KSK

The Ant is too weak to get you off the launchpad but, as others have pointed out, is a great little engine for other purposes. The radial Ant is also a bit weak for a main lifter stage but does just fine as an upper stage if you really want. I built this as a slightly snarky response to a thread complaining about the engine rebalance.

Quantum mechanics can be made consistent with Special Relativity but not (yet) General Relativity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_quantum_mechanics

This seems a bit contradictory. If the mobile lab allows easy unlocking of the tech tree I would have thought that the game becomes less grindy, not more? Up to a point. Some things would clearly be unbalanced, for example your example of a 20 TWR, 2000 ISP engine in Tier 0 (which I'm guessing is the point you were making ). However, in general, I would say that options are more important than balance in a sandbox game. As stated on another thread, I'm quite happy with a game providing easy options and harder options for the player to choose from. For the MPL - if players really want to timewarp their way to a completed tech tree then that's their choice.

On a more serious note. KerbMav - thanks for both parts of the that comment. Me too. Mac - you pretty much nailed it with your thoughts on business, influence and emotion. Any reasonably local manufacturing shops looking to upgrade their equipment might well be inclined to donate their old gear to a good home for example. GluttonyReaper - yep, definitely don't want to bog the story down. ("Now as you know, Professor, we kerbals have a very sensible economic system...") but I am wondering if I could add a couple of additional references in as per macdjord's second post. I do like the idea of work coming to a temporary halt because the VAB is being rented out for a fundraiser, not to mention Geneney going quietly nuts in the background, making sure that their donors don't trip over anything, break anything, cut themselves on sharp nose-cones etc. etc. VelocityPolaris - I've thought those through too. I'll spare you the details though, unless anyone wants the low-down on assorted kerbal booze?

You do realise that I've now got a vision of Jeb et al. driving around the capital in the kerbal equivalent of brightly coloured Mini Coopers. "Now hang on lads - I've had a great idea" - Jebediah Kerman. "Bob - I only told you to blow the Kerm blighted doors off!" - Wernher Kerman. The KIS -- 'this aint a self preservation society....'

Excellent engineers build spacecraft from junk.

$40 for something you love and that you've spent hundreds of hours on sounds like a steal to me. As hobbies go, that's pretty darn cheap. It's also a comparatively rare beast - a computer game where what you see is what you get. No DRM, no in-game purchases, no microtransactions, advertising or any other wretched attempt to nag you into spending more money. If spending $40 on a computer game isn't in someone's discretionary spending budget, I can completely understand and sympathise with that. Do your research, play the demo, watch some YouTube videos and make an informed purchase (or not). But I don't think $40 is an unreasonable price.

I like this idea, although I think I prefer cwood's version to Red Iron Crown's because it seems more generally applicable. Another possible answer (and feel free to forum-slap me if this is already a thing) would simply be to add keyboard controls for the maneuver nodes for opening them, sliding them along their orbit and adjusting their control handles. That way you can drop your node, focus view on your target and use the keyboard for fine tuning. Not quite as elegant but perhaps a little easier to implement?

And has been on several occasions, going as far back as the Soviet Luna 10 probe. Google for gamma ray spectroscopy and take a look. Fraid I don't see a need for this either, at least not in stock. Forgetting about realism for a moment, it's also not quite true that nuke engines are the only efficient way of travelling between planets. Now that ISRU is a stock feature, all your giant interplanetary ship needs is a refueling lander. Once you don't have to carry all your fuel with you from the start, you have a lot more flexibility about which engines you can use.

This. Especially since there's a similar in-game tutorial contract for rendezvous as well. Also, as far as I know, the first orbital docking attempt was on Gemini 6 - and would have been between two separately launched spacecraft, Gemini and (unmanned) Agena had the Agena not been destroyed at launch. The first successful docking attempt was on Gemin 8 - again with a separately launched Agena docking target. Edit: I like the mission success text for both contracts.

I'd say that the point of the game is to have fun playing it however you wish. Efficiency to the exclusion of all else is a very overrated way of playing any game in my opinion. There's no problem with a game that offers easy and boring strategies alongside complex and interesting strategies, if anything it makes the game better. It lets the players that want to boil KSP down to a set of cookie-cutter strategies do so if they wish, whilst providing plenty of options for players that want to take a different path. [Diablo 2 was a great example of this. Plenty of cookie cutter builds for those that wanted them, lots of (objectively inferior) variant builds for those that wanted something a bit different. Diablo 3 caters much more to the cookie-cutter crowd and (in my opinion) is a poorer game for it.] Besides, between the difficulty settings and the various debugging tools available, KSP has a whole spectrum of options to make the game as easy or as challenging as you like. The MPL is just another one of those options. If players can't resist pressing what they perceive to be the 'I win' button, that's their problem. It's not a problem with the game.

