MaxMurder

This must have been the scene at Squad when .17 went live.

Amazing work! This is incredibly helpful and i haven't even tried using it in practice yet. I now have a good rule of thumb to go by as far as phase angles go. My first duna mission took 4 years to reach the planet. Now ill probably be able to do it in less than a month!

o.O Awesome! I was hoping that this was possible as i hate both fullscreeen and windowed... but fullscreen-windowed is perfect!

Remember KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) from your description it seems that you are building ungodly huge rockets. Unnecessarily big rockets tend to fail miserably as they are so heavy that they will crush themselves under their own weight. Having a lot of thrust will add to the problem as the G forces become more extreme. Start with the smallest design possible, try not to use full throttle if your rockets are exploding frequently (keep an eye on your g meter), don't add unessasary boosters (if its gaining velocity it has enough), plan your stages carefully (launch stage should get you out of the atomosphere, orbit stage should take you to orbit and TMI, lander stage for landing and an optional return stage) and always remember KISS!

I doubt that you could actually build a castle of regolith irl... the absence of water would probably make it very hard to retain a structure. Although this may be a good question for the Mythbusters.

Love this idea Nova! A perfect tribute to the heroes of the space age.

Congrats guys! Hopefully this brings in lots of new players! I found out about ksp when RPS did a article on it... im fairly certian those IGN guys are stoned in that video.

I always put 4 legs on my landers as 3 tends to be too unstable. They say a tripod is the most stable structure... id like them to say that after my lander touched down with 1ms horizontal velocity then immediately tips over and breaks in half.

they are both amazing! welcome to the true world of gaming my good sir....

Most games do not even get announced until they are in beta... the fact that we have such unprecedented access to information about KSPs development is incredible. Major game dev's would regard the info the KSP team gives out regularly as highly confidential, sensitive, trade secret information. After working for a major dev studio i know that just mentioning any development related information can get you fired and blacklisted from ever working in the industry again. We should feel extremely privileged that we get anything more than a release date... I am very grateful that Squad has allowed us to follow along with the development of this incredible game!

China plan to put men on the moon by 2020. As the SLS probably wont be even doing test flights until that time they will likely be next. Although there is the possibility of a private company doing it first, however private spaceflight has just now begun to operate in LEO and do not have any significant manned operations. Unless the industry picks up considerable steam in the next eight years then China will be the next on the moon.

Im guessing that this is a mix of a ridiculous number of plugins and a huge amount of high poly parts. By the look of those parts you could probably fry an egg on your video card...

I don't know if you got the memo... but the rp forums were shut down months ago...

Piracy is more of a social problem than a technical one. No amount of DRM will stop pirates from cracking and distributing it. Some people just believe that if they can get the product for free on the internet why bother purchasing it at all. A while back i remember hearing that a Pay-what-you-want for-charity humble indy bundle was cracked and being distributed free (which imo is essentially kleptomania). Draconian DRM only serves to compound the problem, making games near unplayable for many legitimate users while pirates play worry free. For example i have had to download cracks for Spore multiple times even though i purchased the game legitimately, i lost the cd key long ago and there is no way i can play without the crack. Other games i have bought and am completely unable to play because i do not have a 1Gbps internet connection and time out the authentication servers. Now i make a habit of researching games before I buy. Do they have intrusive DRM? Do I need to be connected to a server in order to play? Is it a Ubisoft game ? If so i will avoid it all together as this causes more headaches than it is worth. Most DRM strategies only exist to convince shareholders that they are fighting the pirates and safeguarding their investment. I applaud Squad and all other devs who are anti-drm. It is humbling to know that there are still developers who actually trust their customers enough to let them play their without a full cavity search beforehand.

As it develops i can see KSP becoming extreamly popular. Everyone I turn on turn on to the game love it. The biggest turn offs are usually lack of planets to visit and steep learning curve (both of which will likely be fixed in .17). However most people (I know) understand the concept of WIP development and instead see the games immence potental. Hopeflly enough Kerbanaughts spread the word and KSP will become a smash mainstream sucsess! (which it totally has the potental for) Also KSP can really inspire people about space and can be used as a learning tool! Most the most ive learned about orbital mechanics and menuvers i learned playing KSP!

I see your star fighter and raise you... EDIT: BTW... how does one add spoiler tags with this new fangled fourum thingy? is usually the standard

There over 3/4s of the way to their goal now... and its only 10 days in. It looks like the are going to meet their target! Hopefully they can also meet at least a few of their stretch goals as well. I am SOOOO exited for this game!!!! Almost as exited as i am for KSP .17

Wow... Congrats Squad! Now just wait for the next generation of NASA spacecraft to be designed initally using KSP...

The arches are just meshes like buildings, munoliths, rocks etc... To make caves or a re-write of the terrain engine would likely need to be undertaken. Not worth it IMO. EDIT: Ninjad! Darn you vostok!

You can actually make rather nice stations with strictly stock parts. They wont look as nice as Kosmos pack stations but they get the job done... For the station body and structure use the structural fuselage as it is much lighter than the fuel tanks. Once you are in orbit you wont need much fuel so design your launch vehicle to take you almost there This way you can get away with just having a small engine and a single fuel tank for circularization and orbit operations. Alternatively you can use a stack of RCS tanks and linear RCS for station propulsion. The extendable ladders can be used as decorative antennas or solar panels, inverted landing legs for satellite dishes, stacks of big radial decouples for experiment racks. To get perpendicular modules just place a radial decoupler on the main body then put a 90degree turned fuselage onto it so it is half inside the body. I will post some pics of a few of my stock stations/satellites later. EDIT: Actually I already have a few! Sorry for the lack of spoiler... WTF kind of forum engine has no spoiler tag?!?

Yes this is a very interesting app. A bit off topic: If a minecraft world can be a max size of 108 quadrillion blocks (according to the app), could one actually be able to store all the world data with any HDD in existence? According to the wiki minecraft blocks are at least 8 bytes plus an additional 4 bytes for special information. This means that if every chunk in the world had been generated the file size of the world would need to be a whopping 500 petabytes, which by today's standards is an impossibly large amount of information. The largest data storage array ever built only has a capacity of 120 petabytes. The Blue Waters super computer which is currently under construction will have a storage capacity of 500 petabytes. Perhaps it will be used to create the first full fledged minecraft world...

I believe that moon distance earth actually would be inside Jupiters atomosphere. I cant wait to drop a kerbal into it to see whats inside!

Lookin good nova! Im wondering if its possible to animate the planet's texture over time as to get some swirling effects in the atomosphere. It would be a really neat effect especially when warping. Also it would serve to give the planet a more fluid feel. IIRC unity can do animated textures. However, i am assuming that the planet is a simple sphere map.

Normandy Enterprise Nautilus

Jeb! you must go to the Degobah system!