Sean Mirrsen

Ferram, for "calculations heavy enough to use another thread", have you considered taking a second look at raycasting or some other methods for detecting the geometry of the craft in FAR versus the airflow? I recall you trying it at one point, and it didn't work very well - could it work better with this?

If you make an effort to dumb the principle down to brick levels, so you can look past the actual math and science, it kinda makes sense. A photon drive effectively makes its own reaction mass, while a Q-thruster wrings reaction mass out of nominally empty space. The energy required to make something available doesn't really have to correspond to the energy of that something. Putting it into brick terms, you don't need much energy to reach out and grab a nearby brick, but you can put a lot more force into a hand with a brick than an empty hand. That being the case, reaching out to grab the bricks that float around and use them is a much better investment of energy than not doing so, especially if the bricks are plentiful and everywhere.

"Bigger isn't better" is a little misleading, as it's "not better" in one specific area, cost-efficiency. Between equally well-built rockets of different size, the larger one will always be able to do "more", but the catch is that unless you specifically aim to test the limits of what's possible, "more" can end up being more than what you need - or more specifically, more than you really want having to pay for. If you want to do a bigger thing, you will need a bigger rocket. A bigger rocket for a smaller thing is simply a waste, hence the saying.

They're really more like drop tanks. There's this mod, RLA Stockalike, that has the tiny radial decouplers and .625m fuel tanks, and there's the TurboNisu's "stockalike parts for useful aesthetics" pack that has the fuel-containing fuel tank caps, bright yellow ones in case of the .625m.

Spending time waiting for .25 experimenting with inverted-cargobay bombers. The bomber's a success, but I suck at bombing runs.

Ooh, vertically symmetrical parts! And, if the cockpit model we saw is any indication, they no longer have heat-shield textures, either, so they're completely symmetrical top and bottom. To be fair though, making upside-down fuselage aircraft was a frequent practice of mine. Made it easier to fit something under the wings.

NEAR and FAR strip parts they recognize of aerodynamic data, and replace them with their own. If there is no NEAR config for SP+, then only the stock parts will have been stripped of that data. Since every fuselage in SP+ is lifting-body, it ends up having more lift than any stock wing with NEAR, so adding stock wings to SP+ fuselages is futile. The stock wings will still obey FAR rules and work ingame, but the CoL indicator and the function of the lifting bodies will be shot.

You know what I realized? The 1.25m radial airlock looks surprisingly good on the sides of the observation pod, replacing its normal hatches. The resulting assembly makes a pretty neat "station hub", even if you can't dock anything to it unless it has docking ports.

Well, I suppose if you stretch the definition of "carrier" and make an ekranoplan runway barge that can match the shuttle's landing velocity on water...

Right now the best way to make a Surface RT useful is to make it accept Android, or at least Linux. The hardware should be compatible enough, the Tegra chip is theoretically able to run Linux, but someone would have to actually try and rewrite and recompile the kernel to work on it.

You can slightly increase its usefulness if you jailbreak it (a small community of people over on xda-developers recompiles some open-source apps for it), but other than that a Surface RT is really good for almost nothing.

You could just fit a gaggle of parachutes and inflatable buoyancy aids to the shuttle. Or if you want a controlled carrier landing, make it one giant parachute, but a sport one instead of a military one, so you have a whole lot more wingspan and can control your glide.

Here's what a SABRE looks like: Here's what the RAPIER looks like: KSP doesn't model turbines in jet engines. All you can have of the SABRE is there already. Do your research.

"All" parts can't be dockable, because a docking port only has one active side - so you'd only be able to dock one side of a part but not the other, and wouldn't be able to dock anything to the back of the part you docked, without another part facing backwards. One way or the other, you're placing docking ports, whether they're integrated into parts or are separate parts. I think what is really needed here, is a set of station construction docking ports, designed not to look out of place. Making the hatch piece dockable would be a nice first step to that, I think, since it does make sense and the part looks good. If the 2.5m high-strength docking port is redesigned a bit to make it look more in line with the 2.5m station-parts design, I think most of the aesthetic issues with constructing stations in space will go away.

