tater

We don't need terraforming (kerbiforming?). We would need in situ construction long before changing planets.

Which argument? The "safeguard humanity" argument? I think it is clearly literally true---if we moved a sufficiently large number (biological diversity) of humans to another location, it would certainly mitigate the chance of a cosmic catastrophe from wiping out humanity. The pragmatics of this---how possible/cost effective is it are another matter. You can also argue if we should, I suppose, but you could argue the same about modern civilization, perhaps we should lead brutish, short lives knocking each other over the head with rocks. For reasons. If we should strive to maximize human well-being, then maybe we decide that O'Neil colonies are part of that. Perhaps the effort to do so decreases due to technology (machines to build such habitats autonomously, for example). Regardless, it's nothing that will happen short-term, heck maybe not on 100 year time lines. I agree with @Nibb31 on the robot nannies, heck, I assume that in the distant future when something like an O'Neil colony is more practical, they will be constructed by robots anyway... then the robot nannies could be instructed what to do in terms of constructing habitats---assuming humanity preservation is the sole goal. You could add that why did humans colonize any new place? Clearly it was easier (vastly) on Earth than in space, but that might change with technology (objectively harder, still, but not for the colonists, as they won't be doing the work).

This is flatly untrue. If any of us were alive in 1944, we would have been alive at the least violent time in human history up to that point. The same has been true for centuries. Stephen Pinker has a book on the subject, and there are some decent youtube videos of him giving talks, but basically if you look at stone age societies that survived into the modern world to be studied by anthropologists, and you look at historical evidence from other cultures over human history, you'll find that the chance of a given human being dying due to the actions of another human being have decreased over time. Obviously in fits and starts, but the trend is clear. On those stone age cultures (amazon, new guinea, etc), people had about a 20% chance of death due to homicide. Even in the midst of ww2, those chances were a fraction of 1% (the most violent war in human history looked at from the perspective of total casualties. Genghis Khan's forces might have killed as many as 50 million people in a time period when the population of the earth was vastly smaller (modern Iraq only reached a pre-Khan level population in the last few decades, for example). I only mention it because there tends to be a perception that the world is more violent, when this is simply not the case. The short version in a TED talk: The long version:

Is "level design" a "campaign editor?" If so, this would be a great tool to have, actually. It would allow people to more easily experiment with alternate career schemes, and perhaps someone could come up with one that is not awful. I'm pretty down on KSP career, and think that it's basically luck that any of it is good at all, since I don;t think they had a goal/plan when they slapped it together. I don't think it's easy to design, OTOH, the balance between the right level of constraint, and freedom is non-trivial.

Lagrange point colonies don't count in the "save humanity" column of the pros and cons, since a truly humanity-ending catastrophe would be akin to the impact that created the Moon, and L5 would not be a safe place to be. That said, some similar habitats elsewhere would fill that roll assuming they had a sustainable, genetically diverse population o the right size. The idea of Earth-based closed loops doesn't work, as you'd need to build them ahead of time, and you'd need enough of them that you can deal with various impact points (huge impacts would rain secondaries down all over the earth). Better would be to have a spacefaring society to be able to divert threats so they don't hit in the first place. I think at some level this might be a rationale for some deep space colonies, because I think that given unpredictable orbits of threats, we'd need the ability to extemporize once a threat is detected, and having multiple starting points for missions to do so can only help threat mitigation. The idea that we should not care about extinction is odd, IMO. We care, because we're able to care. I think it's normal to consider "posterity," even on the level of genus Homo (note I leave the species open to the next version(s)). I don't see governments doing it, however, except perhaps subsidy on the asteroid-mitigation level. We'd need a real space economy at some point to drive such a thing (which I'm pretty unsure about happening, frankly). I don't actually care about cultures that disagree with post-Enlightenment western liberalism in the least. Yeah, that's a chauvinism, but there you go That's in fact the only culture I'd bring to a colony, since I'd not have anyone head up not from a spacefaring society. We are a happy (to us) accident. That something else would come along doesn't mean that I would not prefer to keep humanity alive. The reality is that intelligent life is likely fairly rare in the universe. There is certainly other life out there (from a statistical POV it seems nearly certain), but I tend to think it is not super common (at the risk of turning this into a Fermi Paradox discussion). I think it's worth preserving if we are capable of doing so,

Thought you might find this view of D2 minus the outside bits useful

I'd vote "hell yeah" if the alternative was what we have now. If the alternative is a new set of consistent parts that don't look like rubbish (i.e.: pretty much any change from the extant rocket parts), then I'm willing to give those a try. I might be more willing to wait simply because I no longer use the stock parts because they are so awful, so I'm not even used to seeing them at this point.

Feel free to share some pics of the wilderness up there, I've not managed to get up there yet, Colorado is about as far as we can make it on weekends from Albuquerque... I can only assume it's a lot like Colorado, which is saying something, since CO is pretty stunning.

