IncongruousGoat

They weren't even that common historically. The only two I can think of off the top of my head are Kestrel (Falcon 1 upper stage) and the LR-101 (vernier engine used on Atlas, Thor, & Delta).

Been listening to a lot of Great Big Sea lately. Dunno why.

To elaborate somewhat on @James Kerman's response: The stock (un-modded) game simplifies quite a few things compared to real life. Off the top of my head: The Kerbal home system is 1/10th the scale of our solar system, with planetary densities adjusted to get similar surface gravity to our solar system. This means that the delta-v (how "distance" is measured in the wonky world of orbital mechanics) required to go from anywhere to anywhere is roughly half to a third of what it would be if the Kerbal system were at a realistic scale. To compensate for the above, all the parts (tanks, engines, etc.) in KSP are much heavier than their real-world counterparts. There's a running joke around here that, instead of using aluminum and carbon composites, Kerbals build their rockets out of lead and rebar. This makes Kerbal rockets less performant than real-life rockets, which partially offsets the sub-scale solar system. The orbital mechanics themselves are simplified somewhat compared to real life. KSP makes use of something called patched conic approximation - basically, you assume that the ship you're plotting a course for is only affected by the gravity of one body at a time. This assumption is accurate 99% of the time, but you lose out on some fun N-body interactions (for example, Lagrange points). The aerodynamics aren't so much simplified as modeled in a way that produces odd results sometimes. Aerodynamic forces are modeled on a per-part basis (instead of over the entire vessel as a cohesive unit) with some heuristics for occlusion tacked on to make lift and drag behave more or less as you'd expect. There's no life support, and Kerbals are perfectly happy to spend 50 years in a space suit strapped to a chair on the side of a rocket. All rocket engines in KSP can be started instantly, shut down instantly, throttled anywhere from 0% to 100%, and restarted an infinite number of times in any conditions. The same is definitely not true of real rocket engines. There's no light-speed delay when controlling probes in deep space over a radio connection. Structural failure due to aerodynamic heating is all-or-nothing. Or, in other words, KSP doesn't model the way the strength of a material changes with temperature - it just makes parts explode when they get above some threshold temperature. Batteries are modeled as tanks that hold electricity. A few parts have stats that are even more off than usual. The worst offender is the Dawn ion thruster, whose thrust is ~1,000x what it would be in real life. It's a long list, and I definitely left some stuff off. But don't let it dissuade you from playing the game. "Easier than real life rocket science" does not imply "easy". The simplifications aren't there to make the game easy for new players - they're there to make the game playable at all for new players. And, if you're looking to learn something in the process, the stock game has plenty to teach about the broad strokes of rocket design and orbital mechanics, even if it might fudge the fine details in the name of playability.

3/10 Text is partially obscured

Because if you do, it will produce a cup of something that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. On topic: Testing has been aborted for today. SN3 is still intact (no explosion). Not clear when they'll be trying again (though the answer is probably some variety of "soon").

10/10 Very artistic, username checks out

It seems fitting to the times we're living in:

To make getting into space easier. Orbital velocity in low Earth orbit is ~3.5x what it is in low Kerbin orbit (7.7 km/s vs. 2.2 km/s), and the delta-V required to launch to LEO is ~2.5x the d-V required for LKO (9.3 km/s vs. 3.4 km/s).

Jean-Guihen Queyras's recording of Bach's cello suites Stan Rogers: Home In Halifax

Now I'm seeing it too, on Windows & Linux, on two separate machines. Looks like it's a bug in either KSP or Unity (though the former seems more likely than the latter). Fascinating. As a quick fix, for those willing to use mods, Scatterer (link) does (among many other things) a good job of masking the problem in atmospheres & sunflares. I'm not so sure about how to deal with it cropping up in skyboxes, though it might be worth a shot to swap out the skybox and see if the issue persists.

If you haven't taken a look at KSP's graphics settings yet, that's an obvious first step. They come set rather low out of the box and (to my knowledge) there's no graphical capability autodetect. I suspect you're already done this, but just in case, it's best to get this out of the way. Also, could you upload some higher resolution non-cropped screenshots? It'll make diagnosing your problem easier for us, since we don't have direct access to your hardware.

I second this. People talk about the situation here in King County like it's the end times, but in truth life is going on. The situation isn't great - working from home is unpleasant (for me, at least), and losing what little social life I had doesn't help. But. The sun is still shining (or it would be if this wasn't Seattle we were talking about), the lights are still on, food is still on the shelves, and in general the world is much the same as it was, albeit a lot quieter.

