Kerbart

The good news: on a Mac, “it just works™”

It certainly didn't help the nuclear industry that Fukushima happened just as nuclear energy seemed to be gaining in the public opinion. The fact that we're now learning that TEPCO knew the reactor was experiencing a meltdown when they were still announcing to the press that they were doing everything in their power to prevent a meltdown from happening doesn't really help. The Chernobyl area is recovering, sadly, has more to do with the side-effect of having virtual no human life in the area. It kind of makes you think how bad we treat our environment; radioactive poisoning of an area is less harmful than letting humans live there, it seems.

It's an old, old issue. Squad never cut the mass of the Mk1-2 in the past despite many pleas. So I'm going to be quite surprised if they do so in the future. If they do I'll happily take the weight reduction. But I doubt there will be any "rebalancing." I'm just going with what the game offers me in this case.

Your main problem is that you're trying to debunk an irrational fear by being rational. And it’s done by the “same” scientists (they’re all “scientists” after all) who told us that nuclear power plants are perfectly safe and nothing could ever, ever, happen. Cue Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Fukushima. You don’t have to tell me how wrong that is and how one has nothing to do with the other. I know that. The problem is that Joe Public doesn’t know that and has learned over time that for something that you cannot sense, history has taught that having a blind trust in science regarding how safe something is might not be the wisest action; the people that tell us that “x” is perfectly safe and should not be feared seem to have a hidden agenda sometimes. That is the problem that needs to be solved first, not public ignorance regarding the dangers and safety of radiation. The scientific community treating this as an ignorance problem is just as ignorant as Joe Public treating “radiation” as a ZOMG problem. It’s an equal display of not understanding the underlying issues and ignorant behavior (“let’s educate the people”) that doesn’t address the true problem surrounding this—a lack of credibility.

I just role-play with it and use the various pods accordingly. The lander-cans might withstand atmospheric re-entry as we all know, but the description clearly says something else and I use them that way: in vacuum only. Similarly the Mk1-2, in my Kerbal world, offers superior life-support and re-entry capabilities, making it the preferred solution over the Mk1 pod which I out-phase as soon as the Mk1-2 becomes available. Yes, there's a weight penalty, but I simply assume that whatever causes the penalty in the first place is more than worth it.

I might be incorrect on this but the cost of an exploration platform greatly exceeds that of an average rocket launch. I'm not sure they'd be happy with being "in the line of fire." Production platforms might be cheaper, but shutting down production for a few days is a pretty expensive adventure (and pumping oil up from well a few miles away is not like opening and closing a kitchen faucet; you have to consider the momentum of a few miles of oil, so stopping and starting that needs to be done slowly unless you want to blow out your valves). EDIT: Oh wait, I thought you meant abandoning them. Moving them? No way. Noooo way.

There is no right way. I have plenty of hours under my belt. Yet I still have great fun noodling around Mun and Minmus. Others get bored by anything inside Dres' orbit. The great thing about KSP is that it suits pretty much anyone's wishes, and there's always mods.

This. Remember the 1.0 release with its flurry of patches for all kinds of bugs that made us think “did they actually play the game before releasing it?” The systematic stuff has already been done in QA. This is about playtesting. Communicate about bad interface design, weird things that shouldn't happen (remember Scott Manley's airflow bug). That doesn't mean don't do stuff to see if it breaks—by all means do weird stuff — but do it literally in a playful manner. That's where the benefit of this stage comes from, to discover things you’d be doing while playing the game. The QA testing has already been done.

I recently remember seeing a thread here on the forum that revealed that hatches tend to be all mechanical (due to the rather nasty consequences of a software glitch or power failure opening the hatches). Apparently Kerbals design theirs differently!

Google "the tragedy of the commons." In this case, the fertile ground is clean LEO space. Everyone agrees that if everyone else keeps it clean, it will be just fine. And we can save a good chunk of money on the launch cost by NOT fitting reentry thrusters. It's just one piece of debris, as long as everyone else plays nice. Right?

I don't see why it's a problem to open a launch pad that seems limited to GSO (I don't know if it truly is). After all they still have the Cape Canavarel pad, which gets more capacity for inclined orbits this way.

There's no reason on this forum to type a3 as a^3; you're just exchanging readability for laziness.

