cantab

I suppose it depends how much like the movie incarnation you want? If we take the fundamental idea of drawing power from a star to destroy a distant planet, then there are a few pretty pragmatic ways to do it. Giant mirrors is my first thought. Build something akin to a Dyson sphere, but designed to reflect and focus the light from the star onto its target. Applying (possibly wrongly) the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_length I estimate that you could focus on a planet-sized target at a distance of a couple of thousand parsecs - which is a pretty big chunk of the way across the galaxy. You would probably be using planet sized mirrors too - the whole affair would make Starkiller Base look TINY. With a whole star's worth of light the target would be destroyed in short order. Of course the catch is light travels at, well, the speed of light. The next obvious idea is to run solar powered antimatter factories. If you cover a planet in solar arrays it's going to take millenia to make enough antimatter to blow a target planet apart, but if you Dyson sphere the whole star then you can make target planets go boom on a daily basis. Presumably if you have faster-than-light travel you can load your antimatter bombs onto that. The bombs would be several times the size of an Imperial Star Destroyer but smaller than the "Super Star Destroyer" type ships. Again your Dyson sphere is making Star Wars stuff look miniscule. Either concept also avoids the "one hit blows it up" aspect of the Death Star and Starkiller Base. A realistic Dyson sphere is just a swarm of satellites, albeit perhaps satellites the size of planets. Blow up one mirror or one antimatter factory and it's just a single piece that the weapon will work fine without.

In my view and experience I'd keep the docking arrangements simple and not worry overly about flex, provided you use senior ports and don't have too many connections it'll be fine. Consider that this mess flew without a hitch: https://flic.kr/p/nTmzTU Engine clusters are your friend. If you have three or more engines you can lower the thrust limiters on some to compensate for off-axis centre of mass, for example if you have two different modules docked radially to your propulsion module. "Control from here" is also your friend, put a probe core near the engines and main fuel tank and control from it, because that's what SAS will respond to the movements of. If you control from a nice stable point then it doesn't matter if the other end of the ship flexes around a bit.

Kerbin survey contracts are a good use for planes and they give decent rewards at least in early career, though I'll admit they do take a bit of time. Leaving the plane landed out means it can be better placed for the next survey, which may benefit the Wheesley vs the more fuel-hungry Juno. Planes also useful for some part testing, though check the conditions are within your flight envelope - but then again said envelope gets expanded with the Panther or Whiplash so is not so great for the slower engines.

This is on the coast around the southern tip of the KSC continent. Not the best view but those are some decent cliffs dropping down into the sea. https://flic.kr/p/qZ2Swo This cliff is in the same range as "Keverest", Kerbin's highest mountain https://flic.kr/p/r9oJV8 I believe the range in the background here is the one north of the desert's east end. Not a close view but looks OK. https://flic.kr/p/romK31 The range west of KSC in general is full of steep faces, it's not just K2 proper. The hill by the island airfield might cut it for a short jump that's easy to get to. I bet the big crater rim has some good sites. Never looked closely though. Though it would be a short jump, the edges of the ice caps are a thought. For the "B" of BASE the VAB is the obvious one, then there's the island airfield tower, and the VAB at the other space centre. The radar dish at the other space centre might fill the "A" in BASE. It has a little trick for the unwary jumper too

-79 (-)

In the absence of magic "inertial dampeners" and unobtanium materials, large spacecraft will have their acceleration limited by structural considerations. They might have more delta-V because they have more volume for fuel in comparison to surface for tankage and armour, but they probably have lower TWR than smaller spacecraft, down to a point. Moment of inertia, and centripetal forces needed when spinning, also start to bite big ships. Even if they pack great straight-line acceleration, they probably can't turn as quickly as a smaller craft. You can put multiple engines in different directions or thrust-vector the engines but both those add deadweight from a straight-line performance standpoint. (And at the really big end even thrust vectoring the engine probably isn't such a quick thing either). Of course the internet has had its say on "space fighters" anyway. The widely accepted argument is that a disposable missile is better than a fighter that needs to fly back to its carrier afterwards. But doesn't that pose a question - at what scale, if any, is it then worth building a spaceship instead of a giant missile?

Holy wall of text. Anyway, I think the problem is KSP version 1.0 was a big step backwards in terms of game performance. The combination of the (reasonable) new aerodynamics, the (overengineered) thermal system, and the extended physics range all mean that KSP now lags worse at lower part counts than it did back in 0.90. Even 0.90 with FAR and DRE ran better than 1.0.5 does now. Things like that Mars Ultra Direct video were done on previous KSP versions that ran less badly. That said you *should* do better than you are. I run a Core i3 6100, GTX 750 Ti, Debian Linux, and I can maintain 10 fps on a 600 part ship. You have a similar CPU as far as running KSP goes. Two factors could explain the discrepancy: Game settings. The aerodynamic effects tank framerate for me so I usually put them on minimum. If you're actually GPU-limited then obviously sending the detail right down will help. Even if you're "CPU-limited" like most people playing KSP, graphics settings still impose some CPU load. Mods can sometimes seriously hammer your fps, I've seen an 80% drop from a buggy mod before now - that means that what should be 25 fps will be running at 5 fps just because you installed or even just updated one of your mods. I've also seen a serious hit from Smokescreen, which is a part of Realism Overhaul. On the other hand I've not seen more than about a 5-10% hit from FAR, but of course if several mods each cost you 5% of your framerate it starts to add up to big damage.

