Beowolf

Yeah you WISH there were only a dozen of us! Dream on, Foxster.

Respectfully, no. Such "ultimate limits" are built-into the very fabric of our universe. For example, there are ultimate limits on how quickly you can pump a liquid. Liquids have mass and inertia and don't like going around corners. On rocket-science scales, it doesn't take long at all for the pressures to exceed anything that a turbopump made of matter can withstand. When turbopump turbine blades made of diamond can't handle the load, you need magical sci-fi tech. But if you have the tech to build turbines out of force fields or some such, what do you still need a primitive ion engine for? Everything in chemistry and physics has ultimate limits, because our universe's four fundamental forces came with limits pre-installed by the factory.

Thanks for the videos! I'd never seen the winged boom refueling except from the tanker perspective. And I'd never seen Russian at all, though I couldn't find any difference between their system and the US Navy's. Are there any, beyond metric vs. Imperial connectors?

Orion has a bathroom. Dragon doesn't. That's a pretty meaningful difference, when your flight extends beyond a few hours.

My Cherokee 140 was about the same. I imagine every plane with a fixed prop's going to make a pretty poor glider. Props were designed to efficiently disturb the airflow, after all.

I'm afraid this suggestion would mess up the Normal buttons. When doing a plane change, the direction of Normal/Antinormal keeps moving as your inclination changes during the maneuver.

Well, because they don't agree with your conclusion, probably. A capsule designed for deep space masses more per person than one designed to last a few hours in low orbit. The last and heaviest Mercury capsule massed 1,400 kg, but the lightest Apollo capsules were 5,650 kg (1853 kg/person). Russian Soyuz run even heavier, with a current one massing 7,150 kg for three cosmonauts. A shocking 2,383 kg/person for a short-term, low-orbit vehicle. But Soyuz are far more modular than Apollo was, which added to both their mass and their flexibility, resulting in the design's amazing longevity. Plus they all have these sweet built-in airlocks via depressuring the Orbital Module. What you're after is a cheap surface-to-orbit taxi: SpaceX Dragon v2 will be 4,200 kg for seven people (600 kg/person). That figure even includes a fully redundant escape system enough fuel to soft-land on engines, and landing legs. But, other than that nuclear engine, KSP rocketry is based in 1960s tech. A Dragon couldn't be built in the 60s for any amount of money. It takes another 50 years of progress in materials science and CAD to make a ship that light. When I want to play in the modern age, I use LazTek's SpaceX pack and recommend it. Dragon's such a flexible and useful vehicle I end up with them all over the solar system, though I always include an inflatable habitat on long missions so my Kerbals don't go stir-crazy. I agree stock needs a better selection of command pods, and truly hate the lack of a Gemini-equivalent. But I believe your criticism of the Mk2 is misdirected. Making it lighter will just annoy all the realism players.

Hmm, drag's a good question, and with all the recent aero changes, I have no idea. Most of my lights start life inside fairings, though I do like a "Welcome" light over capsule hatches. Shouldn't use much RAM, since it doesn't add any new parts. It's the new parts and textures in mods that eat your RAM. Plugins like this one generally have a tiny footprint.

My new rule is, if it has a bulging fairing then it gets fins. Even the starter fins seem to make a big difference, and even when I'm already using gimballed engines. The other thing is to watch your acceleration, particularly while passing through 10k-16k. I limit acceleration to 18 m/s all the way up. Then, at 30k, I eject my fairing, finish bringing the nose down to 0-degrees, and go to full throttle. Happy flying!

Seconded! I love both those mods. Incidentally, ORBITEC is trying to establish a standard for spaceship running lights: Aviation-style red/green on the sides, two white strobes at bow-topside, and one amber strobe at stern-bottom. edit: OP, do you use TweakScale? I also like making smaller versions of the standard lights. I find all sorts of places they look great at 25%-50% regular size.

I've played this way, and also got frustrated. These days, I'll generally play career on "Hard", but manually turn revert and save back on, and only use them for KSP or mod errors...though I've had to close the game and walk away a couple of times to keep myself from quickloading after I do something dumb. And, at least once, I lost that Will roll, and cheated Jeb back to life. Once I played an Ironman sandbox game with KAS installed, where I shipped spare parts along on every mission and the idea was, every time something broke I'd try to fix it in-flight, whether it was my error or KSPs. That was a wild ride! Some of the problems I encountered (I was building a huge Munbase in sandbox) were maddening, but I persevered until a KAS glitch eventually blew apart the whole base. That was too much to patch with digital duct tape and a backpack of spare solar cells.

