EndOfTheEarth

My old station, sadly lost when my computer's hard drive went kaput a few months back.

Don't give up. Learning how to get into orbit the first time without prior knowledge is, in my opinion, the hardest part of the game. It took me two and a half days before I had it down to a level where I felt comfortable.

Exactly! The idea is to give it contrast against a gray or bluish background, which will account for most of the landings that I'm going to make anyway, so that it pops out in PR pictures. The marker will get me in close, and the color will make it so that I can get the rest of the way. Also, I know that orange isn't a popular color.

Not the most elegant, I know. The orange is there for visibility, in case I decide that I ever want to return to pay a visit.

There are some issues with this, that stand for RL combat as well: 1) There wouldn't be much point in building a space platform of any sort, unless it was capable of firing solid-state anti-BM lasers. 2) US and China have proven that it's extremely easy to take out enemy spacecraft, and considering that docking is still a snap, while re-entry is a pain, people would probably be better at it. 3) KSP is a 1st/3rd person simulator, which means that you can't control multiple ships at once at this time. Either everything would have to be automated (taking the fun out of actually attacking anyone) or battles would just be 1 SAM vs 1 Plane, or 1 SAM vs 1 Rocket, over and over and over again. 4) Wars move quickly. If you're messing with a new rocket in the VAB, and you get attacked, then what? Therefore, to make KSP into a wargame would involve completely reinventing the UI and user experience; in short, it wouldn't be the same game.

I've been using the same probe for first flights to anywhere, because this design can get into orbit around anywhere in the Kerbol system: In terms of manned flights, it's a multipart ship with a lander and a tug. Here's the one that got me to Ike: And in terms of planetary landers, here's a pic of my Duna lander and return vehicle:

First Probe Orbit-Eve First Probe Landing-Eve First Manned Orbit and Landing-Duna I have this odd philosophy that if it's a one-way mission, then it should be a probe, and if it's a round trip mission it must be Kerbals, and it must be the 3-seat pod. I think I've only used the one-man pod during demonstration flights for friends.

"Squad" Haven't you seen the signposts everywhere?

If there is another solar system, it should be campaign only, and it should be the endgame, only after every other planet, moon, asteroid, and rock in the Kerobol system has been visited, landed on, and returned from, and to build the ship is a multipart mission that requires resources from the most inconvenient places in the system being shipped to an orbital construction facility I short, if I'm going to go to another star, I want to feel like I had to work to earn it, just like I've earned the privileges of saying that I've mastered orbiting, Mun landings, dockings, and interplanetary flight.

It would end disastrously; human cities would be decimated from orbit as nuclear engines and RTGs rain down upon them (by accident, naturally, perfect landings the first time are rare), and because humans don't have the technology to get beyond their own moon, they wouldn't have any way of retaliating. Technically, Kerbals are more advanced in space science than humans, and are a force to be feared/avoided.

121) Moar moonz. Honestly though, I only think I'll be satisfied once there are 50+ places to go. Travel destinations FTW.

Instead of tons of large objects, couldn't they create a ring-shaped fog that causes overheat, or another bar that reads "damage" from micrometeors?

I've always done 100% vanilla; more tense that way.

My first successful Mun lander glitched on return to LMO. Sadly, I lost the picture of it on the surface after a hard drive crash. Later, I began sending lander probes about the Kerbol System as practice for larger missions. Then, last winter, my first successful manned Duna landing: And about a month ago, my first successful manned Ike landing: I don't count these as highly, but here are my probe soft-landings. Sadly, my original landers for Duna, Eve, and Gilly vanished in the hard drive crash. Ike: Dres: Bop: Laythe (still working on a targeted landing, but it was a soft landing under chutes and slowed by rocket power):

Took a week or two because my initial attempts were done with landers where the center of mass was too high, and the base was too small. Mind you, this was before patched conics, landing lights, and large tanks, so everything was done with duct tape and prayer. My first lander actually suffered a glitch once I got it up into LMuO after my first landing. I had another two landers waiting in orbit though (having multiple missions was a novelty back then), so the second landing went off without a hitch.

