tater

Real probes also have programs for contingencies (point back home, safe mode, etc), and all that have to land are entirely programmed for that function, you don't remote-control land on Mars, though you might tell it "OK, land in X minutes" then it executes the burn, chutes, retros, etc autonomously.

Why would anyone think an elaborate relay setup would be needed to communicate with spacecraft never farther away than Mars is from earth near closest approach? New Horizons is vastly farther than anything in the Kerbol system, and uses just ground stations. Voyager and Pioneer as well.

I have some IPA in the 'fridge, had I known this was a good idea, I'dve had that with dinner instead of wine.

I took german in college, I have a feel for what it sounds like Certainly closer to rhyming with loon than fun. Also, it's The Mun, as it is "the Moon" (Apollo visited the moon, not moon, and Viking visited Mars, not the Mars). So I say moon. I'm not a huge Starbucks fan, but I order small, medium and large there, when I happen to go (never ordered a large, I have to say).

Why the ü in the splash screen? That makes it closer to moon.

Docking final approach on live NASA TV right now. Nice. http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Don't hold your breath waiting for contracts that aren't lame.

Most of your blood pools in your lower extremities on earth. In space it equilibrates, which is why the first few days astronauts look really bloated, and pee a lot as their body gets rid of the fluid it feels is excess. The isometrics of velcro slippers wouldn't be remotely enough feedback to maintain bone mass, etc. That's not to mention the period of the day when you are not active. Some studies have suggested that even a moon base lacks enough gravity for long-term habitation.

The science done is actually pretty marginal. The only real value is human physiology in a microgravity environment, which we already knew was troublesome for long-duration flights (not that it is bad to characterize it). The principle function of ISS was never to do science, it was to occupy people who might otherwise end up employed making ballistic missiles for people we don't like after the fall of the CCCP.

While I agree that ISS is a waste of time for real science for the most part, and agree ASM is "it" for actual science done there, it's important to realize that the artist likely thinks all such money should have been spent on direct payments to deadbeats given his politics. I doubt his concern is that the money would have been better spent on robotic space probes that's why I voted meh.

There was no evidence at all that the capsule was "eviscerated." The shadow was shaped exactly like the dragon, and in other, similar events, the pressure vessel remained intact. Challenger, for example. It was clear the morning it happened that most of the orbiter forward of the cargo bay was tumbling intact. Dragon, designed for reentry, like any other capsule, can take far more than the event that occurred.

I'd like to see more than just idles. I'd like stations and bases (any vessel renamed with those 2 icons, perhaps) have crew aboard randomly EVA. Add a tether part for space flight. They'd only move within XX meters of the craft, straight out from the door, then look like they are doing something (an idle animation). It would make things seem much more alive to land at a base, or dock with a station to see a couple kerbals doing anything.

The guy is a whackjob, so what would you expect?

Hope all is well and you are just busy.

It's neither, and both. Why would Acme Corp ask for a pure science mission? If it was like SpaceX, then you'd get contracts from the Kerbin Space Agency to do science (that would at least make sense). That's in effect what NASA does (they supply the astronauts and missions, contractors build the stuff). If my own commercial program wants to do science because that's why we started, then why are all the science contracts coming from 3d parties? Note that as I suggested, you can have both versions possible by moving a slider of what kinds of missions you want.

Yeah, Yosemite is a train wreck. Don't even get me started on Photos. Grrr.

KAS/KIS (the 2 should simply be merged) should really be stock. I don't think it is out of scope in the least. I made a lander designed to tip over a largish (for me) rover on the surface. Why? Because the stock game has parts for rovers, but no good way to deposit them anywhere assuming you want your rockets to look like rockets, and not lollipops. Anyway, I ended up with the front of the rover pointed "up" on the rocket stack (inside a realistic sized fairing, obviously), which made for a tippy lander. That was the point. I had some verniers designed to break the fall when I retracted the gear on the rover wheel side of the lander to let it tip the rover wheels down to the surface. I don't use verniers much, or they care which way "control" is, and they fired the wrong direction. Long story, short, it ended up on the ground, but with the front 2 wheels popped. No worries, engineers can repair... oh, wait, they have to be level 3, which means an arbitrary trip outside kerbin SoI. OK, well no lvl 3, but I have an engineer, and I have KIS/KAS installed. I ended up removing a lander leg, installing it as a jack on the rover, then replacing the wheels (had to send a resupply ship with a couple wheels in storage). It was really fun. I remember about a year ago when I first started tipping over my first mun rover and watching it roll down a crater. It was pretty broken, and I had to walk/hop back to the lander several km away. Repair adds a lot, and really gives engineers something to do.

Yeah, that thing would land easily with a single 909. I don't use those engines much, but my guess is that 4 of them would be fine for a 3.75m tank.

It's actually been pretty cool here in New Mexico, monsoon came early (thanks, ENSO!) so it's only been ~32 C or so as a high, with rains in the evening cooling it off nicely (~16 nightly low---always have that sort of diurnal range in the desert).

