rodion

I might be interested in doing this. Got any other resources, like screenshots of the craft involved, list of crew, and so on? And is this an insignia for a single mission (flight), or a whole series of flights?

800m, if I recall. It had an orange tank and a mainsail still attached so it was neat to be able to look at the individual parts of my old craft, just as I left them during some old mission, without even needing to use IVA view.

Probably not more than 45-50,000kg at this time. A 75,000kg N1-tier lifter (and probably exhibiting the same reliability characteristics) doesn't sound like too bad of an idea for future missions, actually. Edit: smashed this just now. Second stage of a testbed for a scaled-up serial-staged hulk put itself into orbit, 7 Skippers plus 5600 units of fuel, many tanks and other launcher sundries adds up to a little over 100,000kg, I think.

I wish I didn't have to choose just one of these in the poll, but I went for complex scene optimization because expanding the limits of what the game allows you to do will be one of the most important things the KSP devs can work on at any time now or in the future, since the potential for complexity the game offers is actually outrunning the ability of the game to handle it. I think that the more the game is shored up to handle tough scenes, the more impressive are the things we'll be able to see from the players. The thing I'm most looking forward to actually playing with is obviously the science system, of course.

It's usually this for my beauties. Apologies in advance to classical music listeners.

I used this vehicle - -to launch the little probe core and a few solar panels seen on the right at 27km/s out of the system. At ~530,000 Mm the physics engine failed and the camera started flipping around so fast I could barely see anything, but if I go back to the tracking center or run any other mission, the physics isn't enabled for the dead probe (you can't collect a measurable amount of electrical energy with just a few small panels after about 300,000 Mm), so it just keeps going and I could check back on it at any point in the future.

Some of my heavier lifters have transient drops in velocity between initial stages but it doesn't bother me too much, as long as it's before I start turning for lateral acceleration. I assume it is taking a suboptimal ascent through the atmosphere if it does that, but as long as it gets the intended gear to orbit, it's fine by me.

I had a close and clear flyby of a Mun arch from a probe in a very low altitude (~3,000m) orbit, in 0.18 or so before the Mun elevations got more extreme, that's the only time I can think of where I saw an easter egg without actually looking for it. Good find.

This should seriously be a forum rule for people on the GQ&T board who make a thread about any specific problem related to craft designs or parts issues. How is anyone supposed to diagnose such problems with just a description? Just show us something, please.

-the number of objects under the "debris" tab at the tracking station -the number of Kerbals assigned on missions at the astronaut complex -the number of screenshots in your folder (from all versions of the game or only the latest, your choice) I have a gut feeling that these numbers alone are enough to get a fairly good idea of anyone's past and present KSP game, so post them, if you would...

It's certainly a pretty good idea, but I don't see it being possible to map KSP's various important commands to a single gamepad. I'd like to believe it could be done in a way that isn't completely terrible to use, though; not that I'm going to buy the Stream console system, but good luck to everyone who does.

After a successful and productive stay in Dres orbit, an ion probe I was trying to insert into orbit around Laythe was nearly killed/shot back out out of Laythe SoI due to Jool eclipsing the sun. Worse, I a. couldn't time-warp at all because it was throttled-up, and without electrical power the throttle is stuck, and b. was losing my precious small amount of remaining Xenon at the rate roughly of 1 unit per 6 seconds, without generating any thrust, due to the thrusters being classed as flamed-out by the game. After 15 or 20 frustrating real-time minutes waiting to either run out of fuel or get some power back, the Sun finally reappeared. I had enough fuel to get into a nearly circular orbit, and absolutely nothing else, and there it stayed (until I downloaded 0.20).

I didn't realize until a few weeks ago that on the map screen, if you click the little apo/peri tabs, the numbers will stay on the screen after you move the cursor away, so you can fine-tune maneuvers without having to move back and forth between the numbers and the maneuver planning controls.

