cantab

I previously suggested that the tightness in a space activity suit might come from some sort of active system, mainly so it's not uncomfortably tight in one atmo, but perhaps that same active system would also remove the need for custom fitting. As for what it would be, I don't know the details but I'm thinking some kind of shape memory wire or electrical "muscle" or something like that. I know there are materials that can exert a force in response to a controlled input like an electrical current, we're some way off using them in a spacesuit but then we're also some way off the emergency in space scenario.

Nitpick: New Horizons *did* use a Jupiter gravity assist. That got it to Pluto about two years quicker than if it hadn't made the flyby. It also makes New Horizons our most recent probe to visit Jupiter (until Juno arrives this July), and it actually returned more data from there than it will about Pluto!

I think a good thing on a phone would be craft telemetry. Basically something similar to telemachus, but with a bit more graphical flair. In fact, perhaps if it targeted tablets primarily some sort of "glass cockpit" flight controls could work well. Basically IVA-view controls with MFD-like features on the tablet screen. Then as a player you can if you like put the main view in IVA mode looking out a window, prop the tablet below your monitor, and get a really immersive experience.

They do. What's actually going on I've been told is that the default DirectX 9 mode duplicates the textures - once in the graphics memory where they're needed, and again in the system RAM where it doesn't need them. Anyway, the issue is already fixed in DX11 and OGL modes. KSP 1.1 is expected to move to DirectX 11 as the default, so it shouldn't be a problem any more.

There's another thread on the idea. Anyway, it's not the POTUS's place to be deciding what celestial bodies are called.

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The console ports ought to force Squad to make their game better. With weaker processors KSP wants to be better optimised to run well, and without mods more features want to be in the core game. The question is whether those improvements make it back into the PC version.

The Whiplash actually seems to do better for fast planes, especially when making replicas. The Panther does have better TWR in afterburning mode, but often the limit isn't on mass of engines but on their number. Considering the Whiplash is based on the SR-71 engine, it's the obvious choice for you.

That's debatable. Good performance matters for games, just look at Arkham Knight. Needing an extremely powerful PC to run a game that looks several years old, or having a lack of smooth gameplay no matter what, might not technically be bugs but they aren't good things. I feel that generally KSP has been "carried" by being an inspired and unique concept but the execution of that concept is distinctly average. Every version of KSP that gets released still with performance problems and still with nothing-special graphics, the door opens a little wider to competitors who might take the concept and make the game KSP should be.

Science! with the Mobile Processing Lab. But I prefer the lab round Mun or Minmus orbit. Your station has fuel; add engines and/or the lab itself if required then fly it out to whichever one of the Mun or Minmus you've explored less. Hopefully you get there with plenty of fuel left in the tanks. Then send out a re-usable Mun/Minmus lander that can make trips down to different biomes, back to the station, refuel, and repeat. Use either the same or a different craft to take Kerbals from Kerbin to the station and back. If you're good at orbital rendezvous then putting the station in a 30-45 degree inclined orbit helps you land on more biomes without being inconvenient for the trips too and from Kerbin. My Mun station in the current save got a good few thousand bonus science with the lab, as well as what the experiments gave normally, and that was only hitting about three or four biomes.

I've tended to use the Spark on light landers. If I want to land "sideways" the radial engines are convenient, though a suitably mounted Spark also does well. I've never thought of the NERVA for a Mun landing. I almost always do Munar orbit rendezvous, which cuts the dV needed for the lander, so maybe it wouldn't work out so well. Form factor is a challenge (though I've flown tall landers anyway) and the NERVA also lacks a gimbal, not a problem on a small ship where pod torque is enough but on a larger one it means spending mass on other means of control. If I'm making a lander that lands sideways, I make it that flies sideways too. No point having separate engines facing in different directions.

I swear by no-quickload play, it makes me feel so much more involved in my missions. Now there is an important rider: I have my KSP folder routinely backed up. My chosen program automatically scans it for changes every X minutes half hour and keeps all versions of files. So if I hit a serious bug I can restore from the backup and lose no more than X minutes of progress. If I realise my beloved space station has gone AWOL I can hunt through and find the last save when it was still present. The craft files are covered too, so if I mistakenly delete or overwrite one I wanted I can restore it. And I've done all three of those in my KSPing. Set up automatic backups and make sure you can restore them. I do still hit F5 if I'm expecting bugs, and can temporarily enable quickloads in the Alt+F12 menu, which is more streamlined than messing with my backup program. But having F9 disabled by default discourages using it without thinking. There's another practical gotcha - expect fewer successes. I've come back from Tylo and Moho but never returned a Kerbal from Duna, because I've only ever attempted Duna in saves I was playing no-quickloads on. To return a probe from the surface of the mod planet Serran (between Duna and Laythe in properties) took seven missions, while getting a Kerbal there and back involved a further four.

