CptRichardson

What's that hull at the far upper left with a single pair of windows?

Space is big. Like, unbelievably, impossibly big. You'd think big is walking down the country lane to the nearest store, but space is way bigger than that. Now go and try to find an Earth-sized planet at 80 AU. Or maybe 1000 AU. This is trying to find a single grain of rice in a mile-high haystack hard.

Might be that they're running a neutral gas atmosphere in there, and that's his personal air line.

Sure. I'd love to strap three Mk2s to a Mk3 and call it a 2.5

I'm not going to lie, I do like this. But I would rather have the option of a double deck monster of a crew cabin with doors all over the place and all the bells, whistles, and nuclear scramjets (Jeb insisted on the last one) for all my 'oh god, that's a huge station' recrewing convenience. I mean, what would I put down under that, anyway? If I need cargo space, I'll grab a dedicated cargo section. Addendum: Basically, too little crew utility to bother actually using it. Why bother when I can send a smaller Mk 3 instead? Like I said, the IDEA of having cargo space underneath it is nice, but I can't see a practical use for it, and I'd likely end up having to waste space and mass on a second crew section for my large ships and stations which I could spend on more fuel or cargo.

Actually, wouldn't the service bays make a good spot to design mounting points for Yellowjackets into? (or other such VTOL engine mounts?)

Mother of god. *Adjusts hat.*

What, other than Microsoft stopping support for 7 within 2 years of 10 coming out in order to simplify their workload and make things easier to keep secure, and Win10 taking every last good bit of 7 and wearing them like cyber-meatpuppets? MS really went way out of their way to listen to people for once to make a better OS that actually fits what we need instead of what MS thought we needed.

If the russians withdraw from ISS, their space agency simply won't have the funds to do a new station. Basically, everything you said about the US is about triply true for Russia. Except for the automation part (which is the thing that will keep the US going)

Yeah, something like that is company-killing. Edit: The one about repeatedly ignoring a LOX tank cap cracking because the upper stage to dragon connector was badly designed and overstressing it, not the yelling at engineers, If he's yelling at them because he just found out about the caps like us, it's entirely justified.

Overpressure event? What, like a docking collar compressing LOX?

As others have said, that docking adaptor is quite likely the cause of this failure.

Space X is the only one actually interested in getting people permanently off this rock and trying to get at the resources in space. Hurting them hurts mankind as a whole, since everyone else is too busy thinking short-term profit.

If the Dragon safely GTFO'd like it seems to have, they might yet. If it happened, it's a better RUD abort than any other in history.

Was after the MECo.

We've hopefully got enough data to find out. The rocket-cam didn't show anything wrong, but whatever it might have been might have been on the other side of the rocket.

Bad welds, most likely. Seal failed, general 'somebody didn't make sure it was properly put together'.

They're both entirely political. Their current funding boost is a political ploy, and as soon as they become politically inconvenient they will be shut down.

.... Holy mother of god, that's a big cockpit. You could stick a whole second level or three in there and use that alone for ferrying Kerbals up.

Maybe three. Ever.

In other words, all you needed to do was hop the kerbal out in time to grab onto the station when it went by?

No. As I tried to explain to the other guy, take your snub-aeronose. Install four orbital 1.25 meter rockets in it so the engine bells are flush with the surface in the same configuration as an RCS block.. Remove the throttle other than open/closed, rig with RCS control scheme. Now just slap them on the sides of an X-node, and instant vertical landing system! (best of all, it's Jeb Approved for 100% All Kerbal Simple Insanity!)

I don't know if the geometry would work for that. I could see an inverter that splits a horizontal MK 2 into two vertical ones...

Nah, I'm kind of wanting to replicate this for the VTOL airless landing Mk2 design. We've got the x-hub to sort of make it work, but what I'm looking for is the side-pod engines to do the final manuvering/retro-thrust/vertical landing. I almost want to say that maybe some weird kind of Mk-2 endcap super-RCS system that uses the standard rocket thrust would best replicate the design. It'd be a hell of a thing, and it'd even be useful for 'normal' spaceplanes, since you could strap one as the nose and one as the tailcap to give pretty impressive control. Edit: Basically using Terriers as RCS systems in the stubby nosecone design. Four-way, with retractable covers (maybe), kind of heavy (since four rocket engines), and the problem of 'oh god, why?' fuel consumption for an RCS system, keeping the player from merely using them for ascent/deorbit. Make them useful for the last leg of landing, for maneuvering in orbit (ish), etc. But no throttle control. Mad pieces of engineering for the express purposes of 'I want to strap a Mk2 hull to a bunch of rockets, vertical land on the Mun, and THEN TAKE OFF VERTICALLY AGAIN!' *insert mad laughter* Actually, another piece that would help (I don't know if your rover-pod can hold two kerbals) might be a small engineering compliment bay, a half-length fuselage that can hold one or two kerbals to oversee an ISRU and drill.

Well, where are you going to mount the cockpit, then? I mean, I suppose that some finangling could create a way to stack two Mk2 hulls on top of each other with bicouplers, some cheeze, and the four-way hubs, but man it would be janky...