KSK

Both. Reusable drop pods away, sir! Edit. It's worse than that - he's also started a company to develop neural interfaces. If he starts another one to develop high capacity artificial muscles then that's the time to get really scared... ...or resigned to our battlemech piloting overlords.

Nope - a vocal subset of players hate them and even then it depends on the genre. MMOs for example have largely gone over to a free-to-play model supported by... guess what? Why? Because players have rejected the old subscription based models but seem quite happy to pay out for hats, pets and goodness knows what other cosmetic knick-knacks. In principle, KSP would be exceptionally easy to add microtransactions to, assuming you have the backend systems needed to handle the payments. Bored of orange spacesuits and want to have your kerbals go up in natty retro-futuristic Mercury style suits? That'll be $1 please. Or how about these nice 2001: A Space Odyssey themed ones? Those are 2$. Yeah, sorry about the added cost but we needed to license the design first. Right over here we have these StarWars themed LV-Ns. Same stats as a regular LV-N but they look just like an X-Wing engine nacelle. Only $2 for a set of four! What's that - you want Star Trek themed stuff? Well just step this way my friend - do we have the wares for you... There are no end of purely cosmetic parts you could add to KSP for a small price. Keep the stats the same to avoid any accusations of KSP going 'play to win' and you're golden. Missions will be scoreable if I remember rightly, so you wouldn't want the microtransaction parts to offer any unfair advantages. In practice, I think two things (probably more) would get in the way. 1) All the really popular themed parts are likely to come with licensing costs attached and 2) I can imagine it being difficult to keep the game moddable whilst preventing modders from adding their own versions of the official microtransaction parts for free.

Nah - that's not tin foil - it's the Low Mass Engine Protective Cover. (made of tinfoil.... shhhh)

Well alrighty then! One booster on the ground, one flight-proven Dragon back in space where it belongs. That landing never gets old and that view of Dragon coasting away from the second stage with Earth in the background... yeah that's what I'm talking about!

Good spot - cheers.

Mine aren't too bad but I suspect that's more by accident than design. I wouldn't call them janky but I wouldn't call them flush either. But yeah - that first stage has some weight behind it. That carries on all the way through - I can hold the completed model over my head like a javelin and it never feels in danger of falling apart on me. The clips and general seating between the various stages are pretty solid!

Apropos nothing much at all, I've started reading this blog on writing. Example post linked for reference. http://www.chrisbrecheen.com/2013/05/mailbox-should-i-outline-my-book.html He tends to be blunt and fairly sweary but he can also be pretty funny and makes some good points. Or at least makes quite a few points which I agree with, which may not necessarily be the same thing.

Turn your eyes to steel?

Hmmm, Good points well made. Next bit of random speculation then - what happens if a rocket gets hit by lightning? I don't imagine it does any electrical systems much good (it certainly did a number on Apollo 12) but how important is that for an intercontinental ballistic missile compared to a launch vehicle flying a relatively complex trajectory to orbit? Honest question - can you just point an ICBM in the right direction off the pad (or at least once it's clear of the silo) and then just let it burn till it runs out of propellant? Because if you could, then frying your guidance system halfway through the launch won't matter that much. Genuinely curious, because if ICBMs are indeed all weather launch vehicles, what's so special about them (in broad strokes if not exact engineering details ) compared to space launchers and why doesn't that technology transfer across?

I'm not so sure they were - you'd think that ability would have found it's way into launch vehicles too by now. Pure guesswork here but I'm thinking that if you're in a place where those ICBMs are flying then losing one or two to weather probably isn't going to change your day very much anyway.

You've got some good names on that list for sure but I could add another half dozen 'others' without having to think too hard, and probably more if I checked back through the Fanworks library. Way too many to pick a favourite, or even a handful of favourites.

Ah'm given her all she's got Cap'n! She cannae take any more!

I'm maybe a bit out of touch but I recall starionkeeping already being a thing with satellite constellations unless you have a lot of patience setting up your orbits or just edit the persistence file. Oh - and there's doubtless a mod for handling it too - somehow there always is. I really don't see atmospheric drag being a big deal for stationkeeping especially if you can avoid the problem altogether by boosting to a higher orbit.

Got mine early thanks to a tip-off on these forums. For unknown reasons, it was available in a couple of UK stores outside of the Lego stores, before the 1st June launch. I was lucky (and fast) enough to get my order in and had the box in my sweaty little hands on Monday. Took me a few hours to build and as you say, documentation takes time too! As you say, not a terribly difficult build. I made one mis-step lining up one set of sub-builds on the S1C stage but that was easily corrected. It was a very elegant build though, full of clever little techniques and with a remarkable lack of exposed studs on the finished model. Look forward to the rest of your screenies!

