Superfluous J

Try this: Load up the graph you use to check stability. I don't remember the name but the one where you sweep AoA and Mach. Put in reasonable numbers and create the graph. Hit F1 to take a screenshot. Add the upside down nosecone (or remove it) Create a new graph with the same numbers. Hit F1 to take a screenshot. Load up boht screenshots in an image viewer and switch back and forth between them to see if the graph changes. Use more smarts than I have to determine which graph is "better"

Small bug in QuickContracts, when you hit 'A' to accept, the contract gets accepted but the "Active Contracts" value does not get incremented. If you back out and go back in it updates. [defunct site link removed by moderator]

The rotating pulling Clooney away is fine except for the fact that it just pushes the problem one step forward. They didn't come in on the side and Indiana-Jones style bullwhip themselves to the solar panel. They were sliding down the panel in a straight line, almost directly away from the point where the tether snagged on it. Therefore: where did all this rotational energy come from?

Thank you! Can't wait to try them in-game!

I'll go with neither. It was a fantastic movie that did a lot right and portrayed near-to-the-you space (i.e., everything within say 1km of the camera) more accurately than I can remember ever seeing in a movie. The fact that it got a lot of fiddling details wrong (What exactly was pulling on Clooney when they were stuck to the solar panel?) and also mucked up most everything that had to do with actual orbital mechanics (Hubble->ISS takes quite a bit of dV and it's nowhere near as easy as just aiming at it and firing) can be forgiven, I think, in light of what they got right.

It's asteroids all the way down.

Just get used to hitting "ESC" first before chatting with your friends. It's a good idea anyway considering you're flying a space ship

One important thing to remember is that in the real world it takes a lot more fuel to get to ORBIT than it takes us to get to JOOL, so real world rockets are (much) bigger for any given payload. It's not surprising that in KSP the fairings tend to be bulbous or the rockets made bigger simply to make them look "correct."

Halo without Multiplayer is like Madden without a football. KSP without Multiplayer is ... KSP. I don't think it'll matter all that much if they follow the same plan with Multiplayer that they've had since they announced it would be in the game.

Ha that makes even less sense. Which makes sense, in an odd way.

You don't see the X on Minmus because it's frequently hidden under the bumps. I think the mod is drawing it on the "flats" level at all times. If you switch to "fixed body mode" your Trajectories orbit will look a bit weird but where it ends on Minmus WILL be where you will actually crash. Er, land. EDIT: Oops, ninja'd by over an hour.

I've gotten a Kerbal into every science-gettable situation (ignoring biomes) in the game and gotten that Kerbal home... ...with one exception: Splashed on Eve. And I'll be doing that soon.

I do not know EXACTLY how it's done but it's some sort of hash on the name, and it's not simple. It is NOT a lookup as you can type "asdfhsadlfjhdsaflj" for the name and get a profession. What I mean by "simple" is it's not like Kerbal "abc" will be the same profession as Kerbal "cba", and if kerbal "abc" and kerbal "abcabc" happen to both be engineers, changing their names to "bbc" and "bbcabc" will not (necessarily) make them both the same, new profession. They could end up with any new career and won't necessarily be the same as each other.

All I've figured out is the first click only does one thing: Denotes a part as NOT able to be root. It seems the prompts could have been "Click on a part you don't want to be root." and "Good. You have proven you can click the mouse. Now click on the part you actually want to be root."

Your first statement is untrue and your second is an opinion I don't agree with. In the stock aero, yes, procedural fairings do not suffer from any ill effects other than adding the same useless weight and drag to your vessel that standard fairings would. However in FAR (and with any luck at all in the revamped stock aero) ridiculously sized and shaped fairings DO suffer problems that you either have to engineer around or fly through. These issues get worse and worse the more oddly shaped your fairings and at some point you simply cannot get your thing into orbit. There is a reason we (humans) don't use ball-shaped fairings to lift massive pancake-shaped objects into orbit and it's not "they look funny." And it's surely not "We couldn't make the fairings because we're stuck with these 8 pre-made cutouts." It's because it won't fly. Just like (I hope) will happen in KSP 1.0.

I thought you meant me. I typed that quickly and poorly, but it's hard to fully elucidate what I meant. Let me try again. No QA process (which includes the Testers, their support structure and reporting capabilities, and the developers) should have allowed that memory leak through. One of 2 things happened: 1) The testers did not find it. Either they are not trying hard enough or there are not enough of them. I have no eye into the process but I've done enough work with computers and software (professionally) to be happy guessing that there are not enough of them. Whatever the cause, though, they did not find the problem so therefore the current QA system is not cutting it. I very poorly wrote that the TESTERS weren't cutting it and for that I am sorry. 2) The testers found it, but Squad decided it was okay to release anyway. This is worse, for a game supposedly in the phase of development where bugs are squashed to let a new bug like this go reported but unfixed. Again, I did not mean to make the testers (especially those who do this for free. I've done that too and while it was very thanked by the devs it felt thankless from the community sometimes) seem incompetent or sloppy. I meant to point out that SOMETHING is wrong. Maybe it's been taken care of and I don't know about it (I don't expect them to say, either. I understand the need to keep SOME things secret) but "We're throwing in more stuff than ever before AND fixing all the bugs that have crept in over the years that we've previously ignored, and the game will be ready for release, we promise!" sounds... Well it sounds improbable. :/

"How many times have you crashed?' "Too" "Two? You've crashed two times?" "No. Too many times."

