Luis

That's great news. Many thanks for looking into this so promptly.

I may have found a bug in the 1.2 pre-release. I'm using a very simple airplane takeoff script, early in career: function D{parameter m. hudtext(m, 4, 2, 60, yellow, false).} D("R to launch"). wait until rcs=true. rcs off. set H to 90. set P to 10. set T to 1. lock throttle to T. set ship:control:pilotmainthrottle to 0. stage. lock steering to heading(H, P). wait until alt:radar>10. set P to 35. wait until alt:radar>300. set P to 20. wait until altitude>1000. D("Manual control"). This is my airplane: http://imgur.com/8mow1Wu The script will initially rotate the tail fins to aim the plane upwards but as it picks up speed on the runway, they slowly turn themselves horizontal again. Eventually the plane has enough speed to take off anyway, but it never attempts to pitch up. If I fly the plane manually, it is capable of lifting into the air at about 35m/s. I have rebuilt the same craft with the same script in 1.1.3 with the 1.1.3 version of KOS and it takes off correctly. If I fly the plane manually

The video displays a 'not available' error for me, but from the comments it sounds as if he is displaying the map in the terminal, which would be wild.

I would subscribe to this in a heartbeat.

I've played the game since 0.15 and I almost never make it interplanetary with any of my saves. The manoeuvre system is entirely inadequate for that sort of mission. Precise Node helps but it's still dauntingly, depressingly complicated. Even at the reduced scale of the Kerbal solar system, aiming at a tiny target like Duna from so far away feels more like luck than judgement. In my view, the stock game needs several improvements to make planets easier to visit. 1. The tracking station should have an upgrade level that includes transfer window planning. 2. The manoeuvre node widgits should be pinable, so they can be viewed when the node itself is off screen. 3. The node widgit should display numerical dV and allow keyboard tweeking of the numbers up and down. 4. The ship info should state the dV for every stage and the total for the craft. 5. The node widgit should make it much easier to place nodes on hyperbolic orbit lines and much easier to select one craft over another in a crowded map view. 6. It should be possible to design a mission plan of connected manoeuvre nodes, before the ship even leaves the launch pad. 7. Orbit lines shouldn't jitter. I'd much rather they got wider or blurrier to represent the imprecision of the orbital calculation. Orbits that leap from having an encounter to not having one, are very off-putting for lng range missions. This isn't about reducing the amount of challenge in the game. It's about having challenges that aren't a consequence of bad UI design or game engine limitations.

I definitely think that the game mode missing from KSP is a campaign story mode. In my current save, I am role playing a series of missions that has the Kerbals gradually learning about a threat from beyond Kerbin, centred on the easter eggs. Each mission gives them a specific task (eg send rovers to photograph each of the Munoliths) and I write them up in a notepad file to build an ongoing narrative. At the successful completion of each mission I award myself one or two new pieces of technology. These are always key pieces, like engines or fuel tanks. I assume that the little things like girders and adaptors are always available. Certain tech advances require some extra havesting - the uranium for the LV-N can only be mined from the Mun, for example. I'd dearly love it if KSP added a framework for campaign mode that allowed the community to write linear sequences of missions with their own briefing text, completion requirements and rewards. This would override th tech tree, because the missions would determine which parts were available. Money could exist as a limit to the total amount you could spend for that mission, but a new revert mode would always allow you to revert back to the start of the current mission, so you'd never bankrupt yourself into a dead-end.

This is similar to the way that flywheels are used to control spacecraft attitude. You can rotate a craft in space simply by spnning a wheel inside the spacecraft and the laws of conservation of momentum are not violated. But the important thing to remember is that it's not the *movement* of fuel or the flywheels or anything else within the rocket that exerts a rotational force, it's the *acceleration* of the fuel or flywheels, because F=ma. So in the asparagus statging rocket, the fuel from the outer tanks exerts a torque on the rocket for as long as it takes to accelerate the fuel up to its steady flow speed in the pipe, and then the torque stops. This would create a small initial torque when the engines were first ignited (and the rocket is still on the launch pad) but none in normal flight.

It launches eastward from the coast of Florida, so it's flying out over the Atlantic ocean. At stage separation it is less than 100km down range. The next bit of land to the west is still thousands of km away, which would require a lot more dV to reach than simply turning around. The return trajectory is also pretty vertical. The reason it has to cancel out some westward velocity at the last minute is that it deliberately aims for the sea, in case the engines fail to relight for the final braking burn.

Not meant as snark, but delta V is expressed as a velocity in metres per second (m/s), not metres per second squared (m/s^2). The latter would be an acceleration and implies that you jump from zero to orbital velocity in a single second! :wink:

If you really want to, you could always use [URL="http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/37756-1-0-5-HyperEdit-v1-4-2-Nov-11-2015-Teleporter-Orbit-Planet-Editor-More"]HyperEdit[/URL] to move your bases and space stations into place. But as others have indicated, this would quickly feel very hollow. Getting a simple 1-man capsule into orbit around Kerbin will feel better than hyperediting an entire base on Moho.

I skipped to the end and I'm no wiser. The resolution is too low.