Not sure about a cross-over but I've long held that KSP could learn some lessons from SMAC. Probably won't happen but a man can dream.

Thanks folks. Looking forward to seeing @Madrias's predictions, especially as I'm not entirely sure myself how the next few chapters are going to pan out. I thought I did but it seems I've run out of map and am now just looking at a mostly blank space with a couple of (possibly misleading) trails drawn on it and 'here be krakens' scrawled over the rest. Which is good.

Has anyone got a good supply of rags please? Looks like we need to clean the bull products off the pitchforks. Would be terribly unhygienic otherwise.

I have the pictures, but yours are better than mine. Carry on, sir!

What would I like to see added to KSP? In a word - immersion. Which is a bit of a nebulous concept so let me give some examples of things I'd like to add to improve immersion. Usual caveat applies to any of these suggestions that can be implemented through existing mods - I don't care and would like to see them in the stock game anyway. 1. Sound design. Long due for an overhaul. If I'm launching a rocket I want it to sound like a rocket rather than a toddler blowing an extended raspberry. If I'm in space then no sounds please unless I'm flying in IVA mode. Then let's have some decent background noises - coolant pumps, fans, RCS thrusters firing etc. Bonus points if those thrusters sound louder from inside a Mk1 lander can than a Mk1-2 capsule. 2. Launch effects. RealPlumes or something similar please. Stock SRBs aren't too bad but the current stock graphics for liquid fuelled engines are massively underwhelming. The Mainsail allegedly has enough power to rival small nations - it sure doesn't look like it. 3. Contracts. Let me put faces to names here. What does the CEO of Rockomax actually look like? It would be nice to have Civ style talking heads for the various companies. Also - lets have some background info on these companies, even if that's only cosmetic. Better yet make that info easily moddable (including an option to delete them) for those that get bent out of shape by the mere mention of 'story' in-game. 4. Accepting that KSP is unlikely to ever have an official background story, at least give us the tools to create our own. Give us Final Frontier style service logs for our kerbonauts. Have the Companies actually react to what we do in-game. If I muck up a string of contracts for Rockomax, let's have that talking head CEO I mentioned above, get more and more grumpy. If I fail a contract for one of the smaller companies, maybe they go bust. 5. If I'm running Kerbin's first space program (which I clearly am because I'm racking up a string of world firsts) then what were all these companies doing before I came along? Why not have companies spawn (for want of a better word) and grow, depending on how I run my space program. Give them some history and update that history depending on what I do. Maybe Probodobodyne start off as two telecoms engineers working for another company. Inspired by your first Duna probe, they decide they want to found their own satellite company. Probodobodyne then spawns as a contract provider and starts offering satellite related contracts. Bonus points if those contracts happen in any sort of logical progression. Maybe the Comsat market has been largely cornered by another company, so Probodobodyne decide to contract you to set up their spiffy Munar mapping cluster. Then they progress to offering you targeted landing missions to drop their ore detecting landers at strategic spots. Assuming you choose to do that for them, they team up with another company to build mining facilities - and start offering appropriate contracts for those. TL: DR - make me believe there's more to Kerbin than a field, a handful of buildings and a string of random requests from Gene.

If that really is the future of this product then count me out. I bought into KSP for those last two letters. Fair play to those that do enjoy such things but I'm not particularly interested in boats, subs, trains, replica jet fighters and all the rest of it. I do have a lot of respect for the artists who build working clocks, turbojets and other pieces of machinery within KSP. Again, not something that I'm that interested in (or likely have the skill and patience for) but I certainly respect that skill and patience in others. For me KSP is all about flying rockets. Edit. For clarity, I'm not particularly interested in boats etc. within the confines of the present game. I would definitely be interested in a new Kerbal Sail Program game for example but only if it had good game aspects to go with any sandbox aspects.

It always seemed slightly odd to me that a game with such an avowed lack of backstory makes recreating historical missions a centrepiece of its first expansion pack. *shrugs* What do I know.

No problem - I trust you. After all, you swear you're not out to take over the world and you haven't...*checks nervously for black helicopters flown by oddly vitreous pilots*... yet.

I'm wondering if the Frontier Developments team have seen this? I'd think they'd be all over more colourful - but scientifically plausible - gas giants for Elite: Dangerous.

No way - that there is the Eye of the Kraken (insert backing track to taste). And with apologies to all the poets out there... Lo the Kraken spake, by the star-dogged Mun, Twas deaf to groans or sighs, Turned its face with a ghastly pang, And cursed us with its eye.

The ISS fragrance isn't all that great anyway from what I hear. Plus astronauts are big boys and girls - I figure they'll get over any reused Dragon odour pretty quickly