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It doesn't need to be a vertical dive to be honest. Or even involve a drop in altitude for that matter. The "reduced gravity" flight profile of the vomit comets and other related aircraft provides an effective zero g before it completes it's ascent (starting with when it begins to nose back down to level flight from it's climb, then continuing as it noses down for a 45 degree dive). The equivalent near-zero point in a spacecraft launch would be on main engine cutoff I guess - the point where the only external forces acting on the vessel are gravity and air drag, with the crew experiencing the exact same acceleration due to gravity as the vessel.

It's virtually impossible unless you work for a company that's already in the pyro industry. Using basic blackpowder as an example you need a license to purchase & a separate license to store, in addition to dedicated storage facilities. Then you need licensing and insurance appropriate to whatever you're using the blackpowder for. Manufacture is an absolute no-go for private individuals, with possession of the formulae for blackpowder being technically illegal under current regulations.

And it's rather stupid the rules they use to enforce it. Don't know if the rest of the EU has gone this mental but in the UK people have been prosecuted (under anti-terror regulations) for mere possession of the formulae for rocket fuels & smoke-producing compounds. Possession of self-manufactured materials for fireworks is a basis for a fully-armed police response, a military ordinance disposal team and a few years in a cell (as some poor bugger in Yorkshire found out earlier this month). Ecuador's civilian space agency uses launch facilities in Russia to deploy their satellites. If they could launch from Ecuador without too many legislative hurdles to leap I'm sure they would.

Yet I can guarantee you there'll be no private aircraft in the air within many many miles of the NATO summit this autumn. In terms of regs in general, you're looking at the Tripoli Rocket Association and / or National Association of Rocketry as the overseeing bodies (in the US). Most other countries regs are based on these too, so they're a good outline. I know that the largest ready-manufactured engine available without special permissions is a size O, for a total impulse of no more than 40,960 Ns. There are three licensing stages below that output level. Anything larger than that needs a special permit from the FAA or equivalent. Beyond that you'd probably have to speak to the regulators themselves as details of the exact permissions required to launch an engine like that are highly area-specific. Avionics is the biggest sticking point in terms of construction, with most existing systems covered by various export restrictions which even private companies / individuals have to abide by. You could probably engineer you own these days (decent computers are small and cheap) but regs around that would be very region specific. Moving to a less regulated country during development may help but that can in itself bring it's own issues, especially if you're developing something that the less developed country could re-purpose for military use. Again your best bet is going to be to speak to the regulators themselves regarding what you can design and / or purchase without smacking into too many restrictions.

I'd think an amateur building something capable of a trans-atmospheric flightpath is going to be very very difficult to do legally. The line between "private rocket launch" and "privately owned ICBM / ASAT weapon" is after all only a difference in payload. You do remember what happened to the guy who took the space-gun design and tried building it somewhere unregulated, don't you? LOx sales aren't monitored or regulated in any particular way. I buy nitrous oxide 150lb at a time and no-one's ever asked what I'm using it for....

It may do, but it's nowhere near release yet. Indeed the below quote is the nearest that Unity themselves have come to a release date (posted five days ago on the unity forums by Graham Dunnett - the Director of Support for unity) "I'm not able to give you a date, or even a month. It is, however, not the case that 4.6 has to ship before 5.0, although the timing would be odd, I guess. The long delay between the 4.0 announcement at GDC two years ago, and the final arrival in November 2012 wasn't our proudest moment. Our dev and QA teams are working under a great deal of pressure to get 5.0 out during the summer. The beta group may throw out interesting curveballs that cause more engineering work, but the desire is to not make pre-order customers wait forever."

Surprisingly running KSP from an SSD doesn't decrease the loading time compared to a regular HDD. My KSP install loads in 89 seconds from my mechnical drive, and 88 seconds from my SSD. Whatever it's spending most of it's time doing during the loading sequence it isn't file i/o.

Obviously raw figures such as were being bandied about mean little without some situational / distribution data to give them some perspective. It's just my natural response to iffy numbers, a bad habit from ye olde lab days. Believe me I've no intention of getting into a stats discussion Personally for what NASA's achieved I've always thought their fatality count to be very low. They (and the other agencies) have some fantastic engineers working on some crazy stuff and they've achieved great things. Risk is part of going into space - anyone with the balls to strap themselves to the side of 1700 tonnes of rocket fuel is going to know and accept that. If they were to turn around tomorrow and say "We need a crew of 20 people, there's a 70% chance you'll be on Mars by christmas, a 30% chance you'll be atomised" they'd get their crew. But nearly dying because no-one thought to actually check where a water leak was coming from before using the suit again? And having no plan for getting water out of the helmet if anything leaked? Everyone involved deserves a collective smack across the back of the head. Personally I'd have been on the radio screaming "Guys, there's water in the helmet, I'm coming back inside! What was that ground control? Well what're you going to do, ground me?" and probably spend the rest of my life having nightmares about having to choose between drowning in a spacesuit or opening the suit to space......

