Seret

Some countries are super paranoid about it. I remember being on exercise with the Malaysians and we were warned not to take any photos of their MiG-29s, as if they were some kind of secret wonder weapon.

Yep, lots of options.

Is having two pods in the stack really that silly?

Docking is a lot harder than the Kerbal rescue mission though.

This. Six hours should be plenty of time to play around and get near enough. Taking the contract would be a good way to learn a bit of basic RV stuff. There's no need for plane changes or puffing about with RCS, it's just purely about setting up an orbit that roughly intersects then killing some relative speed. As for stock life support, I wouldn't hold your breath (hurr, hurr). The Planned Features list on the wiki isn't terribly current, but life support sure ain't on it.

Some of them are pretty rubbish, too: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/AS11-37-5507.jpg http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/AS11-37-5530.jpg http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/AS11-37-5532.jpg

Sure, but most people aren't really trying to take great photos, they just want a quick snap. You're applying the standards of an enthusiast to a wider group.

Same as always: 1) No reverting after a fatal crash. 2) Jeb stays in space all the time. 3) Stations have to have escape pods for everybody on board. 4) Try to have fun.

There's a lot of new stuff being introduced in 0.24, but it'll probably take a bit of shaking out to get the balance right so you can expect that in 0.25. I think they're going to try and get career pretty much done before they move on to tweaking.

It's worth it already, anything else they add is just a cherry on top.

Sounds like the best thing to do would be play in Career mode, but edit your save so that you'd have all parts unlocked at the start of the game. Turn off money, or edit it to give yourself as much as you like. Getting the game into the state you want it sounds pretty easy really. It's on of KSP's strengths that it's so easy to edit these things.

People will be taking bad snaps on their phone with or without Instagram.

Some pirates really would have gone "yarr", it's just a West Country accent. My in-laws' neighbor goes "yarr", although he is a walking stereotype.

Depends what sort of server you wanted. There are a million types, file servers, game servers, web servers, etc. Turning it into a NAS if you don't have one on your network already is probably the most useful thing you can do with it IMO. There are ready-rolled NAS images you can drop on it, you'd want to add some more hard drives and build an array. It may be a bit overspecced for that though, you ideally want to have low power consumption on that kind of server. As for life advice, well your OP made it sound very much like you were wanting to convince your parents to give you the machine for nothing. Apologies if that wasn't your intention, but it came across that way to me.

Really? This is how the world works: if you want nice things you work for them. Tbh, you should have told us you didn't have any money spend the thread asking for a good spec. The machine you specced isn't cheap, if you're folks have a lower budget than that then was a waste of time. Go find out what your real budget is and we can go back the drawing board for you. Regarding your current machine, break it down for parts and sell them on eBay so you can put the money towards the new one. Your parents may appreciate the gesture and be more disposed to helping you out.

It's not resources, it's the Demographic Transition. When a society becomes wealthy enough to provide for its elderly and child mortality drops, choosing have less children becomes a viable strategy. If anything access to resources causes the growth rate to slow. It's the wealthiest nations that have the lowest growth rates.

A fuel depot in the Jool system is a beautiful thing. Huge ships aren't necessary for reusability though. Even if I'm just returning a capsule to Kerbin there's no reason to let the propulsion section burn up. I did a programme recently where I scraped the Mun dry of science burning up minimal hardware. Once I had the lander and a fuel depot in Munar orbit I just used a shuttle to take pods back and forth to Kerbin. The only part that was disposable was the LV for the pods, which was understandably pretty small. I've moved all the hardware out to Minmus and will do the same there when I get around to it.

Mods will need updating as usual, but what makes you think it'll be save-breaking?

Most of my missions use hardware that I've had in space for quite a while. I have a small class of tugs that do all my orbital ops, a larger one for interplanetary runs, and a crew vessel for transport and quick exploration flybys. Even some of my landers are recycled. I generally only launch specialist payloads and tankers from KSP. Good name for your ship, btw!

I launch absurd contraptions lacking mission-critical equipment like solar panels or parachutes, prang landers into planet surfaces, and crash spaceplanes into the sea. Pretty much business as usual.

I imagine a fair bit of a space station's systems are already designed as line replaceable units. Where you'll run into problems with end of life is big chunky structural bits. You've got large trusses to provide structure, eventually fatigue will become an issue with these, so you'd need to build in a lot of redundancy to make them replaceable in flight. That's a lot of extra mass, so expensive. Every module is also a pressure vessel, so again you've got a lifetime limited by materials issues there. Luckily as you say these can be replaced by ditching the old one and docking a fresh one, so as long as you've planned for that it needn't be an insurmountable issue. I think a permanently maintainable station is definitely doable from an engineering point of view, it would just be more expensive to build than a disposable one. Not necessarily a bad idea though, assuming there was a long-term commitment to support it.

That's the bit a lot of lay-people enamoured of 3D printing seem to miss. Just because you can extrude or sinter something into a fun shape, doesn't mean it'll have the right engineering properties. Things like crystallographic structure and surface finish can be critical to how a component performs, and demand a certain process to achieve. People seem to have this idea that ALM can make anything you want, which is wrong. Additive processes aren't actually that novel anyway. I'm sure the semiconductor industry laughs at everybody else, they've been including additive steps in their fabrication processes for decades. It's just that we're now able to do it on a macro scale as well.

You actually don't machine optical telescope mirrors anyway. They're cast and polished to dimension IIRC, there's no advantage to trying to make one via ALM. But yes, combining a CNC machine with something like an SLS machine would be pretty badass, although a bit impractical.

They don't need to, they could just buy one off the shelf.

The point of the project seems to be to develop a way to deploy large trusses in orbit in a very space-efficient manner. It won't save on weight or cost (in fact lifting the material for the truss plus the robot would be slightly more expensive than just the truss), but it does potentially give a way to pack large space frames into very compact bundles that will fit inside the fairings on normal launchers. It also means the truss wouldn't have to be designed to survive launch forces, which removes a major constraint on the design of trusses that wouldn't be highly stressed in orbit. Nobody is suggesting building an entire spacecraft this way, but for something that might need a large structure (large radio telescope maybe?) then it could be handy. All the other components would be built the normal way and attached to the truss after it was complete.