Mad Rocket Scientist

Crows will drop walnuts on roads so the cars crack them open when they drive over: http://www.pbs.org/lifeofbirds/brain/

I suppose we could just talk about the technical aspects of space warfare. Something something stealth in space.

That part of the suggestion I don't see any potential problems with.

The problem is that you're then limited to using rover wheels for that type of mission, and while that makes some sense, in my opinion the clarity and simplicity of always being able to use powered wheels of any type anywhere outweighs the benefit of making it easier (if wheel power was an in-flight toggle, you could use action groups) to use them for the intended and most common purpose.

I love carefully planned RSS/RO missions. What do you use to make those CONOPS diagrams?

I like the idea of optional (editor installable? Possibly a part variant?) motors on landing gears, however I tend to be concerned about adding mechanics connecting things with no clear physical relationship. For example, what if you wanted to use downwards thrust to keep your rover on planets with low gravity? You could make it toggleable in flight, but then you have to explain yet another mechanic in a game that already has a near vertical learning curve.

My feeling is that it might be hard to ignite that before fuel and oxidizer build up in the chamber. Are the injector plate hole(s) drilled at any kind of angle? I'm not sure, I say give it a try and see what happens.

One of the most popular designs for stock hinges uses linear-7 RCS ports held in a cage of thermometers. Getting them to work as as much an art as a science, but you'll start to get a feel for it soon. The legs and rotating part of the hinge need to be able to separate from the main rocket, either with decouplers or docking ports, then reconnect with a docking port. Aligning the connection docking ports will be made much easier if the root of the landing leg ships is at their center of rotation. Making that work is easier with the Editor Extensions Redux mod. I also recommend WASD Editor Cam to let you see the fiddly little parts easily.

Yep, I misremembered it. Shapeways did 3D printed Kerbal figurines though:

I vaguely remember official support for this via shapeways at one point. I don't remember whether you can still do that.

That's what I thought, thanks for confirming it.

I think KSP 1.0 revamped the atmosphere.

I don't there's any in-game reason to have a landed asteroid. You could launch your rockets empty and mine it for propellant, but you could just mine Kerbin anyway. @5thHorseman may have some ideas for fun things to do with asteroids on Kerbin. I wonder if that would work with the new atmo.

Censorship office: "We need to censor parts of this picture of a rocket" "Do we need to censor out enough of the rocket so you couldn't approximate its performance as an ICBM?" "No, just the top-secret track lighting in the hangar"

Thanks for giving me permission, I'll update my post soon. While looking around at the history, it looks there are still links to it on this thread: On the last page. I'm not sure if that's intentional or not, but I though you might want to know.

Well, I've been convinced about LKO asteroid mining. Especially since I realized I shouldn't combine the advanced deep space transport with the reusable transfer vehicle, and I only need ~65t of propellant for the outbound transfers. Picture from a test of the miner and tug in the spoiler.

So how do flies get oxygen into their bloodstreams without lungs? Do flies even have blood? I don't know anything about flies.

My guess is that the g-forces from deceleration due to the air would kill the fly. A quick bit of searching found this page: http://www.dexadine.com/bexhelp/bexhelp116.htm Which has this graph: I believe the lines are based on models of different shapes of bullets, which wikipedia has some more info on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_ballistics#Fixed_drag_curve_models_generated_for_standard-shaped_projectiles The only thing I could find on insect g-tolerances was this: http://www.sciencefocus.com/qa/whats-highest-g-force-insect-can-survive So it looks like hypersonic bullets of certain shapes decelerate fast enough to kill a bug. Of course there's probably quite a bit of shock heating at mach 5.

Can we skirt the censor on the name of the mod hosting site that was a precursor to SpaceDock for descriptive purposes (no links)? I was trying to answer this question: By telling the history of SpaceDock, but all the instances of the precursor's name were turned into "*" and I'm not 100% sure about why it was censored. I think I recall it was to break links to the possibly now malicious site, but I'm not sure. Could I get permission to skirt the filter with spaces, dashes, or something similar as long as I say not to try to go to the site, and don't include the top level domain?

That's the forum's redaction, I don't remember the precursor to SpaceDock's name getting censored though. Should have double checked the post after I posted it. EDIT: I think that was changed so old links to there wouldn't be followed since it could be a malicious site now. Thanks.