Most people don't, especially when it's tedious and time-consuming. I do recommend going through the exercise once or twice on a simple rocket (nothing with radially attached boosters as it complicates things without adding extra insights) just to get a better feeling for "what makes" delta-V.

Exponentially. If you're interested, you calculate DV by multiplying the Isp of the rocket engine with one standard g and the natural logarithm of the mass with fuel divided by the mass without fuel: DV = Isp×g×ln mwet/mdry For instance, say you have a Mk I pod, an FLT-200 tank and a LV909 Terrier. Total mass without fuel: 1465 kg (if I got it right); total mass with fuel: 2465 kg. The LV909 has an Isp in vacuum of 345 (and 85 at 1 atm pressure which is why you don't want to use it in the atmosphere). Plugging in gives you: DV = 345×9.81×ln1.68 = 1755 m/s. Now, let's put that on top of two FLT-800 tanks and a LVT-45 swivel (and let's not forget the stack decoupler). Empty mass of the first stage: 2250 kg—but wait, we need to add the top stage (full mass) to that as well. That puts the total empty mass at 5015 kg (but it does have a DV of 1755 m/s out of the box). Each FLT-800 holds 4000kg of propellant, so your full mass is 13015 kg. At ground level the Swivel has an Isp of 270, and 320 in vacuum. Let's for argument sake assume that it averages out at 300 for our launch. DV of the bottom stack is then: 300×9.81×ln(13015/5015) = 1428 m/s. Note that you get less DV from this second stage despite having 8× as much fuel! That's because the dry/wet ratio improved only a little bit, and the Isp of the bottom stage is actually less. So your total DV for the entire stack is 1428 + 1755 = 3183 m/s which will, sadly, not get you into orbit. This is where you can add two SRB's, but now things rapidly get complicated. You'll have to treat the your second stage "with boosters" as one stage (where only a little bit of fuel of the FLT-800's get uses) and then, once the SRB's are gone,use the amount of fuel in your second stage at that point for the calculation of your DV. But I'll leave that as an exercise to the student. This is why most of us resort to Mechjeb or KER for these things. It's not particularly hard, just a lot of work

So instead of just manually deorbiting junk you don't want (one piece per launch on average) you'll have to do stationkeeping multiple times per year per LKO satellite/station. Sounds like adding a lot of grind for either a sacrifice on The Holy Altar Of Realism or to solve a problem that doesn't really exist.

I hate to break this to you but I was raised metric. For a metric audience I would use metric units. For an imperial measurements audience I would use imperial units. My point was that I'm not so pedantic as to make a presentation "right" for the sake of being "right" regardless of whether my audience will understand it. Yes, your presentations will be horrible, as clearly the concept of "take your audience into consideration" is alien to you. Alien! Well, you're playing KSP after all. Stay on topic, please!

I was hoping for a trebuchet-like contraption...

Maybe your hard disk is dying? The iMac I use at work had similar issues (not with KSP obviously) when using memory intensive programs (Photoshop mainly) and it turned out to be the hard disk. Which I would never have guessed on the fact that it manifested itself as a "screen problem." EDIT: And yes, it would only show up after a while when the computer heated up, and go away when we let it cool off. I was never sure if it was a manifestation of the hard disk heating up disproportionally and affecting the graphics card or that it really came from the HD whose problems became visible after heating up, but replacing the HD did fix the problem. Not saying you should replace your HD; only that the source of the problem can be very surprising!

Oh boy. I’d hate to sit through one of your presentations… The benefit is “not losing your audience.” The whole point of the video is to explain something to a certain audience. An audience that has no clue what you’re talking about when you're using SI units. “Then they should learn the SI System” (note that I will not call it “metric”, that’s just as incorrect as using miles and inches). Well yes, and they should also exercise daily and stop smoking. But is that the responsibility of the video makers?

The question is... which of those two thumpers is being ignited first?

You can pretend they form a human kerbal chain to hoist the bottom one into the station. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! THE KERMAN BROTHERS ARE GOING TO PERFORM A DANGEROUS STUNT NEVER PERFORMED BEFORE!

Luckily the jetpacks have enough DV to get you into freakin' ORBIT on Minmus. Reaching the door of the lander shouldn't be that big of a deal

To be honest I found it with Google. That seems to yield better results than... oh well, let's not mention that.

you can try this thread.

I see it as well.