Bobnova

Jeb currently has more or less the same issue. Landed a little, cheap, low part count, lander on Luna, It tipped over. Attempts to get it right side up failed. Did get it to a cliff face, nose pointing over cliff. Pulled nose up a bit, lit engine. Goal is to get over cliff, hit full throttle and aim skyward. Didn't see lip on edge of cliff. Lip catches fuel tank. Fuel tank explodes. Panic. Attempt to land pod as gently as possible. Land pod safely. Bored Jeb is now Very Bored. No fuel. No engine. Minimal power. No board games. Rescue time! I installed KIS. May ship him a screwdriver and a bag of parts and say "Have fun!"

Those landing legs MOVE! Without consuming any energy! Hell man, we haven't managed that yet, give the Kerbals a break.

They're working just fine together to me, for whatever that's worth. If your spaceship doesn't slow down enough to put chutes out, you need to redesign it and/or change your reentry angle to slow down further. Trying to do a vertical reentry in real life wouldn't work either I generally try to reenter at a very shallow angle, something that puts the PE at ~30km.

This is what I was thinking. I've built a bunch of tiny little probes. Even built a ship that could land on Mun with a (literal) stack of them and send the probes flying off to different bits of Mun after landing, to survey/science/transmit from other biomes.

Plenty of customers that would like to have an asteroid in a polar orbit with a decent retropack on it, though. Let's not think too peacefully here, nothing beats a large mass moving quite quickly.

Yes. Neutrinos do it all the time. If I remember correctly they have a 50/50 of making it through a light year of lead. They don't even go c either. Other stuff can if its going fast enough, it's just that there may not be much planet left behind afterwards Sufficiently high energy photons ought to be able to, if you look at the progression of visible light to UV to Xray to gamma ray to high energy gamma etc. Gravitons do, if they exist in the first place.

The two cars have to be identical or damn near it for the mythbusters result. Do the same thing with a car and a semi truck and you'll find the car in more or less the same shape as if it hit a wall at 2x its velocity.

Only if you ignore that binary, like hex, has a specific text format to make it clear that it is binary. 0b00000011 is binary, 0b11 is binary, 0b0011 is binary, 11 is decimal.

This would make me very happy as well.

That actually sounds like a really interesting experiment to observe, and one that will be relevant if we start trying to grow plants on a space station that is spun for "gravity".

I like that idea. Has anybody done the calculations to see how fast it'll need to spin to simulate those gravities? I'm curious how fast it'd have to spin.

If you start with ~4300-4400m/s for a 70km orbit, you can ignore atmosphere entirely and just focus on gravity losses and old/new velocity I'd imagine.

Given that nobody has landed anything on Phobos, survivable landing or impactor, I think that hitting Phobos with something is a perfect goal. Any engineers here that can design something convincing enough to get someone (Elon Musk I'm looking at you) to throw half a million bucks at it? Can you imagine the look on people's faces if a group of KSP players manage to land something safely on Phobos for less than a million bucks? That'd be incredible.

Should be able to. The mods are uncompiled code. I didn't have any problems.

Generating 10 lbs of lift does not have to cost 10 lbs of drag. There's a lift to drag ratio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L/D_ratio A U-2 for instance has a lift:drag ratio of ~28. That's not 0.28, that's 28 times more lift generated by the wing than drag (drag being resistance opposing the direction of travel) generated. Thus your spaceplane with with wings can use the wings to hold itself up, which do so very efficiently, while the wingless version has to use thrust directly to oppose gravity.

OP didn't say it had to send science back. Freed of that constraint I could easily see us getting a probe to at least the liquid hydrogen, probably the metallic for that matter. It might just be a lump of Tungsten, but it'd make it!

I don't know if you're intending to, but you're proving my point nicely. Lifting a small rocket with a balloon just doesn't help much over the balloon alone. The booster is a balloon simulation in KSP, which doesn't have balloons to use. But yeah, even starting from 23 miles up you need a lot of rocket to get to space. A decent bit less than from ground level, but still a lot. More than is easily liftable with a balloon for that matter.

The hardest part of all that is getting a functioning, long range, radar or lidar system and steering thrusters into a cubesat sized thing. Object detection is far, far, far harder than anybody gives it credit for being. While I love the idea of a kerbal or three in space, I recommend some research on what you're proposing. EDIT: For the balloon+rocket question, you could simulate it in KSP. Build a rocket with a small peroxide rocket's DV. Let's be really, really generous and give it 500DV. Build a booster to get it to ~15000 meters and reach 20000 meters at 0 velocity, you won't have much upward velocity from a balloon. Light the "peroxide rocket" and see where you end up.

I'd call marketing part of PR, personally. http://www.squad.com.mx/SquadSite/index.htm

I feel like it should be pointed out that this is a Mexican PR company making this video game. It's not a bunch of Americans who have never had to learn another language. If anybody is likely to be aware of language difficulties with regards to userbase and audience, they are.

Sure, in stock. With the realism overhaul and all the related mods? Hell no.

I enjoyed it

I like having specific locations, I found a biome entirely by accident on Mun (double-crater), I was psyched! I would like to see more specific locations given science/things to do.

I got this once yesterday. Closed KSP. Re-opened. Got the Mun landing scene, but the normal one. It's almost certainly an intentional easter egg. I'm running RO+RSS+etc.

The meters aren't meters, either. For that matter, the seconds may or may not be seconds, it depends on which hardware timer they're working off of and whether your PC is overclocked and whether any of that overclocking happens after windows boots. If we're being pedantic, let's be really pedantic! The "seconds" also vary by where you are on the earth, different spots have different velocities. Hell time of day and season probably matter too.