MaxwellsDemon

Absolutely. I've been eager to check out the new "historical" parts ever since I heard about them. I'm not 100% certain yet what to think about the 'Mission Builder,' but I'm still looking forward to poking around with it to see what it can do, too.

I heard James Doohan and Gene Roddenberry speak when they came through Columbus a generation or so ago, but I didn't get to actually shake their hands or talk to them. My wife and I were somewhat amused to see that in the separate photos that I, she, and the kids had with Nichelle, Ms. Nichols struck a pose and expression so identical that it could nearly have been a cardboard cutout we were getting our pics taken with. This is a woman who has had her picture taken many, many, many ^3 times...

My wife gave me a very nice Christmas present this year that I just received today: a VIP pass for a photo and autograph with Nichelle Nichols! This was at Wizard World in Cleveland. She was very friendly and gracious, and, if she saw anything wrong with my somewhat-hastily-thrown-together TOS uniform, she didn't let on. I'm sure she's already seen every variation under the sun...

I set my numeric keypad as secondary for the rotation WASD keys. When I'm in "Translation" mode, they still stay in "Rotation" so I can use WASD for translation and keypad for rotation. I have difficulty dealing with the middle-keyboard IJKHNL stuff for translation.

Yes... you can find the .craft file in the appropriate folder and copy it. It's how I save my favorite designs from campaign to campaign. (You just have to watch that you keep all the installed mods the same, though, if you use mod parts.) Of course, if the design uses parts you haven't discovered yet in campaign mode, you'll need to wait to use them... Oops! I see that you specified PS4. My answer was regarding PC. Hm. I don't know if it's possible to "look behind the curtain" with PS4.

The learning curve for KSP is really more of a challenge than the difficulty settings. Everyone has their preferences for difficulty; it sounds like you might tend toward my style of play, where I want to stretch things out a bit. Once you get comfortable with the basics, you might want to check out KCT, Kerbal Construction Time, a mod which intentionally slows things down. It's one of my favorites. I like to set up a custom-difficulty game with reduced science award (I think I'm running my current campaign at 65%), no Kerbal respawn, and a few other items, but KCT is the thing that really makes it feel right for me. KCT is probably highly annoying to someone who prefers sandbox mode, though. That's the beauty of KSP, that it can accept so many very different playing styles.

Personally, I hate launching without fairings, just from an aesthetics point of view. I like pretty rockets. (But I'll launch an ugly one if that's what gets the job done.)

I wouldn't worry in that regard. I'm sure you'll get an entirely different curve ball coming in from another blind spot. Murphy's Law applies double on Kerbin, evidently.

Didn't have much time to KSP last night (nor will tonight ) -- on high-school-theatre-parent duty -- but I did start putting together an homage to the early 60's Soviet TMK (Heavy Interplanetary Ship). Far from done, but it appears to have some interesting KSP potential.

Launch it without fairings. Seriously. Fairings (in the more recent releases) do help you aerodynamically, but you can launch without them. If you do lose the payload on the way up from atmospheric heating (or at least a needed part like a solar panel or an antenna), try using an engine with slightly less thrust-- that will accelerate your rocket more slowly and help keep the extra heating under control.

Yup. As above-- if a rocket, even a manned rocket, has even the smallest potential of coming down in a populated place, they blow it as high up as possible to consume/disperse all the fuel before it hits the ground. Bad enough to have pieces of rocket coming down-- you don't want thousands of gallons of inflammable fluid coming down, complete with an ignition source. Astronauts know this is part of what they sign up for, and I'd imagine that most, if not all, of them would willingly give their lives to prevent the loss of many other lives. (Ideally, of course, there's an escape system to get them out of there too, but that's not always possible, as with the Shuttle.) Most of those early movie shots you see of U.S. rockets blowing up are actually being blown by Range Safety as they veer off course. There were entirely accidental explosions too, as with the first Vanguard launch attempt, but they were in a minority. There was a sharp debate on self-destruct systems for manned capsules too, in the early Soviet space program. The security-minded wanted to keep "secrets" from falling into Western hands, so early (pre-manned) Vostoks were loaded with explosive charges to blow up the capsule if it was headed for a landing on anything other than Soviet territory. At least two 'space dogs' lost their lives in this way. When it got to Gagarin's flight and beyond, though, the explosive charges were deleted from the manned capsules (though I'm sure they were retained on the unmanned spy-satellite Zenit variants).

Pretty sure this is puffery on Putin's part, a la Khruschev's "manufacturing missiles like sausages." Especially the part about "uninterceptable" cruise missiles. But, saber-rattling has a long and distinguished history, and no country I know (past or present) is immune to it.

