Luckless

More "Top to bottom, from the top and bottom"... Typically you mount your fuel and oxidizer tanks on top of each other, not side by side, So while the thrust does push the mass of an individual tank towards the bottom of the craft it is somewhat offset by the fact that there is another tank at the top with its mass moving more toward the centre of the stack rather than everything moving toward the bottom.

If you want to get rid of bugs, then dig into the communty's bug reporting section. I've been rather out of the loop on KSP for ages, so I have no idea how they're handling feedback and testing at this time, but developers can't fix bugs they're not aware of, and it is a lot harder to fix bugs that they don't know exactly how to reproduce. Remember, testing software is not a fun or easy task to do right, and it involves a lot of repetitive and tedious work to do properly. Not to mention that actually fixing bugs takes time in and of itself, and fixes are rarely a one shot deal.

This is part of why I have checklists. Writing up checklists, and yes they get printed out and live on a clipboard, is just plain good geeky fun, and adds to the experience. As a bonus it also means I very rarely get out somewhere and discover that "Hey, I don't have X that I need to do what I came out here for".

Cannot possibly exist as a natural system. However it could, theoretically at least, be created by other means. After all, gravity pressure isn't the only way to achieve and maintain fusion.

When it comes to space exploration then one of the more useful things to potentially use the moon for is as a resource base and part of in-orbit construction projects. And investment in lunar development now could in turn mean we get to rapidly expand space exploration over the next century by limiting what we need to lift from the surface. Mine and refine materials on the moon, manufacture basic parts and machinable blanks, and then pack them into sled launched aero-break orbital pods to get stuff back into LEO for minimal fuel requirements. Capture them at an orbital dockyard for use in building the bulk of long range vessels and probes, and reserve surface lift mass for everything that can't be effectively sourced from mines on the moon. (Combined with advances in mining and manufacturing robotics, and we don't even need humans to set foot there again for the most part.)

Yes, beyond generic payload, and some computer/electrical/and very limited optical tech, what overlap in goals would you expect between NASA and USAF?

Having had the chance to work with a whole host of alphabet soup agencies from a number of different countries... Yes, oh yes they do. Honestly most of it is whining about how little paper work there is in the movies. Other lesser comments come about over how easy and comfortable they make stakeouts and following suspects look, and how utterly foolish most fights and weapons handling looks, and things like that. But lets be honest, and admit that it kind of fun to complain about movies with the right group of people.

Really depends on a lot of factors. I've personally built precision cutting tools from raw materials in 'primitive' settings in a matter of days. If you could focus production and development along carefully controlled lines, then it really wouldn't take long if you had enough manpower on hand to cover the first few hurdles of industrial capacity. With a well controlled feedback loop: Building small tools to use to build larger tools, and establishing the core industrial resource production, then in theory it could be as low as a decade, if not less if you were able to somehow manage communication and planning.

A big part of the issue is whether or not you can get the fuel shaped into a useable form such that you can achieve rapid enough combustion. Doing some form of a hybrid solid-liquid engine may achieve 'usable' results from a surprising number of fuels. I used packed flour for a test rocket for a hybrid engine back in high school. (Forget what we were using for an oxidizer, I wasn't the one dealing with the chemistry for our experiments.) We achieved 'okay' thrust levels, but nothing exceptionally impressive as far as I remember. But combustion is an interesting thing. Part of our rocket escapades ended up in setting fire to a gravel pit... Fuel mixture looked good on paper from the energy release point of view... We just hadn't really accounted for 'minor' things, like whether or not the engine would melt before achieving lift. But it did lead to a few interesting experiments on the ground.

It has a docking port, doesn't it? Who says it has to be a single launch mission?

I like mods that take the tedious aspects out of the game, and make things feel more like launching real rockets. Personally I would rather ride a rocket controlled by a detailed and high precision redundant computer system (and merely watched by a human) than one flown by a horribly imprecise human watching crude data readouts. I especially like tools that calculate masses and delta-V values for me. I can do all the math for filing my taxes by hand, but personally I much rather use a calculator...

