tater

I'd be much more interested in the ability (tied to resources, funds, etc) to build facilities anywhere you like. Say the Mun. On Kerbin, transportation can be assumed. Anywhere else, you'd have to land XXX tons of "construction equipment," then a small facility gets built in situ---like a VAB for airless worlds limited to certain parts/tonnages (dependent upon "supplies" being delivered, etc).

I agree. I've been pretty vocal about the entire tech tree paid by science paradigm being wrong to begin with, but assuming we are stuck with this system, a profound change within the current system would be better. Meaning science as currency for tech, and e have an extant system for providing parts based upon contracts as well. Intuitive would be missions driving technology to gain (planetary) science, not (planetary) science driving technology to permit missions.

Yep, we're about as likely to contact aliens as this happening. Actually, there is a non-zero chance we could contact aliens, so the alien contact is actually far more likely.

Still, any stealth is functionally a special case. In a universe of initial starting conditions for a fight, stealth would be an exceedingly rare accident Directional radiators cannot be a go-to answer, however. If that is the only made up tech (with supercooling the opposite side). You are still required to know the location of all enemy sensors. If this is our given, any enemy that you need worry about will simply throw passive sensors all around the system. The countermeasures are simply too easy, and stealth stops being a thing even if in special cases it is possible. Our aggressor appears, and is spotted on the hot side however many light seconds away the nearest sensor is on that side. That sensor likely gets spotted, but not before it sends a warning. If that sensor is a weapons system, the fight might be over as the x-Rays hit the target as the warning simultaneously flys by to "home." That's aside from the energy increase needed to actively cool one side. If the enemy is not that advanced, you don't need stealth. If relativistic flight is possible, stealth is the least of the target world's problems assuming a "total war" paradigm.

Many people have intuitions that are not correct, fwiw. Knowing something about real life informs my intuition, and as a result when I see parts appearing late in the tree that I know are coincident with far earlier parts, I might understand there is a "game" reason for the location, but it's not at all intuitive. I said it way up the thread, but almost everything in this tree was in play in RL before 1965 (effectively coincident, not a real progression). I suppose this puts me in the camp of not having a starting node per se, and having a massively parallel tree structure, letting the player decide. I would add that if this is not about replacing the stock tree, anyone modding their game likely doesn't need total noob spoon-feeding.

Not at all, how could I have objections, you are giving me free, awesome stuff The image on that stripe is for the scout service:

Those gear look pretty cool. Course that would mean a couple other parts, and some inset boxes to snap them into.

I read that post. Drifting in from another system seems pretty absurd, the great, great grandchildren of the "attacker" would be interested to discover the result, except they won't know, either, unless they send a craft for BDA, and maybe their GGGG grandchildren can find out. If that's the case throw a rock. If ships have FTL, they need not contain themselves to the ecliptic, they can FTL out of plane, then use normal space if stealth were considered a thing (if you consider it real, then all reasonable countermeasures will also become a thing, so there will be sensors scattered all around, etc). A hard x-ray laser? What is pumping it, a bomb? If it is a reactor… all that energy has to be radiated. You really have to jump through hoops to try and justify any sort of stealth in space, even in special cases. For what people think of generally as SF combat (we will assume FTL drive as the sole conscious attempt to violate physics), we have to have warships appearing in system, then finding the enemy (who is now also magically stealthy), maneuvering without being seen (impossible), etc. One of the guys we hashed this out with around 20 years ago is an IR astronomer (at the time he was at Mauna Kea). Even a comfortable crew compartment is a relatively bright IR source for an early 1990s IR telescope. He did the math on reasonable (current at the time) telescope systems, and whole sky surveys capable of detecting "player" sized starships were easy to do, as they could be very wide field. If the ship was actually powered up, it was "naked eye" visible in magnitude (except in IR) at a vast range. We did this because we actually wanted stealth to work, but it just doesn't. With a lot of hand-wavium, we managed to get some sensor rules for a space combat game that allowed some mitigation of otherwise automatic detection at great range. At any sort of tactical range… all ships are easily visible. Again, I'd stress that for a nitty-gritty discussion, you really need to nail down the specifics of the SF universe people are dealing with so we are all on the same page. If it is Earth vs Mars using nothing we don;t have now, that is different than having a space warship using FTL drive to go to a nearby system to attack. - - - Updated - - - Yeah, but the time frame involved is pretty short, so the target will only alter their heading by a little assuming they are moving at a decent clip. Assuming you know the best they can do burn wise, their future position is still little changed, in other words.

If you look in the VAB, chuck some RCS on the bottom in "Mirror" mode. You will see that they are not centered.

