SkyRender

And this is why I keep my modlist at or below 10. Only my favorites ever make it on, as well as some toolbar mod that's required for Ferram Aerospace. Current top picks: BoulderCo Clouds + Environmental Visual Enhancements (technically two, but the latter requires the former) Kerbal Engineer Redux Ferram Aerospace Research Kerbal Attachment System Procedural Fairings Kethane Even if you count the mandatory toolbar for FAR, that's still a sprightly 8 mods. Keep it limited to your bare essentials and you won't be overloaded with mods!

In this sort of situation, there's rarely a truly "good" solution anyway. At least, not if you also want a solution that succeeds at being "affordable", "easy to implement", and "without baggage". It's generally "choose 2 of 3" if you're lucky. I will miss SpacePort, that said, but not immensely; I know how to find the mods I like via the forums.

I heard a good explanation once on the reason why some people get no better at something no matter how long they do it. "Some people have 10 years of experience, others have 1 year of experience 10 times over." If you never actually get anything out of doing something, it doesn't matter how long you do it, you'll never actually improve. Similarly, if you're particularly determined to get better at something and know how to focus on it to get the results you're after, you can make enormous leaps of progress in a relatively short timeframe.

Kerbal Space Program The most lauded and important organization amongst the Kerbal species (after Ike'n'Gilly Snacks Co., of course) is the Kerbal Space Program, a massive organization dedicated to the exploration of space no matter the cost to Kerbal lives as their primary goal, and the development of the best fireworks in history as their secondary. Though a few dissenters exist to the policies of the Kerbal Space Program, most of them are members of the Church of Treerock or fireworks enthusiasts who think KSP has its priorities backwards. Seeing as the former frequently find themselves busy with the task of avoiding being burned alive by Kerbals who hate them, and the latter tend to get their wish anyway if they stick around the launch site, the majority of Kerbals come out of the deal satisfied either way. Gaining employment at Kerbal Space Program is notoriously easy, which has led to a massive glut of starry-eyed Kerbals signing up for jobs in engineering, manufacturing, science, janitorial services, and most popular of all, flying in the rockets as an astronaut. In truth, the position of astronaut is quite a lot less popular than it would seem, however; any candidate rejected for one of the other positions is immediately shuffled off to the astronaut complex as a candidate for being stuffed into a highly unstable stack of explosives that Kerbals ostensibly call a rocket. This tends to cause quite a lot of panic in about 95% of all Kerbals who actually get the job of being an astronaut. It probably doesn't help that they're also welded into their space suits prior to being loaded into the rockets to prevent them from "feeling the breeze" mid-mission, as reportedly happened during the disastrous first Mun landing. The other 5% tend to be either actually interested in the job of being an astronaut, or too inattentive and slow-witted to realize that they're being sent up on a suicide mission. Until recently it was not entirely clear why almost the entire Kerbal species is behind their space program. However, the galaxy's leading Kerbologist accidentally uncovered the horrifying truth: most of the Kerbals who dissent to the space program [REDACTED FOR CRIMES AGAINST LIFE]. This article's author hopes that this entire article doesn't get censored for mentioning such a despicable and heinous campaign of [REDACTED FOR CRIMES AGAINST LUNCHMEAT]. I hate to put my career in jeopardy by mentioning this, but the galaxy must know! The Kerbal Space Program is [REDACTED FOR CRIMES AGAINST LUBRICANT]! Spread the word! EDITOR'S NOTE: Our former Kerbologist has been sacked due to his profane language and even more profane stating of the truth when a comforting lie would have worked better. We're currently accepting applications for new Kerbologists! Potential candidates should be unfamiliar with any entry besides this one regarding Kerbals. Inquire with Zarniwoop's secretary's secretary for details.

Given that KSP used to be insanely difficult due to missing and incomplete features, I can't particularly say that having those features present somehow makes the game "too easy". I definitely can say that some of us got unreasonably good at doing things by ear that new players can do much more easily now, however! That just means that the game is more accessible. The added challenge of not having the tools available in stock now to make your job easier was never actually intended as a feature. Though I guess if you're a die-hard old-school player, you could just pretend those features didn't exist...

If you're looking for a way to launch Kerbals (well, part of them anyway) into space without a vessel, I think Danny2462 might have a solution for you. ...Oh, head canon! Silly me, I stuck an extra N in there. I wrote an entire Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy-esque series of articles on my take on the Kerbals' peculiarities. I still add new entries to it occasionally, to boot!

You can't make objects rotate during timewarp. You pretty much either have to be satisfied with the dish not pointing the right way half the time, or install redundant dishes so it doesn't matter. Not that it actually DOES matter in stock, but still.

This is the first I've ever heard of anyone referring to any TWR as a "magic number" (well, besides the obvious "greater than 1" requirement if you want to actually get off the ground). Ideally you want to hit mach 1 as fast as possible and stay there until the atmosphere is thin enough that the drag coefficient isn't eating up most of your fuel. Ie. you'll throttle down to slow your acceleration to a crawl once you get going fast enough, and gradually throttle back up as the air thins out.

