Anton P. Nym

Yup. I usually mount a pair of Mk 1s; when I see them light up the terrain I know it's within 500m, when the spots separate I know that contact is imminent. (Stole the idea from The Dambusters, to give credit where it's due.) -- Steve

Space may not conduct sound, but the structure of your spacecraft does. I'm okay with the audio effects as-is; doing without would (in my opinion) be boring. -- Steve

A while ago I saw a map (fan generated?) for the solar system in the Firefly TV show... the writers there insisted they didn't have FTL but travel between several habitable worlds was a matter of days or weeks, which gave a lot of the more science-literate folks pause. The map postulated a quaternary star system with a large-ish (A-class?) primary and two smaller (K-class?) secondary stars nearby, each with worlds in their own habitable zones, plus a distant minor star (M-class?) with couple of large gas giants whose radiated heat created their own small habitable zones. It'd be esoteric but not completely ridiculous... and if you want travel between stars in KSP that doesn't need "magic" drives, it's as good a model as any. -- Steve

Don't worry, Kerbin; this Atlas ain't gonna shrug. (The KSS Piazza Kerman, about to redirect an E-class asteroid that became an impactor when the KSS Argo suffered a malfunction in its mission; the Argo depleted its RCS monopropellant in recovering from the accident and so was unable to reattach to the rock so Big Pete had to intercept.) -- Steve

Memo to self; more reaction wheels on the next model, and maybe convert the LV-Ns into twinned LV-909s in a fore-and-aft "pushmepullyu" arrangement. -- Steve

We're here to cancel the apocalypse! (Oops, wrong movie.) That's the KSS Carl Kerman maneuvering into position to grapple an E-class impactor and brake it into orbit around Kerbin. In the background is Raywig's Rock, so named by Raywig when he scooped up a sample and climbed back up the ladder of his Prospector "lander". (It's casting that wee dot of light on the rock.) -- Steve

I have mixed mission profiles. Small rocks get probes. Big rocks (with their huge masses that make the mass of crew quarters trivial) get crewed flights. I'm also sending a crewed nuclear-pulse mission to an E-class impactor, because it's an excuse to light off 60 15kt bombs. -- Steve

I made an 8-probe array myself and found just right-clicking on the separator for the probe I want to launch was the simplest solution that didn't lead to disaster. Staging each one got weird if I docked a pair of arrays to a craft, as did action groups, even if I didn't use symmetry in the VAB. Too much of a pain. -- Steve

oops duplicate

Actually the whole Citadel rotates for spin gravity. The outer Wards get slightly more than 1G and the Presidium ring gets about 3/4G if I remember the in-game journal entries correctly. The Council Chamber at the top would be in microgravity, but it gets a mass effect field for comfort. Of course the game itself only modeled 1G, except for the scripted zero-G bits. I gather that was a limitation of the game engine. -- Steve

Curious to see in a gaming community that no one's brought up the Citadel from Mass Effect. (link to picture on wikia) It had a water body that ran along the middle of the ring section basically dividing the whole interior into two sets of river bank property, with fountains for decoration and humidity control. The lake acted as one of a set of potable water reserves; no mention of using it to help with mass balance, but I could see it working that way too. -- Steve

The maneuver node system changed with the ARM; I can see "closest"-approaches out to hundreds of thousands of kilometers not just for planets but also targets like asteroids. Much, much easier to make solar-orbit rendezvous now. (Note that "easier" does not mean "easy".) -- Steve

I use 3 refueling stations so far (150km above Kerbin to service LKOs & SSTOs, 300km above Kerbin to service cis-Munar missions and reusable interplanetary transfer stages, and 100km above the Mun for Search & Rescue) mainly because they are easily locatable and serve as good repositories for "left over" fuel from other missions. These days I need few dedicated supply missions to them, mostly to replenish jet fuel in my LKO station but even that's getting rarer. (Also, they provide a place for me to park the Big 3 Kerbonauts so they stop hogging all the missions.) It's not "the" answer for every program, but it works for me. -- Steve

I pushed with this vehicle for about 160m/s to make a plane change and had no trouble. The trick (for me, anyway) was to align the craft with the maneuver node, use RCS to translate until that maneuver node aligned with the rock's marked Centre of Mass, and then moved in to "Claw" the rock. My craft had plenty of torque and RCS to compensate for any slight misalignment... but I must admit it took a while to execute the maneuver properly, and I have another and longer burn coming up to get it captured by Kerbin. -- Steve

The "Trilander" Duna mission finally touches down. Weird; the aerobraking was so successful that it only had to fire its landing rocket for 1s before touchdown. Such a waste of fuel... Rockdiver 2 swoops down, "Claw" bared, upon its chosen prey. Gonna feed a few hatchlings with this kill. You, uh, know that we can see daylight through your rocket, right? -- Steve