Wanderfound

Put some control authority on your craft and fly it there. Especially in a thin atmosphere like Duna, you can glide halfway around the planet without expending any fuel so long as you have a bit of lift. This is easiest in a spaceplane, but also works with other craft. Even a bare capsule can substantially alter its descent trajectory just by tweaking the angle at which it's meeting the wind.

No idea about Apple hardware, but .90 runs just fine for me on Windows 8. Heavily modded, graphics cranked up, routinely left running all day long, crashes maybe once every ten play sessions or so. On a rather old and battered (but recently scrubbed and rebuilt OS-wise) not-intended-for-gaming laptop.

In Kerbal? Anywhere, although Duna is probably the easiest start point. In the real world? Nowhere. Not a murderer.

Any way to tweak this so that the FARisti can take part? It looks like fun, but no way in hell am I flying in stock just to set up an entrant...

To do it right, you'll also need a mod to change the Kerbal pants to flares and add a funky disco soundtrack.

More RAM should help; I went from multiple crashes per hour to about one per fortnight after upgrading and rebuilding my laptop. KSP itself can't use all 8 GB, but KSP is not the only thing that your computer is doing.

Almost. They have a bump or two, but nothing you'd notice unless you're doing serious speed.

Just restarted a career game, so I'm also jetless. So, instead, I sent up a 20 Kerbal space station to a solar orbit with a research lab, science lab, zoology lab, cyclotron and five experiments. Science galore. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/54774-0-90-Station-Science-%28v1-4-0-90-compatibility%29

Kerbodyne Dart GTHO. Zoomy. Flight test at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Dart%20GTHO/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Dart%20GTHO Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/hnn6j1ax9n2sxjs/Kerbodyne%20Dart%20GTHO.craft?dl=0

It's a nice airframe; swap the nosecone and inline cockpit on the Dart for a normal Mk1 cockpit and you'd have a nice little aerobatics plane.

Kerbodyne Dart. Is there a shortage of cargo bays or something? Flight demo at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Dart/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Dart Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/7pttukc5s787ymd/Kerbodyne%20Dart.craft?dl=0

Well, first up, everything addressed by the Stock Bug Fix mod should be corrected. But beyond that, I think there needs to be a major effort (and a lot of playtesting) put into balancing career mode. It's what the reviewers and a lot of the streamers are going to focus on.

Your best non-nuke option on that design would probably be either the RAP/Turbo/LV-909 combo you suggested (if you flattened the nacelles) or four RAPIERs plus an LV-909 (with the current setup). As well as less weight than the Aerospike, the LV-909 also gimbals; the lack of gimbal on Aerospikes is a nuisance for spaceplanes, 'cos they usually have off-centre CoM. For a low-tech option, four turbos plus an LV-T45 would work, too. Canards are rarely required, but often nice. You do need to crank up the authority a bit on your pitch surfaces if you don't have 'em, though. - - - Updated - - - Viper N. Go all the places, do all the science. Test flight at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Viper%20NS/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Viper%20NS Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/xoce1vefrj0j0ip/Kerbodyne%20Viper%20N.craft?dl=0

Climb more steeply, basically. You want to be hitting a bit over Mach 4 when your air runs out, which should be happening between 25,000 and 35,000m. Climb to about 20,000m, level off and accelerate from there.

No cargo bay? No problem. Kerbodyne Viper. Business and pleasure. Flight test at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Viper/story Alternate format at http://s1378.photobucket.com/user/craigmotbey/slideshow/Kerbal/Beta/Kerbodyne%20Showroom/Viper Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/xuboaxds441auxm/Kerbodyne%20Viper.craft?dl=0

Testflight of the Trebuchet:

Final version of the Trebuchet from the video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lu0r0fyxuqjqwcf/Spaceplane%20Trebuchet%20Revised.craft?dl=0

The latest vid: Trebuchet fix-up.

Best rate of climb is not the same thing as best route to orbit, however. You want to get out of the lower atmosphere soup quickly, but gaining just enough horizontal speed to continue to enable stable level flight at the increasing altitude. This is not necessarily the same pitch as best rate of climb; too much climb will see you in a ballistic trajectory, unable to maintain altitude after it peaks. Once you get to the point where your air supply starts to run short, then you want to level off and crank up the speed before switching again to a very steep climb after engaging the rockets (to minimise drag losses after engine shutdown).

Vids of one of my VTOL builds and testflights:

Refuelling stations at Kerbin and Laythe: * Send up a gigantic Mk3 passenger liner packed full o'Kerbals. Refuel it in LKO. * Use all of its fuel getting to Laythe. * Refuel before descent, drop off a hundred Kerbals at your new Laythe beach resort. * Burn all your fuel getting back to Laythe orbit. * Refuel, return to KSC.

At the moment it's kind of a mutant crossbreed between a delta and a conventional airframe, and isn't working as either. There isn't anywhere near enough wing/stabiliser area at the rear of the plane. There's a choice to be made at the start of fixing it: convert it to a true delta, or make it work as a conventional wing/tail design? To convert to delta: pull the wings back until their trailing edge is level with the rear of the engines and fill in the gaps at the rear of the fuselage with wing surface and elevators. Get rid of the canard tailplane. Then spend some time fiddling with canard and rudder size and position to get rid of the last red bits. For conventional airframe: shift the lateral engines forwards until CoM is centred in the cargo bay. Thin out the chord on the wings, and increase the size of the tailplane to be about half to two thirds the size of the wings. Put landing gear just behind CoM, jacked up on hardpoints if you're worried about tailstrike. I'd be inclined to take the second option. Even if you get the aero right on the delta (trickier than with conventional airframes; the rearwards biased CoM reduces your stabiliser's leverage), you'll still have off-CoM cargo bay problems.

Most of the developing world, too. I'm not talking about school plus work, I'm talking about work instead of school. Victorian chimney sweeps, child miners, full-time subsistence agricultural labor, etc. You still find that in the worst bits of sub-Saharan Africa, but it's gone or on the way out in most of the middle tier countries. Kenyan kids go to school these days.

That is the third factor, yes. It's generally the first and easiest to deal with, though; that sort of dependence upon child labor tends to only appear in the most impoverished societies. The economic contribution of child labor is slight enough (kids are lousy workers; they're weak, fragile, unskilled and undisciplined) that it's only of value in the most marginal economies. And again, most people don't actually want to do that to their children if they don't have to. Child labor is much more poverty-driven than cultural, and has already largely disappeared [1] from most of the world. [1] "Does farm chores before and after school" is not the sort of thing I'm discussing here.

A few points: 1) The environmental impact of cities, as ugly as it can be in the areas where it's concentrated, is vastly less per capita than that of rural life. Five million people in a city do a lot less environmental damage than five million subsistence farmers. 2) Population is a problem that is solving itself: 3) All of the evidence is that the best way to reduce birthrates is to reduce infant mortality and increase civil rights for women. Do those two things, and birthrates plummet. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that most women actually don't want to give birth half a dozen times if they're given the choice.