SkyRender

Yes. (2) Yes. (4) Yes. (4) All of them. (24) Many times. (10) About half-a-dozen times, before I got bored with giving Kerbin new moons. (16) I use TAC and FAR together. (8) I use so many mods. (eh) Again, all of them. (120) Total: 188 (9.4) Yeah, I'm something of a long-timer. Most of that stuff I've had literally years to perfect.

I have a suggestion for both a bonus and a new factor in scoring: account for how many Kerbals are sent on the mission. Why? 'Cause I'm totally sending 10 Kerbals out on this crazy mission. Have I mentioned that sanity is for the weak?

I saw a stream of someone's first attempt at KSP as guided by a more veteran player. They were informed that their otherwise-pretty-solid rocket was going to have a bad time shortly. Mainly because he forgot to check the staging. First thing his ship did was decouple the side-boosters, which caused a chain reaction of the whole thing blowing up on the launchpad. Good times.

Destructible buildings means that Danny2462 is going to be making even more hilarious videos, so who am I to complain?

That would make an interesting challenge, actually. Hardcore Mode would be to do it with FAR installed. And by "hardcore" I of course mean "all but assuredly impossible without some serious exploits".

I think my longest KSP hiatus was about 2 months or so, though I've had plenty of times where I've just played on-and-off. Basically any time I take up playing any RPG (or Terraria), KSP falls off the radar for a while. How long depends highly on how engrossing the game is. Tales of Graces f stole me away from KSP almost continuously for the better part of a month most recently.

Pol is definitely the niftiest-looking of the moons. Especially with terrain scatter enabled.

I'll be doing what I do with every new release of KSP that adds to Career mode: explore the potential of the new additions and find new ways to min/max my way to success.

I just ran a very Nordic mission called Project Vitenskap. It consisted of the Oppdagelsen science station, the Ekskursjon science lander, and the Redning return capsule. Norwegian is a lovely language to name your craft from, I must say.

It has mass, therefore it is automatically less broken than the RCS engines currently are. As Scott Malney has demonstrated, there is no upper limit to the thrust you can attain from attaching multiple copies of them to your ship and enabling infinite fuel.

Self-quoting, eh? Here's one of my favorites.

In the spirit of KSP's current music selection, I picked out a bunch of Kevin MacLeod songs ages ago for each body. Mun - , Minmus - , Duna - Gynnopedie No. 3, Ike - Dres - Jool - Laythe - , Vall - Tylo - Bop - Pol - Eve - , Gilly - Moho - , Eeloo -

KSP will ruin sci-fi for you, it's true. Unless it's intentionally campy sci-fi like Red Dwarf or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Those can get away with the inaccuracies because they poke fun at them.

I think you mean tritium. Trilliums are a genus of flower, whereas tritium is hydrogen-3 (a proposed component for more advanced propulsion). The image of an entire space fleet running on flowers, however, is kinda amusing.

Here's my own somewhat-simplified take on things: Aerodynamics -Pros * It's actually a lot easier to get to orbit in a proper aerodynamics model, assuming you have an aerodynamic build -Cons * Unless procedural fairings are also added, most rockets will never be flyable * Aerobraking becomes much, much trickier Solution: A modification of FAR-like aerodynamics, without the aerodynamic failures (the primary cause of around 90% of FAR-related accidents). Universe Scale -Pros * A bigger space to explore -Cons * A massive drain on resources * The engine can't really handle it * Would require significant rebalancing Solution: Really, it's fine the way it is. Isp -Pros * With a scaled universe, it acts as a balancing tool -Cons * Without it, it just makes things much easier Solution: As above, just don't add it. Life Support -Pros * More challenging missions and design requirements -Cons * Not even remotely new-player-friendly Solution: Don't implement it, or have it be an optional "hardmode" feature. Re-entry Danger -Pros * More challenging missions and design requirements -Cons * Not even remotely new-player-friendly Solution: Don't implement it, or have it be an optional "hardmode" feature. Of all of the original suggested realism mods, only the first stands out as an issue that needs to be addressed any time soon. Adapting to whatever takes the place of the current aerodynamics model is going to be one of the hardest things many players do.

Always Pol. It's just the most interesting moon to look at!

Safety equipment? Psh. My "safety equipment" is "I am an awesome pilot". That's all I need.

You know the saying "any landing you can walk away from is a good one"? I think this qualifies that statement nicely... The landing sequence went about how you'd expect for a craft like that: flaps ripped off, then the wings, then the engines. It hit the ground going 84.2m/s and amazingly did not destroy anything save the front landing gear on the forward pod. The cargo bay off in the distance there decided to spin around for almost a minute upon impact.

This looks like it could be interesting. I threw this together to see what would happen: Don't be fooled by its spaceplane-like appearance; that thing has about as much lift as a paper airplane with a paperwieght glued to it. It had to take off vertically to even reach orbit and couldn't really pitch up at all below 15KM lest it cause aerodynamic failure, that's how little lift it has. I suppose I'll have to try to land it next...

I've been surprised at how many parts it takes now for KSP to start chugging on me. This monstrosity makes the FPS dip to around 30 or so, and that's with a number of enhancement mods installed to boot. It's "merely" 188 parts, but seeing as a 188-part ship turned KSP into a slideshow on a stock install for me not too many versions ago, I'm okay with that. (I really hate NVIDIA, incidentally, for making their PhysX engine perform so badly on AMD hardware. Bad NVIDIA!)

You mean like this?

100+ Kerbals? You mean something like this? (That thing was a nightmare to fly! It made it to orbit with 10% of its fuel left. Still, fully fueled in orbit it can easily do interplanetary.)

Turns out FAR and RAPIERs get along better than I'd realized. Yes, that is 10 crew cabins.

In anticipation of Spaceplane Plus being implemented into stock in 0.25, I've been toying around with the parts a bit. I've discovered that the SPP Mk2 system and Ferram Aerospace Research get along very well indeed. 42 Kerbals to orbit on less fuel than an orange tank. (The rear tank launches empty, it's just there so I can attach 2 engines to the back.) And around 40% of that fuel is left, meaning all sorts of orbital shenanigans can be done. Not too shabby, I'd say!

0.18 is hard to argue with. Just about everything that made for more elaborate missions (docking, probes, electricity, differentiated resources, maneuver nodes, action groups, the LV-N engine) first appeared in 0.18. It was also when KSP got more atmospheric since that was the first version with music.