jimmymcgoochie

All this talk of the glowing blue circle, and nobody else thought black hole binary pair?

Good news and bad news. Bad news-- that fix didn't fix the problem. Good news- I have some more information about what seems to be happening. I turned off all the sites apart from KSC and cut the channels it receives to just the relay channel. I now think that the lines are blinking every time a vessel switches its connection path- and that vessel is not visible on the screen. Zooming in on Kerbin until the Mun and Minmus are off-screen did it, as did focusing on the Mun or Minmus and zooming in until Kerbin was off-screen. Even with the setting changed to active connections only and not the whole network, the same thing happened which ruled out my earlier theory that it was purely down to the number of connections being displayed. If I ever figure out how to do file sharing online I can drop you the sandbox file I'm using and the logs from KSP/module manager if you think those would help.

Experiment complete. After turning the DSN down to its lowest setting so everything needed a relay to actually have any signal at all, I put half a dozen relays around Kerbin itself at low altitude then did the same around the Mun and Minmus with dedicated channels for each- 1 for Kerbin, 100 for Mun, 200 for Minmus. I spammed a load of really basic probes (OKTO plus a 16-S antenna) into orbit around Mun and Minmus, and some relays with a RA-100 dish around the Sun at around Duna orbit on a separate channel (10,000), with the ground stations set to receive at all the frequencies I had set. Rather interestingly, when I was setting the spam probes up the CNC lines would blink every time I set the frequency from 0 (no signal) to 200 (relay signal) and after a bit more investigation I think the lines are blinking every time a vessel switches connection path e.g. to another relay or ground station. It only happens at higher zoom levels as zooming out would prevent it entirely. I'll try that develop version now and see how that goes.

After some experimenting, it seems like the blinking lines are down to the number of spacecraft that are active rather than being caused by a specific mod interfering with CNC. Taking mods out would erase some of them, but putting various combinations back in would restore them and the CNC lines would start blinking once about 30-40 spacecraft were active. I'm going to try and reproduce it with just CNC installed by spamming a load of relays in a sandbox game today/tomorrow.

In some cases, I've found MechJeb to be a valuable tool especially when planning and executing a series of orbital maneuvers; however several other aspects of it are less than helpful- the aircraft autopilot will try to snap the wings off every plane I've built when I turn it on even when all I want it to do is hold the same altitude and heading that the plane is already on (those extra 3 metres of altitude MUST BE DESTROYED!) and the maneuver planner will often make a terrible mess of a relatively simple return from Minmus or plot out a perfect transfer straight to Duna- and then straight into Duna! I also tried the auto-land system but it failed dismally at bringing a rocket down at or even vaguely near the KSC pad and missed a landing site on Minmus by about 30km. Use it as a learning tool to understand how to do things yourself, and for executing long-range maneuvers where even millimetres per second are the difference between a perfect transfer and missing the target completely, but don't rely on it- it's much more rewarding when you do it entirely by yourself. Some things I've learnt while playing KSP for the last 6 months or so: - Play the tutorials! Before starting on any save games, I played through the tutorial missions up to the Mun landing/return missions. I haven't yet completed the Mun landing one as it seems designed to make you crash at high speed into the rim of a crater, the orbital rendezvous was particularly tricky and in all cases the tutorials gave me most of the information I needed to then start a career game and do it myself. - You can have multiple KSP instances saved on your PC at once, even on different versions. Just copy the entire KSP directory somewhere else and you now have two independent copies of KSP that aren't affected by each other and which won't update each other's save games. You can run one with many mods and another with few/none, have different versions e.g. 1.7.3 and 1.8.1 (because some mods don't work in v1.8 and later), and if you're using CKAN it can manage these copies too, or if you install mods manually you can do it yourself although different versions can pose a problem due to the 1.8 ar-mod-geddon with the change in Unity version that came with it. - Mods are great, but doing something using purely stock parts is more of a challenge as they're much more generic than the more specific and specialised parts in many mods. Make a copy of KSP and keep it with just the stock parts or with a very small number of mods, then come back to it for a bit of back to basics fun. Mods with lots of new parts will add to the load time when the game boots up; mods with lots of visual upgrades can affect the game's performance and I've had several cases where 1 second of game time took about 5 seconds of real time because it was going that slowly- poorly optimised mods maybe? - Beware of going too far too fast with mods- once I discovered them I started throwing them into my KSP GameData folder until it took nearly 5 minutes to load all the mod parts into the game as it boots up and performance started to suffer. Pick a few utilities- I recommend docking port alignment indicator, commnet constellation if you're using the commnet, something like where can I go or transfer window planner to make flying to other planets easier- and some visual upgrades if your PC can handle it- most that I've seen use EVE and scatterer then build on top of that. Add parts mods after that, but only if you have a specific use for them, and don't be afraid to delete some parts out of the mod (being sure to keep a backup with the un-modded files, whether you're installing by hand or using CKAN) if you don't want them. Some mods provide a huge array of parts, but if you only use a small number of them don't be afraid to delete the parts you don't use to stop them cluttering the parts lists in build mode. - If you're able, you can go into the part files in mods or even the stock game and tweak some aspects e.g. change the thrust or efficiency of an engine, give a probe core more battery storage or more powerful reaction wheels and so on. Be careful when changing the stats on the research lab though, you can very easily end up with a lab that produces 500 science per day which is far too much. Just know that if you update a mod you'll probably lose any changes you make, and if KSP itself updates you'll lose any modifications to stock parts. - Failure isn't failure if you learn from it. If something doesn't work, figure out why and make changes for the next time you try it. - Save regularly especially before attempting a landing or launch; you can always recover from that point if it all goes wrong, but losing 3 hours of work because you accidentally pranged your Mun lander is a real pain. And finally: Have fun!

