Jovus

Truthfully? According to friends working on the project, speaking in a completely unofficial capacity over a few beers? The SLS will never be finished, and is never intended to be finished. The engineering problems are vast and expensive, operation would be vast and expensive, and we have no need for it, nor will we in the foreseeable future. It's a porkbelly tossed to NASA to keep people employed and so that politicians have a sop to the science demographic. It's fairly well-established (read: speculative history) that a lot of the work on the Soviet Space Program took place in sharashkas, which wouldn't exactly have a lot of money for actual development. I feel fairly comfortable suggesting you read Solzhenitsyn's First Circle for a view inside what the sharashkas were like. It's a very good book in its own right, as well, and linked from the same page. (Actually, now that I'm looking over the See Also sections, there are a lot of rocket and aircraft folks listed just right there...)

I went poking through the thread to find the answer, but I didn't. Forgive me if this has been asked already. In your Pre-release notes for 6.5.0, you say: Is this only with RF/RSS installed, or is it just across the board? And am I correct in thinking that you plan not to move this from pre-release to release until that bug is fixed?

My personal favorite answer: we have heard from other civilizations. And no, I'm not talking about little green men or cow-molesters. Rather, many of the slightly-exotic pulsars we see (and/or other highly regular emission sources) are beacons from a Kardashev Type II civilization. Not that I'm convinced it's true. There's no evidence either way for any supposition.

Whoever gets to the Moon first with enough mining equipment (and has the balls to use it) wins. But then, I don't think we'll ever actually see a permanent Moon colony.

Any serious attempt at this question cannot be prosecuted. All any answer does is expose the biases of the postulant. There simply isn't any data (much less enough). One other interesting possibility: perhaps it is disadvantageous to contact other life. There could be any number of reasons for this, and we see this behaviour in various earth biological systems as well. This disadvantage could run the gamut from there being an actively hostile force that hunts down and exterminates species who try to communicate (cf. Saberhagen's Berserkers) to it simply being an otherwise-useless expenditure of energy that has been optimized away (e.g., Watts' Blindsight). Back to the first point, it's a popular idea that species tend to wipe themselves out before reaching a sufficient level of civilization. This is a very temporal viewpoint, made popular only by the situation of the Cold War and the driving philosophies of the civilizations behind it, i.e. 'progress' as sublated from the days of H.G. Wells and so forth. For kindred proof, the answer at that time was 'because they don't want to warn other species before they take over,' though they didn't have the question as strictly formulated as we do. It has at least two principal assumptions. The first is, species are ever capable or likely to wipe themselves out or cause their own civilizations to catastrophically and dramatically collapse. We have no proof of this capability even on our own planet, though it's a popular viewpoint that this is a constant danger. (See above about driving philosophies behind our current thought...) The second is, over time under 'normal', i.e. non-catastrophic conditions, civilization has a tendency to increase. There is no proof of this, and in fact I would argue the reverse is true. Over the long term we humans at least tend to move in a broad and chaotic cycle, and the idea of general increase comes from only looking at around the last 500 years of Western history or so (and doing it extreme violence, at that).

Sadly, no, that won't work. FAR doesn't model airflow shielding (because that would be a serious pain in the ass). Unless it specifically is shielded by a part capable of doing so, it's exposed to the airflow. Your best bet is to slap some part(s) on it with low mass but high drag and high structural integrity (like, maybe modular girders? I dunno) and then raise your apoapsis. In the last resort, unless your budget is way tight, it's probably best to only partially aerobrake and use rockets to finish the capture.

Friends, Kerbals, Forumites, lend me your ears! Read exoterically, this is an appeal for us to stand together to defeat a horrible blight upon the world, and yea, it is just. But! read esoterically, this is a glimpse of the future: Strength through Unity indeed! Our sage did not say 'unity' but 'Unity'. Red Iron Crown has peered into the future and seen our hope! We must rep Green Iron Crown! For the update! For the sacred 1.0! For the ability to use multi-threading and x64 architecture without constant crashes, which is about bloody time!

