borisvolodnikov

Trying to land one at KSC.

Making these things massless was a silly change. I hope they reverse the decision at some point.

^^^^^this.

Jeb approves (but notes that it could use moar boosters)

Kerbin, of course!

I'm not certain allowing derivatives of his code would be taking up more of his time. It's unclear why he would even care - so long as no one uses his "brand" (ISA). Short of a commercial interest in the code (was he planning to charge for this some day?), this attitude is baffling. It doesn't really matter; someone will create a newer, maintained map mod and in time everyone will forget about ISA MapSat. The demand is certainly there.

Don't hit the water so hard!

This please!

Really, you could use that asterisk to close out the entire topic... KERBOL SYSTEM* *Not to scale

I'm not sure making this detail more realistic would make the game any more fun.

I don't think I made an argument (making the tone of your post "invalid"), but I'll make one here: engines are pretty essential to the core experience. Kethane is, at best, an appendage to the core game experience, and to many players, not really of interest. Overall, I'd rather see new core gameplay features than putting in existing mods that do what they do quite well on their own. This, in addition to comments from the dev team about "not competing with modders" make me suspect that things like an improved aero model, reentry heat, and kethane will either not make it into the core game, or be added very late into the release schedule (that is to say, they are not a priority).

To save you the trouble of having to copy a directory into your game folder?

Were it not for the fact that you need some sort of remote control (as others have suggested, a probe core) to fire the parachute off (it'll vaporize when it hits the surface otherwise), you could just decouple it whilst dipping into Kerbin's atmosphere just enough to make the orbit decay, and keep focus on it (via the tracking station or otherwise), and it would be good to go. I can confirm that "debris" that consists of science parts do provide science when they are recovered from the tracking station screen (noticed this when I inadvertently crashed one of my science "sounding rockets" at low speed into the ocean just outside of KSC).

Reaction wheels/SAS being what they were, you might not have been entirely wrong...

Number 1 feature request from me at this stage: add the currency to career mode to make it an actual career mode, rather than guided sandbox (not to say that I'm not having fun with SCIENCE! we just need more substance now to make it a true "game" rather than a interplanetary train set).