Depends how you went about it. If it was all about firing missiles from one ship to another, then it wouldn't make any sense, since to track another ship in space, the missile would have to be its own maneuverable spacecraft, and it could just be fired from the carrier vehicle. If it was all about directed energy weapons, then it would be a slightly different matter. History Channel used to have an excellent show titled "Dogfights", and the last episode was an hour-long special called "Dogfights of the Future". The last segment discussed how a potential battle between low-orbit spaceplanes might be performed, but the end result was exceptionally similar to docking; the person on offense is trying to keep directed at the enemy vehicle, while the target is working to prevent a "docking" from happening by attempting to outmaneuver the turn radius of the aggressor's laser. However, most of these maneuvers would take place early, before either ship was in firing distance, in an attempt to throw off the other ship. The problem that the History Channel people don't seem to think about is the possibility of a target ship flying backwards in LEO, and firing with its own weapon once both ships are within range of each other. At that distance, the weapons of choice probably wouldn't be lasers at all, but hacking and jamming equipment intended to bust the other guy's computers before he could get a shot off. Here's the vid, the relevant parts are at 1:25:5 or so: http://youtu.be/vnUwxDhE1kU?t=1h25m5s Though, it's important to keep in mind that ships in sci-fi films quite possibly have different engines than we do. If they've discovered a magical, highly-efficient engine that negates the affect of planetary gravity on a ship, then some of the dogfighting stuff is closer to possible, but the turns would look really odd and require two counter-acting z-axis motors firing simultaneously to produce the appearance of a wider turning circle.

2010 by Arthur C. Clarke. Do it during a Jool mission; that's all I could think about while reading it.

False, it renders it unsound, not invalid.

A counterargument: Premise 1: All aliens are weather balloons Premise 2: All weather balloons cannot develop games. Conclusion 1: All aliens cannot develop games. Premise 3: KSP exists. Premise 4: KSP is a game. Conclusion 2: KSP cannot have been developed by aliens. By all technicalities, this is a valid argument.

If we're working purely by cost, Soyuz is still somewhere below $80M per launch while the unmanned version of SpaceX's dragon is currently upwards of $100M per launch, and this number is certain to go up with the manned version. New tech and spacious capsules mean high cost. Old tech and capsules the size of a phone booth mean low cost. If we follow that line of thought, we should have stuck to launching Saturn 1Bs; by now the price would be significantly lower.

Why is it useless? It will be able to get more up that the Falcon Heavy will, and more than the Delta-Heavy and Ariane-5 currently can.

Did you move it? An object that isn't in motion will remain that way, quoth Newton.

It's sort of a personal thing for me. Growing up I desperately wanted to become a NASA mission controller, because to me that was cutting-edge action; historic moments, risky business, creative problem solving and all that. Gene Kranz was my childhood hero, and thinking of Astronaut Mike Collins alone on the far side of the moon during Apollo 11 got me through a hard summer experience. It was a goal I was dead-set on from kindergarten all the way through eleventh grade. And then, the year before I graduated high school, I took physics. Not only was it the most dispassionate thing I'd ever done in my academic career, it marked the worst grades that I'd ever gotten in a science class. In an awful moment that spring, I realized that I'd spent the past ten years of my life confusing the concept of space travel with the reality of space travel, and that I was not, in fact, ever going to go into astrophysics. I think I spent the next week a crumpled and depressed mess, and managed to pass physics with a low B. From there I spent two years confused and adrift before I settled on a combination of English and Information Tech. And then, I ran across a mention of KSP on a NASA news site that I follow. I thought it cute at first, but having tried and failed at Orbiter, and being a mediocre Cessna pilot on MS Flight Simulator '03, I was hesitant to mess with another simulator game. A few weeks after that, the first video for it showed up on Kurt's channel (I was following Kurt for his astronomy commentary) and after watching him get into Munar orbit for the first time, and the fact that trying and failing with quick results was a fundamental part of KSP, I began to consider buying it. And then the news got to me that they were adding lander legs to the next update, and in an instant, that childhood dream of being part of the team that landed something on the moon flashed before my eyes again. I bought KSP full-price the same night and attacked the game in every spare minute I had, determined that not only would I manage it, but that I would manage it so quickly, that I would beat Kurt in getting there. I spent the better part of a few weeks forcing larger and more powerful rockets into Munar orbit and, eventually, I pulled off that first landing. I've never had a video game move me to tears before that point; a few got close, but that moment of seeing an old, discarded dream realized in some way hit me deep. I'm still invested in KSP, perhaps not as much as I was before, but I'm still managing good things, and still getting to satisfy my inner kid with historic moments, risky business, and creative problem solving. And yes, I'm still ahead of Kurt.

There's also a graphics element that slows things down a lot. I work off of a technically obsolete laptop (Vista 64bit, 4GB RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo T6500, and the intigrated, low-end Intel Mobile graphics card), and I've found that if you keep your camera pointed away from the planet during flight, your game will run more smoothly.

Yeah, that's the kind of technique that I'm doing currently, with the nose pointed below the horizon by the end of the burn. I'm gathering that it's less efficient?