NovaSilisko

My guess for the release would be some time after everyone's home from GDC. I believe chad at least is still in california.

Almost. At present it's just the debug lander with an early control script. The planets are just spheres and the generator only spits out a single solar system. But, it's technically playable. You can fly around and land, affected by gravity like the other prototypes. You can also see the image degradation system at work in those images. There are at present several presets for it to choose from, which control a stack of effects (greyscale, bloom, image grain, resolution reduction, FPS reduction, etc). The aforementioned image grain is also controlled by the strength of the connection to the base station (which doesn't exist yet in its true form, but a test script with the same equations is working fine). In addition, the image cuts out entirely if you lose line of sight to the transmitter. A side note, I made an early version of a control method that makes aiming your ship around much easier. It's a "pulsed thrust" mode. When you hit W, for instance, it lets out a puff of RCS that starts you rotating. When you release W, it makes an opposing puff to stop you rotating. At present it simply applies a torque to the ship but later it will be done with actual thrusters (and will have a spoolup time as a result). You can also switch to "continuous thrust" mode, which functions just like the RCS in KSP, and is better when you're trying to land.

Let me just leave these here for a moment while I go prepare something... Keep an eye on them.

Well, one would hope they're near the end of the tech tree. Then again, 5 years after the first man flew in space, the first Saturn V was launched. So there was a rapid progression of tech, but then an abandonment of it due to cost (and politics, hopefully ksp doesn't simulate that too much though). Maybe that will be the prime balancing factor for the SLS parts, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume they're expensive as hell.

I've heard of ditching parts on the way up to conserve delta-v, but now it's just getting ridiculous

Oh hell yes, a little drill to fasten a probe to an asteroid and ride it across the solar system would be the best thing ever. I expect/implore the modders to produce such a thing to be made within days of the patch coming out. Prepare yourselves, aforementioned modders.

I'd like to see a belt of (possibly purple) asteroids around Eve, someday... that was among my original concepts for the planet. The remnants of a ring system, the smaller particles long swept away by the solar wind, leaving only big boulders.

Would be nice to, later on, have two tiers of claw. A heavy duty claw that can firmly grab most things, and a lightweight fragile claw with a fuel transfer apparatus (the latter one being further down the tech tree). Or perhaps reverse that, a lightweight claw that can only grab things, and a heavy fancy claw that can also transfer fuel. If and when part damage is implemented, it would be cool to have the claw cause massive damage to the grabbed part, making refueling from another ship via claw more of a salvage operation than anything else. Do it too much and you'd wreck the other ship.

Lower Isp in a vacuum is something you'd pretty much have to deliberately design the engine around to accomplish. Your rocket would somehow have to be producing less overall thrust for a given rate of fuel in a vacuum than at sea level. It's really not possible for an engine to behave that way, it would imply the rocket is encountering more resistance firing into a vacuum than into air.

If not, I wanna see someone make it. If an asteroid is just another class of vessel, it could be trivial.

I wasn't talking about the tuesday thing. I was referring to this: "I wonder if Squad had access to Unity5 during the ARM development, and could get 64bit KSP working for ARM or if we will be waiting till 0.24 for that?"

Doubtful, they apparently have Unity 4.6 scheduled for release this summer. The released version is currently at 4.3 (surprising how much they schedule ahead of time), and it stands to reason that U5 won't come for a while after that. So, certainly nothing in any sort of near term would be done for KSP with U5.

I think one of my big points of excitement for this update is the (hopeful) improvement of orbital accuracy. In the current version, if you try to rendezvous in solar orbit, the other vessel begins jumping by tens of kilometers at a time when you attempt to warp. It's presently virtually impossible to perform a precise rendezvous with something that's not a planet. Hopefully this increase of precision also means better behavior of orbits in the Jool system. At present there seems to be a... "ghost" period, as you transition between SoIs, where your orbit moves in all sorts of weird ways. We'll see if that's fixed, as well...

There has to be a massive catch, here... what's to stop someone from paying 19 dollars once, then cancelling the subscription and making everything from there? That would destroy the whole setup if it were possible.

I too tried making a Kerbal in spore:

I hate, hate, hate, HATE the subscription-based method that everyone seems to be going for now. You don't own the software, you just rent it, and have to pay that subscription fee til the end of time... Also, is it just me or have Epic more or less retconned UDK out of existence? I tried to find it a bit ago and can't seem to anymore. I'm more anticipating Unity 5, personally...

There are guns in the two soyuz descent modules, to use for hunting and defense in the event of landing in a wilderness area... they can shoot bullets, small shotgun shells, or flares. More realistically though, I imagine there'd be more of an attitude of "look at those idiots down there, ruining everything"

It would be nice IMO to see specific divisions of scientific advance be based on specific areas of research/action. For example, if you want to research more and better plane parts... well, get in the rickety biplane and do some barrel rolls, you big wimp.

If it ever does return, I'd hope it's movable like a normal asteroid, so it can be relocated for easier study. I wonder if a modder could do such a thing?

And another thing... http://www.scienceofthespheres.com/nonspecific-progress-update-march-16/

I feel like one of "those" people when I point this out, but the lighting on the moon compared to the location of the sun is really, really bugging me:

Food for thought... pressure at the bottom of the Hellas Basin is approximately ten times higher than that of the rest of mars - high enough that, in very rare circumstances, liquid water can sit comfortably on the surface. Just barely though, a slight shift in temperature or pressure will start it evaporating or freezing (and then sublimating)

Terrain system is going well. Hopefully blog post will be put up soon enough by its creator explaining how everything works.

They can show up anywhere, as long as the planet conditions are suitable for them. There may be a system to randomize their colors to give some more variety.

Don't believe I could (NDAs and such) even if I wanted to, which I don't. I've moved on to my own things by now, just a new chapter in the Book of Silisko (coming 2019, $49.99 USD)