M83

Baseballs. Had to study a packet last year on space exploration and its way of explaining the mathematical forces of Newton's Third Law was by giving the example of baseball-propelled rocket. To be serious though, probably just a good nuclear rocket. If I had my own spacecraft I'd just fly around our own solar system.

Finally learned reliable docking, so I built a small crew and refueling station. Looks a bit like Skylab, no?

I don't play with mods normally, but I do appreciate some parts of mods, such as Mechjeb's built-in Delta-V calc or the Chatter mod, which are nice when you realise that it's good to have information and realism at times. Mods are nice and help fill the gap for some players who are waiting for the updated stuff to end up in future versions of KSP.

Welcome to the forums! Hope you find everything here fun and interesting to make your KSP experience all the much better.

My most recent mission was a rendezvous-and-dock of two unmanned probes around Kerbin at about 3,000,000m. First time I'd ever docked something, so I was very proud of finally doing that.

So I was looking through the "What not to suggest" and saw FTL drives as a possible implementation and I've heard stuff about it being possibly a late-game addition (and to also not suggest it). However, I was thinking about this, if we have FTL drives, shouldn't there be some form of experimental intermediary stages of development between them? It seems odd in my head to jump from stuff like ion and nuclear engines to FTL speeds. So does anyone have any (rational) idea as what would be a good intermediary steps to get from where we are to FTL? Discuss away.

Well the economy is showing signs of improvement here in America as long as financial issues in the EU and China don't drag us down. And as for there not being anything developed since the Space Shuttle, well it's only been a little over 2 years. The MPCV i.e. Orion capsule has been in development since 2005, as it was part of Project Constellation, and after that was canned it was renamed Orion and continued development, so it was started before the end of the Shuttle program. I personally have hope for the SLS, MPCV, and CCDev as they all stand a good chance of being almost done around the 2016 elections, so there should be no reason to cancel them unless massive budget issues or delays.

I can't argue with that, obviously. Also, Deep Space by Sub Focus is a good song for the half of space that is terrifying and deadly.

The mental power of me thinking to use the abacus is probably faster than my processor. Sounds like a deal.

I've got 4GB of RAM in mine but my laptop is by no means built for gaming. My 1.3Ghz AMD E-300 processor is definitely the piece of garbage holding me back.

I tend to disagree, as things like hunger, poverty, disease, are always going to be here. I do not think humanity will be capable of eradicating every last ill that affects ourselves. So because of that, we should not limit ourselves to only fixing problems down here, because we've got dreams up there. No matter what, governments and private companies will promote space, and they're not wrong for doing that instead of doing, say, cancer research. Space and disease, they are quite similar in that we cannot give all resources to one and none to the other, as it stunts the ability for humanity to progress. It's like when you look at all the fancy machines in hospitals and the high-tech computers and all that jazz. When that stuff was conceptualized, it might have had to do with the field of, say, quantum physics, or chemistry, and the scientists and programmers, for all intents and purposes, did not care about whether it affected medicine. But some of the things have, and it's bad to dismiss an area of science if it can help us so much. Apologies for getting so off-topic, back to the discussion at hand.

I'd have to say the most beautiful moment was my Minmus lander + probe, which went perfectly after not being tested. It was made all the more fun that when I detached my probe and watched it drift away, I was listening to a song called "I'm Sending You Away".

I'm no mathematician, but I cannot follow where his work is going at all, and it doesn't tend to make very much sense. It seems like he even had some issues following his own math as well. Maybe the more experienced math people on here can chime in on the matter.

0.18.4 after my friend told me about it when we were studying last year's Academic Decathlon Science guides.

Alright Ben, here's my comically horrible attempt at your challenge. This was the fastest speed I could get the craft up to. And here's a general picture of it, you can see one of the Kerbals' heads poking through. So a max velocity of 58.2m/s, a weight of 1.97 tons, and 2 Kerbals on board. 58.2 * 1.97 * 3 equals.....*drum roll* a lackluster 343.962 points!

