cantab

Sent the Britannia some more fuel and landed her back at Kerbin. Well, most of her. 40 km was too low a periapsis for a re-entry at the speeds involved. I don't think English has a word for travel between moons, that would be the equivalent to "interplanetary" and "interstellar". Interlunar would be specific to the Moon (Luna in Latin) and anyway has an established non-spaceflight meaning. Intermoonly and intermoonish have not been used. Intersatellite has connotations of artificial satellite stuff.

CNET? Don't you mean CKAN? Anyway, in my current main install, 24. Breaking it down it's: ModuleManager, of course. Eight mods for the planetary system. It's the 'gimmick' of my current main save, lots of planets. Four utilities - KER, Precise Node, Transfer Window Planner, and Hyperedit. 11 other mods. Some are gameplay mods like FAR. Some are parts mods like the K2 command pod. Some blur the boundary a bit, like UKS. I try and keep the list reasonably short, partly for ease of management, partly because I feel that even with 1.1 KSP still doesn't have a lot of performance "headroom". On the other hand I haven't "frozen" the mods list in this save. If I want a particular mod to do a particular mission, I'll go ahead and add it.

Tried redownloading the game? It could have been a bad download or a bad zip extraction.

Based on some of the more bizarre bugs I've seen in KSP, both stock and with mods, I agree with this. I imagine KSP is a considerable mass of spaghetti code. I also imagine that spaghetti code is the norm in video games.

A few things the Shuttle either did or was considered for: Bringing satellites *back* from orbit. And not necessarily co-operative ones. Can you grab an uncontrolled tumbling object and take it down? Spacelab. Sort of an ad-hoc space station in the payload bay. Taking the external tank all the way to orbit, and putting it to some sort of use.

As long as it's Cat5e, and legitimately Cat5e not fraudulently labelled, it will be fine. Don't spend silly money on ethernet cables.

As mentioned, ap0r is designing and building a liquid rocket engine and posting about it here. And I agree with him. Make your life easier and use a propellant combination that's safe. OK, nothing's totally safe, but something that isn't going to kill you in a small quantity!

I think OP implied, even if they didn't outright state, that the rocket should reach space from the surface of Earth.

NH2 may be just around the corner, but I'm not letting that stop me from getting on with my basebuilding in NH1. First module! And only now do I notice the solars will be in the way of docking the next module. D'oh. Ah well, I can retract one of them.

Wheels are well known as buggy in KSP 1.1.2. They can be coaxed into working, or you could try a VTOL instead.

After a good few weeks of development, I flew STS001 with my shuttle Britannia, to deploy the QSS Sedgwick Mining Module to the surface of Serran. I used a bit too much fuel in the landing, had enough to fly back to Serran orbit but not get home. No problem, I can send more fuel. (STS - Serran Transportation System. QSS - Que Serran Serran, the name of the to-be base.) Album: https://flic.kr/s/aHskAmrCFJ

If Squad felt it necessary to revert to Unity 4 and the KSP 1.0.5 line, they absolutely could. I don't think that's actually called for and I'm 99 point many nines certain it won't happen, but if Squad really wanted to then it's in no way impossible.

I can't give an informed opinion about this, because I never played 1.1 or 1.1.1. Their reputation preceded them, and along with the usual delays in some mod updates lead me to hold of playing KSP for a bit. By the time I restarted 1.1.2 had been out for a short while already.

Aeroplanes were invented over a hundred years ago. We have here an argument between a pilot and an aerospace professor about how they fly. Think about this the next time you're booking a flight. On topic, yes KSP wings behave like symmetric airfoils. There's a reason for this - "mirror" symmetry doesn't actually mirror the object, which you can see when you try and place Science Jrs in mirror symmetry. So an asymmetric airfoil would end up upside-down on one side.

"What's the least I could spend on a computer to be able to play lightly modded KSP stably with a decent framerate? Also, is it possible to play KSP without frequent crashes" KSP at the moment is buggy and crash-happy on any hardware. The exact software setup seems to have more to do with it, drivers and OS versions and whatnot, but nobody really seems to know what's sure to be stable and what's sure to be a crashfest. Once the bugs are fixed, I expect KSP to be stable on any itself-stable hardware. But as far as performance goes, a good start is a recent "full" Intel CPU (not the tablet-grade ones) at a decent clock speed, which will also usually have an iGPU up to the job. Like I said above though, look for reviews in particular ones that test the laptop's ability to keep running cool and fast under extended load. Some laptops can handle a brief burst of CPU load that you might get in everyday use, but overheat with sustained gaming.

Drag mainly correlates with surface area, so a small rocket will suffer increase drag for its mass. That is likely to impose a lower limit. You also have factors like only being able to make fuel tanks so thin (again, surface area to volume considerations) and the relatively fixed mass of the guidance system. One of the smaller space-capable sounding rockets I've been able to find is the Indian Rohini RH-300 Mk II. It can put a 70 kg payload to 150 km, and is 20 feet high, 1 foot wide, and weighs half a ton itself. Generally this sort of rocket is designed for cheapness and simplicity though, rather than minimum mass. Orbit requires something rather bigger.

