SkyRender

Not a thing. I started the game, choose Start a New Game, named the save Test without changing any settings, built that rocket, and launched it. Unless the game now comes pre-loaded with cheats on, that's not it. EDIT: Maybe going through a few of the debug menus will help. Here's what the Physics sliders came pre-set at: Aero: Global Lift Multiplier: 0.038 Lift/Drag Multiplier: 0.030 Body Lift Multiplier: 8.000 Drag: * Apply drag * Apply drag to non-physical parts * Apply non-physical part drag at parent CoM Global Drag Multiplier: 6.000 Drag Cube Multiplier: 0.060 Angular Drag Multiplier: 2.000 Thermal: * Radiation enabled Radiation Factor: 1.000 * Conduction enabled Conduction Factor: 10.000 * Convection enabled Convection Factor: 7.000 Generation Factor: 0.030 Newtonian Temperature Factor: 1.000 Solar Luminosity at Home: 1360 Solar Insolation at Home: 0.150000005960464

Not a single mod on that install; it's entirely stock, extracted from the .ZIP just today. The only other things I can think of are 1.) a hardware-related issue (unlikely), or 2.) something to do with Windows 10.

http://imgur.com/a/0IYMu That album should pretty well explain what's happening visually.

That's not even my problem at this point. My problem is that the air is no longer behaving like air. At sea level, everything falls at mach 1.5. Parachutes can never, ever open because the vessel will never reach a safe speed to deploy them. The game is effectively unplayable for me as a result of that plus the absurd super-heating that's happening in the upper atmosphere for no good reason.

Just tried that. It did not help at all. Maybe the .ZIP version downloaded from the KSP site is screwed up or something? That's the only thing I can think of, as both the original download and the new one have the exact same issues.

Looks like it's not fixed after all. Even when reverting the game to stock and using the correct physics definitions, it's still giving me the same issues: absurd heating at high altitudes, near-zero air resistance at low altitudes. Suggestions? EDIT: I have no idea if this is related or not, but loading screen hints aren't showing during the game start-up sequence either.

1.0.5 is much better with proper physics definitions. Incidentally, anyone truly wanting to experience HARD mode for KSP should set the aeroFXDensityScalar1 value to 0.09. EDIT: Apparently somehow save files use their own independent physics definitions from the actual Physics.cfg file, and that information is stored somewhere nonsensical and/or encrypted. My first 1.0.5 save is completely unusable as a result. At least it only had two launches done...

It turns out that it was a messed-up Physics.cfg after all. The atmosphere scalar was 10 times too high, among other things.

It'd be easiest if someone could paste the relevant section of said cfg so I can insert it and fix this oddity.

Something is very wrong with the aero model now, that much I can say for certain. Maybe it's just the initial capsule's values being way off, but I keep getting the exact same results no matter what: it will go down to around 280m/s (mind you, it takes until the 5km mark to even get that low), then speed UP to 300m/s or so as it plows through those last 5km. What the heck? Also, for no sane reason, spinning causes the heat build-up during re-entry to constantly go down. I am quite certain that would not actually work in real life.

That's more or less exactly what the culprit craft is made of, except no heatshield. Admittedly that is part of why re-entry is so tricky, but it does not explain why the atmosphere suddenly stops paying attention to the laws of physics when entering the lower atmosphere, never allows me to drop to subsonic speeds, and even speeds my craft up as it enters the final 2km or so of airspace before hitting the ocean.

That's the thing: when I tried a 29km re-entry, my craft exploded horribly before even coming close to that height. I had to raise it to 45km, and this was from a 250km apoapsis. And even then the craft barely survived re-entry! I thought it was going to be alright from there, but nope. Enter the illogical rise in speed as I approached the ground, never once dropping to a low enough speed to safely deploy any parachute type at all. Something really funky is going on, to say the least. The only mod I have installed is Kerbal Engineer Redux. Maybe there's a problem with the first command pod you get now?

Due to rather extenuating circumstances, I've only just been able to try out 1.0.5. It seems interesting, but... Well, is it just me, or has the atmosphere on Kerbin suddenly become a complete troll? Not only does the upper atmosphere now seem to be made of superheated material designed to melt spaceships (seriously, stuff starts blowing up when going to orbit now if your trajectory is particularly shallow!), the lower atmosphere appears to have become non-Newtonian. On top of experiencing absurdly deadly re-entry at 0.01 atmospheric density, I now find that craft not only never drop below supersonic speeds, they actually speed UP as they enter the thickest part of the atmosphere and somehow are going over 300m/s when hitting the ground. I'm pretty sure that's not how physics work, especially not when your aerodynamic profile has the airstream-exposed part of your craft being a massive flat disc. Anyone have any suggestions on how to fix or at least address these twin issues?

