Tiron

I hope someone's mentioned that the only reason there isn't a 64 bit build already is that they come out unstable due to problems with Unity, which I've heard Squad are working with Unity to correct..

The more immediate problem(other than the oxygen actively leeching out of your bloodstream, which is why you pass out so quickly) would be eyes and mucous membranes. People involved in decompression accidents have reported the last thing they remember is the saliva on their tongues starting to boil. As far as skin, though, skin is actually very tough and effectively airtight. So much so that there have actually been studies into spacesuit designs where only the helmet is pressurized, and the 'ballooning' problem is dealt with via mechanical pressure. Really tight elastic that's hard to get into, generally. There's a laundry list of advantages to doing it this way: More flexibility, better dexterity, much harder to suffer a decompression... (most of the suit, if it gets punctured, it's going to cause some bruising at worst. Like poor Joe.) As for water in your helmet, if you watch that video I posted earlier, one thing you'll note is that if water gets in your eyes, the surface tension holds it in a big blob right on your face. Given that the astronaut in this incident reported that he couldn't see 'more than a few centimeters', I'm pretty sure this happened to him. There may not have been as much water in his helmet as is implied, because any water that WAS would tend to be literally right in his face.

This is what they ought to be kicking people off the internet permanently for, instead of 'Piracy'. Although judging by the BBC, in the UK at least there's a growing number of cases of people, even minors, being prosecuted for threatening statements made online. That's the real problem with this. Not that people do it, but that they get away with it. If you said things like that anywhere but on the internet you'd be having a conversation with the Police in a big hurry. That particular problem isn't unique to harassment either: All sorts of crimes committed online are treated as being much more minor and less real than their offline equivalents, and Harassment is just the tip of the iceberg. Make it so there's real consequences, and it'll be a lot less of a problem.

I suspect this effect is probably part of what made that incident work the way it did:

Edit: Why is there no 'delete post' button... sigh. doing too many things at once.

I do notice most of those, including re-entry heat or damage, have 'citation needed'. They're all things that aren't in the game, but most of them don't have citations (though I know the 'autopilot' and 'military' ones have official sources.) Maybe it got mis-categorized. Or someone thinks they're funny.

But how do you deal with people that find political correctness offensive? And no offense, but 'Ze' is not a word. The correct term is 'Neologism'. Until it's widely accepted and used, it doesn't count. And I've never even heard of it, and I've heard quite a few neologisms in the third person pronoun department. And the singular 'Them' can be very awkward to use in many situations. The *correct* solution is a gentle, non-annoyed, non-offended correction and then to move on.

Well life support and re-entry heating ARE officially planned features, last I heard, I don't know about the rest. Thing you run into is that, so far, they make it pretty much realistic except easier, mostly because everything's so massively size compressed, but not always. In real life the atmosphere doesn't really ever 'end', even really high orbits decay eventually, it just might take so long that for practical purposes they don't. It's also variable with things like the solar activity cycle, which can cause the atmosphere to expand or contract and change the amount of drag rather drastically. 100km is considered 'the edge of space', mostly because that's right about the altitude at which the speed you need to produce enough lift to stay airborne hits orbital velocity (and thus, you stay up because you're orbiting rather than because of lift you're generating). The 'size compression' effect is going to make re-entry a lot easier than it is IRL when it gets added, for two reasons: First, and probably the bigger of the two, Orbital Velocity in KSP is about a quarter of what it is for Earth, so there's a lot less speed to bleed off in the first place. Second is that the atmosphere's so massively compressed: The air pressure ramps up a lot faster as you descend, so you won't be getting heated as badly for as long. I'd probably just skip over it too

No connection is unbreakable. Even if you turn on unbreakable connections, it just makes them absurdly strong, not actually unbreakable.

It's not the size of your gamedata that matters, it's the amount of Memory used by the game. To see this in Windows you need to open the task manager (Ctrl+shift+esc), go to the processes tab, and look at the 'Mem Usage' or 'Working set' (or whatever windows 8 calls it) column for KSP.exe(*32 (if you're on a 64 bit windows)). This is limited to 4GB (4,194,304 KB) because the game is 32 bit. In practice you might run into problems before you quite hit that limit, but the closer you are the more likely stuff's gonna break. A 64 bit version that doesn't have that restriction is planned if Unity can manage to fix things so that the 64 bit builds aren't universally horribly unstable.

Because unlike some languages, the only Gender Neutral Third Person Singular Pronoun('it') is generally considered offensive if applied to a person. Consequently, you have to pick a gendered pronoun based on little to no information at all because it's a text-based internet forum with user-picked pseudonyms (and honestly...I don't read people's signatures as a general rule.) Sometimes, usually in the case of companies or the extremely politically correct, they'll try to use a hybrid form(s/he for example) to include either possibility...which frankly mostly just sounds stupid. So one has to guess. And on a Internet Forum about a Video Game involving Rockets, which possibility is more likely to be correct? Part of the reason there's almost no information to go on, other than it being a text based forum on the internet, is that in English, the ONLY time Gender really comes up is in Third Person Singular Pronouns. Unlike, say, French, where the majority of the singular pronouns are gender specific, and the ARTICLES have gender too. Which means, for a start, that every possible object (in the grammatical sense) has to have an assigned gender so you can use the proper set of pronouns and articles with it. It also means that there's a lot more opportunity to gather information. It's a core linguistic problem, not an 'assumption'. Taking it that way is the reason we get stupid constructions like 's/he'.

... http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/ravenspear-mk3-d-manta-stock/

Well I suppose if you ran some kind of inert rod all the way down maybe, otherwise you're anchoring it with just fuel and that seems like a Bad Idea.

Well, some people have been known to put thrusters on their rovers that push it into the ground... >.> <.<

Except... KAS has an Undocked Mode... DUN DUN DUN

You can usually solve the problem without needing booster rockets just by fiddling with your landing gear placement, though. And the ability to refuel solids has been talked about...it may happen in future.

Rockets on the ends of the main rotors, he activates them at full throttle, then decouples the rotor. The gear keep the rotor from flying off and allow it to spin. It's basically in two parts, as you see when he misses and the rotor flies off.

I suspect the same way bombs are made: It's poured in as a molten slurry and allowed to set. Or somesuch.

Another thing that helps: Forward Canards. It's the leverage thing again. The Canards end up being so far forward of your rear landing gear they get a LOT of mechanical advantage as a result, meaning that even a single pair can make it MUCH easier to get the nose up.

Naaah, you'd need a command pod so you could enter and get more fuel.

Well he said he needed 'More Oomph' to get it off the runway, not just to climb...he's got enough thrust there that it's flying more off the thrust than the wings, certainly. Just didn't have enough lift or the landing gear placement evidently, to be able to get it pointed up enough to fly on the thrust. I guess the higher landing gear and different placement solved that... heh. Interesting design. Are those the hybrid engines from the B9 pack?

Well Kerbonaut Infinite Delta-V might be at some point too, just by provision of a limited supply of Jet Pack fuel to refill them with. It'll probably be awhile, though.

That 'Rod and Tube' design seems like it's probably a theoretical one... Seems like if you tried to actually build it, the rod would probably just fall out. On fire. And 'dual composition' refers to having an outer layer of a different kind of fuel, which you can see in the diagram.

Glee! Yeah, I freaking LOVE those landing gear. I actually downloaded it hoping the rover wheels worked better, and fell in love with the landing gear instead.

And as I recall, the surface area governs the thrust, so they like to use fancy high-surface area patterns for the shaft...