I'd have to say that nobody really 'won' the Space Race. Each side had their achievements with the Soviet Union having more; the USSR with the first satellite, first man, first woman, first hard/soft landings on the Moon, first Moon rover, first space station, first multi-man craft, first EVA, and so on and so forth, with the US taking the prize of 6 lunar landings. As much as it was a 'race', which today seems like it was a competition with no huge implications, remember the drive was out of pure terror of the other side advancing ahead in public perception and world might. So if you look into the history of the times between these two nations, it might be easy to say "Well the Soviets did more things first, so they win it." But it's more complex, since there's a difference between what the space program did for each country. The US was helped immensely with lots of lucrative contracts and jobs sent to high-level research and scientific programs, and NASA stuck it out as the forefront of human spaceflight. As for the USSR, the space program was a drain on finances in Khruschev's/Brezhnev's already weak economy held up by lackluster Five-Year Plans. So it's hard to say who per se 'won' the Space Race. We are also reminded of the toll on some brave men, such as Grissom, Chaffee and White on Apollo 1, Vladimir Komarov aboard Soyuz 1, and the crew of Soyuz 11 that perished on re-entry. Those deaths, at least in my mind, make it a draw between the two nations.

I stick to a generic idea of saying what the landing was, who did it, what craft was used, and any special tidbits, like if it was a rescue mission, and so forth.

Super Mario 64 and Tony Hawk's Pro Skateboarding for the N64 and Gran Turismo 4 were the games that kept me staring at TV screens when I was a child. It's a shame I have none of them anymore.

KSP in 3 years? Finished game, updated/more parts, correct aerodynamics, mining, weather, better graphics, larger/better complexes for launches, completed career mode, and hopefully some optimization for lower-end/64-bit computers. That's about it of what I can come up with, considering what's planned.

I think the general look of it is nice, and one has to admire the restraint in detail, but the textures or colours could be played around with a bit to make it look more modern and in line with the rest of the Rockomax family.

I'm just going to throw my two cents in here. I feel like agencies like NASA are beneficial to space overall and shouldn't be usurped by private industry. Private industry currently does things in LEO and supplying cargo to the ISS. They aren't doing any of the things that NASA is tasked with, such as the Moon, Mars, and beyond, and they don't have the ability to do the things that NASA does, since NASA involves science and research to make sure that human spaceflight is a safe venture. Furthermore, those companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are helped a lot by NASA. They get contracts from NASA, and things like the Dreamchaser spaceplane and Boeing's CST-100 are financed by NASA's CCDev program. We wouldn't have a robust rivate space industry were it not for NASA. Finally, NASA helps hold together the concept of space for the citizens. Despite that we have political bickering over it, NASA represents neither liberals nor conservatives. It represents the people, and it teaches the children of our people to have such ambitious goals such as being an astronaut. Private companies just aren't going to do things like that, and the not only national but international cooperation between NASA, ESA, RSA, etc. help advance not only a countries' knowledge of space, but the world's as a whole. And after all, space is a frontier regardless of nationality. And King Arthur, just an opinion on your idea of where the SLS is going, I could see the SLS going through. The projected launch of the first SLS is Dec. 17, 2017, and should NASA stay on schedule, there should be no reason for whichever candidate who wins the 2016 presidential election to cancel the SLS if it's only a year from projected launch.

I've noticed a reversal on my kind of crappy laptop - before .21, the gameplay was laggy but the loading screens were fine, and now it's the opposite. Loading screens are killing me. Also, is anyone else getting bad lag spikes when doing SOI changes?

I'd go for the time. Having as much time on the Moon and savoring those precious moments would be much more to remember in my head than people knowing my name.

I'm a big supporter of the reaction wheel system. Some rockets that are absolutely huge now are a lot more stable, which saves time and fuel since I don't have to work on corrections or anything like that.

I've spoken to a friend on this, and it might lie in the fact that humans would see human mothers providing breast milk to their children, and when they see the cow doing the same to it's calf, we assumed that we could also drink that. Same applies for things like goat's milk. Just a product of a more primitive human mind working towards survival, though it's more of a logical theory than a fact. I would like to know any exact reason for such.