NovaSilisko

Sure, as long as no part of the asteroid experiences fiery flames. Edit: Added as a clause to the first post.

Did you install the parts included in the zip file as well as the scenario? Check your GameData folder for a RendezvousWithRoche folder. In that there should be Parts/New/ and then all the parts in the pack. If so, check in the VAB under the science tab for any of the parts. The asteroid's under structural, the stabber's under utility and the mass simulator is under science. If they are, lastly you should check your debris limit. It might be culling Roche as it's a piece of debris. If you want to keep the debris limit low you can just grab the alternate scenario file at the bottom of the first post.

Added another optional objective, the Kerbal X-Prize Scratch-n-Sniff Sticker

Prologue It was a cool mid-Blaugust day at the Kerbal Space Center. Administrator Joseph Kerman IX sat in his comfortable swivel chair, elbows on his desk and his small hands on his chin - quite obviously bored out of his mind. The chief engineer Billy-Bobthompdorp Kerman suddenly burst into the room! Joseph started, and his elbows slipped off the desk, sending him hurtling face-first into it - knocking him out cold. Billy stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do. He was about ready to simply sprint away and pretend he didn't see anything when Joseph came to. Billy spoke carefully, "Ah... you're ali-- awake." "Yes... now what did you come barging in here for, anyway?" "The first expedition to... R-roche has failed They ran straight into it and are now stranded." "Ruh-roche? What's that? Also, who are you, and where am I?" Billy sighed and shook his head, his initial fear of having accidentally killed the administrator now overcome with annoyance. "Okay, I'll give you the short version. You're the administrator of the Kerbal Space Agency. You're in your office. Roche is a small moonlet orbiting Eve, which is a planet--" "I know what Eve is, you condescending--" "Okay, okay! Anyway, Roche is a small moonlet orbiting it, just discovered a few months ago. Around the same time, we sent a mission out to investigate it, and determine whether it's worth further exploration. The answer was a resounding yes, but they somehow managed to ram directly into it whilst doing their departure burn... and now they're stranded in Eve orbit" Joseph seemed to snap back to reality at the mention of several technical terms. "Well? Draft up another mission, Bill! Hell, this time let's bring that boulder home so we can study it without spending so much." "Uh, yes sir..." - After a bit of walking, Billy arrived at the engineering department. He entered the front door, climbed up atop the secretary's desk and addressed everyone present: "Okay, listen up everybody! We've got a new plan, direct from Administrator Kerman. We're going to haul Roche back to Kerbin orbit for future studies." Someone coughed. Somebody else dropped a coffee cup. This was gonna be huge. Rendezvous with Roche! As the prologue suggests, Roche is a tiny asteroid that's been discovered orbiting Eve! It's suspected to be a fragment of its surface, thrown off by an ancient asteroid collision. Now, you've been tasked with retrieving it, and returning it to Kerbin orbit. Weighing 600 tons, it's not going to be easy to move. We've developed a magnetic asteroid stabbing device, which will firmly attach to any metallic areas of the object. Luckily, Expedition 1 managed to paint a bright red X over an especially metallic area before they met their horrible fate. Now it's just a matter of stabbing it with the provided Asteroid Stabbing Utility and bringing it home! Also included is a cubic chunk of a Neutron star that happens to weigh exactly the same as Roche, useful for delta-v calculations using Kerbal Engineer or MechJeb without having to actually fly all the way to Eve. Criteria for mission success: Roche does get hauled from Eve orbit to a Kerbin orbit of under 300km. Roche does not enter any planetary atmosphere (this would greatly damage its otherwise pristine surface) Note: A large heat shield stuck in front of it allows you to ignore this restriction, so long as you don't scorch any part of Roche. Roche does not impact any planet, especially Kerbin (this would also damage it) Optional objectives: Recover the stranded crew of Expedition 1 and bring them home. Place Roche in an equatorial, circular (no more than 5km difference between periapsis and apoapsis) orbit around Kerbin. Orbit Roche around another body besides Eve before bringing it back to Kerbin. For science. Do the entire mission in one launch, with stock parts. This will grant you a Kerbal X-Prize Scratch-n-Sniff Sticker. There are few guidelines to this challenge - this is more a free-form exercise in performing the difficult task of relocating a 600 ton space boulder. Mods are allowed, but of course the most impressive relocations will be the ones done with only stock parts, or parts balanced to stock standards! I recommend using www.imgur.com to create an album of images to showcase your mission. Now, good luck, Kerbonauts! I look forward to seeing your ridiculous methods of relocating this huge space boulder. Download the scenario and parts > RendezvousWithRoche-update1.zip < IMPORTANT: Roche is classified as debris*, so you must activate debris in the map view/tracking station to see it! Otherwise, all you'll see is Expedition 1. Remember, to enable debris, move your mouse to the top area of the screen, and right-click on the debris button to add it to the currently visible items. Also, it would be a good idea to check what limit you have set for debris on the option screen, so it isn't auto-deleted. (If you want to put up with the possible bugs, an alternate version of the .sfs file is available at the bottom of this post) To install: First, open up your game data folder. (To access your game files on steam, right click on KSP, and hit properties. Then go to the Local Files tab and click "browse local files") Second, get the files from the zip to your game directory. For windows, you can just extract the zip directly into the KSP directory, and tell it to overwrite any files it finds. For OSX/Linux, you'll have to manually merge the new files, otherwise you'll delete your scenarios and normal gamedata! (thank you rspeed on reddit for that note). Please let me know if you find any bugs/problems and I'll try to remedy them. *The reason for it being debris is, if it's classified as a ship, the game thinks "oh boy, this thing's massive and must be important", so it merges your ship into it, and subsequently renames the whole stack as "Roche", which gets annoying.If you're okay with these problems though, and don't like it being debris, here's an alternate version of the sfs file. Just put it into the saves/scenarios/ folder, overwriting the normal one.