Nairobi, Kenya

In general I would agree with your protest, but if you look at the OP the complaint is specifically regarding the craft list having grown too long as a result of having installed mods. So in this case replying with a list of more mods that'll solve the problem is entirely appropriate.

The music has started

An ode to weird roadside attractions everywhere:

I'm (very) strongly against colonization of the Moon. The reasons are many, but can be summed up by saying that, were the Moon anywhere in the solar system other than Earth orbit, it would be near the very bottom of the list of potential colonization targets. In many ways, it's one of the least habitable places in the Solar System. There's very little water, no carbon (which is a killer all on its own, given how vital carbon is to anything humans could possibly want to do), no atmosphere, a very long diurnal cycle, no magnetic field, and a surface covered in a layer of highly abrasive, electrostatically charged dust. Fun fact about that dust: every sample of dust that was brought back by the Apollo program has been contaminated and is unusable for research purposes, because the dust attacked and wore through the seals on the vacuum bottles it was stored in. Lunar dust is nasty. Of the items on that list, only one and a half apply to Mars: the lack of a magnetic field, and the lack of an atmosphere (Mars's atmosphere is thick enough to be useful for some purposes, but it's still a problem). Mars's regolith isn't super friendly, but compared to the stuff you find on the Moon it might as well be Earth sand. The diurnal cycle is extremely close to that of Earth, there's plenty of water to be had frozen in glaciers, and the atmosphere contains enough carbon dioxide to get most of the way towards building a biosphere. Basically: Mars has enough stuff and conditions that are close enough to those on Earth (relative to the rest of the solar system) that there are clear roads towards both a self-sustaining colony and, eventually, terraforming. In any case, the roads to both of those goals are a lot clearer for Mars than they are for the Moon. Those are pie-in-the-sky sorts of objectives at this stage, but they're useful metrics since the traits that make both of those goals possible are also beneficial for nearly every stage of colonization that precedes them (overall friendliness of the environment, similarity to Earth, etc.). Oh, and before anyone mentions Helium 3: We can't even make D-T fusion work yet, and D-T fusion is far easier to achieve than anything involving He-3. So let's not go advocating establishment of mining colonies for the extraction of a resource we don't know how to use.

There's a couple of things to consider here. First, it took a lot longer for Starhopper to come together than MK1 or SN1. Some of the difficulty could be in speeding up the pace of construction without damaging quality. Second, Starhopper made a single, tiny hop before being retired from flight. That's not a very good flight rate, and I suspect SpaceX are looking to get far more mileage out of their prototypes going forward. Testing to destruction and rapid prototyping are all well and good, but if the destruction in question is due to easily-identified manufacturing defects caused by rushed construction, then it stops being useful data and starts being a waste of hardware.

There's already a thread for discussion about this (the title says ITER, but General Fusion came up recently):

I think running the steam through a turbine to generate electricity and then actuating the piston using an electric motor would actually be more efficient than trying to just use a steam piston, because steam pistons are a really inefficient way to convert thermal energy into kinetic energy. To throw some back-of-the-envelope math at it: The efficiency of a typical steam turbine in a power plant is ~40%, the efficiency of an alternator is ~60%, and the efficiency of a 3-phase induction motor is ~85%. This gives us ~20% overall efficiency for the turbine-electric setup. By comparison, the thermal efficiency of a piston-based steam engine seems to (based on some cursory research) max out at around 7-8% for a multiple expansion engine, which probably would get us ~5% for a single-expansion piston. The turbine approach seems like a clear winner, even if I way over-estimated the efficiency of a steam turbine at these scales.

Seattle just had its first clear, sunny day in 3 months (!). I decided it would be a bit difficult to appreciate the weather while stuck in an office building, so instead of going to work, I went hiking. The clouds had completely vacated the area. Even Mt. Rainier, which is normally buried under cloud cover this time of year, was quite visible. Also of interest was the quite pronounced snow line on the mountains on the other side of I-90: The snow on the trail was quite deep. This sign would normally have been 4 or 5 feet off the ground:

I've got this: on nearly every piece of computing hardware that I have regular access to. It may not look like much, but given the winter weather where this was taken I think I'll be fine. The zombies will freeze solid long before reaching me on top of that mountain.

Snoqualmie Pass

I more or less never use ISRU. It takes all the fun out of mega-mission planning, reducing a complicated and interesting optimization problem to "find the biggest hop in this mission and build a ship that can do that".

Is it just me, or is the truss a bit mis-proportioned w.r.t the habitable sections of the station?