If your flight requirements can be met by the Wheesley, it's probably the engine to choose with its high efficiency and OK TWR. Of course how often your requirements can be met by the Wheesley is another matter, but the same criticism could be levelled at the ion engine. IMHO there's a case for improving its high-altitude performance though. There's obviously the demand from contracts to reach high altitudes at not necessarily high speeds. It also doesn't seem unreasonable considering some business jets fly over 15 km and the U-2 went above 21 km, all at subsonic speeds, though granted Kerbin's atmosphere decays quicker with height than Earth's.

Pick four KSP bodies at random, visit them in that order. There are over 30 thousand possibilities. Chances are nobody has ever done that mission profile before. Of course chances are it's also something like Vall - Gilly - Moho - Eve, a mission profile that's just a bit odd to do.

Mun mining seems to be widely enough, I assume it works fine. Consider that you're landing with payload empty, then flying back up with it full, which makes the fuel requirement much less than for landing and returning the same heavy payload. On paper I can make a ship capable of landing itself on Moho, filling up 15 tons of ore, and launching it back to orbit using 12 tons of LFO overall. (Note that this ship does not carry the mining drills itself, it's just an ore hauler). While a slim margin that is a net gain, and means that shipping ore to orbit is viable almost everywhere. That said if you refine your ore into fuel on the surface you gain a further advantage, because you don't even need your fuel for the ascent when you land. But you can still refine some on the surface and ship more raw ore into orbit if you like.

What goes up must come down. -75

I've seen goofy behaviour when hitting water in the current FAR release. And by goofy behaviour i mean a crash at subsonic speeds launched some parts over 5 km high. Of course it may already be resolved in dev. I'm not making seaplanes or boats atm so I'm fine waiting for the release proper.

I've been using Linux as my main OS for over a decade and of course greatly appreciate KSP supporting it so well. But for someone who isn't already using Linux, installing a whole OS just to play one game is a big step. You could argue it should be preferable to waiting for 1.1, depending on when and what you expect out of 1.1, but for a Windows or OSX user I think they're better off sticking with their current operating system. Even if someone gets Linux running great for KSP, it's still a nuisance to reboot just to play it, just like for me I'm less likely to play a Windows-only game because I don't want to stop what I'm doing in Linux and reboot. And I definitely stand by my claim that for memory-challenged Windows users, DX11 and OGL modes should be the first thing they try.

It would, but it just turns "quickload" into another "load" - the whole point of quickload is that it's quick. I don't even know what this forum's quote system is doing. Sal, I'd just say that basically makes semi-ironman the norm. Otherwise, one thing I note is that KSP does an abysmal job of exposing what it calls "named saves". When you do a normal game start the only option given is to load the last autosaves from each playthrough - the game fails to show all the saves you actually have. In the Space Centre screen you can choose "save game" from the Esc menu and get prompted for a name, but there's no indication of what names you've already used! When you're in flight that option is absent from the Esc menu, and can only be reached by Alt+F5, a key combination that is not only obscure but is just begging the player to hit Alt+F4 instead and close without saving at all! Utterly, utterly abysmal.

Maybe. I don't hugely see the point. For a stable re-entry you want something of a conical shape, with a wide heat shield and the rest tapering back behind that. I've done this a lot with probes behind the 1.25 and 2.5 m shields, but what could taper behind a .625m shield? It's already the smallest size! On the other hand, adding the small shields wouldn't hurt really.

Back in 0.90 with FAR I managed to snap the spoilers off one of my planes by deploying them around Mach 0.8. They were just like NOPE. Fortunately I still landed the plane. I've had similar things with my in-development shuttle orbiter, after I extended the nose then at high speeds too much AoA makes it want to pitch further. It's probably down to the ratio of wing lift to body drag changing at those speeds. I've reduced the tendency enough to keep it under control, but it's still something I have to watch out for when flying.

Congrats! I too have been playing KSP for a long time but never got a Kerbal to Duna and back. It's something of my nemesis planet - I've returned Kerbals from most bodies including Tylo, Laythe, and Moho, but stuff has only ever gone wrong at Duna.

Part tests can be fun. Really what it takes is a moment's thought and consideration. What are the flight conditions - are they lenient or annoyingly precise, and are they in or near your normal flight envelopes or way off? What's the part to test - can you handle the weight and bulk, and might it be useful to use for other missions before completing the contract? Read what the contracts say, take the stuff that's doable, and timewarp if there's honestly nothing. And then you get to do stuff like this. Up to altitude by cantab314, on Flickr

Going down with a negative 69. Whatever that is.

Hence, I suppose, the idea that things like the Death Star were meant to control the galaxy by terror. The Imperial Star Destroyer and even the AT-AT have been described as designed on the same philosophy - as important as the actual fighting capability is that the weapon should be an imposing presence that daunts any would-be attackers, and the power of such weapons is meant to intimidate the Empire's subjects into toeing the line. Of course, it didn't work. The rebellion time and again took out the big Imperial stuff, and in the EU (now summarily rendered non-canon by Disney, mind you) the destruction of Alderaan strengthened the rebel cause.

We own a by now old Acer hybrid. It seems to do OK for web browsing and watching catch-up TV, but we've never really tested it further.

The two processors are virtually identical in performance. The two graphics chips are considerably different. All else being equal, and if gaming is your primary interest, get the laptop with a 980M. It won't match a desktop GTX 980, but it'll beat a 960 and in some games pull level with a 970 - seriously impressive for a laptop. The 970M is some way behind.

-65 (-) Make that down to -66. Stupid forum.

There's a hidden "extra" cheats menu, I think you hold down the button, and then you can add and remove science/rep/money. Makes it easy to unlock all the tech if you want.

I've crashed at it a lot. I'm really bad at precisely landing planes. The wide open space of KSC is fine, but the island, not so much.