The average human adult has 30 trillion cells (human ones, not counting all the other stuff that lives on/in the human body). Almost all of those cells are diploid, containing two copies of all 23 chromosomes and a total of a little more than 3 billion base pairs of DNA. DNA uses 4 bases- ACGT- so a four-base sequence is equivalent to one byte as both have 256 possible combinations. That means that each of your 30 trillion cells contains 0.75GB of data, meaning the entire human body contains a total of 23 TRILLION gigabytes, or about 20.5 Zettabytes, of genetic data. The average human cell nucleus is 6 micrometres in diameter, so about 133 cubic micrometres in volume. That 113 cubic micrometres contains 0.75GB of DNA; to put it another way, 0.75GB in 0.00000011 cubic millimetres, so around 6.5 Exabytes per cubic millimetre or 6.3 Zettabytes in one cubic centimetre. A small cube 1.5cm on each side- small enough to fit on your fingernail- could contain all the DNA in your entire body. Makes your 4 terabyte SSD hard drive look pretty wimpy in comparison! A 2014 study estimated the size of the internet at about a million exabytes, so a human cell nucleus one inch cubed could store the entire internet (from 2014) in DNA form.

Liquid fuelled engines (rockets and jets) are throttle controlled, if you set the throttle to zero then they won't produce any thrust. Solid rockets don't have this and will burn at full power until their fuel runs out.

EDIT: helps if you actually read the instructions and install dependencies...

Every Kerbal has two characteristics- bravery and stupidity- and digging down into the options in the pause menu I found the Kerbal creator which also has two other checkboxes for 'veteran' and 'badass'. Do these actually have any effect on the game at all? Does a brave but stupid badass Kerbonaut react differently in any way to a fearful but intelligent veteran? Or is it something that got added for future expansion that never got expanded/something that used to matter but got ditched along the way and only exists for backwards compatibility?

Anything that can fly continuously for several months or even years at several hundred miles per hour has enough flight range to cover the whole world many times over. The 'maximum range' is a moot point when it can go literally anywhere on the planet whenever it wants to. Sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would drastically cut aviation emissions especially on long-haul flights: get the plane flying, switch on the nuclear engine(s) and cruise with zero emissions (except a little bit of radiation, but then high altitude flight gives you quite a bit of radiation exposure anyway) to the destination, then switch back to regular engines to land the thing. If and when electric/hybrid aircraft engines reach the point where they can get a heavy airliner off the ground, those two things could be combined to create a plane that runs entirely on electricity (nuclear reactor on board will top up the batteries/capacitors while flying). Not the easiest sell from a PR point of view especially to the airport ground crews, but the green credentials will make it a reality sooner or later if the alternative is nobody flying at all.

Late 50s/early 60s: Project Pluto- nuclear powered air-breathing ramjet with nearly unlimited range, possibly allowing cruise missiles to fly for months before going to target. Actually produced a working nuclear ramjet engine. A few months ago: a Russian rocket exploded after testing releasing a large cloud of radiation; there was talk of said rocket powering a 'revenge' missile with 'infinite range'... Anyone else see anything in common with those two events? (Also, Project Pluto explains the name of the 'Project Eeloo' nuclear air-breathing engine from Near Future Aeronautics mod- learn something new every day!)

