John Nowak

This might be too complicated to code, but have you considered taking the biome the stage lands into account when calculating how many funds the player gets back? I'd bet that it's harder to recover from mountains than grasslands.

Oops, my bad. Still, I'm not convinced it's a good example to use. Does the price reflect what it would cost to build in the US, or the money Russia would accept for it?

I'd ignore the last two for comparison prices. Locomotives don't have rubber electric wheels. The An 225 is a production model, not a one-off prototype. So it looks like about one kerbuck = $1000 around 1970-ish.

One of the features of one of the most popular mods out there, actually.

I feel the same way. Carl Sagan or Travis Taylor might be good templates, or perhaps go with a Soviet space scientist just to open it up a bit.

This is, however, a feature in the mod Kerbal Construction Time, so that might be worth looking into.

The film and the book are very different birds indeed; 2010 claims HAL was given orders to lie, but in the film 2001 HAL had no particular problem lying; he's clearly capable of deception. I suspect that in the film, HAL messed up the failure prediction on the AE-35. Bowman and Poole were worried enough about this failure to discuss shutting him down; and then HAL defended himself. It's likely that his motivation was partly because he believed he could carry out the mission better than the human crew could.

My apologies if this is already included, but the one science experiment I've always added by hacking the persistence file is "Longest duration in space." Basically, the science value of this experiment is the time of the longest flight (defined as launch to return to Kerbin) in hours, take the square root of that, maxing out at 100 science. So, for example, a 9 hour flight would return 3 science; a 16 hour flight 4. The Science returned is not cumulative. So if Jeb's first orbital flight were nine hours long, we'd get 3 Science. If Bill then goes up for 16, when he returns we get an additional 4 - 3 = 1 Science for the slightly longer duration. Obviously, this is to simulate long term biomedical experiments to see how Kerbals adapt to space, and vice-versa.

Yes, absolutely. This has been a problem for some time. Thanks!

I haven't touched ion drives yet precisely because they're so buffed, and it looks like this fills that hole. Thanks!

Also, Kerbal Alarm Clock.

Congratulations! I'm very sorry your mod wasn't called out specifically, but I think you had an excellent design and it looks like Squad agrees.

It almost sounds like a different mod.

It seems to me that the right answer is for KSP to load a vessel if it is in an atmosphere and not landed. That is likely out of scope for Stage Recovery, though.

This is a minor point, but I wonder if a three-kerbal freezer unit might be a good idea. It does seem to fit with the biggest stock capsule, and with three character classes it's probably closer to the usual crew size.

Right, exactly. Sea Program would need to have very detailed maps of a big chunk of ocean floor, or at least a way of generating it on the fly and allowing the player to revisit the same place later. Square miles of rock and grasslands is fine for the Space Program, but once you start talking about visiting an underwater environment... you need a much higher level of detail and interactivity. And I'd want to see some interconnectivity between the games. Drop a space probe in the ocean, it sinks, you recover it with a submarine...

The chest plate seems to be part of a rigid upper body design, similar to the one used on the EMU. EDIT: Yeah, here we go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Upper_Torso

I'm not involved in TAC-LS or this mod, but I believe TAC-LS is going to be giving the option to hibernate kerbals on "death" instead of killing them. Perhaps that might be useful for a suspended animation mod?

Bandhavgarh National Park, India

Yeah, especially if it got into issues like decompression. I visited the museum in Woods Hole. The details of how a submersible like Alvin works is up there with the details of how Apollo worked. It would be a very different game with very different challenges, but I'd love to play it.

>Freeze your kerbals and then exit the current savegame to the main menu and then reload the save game (because it checks for missing kerbals on startup). If I am reading this correctly, would it be right to say that TAC-LS treats the frozen kerbals as conscious until the game is loaded? Basically, if I freeze kerbals, continue to play for one day of game time, exit the game and then start playing again, I will find a puzzling one day of resources missing?

>Freeze on the launchpad before you launch your vessel. TACLS will not retrospectively consume any resources when you thaw kerbals that were frozen on the launchpad. Why, that must be why doctors Kimbal, Hunter and Kaminsky were taken aboard the Discovery One in suspended animation...

Nifty stuff, and thanks!

I'd vote for #1. It's annoying to find every single tank on a ship and pump from one tank to one other tank. I think this is a very elegant solution to a complex problem.

I'd go with Neptune, to fit into the Jupiter > Saturn naming scheme.