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I doubt there is room in any kerbal craft for a second set of helmets, or room to change at all .

The Shuttle program absolutely did its job. The job was that it was a technical jobs program. It employed a lot of people at great cost, that's what it was for.

We " 'muricans" generally don't actually care about where someone's surname happens to be from, if you weren't born in Germany, you're not a German.

^^^Note that the ISS image above was taken from a Soyuz after undocking.

The whole science for points thing plays into he basic problems with the game, however. I agree that all the points @Pthigrivi makes above make sense within the current paradigm, but it's mostly more of the same reasons for going places we have aside from the surface features additions, which at least might look cool to visit. What if the surfaces and features were interactive in the sense that scatter with collision boxes would be---you need to scout/map to pick decent landing areas, or face tipping over/breaking?

They did static test, but no word on how it went.

I'll be watching

@cxg2827 's station parts are pretty fabulous, BTW.

For large ships (stations can be a little more arbitrary) mass balance really matters, and I tend to dislike really long vessels for a number of reasons (though I put any NTRs way, way back using trusses, etc for "safety."). While not a "real" part on ISS, etc, what about a full-diameter hub part that contains a common area? Imagine a common-area hub (if it had a full IVA, perhaps eating and socialization area), and a hab in each of the 4 radial directions, and the thrust axis through the other 2 faces (perhaps a lab and "bridge" forward, and equipment/tanks to the rear).

I have not done really good tests on framerate, but I can try tonight. Regarding stations, I think that it's important to consider that station parts are also effectively interplanetary ship parts, particularly for those of us that use life support. To a large degree, that's actually what I use them for, to build a craft to comfortably hold ~4 kerbals for a multi-year journey in a space that I don't think would drive them insane (I use about 1 hitchhiker volume per kerbal as a minimum). BTW, would it be possible to have a cupola as a cap module?

One thing that would be incredibly nice to be able to tweak is the mass, somehow, such that a lab and hab could be balanced to be identical in mass, even if the length was added via service modules, etc.

I know many people who have been interviewed for articles, and they are almost always unhappy with the result. The reporters for the most part really don't get it. There is a famous anecdote attributed to Murray Gell-Mann, that he was interviewed for a major US newspaper (the NYT, I think), and he talked to the reporter for over an hour. The article that resulted got his work very precisely wrong, literally 180 degrees from what he had said in the interview. Gell-Mann then says that he was appalled, then flipped to the business page and believed everything he read, knowing how utterly wrong the science reporting was. My wife reacts the same way to virtually 100% of medical reporting (she's a surgeon). A friend who is an attorney has similar observations about legal reporting (that a lot of it is gravely flawed). I have a relative who is an international reporter with a large outlet... and he'll text me questions sometimes to try and understand something he is reporting on, or someone he works with is reporting on. Some of the science questions I could pass to my children, and they could answer them. Not all reporting is terrible, but a substantial amount is bad enough that short of researching whatever it is you are reading about in the news to check the veracity of it, I assume it's wrong. I use the headlines as guides for things to look up myself---sort of like when my father in law forwards emails from some other old guy about stuff that I quickly find out snopes debunked years ago

Reporters are not terribly smart as a group. Not at any news outlet. To think that they are only bad at science, but fine at business or political issues is pretty comical. They are also all biased (which should come as an uncontroversial statement of fact, as they are all humans).

I know, I was just thinking that a "gas giant" the size of Earth is not actually a thing, so expecting an Earth sized body to have 60 moons doesn't strike me as terribly critical, particularly when tiny moons (as all are in KSP) are pretty much all the same. I'd rather see effort put into making the extant worlds more interesting than making another ball that is a slightly different color, and has nothing else to make it interesting as a spacecraft design problem.

Actually, it doesn't for quite a lot of reasons, and everything is not scaled up, kerbals and rockets are ~64% size, and scale really screws up atmospheric issues hugely, and atmospheres are not scaled at 1/10th. If everything was scaled at 1/10th, there would be no difference between KSP stock and RSS at all and there would be no difference between playing the two. "Space" if KSP was actually scaled at 1/10th would start at ~10,000m on Kerbin instead of 7X that. A large problem from a gameplay perspective is that the mini-scale planets combined with oversized rockets (compared to the planet scale) means that gameplay is homogenized. A 240km radius moon (that's what Callisto would be) is just a slightly different colored rock for stock KSP. As a player, I also find the mini scale much less impressive, visually. I tend to play stock parts at 6.4X, for that reason.

