Gaarst

@NecroBones, nice one ! Trying it right now ! I'll see what these things can do in RSS.

Ooooooh, I'm curious about that future use !

Worked on the future of my RSS lunar program. Got a station design for Low Lunar Orbit a few days ago. This will allow longer Kerbal presence around the Moon but did not change the way landings are done: a lunar rocket still has to be sent for a regular landing, with a lunar lander and command module, for a couple days in lunar orbit only. But, now I have decided to use a reusable lander for landings. The lander will be sent to LLO empty of all fuel, and remain docked to the station until it is used; thanks to this reusable lander (currently named MRL, I'll let you guess the meaning), the lunar flights will spare the cost and mass of a lander and will only have to carry the fuel it needs for a lunar descent and ascent. Additional fuel storage of the station will make it able to do landings whenever fuel is available, so that a launch from Earth is not necessarily needed. From then, when the station, lander and additional station modules needed to store fuel will be in orbit, a lunar landing will be possible anytime as long as there is enough fuel. Lunar missions from Earth will then be of 2 types: Crew transfer + fuel: a large rocket (probably derived from my current Moon rocket but slightly smaller) will bring crew to the station as well as enough fuel for one landing (a bit more if possible). Crew transfer only: a smaller rocket will only bring crew to the station, when landings are not planned or if fuel is already available for a landing on board the station. The lander seats 3 Kerbals for an autonomy of over 7 Earth days, has only a single stage for both ascent and descent, weighs about 17t and has docking capabilities (RCS and docking port).

Indeed, this shows how SpaceX could reduce the price of a ticket to $500,000. Though I would like to make a comment on this, a short one, a single word actually: Assumptions. Reality is not a fairy tale. And SpaceX are not magicians. This article just makes too much ridiculous assumptions for its arguments to be realistic. Sure, what it says is possible, but I think that Mars spontaneously moving in Earth orbit is more likely than all these predictions coming true. It would be a great thing if it happened, but there are just so much unpredictable variables that could knock down SpaceX's ambitions at any moment. Predicting technological advances of the next few years is almost impossible, let alone those up to over 20 years. Economists didn't see the 2008 economic crisis arrive. Astronomers were baffled by New Horizons' images of Pluto. Facebook came out of nowhere and has become one of the most powerful companies in less than 10 years. Ebola appeared from nowhere too, was supposed to wipe out humanity, and is now disappearing, all of this in 2 years. The Space Shuttle was supposed to lower the costs of space travel immensly (reminds me of something)... And I can go on. Therefore, arbitrarily dividing costs by hundreds over the next ten years or so is fantasy. Also, I find your "It shouldn't take too long" unnecessary and somewhat condescending. Interpreted it wrong, nevermind.

Considering the fact that a one week stay on the ISS, in LEO costs about $20,000,000, I seriously doubt a ticket to Mars will cost 40 times less than that, and I also doubt they would even manage to pay for their program even if everyone on Earth payed. Going to space costs a lot more than half a million per person, period.

I have W10, and I still haven't decided which one I hated more between W8 and 10. Stay on 7, really.

Yeah, I think a lot of people here (possibly including myself) would have strong feelings of hatred towards Squad if they put 3D on top of their priorities. Let's wait for 1.1, 64bit, multi-threading, bugfixes and tweaks, multiplayer, gas planet 2, and a whole bunch of things that were promised, first, and then start to worry about 3D.

Voted "yes" to this before thinking about Steam. I'm not using Steam for KSP so I couldn't care less.

Did some heavy rocket designing job. I needed a new launcher to put a future orbital station in lunar orbit. The station itself was quite light so my Moon rocket was overkill, and I had no launcher powerful enough to put it in orbit. After trying a few designs, I had a genius idea: Moon rocket was too big, so I decided to remove a few things from it. After throwing away a few engines and the entire 1200t first stage, the rocket was perfect for the job! Actual blueprint used for the conception of the rocket:

To be distinguishable by the human eye, that station should be... a few meters larger than the ISS, at least 115m more precisely. You get this result using the angular resolution of the human eye (about 1 arcminute), and basic trigonometry; in the end, if the station orbited the Earth at 400km, and was bigger than 115m, then you could properly "see" it when it passes the zenith. Note that this is the theoretical minimum: other factors, especially brightness and the atmosphere, would probably make the station invisible to the naked eye.

KER. Nuff said.

@NecroBones, I can test too !

