Sean Mirrsen

I find that the biggest problem modern laptops have is being OEM'd with Windows 8. I'm seriously considering holding off on upgrading until either W9 or W8SE, because finding a decent laptop with W7 in stores is getting harder and harder as time goes on.

I've got an Acer laptop for my gaming needs (and all other needs, because I would rather buy one laptop than a desktop for every location I am regularly spending time at), and so far it's outlasted its warranty by two years. I think. Something around that. In all that time it's needed a HDD replacement because the old one got fragmented into oblivion (I keep it as an external now), and its WSAD keys are starting to fail from heavy use compounded with being right on top of the GPU heatsink. I play KSP and GTA IV on it. I've no reason to believe that Acer laptops are bad so far. My ASUS laptop that I had previously, however, had been in the service twice during its warranty period. Once because its screen failed, once because it managed to blow a chip somewhere due to overheat. It really boils down to how lucky you are.

"Gaming laptop" is no more of an oxymoron than a "handheld console". You might think it makes no sense (a console is called a console because it attaches to a TV), but that doesn't stop them from existing and thriving on the market.

You can always press F3 to see the flight log. And like people above have said, the availability of Revert Flight will likely be dependent on the difficulty setting. It's already pretty restrictive as it is, so it will work alright as a default difficulty, with Hard having it disabled or time-limited.

Most of my SSTOs break 1000 by five minutes. Actually, most SSTOs would do this, period. With rocket thrust added, might even break 700 in two to three minutes. But not one - drag too high at low altitude, and climbing takes time.

A much earlier version of it actually had interplanetary boosters. Used it to perform an ill-fated mission to Duna, as well as find a curious orbit bug around Ike.

It has a nuclear engine, so once it refuels after taking off it could certainly try to reach Laythe. Landing and take-off should be no problem on Laythe, again assuming refuels inbetween - it doesn't abuse intakes, so takes some effort to get into orbit. The rover could explore islands with ease, and the rest of the craft has a control core so it could hop over to wherever the rover is.Ike should be good, Tylo probably not (not takeoff afterwards, at least - gravity too high, it'd spend most of the fuel landing), and I don't remember what gravity Vall has. If you're wondering how it VTOLs - it uses a cantankerously huge array of radial Rockomax engines underneath. (pictured is the roverless version - the rover part is literally just sticking some wheels on the shuttlepod, plus an extra pair of landing gear ) I didn't keep the rover part for long, btw. I just felt that wheels sticking out of a plane cockpit looked too silly in flight.

It could be a reincarnation of the old docking bug, wherein some parts (like strut connectors) would cause docked vessels to experience phantom torque.

I've had a VSTOL SSTO with the control pod being a detachable shuttlepod/rover. Even landed it on/returned it from the Mun at one point. But it wouldn't be able to land on an atmosphereless 1G planet and return. Getting the whole thing to be a rover would be a mite excessive though.

Eh, the issue isn't in how many intakes there are per engine, and not in the realism of how many intakes an engine could actually use, or in how ram intakes don't work that way - it's just plain placing an air intake where it can't actually be used to take in air. Namely, right behind another air intake. Or right inside another intake, or any other part. Last I checked, FAR had no effect on this, despite nominally detecting when a control surface is obscured from the airstream. The huge monstrous arrays of intakes blooming outward like some kind of vacuum scoop of death are quite fine by me - they function exactly the way they look they should. But stacking intakes into compact long barrels or arrays where they barely peek out from behind one another (like Pirke's design up there), especially if they're completely obscured by fuselage, just don't look like they should work. It's a problem with KSP that they do, and like I said they are all legitimate designs - I just very much dislike that approach. And clipping abuse, among other things. My SSTOs are heavy, can't break 20K/1200 on airbreathers, and more often than not can't get anywhere beyond orbit on their own power without refueling. But if one day the air intake behavior is fixed, they will keep on working.

I usually just place lights on long struts or I-beams attached to the launch clamps. Works best that way, and minimal parts.

