GluttonyReaper

I wonder how big you need to get before you start being to resolve these kind of things with the naked eye...

Really, they should make Eve easier. Perhaps give it a thinner oxygen-rich atmosphere so we can use jets, maybe make it like half the mass... and really, to save us the trouble of going through a full transfer and slow reentry every time, they should make it so we launch directly from its surface. If they did that though, they'd need to add something nearby, seeing as Eve surface science would be worthless: maybe some kind of big cratered airless moon, possibly even tidally locked to encourage early comms setup. If they did that though, they'd have to move Gilly further out... maybe make it bigger and mint-flavoured to compensate... ... Wait a second...

Having spacecrafts in pairs is a fun idea, but narratively speaking, it's not that interesting to have three (four?) different ways of generating gravity, especially when the backup is just "spend power to generate gravity by magic". If anything it should be the other way around: artificial gravity is the standard method, and the lower tech solutions are a fun thing you bring up when that inevitably fails. The obvious problem here is if you're already at the level of abstraction where you've got magic interstellar drives, claiming that your ships are cheaping out on the artificial gravity in particular is difficult to suspend disbelief for... unless you build your entire universe to allow that particular scenario, which feels contrived.

Circumnavigate Eve... on foot. Timewarp is cheating, obviously.

Had to turn it off and on again twice

I have once again fallen foul of part failures in my JNSQ+Kerbalism playthrough... this time very much my own fault. I didn't check how many ignitions my twin Lqd. Hydrogen engines have before trying to use them for a Moho transfer, so of course one of them exploded when I was doing my plane change manoeuvre. Fortunately, it only had ~1000 dV left, and I was able to finish the burn with the next stage and a bit of RCS, so I should still have enough for an insertion burn. Unfortunately, that's just enough to turn my planned lander into a more permanent orbiter...

It was almost certainly Jeb, Bob and Bill for me in the old Mk1-2 pod... given Val didn't exist yet. I make sure to give her the honour of being the first solo orbiter in most of my saves now to make up for it

Even if it was practical, there just aren't that many niches that a propellor could fill - the two places they really shine are for quick acceleration, and for high-speed efficiency. As is, flying animals tend not really to rely on thrust-based acceleration for hunting, instead utilizing stalking and dive tactics to quickly catch prey without burning too much energy, and only really use speed as an escape mechanism to quickly get away from land-based threats. As for high-speed efficiency... there just isn't much need? Being able to move from place to place quickly isn't something animals really value consistently, with making best use of natural air currents and the life seeming to be preferable. The key problem, I think, is that wings are just practically quite versatile.

Not necessarily - if you know which direction the thing you're trying to hide from is, you only need to cloak in that direction. In that case, you might be better off with a thin cylinder.

Now that I've been playing without reverts/quickloading, the thing that's caught me out more than one is transferring my [REDACTED] science samples to my capsule before reentry. Nothing like flying a perfect automated sample mission from the Mun, only to burn everything up in the upper atmosphere...

Have any of the other features from the DLC shown up? (i.e. robotics?) The surfaces features are relatively uncommon, they can be hard to find sometimes... and I think (but don't quote me) that they don't show up in old saves from pre-BG.

Haven't got any pics because I was panicking, but had my first proper run in with Kerbalism part failures in the JNSQ save I just started. I was doing my second manned orbital flight to try and get the Kerbin space high Material Bay science, which was going perfectly fine... until I needed to my re-entry burn. I fired up my Pug engine, and it just... spluttered out. I had an actual couple of moments where I thought I'd doomed my poor rookie pilot to suffocate (and feeling a little guilty because I'd actually boosted myself a little higher than necessary "just in case", which is what ultimately lead to the failure), but thankfully it turns out Kerbalism differentiates between "malfunctions" and "total failure". So I sent my guy out to inspect the engine, and yep, it was repairable. Got all the science, and the kerbal attached to them, home safe and sound. ...I'll definitely make sure to pack some redundancy on my Munar flyby though.

The most obvious problem here (even for mods) is the lack of ability of the player to mitigate the problem - if you're landing or docking, you've got some visual cues to fall on as a backup if you work out something's wrong, but there's no such thing for interplanetary transfers or orbital insertion. You're totally reliant on the displays and orbital info 99% of the time in space, and ultimately it would just lead to things appearing to go strangely wrong with no clear explanation from the player's point of view.

I personally quite like the one bundled with Kerbalism, but obviously you need to download the rest of Kerbalism to get it.

My immediate thought is something like a planet-spanning algae colony embedded into a rocky planet. If they all share nutrients, some of them can specialise into transmitting 'data' from one place of the planet to another (i.e. neurones), and eventually that might evolve into some kind of actual intelligence. In the end, you might end with something akin to a human mind, but much much slower, with processes taking days rather than milliseconds. As for evolutionary pressure, the planet could have some extreme weather cycles that are perhaps harmful to the algae, forcing it to develop a kind of weather prediction system to survive as a colony. If it 'detects' a storm or something in one location, it can guess where it might go next and send a 'message' for the algae in the path to prepare in some or another.