I made a new thread so as not to derail this one: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/129155-General-Contracts-and-Career-Discussion?p=2089368#post2089368

Moved this to not derail another thread: This is likely a semantic problem with respect to the use of the word "strategy" in english. A strategy is a plan to achieve an overall aim. Outsourcing R&D is not a strategy, period, it's a tactic that might be part of a strategy. KSP suffers from some misuse of words in general (perhaps for the same reason). Mission Control in KSP is not mission control, it's a contract office of some sort. Mission Control is the part of NASA that tracks missions in flight, period. The tracking station in KSP is actually Mission Control. Again, it might stem from english as a second language for the devs. This is not my opinion, it's just english. Absolutely companies and agencies both do some of each, but it varies a lot. NASA, for example, builds almost nothing. They contract out companies to build stuff to their specs. Companies like SpaceX might have an exploration goal, but they absolutely launch stuff to pay the bills and fund research. My idea would be that the player would choose a balance as an overall strategy for the administration. In current game terms my idea would effectively be a filter that presents the player with contracts weighted to their strategy, say: 50% science contracts, 10% tourism, and 40% commercial launches and parts testing. The player would never then see more than 1 in 10 contracts offered be a tourism contract. If he/she picked 0% tourism, they'd never see any tourism contracts at all. Budget would be hard in KSP as it stands, but not impossible. Player would have to be "NASA" or "ESA," and would be given money up front for specific projects ("contracts"). They'd need good time limits, and have a real chance of failure that would hammer Rep. Bad Rep would reduce the budget next fiscal period. Losing Rep would be the loss mechanism. I don't actually disagree. I advocate for changes to contracts in semantics because as it is (at least for a native english speaker) the whole "contract" idea kills immersion for me completely. I sometimes propose career ideas that seem complex because I'm trying to work within the current system---like the idea that perhaps budget gets doled out every 50 Kerbin days, and if you run out, you time warp to the next Minmonth (a minmus month--- 50 days) to get more budget. This would force the player to move time forward (set initial budgets such that you might only launch 1-2 times every Minmonth). Combined with the tech tree that you like (the parallel one), and contracts and missions that actually time out, it might be interesting. Rescues, for example, would all have to be immediately accepted, then done pretty much instantly or you'd fail. Perhaps some contracts could be obligatory after a fashion? Say rescues are made far more rare than they are right now. You might get a rescue---all would be reasonable, you'd only get rescues for SoIs where you actually have crew already assigned---and the guy needs rescue in 15 days (I'm thinking of Roverdude's LS mod right now and default LS per pod). The mission is there for you, like it or not. Failure loses no funds at all, but results in a small rep hit (your program was not on the ball enough to be able to rescue those idiots). Success has possibly no funds reward, but a huge rep gain. So if you have guys at the Mun, you could get Mun orbit/landed rescues. If you have astronauts at Duna, then you might be asked to rescue guys there. Perhaps when such a mission is taken there is a special ability to add 1 crew to an existing craft. I like the idea of having to think through a sort of Apollo 13 scenario. With KIS/KAS I might add parts to a ship landed at a base

I don't care about anyone else's opinion regarding art, really. I've hung around with enough art people to know they can't even do math. I decide what art I like based upon actually liking it, not being told what is hip by people with an interest in changing what is hot constantly to increase values. Embarrassing for you, maybe. You said that austere is better, which means that you presumably think that simplifying the KSP terrain from what the extant Kerbol system is would be an improvement--or certainly the Mun, which has more complex cratering that other worlds. HarvesteR: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/entries/667-Procedural-Craters On-topic, the Mun is the least boring of the current non-kerbin worlds, contrary to OP's claim it is the most boring. Your image above shows a decent screenshot composition (and a mod that adds colliders to scatter?). KSP is not about screen shots, it's about flying spacecraft. I'm far more concerned with what landing operations are like than what kind of screenshot I might compose (particularly in stock). If stock allowed large masses on trees, that would be a physics failure (physics should trump looks in KSP, too). The tools players have to work with in "sandbox" are not landscapes, but parts. The creativity shown by the landscape in KSP belongs entirely to the devs. You can make interesting craft regardless of the terrain---and if architecture is a model for this, the best includes the site, and if every site is identical, then architecture loses this constraint. My own real house would be rather boring without the mountain it is bermed into, and the boulders that are both inside and outside the house. For my creativity with terrain I'd need a model where I could crater bodies myself (or otherwise modify terrain).

Actually, that's fine if the deployable parts don't hold inventory, just mark the airlock as where such storage goes, and use that---makes them useful (I put 'em on for looks, anyway). You could make a "mudroom" part that combines airlock with KIS storage

You'd be wrong. Aside from looking better, which is secondary, it would create more complex terrain to have to navigate. That's the point of the terrain, to present novel situations to land on, nothing more. Heck, ideally the scatter would have colliders for the same reason. BTW, that video does exactly nothing for me, I watched about 15 seconds of it---9 minutes would be against the Geneva convention to show it to POWs.

Non-argument. Would KSP be improved if the airless worlds were just as detailed terrain wise as the Mun, yes or no? That game (snake) is actually pretty fancy. My go-to old game is netkack. In a vt102 window.