tater

It's hard to find...

Space is dark...

I'm certainly interested in Venus, but the mass/cost budget of doing a human mission has a vast opportunity cost vs sending unmanned instruments.

Manned spaceflight is a PR stunt. Sure, it's my opinion that Venus is not a good PR stunt compared to Mars, but I think it's not an inaccurate opinion. Pictures from Mars would at least look like Mars, HAVOC images would look like any number of airline flights most of us have had. Any argument for humans visiting other worlds needs to look at the interest they generate, nothing else matters, as there is zero scientific reason to send people anywhere, and the benefit of robots over people is increasing with time as our ability to create truly autonomous systems increases. I come down hard sometimes on manned spaceflight, even though I am actually in favor of it, but I think the goals need to be looked at realistically, and the goals are incredibly superficial.

Space is big...

Spaceplanes are powered by magic pixie dust. Ie: they are not a thing in RL. As such, I expect them to have a more sic-fi feel to them (though if I were starting KSP from scratch, my style would have been "retro future" (a 1950s and 60s envisioning of the future)). Rocket parts should always come before spaceplanes, unless they have a starting set of spaceplane parts more akin tot he early X planes like the X-1. As such, the early rocket parts (the 1.25m ones) should have an older look to them, as long as the end point of rocket evolution in KSP ends up in the same place as the spaceplane parts (and you can see the evolution). The part progression need not all match, it needs to tell a story basically, of the evolution of Kerbal spacecraft. It's OK for the early parts to look... early. Then, when that is done, they can add in some sleek parts in the more modern style for later rockets (a set of more Merlin like 1.25m engines, perhaps).

The 1.25m engines are sort of the best of the rocket parts right now. The 2.5m parts are the worst all around (everything except the mk1-2 isn't fit to keep at all, IMO). The smaller engines are also lousy, frankly. All the decouplers are terrible except the largest one and need to be killed with fire (they need to be smaller, and/or flush). The probe parts are mostly clunky.

The plane parts look nothing at all like the rocket parts (aside from maybe the mk1-2 capsule). So the notion of "cartoony" only applies if you consider the spaceplane parts cartoony. I agree they need to pick an aesthetic, but the current paradigm of sleek, cool looking spaceplane parts, and godawful junkyard looking rocket parts doesn't cut it. There are actually people that defend the current rocket parts. Fine, I can live with that, I'll use mods---but then the plane parts need to be dragged down to the awful rocket level to match, pick one style, sleek and cool or; awful, clunky, and cartoony.

The Shuttle cargo bay doors never had solar panels. Those were radiators.

Countermeasures would always be cheaper than SDI itself, but they knew that even in the 1980s. Better to have a countermeasures arms race than piling up more weapons. I think that the ability to knock out a small, or even an accidental attack would be a certain plus as a capability.

Knocking down a few missiles is not implausible (i.e.: a small attack from a rogue state), and the technology should be pursued, IMO. The old 1980s idea of a "ballistic missile shield" was always silly, however. I knew people working on it at the time (many people paid off their student loans writing SBIRs for SDI stuff, lol), and they all knew that even given a magical weapon system that could kill targets X per minute, they'd not be able to parse the targets among various satellites given communications lag without many platforms deciding that the same target was the one to deal with first. So for a few targets, it's just an engineering problem, but for the notional "full strike" of the Cold War era, it just was;t ever going to happen.

Cast in this light, The Martian is not a useful NASA recruiting tool, but a story of a planetary vandal who inoculates Mars with human fecal fauna.

No, you didn't, but I did. Corona688 mentioned the fact that in KSP we cannot "explore" in a real sense (certainly not in replay). This is true, because the destinations are always the same, and the worlds are not minutely detailed enough to make landing near one crater any different than landing near another. I was agreeing with you WRT to this game, but not vs all sandbox games. Clearly MC is sandbox, but every single replay can afford the player a unique place to explore. The same bits rearranged to make interesting, sometimes spectacular (in their blocky way) terrains. Squad doesn't randomize the Kerbol system even as an option, because they have said they want a shared experience (which is weak, IMHO). No kidding... but we're talking about making rovers better in modded, and stock games, right? My point was that offering novel places to explore on the ground might make people want to EVA more.

I'd make the same observation about Mars, honestly. The difference is that you could actually land on Mars, and the selfie taken there is worth it just for the awesome factor. Venus isn't even photogenic...

