AbacusWizard

Or Holger Kerske, perhaps, or Sir Francis Kerb.

A few months ago I went to a big outdoor wedding with a pleasantly goofy attitude and a dinosaur theme. Many of the guests didn't already know each other, so there was a make-your-own namebadge station. Most folks were making badges listing their names and favorite dinosaurs, but I noticed one of them had the fellow's name, a hand-drawn kerbalnaut, and the text "ASK ME ABOUT MY KERBALS." So I did. He lives halfway across the continent, but we've been talking online ever since.

Hah, not intentionally, but it pretty much turned into one. I was trying to capture a giant asteroid for the first time, and assumed the best way to do that would be to attach a bunch of little nodes, each consisting of a klaw and either an engine or a stabilizer wheel or whatever… and I figured that obviously if I had to send up a bunch of little nodes I may as well send them all bundled into one rocket. I got the bundle to the asteroid, split up the scatterpack, attached one node, tried to attach the next… and it wouldn't attach. I tried a few more times and then the whole thing exploded. Since then I haven't done much with asteroids.

It is the tomb of Jeb's ancestor, Arthur Kerndragon. He's not dead; he's sleeping beneath the mountain until Kerbalkind has need of him again.

Outrunning the explosion! External seating on a spaceplane! (prior to 1.0's aero revamp, of course) Perfectly docking a shuttlecraft in my flagship's science bay!

I don't have Steam and I don't want Steam. I much prefer downloading a program from the seller's website.

The only infinite fuel cheat I ever use is my meticulously constructed mine/refinery on Minmus. All the ore I could ever eat, cheap as free...

Version: 1.0.4.861 OS: Macintosh OSX 10.7.5 Processor: 2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Memory: 6 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB Once in a while--still not sure what causes it--I'll switch from map view back to normal view and suddenly everything's covered in weird shadows. Sometimes the ship develops a pattern of dark stripes; sometimes the whole ship is totally dark even when in full sunlight. (Strangely, fairings do not seem to be affected; nor do regions lit by spotlights.) The dark stripes seem to move around as I rotate the view around, and from some angles the planet surface below me also develops dark stripes and/or pixelly patches of full darkness. When this happens, it continues to happen when I switch to a different ship (or even back to the space center), and generally seems to be a sure sign that the game is going to freeze up shortly thereafter, requiring a force-quit. When I start it up again, everything's back to normal. Any idea what might be causing this?

I generally have a station in low Kerbin orbit for crew transfers (crew takes spacebus from ground to orbit, transfers to station, later the crew transfers from the station to an orbital passenger liner and rides to Mun or Minmus or an interplanetary vessel parked in high orbit or whatever). I also like to have stations orbiting Mun and Minmus for science missions; each consists of a lab, a fuel reservoir, crew quarters, and one or two small exploration landers. Recently I've started experimenting with orbital construction bases using KIS/KAS too.

I recently built a spaceplane around the Skipper--eight turbojet engines to get up to high speed and altitude, then one Skipper to reach orbit. It carries four passengers and is my first successful SSTO since before 1.0's new aerodynamics came out.

I've been playing for over a year, I've visited (and safely returned from) every solid body except Tylo and Eve... and I still keep going back to Minmus again and again and again because those minty flats and foothills are so much fun.

I actually use the giant Mk3 monoprop tank quite often in huge orbital tankers and fuel depots. The inline docking clamps can be useful for spaceplanes too.

I don't think "gamer," especially "real gamer," is a very useful label. I'm a human, and I play games, and I enjoy playing games, but they're not such an important facet of my life that I consider them to define who I am.

A few years ago I was considering getting a Mac Pro... and the main thing I wanted test out before I bought one was "How fast will Dwarf Fortress run with a fully populated fort?"

Late last night I was testing out a new spaceplane design. I got it up to 30 km or so on jet engines, switched over to rocket engines... then I rest my eyes for just a few seconds, I promise and the next thing I know it's on the ground in pieces. Welp, time to go to bed!

It looks to me like you're simply launching small pieces one at a time and assembling them in orbit... very very low orbit. Maybe we could call it a "constant acceleration trajectory with lithonormal assist"?

Obviously the stranded kerbalnaut was a stowaway on your first probe.

They're the test subjects of Wernher von Kerman testing out an experimental new kraken-powered teleportation device. (How else would they ended up stranded in retrograde low solar orbit???)

In previous versions, before we got more realistic aerodynamics, I used a single-seat SSTO I called the Utility Zip. Now I use the less exciting (but more practical) four-seat Spacebus IIB (seen docked to Starbridge Station at the bottom of this picture):

Is there any actual reason to use the larger command pods? As far as I can tell a 4-seat hitchhiker can plus a probe core accomplishes the same thing (plus an extra seat or two) with less mass.

The thing is, planet surfaces realistically *are* pretty boring, unless they're biologically or geologically active. If you want interesting stuff on the surface you gotta put it there yourself. Reading Arthur C. Clarke's short stories makes me want to set up hotels on the moons of Jool.

That would be m^2 c^2; exponents distribute across multiplication.

The problem isn't that there's too much science; the problem is that the tech tree is too small.

The way I see it, once you've completed the tech tree, further science is your score.

I once sent a couple of uncrewed rovers there so I could try doing Evel Kernieval style jumps off the cliffs of the big canyon. It was kinda cool. I'm eager to play with the new asteroid ring, but since stock ISRU came out I've been having so much fun just messing around with Minmus that I haven't sent anybody out of Kerbin's SoI yet.