Kinda hard to see the vehicle as a whole given the angle and big lens flare... Got any clean screenshots from a more upward angle? The vehicle looks cool, just hard to see most of it in those pics.

*sigh* I already talked about this on reddit. It's just a leftover test thing that went unnoticed, no functional aspect of resources are actually implemented into the game yet. The things Fel found are just precursor elements, the real stuff is in a completely different branch on Git. PResource is a script for procedurally generating the resource distribution (no idea how functional, but it was the first part of it that was ever started I think), and the entry in CelestialBody is a reference to a given PResource (which would be placed in the planet's gameobject hierarchy, assuming it works the same way as normal PQS mods), and then a texture map used for... overriding the resource map, or something(possibly for the kerbalkon demo pictures, just to test the shader). I'm not sure though, there's lots of unused stuff floating around. Either way, please stop assuming we've secretly added some big feature like that, or somehow accidentally left it in. All these things are split apart into their own little playpens where they're developed independently, with important changes from the main branch merged into them periodically. Git's great for that.

Spoiler alert: there's nothing out there. Now, if we throw in telescopes and observatory buildings, coupled with the game getting about 50 mb larger... that's a different story.

First picture on the first post is actually from LRO, not Apollo.

No, every time I detached the first stage while even 16 km up, it flipped around into that position regardless of my attempted corrections. I'm guessing it's due to some bad mojo mixing KerbX and Bobcat's Orion.

And the second stage, in its aerodynamically stable position In other news I started on a for-once KSP related weekend project.

