KSK

I'm in a similar position with my 1.2 game - I'm about 90 days in, have got a couple of Duna contracts* but a decent transfer window won't open for a good while yet. I plan to wait for the transfer window. In the meantime, I'll set up crew rotations on my stations orbiting Kerbin, the Mun and Minmus and timewarp in smaller chunks between crew swap missions. That way it doesn't feel quite so much like I'm going AWOL for months at at a time. The jump from flights taking several days to flights taking several months has always been a problem for me with KSP. * Including one which I can't wait to try. Put an outpost on Duna. It needs to be able to hold 9 kerbals. It needs to include a science lab. And it needs to be on wheels! Current plan is to do this SpaceX style with a properly sized ship capable of getting from LKO to the surface of Duna and back, probably refueling in-situ. Giant mobile base will be launched separately. This could even turn into a staged Elcano challenge - land a crew near the base, drive them around Duna until the transfer window back to Kerbin opens, bunny-hop the ship over to the lab, collect the crew and head home. The next crew fly in, take the base a bit further, rinse and repeat.

I'll get right on that. Starting when the clocks strike thirteen.

Not sure a screenshot is required to be honest. A 100 ton station isn't going anywhere with ion engines. Not in any sort of reasonable timescale anyway. Liquid fuel engines for sure, possibly nuclear engines if you have them in 0.25.

Go Green, build a couple of Psi troops and have yourself an endlessly regenerating army to bug the AI with. I'm right with you on the Believers though, although luckily they tended to be incompetent as well as aggravating. And as soon as I worked my way up Mind-Machine Interface on the tech tree - well anything that was left of Miriam's troops tended to melt under an unending wave of Chaos Choppers. Strangely, it was Morgan who always used to irritate/amuse me. "You won't let me rip you off - then I must declare unending war on you." Because killing off your customers is such an efficient business strategy.

Does this mean that we get a Fanworks Tuesday instead or is the Fanworks slot being replaced with something else?

Go on then - I'll bite. Which were your favourite factions and why? We'll go with vanilla SMAC rather than SMACX for now - mainly because I don't recall a lot about the expansion factions. Actually, I'll start by flipping that on it's head. My least favourite factions were the Spartans, the Believers and the Peacekeepers. Ideologically I wasn't much for the first two - and I found them difficult to play as well. Not really a surprise since I always preferred a builder type game to an early military, conquest style game. The Peacekeepers, I could completely get behind but they were the classic jack of all trades, master of none, so I found them quite dull to play.

Well you live and learn - +rep for the interesting information! Thanks.

Neutral hydrogen still has a magnetic moment so you can, in principle, trap it in a magnetic field. See this 2007 article in the CERN Courier for example. The bit I'd question (after the difficulties involved in actually making enough of it) is whether you could store antihydrogen at a high enough pressure to give you any significant advantage over just storing antiprotons (which I presume could only be stored at reasonably low pressures due to electrostatic repulsion.) The authors do appear to be reputable physicists - see here for details. Admittedly, that's from their own company webpage but there's enough verifiable information in there that I'd be surprised if somebody somewhere hasn't done a bit of fact checking, particularly given the publicity that this Kickstarter has had. I haven't looked terribly hard but I haven't found any 'zomg fake physicists and their crazy kickstarter' type articles. So I'm leaning towards delusional rather than scam More kindly, I'm leaning towards 'wildly optimistic' rather than 'delusional'.

Agreed. Fantastic game. And speaking of quotes, I was always rather fond of this one from the good Provost: "Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts." Heard after researching 'Intellectual Integrity'. Darn you Northstar - time to dig out my copy of SMACX tonight.

'Smaller amounts' of anti-matter is still milligrams of the stuff and from the Kickstarter: "For the purpose of interstellar missions, the quantity of antimatter is too large to store as charged elementary particles. Therefore, we propose to transport the antimatter initially in the form of antihydrogen (an antiproton with an orbiting positron)" If people want to put their money into speculative research then I applaud them. If people back this in the expection of producing a working engine let alone a working interstellar probe, then I think they're going to be sadly disappointed.

Not really fussed to be honest, provided that the description doesn't include any references to mint ice cream or other snacks that need to be 'explained'.

Umm, I think the best we can hope for is that poor Val actually gets back from the Mun with her brains more-or-less unscrambled by the experience. The ol' Kraken was still going strong in the sequel after all. I'm guessing 'Cage of the Kraken' for the third story. We've seen the end (or at least the end of the beginning - lots of flags left to plant on other worlds around other stars), we're seeing the prelude to that ending - but we haven't really seen the beginning. There was a lot of stuff in 'Heavy is the Head' for example...

