Archgeek

This honestly needs a wee bit of tweaking (or at least it did when I last watched someone playing with it) so that kerbs kindly stop being on strike when they're being returned home. It's a bit disturbing to have a pilot burn up on re-entry because they were too homesick to orient their pod for the return home. Perhaps have them resume duties (possibly limiting pilot abilities to hold retrograde) if the ship is in Kerbin SoI and either sub-orbital or the player has set a manuver node that sends the ship sub-orbital and the vessel has sufficient delta-v to complete the burn.

I've always found that close-to-home science biomes have an implied purpose that's not exactly served by running around doing a big farming run for small gains. I find that they really come in handy as gap-filler. 'That last Mun mission didn't quite rack up enough science to get that node you want to send off your big Duna mission, by an infuriatingly small amount? Grab a rover and drive up to a building or two to fill in the gap. Eve fly-by didn't get enough for docking ports you want for your new station, shy just a couple hundred? Go visit a mun or minmus biome or two while your Duna mission's still in transit. Sure, you could farm the mun to shreds and have most all the tech you need for that Jool-5, but in all honesty, the ad-hoc aproach is a lot less grindy, lets you walk away and progress more readily, and gives those low-density science deposits a shining new purpose into the midgame, especially if you've picked up new instruments since the last visits.

Lively discussion of thrice-cursed international intellectual property law aside (I hate that they call it IP, that's supposed to stand for Internet Protocol, darnit), has consideration been given to the distinct probability that the timelord incursion may've been a mod's doing? Mods have been known to introduce their own easter eggs from time to Timothy, after all. The (module manager?) april fool's nyan cat loading screen, for instance.

They're there to expose the unlock purchase mechanic, so you don't have to go out of editor and into the science tree => the specific node if you find you now want to use a part you didn't buy when you first unlocked the node (perhaps to save cash for a building upgrade, or because you didn't need it yet).

This sounds symmetric. Could you compute the relative velocities of your starting and target bodies, orient your craft to the relative vector, and burn to match it plus/minus your desired orbital velocity, then warp there and pop out of warp in your desired orbit?

Wait a minute, a 700 part behmoth is one thing, but shouldn't the game run a lot better with 10 70-part craft? 'Last I checked the big nasty on part count was the unparallelizable part-tree force vector calculations, which become emminently candidate for multi-thread shenanigans when you slice up those 700 parts into 10 separate trees. The main game thread'll still be the bottleneck, as it's got plenty of tracking, organizing and display duties to attend to, but with say 4 cores to go around, you can have 3 cores handle 3 craft each, and one core handle 1 craft and the rest for some surprisingly decent parallelization gains. That's still a good 210 parts a core (probably in two threads because hyperthreading, so 140 and 70), which is likely still yellowclock territory when there are 10 things to supervise and mediate weapons collisions between, but it should be a lot peppier than the 700-part monster scenario, which would probably be redclocked if it were doing much.

Another thing that can help is to be careful with the number of active docking ports you have. Unless it's been improved, to facilitate docking magnets, every active port in a scene runs through every part tree every physics frame to find other docking ports and check their positions and orientations to itself. This can make for massive loss in framerate. I'd suggested a fix in the bugtracker back when, but I do not know if anything like that implemented before the A-team's dev contract ran out. Also, by active, I mean ports that are both open for docking, and, in the case of the three animated ones, physically open. The shielded port, the in-line port, and mk2 port can all open and close, and do not scan for other docking ports when closed (though if I recall correctly the mk2 actually stayed active when closed due to a bug, but that may've been fixed). So, you can actually save some performance at the expense of a little mass by using closable docking ports to reduce scans through the scene's part list. Or perhaps a lot less if they did get that optimized a bit.

Gotta love that this game makes statements like that take place and make sense.

Nope, but node size can, if you're using axial attachment nodes and not surface-attaching. I do not know if shear forces are treated separately, but if I had to guess, probably not. In fact, compression's likely treated the same as tension, so if a clipped part is compressed beyond the limits of its connection, it will break free into the part above it, no longer be counted as part of the same craft, and thus violently destroy itself and the part it's clipped to.

'Ain't no party like a biplane party, because a biplane party's single-prop.