The Average Joe can be forgiving for not knowing the details of spaceflight. A science textbook should know better though. Then again, does KSP teach us much better? A: To launch a rocket fly straight up about 8 miles then turn it over and start going east. (OK, this is mostly corrected now) B: If you have a really awkward shape thing to put in orbit, fly straight up until it's in space then fly straight sideways until it makes a stable orbit. C: Once you're in space there's no air drag to worry about. D: If you're on a closed orbit it's going to stay the same forever. E: If you want to put a satellite in geostationary orbit you need to get it at exactly the right height down to the metre. F: Actually you just need to get it at exactly the right orbital period. Even a fraction of a second off and the satellite will drift out of place. G: Basically where-ever you're going, you can launch at any time. H: We know enough about the atmospheres of other planets that we can safely and reliably aerocapture into a stable orbit from an interplanetary trajectory. I: The science equipment on a space probe weighs basically nothing. J: RTGs last forever. K: Stuff can crash or explode, but other than that space hardware is completely reliable and never breaks down. L: Rovers on other planets or moons go really slowly, only about 70 miles per hour. M: There is no politics to worry about when running a space program.

To pick a nice round number, 1950. But there wasn't manned spaceflight in 1950! No, because spaceflight for us is expensive and we're cautious about human life. Spaceflight for Kerbals is cheap thanks to the small planet and they are very gung-ho about it, brave to the point of foolishness. They get on the rockets at the stage of development that we were strictly unmanned flights. But why not 1940 then? The V-2 prototypes had flown! There's evidence in the game that the rocket engines and other parts being used are not the first ones - several of the part descriptions refer to them being improvements on previous, not seen in game, parts. So I don't feel the space program is using the very early experimental rocket engines. The game's components are in fact very rugged and reliable, which I regard as an approach the Kerbals can adopt because they don't need to squeeze every ounce of performance from their rockets just to make orbit. Also 1940 is too early for composite solid rocket motors which I think is what the game's ones are meant to be. But Kerbals don't have wheels! I'm pretty sure you see them driving the ground support vehicles around even in the tier 1 VAB. As NathanKell said, making space-grade wheels is another matter. But what about planes? At the moment my best excuse is that Kerbals have indeed invented planes, but the space program knows them to be total deathtraps and is therefore unwilling to pursue them much. If you disagree, I challenge you to design an aeroplane from scratch in stock KSP and fly it to the island and land, first time, no crashing, no killed kerbals But NASA wasn't founded until 1958! No Politics.

Arthur C. Clarke in Islands In The Sky described a different approach. In each room was an emergency patch, described as a piece of thick rubber I think about the size of a manhole cover. If there's a hull breach, you manoeuvre that into place over the breach to make a temporary seal. If the hole is too big well it was big enough to drain all the air before you had a chance anyway. Alternatively, you simply wear a sufficiently lightweight and flexible spacesuit all the time. Something akin to the space activity suit might do the trick, and maybe the compression could be active so it's not uncomfortably tight all the time. The helmet might be slightly cumbersome, but plenty of jobs already require some sort of helmet to be worn.

I frequently do limit the gimbals. Now there are a couple of things to know about my flying. Firstly I use FAR, which as a side-effect increases gimbal range - Ferram reckons it helps control rockets in FAR. So often I'm effectively just undoing that. Secondly I use the hold prograde during my ascents; this is notoriously jittery, and reducing the gimbals keeps it under control. I rarely outright lock gimbals on launchers though. If the engine has it then hey, (mass) free control! And they can offer *considerable* control authority, far exceeding what any reasonable mass of reaction wheels or sensible number of Vernors can give. My big Tylo lander relied primarily on the gimbals on its four KR-2Ls for control.