People 'like' posts for all sorts of reasons and presumably will 'dislike' them for all sorts of reasons too. Not all of those reasons will have anything to do with the quality or factual accuracy of the post. I see this a lot on the Ars Technica forums. It's impossible to tell whether somebody has downvoted a post because it's actually incorrect, because they disagree with the reasoning set out in it, or because it simply doesn't comport with their world view. Therefore I think a 'dislike' button would be counterproductive. It doesn't tell you anything useful and it's just an incitement to add unnecessary drama.

I think methane based biochemistry would be so completely different to terrestrial water based biochemistry that your Titans are unlikely to look much like humans at all, let alone have the same skin colours or red blood. For example, I found this article which suggests that silicon based life (which would almost certainly look very different to carbon based life ) might be possible on Titan. Quoting for convenience: "The geologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch (Washington State University-USA) and the biologist Louis N. Irwin (University of Texas-USA) recently studied the possible pathways followed by life on other worlds, as alternatives to life-as-we-know-it on Earth (Schulze-Makuch and Irwin 2004). They questioned the possibility of a silicon-based life, a substitute to the carbon-based life known on our planet, a hypothesis previously suggested in the 1960s by V.A. Firsoff (Firsoff 1963, 1974). The best form offered by silicon for an exo-life would be a series of silicon hydrides, the silanes, consisting of Si-H and Si-Si single bonds. However the conditions required to make possible a silane-based life seem to be very restrictive: little or no water in liquid form, very low temperatures, little or no oxygen, suitable solvent such as methane, restricted abundance of carbon (Schulze-Makuch and Irwin 2004). According to these authors, the Saturnian moon Titan could meet these criteria, except the low abundance of carbon (but perhaps the cold and reducing conditions on Titan could lead silicon to have an advantage over carbon). However, no silane has been detected in Titan’s atmosphere, in spite of more than five years of closed observation of Titan" On a different note, this discussion (started by a writer who was also wanting some detail about methane based life-forms) has some interesting posts on the problems of dealing with metabolic waste. Wikipedia also has a (very) short article on alternative biochemistries which will hopefully have some useful links for you. Sounds like an interesting story!

Yup. But not knowing anything much about the field, "blob of field-reversed configuration plasmoid" looked like pure technobabble. So I looked a bit deeper just in case.

Had a quick look at the first paper and it looks pretty detailed and was submitted to a scientific conference by a reputable university. So I'm presuming it's not another fantasy 'we can break physics plz?' space drive. Although I honestly don't know enough (or indeed much at all) about the subject matter to properly comment. I think @shynung put his(?) finger on the main question though - power requirements.

Yes. Quite a few. Aren't search engines wonderful? Summary. Yes, certain sets of brainwaves appear to be affected by cellphones. However, as far as I can tell, no clinically adverse effects have been reported and brainwaves (or EEGs) are a pretty crude indicator of neural function, so it's very hard to tell what's actually happening to the brain when exposed to cellphone radiation.

I did. I laughed. Thanks!

It's definitely a small thing (and slightly cliched KSP but I still like it ). The doors on the side of the experiment storage canister. "Mystery Goo", "Test Tubes", "Duct Tape". Presumably the duct tape is for field expedient repairs to the test tubes after Jeb tries working with them in his EVA suit. And another big thumbs up for the navball setting for the map screen.

Settings ---> General ----> Left hand column ----> second button from the top 'Show Space Center Crew'. Deselect it.

Hey folks. I had this problem too - turning off the ground crew seems to have fixed it, or at least made it a lot better. Kind of a shame to have a deserted VAB but I'll take it for the sake of less lag. Hope this helps.

That. Was. Incredible. Fantastic speech, got a signed book and a photo to boot! Had to try really hard not to trip over my own feet in the process or just clam up and look (more) gormless. Thank you Colonel Hadfield - a truly inspirational human being. I am an exceptionally happy (and lucky) space geek right now.

I voted for the first option - start from the beginning. If nothing else I think it's important to point out that a great many cultures (if not all) have had a fascination with the heavens. I agree with monstah though in that the concept of space as a place to explore probably came later. Comets, for example were viewed as heavenly messengers by some cultures, so whilst the ability to foretell them was extremely important, the idea of them as a place to visit probably wasn't.

Yep. I was hoping to play a bit of 1.2 tonight but I'm bailing to get some sleep. I get that a lot of people like watching streams but for me - this was just really dull. Sorry.

Well frankly the community can suck it up. No money in - no Squad produced KSP content out. Isn't it lovely to be so generous with other people's time and money. But provided the community gets a continued supply of free stuff - who cares right? Besides Squad are not a game publisher. They got lucky with KSP - there's absolutely no guarantee that a future Squad released game would be a success, even assuming they were minded to develop one.