Re. the blinking lines and relaying through the same craft- the issues are still present in v1.5 installed on KSP 1.8.1, but I think the self-relaying thing is caused by not ticking the 'only talk to constellation members' box so that the craft tries to use the frequency you set AND public (channel 0) at the same time. It might also happen if you use different dishes at different frequencies (e.g. a small dish to pick up signals from rovers on Duna and a bigger one/set to relay the signal on a different channel back to Kerbin) but I haven't tried that yet. Blinking connection lines only seem to happen if you zoom in below a certain range on the map and they're fine if you stay far away, but obviously it's not a solution as you can't see where you are/where you're going/do maneuvers properly when zoomed out that far.

Going by the information I've come across about KSP2- which is by no means comprehensive!- I'd say there will have to be more advanced mapping stuff in the game as colonies will play such a big part in the game and the really cutting-edge tech will require rare resources to build/use which would then require you to go out and find that resource, mine it in some way and then take it to where it's needed; all of that will need some pretty good mapping and scanning systems to make it a reality. Examples of things that have been hinted at (I just made all of these up but they're based on how I understand the info I have on KSP2, as well as some of the stuff that has cropped up in mods e.g. interstellar extended): an interstellar drive that needs two really rare resources to run and one only exists on Gilly's Midlands but the other only exists in Laythe's Crescent Bay; some resources can only be mined from asteroids but others can be skimmed from Jool's atmosphere; some resources can only be produced over time if you have a collecting station in a specific place such as on Minmus' Lesser Flats or in a narrow altitude band above the poles of Eve. And so on and so forth...

Same trick they used in the original Jurassic Park film(s)- parthenogenesis within exclusively female populations, followed by some random reverting to male because some types of reptiles don't rely on genetics to determine gender (crocodiles use temperature of the egg, for example). None of which applies to badly hybridised dinosaurs that were created by extracting DNA from the stomach of a mosquito that then got preserved in amber (which would utterly destroy any DNA several times over) and mixing it with a frog genome (and some other stuff apparently, especially in the newer ones) to plug the gaps while still magically preserving the original body as opposed to ending up with a very large frog with tiny front legs, pointy teeth and a very growly sounding croak...

