Max Grant

as anyone purposefully designed critical system failures to test emergency abort procedures or ensure that the crew could be saved if something horrible went wrong? Naw. They respawn on the launch pad . . .

Oh, I just figured it was because it looked very similar to ONE of the Gemini twins. Maybe you could call the constellation Separatus or something.

Google 'Constellation Gemini.' Then it will make sense.

I\'m going to chime in here. Thank you Squad. This humble little game has become one of my favorite things to play with, ever. But WHAT makes it wonderful, to me, is the open-ended nature of it. The idea of having a whole, actual world to explore, and no rails or walls or other obstacles except my own capabilities in the game preventing me from flying off to visit anything I can see in the Universe. The new terrain system really makes that part of the experience more tangible. I loved coming down on the Mun the first time and seeing little boulders appear below me. I can\'t wait for more planets to appear in the game. I can see multi-day missions playing out. I almost feel like I need to devote a dedicated machine to KSP because although I enjoy the warp function I also like the notion of 'living' these missions in real-time. I have several times done a 'real time' Mun mission where I launch in the evening, sleep while we reach Munar orbit, and then try to land the ship at 4:00 a.m.

This is an odd aside, but there is a mathematical theorem that governs this. I have encountered it before in of all things traffic, where it manifests itself as Braess\' Paradox. The idea is that if you have too many paths, you will actually slow down the performance of the system. I say this in relation to the struts issue because when I first learned of this paradox, there was a video where someone demonstrated the mathematical underpinning by suspending a heavy object with wires, and after adding too many wires, they snipped one, and the heavy object (it was a piece of concrete) LIFTED instead of sagging more as you would expect from cutting a support. That\'s a weird stretch but apparently the math for the two problems is very similar and leads to a similar result. So, an odd way to get to this notion, but there is such a thing as too much support.

I absolutely LOVE that rocket. It looks utterly terrifying. I was thinking of starting a group for the scariest, most uncertain rocket rides. I've done several that are just mortifying to watch -- 5-tank-long liquid boosters sashaying side to side as the SAS' tries to stabilize my rickety Wile E. Coyote creation. Most of the time using just the basic parts I manage to get about to 3500 km/sec, if that is boosters don't randomly fall off onto the launch pad (happens quite frequently) or I don't overheat and explode parts. I've bolted on up to 9 solid boosters to a 3-engine liquid stage as my startup. Seems to me the biggest obstacle to overcome is getting above about 10km with a decent amount of speed and plenty of fuel still to spend. But it is SO FUN to start with the idea that 'I'm going to make the tallest damn rocket,' and sometimes my rockets have simply fallen RIGHT OFF THE PAD before I can even launch them.