Agena?

Sounds awesome---black or brown bears? We only have black bears here in NM, and in Colorado where we go sometimes, and they're scary enough (black bears mean I only take trash outside the morning they come to take it away, lol).

Hope your camping trip went well. Where'd you go?

Seems to work OK in Mac OS as well.

If nationality actually plays a role in using KSP, I can only assume Canadians smother their computer in maple syrup, then play as anyone else would... though maneuvering is harder with sticky keys.

Back from Italy, and looking forward to mess around with SSTU again! Reading over the past several pages, things are looking good, indeed, great (sorry about wheel hell). The comment above about a parachute model has one possible utility I can see, and that would be a part to add atmospheric capability to some sorts of landers in a way that doesn't look as "kerbal" as many solutions. Past that, there's not a lot of utility for it. Adding an SSTU part for use with stock parts seems sorta pointless to me, I'm at the point I practically don't use stock parts---they are so profoundly inferior in every way to SSTU.

Yeah, there are usually large ticket items that Congress micromanages from a budget standpoint. The current PBR also lumps some NASA spending into the Programmatic budget, which is bizarre (personally, I think that that part of the budget (over 2/3 of all Federal spending) should all become discretionary, except debt service).

Yeah, and quick saving constantly just in case. On EVA, I tend to use KIS/KAS for base construction, and it's trivially easy to accidentally collide with a leg.

Yeah, I agree, it just seems like with the new (?) LOS code it might be easier to do---it's like a "control from here" with the antenna selected, and the pointing target being "home."

Yeah, I was thinking along the lines of the persistent rotation mod. That or you'd change scenes to the spacecraft in question, then it points the antenna along the LOS it is using (ISRU does something like this, right, it looks at the time interval that has passed, then catches you up?).

Yeah, I pilot everything, I've never used mechjeb at all, for example. But to truly be a manager, and to have a game where the end-goal is a sort of infrastructure, I think this is required. I'd STILL do most piloting myself, that's why I play, but the ability to have routine service places would be really helpful. It's odd that Squad has not added KAC (or that functionality) since they require the player to do, well, everything, then they don't provide the tools to make doing that plausible for complex saves.

Gotcha, that is what I assumed he meant, but it always bugs me when my high-gain is clearly pointed the wrong way, and the LOS calculation implies the ability to correct this visually (and possibly functionally in a mod).

So all the stock antenna models are changing? 2 of them are parabolic as it stands (by definition, directional). Or do you mean that they will function as omnidirectional even if the game parts are unambiguously directional? Given that the game will be doing an LOS check, should;t it be possible to point an antenna along that LOS? Not saying it makes a lot of sense e for stock, but it would be pretty cool to watch a flyby with the dish actually pointing to Kerbin.

If it's calculating LOS, it would be cool if there was a new "target" mode to point the directional antenna to where it is calculating LOS to. While I like the idea if even more serious restrictions on comms, I always found RT to be pretty awful, particularly in stock were Eeloo is less far away that Venus actually is (comms would never be a problem in the Kerbol system, aside from LOS, it's far too tiny for even delay to be of much concern). As was said above, we really need some control autonomy instead of having to pilot manually, that should be a trade off with probes, if you want a maneuver out of LOS, then you program it, and see what happens when/if the probe is back in communication with you.

I agree (assuming this was at all directed to me). The only destination for people off the earth needs to be entirely constructed. If humans ever live permanently in space, I suspect it will be in space, and spun for pseudo gravity. Still, we get people like Musk pushing to colonize, when as @juanml82 so aptly says, we have zero data on martian gravity and humans. If a spun hab somewhere closer shows martian gravity to be insufficient, all the Mars colonial dreams are just nonsense. Seems to me the very first step is not to build MCT, but to find out if the one part of Mars that nobody can change or engineer around is a total roadblock. If martian gravity is insufficient for health, then the rest doesn't matter, and the rest is still incredibly difficult.

Assume for a second that the goal, as per Squad statements, is a "space tycoon" game. This requires that missions can be flown without the player having to do every single piloting aspect themselves. Without AI kerbals, there is no tycoon game, it's not even possible. To me such a game puts me in the CEO/Director seat, not the pilot's seat. For the sake of fun, I'd assume that I could do piloting, etc, if I wish to, but I should not have to. Set up a fuel deport/ISRU around Jool. Make a station there. Set up regular service there every time Kerbin is in the proper position for a transfer (in both directions). That should then happen---by itself---assuming I have dedicated the required funds for this crew rotation, etc. Short of that, any sort of infrastructure becomes incredibly difficult for a player, particularly in a game that does;t even have KAC functionality built in.

SSTU Not just engines, but... incredibly useful, I've pretty much stopped using stock parts.