Vostok

Wow. That is ridiculously insanely crazily splendid to the Nth degree.

"Strut your stuff."

Something I might suggest... If you can grab a kerbal by his helmet with the claw, and then get him to ragdoll... Then push him downwards (away from the claw) by his body with landing legs, the rubber bandy-ness of the ragdoll might become a source of propulsion. Not to mention a fitting sacrifice for the space kraken.

If constructive criticism is helpful, you might find it useful to sketch the shape of the whole ship before going for the hard final outline. Try drawing perspective cubes, cylinders, cones and wedges. You will find that pretty much any 3d shape (excluding complex surfaces) will be some sort of combination of basic shapes. If you can manage perspective shapes, you can read about vanishing points, and one, two, and three point perspective. Then all you have to do is to assemble your basic shapes to make the ship. (if you visualise every part of the ship as a piece, that might help! - the fuel tanks are just cylinders, the wings are flat wedges or cuboids, the cockpit is a cone with a cuboid on, et cetera...) Perspective in drawings will tend to make them look a lot more dynamic. Currently you have a very Technical-Drawing thing going on, where all the lines that are parallel in real life are parallel in your drawing. This is not the case, due to the fact that one views an object from a single point. EDIT: Here's a wee example Hope it helps

I tried to use a kerbal as a rotational bearing by having him ragdolled and grabbed by two claws at once. Turns out the game doesn't like this very much.

I'd like to offer a piece of my ancient work, if you could give it the once-over, that'd be cool. It's a short story that I did way back when I did that sort of thing, depicting Jeb very unlike anything I'd heard then. Perhaps it's been done again since, who knows? Anyway, this is 'A Shade of Darkness'. (complete with pictures) http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/12175-Writing-Artwork-A-Shade-of-Darkness

I can confirm it. That rocket does not look like me.

I believe there is a green splatter texture somewhere in the game files. Probably it was once intended to be applied to parts that kerbals have crashed into at high speed. It's a shame it never got used, really.

There have been a few times this would have been useful to me. For example, performing a lunar rendezvous on an apollo style mission, several times have I taken off in the wrong direction, believing that the service module above me was orbiting in a different direction. So, not pointless as far as I can tell, and barely large enough to be screen clutter.

I plan on docking wheels to an A class asteroid, then landing it near KSC and driving it to the space center and having it as a pet. I'm thinking of making a collection, starting small and then seeing if it's possible to land an E class with wheels.

Maybe not so much a reskin, but it would be nice if the tank ends were more like the new SLS parts (you can see the fuel container caps, and some internal stuff). The blank flat ends just look ugly, and it doesn't feel as if they contain fuel, they're just tubes.

Aww, that's a shame. It's still open for attaching to ragdolls though >

I figured that gyroscopic stability would help prevent the pivoting... Maybe multiple claws could be used to make a swashplate arrangement? Or the blades could be on an axle supported by trusses, again to prevent the pivot.

I know it's already possible, I just wondered if it would make it easier

I've been thinking... Does anybody else reckon that the claw's 'free pivot' mode will allow it to be used as a helicopter rotor bearing? If it doesn't we can always use it to dock with a ragdolled Kerbal, and then dock another claw to the same ragdolled Kerbal, and use the ragdoll as a hinge or axle. I reckon that attaching a claw to a ragdolled Kerbal, while not particularly very ethical, might become quite an interesting system. Kerbal-jointed rope anyone?

I reckon the claw's rotation ability will lead to it being used in helicopters as a rotor bearing. It's one of the first things I'll try...

I think that the claw's pivot ability along with the fact that it keeps the whole thing as one ship will lead to it becoming a helicopter rotor bearing in many uses.

I spotted it on a tweet by Notch, of minecraft. I didn't even use twitter at the time, total chance.

what happens if you smash two asteroids into one another at very high speeds...?

No option for build a giant bridge? Take it round the long way, or build a boat methinks.

Due to the nature of gravitational attraction, I prefer to say that the Mun landed on me.

Tracing's not always bad. it depends on the situation I suppose

I'm not sure that the Jebediah Kerman one is entirely suitable.... I always imagined that a company that owned a junkyard and sold second hand rocket parts would have a far less corporate and clean logo, if indeed any logo at all. I don't picture jeb in a suit, is what I'm saying. Jeb probably designed his own logo, in comic sans and clip art.

I think the idea would mean that you might get a science bonus for the extended research. For example, say you did some (what for us right now is normal) research on the lunar surface using a one use lander, and you transmit it to kerbin. All the science equipment would get the fraction of the science available to it via transmission. However, say you land a lab on the same lunar biome, and spend extra time performing research. when transmitted back to kerbin, this would not only net the full science value of all the experiments available to the lab (you could put that down to better communication due to crew on board, better sample processing, whatever), it would also gain a sort of 'surface laboratory bonus' of, say, 50% on top of the science already gathered or something (that would need to be balanced). Numerically using arbitrary values: Mission to mun, one way ship with goo container. Total science transmitted back: 80 out of a total possible 100 science. compared to: Mission to mun, one way ship with goo container and science lab. Total science transmitted back: 100 from experiment + 50 science bonus = 150 science transmitted back. This is still barely worth it if you compare the weight of the science lab to the weight of the goo module, but it is still an incentive. Appropriate adjustment of the percentage bonus would allow for balancing. The lab bonus could be explained as opportunistic research, or new discoveries that the crew on board didn't expect to find. Either way, it would create a good incentive for landing a whole base rather than just the individual experiments. Due to the weight of the lab module, this would remain fair, as it takes far more work to land a lab module intact with all the science experiments than it does to just land a singular ship with all the experiments. The amount of time taken should be proportional to the total amount of science that can be gathered from the particular setup, naturally. The fact that it takes more time to do the research would perhaps relate to the difference between the science that the experiments would normally transmit back, and the full value of the science available from the biome, as well as the science bonus. The longer you spend researching, the more towards the full values and full science bonus the actual transmitted science would tend. It would be possible to limit timewarp whilst performing research, but I feel that it would bore the player to sit and stare at a lab doing nothing for too long. If you were to limit timewarp whilst the lab was researching, some form of sample collection minigame could be implemented (having to have a kerbal walk a certain distance or certain point to take a sample) however that is a topic unrelated to this discussion.

Stranded on the Mun after a rover crash. It was in the farside canyon, and it has claimed a rescue craft already. He awaits rescue...