As I understand it, there wasn't much choice. Unreal at the time cost a bomb, it's because Unity became successful that Unreal Engine is now free or cheap. (And anyway from what I've read, Unreal could be even worse than Unity for KSP anyway). A custom engine would have taken too long to make something to show off to the boss. What else was there available and affordable in 2011? This, though, doesn't mean I don't hold Squad responsible for any issues in KSP that they might blame on Unity. It might have been the least bad option, but Squad still chose it, and I'm still Squad's customer not Unity's customer!

Hell no. The improvements in KSP 1.1 are dramatic. Double the framerate on large ships is not something that should be rolled back. That said, 1.0.5 should absolutely remain available because 1.1.x is so buggy, and in particular it will not even run on some (Linux) systems that ran 1.0.5 fine. Unless those issues are definitely fixed in a future 1.1.x revision, I'd say 1.0.5 should still be available as a previous version even after KSP 1.2 is release. I feel confident in saying that it will be a long time before 1.1.x random crashes waste more of my life than 1.0.x godawful performance already has.

Microsoft recently changed the way it works and now it can install without your explicit consent. Indeed I wouldn't be surprised if a Windows 7 computer now won't not upgrade to Windows 10 unless the user has admin privileges.

Almost certainly not. Although K+R renamed the planets, they're still in the same orbits as far as I know. Two different planets in exactly the same place will cause seriously weird bugs.

My impression is that Microsoft really really really want to push people to use it. Why? I assume Microsoft have some ulterior motive, and its at the users' expense. I'd say that bothers me more than any criticism I might have of the user interface or technical aspects. It bothers me more than the forced-updates within Windows 10, though such forced-updates do seriously irritate me. It bothers me even more than the snooping. After all, it's a "free" upgrade. If you're not paying for a commercial product or service, it's often because you're not the customer, you're the product.

Lots of people do fly planes with SAS, but it is indeed what's making turning weird. SAS attempts to hold the craft in a particular orientation in space. That means that if you bank your aircraft, SAS fights the turn and puts you into a slip, the plane flying slightly sideways through the air. You have to wrench the plane around with manual control inputs to turn effectively when SAS is on. I prefer to fly stable planes without SAS, and instead use trim, which is set by Alt+WASDQE, or RShift+WASDQE on Linux. This sets a constant control input, which you can see in the bottom left when SAS is off and you aren't making manual inputs. I use pitch trim to maintain level flight (or a climb or descent as desired). I hit Caps Lock to enable fine controls, the markers in the bottom left turn blue, which smooths out direct control inputs. I find many planes in KSP don't really need rudder input when banking, the turns are good enough anyway. I only enable SAS if the plane starts misbehaving, in particular in the upper atmosphere where it can get very "floaty". Setting up a joypad or flightstick can let you fly more smoothly, but simple flights on Kerbin or spaceplanes to orbit are doable with the keyboard. Your plane design above looks basically fine, though I agree it would probably do better with two engines.

This comes up before, but personally I feel that with a well-designed control scheme the VAB will be no problems at all. Indeed it could be *better* on console. I'm imagining analogue sticks to move parts up/down, left/right, forward/back. Three axes of motion for three dimensions, compared to on PC where we're trying to manipulate 3D space with a 2D mouse. Button to switch to rotation mode, again three axes for three axes. Button to bring up the parts list as a popup and flip through them. Button that "tabs" through the parts. Buttons to flip between gizmo modes. The closest thing I've experienced was the Gummi Ship building in Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2. That worked just fine. OK it did lock you to a 3D grid which simplifies things a bit. I have my concerns about console KSP, everyone does, but the VAB isn't one of them. Provided Flying Tiger do a good job of the user interface, and I admit that's a big proviso, it will be no problem. It does need the VAB UI, and to be honest all the UI, designing from scratch for console. I don't want to see anything remotely like a mouse pointer anywhere in console KSP. (Unless you actually plugged a mouse into the console). If there's a cursor, Flying Tiger have failed, IMHO.

Congrats on the build! The Mk2 bay fits 1.25m parts and has some room for radially-attached bits, but not much. That said you can do a lot in that form factor. For landers, consider one that lands "sideways". Example (might not actually fit a Mk2 bay but it shows the idea). For rovers, using the extendable landing gear may help, for example this concept. (Pre 1.1.x wheel behaviour, so might not work now). Alternatively, you could just equip the shuttle orbiter to go and land places itself. For a station, I don't think I'd do the full construction with a Mk2 shuttle, but rather launch a 2.5m station core on a rocket and use the shuttle for crew and additional modules.

Here you go