Codraroll

Did anything ever happen to the idea of more radial engines? I once used a 3.75 m storage bay to haul a rover to the Mun, and remember being frustrated that the relatively weak Thud engines were my only means of creating a lander with a door on ground level. Bigger and stronger radial engines would have been a godsend for such missions. If radial engines are being considered, I propose the names "Chicken" and "Rooster" for a small-sh (2x Thud size) and a large one (4x Thud or so), keeping with the naming scheme of flightless birds.

If I'm not mistaken, the Soviets (and later the Russians) have been trying to create a successor to the Soyuz since the 1970s. It hasn't worked particularly well.

Not to mention, if you've got thousands of people working to figure out a way to go to the moon (and convinced that they are working with the real deal), astronauts ready to volunteer for the mission, and you even bother to assemble capable rockets, you've gone way past the point of needing to fake anything. At that point, it's a lot easier to just follow through with the fake mission/cover-up/whatever you call it, and save the expense of a film set.

If you land at sufficient speed, parts of your spacecraft may, depending on definition, land in the moon. Probably not in one piece, and it would not get off (or out of) the moon again, though. I believe the orbital transfer stage of the Apollo rockets landed "in" the moon in this fashion.

As always, I think Randall Munroe of XKCD has a perfect quote for the occasion. "If the Earth were a basketball, in 40 years [as of 2012] no human has been more than half an inch from the surface". For the record, if the Earth were a basketball, the moon would be roughly seven and a half metres (25 footses) away on average. These men were truly great pioneers. They went far.

The problem with having every part available from the get-go, in any order you want, is that the "guidance" aspect of the game design is lost. For absolute freedom, there is sandbox mode. A completely open tech "tree" would be nice for the players who know exactly what they want, but unless you're already sure which order it's best to unlock stuff in to suit your playstyle, you'd have no clear path of progression to follow. Ideally, a feature like this should be as useful to new players as to experienced ones. The tech web would lay down a few distinct paths to follow, so as not to overwhelm a player with what to choose, and to prevent strategical mistakes. For instance, newbies thinking that unlocking all the engines or all the solar panels before anything else is a good idea. Tech trees help distinguish which nodes you can go for early on, and which are clearly meant to be left until the end-game. I don't think letting players access every part to design a craft before unlocking them is a good idea in a specified career mode. For sandbox, sure, but career is meant to introduce players to the game gradually. It's best to start with the parts required to build a very bare-bones craft, just to teach players what each of them do (note how the first node of the current tech tree does this very elegantly), and then introduce new parts gradually. Each node is clearly presenting the player with a set of items that do one specific - known - task better/differently than the parts (s)he already has unlocked. The problem with a tech tree is that the parts are only introduced in a single context. You get extendable ladders for the purpose of entering and exiting a Mun lander, but you also need ladders to enter and exit aircraft, and researching Mun landers to build a workable aircraft makes little sense. Likewise, you get probe cores only after you've achieved orbit (unless you know exactly what to do to get them earlier), so you can't make meaningful unmanned sounding rockets. It makes sense to group rocket fairings and aircraft wings together under the node "Aerodynamics", but their actual purposes are wildly different. A tech web would introduce the different parts at different points of progression, depending on your play style. For unmanned play, batteries would be among the first thing you'd unlock, in manned play they're early mid-game. For aircraft play, you'd unlock small orbital insertion engines (for satellites deployed from suborbital aircraft), before the first rocket lifter engine. A rover branch would give you large cargo containers before multi-Kerbal crew capsules, and so on. Putting together a tech web, and determining when to introduce the different nodes in different contexts would be a bit of a nightmare, but I think the gameplay experience would benefit in the end.

