tater

Then their concerns were pretty legitimate in terms of distribution with so many full DLs.

How many 1.1 versions have been released for testing? If the updates are only coming every few weeks... it's not really any different than a patch bandwidth wise. I guess I'll wait for release, and if I find anything useful, maybe it gets addressed in a patch.

I think you mean 2120

Heatshield in KSP runs about 1 kg per point of ablator.

Mars One is a joke. Mars Direct is only real to the extent the NASA DRA is a thing. IMRS? I love how these "international" programs get funded. ISS has cost about 150 billion dollars. Of that total, over 100 billion came from... the US. I'm not sure what possible benefit comes from letting ESA be a "partner" when the EU has a GDP comparable to the US, but would likely only pony up the 8% they do for ISS. Russia pays more for ISS than the EU, with a smaller GDP, and it's still trivial. If IMRS is predicated upon equal sharing of cost... then it sounds interesting.

Yeah, this is more akin to how things actually work in the world. A problem exists, and technology is developed to address that problem. In KSP, you address some problem to get "science" to build a solution. It is, as they say, bass ackwards. The only issue is that science and the tech tree is the only rewards system in the game. You do science to get points--that you get to spend. A system like the one you propose might work best with a budget system. Kongress gives you X funds, and Y tech points in year 1. You have to buy the tech with tech points and funds, and then build whatever. Your earnings in rep and science then determine your budget next year.

The best cities tend to have an organic, unplanned nature. NYC's grid layout is about the only exception to that I can think of. The difficulty would be to create a space that people actually want to inhabit, that is not soul-crushing. That tends to be the problem with such plans, the designers tend to illustrate with people doing what they, the designer, think they should be doing in a given space, and not what people actually do. NYC created setback laws so that buildings would layer upwards, and many have little fountains, etc, out front. Those spaces are not used very well, people don't mill around, they find every available flat space to stop and eat a hotdog (or whatever), and the rest of the space is wasted. That is always a risk with a designed environment. The problem is that when it is one of many buildings, people can choose an alternative, if it's an entire city as a single design...

I'm with regex on this (your name constantly tries to autocorrect, mon. . ) I dock in the dark looking at nothing but the navball (in normal mode, I never use docking mode). I'd prefer docking ports that would snap into alignment if you were within a few degrees rotation, but I get it pretty close by aligning the V on the navball on the target with a preferred direction, then doing the same with the docking craft.

Arbitrary labels are arbitrary.

In the press conference I posted, Musk says that the first landing (RTLS) is going outside HQ, they just got permission from the FAA because it's taller than anything else around the airport there (hence having to ask). He said the one that just landed will probably fly in May.

No worries, I was mostly putting the density stuff out there to give people an idea of what that might be like. I don;t live in a large city, but I actually like cities as long as they are "walkable." San Francisco and NYC, for examples in the US. I'm sure for many people on earth, living in an arcology megastructure would be a step up... but I'm pretty sure I'd not like to live there, even if I'd love to visit. Of course, it need not be all or nothing. Most people already live in urban settings, and in fact, a primary reason why the US uses more resources is that we have a distributed population. Urban dwellers use less of everything as a function of their choice of habitat. We (my family) have to have 2 cars, for example. My wife is on call several days a month. Work is a 20 minute drive at highway speeds (not LA highway speed, actually going fast). There is no possible way mass transit works for us here (not at all for my wife, and it's not plausible to spend hours a day commuting). Functionally, it means creating a space that not only works (the vertical city/arcology/megastructure), but one that is desirable. Note also that to pay for it, it's likely going to be expensive. I'd certainly not consider moving to a "bad neighborhood" of an arcology, from the side of the mountain I live on right now If I lived in San Francisco (beautiful city), it'd be a hard sell to move to such a place (or course to live in SFO I'd need a 5 million dollar place, I think, lol).

The UN says a western diet takes about 0.5 hectares (~1.2 acres, or 5,000 m2) per person. The absolute minimum required (vegetarian diet) would be just below 0.2 hectares (2000 m2). So again, all of us can easily be fed with the area currently occupied by the US, Canada, and China (that's total area, not arable land, so clearly it would take a bit more, though if you are proposing ar arcology anyway, then that doesn't matter, as the land area could be used for the same type of farming you'd do on a megastructure). I'm not averse to arcologies, I thought they were really cool back in the day... I'm just trying to provide a benchmark for what kind of areas are needed, and how much of the earth is actually available, You were replying to my post, and I was explicitly only talking about agriculture. You in fact said: Arable land is not required for mining, energy, etc. Arable means farmable, after all. So you were conflating the two in your reply.

Popular science. Right. Aside from the weak source, that is not showing agriculture. Try again, with just agriculture.

Oh, yeah, it's still so awful, I forgot they claimed to have put a lot of testing into it with the Q/A people. Wow. Epic fail.

Source? How much arable land is required per capita on earth? In the US? Looks like the global average is about 1 acre (0.004 km2) per person, and the US is 1.2 acres per person. Right now that would take about the area of the US, Canada, and China to accomplish. That leaves rather a lot of the earth available, particularly if all 7.125B of us were "crammed" into a large suburbia. I only posted about the density thing to show how little area is actually required. There is no possible way to have an arcology that is self-sufficient, it would require farming the areas that are now freed from habitation by people. All the arcology does is to make the area we all cram into that much smaller. Instead of fitting all of humanity into Bolivia, we'd all fit into Finland with the density of Paris. An arcology might be 10X that density, easily. Then the entire world fits into Taiwan.

No, that's what I mean. Since we can already alter the pods slightly in that way, why not allow other tweaks the same way. Slide torque, EC, etc.

