Nibb31

You can't really say that the US track record is much better than the former Soviet Union. Both the american and soviet military had many nuclear incidents during the cold war: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents The problem with nuclear engines is what happens in the case of a launcher failure. Rockets are much less reliable than aircraft, and statistically, given enough launches, there will be failures.

No, you launch eastward to save fuel, but once in orbit around Duna, you burn so that you escape in the opposite direction of Duna's orbit around Kerbol.

The same way you got to Duna from Kerbin With mechjeb, you get into solar orbit (you want to get into a retrograde orbit relative to Duna), then fire up the MechJeb Orbital Operations>Trans tool.

Shift scroll wheel

ORDA has a teleport to target function that puts you at 500m of the target (without using any fuel, so I guess it can be considered a bit of a cheat). However, the feature is broken in 0.17, so you have to wait for the next version.

I'm aware that Harvester mentioned it once, but when you are developing a game, there are many ideas that are introduced, discussed, tried, and abandoned. Many ideas sound good at first, but can be dropped because it turns out that they do not fit well in the gameplay. I believe that developing FTL travel would be pretty much the end of the space program. It means that you have a level of technology where you are no longer building and flying rockets. At that level of technology, there is no more challenge in spaceflight and newtonian physics, since you are effectively bending relativity. It becomes a science fiction game about colonization and managing resources or whatever. It is no longer KSP.

I think that FTL travel and colonization should be pretty much beyond the scope of KSP as a game. KSP is about building and flying rockets in a realistic physics newtonian physics environment. Basic interstellar travel would pretty much be an endgame goal. Once you've mastered interstellar flight, you don't have much else to prove. You've pretty much finished the game and you are entering into the realm of sci-fi. Now, sci-fi is cool, but it's not what KSP is all about and it would be a totally different game.

You should learn how to get there. It's not too difficult.

The sinus wave will move as the Mun rotates, covering everything on those latitudes. The usual tactic is to go for a polar orbit and let the Mun rotate under you.

Which is why we are doomed. Birth control is a necessity if we want to survive as a species. Our planet simply cannot sustain infinite population growth. What is the point of doubling the World's population every decade if most of us have to starve. Did you even read the link posted by Robo336 ? It's funny how the same people who oppose birth control also oppose renewable energy and scientific research.

Counting on new technology to save the day is risky business. It's also a race against the clock. The disaster is evitable ONLY if we figure out a way to get free massive energy AND if we are capable of implementing the solutions BEFORE the disaster. What if we don't? What if we figure it out too late? What if we can't agree on the solutions? What if it is already too late? Also technology follows the laws of diminishing returns. The first increments are simple, easy to implement and produce spectacular results. As you advance technologically, each technological iteration costs more, is more complex, and gains less than the previous one. Until you get to a point where your system is simply as efficient as it can be. What if we reach a technological dead-end ? What if those new technologies end up being counter productive (like hydraulic fracturing tends to poison the water and land around it).

My predictions: The economy will have been destroyed by Goldman Sachs and banks that will have sucked everything they could out of it in a desperate race to make more money for the rich. Food resources will be destroyed by Monsanto and greed. There will be technological advances, but lack of funding, lack of vision, and general obscurantism will prevent or slow down any technological revolutions that might save us. With no economy, no more oil, and no long term vision for education, healthcare, and replacement energy, the US will probably go through a dark age of obscurantism, war and fanatism, pulling down the rest of the western world with it. Forget about space exploration. At this point, most of the scientific and technology sector will have been killed off by fundamental religious luddites pushing creationism and home-schooling. Asia will probably emerge as a dominant power, but the world will rapidly be running out of resources. There will be wars for oil, wars for water, and wars for religion. Population will probably keep on increasing until we reach a tilting point. This will cause more wars, sudden famines as the agricultural systems collapse (thank you Monsanto!), the return of auto-immune strains of diseases, and so on... At this point, the World's population will rapidly decrease, with lots of suffering and pain. We might go extinct, but more probably we will reach a bottleneck of a few million people like we already have. Billions will die in the process, but that will be nature's way of reinstating a balance between population and sustainable resources. The only way I can see us avoiding this scenario is if all nations band together, switch to renewable energy, enforce birth control, share their wealth, and create a new kind of economy based on fairness. Yeah, I know... which is why I'm pretty pessimistic about our future.

There are bacteria in your body and inside the suit, so I suppose they would be able to perform some of the decomposition work until the seals on the suit degrade due to the thermal cycles and any atmosphere is vented. Depending on whether your corpse is in the shade or in direct sunlight, you will either freeze or roast or go through thermal cycles of both. After a while, you will probably end up looking like a frozen carbonized chicken

That is a Mun eclipse, not a Minmus eclipse. Munar eclipses are extremely frequent because the Mun is on the same plane as Kerbin, so they happen every Munar month. From Kerbin, Minmus is just a pixel, so it can't block the sun in any meaningful way. Also, they would be quite rare because Minmus is on a differant inclination.

It is more economical to change inclination when you are higher up. It is even sometimes worth spending fuel to raise your apoapsis, change your inclination, and lower your apoapsis again. This also means that the best place to do your burn is the moment when you enter the planet's SOI. However, you also want to do the burn at the point where you want your new inclination to be. For example, if you want an equatorial orbit, you need to do you plane change at the point where your current orbit crosses the equator.

Geostationary orbit around Kerbin is 2868.4 km. Orbital velocity is a function of orbital altitude. If you get a circular orbit at the correct altitude, you will be at the correct speed.

Much too tall, even if you had landed, it would probably tip over. You only need one tank to return to Kerbin, and a smaller engine. The small parachute should be enough too. And why are you carrying winglets all the way to the Mun and back? And why bring SRBs into orbit? They are best used as 1st stage boosters.

Do you plan on adapting the ORDA to Dragon Rider when you're done with the VA ? It could use a slight rebalance and the nodes of the nose cone could be adjusted to fit the ORDA docking ring.

Duna is probably the easiest to get to. When landing, forget about the atmosphere, because it's too thin to use parachutes for more than a little bonus. Go for a powered landing like on the Mun, but with higher gravity. You can train by doing powered landings on Kerbin. EVA is slightly harder to get to than Duna, but once you're there, landing is a breeze with the thick atmosphere. You can parachute yourself all the way down. Forget about taking off again though, because of the high gravity and think air.

I might try building planes when they implement half-way realistic flight aerodynamics. The way it is now, planes do not behave like planes, so there really is no point in having them.

Amazingly, the previous record goes back to the USAF Excelsior III jump, more than half a century ago. http://spacejump.co.uk/history.htm

The poles often show up as a pyramid. It's a glitch due to the way planet's are wrapped in 3D.

Burn normal to change your heading by 5° every time you pass over the north pole. I did this to map Minmus which has a similar problem.

I build a payload (a lander, a probe, a base), and then I build the an upper stage to put it where I want it be. Then I build a lower stage (or 2 or 3) to get the payload and upper stage into orbit.

0.18 has been amply debated here, but the discussions were closed because there really was nothing more to say and the debate ended up going nowhere. There is no point in speculation about future versions. If you have suggestions, then they go into the Suggestions forum (although they have probably already been suggested). They will add the features that they decide that they will add. That's about all there is to say.