I read about 2 of the 69 pages in this thread so I might be repeating what others have already mentioned, but: Tenuous space connection (and spoiler alert of sorts)- Godzilla king of monsters (the newest one): first they fire an 'oxygen destroyer' which can somehow destroy oxygen but not water (which is mostly oxygen) and produces a massive green mushroom cloud and which manages to almost kill Godzilla, which runs on radiation and therefore shouldn't need oxygen, but leaves the (spoiler) giant alien three-headed dragon unharmed. Then to jump-start Godzilla again they set off a multi-megaton nuke literally in its face. I know it's not exactly trying to be realistic with the whole radiation-powered monsters, but still... - Sunshine: the sun is fizzling out and Earth is freezing, so let's fly a ship really close and chuck a fusion device a few hundred metres wide into it to try and reboot it to exactly the same level it was at before, by flying to Mercury and orbiting for a while, having an oxygen garden module with windows (which immediately goes on fire when the sun shield points the wrong way and the sun shines in- so why have the window at all!?) and the entire ship somehow has full gravity in it so the guy in the heat shielded suit manages to trip and faceplant in a compartment open to space. - Geostorm: to counter catastrophic climate change, all you need is a space station the size of a town, a globe-spanning network of weather controlling satellites (including one that uses sound waves, in space!) all linked together by what looks like girders and which would be a real hazard to fly through, which can somehow freeze tropical oceans and airborne planes instantly and create lightning storms, and almost no efforts to counter the cause of said climate change beyond a handful of electric self-driving taxis. And the space station has full gravity inside it AND you can fly a shuttle into a hangar and as soon as the doors close the gravity instantly turns back on and the atmosphere reappears. - Gravity: if George Clooney hadn't wasted so much propellant in that jetpack chair he could easily have made it into the ISS. How did he keep floating away from the space station when they were already stationary to it and why did those parachute cables ping back like elastic bands when he let go? How did they even get to the ISS from Hubble in the first place, and why tow Sandra Bullock at the end of a really long cable when she could just hold on the back of the jetpack and wouldn't keep pulling them off course, wasting more propellant and ultimately leaving Clooney to drift away in space. Apparently the Kessler Syndrome event wiped out direct communications with the ground too for some reason. - Oblivion: Sorry, but how did the Moon get split open and how could that then cause earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions if nearly all of the material stayed where it was? Where did all the sea water go after those floating rigs hoovered it up? Why are the drones so poorly equipped with just one 'eye' and one sensor on the back that will cause the drone to spin out and explode if it gets shot? Why are there glaciers just outside New York and yet there are deserts less than 50 miles away? And who in their right mind would try and set up a colony on Titan!? It's covered in seas of liquid methane with mountains made of water-ice, over a billion miles from the Sun so photovoltaics are useless, and is orbiting a gas giant that throws out considerable radiation and makes navigation trickier, and which will pull passing comets/asteroids towards it potentially causing a collision with Titan in the process. Mars is much closer, has more favourable gravity for human survival, plenty of raw materials including water and in some areas is above freezing during the day; melt the CO2 caps at the poles and you've got a slightly thicker and warmer atmosphere to work with. - Oblivion and Independence Day, and to some extent Edge of Tomorrow but that's not targeted at Earth in particular: so you're an interstellar space-faring alien civilisation/robotic-type thing that needs resources to survive. There are literally HUNDREDS of moons in the solar system you could harvest and nobody would really care- in fact, they could probably have removed the entirety of Uranus and Neptune, moons and all, and gone away without us particularly noticing or really caring. But no, they HAD to go for the one planet that's actually inhabited even though they don't need its habitability and actually want to destroy it, which is harder to get to from outside the solar system and also harder to leave the solar system from, apparently for no better reason than spite. - Star Wars: sooooo many massive hollow things with nearly infinite drops and yet no guard rails anywhere! Why have so many hollow spaces inside space stations etc. anyway, they're literally a waste of space and presumably the bottoms of them are littered with stormtroopers that slipped on a freshly-mopped floor and plummeted to their deaths. How can the Death Star go at hyper-speed or indeed move at all when a) there are no thrusters and b) it's the size of a small moon, and if the weapon in Star-Killer base is faster than light, why can people see it coming? Star-killer base is a big problem for me: it somehow pulls material out of a sun from tens of millions of miles away, which would take hours to get there, and yet is completely frozen and actually depletes the sun after just the second time charging it up- what use is that? It's effectively drifting in empty space at that point, but yet it's still light enough to see outside. In Episode 8, why wait until you're running on fumes AND 3/4 of the shuttles have been destroyed before going all Ben-Hur on the flagship- why not move everyone to the main rebel ship and immediately warp the two smaller ships at the First Order fleet, causing immense damage and forcing them to slow down while the main ship gets away, or at least has time to drop off the shuttles unnoticed and lure the surviving FO ships away before ramming them in empty space? (Not really a bad science point so much as a poor plot point but it's always bugged me) - Interstellar: again, Mars colonies, or in this case Moon colonies since that's vastly closer to Earth and easily accessible (relatively speaking). But no, flying to a wormhole beyond Saturn and going to a star cluster in another galaxy with a supermassive black hole in the vicinity then hoping to find a vaguely habitable planet there instead is a much better idea even if it takes hundreds of years, so let's throw a dozen people at those planets with nothing but a robot for company in the hope that one of them can be used as a colony. The backup plan for Endurance is to use 5000 frozen embryos with some kind of electronic wombs to grow babies in batches, leaving the crew of 4 to somehow create a functioning colony while looking after dozens and then hundreds of babies and children of varying ages at the same time, on another planet that might turn out to be unsustainable after all. Instead of doing something sensible like starting a colony on the Moon and moving hundreds of people there at a time in a 3 day trip, building underground/domed habitation facilities and growing food using hydroponics etc. and with everything being thoroughly sterilised to remove this strange nitrogen-breathing plant pathogen that's apparently depleting oxygen from the atmosphere and destroyed every crop except corn. - Meteor Apocalypse: that might not be the right title, I can't remember it as I only watched it once and laughed at the outright nonsense in it. First, throwing dozens of nukes at a comet (NOT a meteor, as the title suggests!) manages to not only fail to divert it from its collision course to