The big difficulty with the Fermi paradox is that there is no way to verify the underlying assumption. Sure, it sounds reasonable to say that if we exist, and there are millions of other potentially bioferous planets out there, then where is everyone else, but we have absolutely no indicators of any sort for the probability of life. It's like generalizing how likely the population of the world is to get hit by a car by putting one guy out in traffic. Only worse, because we don't even know it's a matter of probability. It might well be something else.

This is great, but don't you think it would be better to implement a [POINTER] tag that allows you to jump to a specific portion of the post, then forces the reader to return to the original position once he has read the indicated line(s)?

Man, I hate this new feature. First they won't even give you dV readouts, now they replace your Navball? At LEAST give us full-definition textures! What's next, NyanCat rockets?

Joke? Joke?! This is

Also, if you're sick and tired of contracts and you have one of the resource extraction mods (Kethane, Karbonite, AMT, etc.) you can drop resources down the gravity well for recovery. Use a big enough tank and you can get a nice'n'pretty injection of cash.

The only thing I can think of off-hand that is plane-related and you might like is Adjustable Landing Gear. You might also like Advanced Jet Engine, but you probably already know about it and I haven't used it myself. Personally, I also like Kerbal Construction Time.

One good way is to drop ATM and instead use DDSLoader and DDS4KSP. The latter is an out-of-game utility to convert .png and .tga to .dds, which is a much more efficient file format. You'll get at least the same savings as using ATM and all your compression will only need to be done once, not every time you start the game. If using DDS4KSP, be sure to except the Squad/Contracts/Icons folder, because for some reason the FinePrint integration doesn't like having its files messed with. (Actually, you can convert them just fine, but you have to do some fiddly stuff that I can't explain well.) Be back later with real mod suggestions.

Are you using FAR? There was a recent change in FAR that dramatically increased drag in the upper atmosphere, which might be the culprit.

Easily possible without even leaving the Kerbin system.

FAR changed some things so that at high altitudes the drag is a lot higher. That's probably contributing to the ease of reentry. Still, that might not be all. I can do a reentry straight from Minimus with a 20km periapsis and only use ~60 units of the 1.25m ablative heatshield, carrying not only the mk1 pod but also 3 Science Jr.s and 3 Mystery Goos.

Wanderfound...stream? Are you going to actually make me get a Twitch account?

And once again, Wanderfound shows his savant stripes. "Make it look like a real plane," say the FAR gurus. Meanwhile, Wanderfound flies around a Dragonfly XR, having twice the fun they ever do with a plane at least as stable.

Use the debug menu (ALT+F12) and on the contracts section, under active contracts I think, you can hit the 'complete' button. In case you care: I think this is entirely legitimate. There are a few bugs still in the contracts system.

Kerbals. Just Kerbals.

Yes I can. A couple months ago I got a new bunch of parts to put together so I could play KSP. Turned out the mobo was bad, and I still don't have a replacement. :'(

Once you're in a flat spin or a stall, the best thing you can do is to open the throttle all the way up (assuming that asymmetric thrust isn't a contributing problem) and shove the nose into a dive. Get the plane back under control, and then pull up. Yes, if you don't have enough ground underneath you, you're screwed. (I know you asked for design advice, but I thought piloting advice might also be helpful.)

Nertea, now that we have viable stock Mk3 parts, do you have any planes to change up the Mk4 parts? (Say, to hold 3.5m parts, or something.) Or is the plan to keep these as alternatives/extensions to the Mk3 system? (Or am I missing something?) This isn't a request; I'm just curious.

Wanderfound, you probably already know, but apparently FAR is giving way too much drag high in the atmosphere due to changes to how it handles skin drag high in atmo. So any designs you make may need retweaking once the next update comes out. Likely they'll just have way more range than you intended.