longcat

NASA "unlocked" the tech to make the shuttle, but Rockwell was the company which built it. If Kerbal Space Program is at all realistic, there are a lot more contractors than KSP employees in most of the buildings.

I almost exclusively use 1.25 meter parts. That was the only size when I started playing, and I'm still wary about that newfangled mainsail engine. I don't care what you have to say about part counts, efficiency, or realism: an asparagused 1.25 meter rocket just feels more Kerbal.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to OhioBob again.

The NASA-military link goes deeper than that. Projects Mercury and Gemini used modified Air Force (and a few Army) rockets to get to space. The Soviet space program was equally dependent on ICBMs. If anything, manned spaceflight was a happy externality of the arms race.

I think the engines we have are fine. With that said, I'd like to see a smaller, less powerful jet engine for planes. I like a gigantic plane as much as the next guy, but sometimes I just want to build something small which doesn't have a 7.0 TWR.

Back when I was in 8th grade, we didn't have these fancy video programs to simulate a space program. All we could do was count down from 10 and throw rocks as high in the air as we could. The rocks usually didn't make it into orbit, and they regularly fell back down and hit one of us in the head. Space travel was rough back then.

I landed, realized I forgot to add a ladder, and decided to take off. Since this was my first launch from anywhere other than the launch pad, I instinctively hit the space bar. The pod decoupled and pathetically fell off the rocket. It wasn't my finest hour. Edited to add: this was before multi-person pods, so my rescue mission was the same rocket as before with a ye olde tricoupler on top; this had Bill's pod, an empty pod, and a lot of ASAS to keep the stupid think controllable.

I started right after they added the Mun in 0.12. It took me a while to actually land there.

A body's SOI is the region in which it is the dominant gravitational influence. There are no objects outside of the Kerbol system, so a distant object would never find a more dominant gravitational influence.

The 20 July plot to kill Hitler?

I use it for tedious things that I don't really find very enjoyable, like launching or holding an orientation during a burn. I have fun planning transfers and landing, so I just do those myself.

I'd hope anywhere on Kerbin would work. It's not like the Apollo astronauts splashed down off the coast of Florida.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that an unhealthy amount of your self esteem is based on being good at a single player video game.

I'm not disputing that it was within the exact text of the rules. I'm saying that it was against the purpose of the challenge. The point is (and was) to see how far you could fling a Kerbal. You ignore the point completely if you just build a giant rocket, put a Kerbal on a ladder, put it on an escape trajectory, and award yourself infinite points. It's like bringing a calculator to a third grade multiplication test. Even if the teacher forgot to say it wasn't allowed, you're missing the whole point.

There's a difference between "I didn't break any rules from the OP" and "I intentionally disregarded the entire purpose of the challenge in a failed attempt to appear clever."

Recreating the crashed capsule from the menu screen. I don't think the thread survived the crash, but the winning entry was the most awesome post I've seen on a message board.

"New ideas," like finding efficiency through something other than intake spamming? I think you're arguing against yourself now.

I'd just spend a while making a replica of the Saturn V (this was before docking, so the CSM doubled as the lander). The first test flight went so well that I decided to pull an Apollo 8 and go to the Mun. That worked well, I decided to land. Unlike all of my previous attempts with other ships, I finally landed on the Mun without crashing. Since this was my first time to actually survive a landing, I immediately hit the EVA button and let Jeb have his small step for Kerbal. Since this was just a test flight, I'd forgotten to attach the ladder. So after his giant leap, he was stuck on the ground. This was my first ever EVA, so I spent almost a half hour trying to jump back into the capsule before I finally made it. I was so excited to finally get back in that I immediately hit space bar to launch the rocket. Unfortunately, that just activated the next stage, so the capsule pathetically popped off of the decopuler and the rocket stayed on the Mun. On the upside, the rescue mission at least went well.