cpast

Keep up the experiments; having something you care about and are doing research on for the sole reason that you want to is probably as or more important than your GPA, honestly. With the universities: How have you been approaching them? Have you been contacting professors and grad students directly (maybe via email)? The thing most likely to work is getting to know one mentor, instead of trying to keep working with the whole team. Have you tried directly asking one of them if they or someone they know might be willing to mentor you? If not, that might help -- someone who doesn't want to keep answering random questions might be more willing to help if they know what's going on with the project, and have some understanding what you're looking for (a longer-term thing). If what you want is just working on research in the field (and aren't wedded to this particular project), you could ask if they'd like a high school intern on what they're doing (which again would not mean you have to abandon this project). No matter what, keep trying.

A scientific journal is also not the best place for what you want your paper to do. Scientific papers are not targeted to who your target audience seems to be; they are written for experts in the field, who are themselves working on novel research in that area. If your target is not people who are specialized in the field, and who know, if not necessarily *everything* in that field, at least a fairly vast amount about it, then a science journal will reach the exact wrong people, because it reaches exactly those people. Instead, you might want to consider a rocketry forum (as sumghai said) or magazine, or maybe a DIY site/magazine? That's more likely to reach people who are interested but not themselves experts. EDIT: Continuing to experiment is great! You might also considering looking for people in your area working on this kind of thing (if you don't know where to find one, asking professors at a nearby university might help), to find someone experienced to help mentor you. But whatever else, keep working on this, because getting hands-on experience with experimentation is incredibly valuable.

Note (K^2 may well be aware of this, but others may not be): Last I checked, arXiv requires some first-time submitters (especially those who aren't affiliated with an academic institution) to be endorsed by someone who's submitted a few papers in the field before their first paper in the field is allowed to be posted.

Was "Doctor" ever restricted to physicians in professional contexts? A Ph.D is just as much a doctorate as an MD; while social settings are one thing, I'm skeptical of a claim that holders of Ph.Ds ever didn't use the title in professional contexts (especially if "Professor" is not accurate, like if they aren't professors).

More importantly, there *is* no "best of KSP mods". Different people like different things, in many cases wildly different things; MechJeb is probably among the 2 or 3 most used mods (certainly, I'd be surprised if it were anywhere below 5), and yet many of those who don't use it rather strongly dislike it and wouldn't want any mod package including it. I'm not sure licensing is as big an issue as it might seem; while CC licenses with SA, ND, or NC terms, and the GPL, impose restrictions on derivatives, it's not clear a modpack would fall under those terms, because neither license considers distributing a bunch of separate unmodified things as a single group (e.g. as one download, on the same CD, etc.) to trigger copyleft clauses or the ND clause. But there are some mods under non-CC/GPL/BSD/MIT/other free licenses, which don't allow redistribution at all.

So you maintain that people don't meet up with friends in cafes anymore? Because that's blatantly false: when I go to a coffee shop, I *frequently* see at least one group of people talking with each other; if I don't, it's most often because the cafe is fairly empty, or because it's morning and people are just trying to get caffeine quickly before going to work. For that matter, lots of people on their phones are talking to friends (often because they do not, in fact, know anyone at the cafe); if they are instead buried in work of some form or another, they would previously have been cooped up in an office or library or similar, instead of getting to go to a cafe, be surrounded with people, and have a fair chance of actually interacting with someone.

Speak for yourself. It may make it hard for you to meet people in person, but it serves the "connect people no matter where they are" function pretty well for me, specifically including helping people meet in person. It's a bit presumptuous of you to judge how every single person uses social media and determine that no one at all is using it to genuinely connect with friends, no?

I'm not sure it could do so as effectively, though - it would require retrorockets Soyuz-style (parachutes don't slow things enough to hit the ground without damage; water can be easier, which is what American capsules used, but then you have to deal with recovery), and would subject everything to relatively high g-forces (spacecraft which generate lift in re-entry have lower g loads than those which reenter ballistically).

The revised height is much better (it fits a full row of featured mods vertically on my laptop; if there's some way to get window height, that might actually be a good target - one row fits at the bottom of the black text). However, I'm still iffy on the lack of new/updated mods on the first screen - in my experience, after I first start using a site, I've pretty quickly gotten a sense of what's available, and when I check back I'm only interested in what has changed. Featured stuff can work if the featured section is good *new* (or new-ish) stuff, with decent turnover (this is most applicable if new files are added regularly, and if feature-worthy additions are a decent portion of them which also is added to not infrequently), but there should definitely be an easy way to see what's new. Part of that depends on how often new files are added, which I don't actually know, but it definitely should be on the first page (even if it isn't on the first screen for reasons). Basically, the issue is that the site seems to be mostly about why it is different from other sites -- the most featured thing, on *every* visit, is "why we're special". I have a very strong preference for sites which devote most of their main page to their core functionality, and whose homepages remain useful past the first time I visit the site. Note that the "homepage" of which I speak doesn't have to be at beta.kerbalstuff.com; it works fine if it's a different page, *provided* that a) it's a simple-enough-to-remember URL (for bookmarking/autocompletion), and is an easy link from the page at beta.kerbalstuff.com. Maybe "homepage" is the wrong word; "bookmarked" page, maybe (as it's the thing one would put in a bookmark)? If featured mods has decent churn *and* is not most of the uploaded mods, that can be useful enough, because it won't be infrequent that I visit and see a new mod. If featured mods doesn't update often enough, it should just be newest mods on the bookmark-target-page. But there should definitely be *some* page which is immediately useful to people who have already read the "why-we're-special", have seen the big mods like FAR, and want to see if there's any new thing that looks interesting.

