desert because I saw it and it looked cool. Unfortunately tailsitters and 10 degree slopes don't mix. But hey, it's survivable! The next step of development will be installing the safety equipment and then making lots of deliberate mistakes to see that it works!

I've heard that called the "Wikipedia Game", it's related but not the same thing. Sometimes with certain pages banned to make it not so easy.

The RX 480 is set to upstage it, but won't be out for another month of so. So I'd say that's reasonable. Though I might prefer an i3-4170/6100 and a better graphics card.

Yeah, evidently the Unity player goes by the real filename not the symlink name. You could make the KSP and the Launcher files hard links if you like, that seems to work. But hardlinks are kind of uncommon nowadays. Probably the biggest reason KSP doesn't use them by default is that the ZIP format doesn't support them and quite probably Steam doesn't properly support developers using them either.

I think the Vector lets you attach anywhere. But if it doesn't, just mount it on another part like a nosecone or a BZ attachment point.

As I understand it FSX models planes based on their known handling parameters. So if those parameters are right you get realistic flight, if they aren't you don't. XPlane by contrast models planes based on their actual aerodynamic shape. That means it can accurately model the behaviour of even a hypothetical aircraft. But I think it can fall a little short on a well-known aircraft where there isn't the opportunity to fine-tune the in-game handling as much.

Funnily enough, from what I've heard about Harvester's original plans, KSP has actually gone in a slightly different direction. As I understood it Harvester had in mind more of a space program management game, and that's one of the more recent and arguably weaker aspects to KSP which is more of a build-em and fly-em game. Which has probably been a good thing for KSP, mind you. It's got orders of magnitudes more sales than Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager, which is very firmly on the manager-ey side of things.

On the other hand, Felipe should have known when he decided to develop KSP as a Squad employee that in doing so he was giving up ultimate control over his work.

Yeah, the latest release of Ven's is seriously bugged when used with FAR. Try rolling back to a previous version.

So it's basically working in a similar way to busybox, the program acts differently depending on its own filename?

Granted, you see the world ... explode. I wish I could safely view a real orbital rocket launch from the UK.