I...am genuinely curious...what sound effects are missing? We've got get engine spool-up/down, we've got multiple rocket sounds, the hilarious new sound landing legs make, that crazy explosion+valve hiss sound for decouplers, normal explosion sounds, the splashdown sound...I'm not sure what's missing. Does the landing gear sound not affect plane gear? RCS/vernor sounds would be silly because vaccuum...electric whine of rover wheels? I guess that might conduct through the chassis. These are of course guesses. I want to know what you think is missing. Also no music in atmo was probably an early design decision: VAB tune => silence on the pad => rockets roaring => space theme marking orbit. It makes ascents feel really good. 'Could do with some plane flight bgm, though, and maybe some kind of subtle but oppresssive Eve bgm. However, I'm sure way too many fans like their creepy, silent duna. *sstv signal intesifies*

Hehhe, 'wasn't too long ago when some shenanigans involving the normal force calculation and the rotation of the landed-on body meant that everyone's landers kept creeping uphill.

I think stage lock is [mod]+L, where [mod] is alt on windows, option on mac, and right-shift on linux. It will be your new best friend if you make a habit of it (and make sure the staging light is green when you do need to stage).

Huh. So did you go past Rob, or Ross?

Ah, the smell of fresh-turned grave dirt. I think one Strattenblitz on the tubes has shattered each of the records with ablative monstrostities, at times moving faster than the game can generate new surface colliders, causing speeders to sink into the ground textures and explode once the colliders do load.

Those comms links look like Kerbin's firing off the Death Blossom from The Last Starfighter.

I think there's a name for that phenomenon: Ike.

Ah, #justKerbalThings, got it. I remember that one, it got badly compromised. I...may've misread that as Norton Antichrist. Which is really not quite as hyperbolic as it oughta be. ...All those innocent boxes wrecked by SystemWorks back in the day. Welp that explains that, it was the one that got hijacked (registration-sniped, severely compromised, or outright stolen? I forget.) Now if only I could remember the old old one that used to have an in-game link, that I think squad hosted themselves for a time.

*? Is there a wordfilter on spaceport, or whatever the elder one was called?

If you need a low-mass, low-radius mounting solution that's not a service bay, I can strongly recommend an emptied mk-0 fuel tank. Lightest thing per unit length in the game, with sub-meter radius (.75, .5? I don't remember). I like to use 'em for ion ship spines.

Curiously, I can think of a pretty good reason. It reads to me as a bit of an abstraction for something like "We've noticed that seawater plays havok with our engine components, so we've whipped up an onboard instrument package to quantify just how bad it gets and at what rates the corosion takes place. Just splash one down for us, fire up the instrumentation once it's in the drink, and send us back the data." 'Sure would be cool if the contract text read like that.

Curiously, those laws have lost a bit of their strength. 1 can be broken outright with a solar sail or electrosail. Ion drives and technically NTRs break it too, but they still need remass, which is probably we can assume he meant. 2 as you note is partially broken by the advent of ISRU, but since a few of our favourite fuels are cryogenic (take your pick), have a habit of drifting right through solid metal tank walls (lH2, and corrossively, at that), or just aren't very available upstairs (xenon, uranium/plutonium/thorium), we are still somewhat bound by that one. 3 honestly sounds more like a conclusion based on the first two -- but it at least still makes sense if we stretch it to max payload. More curiously, the nature of KSP means that oft-times the ability to create a bespoke lifter for a mission can make it better follow #3, in that, instead of winding up with a few tonnes of capacity left putting a 27t payload on a 30t-cap lifter and having to fill those remaining tonnes up with a few little gas tanks that'll get drained and possibly thrown away, we do have to option to create a special 27t-cap lifter, simply because we can build and roll out new craft so very, very, fast.

You see, were it me, I'd design some sort of monster of an ion-powered rescue boat and go intercept them and force that escape trajectory back down to something Jool-crossing, aiming for a gravity assist with Jool and hopefully Tylo, then abuse the excess delta-v in the rescue boat to make the final return trajectory a bit non-hohman to get 'em home faster.

Mun, Minmus, Ike, Duna, a big ol' single-launch Laythe landing/return Tylo for a gravity assist on the way back, Eve, Gilly, and a distressingly fast and low Moho flyby.

Nah, it's more a justification for the observed phenomena underpinning the stock game. Kerbs are goofy looking greenfolk. Off-the shelf parts--an implied explanation for the lego-esque design and construction of things. The player has been charged with development of facilities, directing R&D, mission planning an execution. The rest is clearly the only logical explanation for the player's in-game powers -- I mean, you can view spacecraft from the exterior, moving your viewpoint around arbitrarilly (clearly scrying), rampage forward through time at absurd rates, and leap back in time at whim, but all with strange and specific limitations. Such things are blatantly the work of wizardry, or at least wizard-adjacent. So, what else could it be but a time wizard with some divination skill and scrying tools having been hired by the aforementioned greenfolk to run their space program?