I'm still not super clear what the utility of catching the upper stage with a tower is - presumably for an actual mission you'd catch the lower and upper stages separately, so you'd have to mount them back together either way. Is it just about saving the weight of the landing legs?

Short answer - the ion engine. It's got a higher ISP and it's lighter, so if you only care about dV, that's what you should go with. However, there are some caveats. First, the ion engine has a tibblingly low thrust, so it's (almost) useless for landers... and can result in some painfully long transfer burns. Second, it needs a supply of electric charge - if you're not going too far away from the Sun, you can use solar panels, but regardless you're going to have to carry some extra weight. This can be somewhat mitigated by throttling down, but then you end up with an even lower thrust. Thirdly, don't necessarily rule out chemical engines straight away - if your payload is small, a tiny engine and a big tank can go a long way, especially with the benefit of staging.

The intended behaviour is that precision mode tries to "balance" your RCS for translation by scaling the thrust of each thruster based on how far from the COM it is. The other thing it seems to do is "ramp" your RCS thrust - if you just tap a translation key, it'll only do the tiniest of bursts, you need to hold it for higher power. In general though, it tends to result in lower RCS thrust overall anyway... I'm not sure how it behaves if you have a really weird RCS layout.

1.3.1 was a full update in the end - there was apparently supposed to be an upgrade to the 1.0 demo to bring it up to date with current versions (see this post)... but as far as I can tell, it was never actually released.

All I'm hearing is that is would be trivial to install hydrolox rocket boosters on our cars...

Is it even unlockable? I thought it was just a static asset that just behaves like an easter egg (unlike the sites added in 1.12)

Sure, but is that to do with how their feet are designed or to do with how big and muscular they are (as well as having an extra pair of legs)? I'm not sure transplanting the same design onto a humanoid body would make them run faster. I don't see why not. Like you've shown, the elephant foot is basically the same as ours, just with more padding to accommodate their greater weight. The human heel bone is surprisingly high up, the rest is just fat.

This isn't quite correct (I'm definitely no expert on GR or quantum mechanics, but I think I recall how this works): thermal radiation is an EM wave, EM waves are affected by gravity. This was one of the big revelations of general relativity - by treating gravity as something that "warps" spacetime rather than just being an attractive force, the path that EM waves can effectively be "bent" as they try to follow the distortion caused by a massive object. This is something that's most obvious with gravitational lensing. Black holes are just an extreme case of this. They distort spacetime around them sufficiently that even the speed of light isn't enough to avoid a collision with whatever singularity exists at their center.

As already mentioned, you get rotation just from angular momentum - the host clouds that stars form from can be on the order of ~few parsecs, and individual "clumps" that go on to form single star systems can easily be a few thousand AU wide. The closer in you draw in gas, the faster it rotates, because you're conserving angular momentum, and some of that gas has a long way to fall and thus a lot of momentum to contribute (the classic example of this is an ice skater drawing their arms in to pull themselves into a fast spin) Funnily enough, I think you've described the generally accepted idea here - gas and dust particles collide constantly as they're drawn in closer, transferring angular momentum between each other until they've formed a natural distribution. The actual plane of rotation will depend purely on which angular momentum "wins" out in the end. Also to note: you don't need all of your gas and dust to hit orbital speed... in fact, most of it won't. Anything that's moving too slowly will just fall and become part of the star, and anything moving too fast will be ejected - whatever small fraction is left is plenty to make up a reasonable-sized disc. The formation of discs is... somewhat more complicated. You get some of the disc shape from your rotation and friction, in the same way you get oblateness in planets - i.e. spinning your gas/dust clump forces some of the material to the plane of rotation, and then that overdensity creates a zone of higher friction that 'traps' particles as they cross though that plane, creating a greater overdensity... and so on. The factor you might have missed though, is magnetic fields. There's still plenty we don't understand in terms of detailing exactly how magnetic fields contribute to disc formation (and star & planet formation in general) so I'd recommend having a read around, but a simple model is enough to understand how it can help: A spherical gas clump forms with a close-to-linear magnetic field running through it, parallel to the axis of rotation (which comes first is beside the point for now...). The gas is partially charged, so is affected by the magnetic field. Crucially, charged particles really don't like moving across magnetic fields, rather preferring to move along them. In this case, it means the magnetic field helps to resist collapses along two dimensions, but has little effect in the remaining third dimension. Thus, you collapse your clump into a 2D shape... a disc. There's plenty more complexity here that I haven't touched on (see: the magnetic breaking catastrophe) and some fun side-effects that we can more directly observed (e.g. outflows), but in general star formation just seems to be a very complicated problem. Regardless, there's enough mechanics to toy with that I don't think you need to toy with extra material injections or anything to form planets.

If you've done an Eve flyby already, you can definitely give sending a one-way probe to Eve's surface a go - it shouldn't take much more fuel because you can use a heat shield + parachute to deorbit.