RealKerbal3x

That's just the thumbnail which is a photo from a few weeks ago. On other cams I don't see any activity adding tiles to S20, the heatshield seems to be largely complete.

Probably because an orbital propellant depot would likely completely obviate things like SLS, and without that they wouldn't be able to harvest that sweet, sweet government pork.

I doubt it, considering the significant changes they're planning I'm not sure it'll be that useful for data anymore. They might use those suborbital flights to test catching the vehicles with the tower, though.

Starbase environmental assessment is finally out for public comment!

It's on the forums too:

Also, the Inspiration 4 crew isn't just along for the ride, they're trained to intervene and safely return the spacecraft to Earth manually should something go wrong. Dragon does so much autonomously that they shouldn't need to, but nevertheless they need to know what to do in an emergency.

Probably because SpaceX is already the contractor for HLS, and once they get Lunar Starship up and running there really isn't much else to do in terms of making it 'sustainable' for further landings. A single stage lander with enormous payload capability wasn't the sort of proposal NASA was expecting to get for an initial lunar landing, so I guess they assumed that the contractor would have had to do a lot more work to make their lander suitable for repeated surface sorties. Aside from SpaceX, every proposal they got was pretty conventional by the contract's standards, and those do need further development for a sustained lunar presence.

I believe the 1000 ships figure was the total for building and maintaining the colony over a couple of decades (until it's self sufficient). It's much more likely to be 2 or 3 ships max per transfer window. 1000 ships for every window would probably require a higher launch cadence than they're ever planning to have. The grid fins are likely the backup option in case they miss the load points. They're probably strong enough to take the load of an empty booster, considering the aerodynamic forces they already have to survive. I also recall Elon mentioning that circling back to just directly using the grid fins to catch is a possibility.

I'm perfectly happy for things like this to be available in mods, but please, no weapons of any kind in the stock game, ever. KSP is one of a relatively rare breed of games that contains no violence of any kind, and I'd prefer for it to stay that way.

Seems like the people who make SpaceX's official renders have the same problem as the amateur renderers: The design evolves too fast for them to keep up

Details about the flight from the description:

I believe they fold in before being covered by specially-shaped TPS sections.

Despite the title saying 1.11.x, it works in 1.12.2 (the plumes have even been updated to work with the revamped Reliant/Swivel engines).

I know it's a bit of a cliche, but really, what fits better as the name for an interstellar exploration ship than Enterprise?

If you're referring to the two readouts in the bottom left, I think the top one is actually a velocity display, while the other one is an altimeter switchable between ground and sea level.

YES! 8 seconds isn't much, but at least it's gameplay!

The stock alarm clock may be missing some of the alarm options that KAC has, but the core functionality of setting and receiving alarms is working just fine in 1.12.2. Unless you have a wildly different meaning for the phrase 'it works', it's fine. (There's even a mod that fills in some of the gaps with it)

Unlikely that it's for the catching arms, it would have to have the flat side facing up and that would cause the logo to be upside down. It's probably a crane... ...but, of course, Liebherr builds more than cranes.

Wow, didn't expect the company itself to show up on the forum! Looking forward to seeing what you can do guys!

TWP hasn't been updated in a while (the forum thread is marked as 1.7.x), but it still seems to work OK in 1.12.2. I suppose I should go and ask there instead, but I'm not holding out much hope for an update to that mod at this point.

@severedsolo Fantastic mod, thanks for filling in some of the gaps in the stock alarm system! If you're taking suggestions: would integration with Transfer Window Planner be in scope for this mod? The stock transfer planner is great but I prefer the configurability that TWP provides, so it'd be nice to be able to add a transfer window from that mod directly into a stock alarm, similar to how it's already done in KAC.

Scrub

Not a moderator, but this is probably the Unix epoch bug. Computers think the beginning of time is midnight on 1 January 1970, so when forum software updates mess up a thread, the displayed date gets reset to that - it's kind of a default.

I found that the best way to build a base on top of a ground anchor is just attach a docking port to it and dock your base modules there. It keeps the base stuck to the ground and allows you to build a lot bigger than you otherwise could with EVA construction alone. The anchor is also great in combination with KAS parts, I had a propellant storage rover on the Mun that had somehow flipped over and was sliding down a hill so I put down a ground anchor and ran a cable brace to the rover.