KSK

Oh absolutely - and that (pretty minimal) framework is the main reason I love writing about KSP. There's very little actual canon - really just a handful of memes and a lot of names (of parts, companies and characters) - which gives us a vast amount of room for any number of different fanons. Just look at the range of different origin stories on this thread for example! But it's still Squad's framework at the end of the day and only Squad get to say what's canon. Anything us ink-stained wretches contribute is provisional at best.

Capital - I love a good guessing game. Although you could have given us a wee bit more skyline to work with. A nice shot of an old volcanic plug for example... Back on topic, I think sumghai had it right. Fanon is a bit of a contrived portmanteau but its more accurate than canon in this context, since none of this has been approved by Squad. As for my fanon - see the link in my signature for the long version but the main points (if you don't mind extensive spoilers) are probably in this chapter.

I wish them the very best of luck with their trolling. I seriously doubt that any company is going to get into the Huge Inflatable Tower market within the next twenty years, at which the patent expires anyway. (I haven't checked the expiry date of this thing - it's probably more like 16-17 years before it expires but whatever). And if some company does decide to throw sufficient cash at the idea to make it work (which is also highly unlikely) then spending a little more money to have the patent thrown out would be a trivial extra expense.

I don't even have words for this. Correction - I do have words but most of them aren't suitable for this forum. The patent is unadulterated tripe, consisting of nothing more than a vaguely described wishlist of features backed up by some sketchy and highly dubious looking maths, that utterly fails at telling a 'person skilled in the art' how to practice the invention. A 20 kilometre inflatable tower, strung with heavy spinning wheels along it's length and topped with a structure capable of withstanding rocket launches. What could possibly go wrong? I guess the Kerbin Space Agency might be interested in this but I hope to which deity takes your fancy that no Earth-bound investors take this even remotely seriously.

A trip to rMinmus would require more robust radiation shielding than Apollo had simply because of the much longer journey time. It might (I don't know the numbers here) have require better heat shield materials or more accurate reentry techniques than were needed for a return from the Moon. I suspect that it would also have required Earth orbit rendezvous of two fairly complex Saturn V sized payloads, so might have led to better spacecraft designs to make the creation of a Really Large Spacecraft from its component chunks, as reliable as possible. So yes, potentially rMinmus could have driven the development of space technology, although most of it would have been incremental improvements on Apollo era technologies rather than anything truly revolutionary. The major problem would have been lack of funding and political motivation (on either side of the Iron Curtain) for further deep space voyages after the US had beaten the Soviets to the Moon. rMinmus would be an ideal destination for testing potential interplanetary spacecraft since it would be far enough away that post-Apollo technologies would make the trip a lot easier but not so far away that tried and tested techniques couldn't be used as a backup in case the new stuff breaks. However, I doubt it would have been enough to drive the development of those interplanetary spacecraft by itself. Unless our unmanned probes found any large black monoliths in orbit around it of course...

Yeah - on CatastrophicFailure's version of Kerbin, the kerbals developed spaceflight as a way of escaping from the local wildlife once and for all. See also: RatSquirrelFish.

They're no more unforgiving than anything else in KSP really. They're also something a new player can (and will need to) learn to deal with whilst they're still flying sub-orbital or basic orbital missions - which are pretty short and allow for a nice fast learn-rebuild-and-try-again cycle. It's not like a new player is going to be flying out to Duna and only then discovering that they've borked the parachutes. (That's a trick for experienced players only. )

I wouldn't go that far. If someone at Squad has the spare time and inclination to add airships to the stock game then why not? They'd be a bit like rovers, not terribly useful for most things but fun to mess around with. I agree with tater though - I don't see them as being vastly important to the current game.

hail:spork Seriously though - nice logo!

Assuming that that isn't a rhetorical question. Personally: to share kerbal related stuff that I've created and enjoy things that other forum goers have created; to find answers to gameplay problems and hopefully pass on a few answers of my own; to learn about new mods; to catch up on dev notes and to join in the odd debate on the Science sub-forum. Caring about and passing judgement on others' play styles comes about flat last on my list of reasons to be here.

I find them pointless and slightly pathetic attempts at self-justification.

Source please. From the sources I can find, atmospheric CO2 is currently running at just over 400ppm, so about 0.04%. On the other hand average water vapour content of the atmosphere is around 2-3%.

I too would like a two-kerbal pod of some description. Something akin to a Gemini would make sense given the capsules we already have but a Soviet lookalike would be cool too. Lots of reasons why. The Gemini programme had some really cool missions if you like doing historical reenactments in KSP. Bonus points if you're playing sandbox and manage to replicate the (sadly failed) manned maneuvering unit mission. Then, as somebody has already said, the proposed extensions to Gemini provide still more inspiration for fun KSP missions. For career games,having early access to multi- kerbal capsules would be a nice alternative to strapping a probe core to a Mk1. It's maybe a personal quirk but I much prefer to fly tourist or rescue missions with a pilot+passenger or pilot+empty seat configuration rather than sending up an empty Mk1 by remote control. Having early access to pilot+scientist crews would provide another way of earning a bit more science in the early game. It would also let the player train up crews more quickly. I don't think either of those would provide gamebreakingly large gameplay advantages.

