Tiron

I've seen weird paths before without hacking gravity...not THAT weird, but doing things like it looking like it was going to just stop in mid-orbit and start falling towards the body in question. It only seems to happen on predicted orbits where I'm going to enter another body's SOI, and it never actually follows that orbit. Soon as I enter the SOI of the body in question, it recalculates it, and ends up with a valid orbit. Generally different than the one in question. Mechjeb's 'fine tune closest approach' likes to set up these weird predicted orbits, and the resulting orbit never has the periapsis you were shooting for either, it's always significantly higher. It's annoying.

One of my friends is rather fond of submarines, and I recall that after 0.21 he was saying something about it taking a lot less density than before...

The sunbeam even does that with the targeting beams, though a bit less so. It's funny.

Could be, but Amazon and Newegg at least both were selling them in the US, and it didn't show any obvious evidence of not having been intended to be. Except being cheaper, of course.

NASA also deals with a lot larger orbits, given that Earth has about 10 times the radius of Kerbin to start with, and the atmosphere goes higher too, so a 'couple of KM' is a lot less of a difference in the real world than in KSP. The problem is that achieving a perfectly circular orbit is impossible in KSP, not just because of the difficulty of the task, but because of the same rounding errors in PhysX 2 that caused the Space Kraken. There's small-scale instability in orbital parameters, which is mostly noticeable when going in or out of time warp...or when you've got a nearly perfectly circular orbit. Your AP and PE get very unstable when you've got extremely low eccentricity, so much so that ANY control input will alter them. And even without input they'll shift around a bit. The closer you get to perfectly circular, the more unstable it gets.

Here's what's happening: The game doesn't fully simulate everything. Once something gets outside a certain range of your focused craft (about 2.4KM is the default range but as pointed out the Lazor system can alter it), that object is put 'on rails', just like when you start using non-physical timewarps. While on-rails, the physics aren't actually being simulated. It just locks the craft onto its current orbit, as if it were a train on an invisible set of rails. One of the interesting things about this state is that objects that are on-rails can't collide with anything, they just pass right through it. And because the Physics aren't being simulated, anything that's on-rails inside an atmosphere doesn't get slowed by drag, either. One of the effects of this is that any empty stages you drop, once they get outside of simulation range, go on-rails. If this puts them on a sub-orbital trajectory (as during a launch), this actually puts them on a defined orbit around a point at the exact center of Kerbin. Without any intervention, they'd actually fall through the surface clear down to the center of the planet, then come flying back out of the planet up to their maximum altitude. And keep doing that forever. What the game designers did to prevent that was to set it up so that ANY object which is on-rails below a particular altitude (Around 20km at least for Kerbin) immediately despawns. This makes it seem like it 'hit the planet' in the case of debris. Trick being, it applies to ANYTHING. If you airdrop a rover with a parachute and try to fly away, the rover will despawn the second you get more than 2.4KM away from it unless it's already resting on the ground when you fly off. This also goes for manned pods: If they get 2.4km away from the focused craft while under 20km, they instantly despawn. Because the game can't have their parachutes open and lower them safely to the surface while they're on-rails. The Lazor System has built in features that allow you to change the distance at which things go on rails, mitigating this somewhat at the price of having to simulate more objects for longer. Given that the current behavior would cause some pretty major problems with career mode (Can't recover a stage that's been despawned), I'm expecting some kind of alterations to it in future. Otherwise, the change they made several versions back that allowed parachutes to be deployed on a dropped stage would be kinda moot.

Yeah, the 200 unit ones weigh half of what the 400 unit ones do, so with one of those on top you'd have 1/4th the battery weight you do now. I'd probably slip an OX-STAT or two on it just to give it SOME recharging ability, but they're really light, especially compared to batteries. They also won't break off if you move with them deployed, so they're really the only solar panel type that's viable on a rover.

