Gaarst

An accretion disk would stand a lot closer to the Kerbal sun that what you see. A protoplanetary disk would have been blown away by the early star's solar wind (young stars have stronger solar winds than older ones) long before the Kerbals era (if it didn't Kerbin and the other planets would still technically be forming by accreting materials and they would not look like what they are not, at all). I don't see the link between planets densities and the star's activity. Kerbin is ten times denser than Earth, a body with a diameter of 600km; in fact smaller/lighter bodies are less dense than Earth (the Solar systems dwarf planets have densities of around 2-2.5, compare that to 5.5 for Earth and 58 for Kerbin, even the gas planet Jool has a density of 4.7). These densities are just too high for planet sized objects. Then again, the Kerbal system is old. Kerbin has liquid water, an atmosphere and evolved life, which all suggest it's billions of years old. The protoplanetary disk did its thing long ago. Timescales do not match, again. A recent heavy bombardment suggest an unstable system, hence too young for Kerbin to reach its current state: it would still be in an intense geologic and volcanic phase, similar to the early days of Earth, during the Late Heavy Bombardment. Either the craters are recent and Kerbin would not have evolved life and liquid water; or the craters are old, implying Kerbin's tectonic is non-existant (cooled core) and Kerbin's atmosphere shouldn't be there. If Kerbin cooled extremely fast, then this would again suggest no tectonics so no magnetic field and no atmosphere. Also, Kerbin is technically not a planet considering the large number of asteroids with similar SMAs. The Kerbal sun is actually over three times less dense than our Sun. It also is 110 times lighter, weighing slightly over 9 MJ, making it too light to even be a brown dwarf, let alone a MS star. Assuming the Kerbal sun's spectrum is close to our Sun as it is mainly white/yellow (spectrum centered on visible part of the spetrum), we can assume a temperature of 5800K. It's blackbody luminosity should then be about 1/7 that of the Sun. The solar irradiance at Kerbin should then be 16 times that at Earth or about 2 times that at Mercury. Taking the solar irradiance at Kerbin to be that of the Earth (similar conditions), the Kerbal sun's luminosity should be 115 times smaller than the Sun's. It would then have a bolometric magnitude of 9.9 making it a K or M type star with surface temperatures of 3500-4000K, which means it is a red dwarf. So depending on where you're standing, the Kerbal sun is a G (yellow) type star, a red dwarf, or a big Jupiter; and Kerbin is either burning, warmish or freezing. This contradicts special relativity. See above. It depends on where you are. Andromeda is visible to the naked eye. And we did not realised it was a galaxy until the 1920s. About expansion, it depends on a lot of physical stuff related to the evolution of the universe. Since we can only study one universe (if there exists others), any conclusion on that matter is guessing. Conclusion: applying real world cosmology (or science in general) to the Kerbal universe doesn't work.

Your craft would probably be ripped apart by tidal forces before that point.

I play with a "RSS non-RO" install, mods list in my sig. Note that I don't play career with this install so I haven't got any mods which change career gameplay; but it will hopefully be enough for a basis. I have very few visual mods and this install runs fine on my laptop.

The same as you would in sandbox. Only with less parts.

It's garbage something collection (Unity cleaning up RAM bits that are not used anymore I think). It was there way before 1.2 and I thought it was supposed to be reduced with 1.2. I don't know/remember ways to fix it, but I know there is no magical solution: you can probably reduce it, but it will stop whenever it wants.

There is a mod that does it. Though it's no excuse for this kind of shortcoming. The current CoL isn't the actual CoL, and even then, no one cares about CoL: what matters is CoP, which includes drag and is essential when designing crafts made to fly at high AoA.

This. While I like the idea of a comm network, the fact that we still can't plan manoeuvres doesn't make any sense. There should be a way to plan nodes when you have comms available so that you can still execute them (automatically maybe, with no direct control if they go wrong) even if your craft is on the dark side of the Mun, Duna, Jool, Sun, whatever.

Yeah "hourglasses", in addition of being ugly, are quite draggy and your results don't surprise me. Though I would tend to think that the 1.25 > 2.5 junction (Terrier to 2.5 tank) causes more drag than the 2.5 > 1.25 junction (2.5 tank to Terrier). I would be interested in result you could obtain by sticking adapters above or below the Terrier and comparing the difference in drag due to their position. Also, remembering the results I obtained on my tests, you might want to try using larger fuel tanks so that your rocket burns longer. The reason is that with flights averaging around 10km I assume that none did overcome transonic speeds (probably due to fuel and not drag); while in my tests the difference between non-aerodynamic shapes and aerodynamic ones was essentially seen when approaching Mach 1: while draggy shapes never made it out transonic, aerodynamic ones felt almost no effect during the transition from sub- to supersonic. You'd get even clearer results if all the flights get through this transonic regime at one point, seeing the effects depending on the shape.