At long last, after so many months, my mother and I have moved into our new place. There's a ton of unpacking to do, many things to sell or get rid of, but things are finally going back to something resembling normal. Thank you to everyone who has helped us out during these trying times. The road ahead is still a bit rocky, but it's looking a lot less so than it was even just a few weeks ago.

It's been about a month now since I last posted. It would be fitting to explain what's been going on since then. On Halloween, my mother and I moved into a spare room in the house of a friend of ours; we've been living out of it since. About two weeks ago, I secured a job, giving us an income (albeit a meager one as it's part-time and minimum wage). With that, and mom's Social Security income, we were just able to get ourselves an apartment. Around this time next month, my best friend will be moving up from Texas to live with us, further stabilizing our living situation and giving us a shot at taking our lives back for ourselves once more. It will be difficult for a while, to be certain, but we are finally moving towards a more stable life situation. As for my father... he's moved south with his RV. He has no part in our lives now. What few ties remain are technical and also being addressed. I hope that he continues to get help for his mental health issues, and that he can accept one day that he is in fact both bipolar and dangerous to those around him. Only time will tell, and his future is in his own hands now.

The answer is disturbingly human: there is absolutely nothing preventing anyone from landing on (or colonizing) the moon or Mars without anyone's consent, provided they have the resources available to them. Practically speaking, of course, you can be sure there would be quite a lot of controversy that would arise from such an action, and likely someone would try to shut the effort down before it could get off the ground (literally), but that doesn't mean they'd succeed in doing so. With enough security-through-obscurity, pretty much anything can be done without any "official" consent, and once it's done, you can't exactly undo it when it comes to missions to space.

"Old" truly is relative... For me, the games that fall into that category are all on the NES (and a handful on the 2600, even though that was technically before my time). My favorite of the NES era was actually not one you'd expect: Zelda II: The Adventure of Link often gets a bad rap for how hard and occasionally obtuse it can be, but it's a fun game. It left a lasting impression on me, and was the impetus for me to explore the RPG genre.

Repairing the house has proven impossible; we'd need far too much money, and dad would just stake a claim in it since he technically co-owns it with mom. Right now we're focusing on getting a place to rent instead. With the help of a friend from Texas moving up here soon, we'll be able to afford it between the three of us.

No, revenge is not an acceptable solution. He is mentally ill; he needs help, not suffering. Also, he would just find a way to become even more vile if someone did enact some form of revenge on him. The best thing we can do is encourage him to get the help he needs and cut him off from our lives, which is what we have done.

Things have gotten exponentially worse. My father has spent a sizable chunk of the repair budget given to us by the insurance company on an RV for himself, and we cannot make him repay it since technically that money was his to spend. Without that money, we cannot fix the house. We're really in a pickle now...

I wish I could say that things are getting better, but they're kind of getting worse. The housing budget for temporary lodging is going to run out on us on the 22nd of this month, and we still haven't been able to secure an apartment. The job hunt has similarly been moving slow, although it's still been more successful than it ever was when we were living up in Portland. I'm honestly not sure what we're going to do if we haven't secured a place to live by that cut-off date...

Real-life space missions have run into much the same sort of issue. While the research of the solar system and beyond definitely holds interest in the scientific community, to the layman, we're spending an awful lot of money to look at gigantic rocks and balls of gas that are so far away that nobody alive today is likely to see any of them in person. Practical missions such as putting up new satellites for broadcast and GPS are easy enough to justify to the public, but it really takes some effort to make the Joe Average care about seeing yet another giant space rock up close. A large part about why space exploration loses its appeal is that it really does involve an awful lot of nothing with occasional bits of something interspersed. And once you've hit the limit for what you can learn and apply practically from it, what is there left but curiosity and sense of accomplishment to drive you on? I'm not saying that space travel has no further value to mankind (far from it), I'm just saying that it doesn't have much value in the eyes of the layman at this point short of discovering a means of actually reaching those interesting places in person within a sane amount of time (and being able to get back again in a sane amount of time as well). Those of us who are starting to find KSP to be lacking in things worth doing despite the wealth of things you can do are experiencing a variation on that perspective.

Life-long sinistral, right here. (Yes, that term does in fact mean "left-handed". Should give you some linguistic perspective on just how cultures used to view anything different than the norm, as well; "sinistral" is in fact from the same root word as "sinister".)

It's amazing how fast things can change sometimes... Over the last two weeks, some very unsettling things have come to light about my father, and my mother and I were forced to take restraining orders out on him. We even had to leave Portland, for our own safety. Now we both have to start a new life in a new town, with practically nothing to our names and the majority of our surviving possessions stuck hundreds of miles away being processed in the insurance claim. But at least we can start a new life now, without having to worry about my father keeping the two of us locked down watching him constantly and trying to fix whatever he destroys next.

I regret that I wasn't able to watch any of it; my family has been convening pretty much the entire week, and yesterday was the big day for taking action on the "dad" problem (as well as deciding where my mother and I will be going from here). Hopefully I can catch the next streaming sessions, though!