It's not the nature of a sandbox game at all, IMHO, it's the nature of this sandbox game because of the insistence on a "shared experience." I don't play Minecraft much---maybe a few hours every time there is a big update---because it's sorta boring, though I actually like building stuff (I only play survival). Most importantly, I like building stuff in the context of the local world. I tend to try and protect/increase the villagers by making them larger towns, adding walls, etc., until they are rather huge sometimes. I have made more complex temples, etc, as well (some quite huge)... I then let my kids have the world to poke around in. Guess what, I like just riding around (walking is too slow, lol), looking for cool sites to build stuff. If every, single time I started Minecraft I was in the same seed, I'd not even go back and replay it even the few hours I have in the last couple years, without novel worlds to explore, it would be too boring to bother. Interesting planetary surfaces, plus the feeling of actual exploration would make me more interested in looking around.

You could send rather a lot of probe mass for what that entails for literally zero improvement in scientific return. "Yup, that's Venus!" "Take a selfie in front of the window!" Profit?

FAR was better than the soup, so why bother improving the atmosphere, just use FAR, right? It was before my time (0.23-0.24 was when I started), but didn't there used to be no landing legs? Were there any in mods before stock? Then why add legs to stock, when there were mods for that? If the answer is functionally no more than "I think X should be stock," or "because I like X, it should obviously be stock," then the argument doesn't cut it.

As has been suggested, an out of focus autopilot. 1. Tie the map view to what the player has actually observed---meaning the apparent altitude of the map camera is a function of crewed exploration (a radius around where you happen to be is available the same way you can zoom the camera now, right down to the faceplate). This would require some scansat-like photography parts to map surfaces (include crashers like Ranger, landers like Surveyor, etc). 2. Allow waypoints to be placed on the surface of the map. The rover will then follow them. Choose poorly, and there might be a crash. Allow probe rovers as well, but tie it to the new comms system, and perhaps set a max speed for rovers based upon the proximity of kerbals. Note that if you add waypoints without the map being zoomed in enough via mapping missions, the chances for accidents are greater. 3. Add some science as you go as suggested by regex. Perhaps the amount is tied to rover speed, and scientist crew (the faster you go, the less science). 4. (crazy "end game" stuff follows) In-situ construction. a. Perhaps new regolith moving parts could be added. Land XXX tons of supplies within 100m of some spot (perhaps the construction rover, itself is the spot, via a right-click, "Build here"), plus such a rover (and a certain number of crew/engineers) and a facility can be constructed on the spot (the spot might have to be within certain slope, etc). The facility would be a custom-designed for that world (basically a simple model, covered with regolith as radiation shielding). Another facility would be a construction shack (VAB/SPH-like) with a take off/landing area cleared and marked. b. Related to roving around, perhaps the game could have semi-randomized caves added (rilles). The could appear in the sides of craters or canyons that meet certain requirements (not 100% random, but a random chance at any of many possible locations. These caves would have reduced construction costs in terms of required supplies, otherwise works as "4a," above.

All I did was add CAP { name = Adapter-1-1-VA useForBottom = false } to the bottom of the list of CAPs for 2 MFT (A and B) tanks in their cfgs as a test.

So have I, I just hadn't really thought about what I was doing WRT making my own SMs much before. Honestly, many times in the past I explicitly added a decoupler under the capsule out of KSP habit. My SSTU craft workflow was only different in that I used the nice SSTU decoupler in every, single instance instead of the awful stock choices . I recently started forcing myself to use the "decouple SM" feature all the time so that it would become "the new normal" for me (to break the stock habit) and realized quickly what I needed to do it after my first test failed. That test failed because it was, as I said, somewhat counterintuitive given the way the tank tops look (and the fact I'm not one who likes to clip parts). Adding the 1-1-VA cap allows me to do what I have been doing anyway, but with a little more polish.

I am home waiting on another repair guy, and I just checked the Apollo and Orion. Looks close enough to me.

I have shown it in the image above attached to the lower node (so you can see it). As a SM, it must be the upper node, and it works fine, and looks like a proper SM part .

The answer to my own question is "yes."

Ah, makes sense it is an artifact of working around the stock code. Question: could a "service module" be added as a "nose" adapter to the MFT and MUS tanks? Ie: an adapter that has a concave top---like the 1-1-VA adapter on the DOS-TKS?

You do not want/need radiators for reentry.