Directional radiators presume knowledge of where enemy detectors are. Accept stealth for the sake of argument (bad given, but wth). Enemy sensor platforms and picket ships are now also stealthy. I am presuming FTL, as any 1- system scenario has us seeing every single ship take off anyway. So a wild enemy ship appears. Where does it point the magical radiator (since it is being watched by "invisible" sensor platforms it cannot know the location of)? How does it maneuver without being seen? Decoys… Decoys are not a thing. Any decoy that would work would be another whole ship, it can't just look like a ship in IR (aside from the fact that it might well be resolved anyway with a space based telescope), it needs to act like one, and that means observed drive plumes matching the altered orbit. That means the right mass. Being in front of the sun would certainly mitigate detection, but from the earth, for example, that's 0.5 degrees to hide in, as you must by definition be directly between the sensor and the star. Even then you are then transiting, and now a dark contrast. If if you want stealth, you should stop trying to pretend to have "hard" SF, and posit "subspace radiators" or something. - - - Updated - - - How does A know B is there? LOS is reciprocal. A cannot get to the far side easily without knowing at all times where B is, even when it is unseen. It would s not impossible to imagine rare cases where a ship might find itself surprised, but both would likely be surprised, and this would be very, very rare.

Admiral-Helwyr let me mess with the Scout to test and suggested I post comments/issues here. Very cool. A few points: 1. Unless there are going to be markings on the back, the dark areas in the white stipe might as well not be there (flag decal there, instead?) 2. The ship doesn't appear centered, I was gonna throw some RCS on there, and it is offset. 3. The CM seems in the geometric center, and it is likely actually closer to the turret location front to back (and midpoint in cross section).

There are already too many rescues, though I am fine with them being more interesting. They should only appear within the SoI of bodies the player has planted a flag on, however.

Again, you need to define all available tech. Anti-missile fire is basically 100% effective, it's only a matter of at what range (the FC solution is trivial as you know exactly where it is going, and eventually its bearing will not change). Unmanned warships are possible, but also the expendable as targets (your own ships would be similarly unmanned, and you'd not mind losing them anyway). if you posit drifting probes that have missiles, you need to think about timescales. Were they dropped in the Oort Cloud, and did a retro burn 10,000 years ago to fall into the system, or did the war start a few weeks ago (assume some FTL, unless we are talking one solar system)? In that case ships need to appear somewhere in system, then engage targets. Depending upon your FTL flavor they won't know where the enemy is.

You cannot keep the ship from radiating IR, period. Failure to do so cooks the crew, period. How do you radiate inside, exactly? That's where the heat already is. The only reason FOR stealth is presumably war, right? Your spacecraft cannot be moving fast, as that would take a visible burn. As a result, the weapon is not a KE weapon. Any directed energy weapon requires massive power inputs… all of which power, must be radiated. All. Megajoules per cm^2 worth for directed energy weapons. This has been beaten to death by space warfare gaming geeks for ages on the net, very possibly since before you were born (we had long discussions about it on USENET in the 1980s, back when the ante to be on the net at all was to be in science or engineering at the university level). The answer has not changed.

Driven by a kerbal with a lobotomy? J. Frank Kerman.

I play stock when a new version comes out so that I can make intelligent commentary on the changes here. I'd play heavily modded if the game was more stable while heavily modded, as I think it needs many mods, frankly.

Wow! That was fast.

Grasshoppers aren't bad, but don't eat the big legs, they get stuck in your teeth.

I posted a similar thread. Stock fairings don't reliably make interstages (I tried a couple times more than I should have to, then installed PF which simply works). PF autostruts, which as was said above makes sense since the fairing/shroud IS the structural linkage (ksp acts like the rocket is balanced on the engine bell). I also use KJR for the same reason (and to lower part counts to delay my inevitable crash after x minutes of play).

The landing gear should break off on anything but tarmac anyway.

A traveller RPG Scout/Courier would be cool. http://traveller.chromeblack.com/scout-courier/ http://th00.deviantart.net/fs70/PRE/f/2013/032/1/d/type_s_scout_by_arcas_art-d5sg7o5.jpg

The problem is the OP asks effectively for a number, and I can cook rather a lot. Even a number of types of cuisine would be hard to come up with. American, Mexican, French, Thai, Chinese, Swedish, Indian, Moroccan, just to name a few I have recently done.

Conservation of energy, and conservation of momentum. Think about it a while.

A round hakenkreuz means nothing at all. Or do you have images of it painted on aircraft, etc?

It doesn't matter, I did several experiments mentioned above, I think. I had a 20km periapsis, and hit between 11 and 12 km/s.The heat shield burned off almost instantly, but the pod (mk1-2) was still almost 9000 m/s, now with no heat shield. Landed just fine.