Yet... But like I said, we're dealing with Kerbal players here, and there IS a mathematical limit involved, so obviously someone is going to try and poke it. Memory systems of modern operating systems are designed to safely exceed the attached primary memory used as RAM. However, 'fun things' happen when you get into trying to run a program that is forced to page its working storage in and out of primary memory to secondary (hard drive/SSD) storage. You can still reach a limit, and things can still go wrong even if you 'haven't run out of memory', but actual crashes due to that tend to be difficult to pull off.

Given the nature of the Kerbal Mindset, I would say that someone is still going to find a way... 64bit memory addressing just pushes the limits up to insane levels, but doesn't actually get rid of them after all... (Also memory handling isn't 'true' 64bit in most cases, and most systems break down well before their actual 2^64 max. Luckily it is still an insane amount of data before that happens, but, well, 'moar boosters' and whatnot... I expect someone is going to break it sooner or later.)

Another point about procedural vs random that people often forget: Procedural isn't 'random', and because of that it can be reproduced. So, the "Stock System" can still exist, and you and I can both play in that same system with the same planets and the same delta-v values and launch windows that all let the same crafts work to do the same missions. But once I get bored of that, which I mostly am, then I can go and recreate a new system, and enter seed 011101110110100001111001011011100110111101110100, and have some decent data on similar planets in slightly different orbits, but have new smaller moons and a few things way out on the edge of the system that I only vaguely know or haven't found yet. I can go out, and I can find some neat things that no one else has seen yet, because no one else has ever played that system's seed. But,... I can pass that same seed number on, and then anyone else can type that in and go play on that same system as well. And if it was an official dev supported feature, then I can be reasonably confident that things aren't going to break with the next update, and that they're not going to get bored of it and wander off and drop support because their lives got busy or they started playing some other game.

Personally I would love to have the option to have 'fuzzy data' and procedural solar systems as part of the stock game, along with more planning tools. I think it would be neat to have relatively vague data about some of the stuff farther out, and had to manage a science program to nail down more precise details, and also kind of neat to go 'out there' and see what the game generated this time around.

There are a lot of variables at play for that, mostly relating to how the craft is put together, how the mass is spread out, and where the sources of torque are located. You can stick all the torque controls you want on the end of a 2km long noodle, but it isn't going to get any more controllable. But if you rebuild the same craft into a smaller and tighter ball like structure with a bit of torque control spread evenly around the centre of mass, then it can be nicely responsive and well controlled. Post up some screenshots or the craft files and people can probably give you better pointers and areas to discuss than doing so blindly.

Micro jets and pulse width modulation. You can 'throttle' something like RCS rather easily by including multiple (and thereby redundant) outlets on the same vector which can be toggled individually, and then you can turn some/all of them on and off for different durations to effectively control the level of thrust from a given point. As for more on topic content, personally I would be very interested in building custom controllers if I had more time and space. No idea how well the Saitek controller really is or how useful it would be. To me a big thing I would want in my control panels would be safety controls. Most push buttons shouldn't be a simple push button, but also include an inline switch and state indicators. Staging would probably get rigged with a self-resetting inline toggle switch. Flip the switch to arm the staging, press the button to fire the staging, and then the switch gets flipped back to the safe mode automatically. And of course it would have a big safety cover over the whole section with the switch and button. An even cooler option would be if it could include in game feed back so you could control stage section modes. So launch section modes might have stages 1, 2, and 3. By that point you would be in orbit, and wouldn't want to fire off your next stage any time soon, so the stage button should become inactive until you've manually advanced to the next section mode so you can ditch your transfer burn stages, and then advance again before you can fire off your parachutes or whatever. On the topic of general simulators: I enjoy Euro Truck Sim 2. It is relaxing to fire it up and just move cargo around. Personally I think it really needs far more work put into the business modelling side as currently it is a rather shallow game play section that is really just a mindless grind. I would be all over a good trucking simulator if it included great physics and a strong Tycoon influence. And yes, I find it very boring if you play it with excessive arcade mode kind of thing. Managing a large trailer in tight spaces and trying to get it parked properly and quickly? That's just a fun little puzzle.

