Ember12

Of course this also applies to NERVA's and Orion drives. I think that in addition to this nuclear RAPIER, a nuclear turbojet would be great as something that can run for weeks or months without a refuel.

In practice this might be hard to prevent. There's nothing stopping someone from saying "If you launch my probe to Jool then I'll land 10 units of uranium at your Mun base." I totally agree that this sort of exchange has the potential to turn foul, but I don't see a good way to police or prevent it: no computer program can tell if things are getting ethically murky, and preventing this outright would make any joint mission much harder.

I didn't see a Mac support place, so I'm posting this here. I've been playing stock KSP on my Mac M1 Catalina for a while without issues, but when I tried modding it (with RP-1 and associated mods) it didn't work. What I'm wondering is, has anyone gotten these to work on an M1? I haven't seen anything on the internet to suggest someone has. If you have, I would really appreciate help in resolving the issue. Of course, I can share the details of the failure and the log file if needed.

Can you help me understand, what is the difference between your suggestion and the current KSP part menu?

I use the engineer's report quite a lot, thank you very much. Anyway, if nobody uses it, why would they use a different thing with the same functionality?

I may have misunderstood what you meant by git tree. What I am thinking of is an organizational array of manually saved files. Going back to my rover example, for instance, there could be branches for high, medium, and low gravity, each of which has sub-branches for power generation method, each of which has sub-branches for scientific payloads. I agree though that trees can get messy quickly. An alternative/supplement might be tags for crafts and sub-assemblies. So if you are looking for a rover to send to Tylo, you could search for "rover non_solar mid_gravity" or whatever.

I disagree with this. One way I see a git tree being useful is for my launch vehicles; especially in career mode I have a standardized system of launchers, for different payloads and destinations. I've had to label them as things like "Universal Launcher 2-8-1" meaning a 2.5 meter core with 8 1.25m side asparagus stages. (Don't even get me started on what I have to do with SRBs.) A tree organization would be a far better way to organize them. This would also apply to rovers, where they often (at least for me) have the same basic design but vary in terms of experiments carried, power generation parts, number of wheels, etc, and you want a good way to find the one you're looking for.

This could be done, but I'm not sure how enjoyable it would be to have your low spacecraft fall down after a while; especially with time-warp it would be easy to lose track. Also I'm curious, about that cutoff-at-60-km thing, did the KSP2 people say that the atmosphere would stop there? In the current game it goes to 70 kilometers, and if they said that was changing I didn't hear about it.

That's possible, but I don't know where the heat would go, because I don't see any radiator fins or anything. Maybe it would dump the heat into the fuel before it it lit (however it is lit), or maybe you need to attach your own radiators.

Rotational stability would be a useful feature. But it's quite possible to set up just three fixed panels so that al least one always faces the light source.

According to the Next Gen Tech video, when designing the metallic hydrogen engines they consulted a Dr. Uri Shumlak at the University of Washington, who is an expert of things like plasma confinement. So there's probably some good reason for the star-exhaust, although I have no idea what it might be.

Perhaps it would be more apt to have a Kraken, with a whole bunch of harpoons sticking out of it, but still very much alive.

I'm not an oceanographer, so all of this just represents my brief (non-Wikipedia, but still) internet research. Apparently, the salinity of the ocean at the surface varies between 33 and 37 grams per kilogram of salt. Two factors that influence that are a) precipitation and evaporation, and b) proximity to freshwater sources like rivers. High-salinity water, being slightly heavier, sinks, so lower layers of water are usually slightly denser than those above them. If I had to made something up that would increase this difference, I'd say that if you had a watery world with a lot of salt, humidity and precipitation, the surface water would be continually freshened while the large amounts of salt would concentrate deeper down. EDIT: I just realized that, obviously, there have to be large amounts of evaporation somewhere to keep up a lot of precipitation. So on a world like this, there would be places where lots of evaporating surface seawater would decrease the salinity differential.

The density of Earth's oceans do change slightly with depth, because of small differences in salinity. This difference is only on the order of centigrams/cm^3, so it doesn't effect buoyancy much, but alien oceans could potentially have much steeper changes.

I agree. I've flown many missions where I forget to run science at some point, and this would be a great way to solve that issue.

I stand corrected, this could very well be in KSP2. But could a nuke do anything that a "terminate" can't?

I don't know what this "crew recovery" thing is, but I doubt it will be in stock KSP2.

I don't understand how having a single nuke part would help with this. You need multiple nukes to get a good delta-v, and a whole bunch of stuff to eject the bomb at the right time, detonate at the right time, etc. I'm not very enthusiastic about that, but yeah, you could definitely blow some big stuff up. This is probably would be why it would be an easter egg, because the part has no real use within the game.

It would be fun, but the physics would be problematic; with a launcher 100 meters in radius, just getting to Minmus orbital velocity (150 m/s) would mean that before release, whatever you're firing would be under 225 m/s^2 of centripetal force, or about 23 g's, which is certainly more than a human can handle for a reasonable time, and probably beyond the ability of many (human-made) rocket parts as well. Launching from the Mun with the same 100-meter spin launcher would exert 308 g's, and something like that on Kerbin would exert over five thousand g's. Right now KSP is okay with absurdly high g-forces on many parts, but that's a big hit to realism which I hope will be addressed in the second game. This force could be reduced by increasing the radius of the launcher, but 100 meters is already pretty big for something that has to spin so fast. While these would be workable on tiny worlds like Gilly, producing a mere 2.9 g's with 100m radius, given how easy it is to orbit tiny worlds like that by conventional means, I don't think that spin-launchers would be worth the effort of including.

What exactly would you do with this?

My personal hope is that the KSC will be expandable, with choices about where to position stuff and new stuff costing resources, to act as a sort of colony practice.

I think maybe you're getting SSTOs mixed up with spaceplanes? They are different things. Spaceplanes would indeed be useful on worlds like those, but SSTO rockets wouldn't be particularly effective.

I don't dispute this at all. My only point is that you wouldn't learn an especially large amount about cooling tech in the outer solar system.

Ah, I hadn't noticed the trees. Also I stupidly posted before I knew where that image came from.

Are we sure that's the KSC? The terrain looks pretty non-Kerbin-like. It could be a colony.