UmbralRaptor

A direct clone of the shuttle is a terrible idea. (It's cheaper to build a new rocket each time) A crew carrying spaceplane may be of some value.

It was highly effective once. Right now I need to cut back to regain sensitivity. edit: on a related note, I usually drink coffee black. (Cream makes it taste like ash.)

Get burned out about it because Tell Plausible Lies day starts at UT+14 and I live at UT-5. So everything past 5 am on March 31st involved seeing the "pranks."

The runway is ~2.5 km long. Keep in mind that lots of real-world runways are 1.8 km or less, and even the longest is only ~5.5 km long...

Isp parity with the Aerospike is achieved at 1717 m on Kerbin. (Though TWR is still a bit of an issue at that altitude.)

45 km/s? I'm getting that even with LV-Ns you'd need a mass ratio of over 300. Ions make it manageable (less than 3), but since high TWR is apparently a priority...

Bugfix more. Given the huge feature count, a 0.9x (or 1.0 RC or whatever) at the end of this year, with "actual" 1.0 happening later seems reasonable.

Cryogenic, maybe half the density of kerosene, and apparently offers an Isp advantage of <5%. Also annoyingly, its liquid range does not match up with that of liquid oxygen. Given the budget thrown around, the Saturn V could specialize -- kerolox for high thrust in atmo, then hydrolox for high Isp at altitude. edit: I'm not sure it's expensive enough to make a difference.

Still getting the uneven text weirdness in windowed. While strategy does exist, it's still about spamming restarts until the RNG has mercy, though. How is that satisfying?

The problem is that I don't own a 1280x720 (or more generally a 16:9) monitor. Initially I was running it on an old CRT at 1280x960, and it somehow got distorted despite the letterboxing! The last two pics are windowed mode on a 1920x1200 LCD, so...

I see no reason to recommend the game. Blurry and distorted graphics. Where I was when I gave up. Have fun trying to progress. (Chances are people who say "it's easy, just use x ship" are referring to one that's difficult to unlock)

Doh. So this sort of ellipse should show up if one abused a hooke's law problem enough?

It's somewhat infamous for being perfectly possible, provided gravity scales with 1/r instead of 1/r².

If it flies good, it looks good. And for aircraft in stock aero: If it looks right, it flies wrong. (But really, spamming parts to fit some preconceived measure of beauty that has nothing to do with a craft's operational environment in KSP and often has little to do with real life seems boring)

Without life support, easily. (If we assume 80 kg per congressperson, then 535 of them run just under 43 tonnes) Not just Ares I/IV/V. Examples go clear back to the Shuttle C

That's why it would be an amusing name. (If unlikely to ever be used)

The correct name is Senate Launch System. Though I suppose one could call it a Delta V, since it uses the same upper stage, and the SRB + hydrogen core shows some similarities. (Even though it dropped the Ares 5's RS-68s in favor of SSMEs)

Well, what are you setting the graphics to? Dropping overall resolution and texture res helps. On a related note, do things become more playable when you're not near a body with oceans? Similarly, how many parts do your craft have? I'm able to run KSP on an ancient desktop, but it was a workstation in a previous life. Core2Duo 6600 @2.4 GHz, 4 GiB of ram, ATI FireGL v7200 (think Radeon X1800)

Some quick googling indicates that it is from 1540. Quite aside from the problems presented by the limited resolution, early modern English is sometimes problematic to read. Though apparently this is more of a list of ship names/classes?

Besides wikipedia? http://www.braeunig.us/space/orbmech.htm http://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Astrodynamics-Dover-Aeronautical-Engineering/dp/0486600610/

And then there's how hard it is/was to get images of 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko from the good cameras. (Chances are you've seen navcam ones, but nothing from OSIRIS!)

Scientific cameras typically have CCDs that work over a large range of wavelengths with a filter wheel to get the various narrow pass-bands of interest. This is generally understood to get more 'colors' and resolution for less mass than any other method. Dawn's framing camera is a 1024x1024 CCD with a filter wheel with 7 narrow band and 1 broad band filter(s). I am unsure of exactly why those colors were chosen, but then my geology/mineralogy background is pretty limited. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/spacecraft/instruments.html http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/technology/science_payload.asp It's not clear to me what bands the current Dawn images are in (presumably the clear filter?). "True colors" tend to be harder to determine than one would expect. Mars is somewhat infamous for this. I expect that any color images will be like those of Mercury or the highly stretched ones of the Moon -- more for mineral detection than what a person would see. Getting what a person would see out a spacecraft window is a pain in the donkey when your camera sees different bands than the human eye, and white balance can be endlessly annoying to get right.

well, it's possible to unlock the entire tech tree in science mode in a single launch. Presumably similar techniques could be used for a Duna landing.

Probably Maya Ibuki. =/ (Also, for obvious reasons, this sort of thread can wander into very creepy territory.) Edit: Misread. Let's go with Kaworu.

July 16, 2011 with version 0.8.4.