softweir

A Close Encounter with a dwarf star Might that do the trick?

The Saturn 5 first stage was designed to use the same strategy for the same reason - especially important at the time as the gimballing systems were slower and the control technology less sophisticated.

You guessed right - deep-cryo oxygen is liquid oxygen which is much colder than its boiling pooint. It is so very cold that far less of it boils off during launch preparations. This in turn means they can fill the tanks to brimming and be sure they will still be very full at launch - which means they get more dV with no extra hardware. At present they have to allow for a certain percentage of the oxygen boiling off, which means they always launch with partly empty tanks, so less dV and excess weight.

We can't say they are anti-science because of denying one idea - or even because of denying a few. Their primary criteria is that they can sell sufficient kits, and if they are sure they can't, then they won't try. There are also licensing issues - did NASA allow them to use the design? And finally, did the modeller use custom pieces? LEGO will create special pieces, but only if the kit is likely to sell hugely. Otherwise, no, the modeller must stick to pre-existing pieces. Given the science sets they have gone for, I would suggest the Hubble telescope idea failed one of the tests I mentioned above.

I supported this a few weeks ago!

Blast! I got it all wrong! I blame my sources.

DISCOVR has its own thruster to take it a long way beyond what the 2nd stage can reach. The 2nd stage hasn't enough dV to reach escape velocity so will fall back long before a lunar encounter, but can get DISCOVR to an orbit from where its own thruster can take it to L1. So the moon could have been too close to DISCOVR - but nowhere near the 2nd stage.

Put a herd of cows into a large, airtight storage space and filter the methane from the air. There was a cow-related explosion in Germany: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25922514

Front end of a cow. Cows ferment their food in their stomachs, not their guts, and that's where the methane is produced - and it gets belched out. (If, for some reason, they can't belsh then they are in very serious difficulty and a veterinarian needs to puncture the affected stomach-lobe. They have a 4-part stomach.) The bacteria in their guts don't have a lot to work on, so a lot less fermenting goes on. Instead, that's the point where the animal absorbs the nutrients released by fermentation in their stomachs. As a result, they fart a lot less than they belch.

My guess is they are there to carry boiloff away, rather than to replace it. After all, you really don't want clouds of high-concentration oxygen and fuel hanging around if you can avoid it.

More likely Orbiter - that's better suited for animation production than KSP thanks to a very mature and extensive set of mods. The fuel plugs are designed to produce a varying thrust curve, with a slow, controlled drop in thrust towards the end of the burn.

I agree - fake explosion. The wreckage they showed at the end hadn't been through an explosion, it had just hit the ground very, very fast! I also wonder if that was a real Reliant. It could easily have been a thin mockup under all the paint and extraneous fairings - MUCH easier to launch. Still - the launch was terrific!

I hate to agree, but I have to agree: I am very sceptical about it happening. Now, if REL took their heads out of the "it must be a spaceplane" place they are in, then they could make a fortune by licencing their heat-exchanger IP for other applications. There are numerous applications where a very high-efficiency heat exchanger can save energy and money: not household applications, but very large industrial applications. It does: and that also is new, untried tech. They envisage using two counter-rotating compressor fans with no stators. Nobody has tried anything like it for a supersonic engine, and they have yet to prove it will work as well as they hope.

Actually, there is no orbit that will never cross the parent body's shadow at some time of year. Whether the moon is in an inclined orbit or in a polar orbit, twice each year that orbit will coincide with the line between the sun and the planet and there will be the chance of the moon being in shadow. The more inclined the orbit is the fewer times the moon will be eclipsed, but it will never be zero times. In theory, if the moon orbits the planet an exact number of times per year then it can be phased so - by apparent coincidence - it never crosses the shadow. However such resonances are very unstable, and gravitational interactions with the star will destabilise the orbit until it is no longer an exact multiple, and it can once again cross the shadow.

What they said, but in more detail: Delta-wing planes such as some fighters, Concord and the space shuttles HAVE had control surfaces with combined functions, known as elevons, so it can be done if the wing-plan is appropriate for it. The reason they are usually separate is because their jobs are very different and so they are best placed at different points: ailerons need to be spaced fairly far apart and out from the CoM of the craft, while the elevators are better placed as far back as possible. In most conventional subsonic craft, the best place for the ailerons is on the main wing where they can be placed far apart, while the elevators are best placed on the tail where they are as far back as possible. On delta-wing craft the shape of the wings means there is only one place to put control surfaces, and that is at the back of the wing - which is fine because they can be placed far apart enough to act as ailerons, and far back enough to act as elevators. (Modern fighters are rarely these days built as simple delta-wing craft. This is because the simple delta-wing shape is too stable, and prefers to fly straight because the wings are so far back; what is wanted is a craft which is very nearly unstable, usually to the extent that the fly-by-wire avionics are fighting to keep it stable! This makes for a much more maneuverable and responsive fighter. As a result, the elevon model is becoming rarer.) EDIT: I type so slow I got ninja-ed twice.

No. No atmospheric oxygen gets into the SRB, so it can't affect the chemical reaction. Differences in external pressure can slightly affect outflow from the nozzle and this in turn can affect combustion pressure, which in turn affects combustion rate and therefore thrust; but these are small effects.

Nobody died, it's safe to laugh.

A progression of buildings. Start with a garden shed for VAB and a barn door for launch pad, and earn cash to upgrade them and build all the other facilities.

Indeed! Good advice.

It can be worth re-downloading a mod again. Sometimes a download will abort prematurely, leaving a "short" .zip - and Windows will fail to notify users of the error! The upshot being that only a part of the files in a mod will actually be installed.

It's the sun, seen through the appropriate filters. There may have been some digital processing, but not necessarily. @OP: Could you link to the original site this came from? Thanks!

Are you using Active Texture Management? May that have weirded-out the cursor?

Make sure you have updated KSP! Is your KSP installation anywhere inside the Windows "Program files" or "Program files (x86) folder"? (If you are using Steam to download KSP, then having Steam inside Program files causes the same problems.) If so, move KSP out! A place like "C:\Games" is a good place. (You will need to create that folder.) Delete ALL old copies of mechjeb and mechjeb 2 before installing. Make sure you install the *latest* copy of mechjeb. Make sure you have downloaded the latest copy of ModuleManager, and delete all old copies of ModuleManager. Download Mechjeb again, just in case you have a broken download. If you want to use Blizzy's button bar, make sure you download and install the latest version. Make sure you are only using mods that claim to be compatible with KSP v0.24 If none of that works, try removing all other mods and see if that makes things better. If it does, add the mods one-by-one until you break Mechjeb, then remove the last mod you added, then carry on with the rest of them.

In a word - "yes". It's the quickest and easiest way. You can use one of any number of file-hosting services (I use Dropbox) to upload the file and link to the upload. Good luck!

You need to read back a page or two for working download links, posted by users who have provided mirrors. Most parts all work (iirc). The large solar panels require the Firespitter mod to operate. Note that you also need to read back a few pages fo rposts describing an adjustment to their .cfg to get them to work properly. This mod does not currently work with Connected Living Space, Crew Manifest or Ship Manifest.