You already have an adapter though, it seats six and has a great view of the everywhere. The problem with having a station command pod that has a 3.75m end is that there are very few things in the 3.75m size for it to logically connect to. A 3.75m crew/life support/RCS cabin, as a sort of an ultimate station core block, would be pretty good. It can be capped off with those command pods on either end for a sleeker look. About the only thing I'd imagine you would need to add to it is a sort of a "service" section, a relatively featureless plated cylinder (1.25m thick) with RCS and power storage, designed to fit inbetween 3.75m station pieces and act as a hub for the 1.25m "hatch-connectors", allowing to make any kind of hub with various symmetry levels. Also, since stationbuilding is the focus right now, do you think you could add some fancier self-illumination lights? There's already a mod that does it, and its three lights are neat, but they are very small and lack variance. If you want to light up a large station with them, you need to use a great many, and the stock lights are way too powerful. Some kind of large soft light to illuminate space stations, as well as better designed flat-profile surface-highlighting lights would be neat.

The narrow windows on either side of the hatch on that observation pod look weird. Maybe see if a series of small, round or square viewports, or no viewports at all would look better? Also, how about a 3.5m crew cabin, to go with the 2.5/3.5m station capsule?

So... you're asking for a docking port that can't undock? Because docking already merges the parts together like in the VAB, the only difference is that you can take them back apart.

Of course the iPhone is more popular than any given Android phone. That's like saying that the PlayStation 3 is more popular than any given laptop model. Because of course it is. Apple caters to their own niche, and that niche is "people rich enough to afford the only phone configuration they are offering, whether they actually need all of its functions or are simply gullible enough to follow the advertising". Samsung, LG, Motorola, HTC, Acer, Asus, and all the other reindeer phone manufacturers just make phones like one would make laptops - they provide a selection of prices and hardware setups, so that the user can choose. Me, I choose to dislike being boxed into one specific setup and price range. I dislike consoles as well, but that's why I have a laptop good enough to play PS2 games on.

Ooh, those look neat. Will the airlock parts be dockable though, or will they be purely decorative?

I personally consider fuel realism in KSP to be as silly as real mineral names in Dwarf Fortress. In a universe where a typical person's native name can be used as a Japanese tongue-twister and typical towns have names like "Bucketflowers", you have minerals like "tetrahedrite" and "pyrolusite". It just clashes with the rest of the setting. It's pretty much the same here. Why have realism in fuels and real fuel names and parameters when the premise of the game forfeits realism in favor of accessibility from the get-go?

Ike is pretty easy to land on, yeah. Easy to take off from, too. Compared to a return mission from Duna, a return mission from Ike is easy.

A very big part of the appeal of Nertea's parts is the stockalike look. That and the quality they're made with, of course. Superb work on the model. I can't help but imagine the four interior seats being arranged around the center passage with the tops facing outward, so that every pilot has a view forward out the windows. Although realistically it'd probably be the opposite, with each seats' bottoms on the outer rim, so that rotational gravity would feel more natural (if equally dizzying) to the pilots.

I can just pop the microSD card out of my phone if I really need to. And MicroUSB cables are a lot more ubiquitous if you're not surrounded by Apple products on all sides. I'm charging my gamepad and my phone with the same kind of cable, for instance. Plus I can view any file format this way, rather than "almost" any.

Plus if you know biology, the density of sensory cells on the human retina is somewhere around a hundred thousand per square millimeter, and denser towards the center of the retina. Both distance and the eyesight of the viewer matter in this case.

Correction: iOS doesn't want an antivirus. App curation is all fine and good while it works, but it's like refusing to have a police force because you have impenetrable walls around your town and the citizens seem to be happy for now. The moment anything gets through - and things do get through - it becomes a huge problem that Apple itself has to fix, leaving the common user at the mercy of whatever is responsible until they do. In the meantime, Android users may have many more vulnerabilities, but they have all the tools they need to effectively never notice whatever comes through. My Windows 7 laptop, for instance, is a complete mess when it comes to security, but I haven't had a single virus or trojan problem since I started using the Kaspersky Internet Security suite. I don't need every single thing I download and install to be approved and tested for me, because I have the common sense not to download suspicious software, and I have the tools to deal with any consequences of things that do end up being harmful. If I ever had any problem on any of my Android devices, I could do the same thing. Whereas when - not if - someone finds a way around Apple's "wall of overprotection +3", you're stuck enduring the issue until Apple manages to get a fix in - and you better hope that whatever it was didn't take out your internet connection.