rodion

I started out just messing around with some domestic-grade high-altitude cruising test flights (target was 24,000m) but after a while it got pretty silly. Altitude of 38,000m, air below instrument threshold and reads "0.00" (didn't flame out), turbojet running at barely 5% of rated thrust while cruising at mach 6 and change...

I try to do this too. Doesn't have any effect on the game but it assuages my...conscience?

This is really great to see, and visually the system is surprisingly well differentiated already considering the distance. Just a couple more years, now.

Is announcing a release date going to be a consistent thing now? And does anyone know it for 0.23?

Wow! From a distance Moho is a contender for the most boring surface in the Kerbol system, but at the right places and times it actually looks great. Probe landing site also gave a very interesting view. Grey speck is an RCS block, only thing that survived from the ditched interplanetary stage.

How can people bring themselves to defend comic sans in public? Do you hide your face in shame when you go out? Or are you all just primary school teachers?

Same idea here. Duna doesn't require a lot of delta-v to achieve insertion, it seems more like a failure to make a good encounter than a failure to bring enough fuel.

Here we are. We'll quickly skip past the banalities of launches, orbits and insertions, and get down to the meat of our tale: Somewhere over the Munar equator, an unidentified object glides silently over the cold and sterile surface, heading to destinations unknown... Wait, never mind. It just drops down onto the ground without making much of a fuss. It reveals itself to be a crane and a rover. One Bill Kerman is our pilot. He hops into (one of) the driver's seat(s) so he can roll the machine out into the open for its first Munar jaunt - it should be noted that the masterminds at the VAB omitted to provide any sort of remote control capability in either vessel, because at what point would that ever come in handy? As such, it's all in Bill's hands. Fortunately, this task is an easy one. All you have to do is drive straight forwa-- Oh no, no, that boom holding the solar panels is completely jammed between those legs, isn't it. It is. Oh my. Well...you tried wiggling the wheels around, right? And going back and forward a few dozen times? It made it worse? Right. Let's not do anything silly, let's stay cool and take stock of our situation here. No sudden moves... Wait! No fear! Bill brings to bear the full might of the great practical intellect he decidedly isn't known for, hops back into the cabin, and lifts up the offending leg. Actually, he lifts up all four legs in the group, as the game refused to have it any other way. No matter, precious redundancy is our saviour on this auspicious day. Perfect deployment. Our precious cargo now free, Bill is at liberty to take it for a little spin and get to grips with how it performs on the Munar surface. And... Oh no. Ohhh no...this is bad. It moves on the surface of the Mun like loafers move on puddles of cooking oil. It rate of acceleration makes my grandmother's Skoda look a Team Audi Le Mans car. Its turning circle and overall maneuverability is narrowly beaten by the Titanic. This isn't good...this is...the worst rover. Impossible! Cry the engineers, safe at home on Kerbin, particularly safe knowing that they will never having to drive this death trap across kilometers of hazardous alien terrain. "It performed marvelously at the Space Center!" Bill, after exchanging words and grudgingly admitting on radio that it would be pretty hard to construct a twenty-acre Munar gravity simulator on Kerbin in a giant vacuum chamber, has no choice but to either continue the mission or abandon it and go home in his crane-orbiter vehicle. Midway to his orbiter cabin, his radio informs him that he has no choice but to continue the mission. First order of business...simple. Just get out of the immediate vicinity of the landing site. Piece of cake. Funny, it looks like a cliff face in the distance, there. Pretty steep, right? Our rover would never manage such a climb in a million years. Wait a second. There are a lot of cliff-like structures here...almost seeming to go...wait, where exactly did we land? Oh no. That is the worst place to be...the absolute worst. There's just about no worse place 50km around that I could have touched down at. How...how am I supposed to get out of this? How? What am I going to DO? Now take note here...getting out really was nearly impossible. By my reckoning I spent 45 minutes freeing this blasted rover from its prison without bars, eternally taunting me with its promise of level ground. Not even 45 minutes of game time...45 minutes of real time, of my life. Driving around the same 10km² of KSP terrain for that amount of time, always slipping, always falling back down...quickloading endlessly the whole time...never again. Never again. Eventually, after a suicidal 30 m/s run-up to the NNW face of the crater (hill assisted, of course, if the rover could make 30 m/s by itself I'd be having no problems in the first place), we finally reach the promised land. As you can see, Bill even caught some major air (okay, some major vacuum) when he crested the rim. Excellent. Bill departs with relief from his foe, unaffectionately nicknamed Nemesis Crater during the ordeal. It's not the last we will see of it, as Bill still needs to drop the bastard rover back down the side of its rim to get to his return vehicle. Meanwhile, just a couple hundred kilometers away, something else entirely is happening. This foreboding shadow courses over the dark side of- Well, it's just a goofy looking lander and a transfer stage. Looks like it seats three. Where is it heading? Surprise...after a passable 2km distant landing, hop-corrected to 1km, three extra butts arrive to fill seats. Here the rover is pictured sliding way past the lander from way back at the far side of the image...let's say the brakes were a little bit wet on the terrain, despite being pinned for a full 30 seconds or more. After a swift and embarrassing turnaround, our crews are united at last. Bill is joined by Bob, along with veteran mission/space station crew and all-around experienced 'nauts Fergee and Nedcas Kerman. Jeb couldn't make it because he's in Laythe orbit right now, he radioed that he'd be back in time for Khristmas. For now, that's where we'll leave our guys. Coming soon: dozens and dozens of kilometers of driving! A comprehensive and terribly dangerous survey of the Mun's most twisted and curious surface features, including "Buckshot Alley" and "Fields of Crumpled Pain".

