Luis

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).

On the contrary, I bet one of the reasons he has money is that he works all the hours he isn't sleeping. The idle rich are typically the ones who inherit their money, not the ones who make it.

My hunch is that you will lose more dV by staging early or throttling back before staging, than you would from the extra mass of a few separatrons. But I haven't actually tested this.

You get a lower amount of science when you transmit. The dialog box shows you what percentage you'll receive on the transmit button. I think it's 25% for goo pods, for example. Goo and the Science Junior can't be reused for new measurements after you transmit, unless you 'clean' them using the mobile science lab. As to the 'point' of probes, they are generally lighter than a manned mission, and therefore cheaper to launch. You can also use them for fly-by or impactor missions, which also saves you the delta v that would otherwise be needed to perform an orbital insertion or landing. You can do this with manned pods too, of course, but it requires rather a hard heart to intentionally send Kerbals to their doom.

OP is talking about the LV-1 'ant' engine, not the LV-N nuclear engine.

All these "plans" you refer to are from the unofficial wiki, based on a forum post that Novasilisko made a long time ago. He doesn't work fro Squad anymore and I'm not aware of any official confirmation that a new planet is coming any time soon, let alone specific details about it. Treating that wiki as if it is an official developer roadmap is just going to lead to disappointment.

A moon in KSP is an analog for a different moon in KSP??

I just read the whole thing in 10 minutes and found it much more convenient to scroll through than clicking a link for each tip. So I say well done and have some rep!

Now that is an excellant idea.

Actually, I think that has been the concensus for the last decade at least.

A vertical ascent to space is the least efficient trajectory. You are essentially subtracting gravity from your thrust all the way up.

Although adding more interesting contracts is definitely a good thing. I really hope they also remove the stupid contracts currently in the game. Testing jet engines on the Mun, for example. Or flying at nonsensical combinations of speed and altitude. And I really really hope they get rid of the randomly generated briefing text. That really breaks immersion for me. Either replace it with better boiler plate text for each mission type, or just get rid of it altogether.

If they ever did this I would refuse to update. That sounds horrible.

I agree with just about all of these suggestions and I am increasingly perplexed about how long some of these basic and obvious changes have been ignored.

KSP is currently the game that I play to the exclusion of everything else. Before that, I played Minecraft obsessively for about a year and WoW obsessively for 6 years. I think this actually says more about me than KSP, and it's possible that the greatness of KSP is its ability to trigger this obsessive response in a certain kind of person. This might also be the reason for its niche appeal. Not everyone is vulnerable to this drug. WoW, being a subscription game, was designed from the outside to encourage addiction. Measured by total number of player hours, or total revenue, it is the greatest game so far. But it also had huge development resources put into it. If you divided total player hours by total developer hours, KSP might get close.

This could probably all be fixed with a simple check in the code that prevents the runway from exploding if the impact isn't fast enough to make the ship explode. Or just a hard cap of 10m/s. Not perfect, but it would fix 90% of cases with minimal effort.

I'm also firmly against the idea of Kerbal XP providing ship boosts. One additional problem that I don't think has been brought up so far is that 'moar thrust' isn't necessarily a good thing. Imagine you build a launcher with a TWR of 2.5. On the first flight it flies just fine. But then the kerbal pilot levels up and gets a passive thrust boost. Now the TWR is higher and the rocket tears itself to pieces during the ascent. Do I need to keep a roster of medium skill pilots now, and retire them every time they get too good? I love the idea of an XP system that affects suit flair, rank and reputation. I'd settle for something tied to the science system or a certification-based limit to which parts kerbals can use. But passive ship boosts is a definite NO. If this makes it into the game, I'll be modding it out again as quickly as possible.

Sorry to take so long to reply. I've added another pic to show the rotary switches more clearly. The lefthand one switches between different flight modes, which changes the key mappings for WASDQE and IJKLHN, as well as the information displayed on the LCD. The righthand rotary is used to select the mode for the MechJeb auto attitude function. The dial positions are Prograde, Normal, Radial, Target, Target velocity & Target parallel. The blue Pro and Retro buttons set which way round you face along that axis. So for example, to point prograde, you turn the dial to PRO and press the blue PRO button. To point anti-normal, you turn the dial to NML and press the blue RETRO button, and so on. The green button ignores the dial completely and just points to the current manoeuvre node, and the red button cancels the auto-attitude system altogether, so that you can steer with the joysticks again.

That would be an enormous waste of dev time. How often do you fly around Kerbin? I think it's much more likely that the destructible buildings are a harbinger of constructable buildings. Maybe we'll be able to create new launch sites on Kerbin. Hopefully we'll be able to build bases on other worlds too.

Huh, I wonder why I've never noticed that before. I guess it's because of the weight. 150kg seems excessive for any ships of medium size and below. I'm no fan of massless parts, but perhaps this should be available in a smaller, weaker, lighter version as well.

It would also save us from using the ugly hack of clipping the little cubic struts into each other to make a right angle joint.

The mouseover text in http://xkcd.com/1106/ was what originally switched me on to KSP.