Rocket Witch

I always wondered, what is that rover thing in your old videos? An avatar for you as a narrator?

The only thing I can think of is them exploding out of the packet when it's opened, showering all the electronics in fine cheese dust. Magnificent. I'll take a coke to drink in a low-pressure pure oxygen environment. Carbonated drinks must be quite different in space.

The ambient light changes with your distance from the star. It's a stock feature, but normally a player's only experience with this is it being very bright at altitudes closer than Moho. Noticeable darkness requires you to travel out to maybe 5+ times the altitude of Eeloo.

When the readout is not being displayed, it doesn't have to be stored in memory and updated by the CPU for each frame. Technically there's some benefit, but it's extremely minor, assuming both that it's even worth the overhead of displaying the extra GUI elements, and that the game actually stops keeping track of these readouts when they're not being displayed. For a while I've thought it would be great if the experiments could store a history of their readings and generate a graph, and if this could be connected with latitude and altitude readouts from KER. Actually being able to map the planetary climates would be really cool, as I don't think anyone has ever done that.

I do hope explosions in vacuum will behave properly, to be consistent with the details put into rocket exhaust. The nuclear pulse drive (aka. Orion, but see also Medusa) in particular has very fiery explosions in one of the early KSP 2 videos, which could be a placeholder, but basically no type of explosion looks like that in space. This video of Orion makes an example of how the plasma may appear impacting the pressure surface, though it's missing the bright white flash of the detonation itself. Such flashes would be very hard on the eyes, but I think the contrast they produce could be captured artistically without being too harsh.

Interesting. It's nice to see uses for the ore resource explored more. For a point of comparison, the Stockalike Mining Extension mod has mass drivers that rapidly shoot small particles of ore at high velocity, consuming quite a lot of electrical power to give thrust and Isp somewhere between the nuclear and ion engines. Heat production values over about 450 will eventually make an engine explode from prolonged running in vacuum. A value of 6000 is a bit extreme I think, but should still be manageable with stock radiators, which would probably already be installed on an ore-carrying craft for mining. Normally parts that are twice as big have four times as much stats like thrust and weight, so I'd recommend setting the large engine to 4000 if the small one will be 1000.

Can anyone provide a link to the original unedited release of v0.41? The link in the OP has been removed as 'questionable' (what? why?), but getting the URL from a web archive shows the file is no longer available anyway.

With my Munar expedition rover unable to obtain sufficient solar power from its mostly broken panels as it travels toward the north pole, I devised an upgrade package to switch it over to fuel cells and give it better lighting. But I haven't played for quite a while, and put a heavier variant of a rocket under a lighter than normal crew craft. Space is closed for the night.

An idea for the asteroid habitat: unique science experiment that can only be done once it is expanded inside an asteroid, based on observations about the interior structure of the asteroid. Of course it might not be so simple to implement detection of the part actually intersecting with an asteroid for this purpose, and adding new science might be against the stockalike ethos of the mod, so it's not something I expect to be added, just a thought. The Jaw from Asteroid Recycling Technologies does this, but that's a USI mod that does a lot of its own things (including making asteroids 33x more dense and 5x larger). IIRC it changes asteroids to contain a new rock resource instead of ore, which you can do multiple things with, including turn it into ore.

Nertea's comment isn't about the presence of foil, rather the inconsistent visual style it has across all of Squad's parts.

People always rate things in extremes. Look at reviews on any site with star ratings — they're usually either 1, 4 or 5 stars. If you aggregate all the ratings for some things, say a list of movies, you can basically dismiss anything under 4 stars out of hand as total crap.

Moho itself was actually like this in really old versions of KSP. It had an atmosphere very close to the ground (5-10km tall?) which was extremely hot. Some planet mods also have ones like this.

Sounds good, but regarding those tugs, make sure that 5.1 km/s is your laden capability for the payload capacity you're designing for. Something with 5.1 km/s on its own might have less than 2 km/s left over when docked to another craft of similar mass to its own, and your description of them having monopropellant engines implies you've made them quite small. For comparison, my own 'tug' designs are large 80+ tonne (wet mass) craft inspired by the NSFD Shuttle and have over 12 km/s unladen. Given that these tugs are reusable and just trundle back and forth between celestial bodies and stations, nuclear engines are ideal for them. Once you've footed the bill to buy and launch them, you've got the best possible combination of efficiency and thrust to make efficient tranfers with heavy payloads.

