cantab

Illumination angle has been well covered. Now that the rover is on Minmus, the most obvious solution is simple: wait until the Sun shines on the solar panels more directly. Less obviously, consider disabling the motors on some of the wheels. Chances are two-wheel-drive will suffice. If that still doesn't help, you'll probably just have to keep tapping the forward instead of holding it down. Of course driving on Minmus presents other challenges anyway.

It relies on user submissions, so interest or lack thereof will bias things too. The "most mistakes" overall are in old films where people have gone through with a fine-toothed comb looking for tiny errors. As for The Martian, it's a mix of "continuity mistakes" and "factual errors", but several of the claimed factual errors are themselves making big assumptions.

I would judge SLS as successful if it launches useful missions that other rockets could not have achieved. The only other thing in its class is Falcon Heavy, but SLS can launch heavier and wider payloads. Cost is less of an issue when there's no alternative.

Tony Hawk's Pro Rocketeer 2. Keeps track of points when you do stunts. Flips, spins, and even lithobrakes can be chained together into super-high-scoring combos.

Gotta love those dangling modifiers. This thread is the not-(required-to-be)-KSP one.

It's no more or less "cheating" than anything else. By itself against the stock parts I think it will be grossly unbalanced though, at least outside career mode where cost can check it. But that's because nuclear pulse propulsion is exceptionally capable in real life. Nothing else offers the same combination of high thrust, high specific impulse, and high technology readiness. As far as environmental impact goes, you arguably don't even want to be in your planet's magnetic field when you start using these things, so you need to get on a high trajectory first. On the other hand if you really don't give a flying fig about the environment, an Orion Drive can launch from within the atmosphere. And actually, for a small ship the nuclear fallout wouldn't be all that severe. You're looking at a total yield of maybe 25 kt, mostly detonated high in the air. Compared to the nuclear tests conducted in the Nevada desert, an Orion launch is no big deal.

It's gotta actually be passed by Congress first. There's obvious pork going on too. NASA banned from human-rating the ICPS? The only reason I can see to do that is to make sure the EUS builders get their moolah.

Rant-O-Matic. Monitors KSP for game crashes, nullrefs, kraken strikes, and the like. When one is detected, Rant-O-Matic automatically makes a post to the KSP forums complaining about Squad. TomTom Go To Space. Gives the player voice directions to their destination as they fly their rockets. Includes official Kerbal voices! Map updates charged at £9.99 per body. Explosions Plus Plus: Michael Bay Edition. Unofficial endorserised by the greatest director to ever exist, it makes the explosions even more awesomer, and occur without the annoying requirement to collide first.

2x symmetry puff engines on the ends of my I-beams, thrusting down.

On the 2nd day of Christmas my true love gave to me Two pairs of pears

Down to -46. Chip, chip, chip away.

8/10. No idea what it is, but it's all glowy. Intentionally Left Blank by Zuckervati Jones, on Flickr

Launch from international waters, sure. Build a spacecraft capable of a Mars trip in international waters, not so much. Or build it in the USA but somehow make sure everyone involved keeps it a total secret? That's as implausible as the claims the Moon landings were faked.

It was made with Reddit in mind and was very popular with Redditors who then drove the wider popularity. It's also gone in for "social" features itself. It's not the only free image host though, not at all. Personally I use Flickr.

Senior docking port under the monoprop tank, but placed the wrong way up. Because half the KSP community has done that at least once with those ports.

Down to 43 below 0.

Overstressing the airframe and breaking the wings or tail off. FAR makes this quite easy to do if you lighten the wings, and it sometimes leads to total airframe disintegration. I suppose it usually falls under poor flying, and indeed it's usually when I'm clowning around not flying sensibly, though earlier today I managed to have an aircraft break up due to *lack* of control authority (it couldn't pitch up out of a dive and so got crushed by the denser lower air). Really the only possible recovery from that is to eject either the cockpit or the crew and descend on a parachute. The other way I crash is when landing, especially away from KSC. Landing problems are typically down to a mix of bad plane design and one part unskilled flying. In this case it often is possible to take action and hold the landing together, or indeed to recognise when a go-around is appropriate.

