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At anything like 0.3 to 1g acceleration, the trip times would be so short, there would be no reason to bother with acclimatizing people to variable g loads. You will always be fine going to a lower value, anyway.

I can only assume the reporter who wrote that article is not a native English speaker. Man, web news content needs to realize that copy editors are a good thing. Without specifics of the actual problem they are having, it's hard to say what the prognosis is.

It's always funny when a thread is started that is nothing but politics, that then says, "don't discuss politics." Any discussion that involves treaties, or international relations is political, and any discussion that avoids all politics effectively avoids all real content. The same applies to threads about what NASA should/could do, for example. Without politics, you might as well be talking about treaties among unicorns.

The idea of discovering planets except perhaps one out in the kuiper belt is absurd. I think it is outside the scope of KSP to have to "discover" Saturn (I'm going to use real world examples, but assume that any I use are really made-up, randomly added planets). The starting point for KSP is roughly the Earth in the 1950s to 1960s. The planets would all be known, except, again, possible worlds that are very far away. What would NOT be known is: The specifics of planetary atmospheres. What they actually look like on the surface (no one had a clue what Mars actually looked like until the Mariner probe flyby). What their moons look like, or indeed most of the moons. Until we sent probes to Jupiter, we had no clue how many moons it had, dozens of them were brand new discoveries---everything about them. This is ripe for "exploration" in KSP. Large asteroids and dwarf planets. Again, some would have the orbital elements known, and nothing else about them. There is no reason at all to ask for the added boredom of a terrestrial telescope that you have to click on, or whatever. It is needless. KSP is about spacecraft. Give the player in such a randomized "discovery" mode exactly what data they would have, and nothing more, but certainly don't give them less than they would know. The proposal needs to be: Something Squad could actually do. Something people actually want to play. Terrestrial (whatever the word should be, kerbestrial?) astronomy should not be a thing, it should be assumed.

I think that all the astronomy should be assumed, this is kerbal space program, not kerbal "Enlightenment Science." Fog of war hides what is only known by space probes, but all other data is available. We knew orbits, masses, even atmospheric values for many places before probes. All that would be available. I have no desire to have to "launch" a telescope on kerbin EVA and click to observe some planet, that would be mind-numbing. what the game would also need is more planning tools (which it needs anyway). There is he mod that predicts atmospheric flight paths, for example, so you can more accurately plot landing zones. What if something like that was included, but the values it uses for the atmospheres are not the actual values, but the values the player currently has unlocked. Your first Eve probe would use the value determined astronomically from kerbin, which would be wrong. Having transmitted some science from sending the Eve probe, your next probe gets to use the newly determined values. (I used Eve as an example, but this could be a new world we have not seen before with an atmosphere that is hard to nail down (like the RL Venus)). Regarding the notion that the "shared experience" is important to the community... I don't think that is a thing, frankly. I personally don't care even a little about it.

It was interesting to watch the onboard camera view, then go back and watch the chase plane view. It slides after it lands, slightly. Look at the nasa video around 5:50 at the presumably 1st stage mission control. They have the camera on the drone ship on the big screen, but you can see the "paddles" deployed on stage 1 as well (after boost back).

It would still show a useful comparison to look at the spaceplane cockpits as they are so OP. Any of the command pods need to be lighter than those. I agree that the hitchhiker is not a reasonable comparison, it's supposed to be an on-orbit habitat. Like even other non-spaceplane part, it need to be made not ugly, and we need more options for station and base parts.

This will likely go the way of the previous megastructure movement of the 1960s.

Add the mk3 spaceplane cockpit. It's absurd. It bests the mk1-2 in every single statistic, but has lower mass.

Regarding the drone ship landing "We were confident that if it did fail, it would fail for a new reason... it turns out there are a lot of reasons for a rocket to fail."

This is a 6" with a computer control, but still dobsonian mount: http://www.telescope.com/Telescopes/Dobsonian-Telescopes/IntelliScope-Dobsonians/Orion-StarBlast-6i-IntelliScope-Reflector-Telescope/pc/1/c/12/sc/27/p/102026.uts?refineByCategoryId=27 Slightly larger than the Celestron you linked, but basically the same features in a more compact mount.

Just awesome. Gotta come up with a nice cocktail to make this evening.