I really haven't had much time to play KSP since asteroids were added, and less since the newest builds, but how much asteroid mass to harvestable fuel mass is there on average? Can you make mining them more feasible with things like grab-n-go from flyby ones? (Don't haul the whole thing back, just wait for 'good' ones with favourable orbits you can dash out, milk dry, and return the fuel to a useful orbit while you leave the bulk of the asteroid mass on its original path?) Or how effective can you make areobreak captures?

In general I play most games stock, and don't spend much time working with mods. I will sometimes use well polished, popular, and useful mods. Kerbal Engineer and Alarm Clock for example, and I've used a few different docking port mods from time to time, but I honestly have no desire to spend my time and effort sorting through mods and finding ones that are not only interesting and useful, but which also play nicely with each other. The stock game itself is more than enough fun, and I would rather be playing it than trying to juggle mods, or waiting for large ones to get updated each time the core game has a new version roll out.

How is useful game play info a bad thing?

I'll often use a ring of SRBs and a central gimballed liquid engine that is throttled way back as my first stage, then drop the spent SRBs and power the main engine up in the second stage. I just want the liquid engine to vector thrust a little and help keep everything in line rather than using fins and increase drag, but let the SRBs carry the bulk of the weight off the pad. I've also had a few landers that come down full thrust, leave the bulk of the mass as a ground station, and only need partial throttle on takeoff. The default position doesn't really bother me, as I always (try to) check that stuff before launch anyway. The game really needs in-game checklists.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/cursor Would anyone who insists that it is a mouse pointer and only a pointer rather than cursor care to explain how that definition fails to cover the mouse input as well as a text input? (And it also covers visualized audio input as well.) As for the KSP pointer, I have no complaints about it. Seems to work well enough, and I haven't totally lost sight of it while playing yet. Good enough. A toggle option to keep the default OS level pointer would be a welcome change, if not a full customization system so the user can set their own specific cursor.

I also like the idea of a specific 'mission part', and would say go even further with them: Maintenance/upkeep missions. You would not only be asked to place specific parts in a specified orbit, but will also eventually generate secondary missions from them, go swap 'data' or 'parts' from them, that you have to take up and either do it with an EVA or a robot. Could even have a procedural station system, where you're tasked to move pre-generated modules. (Or maybe not fully procedural, but rather a community driven system where users can submit a section design that can be approved and pushed out to the general userbase and the system then pulls parts out of the pool as needed.) This could even go a step further for a PvE element options: An AI agency or two that will pick up contracts if you don't. Players would have another element to factor into their decision making: Do I skip all of these contracts, and risk letting the 'AI' company snag them and pull ahead in prestige? I don't see anything wrong with missions that can be completed with a multi-mission vessel, but I think it needs to be contrasted with ones that take specific and dedicated craft or sub craft.

I tend to go for Career over a Sandbox mode for this kind of game. Sandbox is fun, but I enjoy having an extra constraint around what I can do at any given time. I have my own goals and things I want to do in the game, but having a set of other rules to follow along with my guidelines pushes towards a different kind of creativity. I would happily play a far more polished career mode that worked differently than the current version, but what we have now is still enough to make things interesting.

I use Kerbal Alarm Clock myself for reminders, and run a handful of missions at once if they involve long transits. However it doesn't bother me at all if I have to skip ahead a decent amount of time to get to the windows I need for my next mission. I just assume that the Kerbals spend more time playing with test equipment in the lab and eating more snacks instead of carefully building parts for the next rocket. Then they'll scramble like mad ants to get all the work done the week before the planned launch window. Seems logical.