Working on my VTOL spaceplane/shuttle screenshot284 by cantab314, on Flickr Looking reasonable so far. Uses eight Panthers with the afterburners for VTOL, and with care the transition to forward flight can be made but it is easy to botch up. I'm hoping to improve control at low speeds by adding Vernors. The altitude is good but the top speed of ~960 m/s is a bit underwhelming. I've yet to decide on what rockets to use, I may opt for a pair of rapiers so I also get some more jet power. Biggest problem is the thing is a right handful in roll above around Mach 1.6, I'll need to look at improving that, probably bigger tailfins and maybe increase the wing sweep a little.

For what it's worth, though, I think that if you're going to "stress test" your system, which is always sensible after a new build or even an overclock, you should do that under maximum power draw. That means GPU and CPU together - I suggest Prime95 with one or two fewer threads than it defaults to, and then something like Furmark. This can sometimes highlight stability issues that don't occur when you just test CPU and GPU in isolation. You could even throw in a disk benchmark if you like too. Even though the system will rarely be under anything like that much load, I for one sure don't want it crashing when it is!

I'm pretty sure that's incorrect. Remember that nVidia's early "Tesla" physics acceleration cards didn't have a display output at all. I'm 99% certain that modern GPUs are capable of processing data and sending results back to the CPU. The reason I believe that GPU-accelerated physics is mainly seen for graphical shinies is that limited and vendor-specific hardware support means a game cannot rely on it for "core" physics functionality without severely limiting the potential customer base. Though things are getting better in that respect.

In my view a limited range of 5m parts would be worth adding. In particular a 5m orange tank and matching nosecone pieces would make shuttles really look the part. But I don't think there's a need for 5m engines or most parts, just a few fuel tanks and a couple of size adapters.

2x symmetry I-beams sticking out from the big battery. Four Gigantors on each, arranged to taste.

Dark?

The small KSP system actually I think counts against the LV-N, by reducing the delta-V requirements to get anywhere. In real life the NERVA was considered as an upper stage engine for a Saturn V style rocket, I've virtually never seen them used on KSP launchers because you don't need that much delta-V at the low TWR the LV-N does well. Last I checked you could go as far as Duna and the chemical and nuclear options would be similar in overall mass, and that was before the LV-N gained weight. All this talk about spooling and excessive thermal management seems a bit complicated, I reckon it could get annoying. What I think would be better to make the LV-N stop being so dominant would be the same thing that limits it in real life - it uses liquid hydrogen and that boils off. Fuel boiloff could be implemented quite easily in KSP already I think, just make the fuel tank slowly consume its own fuel. To that end KSP would of course need to adopt multiple fuels. I don't though want a zillion fuels and tiny differences in mixture like you get in Realism Overhaul. What I think would be about right: CryoFuel: Has properties similar to liquid hydrogen, including boiling off. Alone, runs the LV-N and the RAPIER in jet mode. CryoOxidizer: Has properties similar to liquid oxygen, again including boiloff. Burns with CryoFuel in highly efficient chemical engines and the RAPIER in rocket mode. Liquid Fuel: Has properties similar to kerosene and hydrazine. Alone runs the jet engines, other than the RAPIER, but also now runs the RCS jets and some of the smaller chemical engines. Oxidizer: Has properties similar to nitrogen tetraoxide. Runs most of the chemical engines along with Liquid Fuel. Monopropellant: Is now abandoned in the interests of simplicity. In this vision we've only one more fuel than before, and yet I feel there's considerable new richness added to the game. Engines great for the ejection burn are no longer also suitable for orbital insertion at your destination. Not needing separate monoprop tanks will I think be a welcome simplification of craft designs, and make RCS more practical, at present it seems under-used. ISRU becomes more relevant than ever - the only way you're flying back from Jool on an LV-N is if you mine some hydrogen when you're there. There's the natural option for engines using Liquid Fuel and CryoOxidizer too, which would fit between CFCO and LFO engines in efficiency, and might logically be some of the most powerful in the game. On the downside, we'd probably need a fuel tank switcher in stock to keep the parts list manageable.

Getting rather political here. Anyway, the UN couldn't and wouldn't stop any nation landing a person on Mars. As far as private companies go, clearly they would need the approval of at least one government in order to be able to construct and launch their rocket, and also the non-hostility of other powerful governments and organisations. Plenty of governments and organisations have the resources to stop you building your Mars rocket, by any means up to and including putting a bullet in your skull and a bomb in your rocket factory.