According to NASA, GRaND can detect "major, rock forming elements, such as O, Mg, Si, Al, Ca, Ti, and Fe; incompatible elements, including K and Th, detected by gamma ray emissions from the decay of long-lived radioisotopes; and H, C, N, and Cl, which are constituents of ices and products of aqueous alteration of silicate minerals." So most, if not all, of the elements you'd be interested in and you could perhaps infer the presence of some simple compounds too. That NASA page includes a pretty decent summary of the science behind GRaND too. Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometers can be used to detect elements heavier than fluorine via particle induced X-ray emission. They can also detect elements via Rutherford backscattering spectrometry and I would expect heavier elements to be easier to detect by RBS than lighter elements.

My incentive is that I don't want to send my kerbals on a one way trip. I don't care about how much science they could generate - there are other ways of doing that. It's a sandbox game (yes even Career mode) there doesn't need to be - and nor should there be - built in incentives for every player behaviour.

Delivered the orbital scooter to my Munar observatory. Sadly it doesn't have quite enough delta-V to land and get back to orbit, so the legs ended up being a bit superfluous. Still meets its primary design goal of being a lightweight spacecraft for carrying out sensor scans from orbit and Val seems happy enough with it.

Mainly because I see the kerbals as not being terribly acquisitive and their global economy as being fairly socialist. Kerm controlled agriculture is tremendously efficient and almost entirely green. I expect night soil is used as fertiliser but otherwise there's no real need for pesticides, herbicides or artificial fertilisers. So quantity of food is not a problem and much of the environmental degradation associated with intensive agriculture is avoided too, so clean water isn't so much of an issue either. I've also tried to paint the kerbals as being pretty environmentally aware (again because of their history with the Kerm), so kerbal overpopulation is at least implied to be a non-issue. Social mobility between kerman and kermol is high, not least because all kerbals necessarily go kermol for a short time if they wish to reproduce and (as touched on in 'Echoes of Time') relationships between the two castes are cordial, which makes food distribution quite fair and efficient. So any individual kerbal will normally have easy access to the basics of civilised life - food, water, shelter, the company of other kerbals - and any kerman who's seriously down on his or her luck can go kermol without fear of stigma. So Kerbin is a nice place to live but it's also far from perfect. The various Regionalities are at peace but operate on a 'trust but cut the cards' level. I recall mentioning in one chapter that the Doreni in particular had something of a political reputation. The kerbal government (as mentioned on a number of occasions) is seen as slow and bureaucratic, which leads to frustrations and ill-advised courses of action arising from those frustrations. Anything other than the basics needs to be paid for of course and so the kerbals do have companies, corporations and a market economy. However the social safety net provided by the Kerm tends to moderate the gross excesses of a market economy. At the end of the day, kerbals choose to work to buy nice things - they don't have to work to put bread on the table. So they have a lot more free time to volunteer for 'rule of cool' projects such as a junkyard space program. It also means that any kerbal captains of industry who consistently pay themselves a large and undeserved bonus are likely to come in the next morning and find that half of their workforce have gone kermol overnight. As a result, the kerbal economy includes a much higher percentage of non-profits and partnerships than the human economy - if a company is paying it's bills and paying its employees it's seen as doing well. If it's making a modest profit on top of that, it's doing very well. And remember that good pay for a kerbal can be relatively low since it doesn't have to be a living wage. Net result, wage costs on Kerbin are a lot lower and so the cost of doing business on Kerbin is also lot lower. Combine that with modest profit expectations (and relatively restrained shareholder expectations (if such exist) ) and kerbal companies can be much more a vehicle for organising large numbers of kerbals to do something amazing rather than a vehicle for making vast amounts of money. Even so, the KIS and Rockomax will need funding as you point out. Rockomax funding largely comes from their satellite business, where they have government and corporate customers. I tried to imply this with references to new communication satellites and during the CORDS negotiations, Ademone revealed that they'd received a government contract to launch a Melvey Belt mapping probe. KIS funding is more precarious and comes from a grab bag of sponsorship deals, Space Centre rents (it makes for an extremely prestigious conference centre, especially if the KIS can provide a couple of tame kerbonauts for your event), entry fees on launch days, commercial rents on launch days, sundry other enterprises such as their spaceflight museum, and private donations. They do also enjoy a high level of public support (which helps to generate those private donations), the kerbals in general have sustained a much higher interest in their space program than humans managed to - witness the kermol village gathering around its TV set to see the first images of the Mun, and all the KIS pennants etc. on display when James and Sherfel came to Barkton. TL: DR - My version of Kerbin is probably more idealistic than realistic but I have tried to avoid making them too Space Elvish.