Spoiler please ! Anyway, as swjr-swis said, KSP uses a lot of CPU (but no multi-threading yet) and few GPU. You can try to use the opengl or directx tweaks to transfer some RAM load to graphical memory, but that will not improve performance.

Both are useful. Even though I prefer PF and use them more, there are some designs where the stock fairings are just better. For example for an inline fairing in a design where you can't have a fairing base ring in the middle (because of mass or crossfeed), then using KSP's fairings is easier.

I don't think so, you theoretically can have a strictly 0 velocity relative to your environment with no uncertainty but that would basically mean that it is everywhere at the same time (from Heisenberg Uncertainty principle).

Not necessarily if you involve relativity and time dilation. Just think about the fact that relativistic speeds don't add up (moving at 0.9c towards object A itself moving at 0.9c towards object B doesn't mean you're moving towards B at 1.8c but 0.9945c). Space and time dilations allow for non-linear velocities relations, and therefore, I don't think your statement is valid.

Kinda like light but instead of moving at c relative to everything else, it would not move at all. If it has no mass, then you can imagine some wierd things happening with time accodring to relativity. If it has a non-zero mass, then some pretty heavy space-time distortion involving exotic things such as infinite energies and that kind of stuff would appear. Note that I don't know a lot about relativity, and even if I did I'm not sure I could give an answer to that; so what I said is probably very far from accurate. PS: ask @K^2, he knows everything about physics

Changing the resolution of your RSS textures might help, but considering lag is already an issue increasing it might not be a good idea. You can try to manually edit the coordinates of the Baikonur space center in the KSC Switcher mod files to make it higher, so above the surface.

I don't play career, only Sandbox mode with this install. But considering the fact that you need significantly larger and more advanced rockets to get in Earth orbit than in Kerbin orbit, I'd say that a normal career is going to be really hard with RSS. And AFAIK, RP-0 requires the whole RO package.

My laptop is upper-mid range (quite expensive but not a proper gamer laptop) and I'm playing 1080p. I get smooth fps overall (at least over 30 so fine for me), the only moments fps get down are when some SRBs fire in lower atmo (because they generate a lot of RealPlume particles), with atmospheric effects during launch or when I start to go over 150 parts during launch. But I keep steady fps in VAB no matter the number of parts. I guess the issue then comes from your laptop, maybe your CPU as KSP is very CPU-demanding and relies a lot on clock speed and single-thread performance; I run an i7 but I don't know about the performance of AMDs. You should probably ask about your fps issue in a dedicated thread if it is a real problem for you.

Yes, this is what I currently do, and I'm playing on a laptop. With Stockalike configs, SpaceY and KW Rocketry and their 5m parts are enough for most of your rocket needs. But if you want to start sending Kerbals to the Moon or further you are going to need larger rockets: I personally use SpaceY Expanded which is enough for my Moon rocket (weighing 2200t and 170 parts). I have made realistic-looking designs (ie: not 50 layers of onion staging) up to 4000t with SY Exp. Worst case, download TweakScale or Procedural Parts to have access to bigger diameters and thrusts. If you want, there is a link to my modlist in my signature.

I don't want to be "that guy" but spaceplanes are not the only thing that need variety in KSP...

Yep, we had that one too, for a Newtonian Dynamics course. Say what you want about realism in KSP, it is an excellent tool for teaching basics of orbital mechanics and other rockety subjects. A surprising number of students seemed to recognise the game also.

31/12/1969 has something to do with a non-defined date. For some obscure reason a lot of date systems on the Internet start at 01/01/1970, the 31/12/1969 would then be a "404-like time".

Started planning my future Taurus program for my RSS save, which will essentially be unmanned flybys of the "too-far-for-Hohmann-transfer" planets of the Solar System (Saturn and onwards). Every mission will use Jupiter's gravity well to slingshot themselves to the furthest planets of the Solar System. While reaching Jupiter with a Hohmann transfer orbit takes something like 3 years, the cheapest transfer to Pluto takes 60 years to get there! Using a gravity assist from Jupiter, I can cut that duration to 10 years for about the same dV cost. I currently have some early designs for the Taurus probe and launch vehicle. The rocket weighs 685t, puts 28t to LEO and is able to perform a 10 km/s ejection burn from Earth. If I don't screw up my manoeuvres and inclinations, it should be able to reach everything up to Pluto in a 10 year span. I might later use the same hardware for exploration of the Jovian and maybe Saturnian systems. Though that requires circularising and circularising is prohibitively expensive in terms of dV.