I'm flattered! Actually, with a couple of creative liberties it would fit rather well into the First Flight timeline. Although that would be taking creative liberties with history so perhaps something standalone would be more appropriate. The back to front engine though - was nothing of the kind. That was an early experiment in retropropulsion using solid rocket motors. Why else do you think the early in-game SRBs are designated RT (for retro-thruster)?

Writing a diary for Jeb via the comments attached to each saved design in the VAB. Totally pointless but it adds a bit of history to my space program.

I stand corrected - thank you arkie. To Wedge. I take your point but in this case I think it's worth quoting things in full simply because thermodynamics is a science (perhaps more than any other) where there is a lot of room for confusion unless you set out your assumptions clearly. As arkie demonstrates very clearly!

How about quoting all of his reply before getting too snarky. Compression is a change in pressure, which yes, causes heating by Charles's law. However simply maintaining something at a fixed pressure does nothing to change temperature. Which is what Peadar said.

I believe xenon is used because its a noble (so doesn't corrode your electrodes) gas thats easy to ionise. Most of the energy used to run an ion drive goes into ionising the propellant.

According to the ideal gas law - no. This treats the gas molecules ( or atoms in the case of helium) as point particles which don't interact. Clearly this is not the case otherwise gases would never liquify. The van der Waals equation is more accurate and includes empirical terms to take account of molecular size and the forces between them. It's a better approximation but only within a certain range of pressures and temperatures. It predicts that the helium should expand slightly more. Nitrogen molecules are larger and so the attractive (van der Waals) forces between them are higher, so for a given pressure and temperature a mole of nitrogen should occupy less volume than a mole of helium. In practice, the difference is so small that you probably wouldn't notice any difference in balloon size. - - - Updated - - - Not sure about charcoal but flour can be very dangerous for that reason. I've read that it used to be a big danger in medieval mills (where lighting options were limited and usually involved flames) and even today, it's by no means something that the modern day food industry can ignore.

You get what you pay for. Pity people have forgotten that too.

I was thinking this last night as I was clearing out some of my old designs from the VAB. It would be nice to be able to archive your old designs or better yet just to have more ways of organising your design list. I'd quite like to have a set of tabs for probes, LKO craft, deep space craft, space stations and historical craft, for example.

Put my first ever probes around Moho. One with a resource scanner in polar orbit in case I'm ever crazy enough to put a fuel station there. The other in low equatorial orbit.

They're very different games. Harry has pretty much nailed X3 - it's an economic sim /empire building game set in space. It's pretty but the actual spaceflight part is quite limited. All the nicely rendered planets and stuff that you see in the background - well good luck getting to them. Elite Dangerous on the other hand is much less of a building game. It's just you and your ship. You can purchase other ships to play in but you only get to fly one at a time. No capital ships (for you at any rate), no factories, no legions of remotely controlled trading ships and fighters. You can trade, you can mine, you can go shoot stuff, you can participate in galactic politics but - at the moment - it all happens from the cockpit of your ship. It's also a lot more hands-on than X3. The autopilot is very limited and a big part of the game to start with is just learning to fly your ship. However, I've missed out the absolute key part of Elite - exploration. You have the entire galaxy to go and explore, you can go anywhere you like and it's all to scale. It's a little like KSP in that there's (currently - this will be changing when the first expansion hits) not a lot to actually do once you flown to another planet, but the sheer scale of the world around you is just a joy to be in. I've seen binary ice moons, I've flown around hot Jupiters, I've seen volcanic worlds that would put Mustafar to shame. I've seen water worlds and earth-like worlds, I've heard rumours of black holes and neutron stars. I've flown through the rings of gas giants, watching the myriad chunks of ice and rock tumbling past me. I've heard it's even better with the Oculus Rift. If you want a good review of Elite Dangerous, head on over to Ars Technica and search through their old articles. Their reviewer is clearly an E: D fan but he's certainly not a blind fanboi. He points out the flaws (some of which have been addressed - the review is quite old) but he also does a superb job of telling you why the game is so good despite its flaws.

Or hopefully those aliens would take the Ian M Banks approach and decide that turning chunks of the galaxy into swarms of identical machines would be a) too egotistical to be cool and deeply, deeply boring. - - - Updated - - - Now that's a beautiful idea. Humanity finally makes it out to the asteroid belt, uncovers alien probe - and in exchange for a couple of lumps of rock we get our own ambassador to the stars.

Ahh, I see. Thank you. Only up to a point, as I think you well know. And that has nothing at all to do with my argument which was a rebuttal of your assertion that "in order to differentiate between understanding and storytelling, we must be able to make predictions or produce other tangible results. Some things are just logically impossible to understand, while others are practically impossible due to their complexity." Which is just flat out wrong. We can understand everything about a system and yet be unable to make useful predictions about it. In fact it is our deep understanding of that system that leads us to appreciate its unpredictability.