Curse and curse forge are the official mod hosting sites, however most mod makers do not like them. Curse particularly has a lot of ads. For a while mod makers would put their mods on generic platforms, such as Dropbox, Mediafire, and Github. However, there was still a need for a proper, built for KSP, modding platform. If I remember right, there was something called the Majiir challenge, to make a hosting site equal or superior to curse. What came out of that was a site called Kerbal Stuff made by @SirCmpwn, which was far better than curse in almost every way. It had no ads, better categories, better UI, hand picked featured mods, and you could sign up for email updates for mods. Over time almost all mods moved over to Kerbal Stuff as a primary host, sometimes using curse or another site as a backup. However, it ran into the one snag of community sites: the maker left. I'm not sure of the exact circumstances, but I believe it had something to do with a combination of hosting costs (~100/month USD just for server costs) and the community taking the site for granted. Unfortunately, all the mods on Kerbal Stuff were lost, since it was impossible to tell whether their license allowed for rehosting easily. The site is now owned by someone else, and is malicious. Don't visit it. Luckily, @VITAS and the community were able to get a replacement (SpaceDock) online within 48 hours of Kerbal Stuff going offline. The owner of Kerbal Stuff also donated their code, so aside from the color scheme, SpaceDock is almost exactly the same as Kerbal Stuff. EDIT: Since Kerbal Stuff stopped being maintained by @SirCmpwn, it has become a malicious site. Do not attempt to visit it, and definitely don't download anything from it. The forums will break links and mentions of it if it is formatted without the space between "Kerbal" and "Stuff". I've received special permission to skirt that filter in this post, but please don't skirt it elsewhere, we don't want anyone thinking it's a active mod hosting site. Since most large or popular mods were transferred to SpaceDock by the mod makers, it still remains the most popular hosting site of the community. However, for the best results in being up-to-date, I would look at the forum thread and find the primary download link. SpaceDock conveniently makes it very easy to link forum threads, so searching there for a mod, then checking the thread is a good way to make sure you're installing the right version, since the forum search is terrible. You could also use CKAN, but I only recommend that for large mod suites that have official support on CKAN, since installing mods isn't the hard, and unofficial CKAN support isn't that great.

If switching from the Rhino to a Poodle, Wolfhound, or Terrier doesn't work, you have to either: A) Make your lander+transfer stage lighter. You mentioned emptying tanks, so consider replacing partially empty tanks with a mix of smaller, full tanks. There's no advantage in KSP to using larger tanks except for part count and wobbliness. Have you removed any extra ablator? Heat shields that are full of ablator can survive dropping all the way from Jool or beyond. Is your lander two stage? You might be able to shave some weight off by making it two stage. And is your Dres ascent TWR high enough? Unlike Kerbin, 1.2-1.5 TWR is too weak to be efficient on airless worlds. B) Add fuel to your transfer stage. It probably still won't be TWR-limited if you've got a average sized lander. This will mean that you will have to add fuel (and possibly engines) to every stage below it.

I haven't been there, but I have been to the Hawaii observatory. It doesn't really have a tour, although it does have a visitor center at lower altitude, which hosts night time star gazing parties with telescopes. I visited in the day, so I just looked through a solar telescope. And I have pictures @Vanamonde.

TAC fuel balancer will keep fuel balanced in VTOLs: And TCA will keep unbalanced VTOLs level with throttle control:

I don't think you should feel bad about not knowing those. Most of them are synonyms or less common ways of saying something. In many ways English doesn't have a concrete "formal" or "high-brow" vocabulary, rather it has many ways of saying things, and some people choose to use less common ones to be more precise. I would not have known you were not a native speaker of English at all. Of the words you listed, only reconcile and condescending are relatively common. To reconcile with someone is to drop, or come to an agreement over, whatever argument you were having. It can can also be for ideas, you can reconcile two ideas or opinions that you hold. For example, I could be fighting with someone over whether KSP of RimWorld was the best game ever, and reconcile with them by both of us agreeing that they are the best at different things. However, I could also reconcile those opinions if they were both mine. To be condescending or to condescend is almost exactly a synonym for patronizing, or treating someone like they are inferior, particularly in knowledge, often with a fake tone of teaching.