The entire population of the earth would fit into an area the size of India and Mongolia combined with a population density the same as Orange County, CA (mostly suburban, single-family homes). If you were willing to live as densely as San Francisco (mostly low-rise buildings no more than 3 stories tall), you could fit the entire world into Bolivia at the same density.

The tech tree as it is is completely absurd. It needed to be completely redone several versions ago.

Walk away from the wreck? often. Gas it up and fly away? Nearly never unless they are purpose-built for rough field landings, and even then that would be a grass runway, not a random roughly flat spot of the right length. I live in New Mexico, and we have many, random flat spots. They look flat, until you are walking them, no jet, and few light aircraft specifically built for rough fields could land without problems at random places. Planes in KSP don't even need wheels, all aircraft wings have a higher impact tolerance than any of the landing leg parts.

Two issues. One, there is no Soviet Union, so there is no longer a claim. Two, the US disagrees, and it can be solved the way territorial claims have historically been solved, treaties, or war. See, it's political No exceptions to the WMD thing was... political. It was not about "peace," it was the fact that the US could plausibly have done something the CCCP could not, so they vetoed it. Political. It's all politics.

Having to role-play things that are obviously screwy is bad game design, IMO. It would be better to make them rational. What would be the best possible solution might be to have a slight variation of the "tweakable" things already on such parts. You can control the amount of mono carried, for example. Maybe have a couple version you can set in the right-click menu. One is the "short duration" version, and is lighter, the other is the long duration version, and is heavier. LS mods could then use that hook and provide the difference, and otherwise people can "cheat" and use the lighter version, but the part says "short duration" right there, so role-play away to square that.

The default can be to use the stock solar system. This is really about career/science replay value. Think in terms of players who have landed everywhere already. What's the point of going to the same places, particularly when you already know exactly what kind of craft it takes to get there? If you've only played in the stock solar system, here's something to try. Get Sigma Dimensions (mod) and set it to make everything 2-3X larger and farther apart (there is a 2X mode that does this as well). This works perfectly well with nothing but stock parts, in many ways you'll barely notice a difference---except all your notions about how much ship it takes to get places will be entirely wrong. Play career or science mode for a bit. It will be like when you first started as far as rocket design goes (in terms of size, not basic good design). That will give you a sense of exploration from the craft design POV, just not the solar system (because you'll still know what everything looks like having been there before).

Yeah, I suppose I could do some drop tests to see what the deal is with how impact is mitigated by gear/legs. I have no issue with the effects propagating, actually. The LEM landing parameters (the graph of acceptable horizontal vs vertical velocity) was shaped like this: ^ / \ | | and called "the dog house." (sorry for crappy ascii art) They had to keep the apex was 0 lateral velocity, and ~3 m/s sink. This was to protect the structures above the landing gear from presumably compression forces (3 m/s to 0 in 0.1s is ~3 gs, in 0.01s is ~30, etc, so more than launch stresses depending on how compressible the soil is, and how quickly the craft decelerates). I'd like to see something like the landertron mod being a thing (that functionality could be added to the septratron part as an option), and have a real difference between splashdown, and land landings for capsules. Again, it's about having designs in KSP be less universal, because designing novel stuff is kind of the point.

Yes, I know there is a mod that shows part damage. Very cool. Another thread got me looking at impact tolerance of parts, and had me reading a technical paper about the landing dynamics of all the Apollo lunar landings. Yet another thread was about the tier 0 runway, and why using that is dangerous to aircraft wheels, but landing at speed someplace that should be fatal (anywhere, on any world that is not a paved runway) is not. Since I land with chutes and/or landing legs, and I do so at LEM-like sink rates at touchdown, I never notice the impact stuff, except watching crasher stages hitting sometimes below me. I think that all the engine parts should have the impact tolerance reduced to effectively zero. Maybe 1 m/s. The engines should be incredibly delicate things you would never land on, ever. Oddly (not really, I suppose, because "spaceplanes!") the spaceplane engines are magically set to far higher impact tolerance for some reason(rapier, etc). I realize that in the past there were not so many parts, and you needed to land on wings, etc, but that's simply no longer the case. Making parts more delicate where appropriate creates design challenges, which is sort of the point of the game. Simple proposals: 1. Add more runways around Kerbin, some at tier 0 level, all the way up to paved and long. Fix tier 0 to be not so awful. 2. Make everywhere else in the solar system at least as bad as the current tier 0 runway to land on for aircraft wheels. 3. Make launch clamps and some landing gear/legs to tier 0. 4. Reduce the impact tolerance of all the engines in the game to near 0, the jet nacelles can be slightly higher (by slightly I mean maybe 1 m/s higher). A Apollo LEM descent engine buckled not from impact with the lunar surface, but from overpressure due to running near the surface. These can all be easily designed around with the game as it is. Better damage: Ideally, there might be a couple levels of damage instead of perfect --> #LOLEXPLOSION. Some parts like landing legs and wheels (do aircraft gear, I don't make planes?) already have this. Add this to other parts, and it could be as simple as a damaged texture. Damaged tanks could leak at some rate, damaged engines would simply not work. Damaged structural parts have impact tolerance reduced by half or something. Engineers could perhaps patch leaks, or allow an engine to work. Damage could occur at the tolerance, and destruction at (tolerance)*3 or some value that works. This gives them something to do, and makes landing something to actually have to think about.

That kind of terrain should break off any gear that hit them. When it comes to fund recovery for vehicles, any lost gear (including legs) should result in a total write-off f the airframe. All the engines---rockets as well as the OP plane parts that can magically survive 20+ m/s impacts---need impact tolerance reduced to basically zero as well (and the launch clamps should be tier 0 since any rocket resting on an engine bell should be destroyed).