Earth at all but also create a cloud of shrapnel that travels ahead of the comet itself but straight at the Earth as well, raining fireballs in all directions at regular intervals and somehow poisoning the water supplies with something that was chemical, or possibly biological depending on who was talking about it. And of course the only place on Earth affected by the fireball rain (and indeed hit by the comet itself) was the area of California directly around Los Angeles, which conveniently is where the main characters were at the time. And of course the main character manages to stumble across a lab which happens to have an antidote ready-made and then blunders around in the mountains for a while before miraculously finding his missing wife/daughter and deploys that same antidote to save said daughter with seconds to spare. Then they have a big happy family hug time despite literally standing and watching a comet destroy the whole of Los Angeles seconds earlier... - Passengers: The spaceship is going at half of light speed, yet everything on board occurs at real time and a message sent to Earth will take 55 years total to get a reply back despite that pesky relativity time-slowing thing that wreaked havoc in Interstellar. They also fly directly past a very large star, apparently within one diameter's distance, at half of light speed, while two people stand at a huge window and watch but don't get instantly turned to dust by the effectively compressed radiation, heat, gravity etc. along with the entire spaceship as it ablates into ions and scattered across the cosmos. - Avatar: why is the toxin used on the arrows lethal to humans AND native life? What's in the air that kills humans? Mile-high trees and floating rocks because unobtainium? Somehow life on Pandora uses the same genetic structure and more importantly the same genetic encoding system that life on Earth does (which is next to impossible in reality) and the Na'vi(?) have a very human-like social structure and behaviours, only with an Internet of Trees and a conspicuously environmentally sensitive way of life to deliberately contrast with the land-grabbing humans and their smoke-belching, hole-digging, forest-levelling industry. And a plot hole- why not immediately take out the shuttle and the heavy gunship in the first attack instead of leaving them until last? A few well-placed gun bursts by Jake to the cockpits of both and the whole plan goes out the window, most likely resulting in a brief and one-sided air battle with most of the helicopters downed within a minute and the ground troops left unsupported and with no real chance of either completing their mission or getting back to base. No need for the suicidal cavalry charge, no major characters lost (probably) and no need for the wildlife to intervene. It might not fill the time out as much or be as dramatic as the real version, but it makes much more sense. - other films I can't remember the names of: there's one where a lump of dark matter the size of a tennis ball hits Mars and utterly wrecks it, but hits Earth and simply drills a very neat hole completely through it, somehow stopping the planet's rotation dead (with none of the effects you'd expect from stopping an entire planet's 600+mph rotation speed, obviously, that would just be a distraction). With the spin gone, the magnetic field starts failing and only a pair of magic satellites can either restart the planet (if you're the main characters) or provide a shield for a small habitable zone (if you're the self-interested military/government types making walk-on appearances, I'm not sure if this one had some recognisable actors in it or if it was some obscure thing amazon dug up to stick on prime video to fill it out) and those satellites get repositioned on a second by second basis with a gleeful disregard of orbital mechanics or any form of physics at all. Oh, and the hole in the planet causes massive storms because all the air gets sucked into it thus causing killer lightning storms with a whole lot more than the 1.21 gigawatts needed to send a certain DeLorean 30 years into the future... There's another (might be called apocalypse earth or something similar) which involves questionable high-speed travel, this time at 99% of light speed and yet it can slow down again when they arrive (spoiler alert) back at Earth but don't realise it because the Moon has again been destroyed and is now a large ring around the planet, which obviously means all the mountains have sunk and the whole planet is jungle. There's another one, might be apocalypse now or deep impact or something similar, where a comet is going to hit Earth (again) and the only way to stop it is to fly around the moon in two space shuttles, fly through the comet's tail (which is full of random chunks of debris that wipes one shuttle out) and land on the comet itself, then drive a rover to a specific site and drill several miles into the comet to drop a nuke in and break it in half, which despite a few setbacks like one rover getting launched into space by a random gas burst and the drill breaking repeatedly, manages to succeed and split the two halves to travel either side of Earth with, as ever, seconds to spare. Another one I can't remember the name of had a manned mission going to mars to find out why the algae and cyanobacteria they had bombed it with a while ago had disappeared (the obvious answer, because they couldn't live on a planet with negligible atmosphere, no surface water and sub-freezing temperatures pretty much everywhere, wouldn't make a good plot it seems). The orbiting ship had a huge fire on board and had to vent all the air which put it off course, the lander crashed miles from the landing site, the pre-deployed surface outpost was destroyed but somehow the atmosphere had oxygen in it and could support humans with no breathing gear. Turns out there were little insects all over Mars that were eating the algae and emitting oxygen (because science, apparently) which then ate most of the astronauts on the surface too, leaving the one survivor to hotwire a Russian sample return mission to get back into orbit and intercept the spaceship before it either crashed or had to return to Earth. Oh, and there was a military robot on board the lander that got dumped to save the crew capsule, but survived the crash with some damage and went to 'military mode' and started hunting the crew down one by one. A cameo from Pathfinder and some dubious DIY fuelling of the sample returner rocket later and of course everything ends fine with the two surviving crew heading back to Earth with some little oxygen-emitting beasties to save the Earth from some kind of climate disaster that meant the oxygen was running out (they never bothered to explain that bit). And to cap it off, what's the best way of staving off a tectonic cataclysm that will end humanity? Why, shooting nuclear torpedoes at the fault lines under the sea of course! Never mind the fact that the submarines are literally sailing through the deepest trenches in the ocean, many miles deep when the best military subs out there don't go more than a few hundred metres down, or that they travel straight into the blasts from their nuclear torpedoes without ill-effect but yet one of them gets hit by a rock fall that smashes a hole in the hull while somehow not immediately imploding. I've seen plenty more dodgy sci-fi films but can't remember them due to their mediocrity or plain rubbishness, if you want some really questionable science in films then amazon prime video has loads of low-budget and low-credibility sci-fi stuff, or just scour the movie channels on TV for anything vaguely sci-fi-ey as odds are it'll be heavy on the 'fi' but cherry-pick the 'sci' bits for the sake of what little plot there is.