The docking systems really weren't designed to work on the ground. The magnetic attraction isn't really strong enough to pull the ports into alignment when on a surface. Personally I use Kerbal Attachment System for this sort of thing, because you can have a kerbal grab the cable, haul it over to the other vehicle and attach it. Still a bit tricky figuring out how to mount it, but once you've got that figured out the actual connection is a breeze.

Sometimes. I have an ASUS A53SV-XE2, which really wasn't all that expensive. So far as I have been able to tell, it's pretty much just a K53SV with a different model number... only it cost a LOT less. Even the sticker on the bottom says the motherboard is a K53SV. None of the ASUS sites even listed the A53, except the Malaysian one (in English!) despite more than a few of the online retailers having it. No idea what the deal is there, but it looks for all the world like they just gave it a slightly different model number and sold it at a steep discount online, without really advertising it.

Do ASUS Laptops still come with the year of Dropped/smashed/whatever warranty? 'cause that's just awesome. My laptop (which I don't use much now I'm not going to school), is an ASUS that I got surprisingly cheaply. Seems to be a discount version of one of their more normal ones, or something. Even when new it only had a product listing on their malaysian site, though I got it from Amazon...

DO keep in mind how CPU loaded KSP is though, assuming he wants to play that on it as well...

There's an element of truth to the 'get a desktop' thing. Laptops can certainly DO gaming, but due to the form factor almost invariably have heat issues. Especially since most manufacturers, last I heard, had decided that it was acceptable to lean on the emergency thermal protection throttling system in normal usage, rather than trying to design it to actually be able to get rid of all the heat (admittedly difficult). Even if you don't have throttling issues, it's fairly likely that it'll 'burn out' faster than a desktop would. Anecdotal experience with my friends is that laptops heavily used for gaming seem to have a habit of dying every 3 years or so, sometimes less. But frankly, guys, it's his money, if he wants a laptop, it's not really our place to tell him otherwise or disparage his choice to do so. He has that right, suboptimal or no. And for all we know he's got some situation that necessitates being able to move around regularly, thus the need for a laptop.

They do seem to break more often, though that's not so bad given that you can have a kerbal hop off and fix it, the bigger problem I've seen is that the new terrain seems to have more and larger of the 'bad segments' that make you bobble about, particularly up in the mountains.

Nuclear rovers are definitely the way to go, in my experience. Partially because their power use is so severe. I tried to do solar at first, but the weight in batteries I needed to get any significant run time in the dark was getting to be nearly as heavy as the RTGs. The bigger factor, though, is that a landed craft spends a lot more time in darkness than an orbiting one, because you're limited to the rotational speed/orbital speed of whatever body you're on to get you out of eclipse. Getting enough batteries on a rover to run all night on Kerbin is...all but impossible. And would weigh way more than just slapping on enough RTGs to power everything all the time. On an orbiting craft it's less of an issue, because they're generally going around the body substantially faster than its rotational velocity, so it's easier to get enough batteries to keep them running. And unless you're doing a lot of reaction wheel maneuvering or using Ion engines or something, the power use is going to be a trickle anyway.

Bloody aweful looking, but it does illustrate the principle. I was thinking more along the lines of leaving the warning stripes, and putting the little red arrows off the decoupler on either side of the warning stripes, next to the 'handles'

They're also good for those times you're eclipsed by whatever you're orbiting and still using power. But keep in mind, there's been a MAJOR change in power consumption just in 0.21: Turning the ship via reaction wheels now uses electricity, even if it's just the ones built into a pod. It's a pretty serious load, too. I used a cupola's reaction wheels to drain its batteries as part of a test earlier, and while turning on all three axes at once it was draining 2.8 electricity per second, I think it was. This is going to make both storage and power supply more important. And last I checked, it does NOT drain power storage relative to capacity, but takes an equal amount from all available storage at once. Meaning the small ones will run out while the big ones are still at a significant portion of their capacity. Part of the reason it may have caught OP off guard is that most engines generate power while they're running, so he may not have realized that by default there's not actually a built-in power generation device on the ship as a result.

