Kibble

One nice difference is it doesn't have that fat 10m core - I am too young to actually remember before Constellation was cancelled, though! System will probably have the same aesthetic look as Space Shuttle did, just with Orion on top.

Titan! It's like the evil twin of Earth - inner Solar System vs outer, hot and dry vs cold and wet, rocky and molten rock volcanos vs icy and molten ice volcanos, and so on. But they both are linked because of they have thick atmospheres, liquid oceans, and can (potentially) support life. In the Kerbolar System I like Dres.

Actually System Block I has 5-m DCSS as its upper stage, with a gross mass of only 30mt. AFAIK Block IB will replace DCSS with EUS, with a gross mass of 105mt. It will ignite once to circularize, for a on-orbit 93mt stack. Most of the information I've seen indicates Block IB will fly for a long time as the standard configuration before Block II.

The meaning of life is... Fur!

KSP distinguishes itself from a typical space sim game by somewhat resembling real life spaceflight. (The only space sim I ever heard of that does this better is Orbiter) Agreed 100%

I don't know why all those publicity pictures do that, except maybe to try and make it look Apollo-y. There are plenty of renderings used on L2 Nasa Spaceflight Forum with a proper orange core. (not that I can afford L2 membership, they just sometimes use disappointingly scaled down versions of the pictures in their free news articles)

You could have a whole Soyuz-will-never-be-replaced (deal with it Russia) set, with PPTS, Kliper, Zarya, and we already have TKS! Woof woof! Want!

Stylish! Will you make the texture of the core like the orange foam insulation?

If nobody was offended by it not only would the thread have not started, but had it started, it would have ended immediately.

I think it is definitely worth the effort to remove words that offend a significant portion of the community.

That's not true. At least half the English words referring to Homo Sapiens are derived from Proto-Indo-European words - PIE pleh means "to fill". This evolved into the Latin populus, which became "people", "popular", and "plebeian". Other words came from deh meaning "to divide", becoming Ancient Greek demos, serving as the root for "democracy" and "demographics".

You might want to start a little smaller than a replica of Space Station! When I started using RO it took me like ten tries to put a little Sputnik-thing onto orbit. Anyway its been awhile since I used mechjeb for autopilot, but doesn't it let you set your desired orbit altitude?

Is it really that different from Space Shuttle?

Just noticed - nice avatar!

I disagree. Didn't you watch The Iron Giant? You are who you choose to be, not what other people expect you to be! Stereotypes make people feel like they have to fit into those stereotypes, cause they are a social animal.

Space Launch System isn't a very good name. Space Transportation System wasn't a very good name either, but it got the stylish moniker Space Shuttle. "Shuttle" just rolls off the tongue better than Es-Tee-Es. The same goes for Es-El-Es. I've been calling it simply "System" but that probably won't catch on. And at this point renaming seems to be pretty much out of the question. But maybe there is a better solution. SLS uses the same rocket engines, the same tank hardware (slightly stretched), and the same SRBs (also stretched to five-segments) as Space Shuttle. Aside from ditching the Orbiter for an in-line stack (and putting the RS-25s where they should be) it is almost the same vehicle. The core of the vehicle will still be a big orange tank and two slender white boosters. So why don't we keep calling it Shuttle? It honours the central role Space Shuttle played in NASA's post-Apollo spaceflight operations and in the directly derivative hardware heritage of the new vehicle. Plus Orion-Shuttle just sounds awesome! What do you guys think? Could SLS be recognized as a continuation of Space Shuttle, just with a nifty new Orion spacecraft on top? (oh and DCSS)

You can't just pay no attention to pronouns. Its a unit of information conveyed in a sentence that is absorbed by the person hearing the sentence. Because of the way the brain works, if you hear about something all the time, that thing becomes important to you - it carries connotations. Which socially polarizes us into two distinct groups: male, and female. But those "groups" are less than distinct, and indicate very little about a person - physically, or psychologically! EDIT: I didn't mean to derail the thread! The point is I am in favour of using only gender-neutral terminology in the context of the game. "Manned" can be replaced by "piloted", "crewed", "populated", or any other word you can imagine. Avoiding gendered pronouns in game descriptions shouldn't be hard either. Awhile ago somebody proposed "Kanned" as an alternative to "Manned" which I think is pretty funny, like with lander cans.

It's profiling, even if its not explicit. In English, you can't talk about somebody without saying "he" or "she" or "Mr." or "Ms.", and so gender immediately becomes the first trait the listener knows of said person. When things are passed along in everyday conversation, they become important to public perception, subconsciously or not. When the first trait anybody knows of anybody is gender, it feels like you don't know the person until you know their gender! ​And that is sexism.

Orlan spacesuit (and the Apollo A7L suit) only has 7 hours of life support, and EMU has 8. If a Mars buggy travelled at the same speed as LRV (11 km/h) you could only go a maximum of 40 km from the base. But you can go in different directions, so the visitable areas during the expedition would be a circle of 40 km radius. Operationally, they probably wouldn't go that far though in order to maximize the amount of the drive in which, if the buggy broke, the astronauts could walk back to the laboratory. And minimize the black zone where if they lose Mars Buggy, they die. Although if there are two buggies they could have the second one ready to drive over and rescue them - that might make it safer to explore the whole 5000 square kilometers surrounding the base.

That's too Star Trek-y. The game is supposed to be inspired by real life spaceflight, and you never see astronauts in different colored space suits, except that for spacewalks one of the EMUs on Space Station has a few red stripes and the other doesn't.

Yeah I like the middle initial idea too!

Thomas J Kelly, from Northrop Grumman?

I posted in a thread earlier today, the topic being gender-neutrality, in the Suggestions and Developement section. When I again in the section, the thread was gone - like not locked or moved, it seems like it was permanently deleted, if that is in a moderator's power. I'm just asking because I've never seen unwanted threads get deleted, just simply locked.

You don't wanna make it too military though - my Kerbals are peacefully exploring space!

That is one seriously gorgeous rocket stage!