Had my first actual accidental collision between two separate craft today. Also the only docking I've ever ruined after the fact (no, I didn't quicksave either). I guess 20 or 30m at an angle isn't enough clearance to start retrofire when you have NERVAs and solar panels, among other things, sticking out on those extra-long struts.

I think the average release time between the past few updates has been about 50-70 days, so we should be getting fairly close now even if this new update requires a unusually huge amount of work. There's no official word so I'm just looking at the trends.

This exactly...I figure you're there for the long term regardless of whether there are zero ladders or ten...

Crashed, probably... Next shot, insufficient fuel for return, et cetera; made all of the classic errors at this early stage in the game. First successful lander carried way too much fuel compared to how much I'd need now; my main problem was that I was unaware of the timeless "burn periapsis just barely above the surface and kill all lateral velocity at low altitude" technique, so i was trying to make a controlled deceleration and descent from some ridiculous height like 15 km. That's an awful lot of wasted ÃŽâ€v.

This happens to me way too commonly. My early heavy Mun lander wasn't much better. I try to hold function above form, but in the end, I tend to go out of my way to try to edit things like this out of my designs...

This is serious stuff, guys.

I agree. Send a robot. They don't fear space, time, or the onrushing Munar surface. Let your stranded crew just walk over to it and climb in; docking two vessels on a body's surface is a great recipe for producing two ruined vessels.

Wow, this is an insane challenge, a ludicrous booster. If you put structural plates on the inside of that thing, it would serve as multi-storey parking for rovers. Well done on the Big 6th Order of Magnitude for payload mass. If the game had achievements, you would probably get a little badge pop up in the right corner of the screen. I can't really believe my eyes.

Why not take some idea or activity you've already tested and proven previously, take it to the drawing board and scale it to Ridiculous? Make a spectacle out of the game.

The way I see it, NASA has been in a fiscal shutdown for about the past four decades, am I right? [sound of crickets and disgruntled silence] I don't see NASA really "shutting down", now or in the future, any more than I can see the US Air Force or Navy shutting down. They may be on the back end of nowhere on budget priority lists, but they are an enduring symbol of national and indeed, international pride for a whole lot of people, and killing it would be about as acceptable as killing bald eagles to a lot of folks. Not to mention, there's no shortage of major political rivals and "ex-" rivals who are running their own fully formed space programs at this time. It's just not a good look to can it just as the gauntlet is being thrown down again. It's just a pause. I won't make any comments on which political institutions and bodies might be saying what about this and that, but I think shutdowns like this are a self-solving problem in a way. A massive public failure like this is a huge loss of face for the, uh, Kovernment of the...Ignited Stages...when ordinary people notice that their country just made stools in the bed because some old guys from Yale couldn't come to an intelligent decision on [a certain disputed proposal] and just heaps on the pressure to hack it out and resolve the bullheaded gridlock as soon as possible. Maybe deep inside I'm too optimistic though, because I just want to see NASA up and running again as soon as possible.

No real problems with electricity or fuel any more here, but the way the damned VAB resets my crew loadout every time I edit or revert my craft for whatever reason...I could find much time to get angry at the unknown dev who didn't make that setting a bit more persistent, if he didn't also help make the other parts of the game I love so much.

I'd personally love to see something more comprehensive and amenable to aesthetic building like this, though it would possibly interfere with the "lego-like" simplified build process that lets newcomers into the world of KSP easily; also, the part menus as they exist now would almost certainly have to be substantially rearranged, maybe into nested tabs by diameter (frankly I'd quite like to see a higher degree of organization like this anyway, since nothing is really grouped properly right now), to accommodate all of these extra parts with their new lengths and diameters, to save every section being 5 pages long. I think the most problematic part of this suggestion is the implied workload, since the game devs don't usually just crudely resize a part when creating one of a specific size; the texture and model is always pretty much brand new. Either they would have to ditch that for the sake of expediting the creation of parts of many sizes, or put in a possibly unreasonable amount of work whenever a part is introduced that benefits from being of several sizes.