HvP

Same. I still enjoy Civ IV and play it all the time. Once the Civilization franchise required Steam installation, DRM, and frequent online check-ins to be allowed to play it offline I refused to buy any of the later versions. If KSP 2 requires those type of demands then I simply won't buy it either. Fortunately, I know that I can play my copy of KSP as long as I want, whenever I want, on any system that can play it.

The best darn game I've ever played has grown up! Just like your career isn't over just because you unlock the whole tech tree, this game hasn't ended just because it reaches its final form. This just means it has reached maturity.

Ok, but the vast majority of all the gold we have ever mined is tied up in jewelry and bullion - about 75%. Only about ten percent of all the gold floating around the world's economy is used for actual practical purposes like engineering. If we truly have a gold shortage for industrial purposes then you can blame the "it's so shiny" crowd for that. Although, part of me would love to flood that market with cheap gold, and see their baubles become nearly worthless overnight.

Indeed. There's a reason that gold is so often used in space hardware. High electrical conductivity, chemically inert, reflects radiation across a broad spectrum, easily malleable, non-toxic, won't oxidize or corrode. It's almost perfect for a wide range of industrial uses except that it's high density makes is very heavy - which actually makes it a good radiation shield for spacecraft, too. In my opinion, gold's prominence as a decoration and currency is the least interesting thing about it (and one of the most depressing revelations about humanity.) But that's off topic. I've always been skeptical of any pursuit to mine elements on other worlds, except for local use on those worlds. Whatever the concentrations of those elements on Mars, the only reason to go there and bring them back is if there is a real shortage of the element here in the first place.

As far as I'm aware, the main component of bioplastic production is extracted cellulose from agricultural products. Cellulose is of course naturally very flammable so flame-retardant additives have to be used. The difficulty is choosing additives that are economical, sustainable, non-toxic, and aren't themselves sourced from petrochemicals. I'm not sure this will ever be achieved in all respects unless energy production itself becomes so cheap as to justify the extra costs. The most recent research I can find dates back to 2016 and didn't seem to advance anything particularly game changing. Of course, plastic itself is also intrinsically flammable and has flame-retardants added to it so there is precedent.

I've been saying for years that one of the most important reasons to transition to renewable resources is so that we can save all that oil we are going to need for other products, instead of just burning it up. However, it is possible to make bioplastics from plant based polymers (that's where the oil in the ground came from in the first place after all.) It's just more energy intensive than using the oil that was made naturally in the ground. If we do manage to achieve surplus energy from sustainable fusion or renewables then sustainable bioplastics industry might eventually become economical. This might not be a good thing considering the increased disposable environmental waste it would generate, though.

Science and fuel, it's hard to ask for more from a space station. Although, I see a distinct lack of solar panels. Perhaps you have some RTGs stashed away in those service bays. For some reason it seems like there aren't that many 3-way symmetrical stations built around here. I've always fancied that arrangement myself.

Also, make sure you aren't accidentally still time warping.

Whatever they call it I'll be sorely disappointed if they aren't playing "Catch a Falling Star" when it does its trick.

It's easy to recognize a plane, or a bird, or a balloon - until it's far enough away that it's now hard to recognize. They also look much different in infrared because we aren't evolved to recognize anything in IR. Out-of-focus lights are still out-of-focus whether they are in the visible spectrum or the infrared. They also appear to move across the frame quite differently when viewed in 300x zoom from a mile away using a motion stabilized auto-tracking camera filmed from a jet aircraft flying 600 mph at some arbitrary angle to the target. Our brains aren't evolved to process the geometry of those viewing situations so we instinctively misjudge speed, distance and size. For every one of these "unidentified flying objects" I guarantee you that it would have been an identified flying object if it had just been close enough to easily make out the shape. It is frankly unsurprising that anything would be difficult to positively identify when its a blurry blob at the extreme limits of camera resolution, focus ability or tracking speed. And every camera has a limit.

This exact use case is already implemented in the game. It just doesn't get much attention. It's called a Probe Control Point. That link takes you to the Kerbal Wiki on the concept. It allows pilots in suitable command capsules to control certain probes fitted with "remote pilot assist available" probe cores without needing a link to the KSC as long as they have a relay antenna capable of reaching the remote probe.

