rodion

A GSO is simply a circular, equatorial orbit at a certain altitude, different for each body, where the orbital and rotational velocities are matched so that the same face of the body being orbited is presented to the spacecraft at all times - so if you drew an imaginary point on the surface of the body, that point would appear to always be in the same place from orbit, whatever time you looked - and similarly, from the ground, the satellite would appear to hang motionless in the sky. Here's a Wikipedia animation of two bodies in GSO: The KSP Wiki gives the altitude your spacecraft needs to be at to be in a GSO for all bodies in the game. Some bodies don't have one, though, due to the limited sphere of influence the game gives them.

That's great...in terms of slim chance encounters it reminds me of how I burned into a neat Kerbin intercept trajectory from Duna, only for the game to tell me that it would end prematurely due to, of all things, a collision with the Mun. As regards the shadowy non-existence of Dres, maybe I really should send a real mission to it one day. Perhaps. Maybe.

This rules, well worth sitting through the whole thing. Super informative on the game dev process and often funny. Especially interesting to see cameos of the earliest iterations of the game, down to 0.1.

It's amazing how many of these ship designations you want to see in the game after just a few seconds of thinking, actually. Tug, fuel depot, drive stage, impactor, orbital laboratory...

Thanks, I'm also in the UK so I'll look out for it later tonight.

On a smaller update scale as regards 0.22, isn't there an issue of KSP Weekly due today? Are they published at any specific hour, or just whenever they're ready? I don't want to pester, but those things are like heroin to me.

Bookmarked, I hope I'll see this.

Burn times aren't really an issue in KSP...at worst, you can go get a sandwich and a cup of coffee, or just window KSP and put something else on top, showing only the maneuver progress. If anything, consider yourself privileged to have such overpowered ion engines; each KSP-model ion thruster has over 5,500 times the thrust rating as the one that powered Dawn to Vesta and (en route) Ceres.

Good idea, and similar effects already exist for rocket engines in the atmosphere so it seems like it would be a relatively quick job to add such a thing.

During certain parts of spaceflight real-life astronauts often wear full pressure suits on missions inside their capsules for safety (because of things like this), so it's conceivable that the average Kerbal is sitting in a pressurized suit, inside of a pressurized cabin. Also, when we go on EVA we never have to wait 30 minutes of game time for a Kerbal to awkwardly don its 55 kilogram suit, so it's expedient...

I don't think it's possible at the present time. The only way I've ever known is the back-and-forward. As was said, it would be nice if the ports could manually be "reactivated" on the part menu.

Personally if I use the n-couplers on a rocket I never stack them linearly with anything else. Building outwards is the most bulletproof way, makes for a squat rocket but it's more stable and functional. If the current Unity engine allowed parts to snap onto multiple build nodes at once it would be a whole different story, but you have to play the game, so to speak.

Considering the game is a specifically Earth-analogue space agency simulator and that women have been piloting space missions for fifty years, and that some of the most accomplished of all astronauts are women, it seems more sensible and realistic to include female Kerbals than not. I think it's quite a conspicuous gap at the present time, completeness suggests the addition.

This was a really nice view to greet my rover landing (less nice to drive around when you're on the ground, but I'll forgive).

This exactly...what a fantastic project.

Precision landing. Many landings later, my accuracies can still be measured in tens of kilometers. What am I going to do if I ever start a base? Put everything on those giant wheels?

I regret not having this feature too, for airstrip dragsters as well as aircraft, among other things. Would be a nice improvement to the game's stock of chutes. Devs might have an annoying time working out the actual behaviour of the parachutes on the ground though, I guess they'd have to be deformable or animated somehow.

This is a great idea and very pleasing to the eye. It's a really great way to extend the capabilities of Kerbals and give them the benefits of a real vehicle (nodes, nav ball, etc.). Well done!

perhaps also: Sorely Needed Apparatus Concerning Kerbal Safety

If you try to amplify any digital sound past its peak volume it doesn't actually get any louder, it just distorts, like a balloon being inflated too much inside a box of a fixed size - the outsides press against the barrier and flatten out, same thing happens with the signal shape (it clips). You can't really scale up sounds on your computer in such a way.

Can't help you with your main problem, especially due to busted image, but this one is easy - neither. Flag planting is a real + supported thing Kerbals can do in the game and doesn't use any in-game parts except the flag part, which also counts as its own flight in progress. Right click a Kerbal on the surface of any body to see the flag planting option.

Yes, it's hard to doubt this is Minmus, just based on the colors in the speck.

Yes, please make this happen.

The fatal incident you're thinking of is the mission Soyuz 11. As the re-entry capsule was decoupled, the explosive bolts fired with incorrect timing and popped open a small valve that was supposed to let fresh air in for the crew when the capsule reached the ground. The cabin immediately depressurized and the crew all suffocated within a minute. After this Soviet and Russian crews started to wear pressure suits inside the vehicles, too. As it happens, it's the only time in history anybody was actually killed in outer space proper, as opposed to on launch or in the atmosphere during re-entry.

Sun from just over 500,000,000,000 meters (!) - about 7.5 times the orbital radius of Jool. Probe is still traveling at 22,700m/s so conceivably I could go much, much further but I already wasted 450 days of mission time on this jaunt, so I think I'll leave it a while. At this distance solar panels, even when directly exposed to sunlight, can't generate any measurable amount of electrical power, so the probe is inactive, but it doesn't stop me looking around at least.