Jool is slightly smaller than Earth. Just throwing that in as a reality check.

Given the odd nature of using the VAB for EPL stuff, perhaps a simple method to ensure ease of building would be to provide the deployed dock, or a cartoonish analog, as a single VAB part. You can then place that part, and the default direction when you select the part is how it will be relative to the craft in space. Attach it to the bottom (or top, whatever your system requires), and if your craft doesn't hit the framework, it's good in space.

You could have a linear shipyard, but with a platform on one end (the "bottom"). The simple dynamic in the VAB might be that you can build in the Z direction (up), in the +X direction (towards the door), or +-Y direction (left and right, while looking at the door), but not the -X direction (away from the door) any more than a radius of 7.5 meters (I have no idea if those are the actual directions, I'm stating it for clarity). In this case it's constrained on just the one side (I built the girders on the "inside" side of the VAB. It's a central 2mx2m plate part with 3 more radially outwards. The SSTU tank is 10m.

Given the amount of time I've spent enjoying KSP for $25 (or whatever it was), I think it is already free within rounding errors.

I got a small refractor as a kid, and it made me internalize something that I knew intellectually, but had not yet felt in my gut---that I was standing on a tiny ball in the middle of a vast ocean of stars.

I'm pretty sure the large pork jet inflatable (Bigelow looking thing) is actually 2.5m. 2.5m tank left, 3.25m right.

A few things... 1. Porkjet has inflatable parts, and he's said that he means to bring them up to current at some point... something to consider, perhaps. 2. Size wise, you are right, 2.5m is likely the best, though I would like to see larger for planetary base use, perhaps (the Mars Direct concepts show basically 2 floor high cylinders, but they look more squat than 2.5m would be. Even if you don't do an IVA, think in terms of a rough sketch of how it might look so that they are the right size, IMO, I'd rather see them bigger than too small for their supposed job (for example if they are supposed to have an airlock, the storage for kerbal helmets alone eats up most of a 2.5m part ). Functionally, what crew parts are actually needed? Sort of depends on the use of LS mods. A hab part would make sense (fit in some sort of beds), as would perhaps a common area (food prep/eating, etc). 3. The shape change possibilities of SSTU should be used... I agree that resizing the crew parts makes no sense as you have described the problems, but that doesn't mean they could not have elements outside the crew cylinder, right? Like "mount" and "nose"? They could also be like the fairings where there is a diameter setting on that part. So the crew part is 2.5m, and 5m longer a given part. You could set one side to slope to 1.25m, and the other side to go to a larger diameter, for example. The crew part is unchanged, only the external bits to the compartment scale.

The best way to make them more interesting would be to make all of them larger. Since Kerbin has 2 moons, my benchmark would be to scale up the system such that the Mun presents a design challenge to the player in terms of mission mode---Minmus can be kept as a small, low gravity world that requires no special choices. The requirement would be that a staged lander should be a reasonable solution, not utterly pointless. As apparently most players never leave Kerbin SoI anyway, this would at least make Kerbin SoI interesting.

KAS/KIS should be a stock thing, frankly (the base elements of it, not the whole thing) as Kerbals really need more to do, they bothered to animate them, let people do something with the little critters. Personally, my primary interaction with the terrain is landing, hence my want of smaller scale terrain features so that there is a non-zero chance of an interesting landing. The ability to manipulate the terrain (i.e.: crater it) that would be profoundly cool.

Higher terrain detail would always improve things. Terrain that is dangerous to spacecraft that is at the scale size of spacecraft. Right now, the Mun is my benchmark, the rest of the airless worlds look terrible in comparison. Short of in-situ construction (being able to alter the terrain to bury base elements with regolith, or for more realistic mining of some worlds), there really is not much to do once landed.