rodion

Well, it is quite depressingly common with many launch vehicles, many of the largest debris-creating events in spaceflight history were caused by used upper stages exploding, comparable to satellite malfunctions and the like. What does the article say about it, exactly?

I've heard of the flashes and flickers experienced by astronauts and other exposed people during various activities, but to get such a large flash and eye irritation after the fact must have made it quite a high energy event, by the sounds of things. I think it's perfectly possible that it could have been a rogue high energy particle, but other conditions vie with it equally to explain it. Maybe it was just some normal physical event (you actually did touch your eye, some small bit of particulate matter in the cabin air got into your eye, et cetera), or maybe less likely, it was a sensory hallucination from the edge of consciousness - funny things happen to your various senses when you're falling asleep, most everyone knows the feeling where your sense of balance/orientation fails and you wake up from a feeling of tumbling, and auditory hallucinations of name-calls and other things when falling asleep are common too. I've never had it myself but it seems credible that one's vision could experience that kind of brain noise too when snoozing, I don't have any special knowledge though so I'm just putting ideas out there.

That's really cool, but what happens if you run out? Despite the length, Akira didn't have that many named characters, did it? Maybe you could eke it out with the characters from Domu or Fireball, or something, if comes to it. The general idea of the naming scheme is very appealing, though. Maybe it could be done with War and Peace or some other epics. All aboard the KSS Pierre! Oh God, it's heading right for the Napoleon!

Fluorine, in its elemental form, is pretty evil but it has a certain emotional character about it. It won't stop causing unthinking, absolute mayhem on everything it comes into contact with until it is entirely bound in a prison of its own causation, and it makes the greatest spectacle in the process (from the maximum distance you can possibly be). If fluorine was a person, it would probably be Carl Panzram. Probably close second: silicon, for helping to facilitate the microelectronics revolution and the relative trivialization of computation. Judging by how I'm sitting at a computer right now and reading a forum about something else I can do on the computer, I probably owe silicon a lot.

The launches you might save in conventional interplanetary stages from this scheme seem to be likely to be canceled out by the refueling schedule such a system would require. Remember, it's always possible to return your normal IP stages to orbit and refuel and reuse them for future launches, so long as they are robotic and can function autonomously away from the payload. The main way I can see this benefiting anyone is that if you have to launch a large number of separate craft in a relatively small launch window, a small fleet of these with frequent refueling trips would probably be able to serve any number of Kerbin escapes. I don't know what kind of space program would be so busy to require that many launches, though.

I'm not sure this is possible with the game's current build mechanics, but I thought I would run it by someone. Currently the parts with 2 configurations/modes only show 1 state, deployed or undeployed - for instance the landing legs always show up undeployed, and the ladders always show up deployed. Would it be possible to add a function which toggles between these shown states in the VAB? I have problems with relatively simple things here, like trying to tell if my landing legs will actually touch the ground based on where I've placed them - if I want to know for sure, I have to set up supports, deploy the vehicle on the launchpad, test everything live, et cetera. If I could toggle the view in the VAB, I could just do it by eye in about 15 seconds using the floor texture clipping, or what have you. With the extendable ladders, despite being a small part on the ship with fairly minor functionality, they cover up a big strip of whatever I'm working on underneath on the craft, and many times, when I'm trying to move RCS thrusters or other small (but important) things, I pick up the ladder instead and get disrupted. Once I've placed the ladder I don't need to see by eye how far down in goes, I already know it's okay. So, is this at all possible? Thanks.

I'd applaud you if you could set this up with any two bodies in the Kerbol system, but my guess is that over the course of a few cycles the game engine's accuracy across large distances, or lack of it, would fail it and an encounter would no longer be made as predicted.

I like your truck idea, I think it is what I'd do in your situation, although considering the great size and awkward center of mass the payload would probably have, it might take some hard work to get it there in one piece. You seem to have KSP well in hand though, so why not. Personally for the sake of space hygiene I always try to leave enough fuel and electrical power in skycranes and other temporary thrusting stages that they can be shot off into the ground elsewhere and totally destroyed, or put out of the way.

If those moon landings were really real, how come the only photographs we have of it all come from a seemingly magical, invisible camera mounted at a varying angle about 20' above the scene?

If the component isn't connected to anything it doesn't count as being on your craft and won't appear on the launchpad, so it's pretty self evident. If there's a more specific case you're having trouble with, screenshots would help.

I always thought the old key to this was just to add excessive amounts of intakes so the engines could continue to function due to the sheer amount of air available to the craft (the infamous school of airhogging/intake spamming). If even that isn't working for you, I don't know what you could be doing wrong.

Oh, that's very handy, if slightly weird. Makes me feel less fretful about how much stuff I'm potentially dragging up with me to space, especially things that have awkward structural properties. Thanks for the info.

