asmi

It's actually more subtle. Anyone who ever played Orbiter and went to the Moon knows that significant part of journey happens when the Earth is NOT a major body that affects the motion, but the Sun is - this is "computer-melting" © (Squad) n-body physics for you, which oddly enough works OK even on stone-age computers without melting them. Second - craft returning from the Moon has velocity of over 10 km/s, and as such can produce enormous lift if it's aerodynamic enough (remember lift is proportional to velocity squared!). So the vehicle can bounce off atmosphere almost without losing any speed, and therefore its' orbit apogee will be close to the distance to the Moon. Now, if it's lucky (or unlucky - depending on whether it's intended or not) and reaches apogee when the Moon is nearby, it's gravity will pull the craft towards it raising perigee out of atmosphere (again, this is n-body physics for you), and this spells doom for the crew. If you think it's too far-fetched - look at the Spektr-R radio telescope mission, which exploits such Lunar gravity boosts intentionally to raise its' perigee over time. So in KSP terms the Moon is outside Earth's SOI, which may sound rather bizarre until you recall that the concept of SOI is only applicable to objects with mass that is insignificant compared to the main orbiting body, and the Moon's mass is obviously not insignificant.

It would be interesting to see how many of those who posted here would put their money where their mouth is.

Such functionality exists in Steam for a long time - you can buy anything in store for somebody else.

Which is far cry from what they originally were telling it would cost (I think it was $20M or so - can't remember exact number). But there is a problem with it - it doesn't exist. "Paper rockets are always better than real ones" © We yet to see how much it would actually cost once it starts flying. Methinks that it would cost closer to $150M mark. We're comparing it to ILS and Arianspace, both have prices roughly in the same ballpark as SpaceX (especially keeping in mind their better GTO performance, which is important for heavy GSO comsats).

Where did you this idea of SpaceX being cheap? Here's kicker - they are not. Not anymore. Besides neither ILS/Khrunichev nor Arianspace will go out of business as their owners need these vehicles to launch military payloads every so often, for which they can't use foreign launch systems. - - - Updated - - - There is a reason SpaceX didn't go for methane engines right from beginning. To get respectable performance out of them, you need to develop closed-cycle engines, and they are well-known for their explosive character, so development will cost a lot of money.

Only if Squad will pay players money each time they encounter a bug, or crash... I bet all bugs will be fixed in no time flat!

I think the root of the problem is that developers somehow got an idea that it's OK to release anything with bugs. Squad's problem seems to be that they've got used to "perpetual alpha" status, and it was helped by lots of fanboys here with "it's only alpha, deal with that" mentality. Well it's not alpha anymore - but I don't see that mentality changed... If only I'd have a luxury of doing so at my work...

There was (still is?) a mod called RealPlume which did (still does?) just that.

See - this is a problem. All the people who know it's worth $40 already own it (and almost all of them didn't actually pay $40 to get it - I bought it for $18 back in days of 0.17), but for new players it's rather steep price. I know it's above my personal limit for "throwaway" money - which I can spend and not care if the game will turn out to be a total crap. And no, the demo wouldn't help advancing my own case as it fails to demonstrate modding aspect of the game - I know for sure that stock is not and will never be the game for me, so modding is the only way for me to get things the way I want them.

I think the biggest problem with insta-scan is that in never actually explains why it had to happen from polar orbit, as player is not given an opportunity to try it on a different orbit to see why.

Density doesn't matter for orbital mechanics (neither Keplerian nor Newtonian), only mass does, since both treats celestials as point-mass objects. Therefore the fact that celestials have unrealistic densities changes nothing regarding their orbital motion.

But that doesn't stop someone else from making their own models.

Actually it wouldn't work at all. I'll leave it up to you to research why.

This is what happens when you break some laws of physics - other laws of physics starts breaking down as well as they are all interrelated.

Silicone. But not because it's a basis of pretty much any electronic device in existence, but because it's a chief candidate for being a basis of non-carbon-based life forms.

There were several Progress missions which were intentionally deorbited over land (they had return capsules), and I haven't ever seen any record of any pieces making it to the ground (except for capsules obviously).

This is really good question as it was Glushko who perfected ox-rich staged combustion tech in RD-170. And big part of his motivation actually was "beating NK-33/43". On the whole US/USSR thing I won't go into details as they poster who brought this up obviously doesn't know what he's talking about. I will just leave this link for those who doesn't know: http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/09/the-little-known-soviet-mission-to-rescue-a-dead-space-station/ I ran out of fingers when counting how many firsts (and many of them are "only's" too) just this mission had.

Go with 980 GTX - it's cheaper, consumes less energy (this is the first hi-end video-card with TDP of less than 200W in a VERY long time!), and more powerful! According to tests even 970 GTX would outperform it, while being almost two times cheaper. Red team is losing big time in this round

There is a reason nVidia cards are more popular in gamedev industry. Their developer tools are awesome (and free!)! Ask any gfx developer, and odds are he/she will have nVidia card(s) onboard. Then there is a consumer part of it - nVidia 3D Vision/surround/3d surround (I have the latter setup at home) works in just about any game, while equivalent technologies from AMD are not (at least they were not about 1.5 years ago when I was building my home system). That pretty much predefined what my config will be like (three 27" 3D-Vision-compliant monitors, two 680 GTX video card in SLI) at that moment.

Incorrect. You still owe 5% of revenue, even if you cancel your subscription after you release a product using UE4 (though it's only 5% from revenue exceeding 3k$ per quarter, so you can make $1k/month for free using UE4). There are few more catches with their license (like counting a revenue-before-store-deductions for games sold in Steam/*Stores, which negatively impacts a bottom line), but this is mostly it.

Well since upgrade to Unity 5 costs money, it's more of "pay-twice" now

Valentina is an obvious exception. Oh - and by the way she is alive and well. I had an honor to meet her in person once.

Thanks! That's what I figured it would be. One question though - what is your policy on pull requests? I might be able to find some time to help implementing these things I've talked about, but I want to make sure I won't step on anyone's shoes. Oh, and a quick bug report - ENGINE:THRUSTLIMIT field's setter is clamping incoming value into 0..1 interval, while it should clamp into 0..100 (since that number is thrustPercentage).

As you wish

Tried the mod yesterday, and found new features missing (or I don't know they exist) which I would really like to have: 1. user-defined functions. Any more-or-less complex program quickly turns into unmaintanable mess of code (tried to create a program for automatic powered lander that uses suicide-burn while keeping in mind the presence of atmosphere (I play with RealFuels, which fixes engine behaviour in atmosphere, but also complicates landing because actual thrust is less than in vacuum and not constant)- 3-way PID for orientation, plus additional one for throttle (for the very last stage of landing sequence, program times suicide burn such that it would bring vertical speed to 0.5m/s at 3 meters above the ground, and after it adjusts throttle to keep that speed until touchdown). 2. connected to previous one - ability to include other files (c-like #include would do). It would allow to reuse code without copy-paste. 3. Ability to control engine's gimbal (for those engine which can gimbal of course). Keep in mind that the engine can have several thrustTransforms for multi-nozzle engines - for example RD-180 has two, while RD-171M has four, and it would be best to have ability to control them independently (for example RD-180 provides roll control by vectoring nozzles in opposite directions). 4. I would like ability to control other CPUs on the same vessel (simplest example - having secondary CPUs on boosters, and start avoidance program (gimbal booster engine away from the core like Shuttle SRBs do) on them just after separation. Is any of that in plans? Thanks!