Sean Mirrsen

Personally, I could see the little cupola (cupolette?) being a one-seat auxiliary control platform. Something you'd use for docking maneuvers in absence of a hullcam, or for good-view inline cockpits. It'd be one of the few things allowing for neat, non-pointy rovers, or flitters like the Faerie class from Edge of Chaos:

I feel like Near Future Construction should be the next mod to be made stock after SP+. It's very stocklike, and very nice. With the stock crew-transfer function, even the little airlock and the tiny cupola with no way in or out will become highly useful parts, in addition to highly visually appealing.

That's, however, not a direction KSP itself is heading in. It's also far beyond a mere parts mod, and has been a requested feature (in stock or mod) for quite some time now. So, given the circumstances, NFT is quite a good mod.

Then, like I said before (twice), be sure to check out Near Future Technologies. Also, forget about the PB-ION as it is now, because as it is now it's been buffed to high heaven. NFT is balanced against the old stats of the PB-ION, and brings those stats back. Mostly because proportionally scaling the new electric engines to the new PB-ION stats would make the electric engines a universally superior choice for everything without an atmosphere.

That would still be realistic, since you measure against the real world. By the same metric, turbojets and bell thrusters should be too inefficient to create working single-stage-to-orbit designs, and yet here we are. And any burns using the PB-IONs would take real-time months. Like I said, almost nothing in KSP is realistically scaled. The electric engines in NFT are scaled to the original implementation of the PB-ION, but are using a different balancing metric. They're not balanced against the rest of KSP, they're balanced with regard to technological progress, and their power consumption is dictated first and foremost by internal balance within the mod, not within KSP. Stock KSP barely factors into it. So, appropriately large power consumption and performance. Not realistic, because nothing in KSP is. Not balanced, because current KSP balance is a sandbox of similarly useful parts and NFT implies a technological progression to more efficient engines. But it's appropriate, because it takes an existing part as a starting point and tries to stay within reasonable bounds with regards to both realism and stock balance (i.e. no Q-thrusters just yet, and engine performance is upgraded from real life in the same way the PB-ION's initial version was). It's really quite a fine mod.

Appropriately large, not realistically large. Almost nothing in KSP is realistically large.

Like I said earlier, you should try the Near Future Technologies mod. Lots of large electric engines there, with appropriately large power requirements. The mod even scales the PB-ION back to its pre-buffed state, to keep the new electric engines balanced.

Because think of what it means to have destructible buildings, from a codebase standpoint. It means that static objects - what you'd normally consider terrain features - can now properly interact with the player's actions. And they are no longer static, in the sense that it is now possible to modify them ingame. This also means that we get a UI specifically dealing with restoring damaged buildings in the KSC. Put it all together, and add the devs' earlier statements about the huge amounts of content being worked on for the upcoming .26 feature, and how big the feature is, and you get something along the lines of "we will be able to build new buildings, maybe just at the KSC, maybe anywhere we want, and we'll be able to blow them up and otherwise interact with them". Not sure where people are getting damageable parts from though. There doesn't seem to be anything supporting that theory, at least as far as I can see.

You might want to check out the Near Future Technologies mod. Among (a lot of) other things, the Propulsion pack in particular adds a whole host of new ion and plasma engines, using Xenon, Argon, and Hydrogen fuels. And it has inline and radial Xenon tanks of many sizes. Not to mention the various solar panels of the Solar pack, the capacitors and reactors of the Electric pack, etc. It's really a mod worth checking out.

I take it every rocket and spaceplane you launch is always perfect, and you never ever have to revert the launch due to spontaneous rapid disassembly on liftoff? Or accidentally messed-up staging?

I believe they did say that experienced players would hardly notice it. Congratulations! You sound like an experienced player! And do recall that this is mostly just a byproduct of what they're really working on for .26. I personally don't mind seeing sooner rather than later.

Not agreed on the spaceplane front at all. Moving SP+ to stock has far-reaching implications for a lot of people, not least of whom are modders. Firespitter-like part animations in stock, at the least! Expanding the stock setup also means that everyone who likes playing the game "pure" will see renewed interest in it. In general, this is much more to renew interest of existing players, not really draw in new ones. Especially because nary a youtuber plays the game unmodded nowadays, so your own earlier argument holds - if they are showing off spaceplanes, chances are they already have SP+. Otherwise - I don't see why not. Better eyecandy equals better sales, equals longer sustained development of the game, equals more happy times for everyone who plays the game - i.e. us.

I pointed at the very informative video in my post. The reviewer who did the bend test for the iPhone 6+ tried to bend it back. Since the metal has its quirks and tends not to handle re-bending well, the frame warped at the bend point and cracked the screen. You'd need to take the phone apart and carefully bend just the frame itself, straighten it out, then put everything back together.

