GluttonyReaper

Somewhat tangential to the topic of extra planets (although personally my stance is that I'd rather have outer planets instead of interstellar travel...) but I'd quite like to see the asteroid system expanded to include a lot of these minor bodies, seeing as many of them are usually on the order of only a few kilometres in size. It'd be pretty neat to have to find and track the minor moons in the same way as we do with asteroids in KSP1, and that only leaves a handful of hand-made bodies to make for each planet, which lets you keep them nice and diverse.

They probably should, yeah - but I still feel like the convenience of them is enough to make them worthwhile without hobbling other engines, in a way that makes the game a fair bit more complex. I disagree on the RCS front... I'm a big fan of the game letting you make your own mistakes. Mainsails are obviously a terrible choice for RCS control, but that's something the player should find out themselves in a fun way, rather than the game arbitrarily deciding which engines "count". Plus, there's no actual reason that someone couldn't use Terrier engines as RCS thrusters on a really large craft, and that's definitely not something I want the game to stop people from doing.

Having messed with mods in the past that add similar mechanics... I'm kinda split on this. I like that it makes big lifter engines feel a lot more powerful when you have to let them spool up to full throttle before launching, but it does get a bit old after a while if you're launching a bunch of rockets, and I'm not really sure it fits the stock "vibe". Sure, but arguably KSP1 managed to let most engines exist pretty comfortably in their niches without this quite successfully - I'm not really sure it's worth restricting them even further just to justify the existence of manoeuvring engines. In general, I think that KSP should err on the side of generosity rather than tight restrictions, and this definitely feels it would start to walk down the path of "There is one objectively correct way to build you spacecraft, and any deviation will be heavily penalised". That said, I wouldn't be opposed to there being a minimum thrust limit on some engines at least... it was always a bit odd to me that KSP1's infinite thrust limiting meant you could theoretically use your lifting Mainsail for docking. No opposition to this, though, if anything the game should let you tie any engine you want to RCS. The opposite would be great too, for smaller craft there's no real reason you couldn't tie your RCS engines to your main throttle instead of having any liquid fuel.

Right, but that's not arbitrary. That's physics.

And even better - if you're like me, and not really a fan of far-future interstellar tech in KSP, you can just... not use it. The devs so far seem pretty committed to creating a game where the player isn't forced to do anything arbitrarily.

Right, at the very least, you presumably don't want to use up your rare precious resource when collecting more of that resource...

Oh sure, mass extinction events could act as a "genetic reroll", giving a chance for creatures to evolve that never would otherwise... but there's no guarantee that they'll be better (or worse) in terms of, intelligence for example, than their predecessors. As always, it's difficult to gauge whether it ends up being a net positive versus letting life evolve through the slow route, because our sample size for development of intelligent life is still just 1 (for a particular definition of intelligence)

Right, it's closer to dousing your Petri dish in antibiotics than most natural causes. It's likely to be more of a man-made mass extinction event than anything else. Depends what you mean by "greater" Arguably, the surviving species would simply be differently adapted rather than better in an absolute sense - they might be better at surviving in a more variable climate, but at what genetic cost? In general, I assume the massive drop in biodiversity would outweigh any gains made by individual remaining species - e.g. previous mass extinction events mean we don't have any giant lizards or insects running around anymore (although that might have been inevitable anyway).

What we really need is an Austin-Powers-esque cutscene that plays every time a Kerbal dies, in which a space program ambassador has to explain to their spouse and children how they were killed because someone forgot a parachute again... /j

I doubt it's the only mod that adds this, but Restock replaces the light models and lets you pivot them (the lights aren't listed on the forum post, but they are on the wiki page). I'm tempted to say that's the mod you have installed there given you have the variant colours from Restock too (and they look restock-ish)... but I'm not sure why you've got two versions of each? My install is only showing one of each model.

As always, the questions are: If you can't know one way or the other, does it matter? Even if we could know, would it matter? Part of the problem is we don't really have a concrete idea of what is 'real' in any meaningful sense - what makes my chair any more real than, say, a collection of particles whizzing around in a simulation running on my computer? This feels like some kind of logical fallacy, or an abuse of statistics... but I can't quite work out why. I think the issue is that we just don't have enough information about the conditions - it'd kinda be like a student coming out of an exam, and saying that they have a 50/50 chance of passing, because there's only two possible outcomes: either they pass, or they don't. Obviously that isn't true - the actual outcome is the result of a mixture of complex outcomes, which is clear if you know what an exam is and how they work. But if we had no idea what an exam was, and only that there were two potential outcomes... I still don't think it'd be reasonable to assume a 50/50 split. This applies to everything: a coin flip isn't 50/50 because there's only two options, it's 50/50 because there's two specifically equally likely outcomes. At this point, we know so little about how such a simulation would even work - let alone what a host universe capable of running one would look like - that it's pretty much pointless to try and assign a probability to the possibility. 'Why are we in this universe and not another one' isn't a question we can answer with numbers alone.