IIRC you can't scale the root part, but I don't remember whether they disallowed it or if it just invoked the Kraken. So I'd suggest your actual root be a probe core you offset to hide.

My actual answer would be, "I run lots of mods with a level of bugs I'm willing to tolerate." There are a few major problems that pop up, but they're old frenemies I know how to work around.

Absolutely everything that creates a pleasurable response in a brain will be addictive* to some. Seriously. Everything. That's just the way Earth life is wired. When KSP makes you stay up too late, that's a good game. When KSP makes you fail classes or lose your job or family, that's addicted, and time to ask for help. * Technically "addictive" means "produces physical withdrawal symptoms when removed", which fits coffee but not KSP. My wife the Psych prof tells me there isn't a better term yet, just workarounds like "psychological dependency", but they're working on it.

It works pretty well when mixed with a life support mod, and keeping multiple interplanetary missions running simultaneously with help from Kerbal Alarm Clock. It may be OP when playing stock, but with two years experience I've only played stock for 15 minutes, so my opinion isn't worth much there.

Other, including water, coffee, and good beer. I don't think I've tasted a cola in over 10 years, and haven't missed it. If I'm in a place where sodas are the only choice, I'll go for Dr Pepper, root beer, or one of the fruity ones. But, for me, even plain tap water > cola. About a decade back, they learned that artificial sweeteners cause diabetes just as much as sugar does, and I just stopped with sodas.

This is why they gave us named saves. After my own painful learning experiences, now I do a new named save after each gaming session. That way I can't lose more than a couple of hours, and it's been worth that a few times. In fact, I started before we got named saves. Then, I'd drag a copy of my persistence file to the desktop before every session, so I could always go back to its beginning if needed.

I bought KSP, launched exactly ONE rocket, then went looking for a mod to display TWR and dV. It's been two years, and to this day I can't comprehend why anyone would want to play this game without that critical information. It's a completely different game with a dV display, and IMO ten times more fun. Doesn't running out of fuel mid-mission get old? Stock-only players seem to be complaining about that happening constantly. Then Kerbal Alarm Clock showed me still another layer, opening up possibilities for simultaneous missions too complex to keep track of manually. In the planetary-exploration phase of my last career game, at one time I noticed I had fifteen simultaneous active missions. Incidentally, mods don't make you run out of memory. Adding lots of new parts is what does that, so it's only that specific kind of mod. All those magnificent plugins that enhance the KSP experience only cost a few kilobytes.

A thought experiment: Let's say the Star Trek transporter does kill the passenger, and the created clone is a new person complete with a soul. Let us further say Star Trek's universe has an afterlife, which would therefore contain hundreds of instances of each Starfleet member. An interesting notion for an absurdist bit of fan fiction.

Same for me. First time I noticed the cost of hiring new Kerbals was the last time I ever hired one. Now I see each rescue mission as saving me enough on hiring to pay for a whole interplanetary mission. Makes them far more attractive. Last game, I got 3 at once in pretty much the same orbits. Got them all with one mission.

This is exactly why KSP is a moddable game, and there are several mods addressing your specific complaints. I understand you believe it's vital those details be in stock, but they aren't so deal with it. I have my own set of KSP issues I'm just as passionate about. The catch is, there are 10,000 different conflicting opinions involved. In fact, In two years I can't recall a single issue people didn't argue both sides of. So, use mods.

In sandbox, I build fancy landable/reusable boosters, though don't often bother actually landing them once I know they work right. I don't tolerate debris, to the extent of occasionally flying a mission to rendezvous, grab, and deorbit any that does get left in orbit. In career, I seldom have money for such luxuries, so anything goes.

Another xkcd here. His strip mentioned landing on the moon in KSP, I didn't know what that was, and owned v0.16 about ten minutes later. That was a good day.

Doesn't even have to be 50m. I got distracted and didn't stage the chutes until 300m once and killed my pilot. He'd slowed to maybe 15 m/s when he hit. They're much slower to deploy than before. But, on the bright side, opening chutes while physics-accelerating doesn't break the cords anymore.

So much this! OP, you're complaining about something you can fix by editing one line in an engine's config file. If you don't know how to do that, there will never be a better time to learn. Editing text config files is probably the most valuable gaming skill one can learn in half an hour. I can't remember the last game where I didn't change something. And it's not just customizing parts; KSP initially didn't even support my screen resolution. Took all of 2 minutes to fix, because I know how to edit config files.