What are the cases made of? Plastic? Then why doesn't Apple make the phone itself out of it? Also, no it wouldn't, not this specific problem. The case would bend just as well as the phone, it offers little extra rigidity it just softens impacts and protects the surface. The metal of the phone would still get warm from being close to the body, and would still tend to retain its bent shape, and would still fail to return to its original shape if somebody tried to straighten it. More than likely, the phone would bend with the case, and when the pressure lets up it would pop out of it.

This followup is also quite informative:

They might also make one for the Note Edge, it would really need it. Although I wish the ZeroLemon people luck in figuring out how to make a case for that one. The Edge is a neat idea with good merit, but it offers some hurdles to things like damage resistance and case making. If the curved screen were a separate piece, so that damaging it would not require replacing the main screen (sort of like a crumple zone for the main screen, hehe), then it would be more practical. As is, it's neat and useful, but seems like it'll lower the overall endurance of the phone.

That site also lists 10Ah batteries for the Note 3, so I'm assuming there will be something similar for the Note 4 as well.

Apple can "do magic" the same way the technowizards in the late days of SNES did magic. They can control what the device and the OS do together, so they can push little tricks out of it. That still doesn't change the fact that it's a SNES. I mean iPhone. I haven't used either the iPhone (any iPhone), or any of the Samsung phones more modern than the... er... SGH-D840? I mostly come at this from a less attached angle. The iPhone... is just a phone. A fancy, distinctly overpriced, and profoundly overhyped phone. There is nothing that it does, that it does significantly better than any reasonably contemporary smartphone, to warrant treating it as some kind of ultimate smartphone. Same can be said of the latest Samsung, mostly, but at least I hardly ever see Samsung phone owners treating them as something special. Samsung, LG, Lenovo, it hardly matters. It's a phone, it works, it takes pictures, plays videos, and browses the Net. If you weren't a cheapskate when you picked it, it also has GPS and enough battery life to last through the day. Honestly, I can't imagine somebody wanting their phone to do more, when better specialized devices for those specific things can be bought for less than a jack-of-all-trades flagshipmonger, phone price included.

In a different spin on that problem, why do SP+ wings have no regard for their orientation when surface-attaching on their edges? Stock wings, if you attach something to an edge of a rotated wing, it will match the orientation to the wing. SP+ wings, you'll have to pray you can precision-rotate whatever you are placing into the exact same angle, because it will start parallel to the ground. I understand the periodic usefulness of having control surfaces parallel to the ground, for performance purposes, but for aesthetics purposes it's very annoying.

I see what looks like some buildings hiding behind a hillock. Can anyone tell if it's possible to see the KSC or any other existing structures like that?

To be entirely far, some electronics have their battery compartments secured with a screw to prevent accidental opening. Also, some other electronics require some arcane manipulations to open the back cover without damaging anything. *glares at own tablet PC* I rather doubt either of the required tools (case 1: teeny screwdriver, case 2: flat plastic thingy) are worth 5$ though.

Actually, that is very much a function of the brightness of your monitor. You can turn it up enough that you'd see even in pitch black. Thing is, with all the stars around, there is very rarely any "pitch black" in space. Factor in the moon, the scatter lighting from any nearby atmospheres, and you always have some ambient lighting going on. Not enough to see details most of the time - - but enough to at least make out the shape of what you're supposed to be seeing. If you are seeing more than a vague blob of star-obscuring darkness attached to the engine plumes in the above screenshot, your gamma level is set too high.

Not to mention, y'know, the expandable storage. How much is a 64GB microSD card these days?

Hm. I like the idea of a Mk4 (although it's actually a Mk3-2) fuselage. Depending on how the stock cargobays work, this could be quite interesting. You better be prepared to make a whole lot of adapters though. Mk3-2 to 2.5+2x1.25, to 2x1.25, to 5x1.25 (two top, three bottom), to 2.5m plain, to Mk2, to Mk3, to Mk2+2x0.625... I'm sure there are more.

The intake suggestion actually makes quite a lot of sense. I was suggesting it - not quite in this manner, though - for quite some time now. It makes sense for two reasons, to me. First is subjective, one I think would plug up (to a point) something I consider abuse of the existing model. Giving more of the mass to the intake, in the intake-engine pair, will mean that the fairly ridiculous practice of airhogging will at least be in some way penalized. Second is objective, and comes in from a realism standpoint. Right now KSP abstracts away one of the four important pieces of a jet engine. We have the intake that lets air in, the exhaust turbine that pushes air out, and maybe the combustion chamber squished away in the too-short engine part somewhere, but no compressor turbine that allows real jets to function. Notice how there's at least as much stuff in the front of a real turbojet, as there is in the back. The intake part in KSP could weigh as much as the engine itself, and it would still be realistic - in mass, if not size. Even if KSP isn't going to recreate the exact usefulness of compressors, giving the intakes a little more bulk and mass to at least pretend they are there would be quite logical.