My theory is that they play with their eeloos on the way to Eeloo. (Second-to-last paragraph of the first post if you don't want to hunt down what the heck I'm talking about.)

Most of the Japanese rockets remind me of my own Kerbal rockets, what with their focus on large quantities of stage-dropping early on during the most fuel-intensive part of the flight. The N-II in particular is very similar to a number of my launch systems: Naming-wise, my rockets more closely resemble the Indian launch systems: perfectly utilitarian and descriptive of their function rather than being some sort of reference. That said, I don't see any space agencies that launch rockets with horrible puns for names, so I still hold the distinction of having no real-world counterpart there.

MechJeb isn't cheating, but it won't generally win you any brownie points with the die-hards for using it either. Topic over.

dV = v(e)*ln(m0/m1) That's why. We call it the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, and it basically says that the fuel you carry to propel yourself also has to be propelled in order to be used. This results in a very unfavorable exponential curve wherein you end up using more fuel to push the mass forward the further you want to go. The simplest counteraction to this problem is to include components that are separated along the way, thus reducing the "dead weight" factor of lugging around empty fuel stages. The other reason is that, while KSP does do its best to balance the model to resemble Earth rockets, the fact remains that the Earth is around 6 times bigger than Kerbin. Low-orbital velocity around Kerbin is a sprightly 2,150m/s or so, while around Earth it's closer to 7,660m/s. Even if KSP's parts didn't have a mass greater than osmium (the densest material known to man, incidentally), they would still not fare that much better than Earth rockets in trying to reach 7,660m/s with a single stage.

Just because the old "MOAR BOOSTERS" mantra is inefficient doesn't mean that you cannot build efficient rockets in KSP. Scott Manley occasionally demonstrates that craft of absurdly small part count can make it to space just fine.

Two new entries have been submitted to the Guide concerning Kerbals. The Kerbal Economy Normally the Guide does not detail the economic behaviour of a species, but with the Kerbals, it was inevitable. Put simply, the vast majority of Kerbals don't understand the first thing about money, in spite of their utter love of it. This trait is believed to be so unlikely in an intelligent species as to be improbable that any other species in existence could possibly share it. A large part of why most Kerbals fail to grasp the value, purpose, or proper storage of money is that the majority of the money Kerbals produce gets funneled directly into their space program. In fact, 95% of all money spent on Kerbin goes directly towards designing, engineering, building, and launching rockets. It's estimated that around 94.5% of all money spent on Kerbin specifically goes into the latter two activities, but the lot of them tend to get lumped together for tax purposes. The remaining 5% of money on Kerbin, according to the leading Kerbologist and his assistant, is spent exclusively on the manufacture of snack foods. While this may sound absurd, given the need for shelter, government, police, hospitals, fire protection, and a mess of other civil services, this is where the average Kerbal's failure to understand money truly shines. The majority of Kerbal goods and services are traded for not with currency, but rather with snacks. The going exchange rate in this backwards economy is suitably absurd as well, and fluctuates wildly depending on what snacks are currently deemed tastiest. Generally a Kerbal who invests in ike will be wealthy for life, for example, while one who invests in bop is as likely to be fabulously rich one day as he is to be destitute the next. A recent trip to Kerbin by the leading Kerbologist's assistant has led to an important discovery in regards to the Kerbal economy: visitors must take care in how they treat Kerbal snack food. The act of spitting out one of their treats in disgust can and often will result in a national economic crisis, and can even lead to war if you happen to do it around a member of the Church of Treerock. As ever with Kerbal cuisine, the best course of action is to politely decline, unless you happen to enjoy causing disaster. And really, if that's your game, Kerbin's the place for you anyway; you'll fit right in with the Kerbals and their tendency to cause explosions at random for kicks. Kerbin's Calendar The Kerbal homeworld of Kerbin follows a highly unlikely calendar system which was adopted shortly before Kerbals took to spacefaring. The typical Kerbal day lasts only 6 hours, while the typical Kerbal year has 426 days, leading to a very unfortunate situation in that there aren't a lot of numbers that go evenly into 426. In ancient times, the solution to this problem was that Kerbals had 71 months, each one 6 days long, and held a celebration on the 6th day of every month during which they would gorge themselves on bop. This led to a massive dislike of bop, and an increasing interest in finding somewhere in the solar system where nobody ate it. The modern Kerbal calendar system, by contrast, has six months that are 71 days long each. Going by the names of Radaphi (Kerbal for "booster month"), Giraphi (Kerbal for "liquid fuel month"), Daphi (Kerbal for "oxidizer month"), Makaphi (Kerbal for "command pod month"), Snaphi (Kerbal for "launch month"), and Kablaphi (Kerbal for "explosion month"), the Kerbal months are generally heralded as a pleasant and desirable adaptation of the former calendar which is still upheld by the Church of Treerock. Members of the Church of Treerock tend to also be upheld, often over burning copies of their hated calendar and piles of bop, which does little to improve relations on either side of the fence. Despite the lack of any sort of logic behind it, a number of Kerbals insist on following a much more bizzarre calendar which shows no ties whatsoever to Kerbin or anything in its solar system. In this calendar, they record every four Kerbin days as a day, and track every 365 of these extra-long days as a year. Why anyone would ever measure time in such a backwards fashion remains a mystery, but certain Kerbals insist that this is the "true calendar". Other Kerbals insist that the Kerbals who believe in the "true calendar" have eaten too much bop lately.