[pulls on his hardhat-and-flamesuit-of-evidence-hunting] There have been 2174 deaths of US military personnel in Afghanistan in the 13 years they've been there (with 1795 formally listed as enemy action, 82%). There're 33,600 currently deployed personnel with an average deployment length of around a year. That's 2174 deaths in around 436800 personnel-years, or 0.497% If NASA have had 14 deaths from 277 crewmembers then that puts their mortality rate for the shuttle program alone at 5.05%. Apollo / Gemini may shift that figure up or down a bit, but I don't have the figures to hand for those programs. Per person being a member of the shuttle crew put people at a risk of dying ten times greater than being deployed to an active warzone as part of US forces. edit: not that i'm against space exploration, far from it I'm an avid supporter. But NASA's safety record makes issues such as water leaks into suits completely unsurprising.

Yes and yes (there's a small server list in the KMP thread in the addons section).

Running B9 plus KW is pretty much a summons to the dark lords of out-of-memory crashes, at least in the current version of KSP. Have you tried using the low-resolution texture packs for both addons? Pulls the memory footprint down nicely. (and yes there's supposed to be a kethane map on the title screen, I'd love to know how to turn that off myself)

Bone density loss is probably the real issue out of this pair. When you consider how many martial arts and exercise regimes can produce significant amount of muscle tone and / or bulk without ever going near something as simple as a barbell the whole "we need technology to maintain muscle" argument gets rather rapidly thrown out of the window. Considering the basic level of fitness required to be an astronaut I'd be surprised if most crew members didn't already know this. Wonder if drugs similar to those used to treat brittle bone disease could be used to cut down on the bone loss? Those particular drugs don't work by causing additional growth of new bone, they leave that to the body and instead interfere with the continual breakdown of bone that the body also undergoes. My money says someone at NASA (or a related agency) has already suggested this and been shot down by some foamingly rabid pencil-pusher.

Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast. The dinosaur-looking guy was called "Desann".

It's the top link on the 2nd page of the "addon releases and projects showcase" forum, so not exactly hard to find. The issue with the developer not playing by Squad's rules was sorted out some weeks ago. There's also a download link in the post immediately above yours....

Crew composition would be.... interesting to say the least. There would after all be no reason to evacuate someone, no matter their "genetic profile", if they don't have any useable skills. Think of all the multimillionaire footballers that's skills extend to "kick ball, fall over, cry about it to get a penalty". Think of all of the managers that's skills extend to "I've been answering phones longer than you so I'm the boss!". The entire banking industry. From a certain point of view something like this would be the best thing that could happen to us as a species. lil edit: inheritable disease may not be such an issue, you could easily take enough stored sperm and ova along to ensure that the following generations have absolutely no genetic relation to their "parents" if you so wished. Gene therapy can also be used to prevent conditions passing between generations.

It's probably causing you to run out of memory, it's fairly harsh like that. The mod itself works fine. Try adding the lowres texture pack for B9, likewise for any other large parts packs you have installed (Kw rocketry and novapunch being another couple memory-munching beasties).

What laptop is it exactly? There're already threads kicking around (both here and on manufacturers websites) regarding issues with GPU switching on these intel / ATI combos, but we won't be able to track down much more info without some more information from yourself. In that task manager screenshot what is causing the use of half of your system memory? Is that from KSP running or was screenshot taken without it running?

Very odd. I've been using KW, KAS, Mechjeb and Kethane together with no issues. Not something daft like a broken file download is it?

At the current rate of production from the LHC, it'd take in the region of 100 million years to produce one gram of antimatter. Also requires 120 MW of power to run the collider, so you'd be hauling a fairly hefty nuclear power station with ya. Horn Brain is right, it'd be massively more efficient to just accelerate the collected gas directly. Or ignore the collider setup and just feed the collected gas through the power station for mega-NERVA action.

Heavier-than-air flying toys have been around for the best part of 2500 years. Engine powered "heavier than air flight" predated the Wright brothers' by more than 25 years.

Built modified version of the Aeris using a couple of rapiers plus a turbojet. Twice. Successfully SSTO'd to my refuelling station @ 125km. Twice. Gassed up & went out on a jaunt then made reentry to Kerbin atmosphere. Twice. Died in an autopilot-induced low speed flat spin @ 500m. Twice. Lesson learned. Maybe

Dont really see how they could expect any more time off over Christmas than anyone else working a residential technical role, or working a critical infrastructure support role. While they might get some leeway in what they're doing during their personal time (and maybe some treats sent up with the latest cargo run) the important stuff will take priority. Wonder why it takes NASA three spacewalks to do a 6 1/2 hour job when the Russian crew will be outside for 7 continuous hours on the 27th?

Hey, it's original at least Most people I know who dislike the circus are fine with the animals (if well treated). Throw in one of these guys and they'll run a mile. (Tim Curry at his most.... memorable)

Yes they do The launch profile for the shuttle (as an example) has a coast phase of about two minutes, between the main engine shutdown / external tank dump and the firing of the orbital maneuvering system to circularize the orbit.

Have you tried editing the mass to a number that doesn't have multiple decimal points in it? Because a mass of "1.0.0276478" isn't going to be understandable by anything, human or computer - it's nonsense.