IncongruousGoat

It's different in every save, and often highly random (for example, I had a save where every craft name was the name of a Simon & Garfunkel song). The only exception is my naming scheme for RSS/RO/RP-1, where spacecraft are named after figures from Ancient Greek history and mythology. Even there, though, I pick something random for my booster/upper stage naming scheme (for example, I had a save where boosters were named after birds of prey, and upper stages after songbirds).

Both of those hurt it pretty bad. It's actually the reason I farmed the Mun so hard in my NCD run before setting off for Duna - I was trying to get all the high tech I would need to build my ship. Now, some of that tech proved unnecessary in the final analysis (lander cans come to mind), but the nosecones were really important.

The first stage had 1 Reliant and 4 Sparks mounted to .625m nosecones (the nosecones are important, by the way - the aerodynamics don't work out if you use, say, Oscar B's), and the second stage was just a Terrier stage. There was no third stage. Although, the engines used on the first stage changed depending on the part count of whatever I was launching. A couple of the higher part count components needed to be launched by a 2-Thud first stage. Credit goes to @GoSlash27 for the Reliant+4 Sparks thing, which he came up with for the Caveman Heavy Lift challenge.

Yep, this is a thing already. I'm not a huge fan, personally (I find orbital assembly to be less irritating), but it works for some people.

Over the course of the last couple weeks, yeah. The snowstorm that kicked it off wasn't too bad (it only dropped about a foot or so, which is nothing unusual around here. City had it cleared within a few hours), but some of the sidewalks didn't get cleared as well as they should have, and we had a thaw right after the snow fell... which means sidewalks covered in sheet ice. No good. Then, a couple more inches of snow, then that big cold snap that seems to have hit everywhere from Boston to the Twin Cities. Not as bad as it was out in Chicago or Minneapolis, but the place I live is perpetually windy, which as you can imagine exacerbated the issue. Right now it's unseasonably warm, though (the high today was in the 50's. I was overheating in a light fleece).

Well, they seem to be moving away from that anyways. Makes development a lot easier if they just have to match the landing accuracy they've achieved for Falcon 9, rather than trying to push the envelope on pinpoint landing.

Depends on whether you have the OKTO unlocked or not. Without it, it's really precarious, since you need to do a funky thing with multiple offset capsules. If you do have the OKTO, you can use that for control and stick a rotated battery at the bottom of the capsule's ladder to keep the ladder-naut in place. It's still tricky, but not nearly so bad as the multiple-capsule approach. Once you're in space, the situation changes, since you can't warp while a Kerbal is holding onto a ladder. Normally letting go of the ladder would cause drift issues, but @dvader found a way to get nearly zero drift, even over interplanetary distances. He'd have to be the one to explain it, though, since I'm not super clear on how it works.

Tell me about it. The cheap probe approach isn't much better, either, since you only get ~25 science per probe, which means visiting every single benighted biome on that moon to get enough science to do things. Ever visited the Polar Lowlands? Neither had I, and I never want to again.

At low temperatures and with a stoichiometric fuel/oxidizer ratio, mostly yes. At the kinds of temperatures and pressures Raptor will be running at, and with the fuel-rich fuel/oxidizer ratio it uses, you'll have some CO2 and H20 in the exhaust, but you'll also have some OH, CO, H2, O2, C, H, and O (and yes, some of those species are free radicals). High-temperature, high-pressure combustion is a messy process.

I just ran the numbers and it doesn't look too good. You'd need to bring Bob along on a ladder to aggressively reset and re-use science and to get EVA science, and even then you'd need to visit 6 biomes on Dres in order to get enough science. It's possible (as in, Dres has more than 6 biomes), but mission design would be a challenge.

Yeah, but you can't control which node they give you. It might even be one in the part of the tech tree you can't unlock by spending science.

As mentioned, this is just a test article. Also, yes, there are plenty of people who believe in this "foolishness", as you put it. If SpaceX were some company running out of a garage on venture capital, without a steady source of income or any experience in building rockets, then I would doubt their proposal. But they aren't. They aren't even the plucky upstart anymore. They're one of the biggest players (if not the biggest player) in the heavy-lift launch market, with over 60 Falcon 9 launches under their belt and over 200 metric tons of payload in orbit. They know what they're doing.

Every time I look at the DCSS, I can't help but cringe at what all that non-tank metal does to the dry mass. I can't even tell what that ring around the LOX tank is for, other than maybe stabilizing the stage against the inside of the fairing. Not all versions of Centaur had same diameter tanks. The one that flew on Titan IV (Centaur G, IIRC) had multiple-diameter tanks. I agree, though, common bulkhead and same diameter is the way to go.

There will never be multiplayer. Squad haven't out and said so because of concerns over PR problems. Stop hoping that it'll happen/asking for it to be implemented/proposing solutions. If you really want it so bad, there are mods that will solve your problem, and please, for the love of all things good in the world, stop posting threads about it here. Thank you. EDIT: I see you're new to the forums. Welcome! Normally we're not nearly so prickly, but the multiplayer discussion has been done to death and a lot of us are sick of it.

I listen to whatever I feel like listening, though it usually ranges between folk, country, folk rock, soft rock, baroque, classical (as in the period between baroque and romantic), and romantic.

Looks actively cooled to me. All that white stuff around the hot bit looks an awful lot like the frost that forms on the Falcon 9 LOX tank before liftoff.

Same here (Firefox on Debian Linux)

The surface of Minmus, of course. It's more than possible to get there in a single launch if you're willing to forgo bringing any Science Jr.'s, or if you feel comfortable with a razor-thin delta-V margin. EDIT: Although it might make more sense to get Miniaturization instead of Electrics. Probe cores allow you to go everywhere in the Kerbin system, but docking ports allow you to go everywhere, period.

Nope. If you want a comprehensive table of what science is available where and in what quantities, the KSP Wiki page on science is a great resource: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Science

Just jumping up and down, yes. The more interesting story is the temperature readings over the space center biomes, since science rollers will occasionally register as "Flying" when rolling fast enough.

The term you're looking for is ecliptic plane.

Honored, not insulted. I made my log as detailed as it was in the hope that it would be of some use to someone.

Close. Upstate New York. I'm outside of the mountains and the lake-effect regions, but winters here are still fun.

Only down to 10 F? We're getting wind chill of -28 F here. I'm going to have to take some extra precautions before doing something so foolhardy as to step out the front door on Monday.