jtyotJOTJIPAEFVJ

Making an ion-only plane was perfectly possible before, and not even very hard: There was a whole challenge thread here if you're interested: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/26137-Challenge-An-aircraft-capable-of-flight-using-ion-engines/ The only thing the new ion buff made was to cut down the time burn time to get anywhere down. That I think is a good thing, since I've never used the stock ion engines on a space craft before, they were so uselessly slow to get anywhere. I don't fully agree with the decrease of electricity usage though, that should've been quadrupled along with the thrust.

You can fix this by going to the part.cfg and changing suspensionSpring = 1 to something larger. Or you can disable the suspension effect completely by setting suspensionUpperLimit to 0. This should let you play the game with landing legs again.

I really like the new system. Since mechjeb doesn't work in the career mode yet, I've had a nice learning curve to go with the tech levels. It's still pretty quick, but not too much so. I did manage a mun landing and return in the first ten flights, so I wouldn't say that's how a new player is going to do things, but it feels just right to me.

This sounds like an exciting thing. I'll be following this. -jtyotJOTJIPAEFVJ

Looking at KSP with process explorer, it does indeed seem to run on 20-something threads. Although it's not a very significant increase in performance compared to what a single-thread program would be. Only one of the threads uses a core fully, while a few others combined use around a third of another core. The highest I got my CPU usage to go with a 600-part craft was 17% with 8 logical cores on an i7. Below is a screenshot showing the CPU usage of each thread. As you can see, only one of the threads does any real work while the rest run some minor tasks. This is most likely caused by Unity disliking multi-threading as mentioned above. Edit: Rendering doesn't seem to be a bottleneck at least on my system. The same test that screenshot is from had GPU usage rise no higher than 33%. This is not so surprising, seeing how KSP doesn't have many fancy graphical effects.

There you have it. Since it doesn't have any control surfaces, I raise the rear landing gear to take off. It also can't really fly since the pod torque is not strong enough to control the plane. Also, I like how you edited out my criticism of your moderating skills. I guess some people just can't take feedback. But I'm sure you're still a great moderator even with your flaws. Edit: Here's the craft file if you want to see it for yourself. I modified it a bit so you can control it with the pod torque. http://sdrv.ms/18EEnwh

That's just plain wrong. You should check your facts before saying something like that as a moderator. I've done this in the past and I can say it works just fine. You just need an ultralight plane that can take off at about 30 m/s and you don't need any control surfaces. As long as you use just one engine and solar panels instead of those reactors, your plane will be light enough to take off using only ions. I have an old picture of a plane I flew on Duna that would fly okay on Kerbin as well using only the ion engine. Sadly I've lost the craft so I can't take a video of flying it on Kerbin, but it shouldn't be hard to replicate. It weighs less than a ton so it can take off at around 16 m/s on Kerbin if memory serves. Edit: ((MOD EDIT)) Please keep all posts civil. Everyone can make a mistake.

I got a design to go as high as 607 m/s without losing the driver or anything else. It can go higher than that but the external seat tends to fall off at that point due to the huge downforce. Highest velocity I got it to go was 749 m/s but that was in the crash result window, the car being a mile long smear on the runway.

Mod note: would be nice if you merged these as I can't edit the posts that haven't been approved yet. Did some further testing and it seems that highest speeds come from exploiting the infiniglide bug and not from the wheels. I stripped all the extra bits off my automobile to cut the weight down to 0.32 tons. I could get that going up to 780 m/s before it broke down. It would keep accelerating even without me throttling the wheels. This challenge seems a bit broken right now.

It looks like lightweight works rather well. I think it might be something to do with infiniglide. Once I reach around 150 m/s it speeds up to 570 m/s in maybe one second and then falls apart from all the downforce.

Testing a new escape mechanism. It's not terribly efficient or useful but it looks nice. That's also not the fastest I can make the thing go, I got it up to 350 m/s.

I used modified wheels though. To stop, I use the canards to lift myself off the ground and then deploy the chute. That's instant and safe stopping right there.