I have gotten into the habit of shutting off SAS and RCS once the docking ports have clearly "locked on" to each other-- I noticed that otherwise there can be some mutual "shimmying" that was (1) annoying, (2) wasteful of monoprop and time, and (3) reminded me too much of Soyuz 10. Looks like there's an additional benefit to it (noted above)...

'Zackly, and through the same route... KSP inspired me to read about it.

I've been on a Mir-replica kick recently, so I've been concentrating on specialized modules a la the TKS/FGB-derived Mir (and Russian ISS) modules. I first determine "what function does this module serve?" Frequently, it breaks down into pretty obvious categories, such as habitat, service (life support, resources), laboratory, etc.... some things may need to be more widely distributed and shared among modules, such as solar panels, RCS, and reaction wheels, but in general I try to keep each module single-purpose as far as possible. My current project is a Mir-based station in LKO that is basically a test platform for two purposes: (1) learning how to optimize Kerbal survival/habitability (I use the USI Life Support mod) for extended missions, preparatory to interplanetary expeditions, and (2) learning how to build stations better... this last because I want to put a fuel depot in Minmus orbit but I don't want to send one there that isn't optimized for the role (so where my LKO station has science modules, the Minmus one will have mostly ISRU, tankage, and power).

I tend to use Construction "docking ports" to weld modules together if I'm not planning to swap them out or move them-- that cuts down on some of the flex in the structure. If I see the wobbling start, I shift to another vessel out of physics range and then back again-- seems to settle things down. (This works for "dancing" landers, too, though sometimes KSP will object to switching "while moving over the surface.") And, then there's good old KAS EVA-applied strutting. Give those engineers something to do!

Oh, planning to celebrate that one too! Mmmm.... pie...

A happy St. David's Day to all the Welsh and Welsh-descended out there! In the US, it's almost completely ignored, probably due to the proximity of the much-more-famous St. Patrick's Day, but there are a few of us who wear the leek...

Mostly designed-- redesigned some TKS/FGB-inspired modules for my next station (based on some learns from my current station-building), as well as a PTK/Federatsiya tribute (which I think is simpler and cheaper than the design I had put together as a crew transport-- we'll see after some testing).

I'm embarrassed to admit how recent it was that I finally "got" why blunt-body reentry works better (heatwise, as well as brakingwise) than other shapes. I had taken it on authority, of course, figuring that someone else knew this stuff better than I did, but it took a while before I found an explanation (in an old NASA book, no less) that finally allowed all the pieces to fall into place for me. Many things about space flight are counter-intuitive on the surface (although once clearly explained, they then make sense), since we're so accustomed to the way things work at the bottom of a gravity well in an ocean of air.

A friend of mine growing up had a dad who was the first computer science professor hired by the local university... I used to go over and marvel at their computer, which was an Apple II. Not a IIe or II+... an honest-to-goodness II. This guy knew and corresponded with Jobs and Wozniak... anyway, the problem was that hitting the Escape key cleared the memory, and it was located right next to the 1 key (where the tilde usually is on modern keyboards), so he built a little square cardboard tube around it to avoid striking it accidentally... same sort of idea as the Molly shield, which I bet he knew about. (He also was annoyed that he couldn't tell when the computer was on-- the Apples of that day had no built-in cooling fan, so it was silent-- so he rigged up an LED to let him know when it was on. To this day, I wonder if he was the first guy to do that...)

Sitting upright, too.

I play KSP on a laptop with integrated Intel graphics, and I can definitely confirm that it struggles. My next machine will be purchased with an eye towards much better graphics capability. ETA: Let me put it this way: It wasn't till recently that I realized, from people talking about it on the forums, that the clock in the upper left wasn't always in yellow font for other people!

The automatic lander on its side in the Greater Flats proved to be irretrievable by any means I'm patient enough to accomplish presently. (In other words-- reverted to a saved game. Not elegant, but practical given the limited time i have for KSP lately...) The "Tjehnet" module (=Kristall) docked successfully to the "Hotep" (=Mir) station, and the "Geb" module (=Priroda) was placed in orbit for a later rendezvous. Then the complex will be ready for crewing. (No, I'm not sticking strictly to a Mir sequence or timetable... for instance, in "my" Mir, I swapped the docking port from 'Kristall' to 'Spektr,' and 'Priroda' is primarily a greenhouse. But it's an homage to Mir, not a duplicate... at least, that's my excuse.)

I always reset the spacebar keybinding to the backslash.