"Ripped apart" implies a complete disintegration, which isn't the case really. At large scales, planets are surprisingly flexible, especially if they're made of things like ice. Most of the earth's interior is molten or at least partially molten, so what's mostly at risk is the hard, fragile crust and upper mantle. I think what would happen, assuming you magically increased earth's rotation speed without the force of doing so wrecking stuff in the first place... First, the earth would begin stretching outward due to the newfound centrifugal force. As that happens, more matter is shoved above the roche limit (now at the former sea level), and goes into orbit. The atmosphere and oceans probably would be the first to go as they're much less dense than the rest of the planet. I envision a sort of... never-ending cycle of matter drifting away from the surface ALMOST at orbital velocities, going on a long trajectory, landing again, and then repeating the process. Eventually, it would reach an equilibrium after expelling quite a bit of mass out into orbits that don't intersect the surface (maybe forming a ring, or even a moon after longer timescales), while what's left of the planet would likely just be the mantle and core, probably glowing hot except at the poles. In fact, you might actually be able to survive the whole ordeal if you're at the pole. Of course, I'm not an expert. What would be the best way to answer this is to mail something into what-if.xkcd.com. This seems like the sort of thing he'd love to answer

I... I can't... I don't...

Transport Tycoon Deluxe sort of has that, there's a variable economy which affects loan interest and businesses in the game world (market crashes can really screw things up since a lot of businesses will close, leaving you with nothing to deliver or nowhere to deliver it to), but it's not really a business sim. There's an opensource remake of it available if you want to try it though http://www.openttd.org/en/

In addition to Harv, I more recently ran a small experiment for a possible future planet or moon. There are a lot of issues to work out, but it's pretty weird and fun to play with. 70% of the planet is a continuous hill due to its oblateness. It rotates so fast (12 minutes I think) that at the equator, gravity is only 0.01g on the higher mountains. At the poles, it's 1.7g. I tried driving a rover from the equator to the pole, but because of the extreme centrifugal force, you begin rolling uphill as soon as you drive off the equator. If you can escape this, though, you'll then start accelerating downhill at an extreme velocity due to the ever increasing gravity and incredibly steep terrain. Needless to say my rover didn't last long. On a related note, there's nothing stopping a planet from forming like this if it's made of malleable enough materials - ex. ice. As long as the equatorial rotation velocity is less than orbital velocity, it will retain material. If it's above orbital velocity, then that material is flung off into space, and the planet remains at a specific size. This sort of happens around two of Saturn's moons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(moon) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(moon). Haumea, perhapts more aptly, is also squashed due to a rapid rotation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haumea_(dwarf_planet) Bonus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_of_Gravity

Well, the Dawn spacecraft's ion engines produce on the order of tens of millinewtons and consume several kW of power, this on the other hand produces a whole newton (already more than the majority of ion engines), from 3 kW (in theory, of course!) But it's still probably the most promising propulsion system under development, I think. It's come much farther than a lot of concepts of this nature in that prototypes are actively being developed.

I like cats because they're very low-maintenance, they can take care of themselves most of the time. Edit: Mark my words, LeonG17, you will rue the day you ninja'd me!

Kerbal comics merch is completely separate from us.

Ship rotation affecting the sun glint on the ocean has been around for... as long as I can remember. I swear I wrote a bug report about it back for something like .10

They've been sitting in a corner collecting dust while .20 was developed, I guess they were just forgotten about.

Since we're moving focus to Career mode, that means a proper crew management system will come soonerâ„¢ rather than later, so it won't be a problem for too long.

Low settings, I think. Strange that the parts and sky aren't point-filtered though.

Anyone got a .19 craft and sfs file (stock)? I can test the compatibility for you right now.

This is an inaccurate depiction of what we're doing, actually. We're taking the existing terrain mesh and overlaying these normal maps on it to add more detail. The ~30% less RAM usage comes from under-the-hood optimizations and shrinking of some textures that were too big, etc.

False. I think the whole end could've occurred in the time they were drifting on a suborbital trajectory. The user below me has never played portal or portal 2

Doubtful. With the QA team fully up and running, we can kill bugs as soon as they show up, not wait until the exp phase to start. Now the exp phase is just feature lock followed by a final checking-over using a larger number of people than the QA team, to make sure there aren't any issues that were missed.