tater

OK, not for right now, but here is a crazy part idea. People have asked in here someplace for a full-size hub. a + where each arm is the size/shape of an undeployed base part. That'd be cool. Another part, strictly roleplaying, really, would be a large hub, perhaps with a greenhouse roof. Make a 3.75m (5m?) part that is basically a dome (glass can be flat panes with a lot of structure to fit the glass/frame ratio of your greenhouse). Like a giant Cupola part. 2X the height (or more) than your current parts. When you hit deploy, full-sized gangways pop out (ready to accept your normal, inline parts/docking sections, etc. Here ya go: Using a 3.75m part: Using a 5m fuel tank dome: The command pod parts are the ones touching the 3.75/5m tank parts in both images. In this idea those would be hallways/whatever, and would be entirely inside the 3.75/5m part until deployed. They would need integral docking stuff. If it was the 2d image, there is actually room (in IVA) for a balcony high up in the space. Imagine the blue part is window, there might be a ladder to a "view lounge" with seats looking out (a grate for a floor, just below the blue to let the view into the large, common area below. Hotel-lobby like IVA (potted plants, mixture of comfy chairs and dining tables), perhaps with a small kitchen area on one wall. Would make for some stunning screenshots

Yeah, I'd like something like this as well, pending 1.1 (when maybe I can load huge numbers of mods without crashing). I've been playing 365, which is a 3.2X planets, and a 6.4X system, so the dv requirements for transfers are fairly substantial, and I need SpaceY parts to get anything large anyplace (if I want my rockets to look like rockets, and not contraptions).

Nils, you should do whatever you think is aesthetically best regarding the airlocks. I like them to "fit," but I totally understand not having one on every part. I add a gangway airlock to most bases, just for roleplaying. The emergency hatch on the roof is because the game pulls crewed parts as rescues at random, and the other doors are not visible when retracted, so there's not much you can do about that. That said, I think the image above looks nice, but that's just me, and if you don't like them, you should do what you think looks best! If you keep the current parts instead of the new versions, a full-sized airlock part (like the command part) for inline use might be cool (others have suggested this) for people who want that. It could have a door like the ones you just made for lateral egress/ingress, and/or one in the "inline" direction. Like this (I'll show my age with a crappy ascii drawing, the hab is deployed, the Hs are the hatch options): [FONT=courier new] _______ _|_____| _H_ | | | | hab |AL | |_______|_ _| |_____| H [/FONT][FONT=courier new] _______ [/FONT] [FONT=courier new]_|_____| ___[/FONT] [FONT=courier new]| | |[/FONT] [FONT=courier new]| hab |AL H[/FONT] [FONT=courier new]|_______|___|[/FONT] [FONT=courier new] |_____| [/FONT] [FONT=courier new] [/FONT] Again, do what you think looks right. - - - Updated - - - If you did a full-sized (undeployed ha/lab/greenhouse width) AL part, then maybe for KIS support it could include a small volume of built-in storage? That could be cool, and make it more than just a role-playing part. Perhaps it has 2 crew spots.

You disagreeing doesn't make it untrue. The meaningful statistic for safety wrt power production is deaths per kWh. For the whole world total, deaths per tWh. Coal and hydro are terrible (the latter largely from a huge dam disaster in China---and actually chinese coal is also pretty bad). Solar and wind kill very few people, but the power they produce is no more than noise, so a tiny handful of deaths wrecks their mortality rate. Note that they have very low rates, under 1 death per tWh. Nukes are safer because they make so very much power, with relatively few issues. If we had a Chernobyl every few years, they'd start looking less safe (they'd still beat coal since nuke power beats coal by 3 orders of magnitude). Space reactors are not a problem. I'd imaging they'd want as few points of failure as possible, so I'd expect pebble bed designs, anyway, which are incredibly safe.

Nuclear is incredibly safe in deaths per unit power produced. Safer than wind or solar. Solar is often placed on roofs, and one fall can kill their average. The nuke mortality includes Chernobyl. Being worried about nuclear power is like being worried about flying while driving to the airport (more dangerous than the flight by a wide margin).

The mk3 cockpit is a 4 kerbal part, and weighs in at ~3 tons, vs the mk1-2s 4.12, for which you get more strength, battery, RCS, and torque. Dunno how the greenhouse exploded, I've been messing with Nils' mod since first release, and have had none explode, ever.