Pop culture dates quickly. A 4 billion year old planet shouldn't be named after a 4 year old game. First this object needs finding. Then if it's judged a planet it will probably get a Greco-Roman name. And I reckon it might well be the PLuto trick - the name of the planet echoes the initials or name of its discoverer. I also think it won't be given the name of a previous hypothesis, so not Tyche. Atlas is an idea, I actually think there's a lot of symbolism there. The Titan Atlas was involved in the conflict with the Olympians, and after that conflict Atlas was sentenced to hold up the heavens; the planet Atlas is suspected to have been ejected from its original location by Jupiter and now "holds up" the orbits of the Kuiper Belt objects. The Titan was also said to be the father of the Pleiades nymphs; the planet might be discovered by the Subaru telescope, Subaru being the Japanese name for the Pleiades star cluster. If it's judged a dwarf planet, well firstly that makes a mockery of the IAU definition, but assuming the rules don't change then Mike Brown has already proposed that objects in Sedna's orbital region - which not-Planet Nine would be - are named after deities in Arctic cultures. And while it's not exactly Arctic as such, I reckon a name from the Norse pantheon would be popular. Possibly Odin, for the association with knowledge, or perhaps Skathi, the lesser known Norse goddess of winter, fitting for an outer frigid world. Or, if this suspected planet turns up in the wrong place, to be the wrong size like Pluto was, or simply plain doesn't exist then trickster Loki would be very apt.

Reasonably well. You'll probably maintain at least 30 fps up to around 150 parts, after that it will start to lag. The next KSP update will hopefully improve things. Even on a budget build I'd go for 8 GB of RAM though, 4 will cramp you. Zorin OS is an Ubuntu derivative, it should be fine with KSP.

A planet of the mass proposed is going to have a hot core from when it formed, which will be several thousand Kelvins. When the middle is that hot, whether the outside is at 20 K or 200 K doesn't make a lot of difference to how long it takes to cool. Whether it has a solid surface then depends on how the gradients in pressure and temperature with depth compare to the melting point of whatever it is made of. There are I think two plausible structures. Either way there will be an outer atmosphere of helium and probably hydrogen. If that atmosphere is thin the pressure and temperature at its base will be such that methane is solid and there will be a solid surface. If the atmosphere is thick enough though it will grade into methane gas or supercritical fluid, with no solid surface. Considering how much hydrogen and helium Neptune and Uranus have, at 15 Earth masses overall, I think for a planet of ten Earth masses the latter structure is *far* more likely.

In real life we can't do that. The ISS is in an inclined orbit and the launch time is determined by that inclination, so we can't also be choosy about exactly where the ISS is round its orbit. Some spacecraft have some wiggle room, the Space Shuttle had about a ten-minute launch window when going to the ISS, but SpaceX are working with an instantaneous launch window - it either takes off on the exact second or it waits until tomorrow. It's down partly to how much delta-V the launcher has but also to the guidance and procedures. There still are constraints on the ISS's position, in order that the phasing orbits don't take too long, but this I believe is another major reason we don't do "direct orbital rendezvous" in real life.

Would something a bit more flexible and a bit more realistic on the engines be nice? Sure, I think so. Does it rank high in my priorities of what to do with the engines? Heck no. Zeroth, Kerbin wants to be bigger. First I'd like to see the engine balance looked at. Especially the ARM engines, their performance is all wrong compared to the real-world prototypes and that wrong performance makes shuttles harder than they should be. Next I'd like to see the fuel:oxidizer ratio changed to something more realistic, and the game display resource amounts in kilograms, not arbitrary random units. The changed LF:O ratio will implicitly buff spaceplanes too.

Yes, but ... I let my license lapse, I believe I need to file some paperwork with the RSGB to make it valid again. Still got my FT-817 just waiting to be dusted off.

It occurs to me, if we ever get ISRU working in real life, we *want* it to work on any old rock as far as possible! "Ore" is about right. And pretty much any rock is going to contain oxygen, silicon, and assorted metals especially aluminium - those are the elements minerals are made up of. Hydrogen may be the "problem" element but there are places with it. On Earth we don't get aluminium out of feldspar or water out of serpentine because that would be incredibly energy-intensive and there are better ways to do it with specifically chosen ores. But on an early colony on another planet? We're gonna use what's there.

The idea of flashing superheated water to steam by adding a nucleation site seems superfluous, it's more controllable and offers higher performance to just heat water under pressure then release that pressure. Or just plain boil water. The first rocket motor in history used steam, Heron's Aeolipile almost 2000 years ago! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_rocket As for why it isn't more widely used, there are a few drawbacks: How do you heat it? If you use fuel and oxidizer, well you're better off just burning and expelling that and not bothering with the steam. If you use an external heat source, you can then choose propellants other than water that might perform better. That said water is easier to store than say liquid hydrogen. How hot can you get it? Probably nowhere near as hot as a chemical rocket engine, and a cooler exhaust moves slower. Very hot water is actually quite corrosive too. What's it for? This I think is the big one. Chemical rockets have high thrust and decent efficiency, monopropellant thrusters and even cold gas thrusters have simplicity, ion engines have high efficiency and low thrust. Where's the niche for the steam rocket, which is less efficient than chemical rockets and probably more complex than monopropellant thrusters?