In a way, what you are describing is what happens already outdoors. A whole ecosystem of organisms work to break down anything that can be broken down and nutrients are efficiently and endlessly recycled. A meadow or a forrest floor are self cleaning, but the end point is leaf litter or soil, not polished parquet floor or carpet. Houses already have their own ecosystem of dust mites, spiders, ear wigs, silverfish, mould and bacteria that feed on the organic detritus that we bring in. And rather than welcoming them because they eat dirt, we count them as part of the problem. The business of cleaning essentially consists of removing organic matter as completely as possible to cut off the bottom of the food chain and shrink the ecosystem. What you are proposing is to leave the energy source in place and instead just add a new organism to eat it. But what about the organisms that eat this organism? At best, you will replace one domestic ecosystem with another, but you won't make your house any cleaner.

By immersing them in a bowl of warm, soapy water, maybe?

Sorry, I forgot to post a follow up. The exhibition is incredible and well worth a day trip to London. Unfortunately no photography is allowed, so I can't post anything. But if you can't go, I highly recommend the official book that accompanies the exhibition. It's available online from the Science Museum gift shop: https://www.sciencemuseumshop.co.uk/home/books/cosmonauts_birth_of_the_space_age.htm It's quite expensive at £30, but it's a big fat book and contains excellent photos of all the exhibits, plus loads of background info. Put it on your Christmas list

This is an incredibly good idea and, if implemented in stock, might just be enough to allow all but the most hardcore players to manage without Precise Node. At this point I think the best way to get it made stock would be for someone to create it as a mod, to demonstrate its usefulness and popularity. Then Squad might bring the modder into the fold, to make it stock. I have my fingers firmly crossed that this happens.

I'm going on Monday. I'll post pics

Tardigrades have been taken to space several times by NASA and ESA. Before that they had been pumped down to a hard vacuum in the lab on Earth. Aside from their ability to switch to spore mode to survive dessication, tardigrades' main survival advantage is that they have very simple bodies. Each species has a fixed number of cells that is the same for every individual in that species. This makes them more resistant to radiation because damaged cells can be replaced without turning into runaway tumours for example.

Anyone coming up with any new ideas is wrong. Roverdude has already said the answer is in the first three pages of this thread.

There is a tendancy to shoot the messenger in these forums whenever someone tries to report a bug. Arguing away the bug is not the best way to get them fixed.

This also gets my vote. I've been wanting a structural part like this for years. Allowing it to interact with the fairings in this way just makes it better.

'Normal' and 'supposed to be like this' aren't the same thing. This might be an unavoidable consequence of the PQS system used for terrain generation, but that doesn't mean it's desirable.

As Skyrender suggests, real rockets don't normally have a discrete ring-shaped device called a decoupler. Stage separation uses a series of charges and electronics that are integrated with the top of the stage. My copy of the Saturn V Flight Manual (Snowball Publishing) says this: "Ordnance for first plane separation consists of two exploding bridgewire (EBW) firing units, two EBW detonators, and one linear shaped charge (LSC) assembly, which includes the LSC (containing 25 grains per foot of RDX) with a detonator block on each end. The EBW firing units are installed on the S-IC/S-II interstage slightly below the S-II first separation plane. The leads of the EBW firing units are attached to the EBW detonators which are installed in the detonator blocks of the LSC assembly. The LSC detonator blocks are installed on adjustable mounts to provide for length variations of the LSC assembly and the circumferance tolerances of the interstage. The LSC is routed from the detonator blocks around the periphery of the interstage. The LSC is held in place by retaining clips and encased by covers which are secured by clips and sealed to environmentally protect the LSC." KSP just lumps all this together into a single component called a decoupler, for convenience.

I would also suggest that you don't try and do the entire mission in one launch. Once you are comfortable with orbital rendezvous you can run your mission in stages. Launch your lander and your transfer stage separately and dock them together in Kerbin orbit. Send an unmanned refuelling ship to Duna ahead of time and leave it in orbit. Your lander just needs to have enough fuel to to a round trip from a low Duna orbit to the surface and back. Everything else you can refuel in orbit.

Waiting until everything is absolutely perfect before you release, doesn't necessarily result in the best service for players. This is the approach Blizzard takes and it means you have to wait 15 years for a game. KSP will never be truly finished and I think Squad understands this. But at some point, you have to acknowledge that you are updating a released game, not an unreleased one. By now, the distinction is pretty arbitrary, anyway. KSP is a game that is already publicly available to anyone, in exchange for money. That, gentlemen, is a released game, whatever you want to call it. And the idea that KSP is suddenly going to get panned by reviewers because it is in official release is just scaremongering. Most of the major games sites and magazines have already reviewed the game at least once in the last four years. I've reviewed it for PC Format, and I will suggest that it is reviewed again for 1.0. Games journalists are perfectly well aware of the journey that KSP is on. 1.0 is an important milestone, sure, but it isn't the end of the road.

If you're prepared to pay the extra launch cost and effort, I hardly think this counts as a cheat. It's sort of the opposite of cheating. Edit: I have left all mine up there so far. I like to build them with more parts than necessary, for aesthetic reasons, so it's possible they may be useful later. But if not, I'll deorbit them at the end of their mission (ie when my orbits get too cluttered).