UmbralRaptor

Turn off thrust vectoring for the (jet) engines in front of your CoM? The current TVC implementation is... bad with such parts.

Calculating the best time is... non-trivial. How good are you at numeric integration? I tend to start at ~5-10 km.

Random failures are (at least for the time being) a bug, not a feature. I imagine that the risk of controlled flight into ground is higher at night, though.

Bill, Bob, and Jeb all respawn after a while.

/KSP/Screenshots/ /KSP/saves/yoursavename/SPH/ and /KSP/saves/yoursavename/VAB/

I'm fairly certain that the smallgearbay part is massless in all situations outside of the VAB/SPH. ...though this seems like it would be easy enough to test...edit: As best I'm aware, it's something about the part type (compare with struts, fuel lines, and 0.10 - 0.17.1 RCS blocks). Landing legs have normal mass.

o_O It takes me ~45 seconds to get to the loading screen with my near-stock (154 parts taking up 349 MB) install. (C2D 6600 @2.4 GHz, some 2 TB Seagate HDD, 4 GiB RAM, and XP Pro SP3)

Current failures are not *that* random, and tend to be fixable with some thought. I like this. Not as a game feature, but creating some silly forms and posting them on the forums would amuse a lot of people.208 (I think). Duct tape. As a new part in addition to struts.

Somewhat. There's FAR, which completely overhauls the aerodynamic model.

Uh... isn't this already being added?It is, and we have mods like Kethane in the interim. But the person was saying that "KSP needs to be exactly like Minecraft" as the bad request... 183. DRM/Copy Protection/Online Activation

I thought Krakensbane worked sort of like that?148. An enforcement mechanism to make players use SRBs on first stages, or do LOR-like (MOR?) Mun missions.

While my Mainsail-based approach lacks Giggleplex777's efficiency, I still think a 14% payload fraction is respectable. (Heaviest payload flown is 37.1 tonnes to a 70 km orbit) In general, fuel crossfeed helps, as does running pairs of struts between vertically attached tanks.

IIRC, "Igloo" was a working name for Eeloo.

Less impossible (to code) than bad ideas: 93) The zero-g SOI suggestion for simulating Lagrange points. (It doesn't work because it assumes Aristotelian Mechanics) 94) Nuclear parts that explode if you look at them the wrong way. 95) Ion engines that don't need fuel. 96) Attempts to explicitly nerf asparagus staging, especially when they don't consider the effect (or non-effect) on clusters, that success would make any form of parallel staging useless, that it would create a need for size 3 (or larger) stock parts, etc. 97) Solar sails. (Unless this assumes a greatly revised physics/timewarp model, and even then...) edit: weirdly enough, I've never seen a request to make engines more realistic by restricting their throttle range, or making efficiency vary with throttle.

Yes, and the effect is quite dramatic with pure rockets. But an airbreathing SSTO can get you >90% of the way to orbit on jets, so staging is a lot less necessary. Why bother to make them even more complex and finicky when you can get a 30% payload fraction?Non-obvious benefits include recovery gear being built in, and highly precise landings. (None of this ellipse near KSC business, you can land on the runway) Pure rocket SSTOs lack those, but can be very simple, reliable, and scale up almost infinitely. (Your computer/part count being the limiting factor)

46. I want my parachutes to work on the Mun/Minmus! ...I would actually want that. =(

If the unpiloted vehicle is inside the physics sphere of the piloted one, maybe. Otherwise, the unpiloted one is on rails, so no.

Making weapons in KSP bothers me in 2 ways: There are no enemies, and most of the weapon designs I see are rather bad. For the first one, consider all known lifeforms in the KSP universe at this point: grasses, trees, and kerbals. And every kerbal ever seen is part of a single unified space program. There is no one to compete with. Just a handful of explorers on a world almost devoid of infrastructure. The works of Kerbals consist of the craft that *you* create, KSC, a second space center (probably) in a valley on the other side of the planet, and a statue in the desert. That statue may have been made by someone else. There is evidence of one or more races of precursors -- the monoliths, the kraken statue, the SSTV message, the crashed saucer, etc. They are not around at this time, but may return. They may be friendly (the monoliths suggest so), or they may be hostile. In either case, there is little reason to believe that the Kerbals can effectively stand against them. As for the second, just think of all the ships that have manually aimed low ROF guns (often with <10 rounds per gun), and/or unguided rockets. There are depressingly few proper missile buses, and typically the design goals are purely aesthetic, with accuracy and range utterly ignored. This is somewhat understandable for gun-based systems due to the limits of the current physics engine, but for those with missiles or laser mods...

I think the term you're looking for is "infiniglide." It's been around since we've had control surfaces, though took a bit to figure out. Still, nice demonstration.

It's been a while since I last did anything serious with the Mün. Have some pics from a mission back in 0.17:

None of the above. Can I bring the resources to divert a 10 km asteroid? edit: since apparently I was too subtle, this involves preventing the KT extinction.

There's a lot of terminology borrowed from real life. skycrane comes from how Curiosity landed. SSTO is single stage to orbit

Absolutely. If I'm counting correctly, that's an 18.5 tonne payload on a 110.01 tonne launcher. You also exposed an inaccuracy in my system, since I tend to treat payloads as entirely inert, while this supplied the last bit of ÃŽâ€V to reach orbit. I'm afraid that my Mainsail-based response tops out at ~14% payload. And I've never bothered to fix that it potentially kills a Kerbal each launch. You finally got me to stop dinking around so much and set up a (hilariously overbuilt) Moho orbiter. in-VAB: In-orbit. Then I accidentally throttled up Still some fuel. ... Just a 37.1 tonne test payload. MJ is used as a ?V recorder due to curiosity. In-VAB: Orbit established: Fuel: Hand-flown below 4.4 km/s? o_O

A 50% difference is rather large... In an ISP sense, I'd argue that "lower atmo" ends somewhere around 2-4 km up. Though drag-wise, it can be considerably higher. Asparagus staging tends to leave me thrust-limited on upper stages, but with headroom on lower ones. Please post pics and/or .craft files. Getting 20+ tonnes of payload on the equivalent of 1 orange tank worth of fuel, 6 BACC boosters, and some miscellaneous engines seems to imply a payload fraction of 16-19% (Possibly over 25% if you used RT-10s).

Last time I ran the numbers, a mainsail-based SSTO had a higher payload fraction (~8%) than an aerospike-based one (~7%), because the aerospike's fuel savings get eaten up by needing more engine. And at larger sizes, the mainsail is less hassle because of the built in TVC. Of course, the LV-T30's mix of Isp and TWR tends to beat both (eg: up to ~10% payload for SSTOs)...