This is a pretty handy thing to do in last-ditch situations. Parts have fixed damage tolerances but Kerbals are apparently made of some kind of super-strong green rubber material and tend to happily bounce back, literally, from a lot of otherwise deadly impacts. I've saved two or three guys this way...

Being just a simple Ike mission, I think you could stand to carry less gear to your destination. What is that, at least 1,200 units of RCS? That's insane, unless you're the worst at docking in the world, it's on the order of 6,000kg you dragged there for basically no advantage. You can save a few hundred kilograms by ditching the Gigantor panel too, and just using a couple of small panels. Using two one-man cans instead of a single two-man also saves 1,300kg, though that's probably not a design choice for everyone's tastes. The second poodle is pretty crazy for the upper stage on the southern craft, too, they're extremely heavy and just using, say, 4 radial 77 engines instead would save another 2,100kg and probably increase delta-v to boot.

AMD Phenom II 965BE (showing its vintage, i'll probably replace it with one of the 8-core FX models when I get some money in the bank again) 4GB DDR3 RAM GeForce GTX 660.

Wow, that's astonishing. I've never seen wings used for that before.

One thing I always wondered about oil immersion cooling is, when it's set up and running it's all fine, but what do I do if I want to mess around inside my machine, connect something or replace parts? Do I have to drain out several kilograms of thick, messy oil, dispose of it as best as possible (try getting rid of a large quantity of used oil of any kind, it doesn't just go down the sink), then handle all of my parts that are covered in a thick layer of the stuff, before refilling it all again? And I have to do this just because I wanted to install a slightly better sound card? Is there actually an easy way around this stuff?

How's this? It's a standard mission insignia, complete with design cues shamelessly ripped from the shuttle-era NASA style for these patches. Apologies if it's rough around the edges, I don't work in any real vector programs so I just draw everything by hand in Photoshop.

Yes, can I please have an abridged recap of the stuff that was shown, if someone has the time? I would have liked to have caught the stream but I got in literally 5 minutes before the end.

I can't tell exactly just from the screenshots but it looks like there is probably propulsion gear clipped inside of it.

I go to select some parts ten times for every build, and other parts only one time every ten builds, so why should the latter group make it harder for me to access the parts I'm selecting? It would be nice to be able to select a handful of parts and put them in some kind of favorites or speed dial tab, so there's a lot less flipping pages and switching between tabs to find what's needed. If the favorites tab was limited to one page, that would be an ample 24 parts that would always be findable and placeable immediately from their user-chosen positions in the list.

Apologies if you can't make much out, but this is the most painful (successful) landing I've ever done. I had so little light I couldn't even check my own shadow (yes, I was stupid and forgot a lamp), it was basically instruments only. The angle was so unstable that the mere act of loading the scene was enough to make the lander slowly tip over and break. After a few tries I moved it to a slightly better place 4km up the crater field. The result (after an accelerated rest until midday) - well met, komrades! The big tanker-rover will be abandoned on the surface since it was...pretty useless, actually. Subassembly will make these things much handier in the future. This is the first time I got crews of separate missions to meet up with each other on the surface of any body except Kerbin. Bill took these guys home.

I'll agree here, it needs to be remembered that engine mass is still mass that has to be dragged around at a cost. One NERVA on its own has the same mass as a fully fueled 180-unit fuel tank, so if your total craft mass is equivalent to not more than a few of those, it's probably a waste to use a non-chemical engine. The 909 has half the Isp, but less than a quarter of the mass, and the little red one is even more extreme in the difference.

But if you do that, does your game still count as being stock?

I've actually had to do a direct-line return similar to this once before, except it was from low Munar orbit instead of the surface proper. I was under quite extreme time constraints because the mission was a bust and none of the flight-capable modules I had were fitted with any electrical generators. I had to get from the Mun to Kerbin touchdown before the 1600 or so units of battery drained out, so I pointed the nose straight at Kerbin, gunned it with a very generous amount of fuel from a lander and more than doubled my re-entry velocity. According to post-flight reports I think I pulled 40 or 50g on re-entry doing that, not ideal for crew comfort.

That's good, I can work with that. I'll see what I can do, though if it turns complex I might have to sleep and finish up tomorrow afternoon.

I never saw this either. I'd rather I didn't, it's bugging me too, now.

I was testing this rocket-boosted gliding probe, and it later made a very photogenic pass the whole way over this northern mountain range. The vehicle overperformed and made a powerless glide for dozens of kilometers for over 40 minutes game time, I was especially impressed since it was basically just a tube with lopsided control surfaces stuck on it. Also: After forgetting all about it for months I was suddenly reminded that the VAB displays a plus-sized version of your flag on the wall. For morale purposes.

After thinking about it for a minute, I think they may actually have been preserved pretty well - Venus is hostile, but it isn't privy to a great amount of erosion or change on its surface landscape, either. Wind and rain erosion aren't a problem on Venus, probably because the atmosphere is so extremely dense that I don't think it's possible for wind to actually get around without all of its kinetic energy being wasted. Acid rain forms high in the atmosphere, but it evaporates long before it reaches the surface. Venus also barely experiences any seasonal change that might contribute to solid object erosion because its axial tilt is very small compared to Earth's. The only thing I can think of that might degrade the pennants in the long term is the relatively high percentage of corrosive and reactive gases (SO2, COS, HCl, HF) in the atmosphere that might react with the materials over time, but I have no knowledge of chemistry so I can't say what effect it might actually have, if any.