So... bit of an unusual suggestion, this, but I guess it fits the scope of the forum anyway. Basically, this is another attempt to address the tech tree. I'll explain it as simple as possible: Have the same parts be unlockable in several different nodes. Design the tech tree accordingly. This would allow the tech tree to have many more distinct "branches", to allow for a variety of different ways to progress through the tree. It would begin with multiple starting nodes, all containing roughly the same parts. An SRB, some simple tail fins, some form of manned or unmanned command module, a simple Science experiment, and the usual struts and girders. Parachute optional. From there on, different paths of progress would be laid out for the player. Stronger SRBs for more oomph, or liquid fuel engines for more precision? Manned or unmanned flight? Recovering your craft or sending it into the wide, wild yonder? Airplanes or rockets? Interplanetary flight, or LKO space stations? Advanced vacuum engines or powerful lifter engines? Unlocking a part in one node would subsequently lower the cost of other nodes containing the same part, to the points of nodes being unlocked for free if every part in them is unlocked through other means. This way, you might accidentally unlock unmanned launch technology while working on a manned space program, or rudimentary aircraft while unlocking advanced rover parts, but that's just engineering in a nutshell. Sooner or later, you'll find yourself with the parts and tools required to do something completely different from what you intended. Several of the branches would eventually merge in certain aspects. For instance, no matter whether you picked unmanned or manned exploration initially, you would progress through the same nodes for fuel tanks, engines, stabilizer fins, decouplers and suchlike. Propulsion technology doesn't depend as much on payload, the lower stages would have to be pretty similar no matter where there are Kerbals on board or not. What originally gave me this idea was playing through Career mode and realizing that I had to unlock three or four different nodes before I could build a working 2.5 m lifter. You get the fuel tanks in one node, the engines in another, adapters in a third and decouplers in a fourth. What if there was a node that had all the parts you needed for a rudimentary 2.5 m rocket, but which didn't offer any variety with regards to engines nor fuel tanks? With a "tech web", this would be the case. You could rush to build a basic 2.5 m booster stage, or unlock a variety of engines, fuel tanks, adapters and decouplers node-by-node and eventually combine them into a more capable booster. Likewise, you could concentrate on aircraft if you so wished, without swimming through an ocean of rocket parts to get there. Or vice versa. Using a "tech web" instead of a tech tree would make the research and parts unlocking aspect of the game a lot more flexible, and cater to a variety of different playstyles from the beginning. The initial node would be rather costly, say, 100 Science points, to encourage players to pick and stick with a specialization rather than spending all their points unlocking rudimentary parts for every purpose. Players would, of course, start with 100 Science points to unlock their first node, but have to earn their Science after that. That being said, since the initial nodes would all contain mostly the same parts, starting anew in a different branch would be dramatically less expensive after a while. What do you think? Is this a thing in some mod tech trees already? I kind of suspect it is, but if so, I'd like to see it spread further. Laying down several paths of progression would do a lot to allow different playstyles with the same tech tree, without overwhelming the player with choices. I think it's an idea worth looking into, at least.

You mean that where there used to be a small dot that was too faint to notice, now there will be a bigger and brighter dot, but still smaller and less bright than several of the other dots that use to be there all the time? It's exciting because we know what that dot represents and implies, but I doubt I would have noticed it at all if I hadn't been told about it. I don't watch the sky regularly enough to know which dots use to be bright or not, or where they are, unless they are part of a well-known constellation.

If there was an option to have and establish more launch sites - both on Kerbin and all the other bodies in the system - it would give the game so much more to strive for. Wouldn't it be fun to launch from the Mun or from Laythe, after first having established a full base there? It would be a lot more expensive to build and launch craft from off-world stations, of course, but gameplay-wise, it would be worth it. Going to the Mun, for instance, shouldn't be as much of a hassle at the "end" of the game as it is when you first unlock the required parts.

"Pole of story" as in Janczek Kerman, overarching mission manager? I like that idea!

Umm... not saying that 1 kg per day of stuff that isn't food, water and oxygen isn't a reasonable number, but I'm pretty sure toilet paper wouldn't account for all of it (unless living on the moon does unspeakable things to your pooping habits). However, if you lump together toilet paper, toiletries in general, air scrubbing filters, lubricants for life support systems, tissues, cleaning agents for habitats, dishes and kitchenware, and packaging for all of it, I'd say 1 kg per person per day is a pretty good estimate.

Less Delta-V required to resupply the colony or to transport people to and from it, less time required to do the same (which means it has a tourism potential, among other things), the time in transfer is much less taxing for the minds and bodies of the colonists, less lightspeed delay for communications, easier to land, launch windows are not much of a concern, better view of Earth from the base (has to count for something, right?), less power is needed to communicate at all, appreciable amount of solar radiation for crops (although temperature control is a bit more of a hassle), and sports events on the Moon would be freaking awesome to behold (and broadcasting it to the masses on Earth is a lot easier than for similar events on Mars). Plus a few other things I might have forgotten.

Because a relativistic missile will still only affect targets that perfectly cross its path. Miss by ten metres, and you might as well have missed by ten thousand kilometres. You can't take out two ships with one missile without a warhead, or destroy a target that narrowly dodges out of the missile's path. A path that will be very predictable, by the way, if the missile is travelling on a ballistic trajectory. Plus, I'd imagine that the Epstein drive is expensive and complicated enough that outfitting the missile with a warhead is trivial by comparison. You might as well slap one on there.

