rodion

i use chrome. data harvesting doesn't bother me either, mostly because i don't use any services, google or otherwise, that employ targeted advertising or media filtering algorithms (which i do have a problem with). i'd switch to a good open distribution such as waterfox if i had nothing to lose but there are certain extensions and other comfort factors i have on chrome which i find aren't easily replaceable on other platforms (not that i've looked exhaustively).

i'm going to disagree on this one for the subjective reason that to me a key part of the core Kerbality of the whole game is the slapstick "strap the guy in and hit the button" humour that has always been a key part of the game's rare charm. it's the same reason i don't mind starting with manned spaceflight in career - because that's exactly what follows from our experience of Kerbal mentality. including an astronaut training process would in some ways add a measure of depth and realism to the game, but i feel like sometimes players lose their perspective after a lot of advanced play and forget they're not playing Human Space Program. the illogical, dangerous, ill-advised and silly is vital to the game's blood and forcing people to manage their serious astronaut sim program feels drier than unbuttered crackers. secondly, from a gameplay perspective: if kerbals can get XP on the job that's fine, but if you force people to painstakingly qualify their units before any manned spaceflight takes place, it's not going to be a good stock experience for everyone. i'd personally play this sort of thing as a mod, but a mod it should be, so leave this one to the aftermarket.

i imagine that it mostly has to do with the fact that the flat cone form is a great shape for a re-entry vehicle. it gives the capsule a nice low centre of gravity for stability and keeps the maximum amount of the capsule's upper skin out of the direct line of the plasma that will be streaming past it, whereas a cylinder would have much more of its surface exposed to the air and therefore need more, and heavier, thermal protection on its sides. the flat cone also gives keeps the amount of lift generated during descent to a reasonable level whereas the edge of a cylinder, depending on how long it was, would start to generate extra lift as it entered the atmosphere and might cause the craft to skip off the atmosphere. there are probably many more rationales for the design that i haven't even thought of but those are just a few i came up with just now.

if you're thinking of challenger, the problem was in the sealing of the segments that the boosters were constructed from rather than an intrinsic temperature-dependent design deficiency with solid rocket motors.

scared of what? some contrarian jagoffs who didn't do their secondary school physics homework?

good lord. reality is more like KSP than anyone might like to imagine.

it's not shedding onto anything delicate like with ET foam hitting the TPS on the Shuttle orbiter.

i guess this is one of the few situations in which your launcher can burst into flames immediately after liftoff and you don't have to be too concerned about it.

the fact that parts are partially clipped into the docking port body of the smaller ship might be giving the game problems, but that's just a guess based on what i can see.

i don't have an official source for this but i think the general rule is that crew members have an allowance for personal affects so long as the items are manifested prior to launch. smuggling of undocumented items onto apollo 15 caused some PR grief at the time.

could you please post a screencap with the end faces clearly shown?

if you ever grab another copy i'd recommend the Darkplaces engine replacement for maximum compatibility and a raft of other improvements.

i don't know how people over 13 and under 65 even manage to get malware any more. the days of Wild West surfing with unsigned applets executing in the browser and P2P networks full of undocumented mystery meat executables are long over. i spend a lot of time grabbing content from places that could be considered high-risk and i still ran my PC with no AV for over a year recently and never picked up a single thing in that period.

well i'm running, among various other things, KW, B9, Near Future (all modules), Astronomer's VP, and a 2K custom skybox, and that all fits comfortably within the 32-bit version using ATM on pretty mild settings. i don't know why you're running into problems. if x64 really works for you and is stable, however, that's awesome.

making the game run smoothly with high part counts isn't just some magic flag like PARTS_BIGNUM_CPU_FAST=0 that squad can just toggle in the code base. it's limited by your computer's processor and the game's physics engine - despite severe limitations inherent in the system they've been working on incrementally improving it since the beginning and many people are getting ~60% better part count performance than they were a few versions ago, depending on their CPU architecture. here's my interim fix: try a design that doesn't use so many parts.

to be fair to REL the cost and efficiency projections for just about every space launch system ever developed are always vastly more optimistic than expected and often borderline doctored to attract investment, and i believe this is a tacitly accepted fact in aerospace circles, and large engineering projects in general. remember how NASA promised the shuttle would have turnaround time of a week and launch for $20 million per mission? (the real figures were about seven or eight times that amount, on average...)

the spin out is caused by the centre of pressure of the rocket being more far forward than the centre of mass (you can check this easily using the stock ksp indicators in the VAB). try putting some small control surfaces at the bottom of the craft, i usually find that some R8 winglets are enough and they are light and relatively low drag so it doesn't impact rocket performance.

i think my approach would be to split the rover, base, and probe modules up into their own less laggy crafts, attach their interplanetary stages to them and launch them 30 minutes or so apart at the scheduled window, so they're unloaded relative to each other and don't contribute to the physics lag (and leave a good time margin to perform injection maneuvers later). it gives me an enormous headache to try to imagine single-launching such a big heap of hardware, it's just not practical.

After perusing magazine publicity shots of '60s interceptor aircraft, kerbal engineering interns unanimously decided that low aspect ratio, high-load wings were by far the coolest way to increase supersonic aircraft efficiency and submitted this probe-carrying X-plane for evaluation. it worked! this slightly different version as flown has some decoupler mount points on the wing ends from RATO pods (weren't needed in practice), and one of the solar panels didn't deploy because it got melted on ascent and stopped working. unloaded, it got into orbit with 1,370 dV remaining, enough for a circummunar trip and change. i might actually press this one into service, assuming i can work out how to re-enter it safely (haven't tried yet).

can't you just disable avast while you're playing it? i got sick of overly-intrusive AV software a long time ago and currently i only use malwarebytes which has modules which handily toggle on and off.

do you mean the salyut 3 space station? it had an aircraft autocannon bolted onto it which always struck me as being extremely amusing as it's the most deadpan literal way that you could possibly militarize outer space. they performed ASAT tests with it, and reportedly with success at that, so maybe it wasn't such a silly idea. edit/postscript: it's also worth noting as a funny historical scrap that the X-20 dyna-soar had a proposed military payload that included a mounted AR-15 to shoot up enemy satellites that the vehicle was co-orbiting, which is possibly an even sillier thing to imagine (it would be best of all if the soldier-astronaut actually picked up a gun and started shooting out of the service hatch, but unfortunately neither the dyna-soar nor this ASAT scenario was ever to materialize).

minmus' great flats are forever the Barcal Flats to me, in memoriam of a very brave pilot who was stolen away from this plane of existence far too soon (by me, because of incompetence).

this is a good point. if the connection between the crane and module isn't sturdy enough it can induce oscillations around the linkage whenever you bank which completely ruins any control stability you may have had, especially if the payload is the more massive of the two parts (which looks to be the case).

...well, my music library is ~150GB, how do i start to answer that?

this is extremely well done, though i suspect movie magic is at hand when the Falcon launches skyward on the power of nine ion engines.