softweir

As well as the other fixes, you can also use "Stop at stage" in the Ascent Guidance panel. Enter into it the number of the last stage before that of the lander and MechJeb will ignore the lander's engines. So if the lander is stage 0, enter 1 into Stop at stage. I use this all the time - damn handy!

Concorde never made it as a commercial transport facility, it only carried on for so long as an "Experience" flight in combination with a trans-Atlantic cruise - and it's days were always numbered, even before the crash at Charles de Gaulle Airport. The number of people who would be prepared to pay enough cash in order to fly supersonic isn't great enough. The vast majority of people want the flights to be cheap, which is why bucket-class outfits like Ryanair can operate. Supersonic flight is expensive and can never be cheap, because there are so very many additional technical issues over and above those of sub-sonic flight. A supersonic craft needs very many systems in addition to those of a subsonic craft, and many of those systems it has in common have to be more complex so the construction and maintenance costs are much higher, and the fuel costs are VERY much higher. Maybe, if we get out of the global economic downturn we are slogging through and have a significant upturn then there might be a sufficient number of people with the disposable income wanting quick and high-ticket flights that supersonic airliners will become viable. But maybe not.

Perhaps a better idea would be to dissociate the entry field and the underlying variable, and perform the range-checking invisibly in the background - ie, allow users to enter whatever value they like, just don't copy buggy values to places where they will cause issues. Though maybe that is exactly what would take the extra code you don't want to produce.

Hover over a fairing and tap "F".

Concorde didn't have flaps, only elevons - elevator/aileron dual-function control surfaces. In order to deal with Mach tuck, fuel was pumped from forward tanks to rearward tanks. Trim by transferring fuel would be a neat feature for a KSP mod...

Pretty much correct, though the heating systems were left off for the entire 31 months and the CPU did nothing except check the time every 15 minutes. The heaters were only turned on during the wake-up procedure to allow the star-sighting navigation system to operate. Once the CPU knew which way it was spinning and how fast, then it could kill the spin and re-orient the craft to point the main antenna towards Earth, and then start sending a carrier wave - the least energy-consuming communications mode it has! Energy economy is still important at this stage, because the craft is still getting considerably less sunlight than it needs to operate fully. The controllers will instruct it to activate and test systems as and when there is enough power for it to do so safely.

Because Squad don't put genuine gas formulae into KSP, they just shove some numbers in that make the game work the way they want. They don't simulate density, speed of sound, sonic/supersonic shockwaves or anything - they just have a graph that rather arbitrarily associates coefficient of drag with altitude, adjusted to reach zero at 69km altitude. Not to mention that KSP calculates drag for each and every part of a vehicle regardless of what parts are in front of them and ought to be "shielding" them from much of the drag.

It would help to have a picture of your rocket! Generally speaking; without FAR, KSPs sticky atmosphere means you can get away with a lot that wouldn't work in real life. The atmosphere slows you down so much that it is hard to get enough airspeed (during vertical launch) to break up any reasonable rocket design. When you add FAR you are liable to find your liftoff velocity climbs far faster than you are used to, so any instability results in a very high airspeed breakup - just like happens in real life if rocket stacks have any instability. As for where the instability comes from, designs that are stable in stock will be unstable under FAR, and vice-versa.

The "egg sacks" may be prey wrapped up and kept to be eaten later.

Then again, the Soviet Buran vehicle managed a 100% automated flight from launch, through orbit to automated landing. (Assuming the technicians didn't cheat and use remote control at any stage.) It can be done - if sufficiently talented and resourced coding teams get to do it! I wonder if those guys might be available to program Skylon?

Maybe in a mod, but it's a HUGE amount of extra work - all the way from rewriting core code right up to creating new animations - just for a neat feature most people will ignore after 5 minutes.

Ditto Ditto. It is irritating, and I am sure adds to reliability problems.

Looks great! It may get some niggles from realism enthusiasts, on the basis that real-world LESs are generally external to protective shrouds so the shroud can protect the capsule from LES exhaust. In the case of Apollo, the LES and protective shroud were a single part, not separate parts. Me, I prefer the appearance as it is. Afterthought: Having that much space between the nose of the shroud and the mass of the capsule may cause stability issues during Launch Escapes when used with FAR. Basically, there is too much drag too far up front. It might be better to make the shroud fit the capsule better, and have the LES bolted on the front of that, or put rockets in the shroud.

The engines could do it, probably, given extra fuel tanks and a few fuel deliveries. Achieving the delta-v needed would take a lot of time and - because it has such low acceleration and a VERY slow turn rate - would require some nifty navigation so it would require years of planning and some very precise changes of orientation, but it might well be able to get there - assuming 100% engine reliability and all other factors being allowed for. Those "other factors" might be killers. The ISS's cooling and power systems were designed with the assumption that it would spend slightly over 50% of its time in sunlight and slightly less than 50% in shadow - change that too much and it would either overheat or run out of electricity. On the way to the moon it would be very likely to do both! So, in order to migrate to Lunar orbit, it would require significant upgrades to power and cooling systems. I'm also not sure the electronics are sufficiently radiation-hardened to survive outside Earth's magnetosphere: probably, given that they have to survive for years in orbit, but further up things get even hotter. The ISS depends on regular supply trips. A transfer to lunar orbit might take a very long time and once it had got going it would be beyond any supply capability we currently have. If it used fuel too fast, or too many redundant units failed then it would be beyond any chance of restocking or replacement. And finally, there is the political situation. A lot of the partner nations managing the ISS do so on the understanding it will be available for Earth Science and microgravity projects. Even mention sending it to the moon and they would be furious that their orbital lab would be snatched away from them. (Yes, the microgravity research currently being conducted would continue - until it needed to be taken home for analysis.) Funding would dry up faster than than a pool of **** in the Sahara, and you wouldn't even have a LEO station, let alone a lunar orbit station!