Spend a bit more time watching these (and other space related stuff) and you will soon start to appreciate how unrealistic KSP is.

I doubt the stock slim shuttle has the capabilities to go to the Mun, let alone land and return (winged crafts have this obvious flaw where they need air to function properly). I'm assuming you are relatively new to KSP as this seems to be an early Mun mission, so I suggest you forget about shuttles for a while and stick to regular rockets (you'll find out that shuttle are about the most difficult thing to design and fly in KSP). Now, if you need help improving your current Munar rocket design to rescue your stranded Kerbals, then post a picture and we'll be happy to help. Edit: also I'm summoning mods to move this to Gameplay Questions and Tutorials which is appropriate for this kind of issues.

In addition to that, Z is zetta- or 1021 and Y is yotta- or 1024. I don't think there are any official names beyond that.

Or you can use µ and not bother considering G and planet masses (that is what astronomers do, because we have very poor accuracy on the value of G). Though calculating the mass of Kerbin wouldn't be very hard. Edit: assuming the orbital values for the Mun and Minmus on the Wiki are correct (big assumption), Kerbin's mass is 5.2915x1022 kg with the new value of G. Edit2: and using values obtained from KER, I get 5.2897x1022 kg Well, we can conclude that Kerbin has two masses! Or that on rails orbits are wrong. I'm wondering if/how orbits of vessels launched before 1.2 will be affected by this change.

Bon appétit !

How often? No. I won't say it's cheating because half of the forums will come screaming at me, but just that I find them a bit OP.

RSS has a modified warp bar (x1, x10, x100, x1000 and so on) so it's definitely possible as a mod. Now when doing really long transfers I usually set up another mission in the meantime, I don't just wait for each mission to complete one by one, so I feel like this might not be needed for stock.

Build a space station?

Your name can be changed. Once only though.

The Switch has a big list of partners, of which a lot of AAA developers/editors; and Unity. Who knows, there might even be KSP on that thing. Not that I care the least about it though. Edit: duplicate with this one:

Not saying this is not a good idea. I'm just saying Squad has its own sense of priorities. I wouldn't be surprised if this was added while we're still missing basic stuff.

We still don't have basic and essential information displayed on vessel view (apo, peri...) or dV readouts anywhere, and you're asking for a wind tunnel simulating airflow? Priorities

You need SpaceY Heavy Lifters which contains all the textures.

And now I have to send dozens of probes to the Mun and Minmus to find it (hoping its not on Kerbin because I'm not inspecting Kerbin today). Well time to learn how to use comms and KerbNet I guess.

What I meant was that Kerbals are already intended to be experiment subjects or early-test pilots. Adding animals to make these tests wouldn't make any sense when most of the game's advertising is based on reckless and silly little creatures testing their own machines in situ. Also, Kerbals are fake. Dogs are not, and for some reason killing dogs seem to upset a lot of people. Adding a fake animal would once again be redundant with the concept of Kerbals, and also, as stated above animals are not put in rockets by their free will so that would raise more ethical concerns. Humanising Kerbals at any point is/was a mistake. But then it comes down to the realism debate: KSP has shifted to a more realistic game recently (comms, genders, contracts...) than it was originally. While I like realism and myself play with a good lot of mods adding realism, I don't really like stock KSP's realism when the surface is enhanced with each update but the core gameplay (rocket mechanics) is as basic as ever. I think KSP should have stayed unrealistic and left realism to mods, or hard-shifted to more accurate realism in Beta; but not staying somewhere in between. Kerbals evolution is the same: we have genders, Kerbals that pass out with high G-load, individual specialisations... but they are still powered by zero point energy. Back to the topic: test animals in KSP are not a good idea IMO.

Me be back, smashing records (and planes)! With a brand new flying brick (seriously, this thing has no lift) that I took up to 236,287m only to crash land safely in the ocean and destroy 21 parts, for a final score of 235,972 points (under 236k points but I went over 236km so I'm satisfied). (Since I tried to land this thing about a million times and F9'd as many times, the max altitude shown by the F3 menu is wrong as usual) I read the rules, and technically my entry is valid: there is nothing saying that the plane must land on land and in one bit (plus, I removed points for destroyed parts) and Valentina is still alive. If anyone would like to improve my design and land it safely so that we can get over 236k points, go ahead! (Since this seems to have become more about breaking maximum altitude than making a proper plane, my next entry, if any, will probably be a missile)

They don't. They are powered by thermonuclear fusion.