Lord Aurelius

This particular argument against an aether doesn't actually work. If the aether is displaced by matter but not the other way around, then the aether wouldn't be able to exert a force on the mercury to displace it in that example so what you're seeing would be expected behavior either way.

That's what I would advocate for. I'm not saying we need full TAC life support in stock, but something is needed. USI life support is a great candidate, especially given RoverDude's position with Squad. I wouldn't be surprised if it's already being planned for 1.2.

Following that line of logic, why do we even bother with EC, or even fuel for that matter? It's just extra parts and weight and they can be generated easily enough with the right equipment (especially EC). From a realism standpoint, the case for life support is obvious. From a gameplay standpoint, it balances manned missions against probes.

I think stock needs life support (in the same way that reentry heat and antennas are being integrated) not only to make ISRU more useful, but to balance the game as a whole. Right now probes are at a pretty big disadvantage to manned missions, and this will only get worse with the antenna logic. For a weight penalty of only 0.5 tons (less if you use the external command seat) you can slap a lander can on anything and gain access to a lot more science experiments (crew reports, eva reports, surface samples), and can reset experiments (or at least pick them up and put them in the pod so you don't have to return everything) and don't have to worry about antennas, not to mention infinite EVA fuel in a pinch. Even one way missions are feasible since there's no penalty for stranding a Kerbal (another thing that should probably be looked at) and fresh Kerbals are readily available via the rescue contracts. I agree that life support shouldn't be mandatory for all difficulty levels, but it's still such a fundamental part of space travel that it needs to be integrated into stock. ISRU would be a great tie-in mechanic for long duration missions.

IMHO, life support is going to be added to stock at some point. Squad's already working on remotetech like features for 1.1 and life support is a logical next feature after that. Another limiting factor besides time could be a limited supply of repair parts.

+1 to this, it's basically what I said earlier. The game does not communicate the fact that the stock craft are supposed to be flawed, that information seems to be entirely limited to the forums, yet the people who are most likely to attempt to use them are new players who probably haven't looked on the forum or used any community tutorials. I personally found the stock craft to be basically useless for the most part and I didn't bother with them at all when I was first learning to build things.

Squad has hinted that improved graphics/VFX and such are planned at some point, but definitely not until after 1.1 and maybe even a few updates after that.

While that's true, it doesn't make the suggestion for progressive wheel damage any less valid since the rework sounds like it will be for the driving handling and physics, not the damage model. I think that a progressive damage system is a great idea and could be extended to all of the parts in the game. The current system leaves a lot to be desired.

This would provide some great opportunities to tie in with an improved career mode. Complete certain milestone contracts and a model of the craft used ends up in the museum. A few general purpose displays (with editable plaques) where you can choose the craft file would be great as well.

I would also recommend Linux Mint. It has great compatibility since it's essentially a modified Ubuntu, but it has a much more sensible and usable UI and configuration.

I get the point that the entire game is a simulation and there's always the revert button, but it would be really nice to still have a simulation mode where you can start your craft anywhere and specify the staging/fuel load/etc (and rewind time) so you don't have to tediously refly large parts of a mission just to be able to test one particular thing (in my case: stage separation of very large rockets), not to mention how tedious lander/rover testing is without hyperedit.

That's a good point, right now it wouldn't make much sense to do a contest given that the parts/physics tweaking is still a WIP. Still, even an unofficial contest could generate some ideas and designs that Squad could use when they're ready to update the stock craft. Hopefully after 1.1 we'll see more stability in terms of parts and physics between releases (provided the parts actually get properly balanced) so something like this would be more doable.

The stock designs are pretty poor overall. I'm not expecting a full grand tour craft or manned eve lander, but I do expect the designs to work well in the current version of the game to provide an example to beginner players or a decent starting point for more advanced players who don't want to build a whole new rocket from scratch for a basic LKO mission. Right now the designs do beginners a disservice since most of the designs don't work very well, and a few don't work at all and thus do a poor job of showing a new player how to build a good rocket. Having the community provide new designs is a great idea, and fits in with how other parts of the game have been crowdsourced. The company logo/flag contest showed how well that can work and I think we could get a lot of great designs for the game. If that's their function, then the game does a very poor job of communicating that. I've only heard that said here on the forums, long after I decided the stock craft were mostly worthless and poorly designed. A better approach would be to have a tutorial that gives you a flawed rocket and some guidelines on how to fix it without directly giving the answer.

I also like to use it for micro rovers that don't need reaction wheels.

The only part I really never use is that micronode. There's quite a few specialty parts I rarely use, but I have yet to find a good use for that node. It also seems to be a buggy part (similar to the rockomax node) in that even though it's symmetrical, you still have to rotate it until it's happy and will connect.

This looks like a great question for XKCD's What If blog.

All of them.

How big are the sensors needed to spot a shuttle RCS plume at the distance of Mars? Are we talking a liquid helium cooled infrared telescope, or a (large) solid state CCD like what FLIR uses in their cameras?

No rush, thanks for looking into it. I'm not planning to do another big career until 1.1.

There's a lot more out there, that's just a few I found from a quick google search for NASA mission patches. Since everyone's craft is different, maybe a generic design could be a Kerbal planting a flag (with the same picture on the flag in the flag) on the body the flag is intended for.

The discovery of liquid water won't necessarily make a manned mission happen sooner. The main hurdle in the way of a manned mission to Mars isn't really technological, it's much more of a political/financial issue. Right now there's no serious plans at all to send a manned mission there, just a lot of hypothetical mission plans. That said, the presence of water will absolutely affect the planning of such a mission. Now that we know there's liquid water available near the equator, the mission can be planned around it and the technology developed to extract it. It will also further push the mission in favor of a semi-permanent colony instead of just flags and bootprints. I do sincerely hope that all the positive PR Mars has gotten in the last decade from the rovers and orbiters, combined with this new discovery will be enough of a push to actually get serious planning and R&D started with a hard target date set for the mission soon after.

This may have been done already, but I would be interested in a set of mission flags for all the bodies in the Kerbol system. It would be great if they were in a style similar to the various NASA mission patches (obviously Kerbalized).

Yes and no. For actual colony modules, some kind of cloud city style habitat in the upper atmosphere would make sense, but you could additionally tether it to the surface and have small surface facilities at the base of the tethers to use as a base for surface exploration. Yes, the surface pressure is ridiculous, but is still a lot better than what a deep sea submersible has to deal with so limited surface facilities and exploration should be feasible. A long term terraforming goal could be to bind up large portions of the atmosphere into solid/liquid compounds to gradually reduce the surface pressure to something more reasonable (and the floating habitats could gradually be lowered as the atmosphere is reduced).

Why not? Most of NASA's probes have random little trinkets like that on them and a small 3D printed Kerbal would add very little weight.

@TheCanadianVendingMachine Great find, thanks for linking it here. Given the popularity of KSP, I wonder how hard it would be to convince NASA to put a 3D-printed Kerbal on the next Mars rover...