Subassembly loader. Or the planned stock implementation of the same feature. Which of course requires that you first build the subassembly, of course, unless you get it from someone else...

It's already out, I think...it's just in .mbm format which GIMP evidently doesn't handle well. Or something. Don't know. Since I was only really going to do it to prove a point, I probably just won't bother. The actual edit would be trivial, I just can't get the (@%( texture to open properly to edit it.

Following the tutorial on the wiki, using Frhed to edit the header (as I've already got it) and GIMP 2.8 to open the file. Strangely, only the main view is corrupted, the preview in layers looks fine, at least on 1024. It looks like there's multiple interlaced versions of the texture layered on top of each other with a slight offset.

I was trying, just to make the point about how easy it is, but I can't get the stupid texture to open properly. It opens all crazy corrupted. It gets better the larger I set the image size in the header, but it's still messed up at 1024 pixels and anything higher refuses to load. Sigh. Stupid useless tutorials... Personally, I don't really need it, since I don't like the Seniors anyway. But it IS kinda hard to tell which way it's oriented without really looking at it closely. You can tell, but it's subtle. It can easily be made unsubtle. So why not do so? And the arrows on the decouplers point towards the side that gets decoupled.

Alright, let me see how far I can this apart. 1.) Engines and SRBs both have obvious, readily visible indications of which end is which. Specifically, big, obvious engine nozzles. Clamp-o-Trons and the Jr variation both have large, obvious shaping differences that indicate which side is which. The Clamp-o-Tron senior has small, subtle variations indicating which end is which. Someone that hadn't ever played the game before, and didn't know which end was which, might not be able to tell right now, frankly, because both sides have obvious 'doors', and the ring's so small it's barely noticeable unless you're looking for it specifically. 2.) The problem is not that people 'can't figure out which way it's supposed to go'(Noobs probably couldn't, but they'd figure it out after testing it), it's that it's difficult to tell which way it actually is, due to the differences being so subtle. 3.) I personally would prefer that 'most people' bought KSP, thus funding the development and ensuring that we got a finished game. As opposed to, say, Squad going bankrupt and development being stopped before completion, because everyone was playing Hello Kitty Online Adventures instead. 4.) Docking ports also have a specific function. Decouplers have an arrow because you couldn't tell which way it was pointing without it. Fuel lines, on the other hand, have arrows to indicate the flow direction just to make things easier. The fuel flows from the first part they're placed on to the second, and you can determine which end was placed first because only the first end is actually selectable after the fact. The arrows are just there to make it easier to tell after placement that it's placed correctly. 5.) Arrows don't insure you build it properly, witness people that still place decouplers the wrong way round. It just makes it easier to check that it is placed properly: You still have to check. You just don't have to zoom all the way in and squint.

I wasn't aware that copypasta from one texture to another (which I could do in GIMP in about 30 seconds if I knew where the textures were hidden!) consisted of 'changing the game'. Even if they add an arrow, you'll still need to check the orientation. Just, you'll have an arrow that indicates the orientation, making it easier to tell. Right now it's pretty subtle. Edit: Okay, I found where the textures are not-so-hidden. Now I've just got to get them open.

I'll share one, since it's not much of a spoiler anyway: Placed by: Bill Kerman The mk1pod was a workhorse which helped the Kerbal Space Program reach new heights in its early days, but is now only useful for sitting on a plinth covered in concrete (it was cheaper than making a replica out of concrete).

That's pretty much my point. Given that it's an easy fix (Copypasta the arrow from the size 1 decoupler, maybe put one on either side of the 'handles'), there's not really any reason NOT to do it. You'd still have to check the orientation to not screw it up, it'd just be easier to check.

Well I'm not sure if they meant for the citation needed tag is just on farlands or bust thing or the entire thing, so yeah... The wiki also points out that the crashed ship on the title screen has the Umlaut...they even have a screenshot. It would be nice if a dev weighed in with the official 'word' though.