Brotoro

It's a well known fact that the ancient Ephebian Empire on Kerbin used the name 'Sol' for Kerbol, so that's why they sometimes refer to photovoltaic panels as solar panels. You can find this out by reading "The History of the Ephebian Empire," a classic work written by Volta Kerman (who was also famous for his early work on electricity).

I can't turn in a bug report until I test things more. Is it happening because of something peculiar about my ship? Is it because I have jet engines running (albeit on idle thrust)? Is it happening because of some mod I have installed? I don't know yet...so it will take time to run this down. But I mentioned it here to see if anybody else has seen this problem (because I'd never noticed it before). I need to run a test in a mod-free game setup.

I've been developing the next set of equipment to send out to Laythe. I have no interest i playing with career mode as yet (but I enjoy watching what other people are doing in it). Career mode will change yet again when they add budgets, and then you'll all have to start over again anyway... so I'll join in at a later date. For now I'm encountering a weird bug: When I deploy chutes on a ship I'm working on, everything works great. But when I REPACK the chutes and try to use them later (I have action groups set up to deploy them, since they no longer deploy with the staging setup), they sometimes cause violent explosions of some parts of the ship. Very strange. This doesn't happen when I deploy the repacked chutes by right-clicking on them in the same situations...only when using action groups. And it doesn't happen when I deploy the cutes for the FIRST TIME (a non-repacked chute) using an action group.

Photovoltaic panels.

The base habitats I use on Laythe are landed via parachutes, so modifications would be needed on the Mün...I'd probably attach some tanks and engines to the top and land the base with a sky crane-like maneuver. The lander/base used on Vall would work fine on the Mün (it can use just four tanks/engines instead of six on the Mün). It can be inconvenient at times, but it's not much of a bother.

There is no hair mod that I know of. My female kernels are modified for story purposes using Photoshop. -ninja'd

My Reusable Rocket lifts almost everything I use into orbit nowadays (unless it's an SSTO vehicle). I fly it straight up to about 17 km before doing any turn so that the boosters can separate and land back at KSC (well...they despawn...but if you bother to follow them down, you'll see that they return safely). The sustainer is recovered from orbit to land at the KSC, either on its engine flame (if enough propellant is left) or via parachute. Below, the Reusable Rocket is lifting a Mk. 3 Nuclear Tug (another of my workhorse vehicles) into Kerbin orbit.

I aspire to being a Boffin.

The moons of Jool are named after people who had associations with Jool, the king of the gods. Laythe, Vall, and Tylo were all maidens whom Jool used trickery to seduce by turning into (respectively) a shower of gold dust, a beautiful swan, and a battery-operated sex toy (then, as now, Tylo was a tough nut to crack). Bop was named after the court jester of the gods whom Jool always hit on the head when he told a bad joke. And Pol was named after the janitor of the gods who never got to attend their parties but always had to sweep up afterwards.

My only kerbals off of Kerbin at the moment are four males and two females on Laythe. Not much genetic diversity there. Oops! I forgot about Desdin on Eve.

I wouldn't call it "nuclear fission" since that might confuse people. When two oxygen atoms fuse, for example they bring in so much energy that the resulting sulfur nucleus that you might expect to result usually sheds the excess energy by spitting out an alpha particle or neutron or proton, etc. (by can rarely stay together as a sulfur nucleus and emit all of the energy as a gamma ray). This is more of a decay than a nuclear fission. In the case of nuclei that are broken apart by gamma rays into the alpha particles that fuel the silicon burning, the term to use is "photodissociation", not fission. I said that iron is a dead end for fusion energy production (because it sits at the peak of the curve of binding energy). Nuclear reactions that absorb energy (instead of liberating energy) can and do occur in stars in relatively small numbers, but are not going to help the star fight off gravitational collapse. In a supernova explosion where lots of energy is being released and there are lots of neutrons flying around, a large number of these energy-absorbing reactions can occur and cook up lots of heavy elements.

