CougarMagnum

It wouldn't be quite as much of a problem as you might originally think. Mars is frigid, but the atmosphere is quite thin (less than 1% Earth's), which means that very little heat would be lost through conduction and convection. Most of the heat transfer would occur through radiation. As has been suggested, heat tape would probably do the trick anyway. No biggie.

However, that is some serious air hogging. 17 intakes for 1 engine! Phew! Without that exploit though, I think the RAPIERs are decently balanced.

When I studied linguistics in college, we learned about “el ley del mínimo esfuerzo†or “principle of least effort†(my linguistics class was in Spanish), which postulates that no matter what, language will always evolve towards the path of least resistance. Language is an unstoppable evolutionary process. Efforts to contain it by streamlining grammar and creating perfect, unbreakable rules will always give way to this process. This is why ideas such as metric-ified English, though they make perfect sense and could theoretically be implemented, will never last more than a surprisingly short time. Rules will be broken immediately for the sake of efficiency, until it becomes standard practice and once again we are asking ourselves why our language is so illogical.

I don't think that .23 is a shift towards a new policy on release dates. Instead, I think it may have been a leak, and that SQUAD just decided to roll with it. SQUAD has been pretty quiet about the whole thing (I haven't been able to find an official statement, maybe someone else has?), which is weird because it's a 180º change on one of their unshakeable policies.

This. I totally agree. There are different (and more realistic) ways of giving us more things to do in our explorations. The truth is that space exploration is almost exclusively reserved for science, both in game and real life, and so I think our activities should reflect that. Ideas like building bases for long term research are valid, but the argument for colonizing other worlds for resources is missing the point. If you're looking to play Kerbal Space Colonies, then there are mods for that. Anyway, just my opinion. Also, there should have been another option in this poll: "Not sure, but I trust SQUAD's direction for this game." According to this poll, half of our Kerbal friends will lose interest in KSP, but I just don't believe that.