Not quite. "Alpha" does not mean "No art assets at all ever" and adding a single art asset to a program does not make it go from Alpha to Beta. Alpha is when you're adding features. Which they're doing in the upcoming release. They have yet to have a major release where they did not introduce a major feature. The closest they got was 0.23.5 and that wasn't a major release. Beta starts when all major features you want in the finished game are present, and you're squashing any bugs that made it through Alpha (usually any that don't cause the game to be completely unplayable), and adding content and balance to the features you put in in Alpha. That's what Squad announced they would be at when they released 0.90 and one could argue that they made it. I think ISRU counts as a major feature but I'd be willing to let that slide and say okay, it was tacked on at the end and so no bigs. Same with Female Kerbals. In the vast scheme of things its an important graphical thing but it's just a graphical thing. Released is when all major bugs are fixed. The game should VERY rarely crash and you should have no memory leaks. Everything should work the way they intend it it to. GUIs are tight. Every aspect of the game is balanced not just internally but with every other aspect of the game. Art assets are fantastic and polished. Brand new players can take the game, go into a locked room with no Internet access, and play it and have hours upon hours of fun with no outside help whatsoever - provided that player is of course interested in the game's concept and design. I truly hope that KSP will have all of these things on the very next version. If they do, I will be the happiest guy in the community, or at least in a 1000-way tie for first in happiness along with a lot of you. I strongly suspect that many of these will not be reached, and this is my concern. One very important thing that I've personally not made clear, though... The list of upcoming features makes me giddy with excitement and I can't wait to play the game, be it version 0.27, 0.91, 1.0. It can be Alpha, Beta, or frickin' Omega and I personally don't give a care, so long as I can keep playing and enjoying it.

I'm not trying to force or limit anything. I'm just saying I prefer the way Squad's doing it. If Squad only put premade fairings into the game (which is actually what I was expecting them to do. Actually that's not true. I was expecting them to not put fairings into the game at all) then I'd just mod in procedural ones and not say a peep. And I don't see what in that picture can't be done with procedural fairings. Is it like a 2-stage thing? Or the fact that they don't bulge out 10x wider than the rocket? If it's the latter, PFairings will only bulge out as far as they need to be. Put a small probe on top of an orange tank and the fairings won't bulge out at all.

I am under this same impression. While the game was in Alpha this was outright expected. In Beta, it's tolerated but you expect stability to increase, bugs to decrease, and critical things like memory footprint and FPS to get better. As we have not seen this (mostly because in spite of their phrasing the game still isn't actually in Beta) we are concerned that the "final" product will not deliver on these point. We've seen a graph slowly rising through each update and are now told to trust that it will suddenly drop precipitously. I want to believe. I really do. But I just can't until I see it. Not sure I agree with that but I'm not saying Squad must take such drastic, Draconian action as ... you know ... fixing bugs and optimizing graphics. I'm just saying that during Alpha when they said they would do that, I was willing to speak highly of them with the caveat that "they're still in Alpha." When If the game hits 1.0 and still has dozens of bugs and UI interface issues and I'm still afraid to go Ironman in case the game simply crashes for no reason, I will not recommend it to friends. I will say it's a great, fun game but it has serious issues that they haven't addressed and maybe my friend should wait until we see what Squad's actually going to do.

Cool graph. One suggestion, though: Change the horizontal labels to flat out km, and drop the "x105m" part. "70km" is far more user friendly than "0.7x105m"

Career mode DOES put arbitrary limitations on what players can do, though. 30 parts. 18 tons. no access to larger (or smaller) tanks and engines until you work for it. I will correct my "base x tech level" maximum length, and say maybe instead, "base x 2 x tech level" with the highest tech level tier being unlimited length. I also think that fairings like those in the Procedural Fairings OP should have serious drag and stability issues.

Totes agreed. I'd even like height=[tech level] x base diameter. Or here's a crazy thought: give oddly shaped fairings all the aerodynamic problems they'd have in real life.

I would, but I want to do it in an easily repeatable way so every time I made a new install I can just run "delgarbage.bat" or something.

So which is it (Squad or the large group of beta testers) who let a memory leak through that makes many players have to restart the game after an hour or so of playing? I'd be far more confident with this massive update that changes almost everything in the game and adds things never in the game, if things like that didn't make it into every single build we've had.