Defender90

If you're playing this on a Mac and you need to zoom in or zoom out in the VAB, hold down the mousewheel button and move the mouse forward or backward. Once I started building heavy lifters with lots of 2.5m parts I was starting to lose my mind - now I can build total monsters with 2.5m subassemblies and see everything!

Last night I had a great moment. I was doing a resupply to my space station in LKO with 5 fresh crew, a small tug to leave up there and a boatload of RCS fuel - I don't know the total mass but it was pretty heavy. The small docking port on the station sticks out on a boom of three fuselage sections, and the command pod on the shuttle has a shielded docking port on it. Normally when I dock I get within about 4 clicks, fire towards the target at 30m/s and stop about 150m away. Then comes some hopeless flailing about while I eyeball the shuttle's orientation before switching to docking mode, and even then I can sometimes still burn a ton of RCS getting lined up. This time was different. I managed to get an encounter 300m away, braked within 30m, spun smoothly into the right orientation first try, set the docking port as my target, had to make only little corrections to get everything to line up on the alignment indicator (awesome mod by the way), approaching at 1m/s. A few tiny RCS tweaks and about 90 seconds after braking to meet the station I tapped the action group to open the shielded port and switch the lights on and had a perfect, and I mean perfect, docking. Perfect speed, perfect alignment; the magnetic coupler could have been turned off entirely. Just instantanous tap and dock with almost zero wiggle. It was amazing. On the way back down I accidentally deorbited the shuttle's hitchhiker container with one of the crew still in it. Can't win 'em all.

Have any of the devs heard of the Conet Project? It's basically some nutjobs who made a 5-CD set of recordings of real clandestine shortwave radio 'numbers' stations broadcasting information to spies all over the world from the 70s to the present day. It's been made free for download and people are encouraged to share it. I grant you the transmissions aren't aerospace-related, but they would make an amazing and atmospheric pack of sounds for the game. The actual dialogue in Chatterer is sufficiently garbled (reversed?) to not be too context-specific or distracting, and if you did the same to the Conet pack I think it would add a lot more depth to the game (the collection is already taxonomically categorized so you could give each ship/station a different set of Numbers Station broadcast recordings). I'm trying to work out how to add these myself; would love any pointers, especially on ways to get these incorporated into the GUI. Conet Package, check it out.