Nikolai

As did the Launch Escape System.

Agreed... with certain exceptions, of course. The astronaut "morale" thing from the original felt tacked-on... there was no real way to optimize it in flight crews except through trial and error; and given how quickly astronaut crews were recycled, I tended to ignore it pretty completely after a while. Needless complexity. There were other fiddly bits that I didn't much like -- the fact that for some parts of the program, there was only one real way to go to remain competitive; the way that failures were always catastrophic and never one-off problems; the fact that a lot of mission decisions seemed to be, basically, "Abort Mission? <Y/N>"... but these are trifles, really; I have fond memories of endless hours of playing the first with my former college roommate, and still go back to the open-source version to reminisce from time to time.

There was a long burn I needed to get from Kerbin's orbit to Jool intercept with a single nuke engine shoving an enormous craft. I turned up the throttle and watched Annie with the kids.

Try The Soviet Manned Space Program by Phillip Clark, ISBN 0-517-56954-X. Or Red Star In Orbit by James Oberg, ISBN 978-0245538094. I highly recommend the second one for information content; the first one has excellent diagrams. (Really, if you want anything on the Soviet space program, James Oberg is your man; I'm in the middle of his Star-Crossed Orbits.)

Heh. You said it. I recently watched the 10th-anniversary episode of Mythbusters, in which they finally successfully launched a rocket-powered Chevrolet Impala off a ramp; during the build, they had to rip open the rear end of the car and build a harness, and Jamie remarked, "The rockets have got to go somewhere." That pretty neatly encapsulates Kerbal Design Theory, as far as I'm concerned.

Altair (Alpha Aquilae). It's aspherical due to its rapid rotation. Mostly, I just like its name.

I think you mean Charon.

Hyperion, for three main reasons: * Its rotation is chaotic, so its orientation in space is unpredictable over time (in fact, it's the only regular planetary natural satellite that isn't tidally locked), making calendars interesting; * It looks strangely organic, like coral or something (if not like a Brillo pad); and * It seems to be covered in organic gunk. (Why?!!?) If I'm not allowed that one, then Dactyl, just because it was so darned unexpected and the first of its kind to be discovered; its discovery was also only possible because we put things in space as a species now, so there's that.

In a sense, yeah. There was a horror game I'm vaguely recalling in which your avatar was a young girl on a steampunk-y airship. It was haunted, but the only way you could see the ghosts coming after you was with a camera you were carrying around. Ghosts would show up in the photographs; finding out they were places you didn't expect, or hoped they wouldn't be, was much more terrifying than so much of the "make you jump" horror stuff I see out there now.

That's interesting. I didn't approach at those kinds of speeds, though; I'm paranoid about breaking stuff during docking.

Thanks. All set.

Thanks. I tried this, and it worked well enough. Now, how do I change the thread tag to "Answered"?

Has anyone else had a problem getting a Clamp-O-Tron Sr. docking clamp to let go? I keep right-clicking on the clamp and clicking on "Undock" in the context menu that appears, but nothing happens. This has worked for other docking clamps, so I have to ask: Has anyone else had this problem? Is it possible that my docking clamp has sustained damage and won't let go? How can I tell? Thanks to anyone who can provide insight into this problem.

A quick list: * Race Into Space (used to be Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space -- now open-source) * The Ur-Quan Masters -- used to be Star Control 2 (now open-source) * Arcanum of Steamworks and Magick Obscura -- cheap on GOG, though not free * FreeOrion -- it's really coming into its own, is free, and is almost as fun as Masters of Orion 2 (which is also cheap on GOG) * Orbiter * Space Engine * Science Girls * A whole bunch of roguelikes, which I really like because they are usually free and are amazingly deep with a little applied imagination -- including Liberal Crime Squad, PrincessRL, Privateer: ASCII Sector, ASCII Portal, DoomRL, DiabloRL, X@COM, Brogue, Dwarf Fortress, and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead That's more than enough for now.

Of course it's overplayed. It's much more rewarding to build a mission that works. But at the same time, there's this undercurrent of weird fatalistic humor ("When it's your time, it's your time") in aviation and space travel generally in real life that I think this game captures pretty well -- which includes a sort of wry humor about engineering simple solutions to complex problems (as if to make fun of our habitual failure to remember how hazardous and odd what we're doing really is) and the ability to laugh at oneself for "doing it wrong". So even if the game itself isn't all about MOAR BOOSTERS or MOAR SPACE TAPE, I laugh like an idiot when people joke about it.

Landed on a slight incline on Mun. Hard. So hard that the capsule popped off the decoupler. Decided to get out anyway. While I was hanging on outside the hatch, the capsule slid off the top of the lander and fell on top of me, then rolled off down the hill. Stunned for some time, but survived.

If your instruments are working, you'd see it glowing pretty fiercely in the infrared long before then. Remember, at equilibrium, it's putting out energy equivalent to a star.

Not necessarily. Just build solar panels that take advantage of the frequency of the light emitted from the Dyson sphere's exterior at equilibrium.

Erm, what? The gravity field everywhere inside a uniform sphere is zero.

I don't think it matters too much. The point of language is to communicate, and both terms are unambiguous -- so even if they happen to refer to the same thing, that's okay. Mission accomplished. Insisting too much on one or the other seems to me to be an example of what Fred called "the tyranny of the small". It's easy for people who feel passionately about a particular subject matter to insist on minutiae that pass completely beneath the radar of people on the outside. My favorite example comes from real-life rocketry. There are those who insist that the thing in the back of your rocket that makes it go ought to be called an "engine", and others insist that it ought to be called a "motor"... and there are those on both sides who are very, very passionate about their chosen side. I love rocketry, but I couldn't care less. A solution I really like came from someone who pointed out that that thing has elements of both engines and motors and elements of neither, so maybe we should call it something new; he suggested "whoosh generator".

Point taken. I just felt... misled. Like when a story seems to be leading to a really tense spot, and it's hard to see how the hero will win the day, and then -- surprise! It was a dream all along! When Charleton Heston gave the voiceover in the beginning of the movie explaining what the K-T Event was (and getting stuff wrong, yes, but you got the sense they were trying), I expected something minimally plausible. I'd still give lots of support to a movie that tried to handle the threat of an impactor with realism. But my expectations were dashed, and it's hard for me to love a story that does that. YMMV.

Re: Armageddon: FTFY. Shortly after joining the forums, I wrote a loooooooong post detailing what I'd like to see in terms of impactor-diversion missions. Some of them are, regrettably, impossible with the way KSP handles physics. Still, I've liked the idea of an educational game based on that particular facet of spaceflight; I just don't know how to prevent it from being all-or-nothing so that the player can feel a partial sense of accomplishment for doing some stuff right.

<LOL> I've done that with lander stages, landers left in orbit, and stages just sort of set adrift on purpose. Look! It's all abandoned! Isn't it creeeeeepy? 'Course, I have a fascination with shipwrecks, ghost towns, and post-apocalyptic movies, so anyone who knows me probably would have predicted that I'd do this. Your picture is amazing.

I'd pay handsomely for a Jebediah bobblehead -- Jeb in a control seat with a very wide grin, and a suction cup on the bottom of the seat so that I can stick it to my car's dashboard and scare passengers. Or action figures. Or plushies. (My girl has even asked for a Jebediah to put on her bed. I'd buy a sewing machine and learn how to make these things myself if I had more time.)

I hope not, honestly. I feel really good if I can pull off a rescue mission, especially if the stranded Kerbal is remote. Adding too much complexity to keep him alive even though he's just sitting there would make me care less about rescuing Kerbals, I think, not more.