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In KSP all navigation data is read directly out of the game engine. It's not quite perfect since there is a little floating point accuracy error, but it is very close to perfectly accurate. In reality, you have to navigate using data from startrackers, radar, laser rangefinders, telescopes, and maybe GPS too if you're close enough to Earth. There's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of room for error to creep in. It's hard to be really certain where you are and where you're going.

The radio version had a lot of the story cut out. There are unabridged audiobooks available too, also read by Chris Barrie.

The Red Dwarf books are good (except Last Human, which is just weird) They're better than the original series, and the audiobook versions are excellent.

Seven out of eight wheels still working. Good enough. The rover made its landing unmanned, and all the colonists are on the other side of the planet. Ogre-D has a long drive ahead of it to get a repair.

Another way that you can have an asteroid become captured is if it breaks apart while passing by a planet. If you've got a spinning asteroid that splits into two parts, one part could be flung back and captured, while the other part is flung forward and continues on escape trajectory. Some asteroids are really loose collections of rubble, held together only by weak gravity, and could break apart really easily from a slight nudge like you might get from tidal interaction with a planet. Other asteroids are a bit more solid and spin quite fast so that only material strength keeps them held together. If something like that got hit by a smaller rock, it could fly apart too.

"The Kingdom of Mars is not a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Scott, fetch my crown." (Said treaty is the one forbidding anybody from making territorial claims on other worlds.)

The best place to go for exoplanet news is the Systemic blog, and they don't disappoint for this story. http://oklo.org/2012/10/16/alpha-centauri-b-b/ Reading that post should give everybody a good idea of why it took us so long to spot this planet. It's not easy work.

Did it get renamed with .txt on the end somehow?

if you look around in your KSP saves folder, you should have two folders called "VAB" and "SPH", for the vehicle assembly building and spaceplane hangar. This one goes in SPH. Once the craft file is in there, you can load it just the same as any other saved plane.

It's not as dangerous as you might imagine. Running on ASAS control is fine; the wings don't take any damage. For some reason, once you get above 10km, you can gimbal as much as you like and make a gravity turn as normal. It's only manual control in the first 10km that make bits fall off.

Are you tired of the same old belly-mounted drop tanks on your spaceplanes? Don't feel like trying to cram even more mass onto the wings? Have no fear! The push-tank design is what you need! <iframe class="imgur-album" width="100%" height="550" frameborder="0" src="http://imgur.com/a/mHNQa/embed"></iframe> The pushtank biplane is perfect for anybody who has wanted to glide through the skies of alien worlds without having to balance a wobbly spaceplane on top of an unstable booster. ... just be careful not to gimbal the booster engines too much while in low atmosphere. They can burn the wings right off!

I guess I'll be the first to mention a film that is both scary and worth watching (seriously, Apollo 18 and Prometheus were both awful). Event Horizon. Plot summary: "oops, our FTL engine opened a portal to hell" Edit: beaten to first good film suggestion. Alien is excellent, of course.

In that latest map of the stellar system, it looks like Moho's orbit is nowhere near circular. Does that mean that it won't be tidally locked? Realistically you need circular orbit to be locked. The idea of having it molten over one entire side would be a bit silly if the magma sea kept drifting over to the cold side.

I'd also suggest adding Laika to the list. Truly the first.

The Lavaeolus spaceplane is there for everybody to play with. Fly it, rebuild it, or build something better... whatever you like!

I honestly can't tell if that's meant to be a good thing...

Everybody is preparing for 0.17, making their plans, making their spaceships. I'm doing it too. My first interplanetary craft is going to be taking off horizontally from the runway. Pictures: http://imgur.com/a/lUtDB The Lavaeolus spaceplane isn't designed for landings. I'm going to be using it for flyby and orbiter missions at first, doing vital research to help in planning lander missions (getting a feel for how much fuel is needed to return, figuring out how big the planetary atmospheres are so that I can aerobrake without "oops"). This thing is fun to fly, as long as you don't scrape its engines off on the runway. Don't pitch up to far during takeoff! If you activate the main ascent rocket at 14k, then ditch the flank jets at about 20k, you should be able to get the upper stages into orbit with about 3km/s deltaV to spare. The Kerbin return stage is a great little plane all by itself. It's got pretty good glide characteristics as long as the fuel tank is mostly empty.

A planet with some vegetation on it would be awesome, but let\'s not have it be an Earth-like swamp world with green trees. Alien leaves could be almost any colour, but I think darker would be cooler. Just based on the idea behind leaves (they\'re mini solar panels basically), a really efficient leaf would be black, absorbing as much light as possible. An icy white world with black vegetation would look amazing.

An old one, made in 0.15. Horizontal takeoff, vertical landing, capable of suborbital flight... sometimes. This thing was almost worthy of a challenge thread all by itself. Anybody who can land it after the SRBs have been fired is a fine pilot indeed.

I tried rebuilding the archer in 0.16, and during testing I discovered that it can still reach orbit easily, still reach the Mun and land, but it\'s about 100m/s of deltaV short of what is needed for a takeoff from the Mun after all that. Jeb had to bail out and is now stuck in a low munar orbit in nothing but a suit. I\'m pretty sure it should be capable of doing a Minmus mission still, but it\'s time for a new vehicle I think. Also time for a rescue mission, because Jeb is getting bored up there.

Wide spaced wheels can help to keep a plane from rolling sideways on landing. The wider they are, the more lateral movement you can tolerate. Still, drifting sideways on approach to ground isn\'t good... I find it easier to land aircraft with the engines entirely shut off, if the design of the craft permits it. Some planes handle really badly without power though, so that doesn\'t always help. It should go without saying that you reduce speed as much as possible before trying to touch down, even if you\'re flying a rocket with tiny stubby fins and 'as slow as possible' is about 300m/s. Find how slow your plane can go. See if it can glide nicely with no thrust at all.

Gabe - the word you\'re looking for is acceleration. Torque is something different. The mass of your rocket lowers as fuel is burned, but the engines keep providing the same thrust. That means that on empty tanks, you\'re accelerating much harder than you did at the start of the flight with full tanks. Getting more acceleration is great, but only if all your components can handle it. Higher acceleration puts greater compression or strain on all your bits. There are two ways to solve it. Either add more struts or throttle down a bit when your fuel tanks are starting to run low.

If by 'best' you mean most capable, then I have still not managed to do better than the Archer. It can go pretty much anywhere and do anything. Takeoff and landing from any solid body in the game, with lots of fuel to spare. On the other hand, if by 'best' you mean most fun, then you\'ll need to look at my less successful designs... I call it the Munbrick. It is the most appallingly ugly spaceplane I have ever made. Launch procedure involves leaping out of the atmosphere on jets and SRBs then accelerating to orbital velocity using the vertically mounted hover rockets. Number of successful launches with this thing: 0 Number of fun launches with it: 30 (approx)

Holding shift while rotating parts lets you do rotations smaller than 90 degrees.

There\'s a second space centre hidden in the mountains over on the next continent. The Jet Train Express runs a regular service there every Tuesday and Thursday.