Not unless you started asking the question "where is this filmed from and how did they do it?". No real-world space missions have featured people zipping around with a camera, straying far away from the station to get all sorts of fancy angles and perspectives, or attaching and operating huge high-quality cameras in cramped spaces like a Soyuz capsule, at least without the camera operator constantly getting in the way. And when perspectives shift so that the same action is captured from multiple angles without time passing, you know fakery is at hand. It might be feasible to have one guy film the work, but setting up multiple cameras for no other purpose than watching astronauts is a huge waste of resources. And of course, you have to assess the plausibility of the stuff that happens on video. A space station in orbit of Saturn is, given current technology, ludicrously implausible. Putting this much mass in Earth orbit alone requires dozens if not hundreds of very expensive launches. Just assembling the components would need years of preparations and hundreds of people across dozens of very specialized workshops. Sending it to Saturn would be a couple orders of magnitude more complicated than that again. Doing it in secret would be literally impossible. Heck, just the engine plume from the transfer burn from the Earth into interplanetary space would probably have been visible to the naked eye over large parts of the world. You can't, that's the short answer. Once the agency starts employing more than a handful of people, it will show up in paperwork. And the people working there are, well, people. They have lives, friends, families and commuter routes. It's very hard to hide a large organization for any length of time. You can, to some extent, hide the activities they are working on, but the existence of the organization itself will be known to observers and the general public.

What the hell is this supposed to mean? There's not being good in English, and there's this... perfect spelling, but everything else being a total and complete mess. Grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, and even topic are all completely incomprehensible. Did you ever look over your post and think "yeah, this will make sense to the average reader" before submitting it? For the record, whenever threads like "is this obviously fake thing real" are posted, the fact that posts like this are the only ones sort-of defending the OP, should speak volumes about the question at hand.

It's been a while since I read the relevant book, but I seem to recall that it took several decades for them to spin up Ceres, and that it's been hailed as the greatest engineering achievement in history. And they started with it long after the Epstein drive was invented. Loving the book series so far, but I have no idea where to find the TV series to watch legally. Is it available in Europe at all?

Relevant? Well, it certainly links a relevant article, namely this one. It is about modding the flight sim X-Plane into Martian conditions, and then trying to fly something there. The problem seems to be inertia. To get the required amount of lift to stay airborne on Mars, you'd have to go fast (Mach 1 just to get off the ground). And at such speeds, all turns will have to be large and sweeping, so as not to crush the pilot, passenger or craft. Not that you'd be able to pull tight maneuvers at all, though, the atmosphere is thin enough and inertia high enough that a plane that tries to turn might find itself rotating, but continuing straight ahead. No yaw control for you. Also, landing. How the heck do you land an aircraft at a thousand kilometres per hour, with no air to slow you down once you hit the ground? You'd need a runway comparable to that of a large airport, outfitted with aircraft carrier-style arresting gear. Or a plain runway long enough to literally vanish over the horizon. A suborbital rocket hopper might be just as convenient as an airplane under such conditions.

World of Kerbal Tanks. With rocket engines, if you so wish.

But I've posted most of my peeves already! Oh well, there's always more (always). How about this? So... your average alien invasion. Or invasion from some other dimension, whatever works. A genocidal race of hyper-advanced or even magical beings is coming to Earth to destroy us all. Their chosen method of widespread destruction? Flying around downtown and zapping small objects. Maybe blowing up cars (one at a time), or single rooms in some unfortunate buildings. Zip-boom, zip-boom, panicked crowds running around, individual people being hunted down by death rays. All in all, less firepower going off than your typical New Year's Eve celebration. Wouldn't it take an awful lot of time to destroy humanity this way? I mean, depopulating the Earth using the explosive equivalent of hand grenades is an awfully tedious and inefficient process. Even in Independence Day, the aliens took out one city per ship per day or so, which seems rather modest too, considering the size of the Earth. But those aliens deserve credit for using a somewhat effective method, I mean, the guys in Avengers and Battle: Los Angeles and even TRON: Legacy decided to do the job with foot soldiers. The aliens in War of the Worlds had vechicles (or whatever the three-legged equivalent is called), as did the Galactic Empire in Star Wars Episode V (four legs), but they still packed a comparatively modest amount of firepower for their operations. Savvy aliens would realize they had the technology to accelerate tons of mass up to a significant fraction of light speed (that's what their ships are doing, after all), and instead play the orbital mechanics game with a big rock and a pair of engines. Instant extinction-level-event without the hassle of getting guys on flying scooters to fly around skyscrapers. Even Starship Troopers got this somewhat right. Then again, if the alien invaders knew what they were doing, most alien invasion movies would have been rather short and depressing, though...