At six times the mass, your 200 intakes would suddenly explode from 20 to 120 mass units weighing down your plane. Extra 100 mass units of dead weight to rob you of acceleration, lift, and delta-V all the way through. Good luck getting the same mileage out of that design with such a change. It really wouldn't be sufficient to stop intake spam, but it'd do very well to at least curb it. For every intake you stack on to give yourself a boost off the surface, you rob your craft of rocket dV that you could have actually used.

I don't find they flip more easily at all. Rovers I make are generally very stable.

Plus career mode is more likely to break established content than work with it. There are bound to be changes, reimaginings, and so on, due to ongoing developments and how having an economy will impact the usefulness of different parts. For instance, tweakables - the Next Big Thing of a sort, in regards to "under the hood" developments - will likely remove the need to have a separate "drogue" and "normal" chutes. You'll be able to set the deployment/cutoff heights of parachutes you attach, manually setting them to work as "drogue" chutes. It's also the reason nobody works on the existing spaceplane parts - everybody knows that they are going to be completely overhauled when spaceplanes next become the focus. In the meantime, everybody is free to use mods.

You could always just surface-mount the thing. Either mod it, or use that flat structural piece that exists literally for that one purpose.

This has been discussed a lot of times now, and personally I find the notion that KSP would be incapable of having n-body simulation ridiculous (seriously, the only time it will actually put a strain - in time warp - is the only time when all the fancy 500-part mothership physics are shelved entirely as the ships are put on rails), but Squad has already stated that KSP will absolutely not have n-body physics. Alas, but true.

Jeb likes his new space scooter. Had to conduct a whole another mission to bring it to him, along with a parachute-equipped capsule to live and eventually return planetside with.

Am I the only one finding it hilarious that in the OP photo, the trash can lid obscures the sign so that it says "Stop! Strictly no entry into safety"?

Yeah, the main two things about why jets aren't so great with rockets IRL is that they're a) complex and expensive, and surprisingly heavy. The current jet engines are just the turbine and nozzle, whereas the "intake" should represent the other half of the mass, namely the compression chamber. An 1.0/0.6 split could be a good first step to fixing the problem, yeah. +1

Well, it's a solid mass of wings that feeds around 200 intakes into four turbojets. While the achievement is legitimate, I seriously dislike intake stacking. :\

It's... well, it's trim. It's the same thing you use on every radio-controlled toy airplane ever, and on any decent joystick. It allows you to move the "center" of the controls, so that the "rest" position is actually a little off to the side and upward, for instance, to compensate for the model you're flying being off-balance.

I adore the new SAS. So many brilliantly retarded things suddenly made so perfectly possible...

The control tower would be even more hilarious though. Fill the orange tank with beer, and instead of buzzing the tower you'll be boozing it. Also, a new results section for craft not using parachutes may be in order, in light of the above post.

Just now I sent Jeb up in a pod to test the new prototype RCS space scooter. At about that point I realized that I blithely forgot to put any parachutes. At all. Anywhere. And the rocket does not have enough control authority, not to mention available fuel, to safely land. What I do have, is a station in orbit. The core of one. It doesn't have any parachutes, or even accomodations, but it's still a better place to be, at least because it has a huge supply of RCS fuel for the scooter. It's kind of far away though. A few long orbital maneuvers later, including a very dumb near miss where I ensured an orbital intersect but forgot to match velocity (nothing says "oh crap" like 30 tons of steel and explosives whistling past you at half the speed of sound), Jeb finally made it. Literally by the seat of his pants. My next project? Sending up a rescue mission. It'll be the exact same rocket. With a new model of the space scooter, and a parachute-equipped escape pod. "End Flight"? I don't even know why we had it in the first place.

If you have a prebuilt rocket, you can just launch from the launchpad directly instead of going to the VAB. That way you will always be able to see what crew you are sending up, since you're opening the mission screen. Deselecting the two extra passengers is just two clicks. Also, as far as I recall, extra command pods aren't automatically filled up. You could have a MkI pod with the pilot, and an empty 2-seater Lander Can behind it for the same space that a Mk3 cockpit occupies, and you'd always have 2 seats empty.