Linkageless

It's true that every outage chips away at the likelihood people will return. However, I'm now wondering how many other ways the forum could possibly break are left. (That's not an invitation to get morbidly creative!)

Well, once again that was a worrying outage, but I had to remind myself that someone, somewhere was probably working to get the cloudflare up again. I reckoned it was just another one of those bumps in the road caused by handover, and I'm glad it's out of the way now. I'm with you, but it is definitely still a worthwhile endeavour. IMHO I think it's definitely too soon. I'd like to see at least the chance of some dialogue with whoever is taking the reigns first. That doesn't mean we shouldn't all be getting on top of your torrent releases, so we can share the burden as you suggest.

Yes, I had a few 502s an hour or so ago also.

That's a good looking concept! Reminds me of a much less aesthetically pleasing Mk3 design I did around 2019. I'd built a Nerva powered interplanetary booster system called DragonFly and wanted to see if I could get one to orbit using a similar wraparound SSTO spaceplane, rather than it's usual vertical SSTO booster. It worked, but was a pain to land and aside from some fuel savings it wasn't an improvement on vertical launch, so ultimately it didn't get used. Sadly, I've not been able to find the wraparound spaceplane craft file, but am now feeling inspired to have another go at that concept. I found piggyback-style with terriers can be made to work if you use SAS prograde and carefully trim their thrust with an independent throttle. That was for an Eve SSTO spaceplane expedition and advance scanning/relay systems. In this case, the SSTO was the largest and providing most of the thrust; I can see that where they are roughly equal there's likely to be a lot more instability. They do look good for rovers, don't they. They also offset nicely on top of other stuff when creating huge rovers.

Makes sense. The licencing can be renewed at any time and why would essentially a new company want to spend out for longer while it's still establishing itself? Of course, it's going to be a significant cost but not the only one and they have those other operating costs to attend to. It's likely that the forum runs from a few app frontends and a DB cluster, probably all AWS EC2 and RDS instances, all hidden behind CloudFront. I'm further speculating that limiting/scaling back of that way have been part of the cause of the issues recently. (ie - There may have been an unwelcome increase in load, for all I know.) Perhaps this was not helped by a transfer of ownership in progress, meaning the right people had yet to be assigned to get to grips with the situation. I'm glad they got there and things are running well again. To me this shows they (the new owners, as an organisation) not only care but are capable and are attending to it. I have full confidence that this means they will continue to maintain these forums as long as there's an enthusiastic community.

Ingenious! Although maybe very low TWR wouldn't be so helpful as you need that downward acceleration to compensate for lack of gravity. It would be interesting to compare on a mid-size rover chassis big enough to host different engine types. I reckon the really high efficiency but low TWR engines would be outshined by some of the others. I reckon mammoths would do the job well, but you'd need a huge rover to make sense!

Open up the part action window for one of those panels (right click) and look for the "Status:" line. As suggested, if it's broken, it's either been broken by aero forces or impacted something (I've also had a fairing deploy do that as it was clipping it even when folded). That is fixable if you're ok with a bit of .sfs file search and replace. The alternative is to get an Engineer there with a repair kit, which seems unlikely. If it's something else, show us a screenshot.

I'm glad to hear reboot cleared things up. I'll guess that there may have been a temporary issue with your environment or window manager, or an issue getting file locks. If this happens again, after confirming there's no other copy of KSP running, you can try running it from bash with strace, eg: strace ./KSP.x86_64 Ordinarily, this will generate *a lot* of terminal output of system calls (startup with strace -o generates a ~51M file on my lightly modded install), but often we are only really interested in the last few lines assuming it hangs and does nothing more. Logging strace output to file using -o is an option but slows things down and you'd probably be doing a tail -f on that anyway and ignore the rest. It would also be interesting if you're seeing it constantly looping round generating the same calls over and over. Either way make a note of where you end up in the system calls before killing the process off as elegantly as it will allow (ie - try kill -15 <pid> and give it a chance to clean up, before you resort to kill -9). I note that the --single-instance option no longer seems to work (at least on my linux/steam install), but two instances wouldn't necessarily be the cause of such a problem so early on in startup..

