Burninate

It's mathematically simple, but... A thought on the more complex problem of an interface that makes it obvious what's going on, without presenting a grey blur: On warp, a 95% transparent grey ball appears around the CoM. It has radius equivalent to the size of the craft, with three dashed hemispherical circumference lines, a 'current heading' indicator in white on the surface of the sphere, and the traditional red-green-blue unit vectors indicating dimensions relative to current heading, emerging from the CoM. This ball does not obscure the craft, and can rotate freely at whatever the appropriate angular velocity is, without affecting the camera. On exit warp, the craft aligns to the ball's heading and orientation, and angular velocity.

There is an effort underway to re-do the stock example crafts without so many obvious poor choices, but it begs the question of titling vs intent, and overall scope. What 10-30 different stock example crafts would you like to see the game ship with? Format: Name Rough size (tons) 1-sentence description No images or .crafts required, just concepts.

You misunderstand - the struts are to connect the docking ports rigidly to the craft, not to connect from the craft to the payload on the other side of the docking ports.

Okay, testing completed: I used a quad docking interface and a senior docking interface, with a rocket engine below, to compare Sr Clamp vs Quad Clamp. Throttle was slowly increased to breaking point. The inline test jig used a Mainsail: Unstrutted Sr breaks at 78% throttle Unstrutted Quad breaks at 78% throttle Strutted Sr breaks at 78% throttle Strutted Quad takes 100% throttle without breaking (note: early anomaly where it broke at 78% assumed to be misapplication of struts, which was not seen in three repeated tests) Here is the lateral test jig, using a Skipper: Lateral Bending is a different animal: Unstrutted Sr breaks at 48% throttle Strutted Sr breaks at 48% throttle Unstrutted quad diagonal breaks at 67% throttle Strutted quad diagonal takes 100% throttle without breaking, taking a 30 degree deflection Unstrutted quad parallel breaks at 50% throttle Strutted quad parallel takes 100% throttle without breaking, taking a 25 degree deflection It would appear that the quad is superior, especially for bending loads & with struts supporting it

Now that we have a solid 1x2.5->4x1.25 adapter in stock parts, which of these is your preference for general use with larger craft? Do you have some alternate part strategy for solid connections with predictable separations that you've managed to make a standardized docking port out of?

Excellent idea.

add "Lock gimbal" & "free gimbal", rather than only "toggle".

Beautiful work

IMO a corequisite to 'Lots of Science' is 'Lots of Celestial Bodies'. Exploring. Not one more planet or two extra moons, but an increase of a factor of ten, with asteroids, comets, small moons, and a whole outer solar system. I have suggested, though, that magnetospheres are a viable option which have real implications for electrodynamic tether propulsion systems.

At present, the ISS has the option to "dock" craft with a lower-strength narrow attachment system, or to "berth" then with a high-strength, wider porthole attachment system. The reason docking is used is because berthing requires manual removal of bolts and reconnection of wiring and other overhead, taking several minutes - which is not acceptable for modules that the crew is relying on as escape pods in the event of a breach. Berthing, on the other hand, allows for much easier movement of cargo between modules. http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/07/nasa-planning-module-relocations-future-vehicles/

I don't see that this would cause any issue - the game can just poll the physics engine once per frame to check for rotation like it does now. I think it would look *confusing* watching a ship tumble at 10k RPM subjective time in a deep warp, but the current system doesn't really make sense.

0.21 SAS torque will likely be considered grossly overpowered in the future. It's too easy to just stack SAS and batteries with an RTG until you can control anything. At the *least*, a rebalance increasing the energy usage per torque by a factor of 10-100 is probably in the works.

Wouldn't these be trivial to store, when a craft with SAS off unloads or fast forwards, and either load using modulo arithmetic on reload, or allow to continue simply rotating in unpowered-warp where momentum isn't calculated? It doesn't add *much* to the game, but it removes what is basically a cheat - fast forward to freeze rotation - and makes it somewhat more realistic, at what seems like a trivial cost.

I have to add: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Assembly_Building

Docking orbit is 120x130km to 125kmx125km, I don't bother tweaking circular too much on the slow-turning behemoths I build. Testing orbit is anywhere from 75x75 to 75x300, depending on how launch is.

I don't have a problem with it, it's just interesting to think what one might find the mod-heavy community building without it. You're right, though - KSP has a tiny solar system; It could be expanded outwards to include targets that are more challenging dV-wise, without jeopardizing the experience of the existing system.

Cost is one big unimplemented part of the idea... but not the only one. In real life, fuel depots are attractive because we only have ~20T payload launchers, maximum. The development of a new 100T launcher would be incredibly expensive relative to using 5x 20T craft; Rocket prices per pound tend to be extremely responsive to a low launch cadence. A Saturn V that is launched only sparingly, every four months or so, and requires a whole new class of larger tooling and launchpad and facilities devoted to the design, is much less economical than a larger number of smaller rockets, launched more often. In KSP *beta sandbox mode*, launchpad part counts are a major limitation on increasing payload. The maximum practical payloads range from about 100T to 1000T, depending on your computer & settings, and anything larger will require in-space assembly of the few remaining parts that aren't jettisoned to escape the Kerbal gravity well. Things assembled in space which don't have to deal with 1G static load and 3G dynamic acceleration, because they're using underpowered engines on huge tanks, also don't have to worry so much about bracing parts. Complex missions can be assembled and launched with *large payloads* that have sufficient delta V to go on interplanetary return missions - missions that would not be possible in a single launch. I find the Kethane mod cool, but somewhat regrettable in implementing simple in situ resource utilization, because it doesn't require you to have these grand large in-orbit construction efforts to complete a mission.

Another note: The other big downside of using solid rockets is vibration. That is totally unaccounted for in KSP.

Along with solar sails and solar electric propulsion, ED tethers are one of the big concepts in replacing chemical thrust. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether This would require a magnetosphere / ionosphere model, and enables trading off orbital velocity directly for power, contingent on the position and direction of the ship being conducive to traction against the planetary magnetic field.

A mainstream consensus that "video games are for children" formed sometime in the 1980's. The people who grew up playing games, however, never seem to have stopped, especially computer rather than console gamers. Average MMO age is now late 20's to early 30's. KSP and Minecraft have a particularly broad appeal not, IMO, in that their userbase is *older* than the average high-quality computer gaming community, but that it's younger.

72 positions in a 360 degree rotation gives you 3*3*2*2*2 divisions. The parts are configured to allow 72-way rotation (5 degree gradations if you hold shift) right now. What's missing is placement. Move a part with angle snapping around a large object, and it jumps in 15 degree increments. Without angle snapping on at some level, it's impossible to precisely place matching parts. Keep 15 degrees as the default, but allow us a button to change it to 5 or 10 (or 30 or 45) as well.

I think this is an extremely cogent point. One wonders if maybe there's room for an in-GUI 'old versions' functionality, so I, a recent devotee of KSP, can see how you all managed in 0.17 and load old crafts.

-deleted, duplicate-

Communications networks do not exist in the stock game (where for the moment antennas are purely decorative), but are present in several of the mod plugins to the game, most notably the RemoteTech project: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/16347-0-20-RemoteTech-Relay-Network-%E2%80%93-RemoteTech-2-has-opened-up-for-playtesting My recommendation is to focus on learning how the rocket launch and orbital mechanics work first, before beginning exploring the Kerbol system, before investing time in comm sats networks. Aside from that... *dive in*. The fun of the game is in experimentation, not following advice. Failure is the first 99 things you do before you get it right.

"Incompatible with this version of KSP"