The first version of KSP I played was 0.11, and while the game did undergo some pretty big changes between 0.7.3 and 0.11... At the same time, the early builds all have a lot in common visually.

I have barely any mathematical background at all, and that thing doesn't intimidate me in the least. It probably helps that I tend to be a procedural thinker, and thus the formulas and numbers do nothing to me as they stand. Once I plug them in and see them in action, that's when they can take a shot at intimidating me. If I let them, of course; I prefer to learn from them instead.

So I figured out the issue and fixed it. FAR is very particular about aerodynamic stability. The flat plate between the hitchhiker pod and the cockpit was what was doing it, and putting a proper long adapter on it solved the issue. The Space Duck flies like a dream now.

Pardon me for not being particularly inclined to be polite about an issue that's been getting on my nerves for months on end. You could say that it's left me a bit rattled. Here's the current pain in my neck. It's currently a bit of a mess wing-wise, because I've been trying (very unsuccessfully) to resolve the issue by altering the quantity and positioning of the flaps. Without fail, despite there being no asymmetry to speak of, it starts tilting like a crazy thing as it gets close to mach 2 and destroys itself as I attempt to point it in the right direction again.

I've noticed this problem for several versions now, and it's ticking me off. Any plane bigger than a gnat will, upon reaching mach 2, start to resist pointing straight forward regardless of how aerodynamically stable the craft actually is. The phantom resistance amplifies absurdly, much like the old rigidbody issues in earlier KSP versions caused parts to jostle themselves into oblivion, and the whole plane inevitably breaks apart due to aerodynamic failure or goes into an impossible-to-correct spin that leaves the plane only able to face nose-first towards the ground at any altitude. It's somewhat of a problem to be unable to reach any speed greater than mach 2 when you're trying to get to space, I find, so it seems to me that either some suggestions for a workaround solution to this issue or a proper fix is in order.

I sent a Kerbal to Eeloo, all by his lonesome. He didn't seem too disappointed about the many-year trip out there, or the many-year trip back. There was also a mission where Jeb spent about 8 years (our-years, mind, not Kerbal-years) on a mission to the Jool system and back. He really liked finally being able to get the heck away from Bob and Bill, I think.

So what you're saying is, they might be giants? That would rock.

Long, long ago, lost to the mists of time now, I accidentally got a rocket to perform perfect donuts in midair without touching the controls. All I captured from this momentous occasion was a single screenshot, which is now lost as well.

Oh I remember all right. Hot off the heels of watching Maxwell Adams goof off with 0.8.4, I went and downloaded the then-latest version (0.11) and proceeded to more or less imitate his antics of making completely impractical rockets that were more meant to blow up than to get anywhere. And much fun was had, to be certain! Not for Jeb, Bill, and Bob of course, but seeing as they were the only cosmonauts at at that time and always came back to life as soon as a mission ended, I don't think they could complain too much.

Looking through the archives of the Guide, a forgotten entry was drudged up. Let's see what it says... Kerbal Civilizations There are few things quite as baffling as that of Kerbal civilization, particularly given the many conflicting reports about their species as a whole. Granted, most of these reports conflict due to the tendency of Kerbals to cause explosions in the vicinity of anyone who attempts to contact them, but this is less due to self-defense and more due to their rather poor grasp of rocketry. That said, at least one correspondant of ours has managed to glean some information about the spacefaring civilization on Kerbin known as the Lovothorians. Lovothoria (a Kerbal term which more or less translates out to "we're better than everyone else"; points at least for being honest about their nationalism) is a nation situated near the equator of Kerbin, on the large peninsula commonly known as Lovotrazi (a Kerbal term which directly translates out to "our landmass is better than everyone else's"). The population ranges across the entirety of this region, though most of them are concentrated to the far west of the large mountain range in the center, the Lovobagits (which is Kerbal for "our mountain range is better than everyone else's"). The Lovothorians were reportedly quite egoistical even before they first started launching things into space, and often tout the fact that they have launched things into space as justification for their tendency to go "nah-nah-nah-NAH-nah!" at Kerbals from other nations. It is perhaps unsurprising then that they also sport a very large diplomatic force, which is mostly tasked with apologizing profusely for the behaviour of the rest of their people to the other nations of Kerbin, mostly because Lovothoria does not have any sort of standing military. Indeed, they possess no weapons at all according to their standards, though other nations around the planet argue that their frequent failed rocket launches should really be classified as ICBMs (even though most of them hit Lovothoria itself). While the civilian population of Lovothoria is very proud of their nation's accomplishments, their space exploration and rocket design team tends to be far more humble. Mostly because they know that if the rest of Kerbin gets sick of the constant spent fuel stages falling down onto their cities, they will be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes.

Whatever currency in KSP gets named officially, I really hope it does not fall victim to K Syndrome. That's all I really have to say on the subject at this point.