The elements formed inside the cores of high mass stars are NOT restricted to those that you listed. Those are just some major products along the way that can hang around for a while until the temperature and pressure builds up to the point where the fusion of those elements can occur (given a massive enough star...except for iron on the bottom, which is dead end for fusion energy production). The jump from helium to carbon, for example, occurs because two heliums would form boron 8, which is unstable and immediately breaks apart into two heliums. Once the temperature gets up to around 100 million Kelvin, the reactions happen fast enough that the boron 8 has a substantial chance of being hit with another helium before breaking apart, and you get carbon as a result of this "triple alpha" process. Oxygen is also formed at this stage when some of the carbon fuses with another helium. If the star is massive enough, it can go on to carbon burning which can produce neon, magnesium, sodium, oxygen (for example, two carbons fusing together can make a neon by spitting out an alpha particle--helium nucleus--after the reaction). If the star is massive enough, it can go on to neon burning, which leaves behind mainly oxygen and magnesium. More massive still, and the star can start fusing the oxygen, which gives you several elements, but mainly silicon and sulphur. Once you get to the stage where you can burn silicon, the temperatures in the core of the star are getting so high that the gamma rays have enough energy to knock some of the nuclei apart into alpha particles...and at a high enough temperature, the silicon and sulphur will start fusing with those alpha particles in a rapid chain of reactions that cook up nickel 56...which decays to iron 56. As always in the shorthand of stellar astrophysics, "burning" as used above refers to thermonuclear fusion.

Now there's a cool tip.

I listen to whatever noises and silly music KSP makes...unless I'm doing something really tedious that doesn't require a lot of my attention (roving long distances; sitting on Ike watching for Magic Boulder; etc.), in which case I'll listen to audiobooks.

I did this trip when rover wheels first came out...version 0.19. But everything about the rover design is still valid (although you wouldn't need the ASAS unit anymore now that the cockpit can provide the SAS stability). The scenery on Duna DID change when they did an art pass in version 0.20 or 0.21... and Duna's surface lost a lot of its quirky cool features. But I suppose the new version looks more "realistic".

This is an important observation of an unwelcome result...but I'm surprised the effect is as large as it is. I would think that the program could test if an object is anywhere near the current object (or have any chance of getting anywhere near it) and ignore the far-off objects. Does turning off the DISPLAY of certain classes of objects in Map view speed things up? In any case, I think I may create a "parallel world" save of my big on-going game (with the UT times synced, but with extraneous ships around the Kerbol system removed) when I do my next transfer of multiple ships to Jool to perform the transfer...and then I'll paste the resultant ships data into my main persistent file after adjusting its time.

You know Squad's rule: No Aliens.

I found out that SSTO spaceplanes are easier on Laythe than they are on Kerbin.

I'm not sure where Mars and the Moon come into this. But because my jet engines work just as well on Laythe as they do on Kerbin (at equivalent atmospheric pressures), I would expect Laythe to have about the same percentage of oxygen in its atmosphere as Kerbin. If Laythe's oceans are just salt water, drinking water would not be a problem, since distillation is very easy. If Laythe's oceans are a mix of water and ammonia, the separation is more difficult, but still possible.

You aren't going to get any significant heating from radiation belts -- the particle density is way too low. Because the individual particles in a radiation belt have VERY high energy, they can damage important molecules in your body or your transistors... but there aren't enough of them to keep you warm.

Over 16 ships to Jool at once? I cower at the thought...but hail to thee, brave explorer.

Congratulations on getting there and back. I thought your aerobraking at Jool was interesting...it looks like only the front of the ship is on fire.

Tested SSTO spaceplanes. A famous kerbal was slaughtered many, many times during the initial "engineering simulations".

If they construct their buildings out of the same things they apparently use to construct their rocket parts: EXPLOSIVES!

I have ignored Kerbal X since Day 1. I hope it's not upset about that.