But if you go through the list of mods and click 'download contents' it only does one at a time and will give you an error message if you try to do a second. I've found at least two mods that aren't on CKAN that I'm currently using, and another which is on an old version (the most recent version was released in June this year so it's not exactly hot off the press) that I've had to install manually to avoid breaking my save games and wiping out pretty much all of my in-flight craft and taking most of my Kerbals with them.

I see a whole lot of mods with a maximum version of 1.8.9 which might just be future-proofing by the mod makers. I just re-downloaded CKAN and am trying to get it working with my KSP v1.7.3 which has a lot of mods in it already but it doesn't seem to be detecting them very well. In addition CKAN can only download one mod at a time- not so good when it's a big one like interstellar extended and you could have lots of other mods downloading at the same time if you did it yourself.

Try searching the forums/CKAN/spacedock/curseforge for 'space station parts', 'station parts' or 'space station' and you'll probably find a variety of mods that should have what you're looking for.

Not all mods are on CKAN, although I don't have a specific example to add here. There are also plenty of mods that are on CKAN which haven't been updated in quite a while (some are still on KSP v1.0 or even earlier!). I tried using CKAN but found the UI clunky and unintuitive, the sorting functions unhelpful (some mods claim to be v1.8.2 dependent, but there is no 1.8.2!) I've always done mods manually but there's plenty of work involved: finding the mod(s) you want on spacedock/github/curseforge/somewhere else I haven't found yet; downloading the latest version (or a specific version of the mod to work with a specific version of the game, I've seen plenty of people on the forums say they only play KSP at v1.3.1 and refuse to update beyond that and I currently have both 1.7.3 and 1.8.1 with different save games and different mods in them); unzipping and storing the mods somewhere- it's a good idea to keep a mod library of some kind and with some type of version control like Git you can keep track of them all without a huge amount of effort- and removing old versions if necessary; removing the old version of the mod from your GameData folder (if you have an old version installed) and copying the new one over. Doing that for a small number of mods isn't that difficult; doing it for 50 of them, with different mods being updated at different times (or all at once if a big release comes along e.g. KSP 1.8) and in some cases different websites being updated at different times for the same mod, becomes a pretty big headache. My advice to you is: Try using CKAN, and if it works for you then run with it, but if not stick to a relatively small list of mods that is easy to keep track of and run version control (use a Git repository in your mod library folder) so you can always roll back if necessary. Keep an eye on the mod sections of the forums to see when updates are released, and a quick 2 minute check of a few mods on spacedock/curseforge/whatever while the game loads up isn't a bad idea at all.

I read this and immediately thought of Zero-X from Thunderbirds/Captain Scarlet, but that's pretty much the opposite of the challenge and would require a rendezvous between a spaceship and a plane (well, two planes if you're doing it properly) in atmosphere followed by landing the whole thing intact. If you ever watched the Zero-X film you'll know that idea didn't end too well...

