Fuzzy Dunlop

Yes there is! press "L"

You can acctually get some lift by angling the pod away from prograde, which can be useful sometimes.

For anyone looking for a slightly less involved introduction to this topic:

You can certainly replace to nucleus of a cell. And if you replace the nucleus of an embryo then you end up with an organism that is (nearly*) genetically identical to the organism the nucleus came from. As the organism grows, the nucleus reproduces itself but the rest of the cell is coded by the nucleus. So the new organism would almost entirely resemble the organism that donated the nucleus. That is assuming that you remove the old nucleus, which I suspect you'd have to do because I don't think an embryonic cell will tollerate having multiple nucleuses (or if it does it will probably divide into two cells, and then you'll have two disticnt lineages, one of which will outcompete the other). Also this works best with closely related organisms, it definitely works within the same species (in fact in the UK we're now doing this to cure some genetic diseases). It can work with closely related species (like cows and guars, I seem to recall). Bamboo and Sequioa are not closely related, their last common ancestor may have lived 300 million years ago, so I wouldn't bet on nuclear transfer being viable. *I say nearly identical because the the mitrochondria and, in plants, chloroplasts have their own DNA and that would continue to be present in the new organism.

Just a point about bodkin arrowheads: While a lot of people assume they were intended to be armour piercing, current archeological evidence dosen't seem to back this up. The Royal Armouries looked at the metalurgy of the medieval arrowheads in their collection, they didn't find any examples of bodkins points made of hardened steel. By contrast type 16 arrowheads (which are fatter than bodkins and have barbs) were often found to have hardened, high carbon tips and cutting edges (generally welded onto a softer iron core).

How much of a problem is remaining fuel, don't you just open the throttles and it will all evapourate and vent into space? If you need to you can leave it exposed to vaccum for a week or two, nothing much is going to be left.

It's the 1.02 atmosphere, compared to 1.0 it's a step back to the old soup-o-sphere. The higher drag means that pods tend to slow down in the upper atmosphere and so avoid much heating later on. In 1.0 pods punched straight through the upper atmosphere then got fried lower down.

Sadly they haven't yet, it's probably the single biggest "missing" feature for me. There was a really good suggestion made in the ideas forum about adapting the maneuver nodes system so it could be used in the tracking station. Basically you would be able to place a node on the orbit of a planet like you can currently do on the orbit of a ship, then target another planet and edit and drag the maneuver like normal.

That depends very much on the mass/drag ratio. Most meteorites on less than 8 tonnes will slow to terminal velocity, but larger ones won't. An empty V2's terminal velocity is roughly 400 m/s but it they impacted twice as fast. Though you would expect most real life most pods would always slow to terminal velocity given that much denser meteorites do.

No they won't. I did test this. Unless you're plunging vertically through the atmosphere your pod will always slow to bellow 300 m/s which is a perfectly reasonable speed to deploy drogues; it's not massively faster than the soyuz drogue deployment speed. Also drogues are occasionally used at supersonic speed (Felix Baumgartner used one to stabalise him on his supersonic skydive). Nasa even uses gigantic supersonic parachutes, for example during curiosity's decent.

This might be why such designs are uncommon in real life?

Ok I still have 1.0 so did some testing. I used both the 1 man pod and the 3 man pod - both with (physics fixed) heat shields and parachutes. On a 75km x 25km re-entry trajectory both slowed to less than 300 m/s by 4km - terminal velocity was about 270-280 m/s. On a vertical suborbital launch up to 75km the pods slowed to less than 300 m/s before I had to deploy the chutes to prevent a crash (so about 500m). I think this is pretty reasonable. Yeah some pods in real life do have a lower terminal velocities, but it's a matter of degree. In KSP 1.0 you should always have time to deploy the 'chutes at subsonic speeds before you hit the ground (unless you have a really high suborbital trajectory, or de-orbit straight into the ground - but there's no reason to do that). Something heavier and more areodynamic than a pod might hit the ground much faster; this is totally realistic - a V2 rocket, mostly empty tank, would impact at 800 m/s (half its peak velocity) from 100 km high suborbital trajectory. A more pressing issue occurs if we make pods slow down more, as in 1.02. Basically too much drag high in the atmosphere kills too much of the pod's speed preventing heating (which isn't linked to drag in the games physics). This makes heat shields pointless since in 1.02 a naked pod can survive a return from essentially any altitude.

The problem is the 1.02 drag boost means that stuff slows so fast it doesn't get a chance to cook properly. I think we need to revert to 1.0 areo then nerf the low altitude thrust of the jets to compensate.

I think what bothers me the most is reports that: A) That the increased drag means the best launch profile is once again ascend to 10km vertically and then turn - which is really jarring because real life rockets turn almost immediately. Heat shields are almost irrelevant because the atmosphere slows you down before the heating becomes too severe. C) That you can't smash into the ground at supersonic speeds because that was quite fun (and also things do occasionally do this in real life; V2 rockets impacted at about 1000 m/s)

I've not got 1.02 yet because the patcher is broken but if this is true it's quite disappointing. I like the fact that a objects could punch straight down through the atmosphere - like stuff does in real life. Also if stuff slows down too high up then that makes heat shields pointless. I don't think there's much wrong with 1.00 areodynamics - the invincible parachutes, massless heat sheilds and uber-explodey tailcones were there own issues and shouldn't have been dealt with with such sweeping changes. I really hoped I'd seen the last of the soup-o-sphere.