Mainly a set of variously-sized expendable chemical rockets rated for certain tonnages to a 125x125 km orbit. Lower stages may be either entirely liquid-fuelled or entirely solid-fuelled. They usually each have a heavy variant with two common core boosters (same diameter/length/engine as the central lower stage). There may also be a semi-heavy variant with two medium-large SRBs different from the core. Superheavy variants with four CC boosters have them placed along the same axis as the first two boosters, giving the vehicle the shape of a hand with its middle finger raised. The reason for this is entirely practical — adding so much mass to the rear of the craft makes it more unstable in flight, but with the craft aligned such that the boosters lie horizontally as it turns over, they essentially act like wings by producing a lot of body lift at the rear end, counteracting the instability. This lift increases in proportion to aerodynamic resistance, making it a very convenient and elegant arrangement despite appearances. Not potentially needing to push any spent boosters up away from the rest of the turned-over craft also makes stage separation very safe and clean. To date I've not played a career/science save to the point where I have such options, but my ideal launch vehicle is something like the Liberty GCNR-HLLV thanks to the Kerbal Atomics mod. Around that point in technology I'd start taking winged SSTO designs seriously, too. I'd also like to make a spaceplane (2STO using drop-tanks) for routine LKO transfers of crew, supplies, waste, etc., but I've never settled on a simple, robust design for a workhorse like that. It tends to end up with too much feature creep, like I want enough space for both a short 2.5m cargo stack and 6-10 Kerbals, ion-based OMS which starts filling that 2.5m cargo area with xenon and raises the electrical power requirement to the point where I'm like "should I install a reactor too?", and so on.

Thanks for the warning. Is it known if vessel loss was due to a bug in the plugin or only the game's poor handling of EC usage and heat during timewarp and on unloaded vessels? I'm only intent on using the nuclear salt water and fisson fragment rockets, which don't seem to have properties the game can't handle in testing, but if there are issues outside of that... It could be that empty space is a cheap way to introduce extra spacing between tanks and reduce the risk of a fission event. Each tank itself already has many internal divisions to prevent fission, but if many of those tanks are packed together the one in the middle might still be at higher risk in the event of a leak or something. Or it could just be artistic licence, and to help visually differentiate them from other tank types.

Do you know where this was available? In Nertea's development thread?

Can't find a direct changelog note or news post about it from Squad, but it was discussed at the time as a result of whatever they did officially say. https://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/4na407/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/220200/discussions/0/412448158152361720/ From sal_vager's link: In KSP's case, vessels probably aren't entirely offloaded to other threads/cores, but some component of the physics is done separately.

Since version 1.1, multiple vessels within physics range will be run on separate CPU cores. At least I think so. So few people remember and use this feature that it's hard to believe it's real anymore. To be fair it's not practical to have things like fleets (though there is a mod called Burn Together that helps facilitate this) but it can be good to bear in mind for bases (ie. don't actually connect the modules together).

How did that flying log survive re-entry?

There are technically seams in every(?) version of KSP. Something fundamental about how the terrain is rendered. They became much larger in version 1.2, were fixed in 1.3 (back to parity with 1.1), and not brought up majorly since. They do affect terrain collision and you can fall into the gap. They seem to manifest slightly differently in different versions of the game, and on different PCs, and after loading different scenes or moving differently across the terrain, making them a notable cause of RUD in bases after updates.

List here: https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Stock_craft Neither the list, nor most of the craft pages, say when they were added, modified, or removed. The numbered-lettered designations are probably just for 'cool factor' or whatever. The Aeris did have a 4A version (the Reliant-powered one Corona688 mentioned) but no 2A or 1A, nor any B or letterless versions; if these existed at all, they would've been pre-release versions of the craft only stored on a developer PC.

Presumably the negative resistance from the propellers in the cargo bay is being enumerated by the game, it just isn't being applied, and the AeroGUI can read and display presently unused values.

The view of Jool on the horizon from certain longitudes of Laythe.

If a society has resolved propulsion down to energy, then you mean laser highways, right? Once you've got an infrastructure of laser installations pushing everything in straight lines around the system, transfer windows stop being relevant. The power differential available to the inner system also isn't relevant for the purpose of intrasystem travel, since craft also need to be slowed by their destination. Having a majority of infrastructure close to the local star is important to a lot of things, and you are right that it may be an overriding concern regarding where industry might be located, but minimum-energy transfer windows are the least concern to people of such an era.

Are/were there any launch vehicles with a stage-and-a-half design other than the Atlas?