Rest of the world: because miles and gallons have no readily divisible units, and because pretty much everywhere else in the world uses the metric system which uses multiples of 10 and makes sense instead of 14 ounces in a pond, 16 pounds in a stone, 12 inches in a foot, 1760 yards in a mile Do you want your VAB floor space measured in acres or hectares? The international standards for measurement are SI units, and pretty much all of them are metric with orders of magnitude being easy to do- kilonewton, micrometre, megaton, gigawatts etc. so trying to shoehorn gallons or miles into it will only cause confusion, conversion calculation headaches and doesn't add anything to the game for the majority of people who either use metric natively, or who don't use it but don't care that the speedo is in m/s instead of miles per hour and your orbit is at 90,000m instead of 295275 feet 7 inches... Now on to the part that I actually looked at this thread for- what I want to see in KSP 2: - Built-in docking alignment indicator plus docking ports that can lock to specific angles (multiples of 15 degrees would probably be most useful e.g. 90 degrees) to build a space station that all points in the same direction. That alignment indicator mod is incredibly useful and yet so incredibly simple, it amazes me that it isn't baked into the game in the first place. - A deeper, more meaningful tech tree that requires more than just grabbing 'science' and buying new stuff with it in the R&D Department- put specific goals in place like flying a crewed mission to the Mun and back, launch a craft into interstellar space, create a space station around Kerbin etc. and create a more conventional path to space that puts uncrewed probes and satellites before crewed missions rather than flying crewed rockets literally from day 1. I'd also like to see more things to do with planes and more of an emphasis on spaceplanes as satellite launch vehicles, plus micro/cube sats: think of the little school-Kerbals' faces when they see the little cube sat they built in engineering class floating above Kerbin (and the boost to your reputation for giving it a piggy-back ride during your latest 100 ton orbital launch); either that, or scatter a thousand of them in the upper atmosphere and then sit back and watch the show! - More commercial options to run your space project commercially- get contracts to launch pre-built payloads into specific options, develop commercial rockets and run a business to get more money and greater prestige which in turn could boost the exploration side of things (and maybe some tech tree nodes could require a specific number of successful contracts/launches to complete or something like launch/return/relaunch the same ship a la Space-X). Do deals with the various suppliers to get their parts at a discount by limiting your use of a rival's products- this would require some partially redundant parts so there was enough overlap to be viable. - Other space agencies operating at the same time. Kerbin needs a space race, and there's nothing like a bit of competition to drive innovation and push the boundaries! Other agencies could compete with you for commercial contracts, race you to achieve specific milestones first or even team up to launch joint or complementary missions like the ISS or US-European missions. Baikerbanur, Woomerang and Dessert Launch Site could become the HQ for rival space programmes, new sites could be created in places where there isn't much happening on Kerbin and you could have the embarrassing situation of landing your cutting-edge reusable booster on a rival's base instead of yours and they'd steal the designs! This would also work as an introduction to multiplayer games, could easily be disabled if you don't want them and combined with the more commercial side of things above would give you something to fill the time as your rover flies for 300 days to Duna or you wait for Jool to be in the right place to do a transfer. - More science! I don't just mean more things to staple on the side of a ship- more deployed science modules (breaking ground has a total of 4 different experiments, and you can only use 3 at a time because one needs an atmosphere and another needs no atmosphere), long-term activities for crewed missions, anomalous sensor readings to investigate and so on plus some real life experiments such as the Hayabusa-2 comet sampler and hypothetical future missions such as a submarine for exo-oceans, whether on the surface or buried beneath it. - Backstory and plot! There's no information on how KSP came into being and virtually nothing about Kerbal society in general except the little snippets you find in missions and the agency summaries within them. There's also plenty of stuff to talk about- where did those monoliths/that Arctic UFO/the pyramids and stone face on Duna come from? What made that huge crater on Kerbin? Why does Eve have oceans when it's over 400 Kelvin on its surface, and so many craters when it has such a thick atmosphere? Having some kind of story running through the game would also produce more events that could be required for research nodes on the tech tree, a better grounding for rival space agencies and suppliers plus a greater role for the characters in the game, whether that's the astronauts themselves or the rest of the team e.g. Gene or Wehrner. - An expanded set of stock parts. Shiny new super-tech aside, there are still plenty of gaps in the parts catalogue of KSP that various mods have tried to fill out, and which KSP 2 would benefit from filling as standard: the 0.625m parts category is almost empty with just one stackable engine and one fuel tank (and a handful of little plane parts but I'm mostly talking rockets here), even with the addition of the new Mite and Shrimp boosters, and very few other parts that actually fit into that footprint (I think the QBE is the only probe core that a 0.625m heat shield actually covers completely); there are a lot of missing parts in the 1.875m size bracket too including a probe core(!), battery, reaction wheel, parachute and a short rocket engine like the Terrier that can be used for landers. There's one nuclear engine, one ion thruster and only one set of RCS thrusters which are too big for small satellites and too small to control big spacecraft/stations without using lots of them and bumping the part count really high. There's a sizeable opening for a set of space station parts- habitations, experiment modules/labs, life support modules and size adapters and/or a larger hub module. I'd also like to see Mk2 plane holds actually able to carry a 1.25m payload with some parts stuck on the outside without those parts sticking through the aircraft's skin and getting stuck when the doors open, and likewise a Mk3 cargo hold that you can a) load stuff in the ramp more easily and b) actually launch 2.5m parts without the same problems the Mk2 stuff has, plus a Mk1 cargo hold for small payloads. - Performance and visuals. After putting together a large mission containing five probes bristling with science parts all attached to a single big craft that was purely for propulsion (admittedly with a few parts from mods) I started what was supposed to be a 1 hour burn, had breakfast, did some household chores, went shopping, had lunch and came back nearly 5 hours later and it still hadn't finished, but was now noticeably off course and would miss the target planet completely. First of all, the game was running super-slowly with 1 second of game time lasting 4-5 seconds of real time even though my PC can cope with pretty much every game I've thrown at it on maximum graphics settings. I've seen the same thing on space stations and large spaceships so either some mods have really poor optimisation, or else the game itself isn't using the available hardware efficiently. The second problem was that the result of the maneuver didn't match what it said it would do, possibly due to using an efficient but low thrust engine. Since KSP 2 promises interstellar travel, this issue could become exponentially worse if using more conventional parts (like the Dawn ion thruster) to go interstellar. Making the maneuver editor take your craft's size and thrust into consideration in more ways than just the time taken to do a specific maneuver would hopefully improve accuracy for long-distance travel, and adding the ability to do time warps while maneuvering, or switch vessels and continue the burn, would be a huge time saver. I've also tried a variety of visual enhancement mods as the stock graphics look underwhelming especially in orbit/map view, will noticeably sharpen up as I fly over or switch back from map view and in some cases will create strange squares where shadows/sea/surface of Jool won't render correctly/at all, and the new graphics in v1.8 made the game crash every other time I switched to a vessel on the Mun or Minmus but looked really nice when it didn't. Without the need to maintain any backwards compatibility to existing players with older or less capable devices and with the option of pushing the required specs up to take advantage of modern hardware, KSP 2 could look so much better straight out of the box with clouds, weather, high-definition terrain and features and much more. If the trailer and demo videos were anything to go by, things look promising in this area! A related point is the appearance of parts in the game, specifically the variants of those parts- or lack of them! I want to see a fully custom paint system for most parts or at the very least an expanded set of stock paints based on real rockets that aren't from NASA in the 1950s/60s- there are plenty to choose from! The stock parts often don't match each other properly (1.875m parts are really bad for this, they look completely different despite using the same hex codes for their colours) and many parts (3.75m tanks, oscar-b and the little orange fuel tanks etc) are lacking in variation. A fully custom paint scheme would make your spacecraft distinctive, would tie in to the commercial stuff above as a kind of branding (which would also make ship-sharing on the forums/steam better to look at) and to me would be a valuable addition to the game. Some of the gameplay demo videos and the images on the KSP2 steam page have brightly coloured fuel tanks, but I'm not sure if that was just to show what type of fuel was in them e.g. some kind of nuclear fuel, maybe? And finally- it's better to release later with all the features fully working and tested as much as they feasibly can before releasing additional features at a later date than to release it early or rush everything into version 1.0 and end up with a really buggy and glitchy game that lets everyone down, followed by a series of hasty patches or removing certain features that didn't work. I'll wait a few more months for a more polished product (but if you're looking for a beta tester, I have some experience doing that and I actually do software testing as a job )

