tater

With stock kerbin and DRE, even a direct munar reentry requires work to burn up your craft. If you send your craft from the moon on the shortest possible path to kerbin surface? You'd probably impact before burning up. I haven't had any issues reentering with DRE in 6.4X Kerbin, frankly. Not once so far… Not saying stock will be anything like DRE, but it's really not a big deal.

It's important to remember that what NASA would prefer to spend money on has little bearing on what they are required to spend money on. Any decision involves which districts need to be bought off. That's the reality of spending other people's money, and always has been. It's why the first 6 frigates of the USN were all built in different shipyards in different states, using wood and parts from yet more states. NASA would likely prefer to buy spacecraft developed without using ANY of their own budget, for example, but that doesn't mean the people controlling their budget want that when they have powerful contributors and interests that are with Lockmart, or Boeing.

If the crew is at normal human temps inside (20 degrees), then the ship itself is that temp, and visible. Stealth is not possible, period. Decoys are obvious, too. Their movement and acceleration give them away compared to signature.

It is pork, plain and simple. Since the Washington administration we've seen the same model of spending, and SLS/Orion are no different. NASA had to sign off on it to get a budget, and the people funding secured pork in the right districts.

This. The lack of time-based mechanics is a serious problem on multiple levels.

Any homeopathic things that work are by accident, not intent. Read the quote above from the founder of said insanity. It's hokum (as is chiropractic).

The thruster plate (from PF) does this, but a stock option would be better. They should remove the tank bottoms from all the engines, though. They also need a stage separator that works with clusters out of the box, as well.

Homeopathy has exactly zero scientific basis, whatsoever. Their dilution rates are to below zero. They claim that water has " a memory." You can dilute their supposed treatment to the point it's gone, then use the water to make more. If it were true, every sip of water on earth would already have therapeutic levels of homeopathic cures for every ailment on earth.

All it needs is the ability to load craft files from other saves, and hyper edit functionality in terms of placing craft in different locations in the kerbol system. (does hyper edit allow you to set year/day?) Any limitations you have on budget/facilities are not needed (as your craft files will reflect this). Seeing the thread made me think, "I heard you like simulators, so here's a simulator within a simulator for you." What if a player is in career mode, and they want to simulate the guys in the simulator needing to simulate something? Can we have a simulator mode within simulator mode, just in case?

^^^yeah, that was well played.

There is no such thing as "alternative" medicine. There are therapies that have been demonstrated in controlled studies to be effective, and those that have not are hokum. It's fine to test some (actual medicines like sow palmetto for BPH, for example) to see if they work, but some don't even need that to debunk--- and practitioners invariably avoid controlled testing ( etc). What is sickening is that some are given legitimacy by the government---like chiropractic is by inclusion in government health care legislation.

The penalty is set to difficulty setting. Easy is no LS, normal hits rep, hard kills kerbals. Going anywhere far without LS makes kerbals equal to robots.

Refractors are fun, though obviously you want a larger objective for deep sky stuff… and dark skies. The Great Nebula in Orion is also easy to spot with any scope as it is a naked eye object (least out here in the high desert). Venus is easy to spot as well, but not terribly satisfying. Mars can look nice in a small telescope as well---oh, and of course Saturn.

Jupiter is a good bet right now. At 21:00 local, it's about straight up here at 35 degrees latitude, and the brightest thing in that position. You can make out 4 moons even with good binoculars (4 are not always visible at any given time). Check out the moon ideally when no where near full, so there are better shadows to show detail.

KCT has this, but honestly, that's what revert is actually for. Perhaps sandbox could have a hyperedit feature, and the ability to load craft files from other saves.

A better analogy: Many airlines have gone out of business, and have mothballed airliners lying around. Why not convert them in SSTs? They're both aircraft, right?

As just the customer, time in flight is an issue for me on flights above some number of hours… how many is sort of fuzzy. SSTs would not be used over inhabited areas, so we have to confine it to transoceanic travel. As it is, airliners don't even fly as fast as they did in the '60s, as they fly lower cruise speeds to increase fuel economy (I want to say the average is ~10% slower). That's about 30 minutes on a 5 hour flight, but an hour savings is nothing to sneeze at for a 10 hour long haul. Unless it could be more cost effective, somehow, it seems like an unlikely choice for an airline to make on small margins driven by cost competition. There might be a model where all long-haul flights are either SST or current systems. Current would become all coach (increasing margins), and the SSTs would get all business(?) and certainly all first class seats. Right now business class costs what 1st used to cost, and 1st class (say to asia from the US) has no analog to 1st class even a decade or 2 ago. Stateroom-like 1st class is a new invention. $17,000 to asia might be profitable on an SST, I have no idea. For mass use it would require a sea change in the way the cost structures work, I think.

Makes no sense at all to send an old habitat, not designed for a mission in deep space, into deep space. Radiation issues alone would be enough to nix the idea, even if it was all brand new modules. Heck, it's not really fit for cislunar use, much less Mars. The number of reasons to use it are virtually nil, and the reasons against such use are about as many as you could name attributes of the ISS as a LEO facility.

Years ago I was running public night at the campus observatory and a guy was trying to show his girlfriend where to look and said it was to the right of the 3 stars that make a triangle. When that didn't help her I said it was not a problem because any 3 stars make a triangle unless they manage to find 3 in a line.

I thought it was pretty clear in context that they were being rotated, myself.

Landing anywhere but a prepared runway for a "spaceplane" is sort of silly unless it has VTOL capability. Generally speaking, I'd like landing ops to take more attention, not less attention. Doesn't matter to me, even if I ever decide to build a spaceplane, I couldn't bring myself to land anywhere but a runway.

Wow, this looks really nice.

I'll be the first to say, Happy Birthday!

In August when I started I was baffled by the ladder unlock and did orbital munar missions, etc, so I could unlock a ladder. RCS on EVA never occurred to me.

Probes should have cameras anyway.