Hi @paynterf, welcome to KSP and the forums. It's great to see that you engineered a solution for your problem. KSP sure doesn't give the new player much in the way of detailed instruction for scenarios like these, which can certainly be frustrating. You should understand that the ethos of the game's creator was one of "learn by failing." In other words, new players wouldn't be given an instruction manual to learn how to make rockets work, because that's not how any space program started. In real life, space programs learn how to make things work by flying tests and seeing what went wrong, making corrections, and then testing again. Unfortunately, this can discourage new players that aren't already familiar with the fundamentals. Honestly, I want as many people as possible to enjoy this game that I love, but I also don't want to lose the experimental way of learning that it embodies. It's a tricky balancing act.

The Making History engine plates are found in the coupling category along with the decouplers and docking ports. There are a few mods that will reorganize the part categories, so be aware of that.

As photons do have momentum despite having no mass this works in an open system. It's essentially the reverse of a solar sail where solar photons impinge on the surface of the sail and transfer their momentum to it. You could theoretically power an LED sail to eject photons behind you instead. It's just that whatever you use to generate the electricity will either run out eventually or be too heavy to use effectively. And using solar panels to gather the light to make electricity to power the LEDs is less efficient than just reflecting the sunlight in the first place. But it's assumed that when attempted in a closed cavity, such as the EM drive proposes, the net forces from ejection to reflection to absorption would simply cancel out leaving no overall thrust.

As the others here have made clear, this proposal is just another "free energy device." In other words, a perpetual motion machine. There is a reason they have never worked. They disobey the laws of physics.

@Jack Mcslay There is a mod for that. Speed Unit Annex is a nifty mod that can set up to change the speed readout on the navball to change the units shown for various situations. It includes km/h, knots, and mach#, for example. It's an old mod, but still works.

No, the narrow band scanner does not save a resource map. I believe the intended use for this device is to be monitoring the scanner interface in real time. When you are over a location you should observe the ore concentrations percentages that show when you drag its marker across the scanner map. When you find a promising ore site click the "Waypoint" button to add a waypoint marker for future landers to target. Be aware that it's really only effective when you have already sent down a landing probe with a surface scanning module to run an analysis of the biome in which you are likely to mine. This will allow the narrow band scanner to discern various concentrations within biomes at greater detail. Also, to clarify: The orbital survey scanner map shows you the chances of finding any ore in the biomes across a planet or moon. It does not show you the concentration of ore that your miner could find under the surface - only how likely it is that you will find any ore at all. A 80% on the orbital scanner could just be an 80% chance of finding a 1% concentration of ore. The narrow band scanner initially only shows you the average concentration of ore in the biome underneath the marker. But, after running a surface analysis with the surface scanning module, the narrow band scanner will now show you the concentration of ore at any specific location within its field of view. It can be used to place markers on sites with promising concentrations of ore for future missions to follow. The surface scanning module can only be used in contact with the surface, but it will show the concentration of ore directly underneath the scanner and improves the accuracy of narrow band scanner maps after you run an analysis. For both the narrow band scanner, and the surface scanning module, you can expect to see sites with anywhere between a 1% to 14% concentration of ore. It is unlikely to be any higher. Some sites will have zero ore at all, of course.

I understand that you're skeptical about the design. You've made that point very plainly. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. Starship is still in the prototyping test stage. Will you still be so adamant if Starship is successful at reentry over the next year or two? Or will you still be unconvinced?

You mentioned that you clicked on the hatch to EVA the first time and it worked. Is that the way you did it the second time, or did you click the EVA button in the portrait picture? I've noticed that the game often acts like the Kerbal can't EVA if you click from the portrait, but it still works when you click the part's hatch. I think this is the game being confused concerning parts that have two hatches if only one of them is blocked.

Another option would be to put a suitably sized parts container on the end of a robotic arm with a ladder attached. Use the robotic arm to maneuver the parts container to the location you need. Have your Kerbal engineer hang on to the ladder when entering construction mode, and you have easy access to the parts right in front of you.

My experiment to create a rotating interplanetary ship fell victim to the Dzhanibekov effect.

I'm not sure this works on console, but on PC you can go over to the staging column and click the plus sign "+" next to the icons to add an empty new stage to the column. You can then drag this new empty stage to the top of the column and it will usually trick the game into recalculating the stages and show the delta-v numbers again. In very few instances multiple new empty stages need to be added. This is very much a problem when the engine thrust plates and nuclear engines are used, at least for me.

Beautiful work! The view from Spock's station there is quite impressive. Now we just need to make a giant green hand.

I still think it was a perfectly valid question.

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