If you want a mod to work, it helps if you actually install it... Turns out I completely missed out KSC Extended itself! After I installed it, I had several failed attempts at getting it to work before doing what I probably should have done in the first place, and dumping the GameData folder from each mod directly into the KSC directory. And it worked! I'm just going to go and sit in the Corner of Shame for a while...

Still can't get this mod to work at all, it didn't work for me in v1.7.3 when I tried it there but that might just be a compatibility thing with 1.7.3 though.The game seems to think there are textures missing for literally everything in OSS, but I'm fairly sure I saw a single wind turbine at Dessert Airfield, floating about 50 metres in the air...

I just tried to install this mod in KSC v1.8.1 but nothing is showing up. I've added the required mods- KerbalKonstructs 1.8.1.2, Tundras Space Centre 1.1, Omegas Stockalike Structures 0.0.12 and ModuleManager4.1.0 all downloaded today- but nothing ever appears and I just have the stock KSC. I've dug through the logs and am getting a load of errors about OSSNTR textures not being found, see below. I'm completely stumped, anyone know why this is happening and how to fix it? List of mods I'm using:

As someone who is actually working on a development project (though regrettably not nearly as interesting as KSP2 ) and after seeing several examples of game developers rushing to release something before it was ready and then either backing it out again with their heads down and tails between their legs or trying to fix all the problems in an even more rushed release, in my experience the only time you'll actually know the release date is if it's in a few days time, or contractually obligated- in the latter case you'll probably end up with something dismal that doesn't work properly/at all. There are many many many things that can pop up during a big project- everyone gets flu and is off for three weeks, new versions of third party stuff get released (e.g. Unity), a 'simple' feature turns out to be horrendously complicated and takes months to finish, power cut breaks the servers and erases the last few weeks' work, etc. etc. - so don't be surprised if the release is delayed a bit. Better to be late but great than release early and be terrible; let's face it, if KSP2 was released and crashed every 2 minutes, glitched you across the solar system(s) for no obvious reason and was basically a rebuild of the original game with barely anything new, the forums would explode. And I'd be throwing plenty of dynamite in there too.