Hi, struts are 50 kg each and each strut counts as 1 part (so far as I know), so in the interests of efficiency, help me out with this hypothetical scenario: if I decouple 2 spacecraft that are linked by struts, does the mass of the struts get set to 0 kg after detachment, or get applied to one of the craft, or something else? (Assuming the middle case, does the way the struts are attached in the VAB/SPH determine which craft retains the mass?) Also, the nodes that the struts were attached to remain on the craft after separation. Assuming I had 4 struts to begin with, does this then make the functional part count of the scene owing to strut nodes after separation (assume the two craft are still in the same scene together) 8, 4, or some other number? If you know anything about this it would really help me out, thanks.

You could look into the Universe Replacer mod and the resources people have made for it; I know it has facilities for reskinning spacesuits as well as pretty much everything else in the game, otherwise I wouldn't know how to do it.

The joke has a significantly shorter shelf life if you teach people to pronounce Uranus correctly...

I think the Kerbol system needs more extreme environments, if anything. Even if a return mission is difficult or virtually out of the question (see: Eve, Jool) the missions can obviously still result in fun and adventure for all (see: Eve, Jool), and if you have to design a probe that can withstand colossal atmospheric entry loads, like the real-world Galileo probe, or a rover that is at home with 4g of surface acceleration, et cetera, that's just all the more fun and challenge for the engineers out there. If you like touching down something relatively hospitable and then leaving you can always go to Minmus, Pol, Bop, Gilly, Ike, the Mun and so on...

Looks a bit generic to me. One colored sphere hanging in space is much like another, and you could stamp this with the same "IT'S SPACE" mark as a million other uninspired spots. If you could clearly distinguish an LV-909 in the image, or if it featured a squat trapezoid-head enthusiastically trying to sell me something, it might be more of an interesting find, but I don't think we have a case, here.

This definitely tallies with my experience. Unfortunately, KSP can only resolve maneuvers and predictions to a certain degree of accuracy, especially when interplanetary distances are involved. The best thing to do is just make sure you check how the motion has changed as soon after you enter the body's SoI as possible, so you aren't deep in its gravity well and it only take a few m/s correction to make the necessary tweaks that are required.

Considering the anomalies aren't even guaranteed to be above the ground after updates, I doubt they will have any value to the new science gear, unless Squad seriously changes its policy towards them. Personally, I think the anomalies actually probably exist in a sort of "super-canonical" frame of the KSP universe where they don't have any serious bearing on actual in-game activities. After all, I don't think Squad is seriously suggesting that there is a race of elusive beings "out there" planting curiously logoed monoliths and leaving cryptic messages all over the Kerbol system. They're there for players to stumble on outside of their regular game experience, not as part of it.

I don't have formal mission plan but I'm looking to get a Kerbin system infrastructure up and running before 0.22 changes things. Plans are for space stations in orbit around Kerbin and the Mun with a fully capable shuttle/tug system to get Kerbals and resources from one SoI to the other easily, and a Mun base with tanker-rovers to transfer all needed resources for missions, landings, launches etc. from the Munar surface. The base will have robotic and reuseable lander-orbiters so Kerbals can go to and from the Mun as long as there is spare fuel at base. I might even be able to finish the ground work before the update makes the entire savegame obsolete. The main stations are built and the shuttles and heavy rovers are proven or semi-proven in live tests so far. Base coming down soon.

BACC SRBs. Anything smaller is for babies.

Had a dramatic moment retrieving a crew of 6 of my best Kerbals, including Bob, Bill and Jeb from my station for use in more interesting missions. The node carrying all of the parachutes broke off at 2,000m ASL (note: this did not happen during tests), giving me a few seconds to fire up the maneuvers engine and get the shuttle out of a tumble for a soft landing. Nobody was hurt. I think this was the quickest I ever reacted to anything happening in KSP. EDIT: the node actually landed upside-down just a couple dozen meters away from the shuttle. Here's Bill posing.

Mine's strange and ad hoc, it basically goes: word I like + a zero + number indicating mass bracket + more zeroes indicating how many major revisions the craft has gone through; e.g. a lander called the Sassafras 0300 would be designed for heavy (bracket 3) work, which went through two (00) significant design revisions since the original design was put together. A two digit appendix is added in flight for the craft's serial number, so Sassafras 0300-04 would be the fourth craft of the type that was built and launched.

I'm glad the very useful "control from here" feature is in the game in the first place, but every time I switch to IVA view, and possibly some other views (I haven't made a systematic effort to check what I can and can't do with it, it just ambushed me during a mission), the game resets the navball alignment back to the "core" parts'. It's a big troublemaker between and during maneuvers. Can the game be convinced to hold the setting regardless of view, between ship switches, etc., until told otherwise? It would really help make complex craft more useable.

Hey, I just navigated to the board a second ago to make this exact suggestion. I too use the 1.25m radial attachment point and structural fuselage parts a whole lot while building, and I would really like to be able to make some 2.5m things such as large roving tankers and space station modules that aren't purely shaped and sized based on the parts that have a specific utility - padding is extremely useful in some cases. Also on my wish list: 1.25 fuselages as long as the 90-unit and 45-unit fuel tanks. This must be one of the easiest part sets to model and implement in the game, since they literally do nothing except snap on to something else.