Yeah, I think the first and third specials both felt really rushed to me? Like I feel like they both could have used an extra 10-15 minutes to explore some of the more unique concepts that they brought up. The third special in particular feels like the actual conclusion to the story got pushed aside to accommodate... well, that. I dunno, it feels like an older RTD episode would have come up with a more clever and satisfying wrap-up to the whole Toymaker thing. No complaints about the second special though, loved it. Gave me shades of 'Midnight', which is still one of my favourite episodes. Spoilers ahead:

As has been mentioned in the posts above yours, it seems that the issue is that the ship is thrusting for whatever reason even after you've cut engines, with your delta-v going down while your relative velocity is rising, and your TWR sitting at 0.02, which suggests it's not 'phantom forces' per se, but the engines not zeroing out when they should - you can see this in the video, the acceleration is always in the direction you'd expect the engines to be pushing you. This might be due to some weird control setup (flight sticks can act a bit strange with deadzones and all that) or some other control-related issue (does trimming thrust work? I actually don't know...), but it doesn't look like a physics bug. I don't think this is the issue in the second clip shown - the change is way too fast, and not really in the right direction.

You can see this more clearly in the KER windows up above - over the same time period, the TWR is registering as 0.02 rather than 0.00, and the total delta-V drops from 2319m/s to 2317m/s, which suggests fuel is actually being used up.

Now that I think about it, there's an easy way to check - if there is any anomalous acceleration, you would be able to see the orbit changing on the map screen. If it's just natural drift, it'll still happen even when everything's on rails.

As others have explained, this can appear to happen if the two ships have orbits with slightly different altitudes. Consider: you have two ships (Ship 1 & Ship 2) right next to each other, with Ship 1 in a perfectly circular orbit, and Ship 2 just slightly lower, but with the same relative velocity. Lower orbits need a higher velocity to be circular (gravity and all that). Ship 2 has the same velocity as Ship 1, but is in a lower orbit... so it doesn't have enough velocity to stay circular. Instead, Ship 2 has to lose altitude to convert some of that gravitational energy into extra velocity, effectively accelerating from the perspective of Ship 1, both radially and prograde. And because the entire orbit of Ship 2 is within the orbit of Ship 1, it's going to have a shorter orbital period, and the two ships will very quickly fall out of phase, so that effect doesn't just cancel out unfortunately. This absolutely does happen in real life (IIRC, NASA effectively uses this effect in reverse to slowly approach the ISS), but the effects are hugely amplified in KSP because Kerbin is so small, so orbits are shorter and the curvature more extreme. That said, if it's behaving inconsistently, then there might be something buggy going on. It's hard to say without video of what's happening.

Tangentially related, but this is the same reason that Apollo-style Mun landings aren't necessarily efficient in KSP - with the fairly low dV cost, the mass of the extra capsule + landing engine + docking equipment can outweigh the benefit of not lugging your return fuel up and down in a lot of cases.

This is also a lot easier if your target is in an equatorial orbit. Once you start having to worry about inclinations... things get a fair bit trickier.

Genuinely I'd rather the choices be wilder than they are now - I want to see Kerbals with afros and mohawks, practicality be hecked.

The point is more than having a full-sized solar system draws attention to how weird and small the Kerbol system is - having them be that small is a concession made for gameplay rather than a deliberate lore choice. You don't really notice how tiny the Kerbol planets are because there's nothing to compare them to (unless you know enough about the game to know they're scaled down obviously) and they feel pretty big still. The planets as they are now are clearly supposed to be roughly analogous to real-life planets with some slightly cartoony elements, having those same real-life planets but at full-size would create some... interesting tonal issues for the base game. As for modding though, I'd be very disappointed if it wasn't possible and relatively easy to add the real-life system as a separate system. That's exactly the kind of thing that mods are for, and would probably be something I might try out for a challenge every so often.

It's a bit hard to tell from that picture (I'm not sure exactly when you separated / the design of the probe & rocket), but I think this might a drag issue? A light, non-aerodynamic probe would experience a lot a drag as soon as it's released into the atmosphere, slowing it down quite a lot. While your rocket (even empty) is probably heavier and more aerodynamic, and is able to "punch" through the atmosphere a lot easier. I can't find any examples now, but I remember that Scott Manley used to keep his empty boosters attached a little longer while in atmosphere if he wasn't thrusting, for this exact reason. As for that experiment you've linked - I don't know the specifics because I'm not familiar with Tweakscale, but @Lisias might be able to clarify - it looks like the result there was that the higher cross-sectional area was what was slowing down the larger booster enough to counteract the additional momentum from the higher weight, which isn't always necessarily true for every design. Downwards acceleration from gravity is the same no matter your weight is.

Bah, you can't toss a pizza in cosmology without hitting some new tension or another...

It's just a little bit of extra feedback - another way of the game telling you "yep these two parts are definitely the same diameter, good job".

This actually would be really neat. Like having a highlighted 'ring' around the attach node that shows up when you pick up a part that corresponds to highlighted rings on open nodes of the same diameter would be neat too, just as a bit of extra visual feedback. Even just a small indicator next to parts that have the same node(s) size as the part you've just placed would go a long way - now that I think about it, having a coloured ring around the last placed open node that corresponds to the diameter indicator colour in the parts list would work. If it's subtle enough, it won't confuse new players, but could be an extra visual shorthand to knowing exactly what diameter you've placed, to help speed up construction for more experienced players.

Tangential, but I do find it somewhat funny that we're at the point where we can reasonably simulate galaxy and dark matter web formation... but clouds are still something that totally eludes us.