Shuttles are really good for one thing: returning a large payload to Earth. That's something that can really only be done via a shuttle-type craft (that we know of). The issue is it doesn't seem like that's all that useful a thing to do.

But it's not a grammatical error: for starters, repeating words in acronyms happens often enough that there's really no way to justify calling it something that's automatically an error. "IRC chat" is best read with "chat" as the noun and "IRC" as an adjective modifying "chat", not as IRC being a simple abbreviation of "Internet Relay Chat". IRC is rarely expanded ("Internet Relay Chat" would likely not be automatically recognized by everyone who uses IRC), and so it's perfectly legitimate to treat it as a word itself and not worry about redundancy. Because someone who thinks "I want to chat with other players" shouldn't have to recognize "IRC=chat" to use the chat system. The link goes to a web IRC client, which requires no knowledge about IRC to use. It's not a matter of getting into IRC; you don't have to be "into IRC" to use a single channel, that you access via a web client which you were linked to, to chat with others.

No, calling it the "Soyuz" would be like calling the Atlas V the "Atlas" (Atlas V would be like Soyuz-U, for instance). R-7 is not any part of the name of the rocket, or of any other modern rocket which ultimately derives from the R-7 missile (calling a Soyuz an R-7 Soyuz would be like calling an Atlas V an SM-65 Atlas V). The rocket's name is just Soyuz-*version*.

Incorrect. R-7, when it refers to a single rocket, refers only to an obsolete Soviet ICBM that was never really any good in that role. The R-7 family includes many Russian launch vehicles; the most numerous subfamily is the Soyuz family of rockets; Soyuz refers to: a family of manned spacecraft, a family of expendable launch vehicles, the obsolete original Soyuz manned spacecraft design, and the obsolete original Soyuz rocket. Russian rockets tend to get named after a payload they fly a lot of (e.g. Proton is so named because it flew the Proton series of scientific missions, Vostok is the family of rockets derived from and related to the LV for Vostok missions, etc.); Soyuz LVs are never referred to as R-7s, because the more descriptive name for the rocket family is the Soyuz family (R-7 is uselessly generic). For instance, a specific version might be a Soyuz-U, or a Soyuz 2.1a, etc.

Reusability of the external tank-like part was very different between Buran and Shuttle. The Shuttle ET was just a tank, while the Energia core was the rocket. Losing the Energia core is a much larger expense than losing the Shuttle ET, and no Energia cores were ever recovered. The Soviet Union was having quite a lot of budget issues at the time (to go along with the existence issues it would soon face).

I do like the mockup better, though I agree with Garoad about new mods vs. top mods. IMO, the site should target a bit more to frequent visitors than first-timers; new mods should definitely take precedence over static top mods. I might also cut the "Welcome to Kerbal Stuff!" area down a bit in height, because right now that's almost all the screen when I visit, and that will get annoying over time (or, better yet: make it so it shows like that for first-time visitors, but either with user accounts or with cookies or something, make it hideable, or just make it so that there's a separate link to a screen dispensing with it [like kerbalstuff.com/recent]).

Other than launch clamps not on Kerbin, are there any other *impossible* tests? I really can't think of any. Jets not on Kerbin or Laythe, maybe (and those are certainly possible to do, just...kinda pointless), but that's about it.

They're Kerbals, presumably ones who didn't think they could make the cut to become Kerbonauts the normal way. But they're still Kerbals, and want to go to space. They just did so through a rather convenient "accident", one which also saw them in a spacesuit.

That would definitely be nice.

RealRoster.

No, it's a mod (Toolbar). You have Toolbar installed if you have Crew Manifest.

One of the biggest issues with using some forum mechanism to designate people as "experts" is that if staff put some status on a user's profile indicating that they're somehow special, it looks like that status was officially granted by Squad. If a user is formally designated as an "expert" using some forum mechanism that can't be replicated by other users (i.e. staff have to be involved), people won't think they're picked by the modder -- they'll think they're given that role by forum staff, and that they're officially endorsed by Squad. That might make sense if someone is helping people work with KSP itself (where Squad is fairly authoritative on "how stuff works"), but not when they're helping with a third-party mod. For that matter, why do you need people to be appropriately vetted to be eligible to give support? If someone giving support is incompetent, that should be handled by the mod creator saying to them "No, that isn't how it works, don't tell people things if they're wrong things". It's not like people are giving medical advice or something, where the consequences of incompetent advice are very high. The worst that happens with an incompetent person giving support is a frustrated user who got bad advice, and a frustrated modder who can take it up with that person (or with forum staff if the person is persistent). No one will die if a user gets poor support.

I've seen a few threads now for showing pictures of the parts a contract is asking you to test in the contract itself. Maybe that could be added?

This would make a lot more sense than predefined tutorials. Tutorials tend to work better the better they're integrated into the game.

On Steam, right-click KSP, properties, betas, and select Previous Stable Release under "beta".

In that case, why's it used on actual rockets? Is it just that it's close enough, and any more complicated thing leads to engineering problems?