Gotcha - thanks. I'm used to thinking of hydrogen-bonded structures in a geometric sense (my PhD was on designing hydrogen-bonded structures starting from small organic molecules), so my first thought was 'the hydrogen bonds are the crystal bonds' but I figured you'd know that anyway. And yes - RMS is a better measurement - good point.

Agree with all of that, although I'm not sure (honest question, not a snark) what you mean by crystal bonds in ice? Edit - this is why I used the term 'net velocity'. Not sure how correct it is technically, but I was trying to cover bond vibrations, where the vibrating particles spend half their time going one way and half their time going the other way - hence zero velocity on average. I don't like the term 'destroying energy' partly because it's just wrong and looks ridiculous in a supposedly scientific discussion thread, but mostly because it leads to unhelpful arguments where it's not clear if the poster is using 'destroys energy' as a synonym for 'energy is not conserved' or whether there's a genuine misunderstanding at play. Take. "In this particular example, if two colliding particles of equal masses impacted and had zero velocity afterwards, it would be destroying energy, so it's not possible." Whatever interpretation you put on 'destroying energy' that statement is incorrect. Anyway, we seem to agree on the main points so I'll stop here.

I know. Not to mention general style issues. Plus - and this seems like as good a time as any to fess up - a fairly large plot inconsistency in "The Seed" when it comes to planting Gerselle's Grove. I think it'll be quite an easy fix but in the meantime, yes, I do need to do a general re-read and edit on the whole story. Edit: In the meantime, as and when I get time, I'll run through the early chapters and fix the more egregious punctuation and paragraphing snafus, as well as standardising on italics for characters thoughts. I don't want to start retconning stuff at this stage, so no wholesale editing but improving readability would be good.

First of all, lets agree to ditch this nonsense about destroying energy (and yes, I carelessly used that phrase myself - sorry). Energy can't be destroyed, merely converted from one form to another. In this particular example, we're talking about a cup of water and yes, in principle, two water molecules can collide and have zero velocity afterwards. Please note that they won't have come to a complete halt - you'll still have bond vibrations - but add up the velocity vectors of all six atoms in those two molecules and the total will be zero. The kinetic energy of both molecules before the collision has been converted to a new chemical bond (in this case a hydrogen bond), which will have kinetic and potential energy associated with it - think two balls connected by a spring, and any excess energy will be radiated away. Granted, for this to happen, the two molecules have to be moving pretty slowly but that's OK because in this example, we're assuming that the water is at zero degrees, so for a reasonable range of pressures it's going to be at it's freezing point, which is exactly the point at which the molecules will start sticking together as described above. More generally, if it wasn't possible for particles to impact and have zero net velocity afterwards, then nothing would ever be able to freeze. Those particles won't necessarily have equal mass - think nucleation, where a tiny ice crystal grows, essentially by having water molecules stick to it - but the idea is the same in each case - particles collide, momentum is conserved, kinetic energy is converted to chemical bond, excess energy radiates away.

Of course. But it still makes the point that the second part of the statement "Momentum and energy must be conserved; and if both particles has zero velocity, energy would be destroyed." is wrong. Zero velocity does not mean that energy has been destroyed, only that kinetic energy has been converted to some other form.

Kinetic energy would be destroyed but it's entirely possible for that kinetic energy to be converted into another form. A particle accelerator is the most extreme example of this where, very loosely speaking, the particles collide at equal and opposite velocities and turn into a tiny fireball which then cools down to create a bunch of new particles. E=mc2, the kinetic energy of the colliding particles is converted to mass. In a less extreme, everyday example, the particles collide at the right orientation, and with sufficient energy to overcome an activation barrier and merge to form a new particle. Bits of that larger particle may fly off in the process. Kinetic energy is converted to energy locked up in new chemical bonds and/or kinetic energy of the bits that flew off. In other words, a chemical reaction happens.

Random thought but do you also need to include fuel supplies for the base in the same way that you do for some space stations? If so, it might be the completion of your living space requirements once the second Hitchhiker is attached that's triggering a second message to remind you about the fuel requirement. Or more likely, it might be a bug.

If we're being picky, then photons aren't charged.

Very rough rule of thumb - I launch when the target vehicle is a little off the west coast of the landmass on which KSC is on east coast. I very rarely get a precise rendezvous but I'm normally close enough that a couple of orbits is all I need to catch up.

All hail Xacktar - and his fine singing voice. Me likey!