As ferram just said: you NEED the 000_Toolbar for FAR to operate. Put it back! Then report any errors.

I am sure I have heard it said that even if the moonshots had missed and gone into interplanetary space, the change in Earth's orbit would have been down at the subatomic-particle scale. @O.P.: You mention the Earth's "perfect orbit". It doesn't have one. It's elliptical, and prone to tiny shifts due to gravitational interactions with other, larger planets such as Jupiter. Not to mention that 28-day wobble caused by our moon!

Indeed. Artificial (synthetic) languages simply don't take off, no matter how flexible or easy they are to use. This is because the adoption of languages is driven by how often potential users hear it being used or are forced to use it, not by how easy they are to use nor how ingenious their grammar is. These days in much of the world it is English, though in the Far East Mandarin is (by force as well as necessity) widely spoken and understood. I have no idea how true this is, but Star Trek fans are heard to say that Klingon is more widely spoken than any other synthetic language!

That's interesting. I know that Welsh speakers of English tend to play with word order a lot, so they might say "the dog bit the cat", or "the cat it was the dog bit", or "bit the cat, the dog did" to get a similar change of emphasis - the first is a bald statement, the second emphasises that a cat was the victim and the third emphasises the misdeed of the dog. That sort of thing is possible in English, but so very uncommon that using it leads to confusion and misunderstanding. Similarly, use of the somewhat more common passive voice ("the cat was bitten by the dog") is very confusing to the 30% less literate English users who much prefer the active voice ("the dog bit the cat"). Or better still an exclamation mark after "SLOW". I believe German tends to use exclamation marks to indicate imperatives?

One of my programming tutors had a solution to this: "(" = "bra" (short "a" so it doesn't sound like an item of feminine support.) ")" = "ket" It might interest you to read up on the language Glossa. As for why and how English came to be as it is: it is a mongrel of Celtic, Latin, and Greek with a great influence from the Germanic languages Anglo-Saxon, French, Norse and High german; and has imported tenses and other inflections from all of them. Very common words would tend to retain the tense and count inflections appropriate to the language they were borrowed from, while less common words would acquire inflexions from other languages. So "child/children" retains a count inflection appropriate to Anglo-Saxon, "wheel/wheels" uses a count inflection borrowed from German (iirc), and "radius/radii" uses a Latin count inflection. Similarly, very common verbs tend to retain the tenses appropriate to their parent language. Rarer words tended to get shackled with the most common word-endings regardless of their parent language. Because of this quagmire of inflexions, a great many have been dropped: almost all the root languages use(d) different inflections for the subject and object of a sentence, but this practice became extremely rare in English and has finally died out now that "who/whom" has vanished. ("Tell me, who struck whom?" "I know not who landed the blow, nor whom was struck.") Similarly, we have dropped person from verbs, so where Latin had "amo, amas, amat, amatus, amatis, amant" we have "I love, you love, he loves, we love, you love, they love" - we reduced it all to just "love/loves" and associate the verb with a noun or pronoun to sort out the person. This has made English very much more dependant on word order - in Early English (Anglo-Saxon) it was possible to reorder a sentence and keep the same meaning just so long as each word retained its endings, and this was often done in poetry. In English, it is easy to change the meaning of a sentence by small variations, and is something that trips up newcomers to English quite badly. On the plus side, it has made it extremely easy for English to import and adopt words from other languages. We may not be able to pronounce them in a way recognisable to users of their parent languages, but they don't get swamped by inflections that fight their native spelling.

EDIT: Just read the rest of the thread and decided my contribution was redundant!

Everything you have mentioned is deliberate design. The Interstage Adapter was designed from the start to decouple the floating node only when the last Payload Fairing is jettisoned. The "decoupler" on the Interstage Adapter is a dummy that was added later to help mods such as MechJeb and Engineer cope with delta-v calculations. Being a dummy, it can't be operated whether by staging or part-menu! One simply should not use Fuselage Fairings with Interstage Adapters - they aren't designed to work together. This is why Fuselage Fairings were moved to the Structural tab: to reduce the chances of users confusing them with Payload Fairings, which remain in the aerodynamic tab. Fuselage Fairings are inactive, non-jettisonable parts to make neat, aerodynamic containers for non-payload parts such as batteries, RCS tanks etc etc. They can be used, for instance, for creating completely customised Service Modules, rather than depending on various less-flexible SM mod parts. As I remember it the order of development was: Payload fairings and fairing bases. These were intended to replicate the top-of-stack payload fairings used in, for instance, satellite launchers. You couldn't pair them up, they always enclosed the entire top of the rocket, though they could be nested. The code was extended to allow fairing bases to be paired up, to allow payload fairings to cover mid-stack payloads. Fuselage Fairings were added, to prevent accidents when fairings were being used for permanent fuselage structures. Finally, interstage adaptors were added to make Apollo-style enclosures possible: they simulated the effect that the fairings were connecting the two parts of the stack fore and aft of a "payload" such as a Lunar Lander. Finally, a dummy decoupler was added to interstage adaptors so other mods could calculate the delta-v of stages without going mad. This wasn't necessary for payload fairing bases, as users would add their own decoupler at appropriate points.

The stock capsule looks a lot like Apollo but there are a lot of differences - this mod looks very much more like!

Struts. I'm afraid that's the only answer, at least until Squad fix that bug!

@OP: Now you have his profile, you can PM him!

So, you're saying the VAB tweaks don't carry through to the vehicle at launch?