Is it possible to create a forum mod that auto-merges all new threads in the Suggestions section that have the words "Mods" and "Stock" in the title, with the existing, stickied, official "Mods in Stock" thread?

I've been thinking about this for a while, maybe this is the thread to bring it up... Would it be possible to create a drone that is cheaper to launch than it is to shoot down? Something built out of bamboo and canvas like a WWI warplane, guided by a smartphone or something similar, launched from aircraft or by the aid of balloons, and with limited aerial reconnoisance abilities or some very simple ordnance? Just a piece of scrap built for one single mission, incapable of landing or returning to base, but with a payload that would be a nuisance to enemies if it wasn't shot down, and capable of flying high enough that you'd need a missile or an interceptor to shoot it down. In a sense, a slow, dirt-cheap missile with some loiter/recon capability, a simple guidance system and a small warhead, which could be churned out by the thousands and launched in wave after wave into enemy skies. The first few waves would be ignored, until they started falling down directly on top of field command centres, artillery guns, anti-air radars, aircraft hangars or other lightly protected, high-value targets. The next few waves would be shot down. Then the requests for more AA missiles would come flying in from all over the front, as much as the storages hold or the factories could produce. Then more cheap drones, and more, and more, taking their pictures and dropping their ordnance, flying straight into dangerous territory without fearing for their safety, or for that matter, caring at all about anything. Left to their own devices, they would pester the enemy. Shot down, they would still inflict losses, as missiles and flight hours don't come cheap. Canvas, wood, simple engines and rudimentary computers do, by comparison.

At the moment, I'm torn between two different scenarios: "We've been to the Moon and it was boring. Mars is more of the same. Let's rather save the cost, and get a lot of money left over we can use for tax breaks for billionaires". Or: "We're the friggin' USA and we can do anything! Let's go to the moon and erect a 150-foot golden statue of our President to show the world how great we are!"

The Mun is fine enough. It has procedurally generated craters everywhere, quite a few landmarks, and a variety of very distinct terrain features (the various named craters, the canyons, etc). For what it does, Minmus is fine too. Large, sweeping mountains broken up by frozen "seas", completely flat plains without any terrain scatter. It's unique and manages to be fundamentally different from the Mun in its visual style, giving early-game some great variety. And Kerbin, of course. Most varied body in the system right now. Could use a little attention here and there, but it's not pressing right now. Okay, the terrain seams maybe, but its visual style is, for the lack of a better term, OK. The rest of the bodies... ehh. They may be too rarely visited and little involved in gameplay compared to the Kerbin Three, but if any rock in the solar system needs attention, it's one of these. Duna is way too monotonous (but it has been revamped according to recent Devnotes). Moho is a big, hot rock, and has the Mohole as a great landmark, but is otherwise quite bland. Eve is fine, as is Gilly, both being rather unique and serve their role as mid-game destinations decently enough. One has a lot of atmosphere and a lot of gravity, the other has very little gravity and no atmosphere. That's variation, at least. I don't have any hands-on experience with the rest of the bodies. But if reputation is anything to go by, there's nothing to be seen on neither Dres nor Vall, and Bop and Pol seem like far-away Mohos for most practical purposes (that aren't temperature-related). I'd be willing to vote Duna based on its current state, but it seems like it has already got some attention to be implemented in the next update or so. Time will tell what it will end up looking like. After Duna, I guess a Dres revamp would be the most pressing.

Rocket part revamp clarification last week, console update this week... I wonder what we're going to talk about in the Devnotes thread now.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: This is the mod I'd like the most to be made into stock. It gives a purpose to building elaborate space stations and outfit them with ISS-style solar arrays and massive battery banks. It challenges players to come up with some really heavy lifters and orbital tugs, and learn to dock heavy modules. And in case of the larger experiments, to plan the station's layout in advance. It emulates real-world research in low orbit. It has a good payoff for the work of building a space station too, you don't just do it because it's cool. And you can use the science launches to resupply your station too if you want. Awesome mod, keep spreading the word about it!