Sinclair ZX-81

Simple solution for you, though it is just a form of "revert." Career game with core mods you won't remove as a starting point. You decide to add some new part mods. You can either make a new savegame, right before installing the mod that is descriptively named, say "Career, pre SpaceY." or you can duplicate the savegame in "saves" and play on the duplicate (giving that whole career a new name, like "Career with SpaceY."). You can switch between them, just don't use the modded parts in the original career.

This is freaking brilliant... had not occurred to me. I will do this this evening. My 9 YO son has already messed around a fair bit, as has my 11 YO daughter (who was particularly happy to see Val, et al). They are decidedly in a minority, I think, in that they cannot stand the notion of harming kerbals. It's almost crippling to them in terms of experimenting much, as they don't want to hurt them. So we have worked a little on chutes, etc. so they can survive accidents. A friend I turned on to KSP has 9 YO daughter, and she plays, but ended up embracing a fundamental problem (IMO) with default staging in KSP. She quickly realized that rockets firing with a chute on the pad at the same time often results in spinning. She is NOT like my kids, and doesn't mind watching kerbals being flung. So she makes spinning contraptions, then EVAs kerbals to see how far they can be flung. LOL.

What are your textures set to?

Yeah, an inline chute, or one integrated into the docking port should also be stock. Far more needed than some specialized plane part.

Why would a capsule have air intakes, and what use would it be without reaction wheels? Just what we need with the current "all planes" focus, to take a capsule away and sprinkle some pixie dust on it.

I've enjoyed their game for a year now, nd I paid nearly nothing for it. Any way they can monetize it is great, more power to them.

All of those things are true of self-driving cars, plus vast numbers of moving obstacles, plus weather, plus any failure is not a car tipping, it's possible deaths... and they still move faster. Guarantee the self-driving capability of Curiosity is grossly less sophisticated than driverless cars. Curiosity was first started in 2004, and launched in 2011. Had autonomous driving been added the morning it was launched, it would still be woefully behind in capability compared to self-driving cars. Pre-2010 tech for that? Yeah, it has some capability, but it's not the same at all. It need not drive "fast" to drive substantially faster than it does now (cm or m per hour). - - - Updated - - - I'm not sure it's a "scam" in the nigerian email sense as much as it is a very poorly considered idea. I think that doubling down on feasibility in the face of facts to the contrary is starting to head into scam territory (though the only ones possibly scammed are any billionaires dumb enough to throw truckloads of money at them.

Or use a mk3 cockpit, more crew, more impact resistance, more heat resistance, more battery, more mono, more torque... 25% lighter. For reasons.

Yeah, but you could send a bunch of robotic rovers for the same cost/mass as the ~4 humans that would likely go. I'd like to see NASA talk to google about a future rover. If you can avoid cyclists, pedestrians, and people in wheelchairs chasing a duck in the street, you can probably manage to drive on Mars pretty well, only having to worry about static objects.

Putting the hatches were they are for every other part cases the same problem, as if you want a good RCS placement you MUST place them all over the hatches, etc. We need stock 45 degree RCS.

The hatch should be on the same side as the windows, as it was on Apollo, not on the bottom (as it is in Ven's otherwise awesome mod). All these orientations shown above demonstrate the need for a 45 degree RCS part. I always in fact end up rotating the hitchhiker and lab to basically match the mk1-2 pod on stations because my CM is usually overlapping with those parts, and I want RCS to not overlap rungs, hatches, or windows.

Nice idea, I like it. I'd like to see the crew have mass as well.

If you go to the Sandia National Laboratories video site, you can find their uncommented video, and some images. Go to historical, they show the post-site inspection as well. 1988 rocket-sled test by Sandia Labs, on Flickr 1988 rocket-sled test by Sandia Labs, on Flickr

Except career is goofy, so if a planet killer was coming, the most effective solution would be to decline the contract, Kerbin saved!

Not much else to do in NM but eat chile, and blow stuff up

Ah, An Albuquerque video, cool. Destructive testing guys have a lot of fun.

A robot sample return mission allowed the same mass to Mars as a manned mission would collect the same mass of samples as the manned mission, PLUS the total mass of what would have been crew and life support, minus the mass of the actual robot.

I think the issue is likely the image. OP's point is that if you look at the outlined area (not the calculated volume), the area shown in the sat image looks to be substantially smaller than what they calculated. Here is the actual image, the news article cuts the scale off (stupid reporters): It looks to be on the rough order of 8km^2 based on the scale, needs to be 12+. Course that's me just eyeballing it.