Why did you attribute the above quote to me? Dobsonians are a very simple mount system. They allow changes in altitude (vertical), and azimuth (horizontal rotation). Equatorial mounts align the part that rotates with the equator, then can have a motor that counter-rotates the telescope so that it remains pointed at the same spot in space as the earth rotates. The one your mom suggested is a slight equatorial variant with a motor on both axes, and the computer uses your a setup algorithm to determine your position, and then it moves the scope as needed in both directions to counter the earth's rotation. Refractors vs reflectors is complex. Bottom line is that at the same aperture, refractors are going to be better for planetary observing. Generally speaking, I think a reflector is probably a better bet for you. The one you linked is fine, and a dobsonian would also be fin---and for the same money, it would be bigger (bigger is better), but it lacks the perks of clock drive, etc. Here's a dobsonian to look at: http://www.telescope.com/Telescopes/Dobsonian-Telescopes/Dobsonian-Telescopes-with-Free-Shipping/Orion-Limited-Edition-SkyQuest-XT8-Classic-Dobsonian-Bundle/pc/1/c/12/sc/398/p/101452.uts?refineByCategoryId=398

Nothing in it has been addressed. Nothing. I can repost everything I typed up thread again, and it still applies. I had hoped it would be addressed before 1.0, but we got a double-down on random side quests somehow being a "career."

I used to play the Starfire games, actually. The animation above reminds me a bit of traveller (another game I used to play).

I've been using ETT, and I think I can mess with that tree a little at some point. Can't test 1.1 until it's past the whole Steam thing.

I'll see if I can dig them up. I've pushed for a randomized solar system with "fog of war" for a while so that "science" instead of being points, gains the player data needed to design and complete missions. I.e.: learn about an atmosphere so that you know what kind of descent vehicle is required, etc. BTW, instead of fully "procedural" worlds, the game could just as well have a library of vetted, hand-made worlds to chose from, and grab a certain number to create variant solar systems. In addition, it could scale the planets and distances between them so that you might see Duna again, but it could be anything from 1:1 with stock Duna, to 6x larger. The code to place worlds might include certain flags so it's not fully random (no ice worlds in close solar orbits, etc).

I think I didn't make myself clear. I was merely looking for a lower-limit boundary value for crossing time. I suppose the cheapest (dv wise) real mission would likely be just killing solar orbital velocity around the galactic center (~200-250 km/s), then letting the stars rotate around it as it half-crosses in its highly eccentric orbit around the core. I was really just putting a lower limit on physically crossing the galaxy. Rama refers to a book by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.

Many ww2 aircraft took off from grass strips. Those strips were none the less prepared, they were not random fields. Even in the early days of flight where barnstormers would land on farms... those areas had been cleared. Where I live in NM looks flat, but if you tried to land even a small prop plane in most areas, the wheels would certainly hit a hole or deep, soft dust and break the gear off. Would the Space Shuttle be able to land on a random flat spot on earth? A few. Not the "virtually anywhere" situation we have in KSP. I was unaware the landing strip was actually a mesh, so my comments about making it rough I guess don't apply :/ . I think that all the worlds need a change in terrain such that landing anything horizontally is nearly impossible except on landing strips... perhaps the new system in 1.1 can look at pressure on wheels, and have a cutoff, put balloon tires on your craft, and maybe it can land rough field. I would also like to see craters (and bumps for places that craters would be odd on) on the scale size of a lander. Maybe at scatter density, but you hit them, and you tip/crash. This would make landing less trivial. Yeah, I'm fine with some areas being things like salt flats. On worlds other than kerbin... not so much. I'd be fine if they were random, then the player would have to discover them, but generally speaking, you'd not land a fragile spaceplane in the dirt on some other world unless it had VTOL capability.

Yeah, I know, but O2 is not intelligence. If we're talking about the Fermi paradox, detecting such worlds without making an intelligent life determination merely increases the paradox (now we have a word of likely life... but no aliens walking around stealing trashcans (as I recall, that was the cartoon they were discussing up at LANL). Your point about directed broadcasts seems to mirror mine. With narrow lobes, the number of hours any such a society could spend broadcasting at any particular distant star is very small---and that means it's wasted effort as the potential recipients would have to be looking just for the few hours when the signal arrives. The combination of the 2 points would be to look at, and broadcast to, planets with O2 selectively, I suppose. Then you can dwell on them longer in transmission since there are far fewer. Still chances are that we could easily miss the call. If you dial random phone numbers (land lines only), and let it ring twice then hang up, you're vastly more likely to have a person answer than a SETI call even though many people will be at work when you call

Yeah, making off-runway landing suitably suicidal (it's not just flatness, but rocks, holes, mud, any number of hazards on the scale size of a wheel, particularly off kerbin) should come along with adding airports all around kerbin.

For my small kids and a Venus transit, I took the eyepiece off the Newtonian, and projected the sun on a wall so it was about 1m in diameter, then let them watch it on the wall. It helps that I have a room where the ceiling is nearly 50% glass.

The terrain need not be physically bumpy. The surface of every single planet in the Kerbol system needs whatever the "terrain" values are of the level 1 runway (or in fact worse than that). If it's not paved, there should be no spaceplane on it (unless the gear are then broken completely off). What defines the bumpiness of the runway? What is the same setting for terrain?

It need not be meshed rough, make sure the texture is a little better, and have the value be rough.