Kimberly

Have the people responsible for sacking the people responsible for the typo been sacked?

What I would like is a nuclear reactor that is heavy and produces a lot of power, the kind of thing you'd use to power a large planetary base, but which requires a kerbal assigned to it to function. Combined with life support needs, this would make it harder to build up infrastructure.

Pretty much anything will float, unless it's really, really heavy. It's quite silly. Actually moving stuff through water is quite finicky and difficult, and I would advise against it.

Why not just put up a whole new craft, though? It's less effort than docking, surely, and it makes no difference in terms of functionality. I like having separate relay satellites for each planet.

What about balance, though? You can't just say "let users choose!" without messing up the game balancing. I'd hate for Squad to take that approach with career mode!

The simplest method is to have three satellites evenly spaced in an equatorial orbit around Kerbin. Provided they use the right antennae, this will give you coverage of the whole planet except the poles. Their altitude needs to be high enough so that they have a line of sight to each other; people often like to put them into a geostationary orbit, at 2868.75km, but this is not really necessary. You can use four satellites to allow for a little drift without creating gaps in coverage. If you want, you can add satellites into other orbits to give coverage to the poles, and there's even a wacky arrangement that allows you to cover the entire planet with just four satellites, but you'll probably want to stick to the simple stuff for now. The satellites don't look like anything in particular; give them an antenna, a probe core with RemoteTech functionality (which may include all probe cores or just the mod parts, depending on whether you downloaded the compatibility patch), a power source and a battery, and you're good to go.

Take On Mars seems to suffer from a severe lack of ambition. You have little freedom in what you do, not that much freedom in terms of rover/lander design, you don't control the landing at all (though I'm told this is planned), and the damage system is random, leading many rovers to get wheel damage as soon as they roll off their pad. You need to land exactly inside a pre-defined mission area or you might not trigger certain objectives, even though from a story reason the place you land makes just as much sense. (E.g., when you are tasked with probing the blue soil, only a small part of the blue soil will actually finish the mission.) And the order of missions is strange, so that you might not be able to complete objectives you're clearly in reach of if your rover gets stuck before you complete an objective further away. Not to mention the fact that the developers' English seems pretty terrible. Supposedly, the game hasn't been proofread yet, but it doesn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence in the developers' professionalism. The game's concept isn't bad, and I think it's definitely got potential...but I'm not going to come back to it until quite a bit later.

Standard Clampotron docking ports will perfectly snap to fit the areas on the station parts.

In reality, the answer was "we're canceling the nuclear thermal rocket research program, and we're not going to Mars with our current tech, either."

I just suffer the long scan times, myself. It just feels so ridiculous to use a ship with scanners on every surface; it kills immersion, which is the source of my desire to play at all. That large amounts of scanners are necessary to scan with time warp on should be considered a problem that ought to be fixed.

Try turning mapping off while accelerating, especially during launch. It can't be easy for the plug-in to figure out what to map while you're changing your course with huge rockets...

The big thing I'm wondering is how moddable the tech tree is going to be. Could RemoteTech implement a progression from basic antennae to interplanetary dishes? Will Kethane require pain-staking prospecting before orbital scans are possible, and make you inefficiently burn raw kethane before you find a way to refine it?

Adding to TheTriniFlyer's point: the current official definition of a planet requires that it has "cleared the neighborhood" of minor objects, i.e. that there is no such thing as a stable orbit around the planet, at least on an astronomical time scale.

I think we should be reasonable here, and not apply a one-size-fits-all approach. Obviously there are genetic disorders we should attempt to get rid of, without a second thought. But there are also cases, as with autism, where it is rightfully controversial. Parents-to-be are often ignorant of such things, especially given the stigma attached to autism, so given the choice of having a child without autism, most would take it in a heart-beat. It would essentially mean the elimination of an entire personality type, both the good and the bad instances. I think that's clearly undesirable and should be regulated against. If it were possible simply to fix the negative aspects of autism, as someone suggested, then everyone could be happy with that. But that's unlikely to be the case, and the lobby for "curing" autism is quite strong. Like many, you have an ignorant stance on autism--you assume it's necessarily a "malady". It's definitely understandable that you'd get that impression, but it simply isn't true.

That's a false analogy, though. Polio is undesirable to everyone who has it, while autistic people do not necessarily experience problems because of it. Of course you typically only see severely afflicted people in the media, and parents of children with a problematic form of autism often have no idea what it's like for autistic people without problems. Equating autism with polio betrays that you have a very narrow (but sadly common) view of autism.

This can already be done by setting your docking ports at an angle, so that a row of docked modules eventually loops around into a more-or-less circular shape. Using non-Fustek parts for the corner pieces, you can make squares, pentagons, etc. as well, making it easier to do smaller shapes.

His talent for writing upside-down loses its shine when you realize it would've been simpler for him to write normally and then flip the video, however, or perhaps to place the camera differently.

It's worth trying even if you have trouble looking through the scope. After all, when the next patch comes out, you can already have some observatories (or spy satellites) in orbit!

Might I suggest removing the 3D printer? It goes against the whole idea of the mod. If you want mining support, you can just use ExtraPlanetary Launchpads, now that it's compatible with OrbitalConstruction. The "shortcut" with Kethane ridiculously oversimplifies the process, and Kethane is oversimplified as it is.

His first step is wrong. When he corrects himself, it is accurate, but also meaningless; if a is the result of a division by zero, then a is undefined. This means a*5 or a^2 or a - 10^99 are also undefined. His third step is also wrong. -a * 0 does not equal 4 - a. Let's pull this same trick with real numbers: 5 * 3 = 10, so therefore -5 * 3 = 10 - 5, so therefore -15 = 5, right? His fifth step is also wrong. If you have the equation 0 = 4 - a, and you subtract 4 from both sides, you get -4 = -a. Things that are real don't usually need to assert that they're "100% real".

Sure, but is your personal discomfort really a reason to want to eliminate your entire group? I'm sure there are black people that would prefer to be white due to the way they get treated, but obviously the solution to racism is not to eliminate difference, but to try and end disparate treatment. Not all people with autism have problems, so I don't think there is any justification for eliminating autism. If you do have problems, you can get therapy or take medication--that doesn't infringe on others' rights.

I agree, though I got the Firespitter electric propellers because they're the only option available. Let me tell you: those things drain electricity as such an awful rate, it's not cheating at all.

It allows you to build a GPS network, which you can then use to tell you where you are on the planet's surface and what heading you need to go to a specified location. It's not that useful without a map, though, otherwise you won't know the coordinates of the spot you want to go! Link:http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/24646-0-21-Figaro-Global-Navigation-Satellite-System-Launch-a-Working-Kerbal-GPS-System You heard wrong. Mapsat scans the actual surface; there is no pre-generated map. You just need to rebuild hilo.dat so it knows the correct maximum and minimum heights; instructions have been posted on the Mapsat thread.

Actually, it's almost exactly how the GRACE satellites work. The twin satellites face prograde and use microwave ranging and detect gravitational anomalies by changes in their relative speed and distance as the first satellite moves through an anomaly before the other does. The only difference with the detector being developed is that it uses a laser instead of microwaves, and a mirror instead of a twin satellite.

You don't have to. Say you launch a mission to Duna: have an orbiter with an interplanetary-class dish remain around Duna while the landing vehicle delivers a rover with a weak antenna. You can't control the rover whenever you want, for how long you want, but that's realistic. You should still have a window of several hours. If you want full convenience, you have to build a network, which seems fair, doesn't it?