I can tell you would rather have got to the cause of the problem and cure that or at least understand it. However, I'm glad you were able to find a way to replace that pod and eradicate the problem. Were you able to compare the config of the old pod with the struts and the new one? I'd be curious to see if the problem could be recreated, but I'm guessing that it may have been due to fairly unique circumstances so that may never be possible. Certainly if you placed strut(s) in the same place and there was no problem, that would be a clear indication that there were more things at play than meets the eye.

Oh my, I may yet be able to live out my "The Algebraist" fantasies!

Sounds like a horrendous bug. Are you able to import this into a separate install with the bare minimum or no mods? If so, does it still behave the same way? If all is fine in a non-modded install, does re-adding relevant mods re-trigger this? Is that strut referenced or referencing another part other than the pod? (Can't remember which way round it works with struts.) If the strut is only connected to the pod, it's not beyond all possibility to manually edit it out of the file. If you're editing an .sfs file, be sure to have keep an identical backup so you can back out those changes.

I recall trying attaching a docking port and docking it, which I imagine would be roughly equivalent to a klaw. Can't remember how that went and I may not have even checked if it satisfied the contract. My career play-throughs end up having so many lose ends to tie up that it's inevitable a few things slip under the radar while I'm making sure someone gives Val a lift home from Dres. Agreed that if I noticed it didn't actually qualify for whatever reason, there would be no shame in cheating it complete since I'd complied with the spirit of the contract.

Actually, Science & Spaceflight might be the best fit of course. Your choice, you'll soon be shuffled about by a mod if they think it's off topic

You read my mind That would be an impressive feat of AI, I think. Maybe all they need to do is prove that KSA is a worthy KSP3 and Haveli will buy them too. I can't say I've thought this through, but the possibilities are endless.

I think Scott Manley addressed the potential ISP of a steam rocket in one of his videos....

There's an idea... RCS or even a Spider or Ant constantly pushing you down for better traction on low gravity worlds. You could set independent throttle to only just enough to keep it grounded.

Woa... dude! I always imagined Jeb as more of a Ryan Reynolds. Keanu could be Bill. No argument about Sandra Bullock's role, but she needs to get a slavic accent right. Seriously though, I'd love to see RW pick up the glitsy bits of KSP2 and work it into a rebranded KSA, but I think things are too far gone for that to happen now. I think the best outcome we could hope for now is KSP2 development to resume in the form of some DLCs to deliver what we really were looking forward to, but even that seems like a fantasy. If we keep plugging away at the mods on both games, then they'll have a reason to keep the community alive.

Welcome back, @RyanBrian! From my understanding, you should be fine to post that kind of thing in The Lounge so long as it's not promotion for profit.

Thanks for the clarifications. I welcome our new overlords and hope they see the value in extending the licence

The badger is perched on a Razorbill. I'll be sending both to Minmus where they will fill their bellies and hopefully the Razorbill will later be joined by some more Razorbills for bit of a frolic around LKO.

Today, I am putting probes in a badger.

Duna is pretty fun for Rovers. Alternatively, if you want to build a specialised rover, try the Mohole at Moho's pole!

What flavours will be in Sarnus' rings? I'd quite like Hazelnut and Rum & Raisin.

And the post that eradicated that is a promise that the download site will be replaced, which is nice

I'm sure we're all wondering... The cynical devil on my shoulder says that domain names are cheap to renew if that signals there's some renewed promise of a franchise staying alive. The trusting angel on the other shoulder says that the owners of the domain took the trouble to ensure it had plenty of life and the new owners are likely to keep that up. Frankly, why wouldn't they keep the forums and wiki alive if it means people will continue to invest in the game(s)? Perhaps there is scope for some more DLC. Anyway, such speculation is off-topic. All we can say for sure is that there's subtle changes underway and that is very likely the result of a change in ownership.