Kerbart

Lol. I guess I'm showing my age here. There was a time gifs where about the only way to get high quality images with realistic colors, hahaha! I will pm you.

Animated or still? I have some experience with getting the size of animated gifs down (step 1: stop using photoshop. )

I use two satellites in polar orbits that have a relative inclination of 90° to each other (so one goes over the 45°W meridian, the other one over the 45°E meridian. Give them a circular orbit of 1.5× the radius of the planet (measured from the center) or .5× the radius of the planet above sea level, and (of course the real number is √2 but 1.5 is so much easier) and one of them will always be in sight (barring being blocked by Mun or Minmus of course). It only takes two of them, and positioning them is so much easier than geokerbal orbits that are evenly spaced (requiring meticulous maneuvering to get them there and station keeping to keep them in place).

A great idea! But perhaps something that can be listed in the config file? For those who want, instead of “landing/impact”: landing/crash landing/lithobreaking brilliant landing/average landing nasa landing/kerbal landing

That depends. “blond” is perfectly fine according to Merriam-Webster. The term blonde would be specifically used to connotate a blond woman, and then assuming that blond women have below-average intelligence. That would be sexist and surely not appreciated behavior on this forum. So “blond” would actually be fine.

Aah my friend, the passion! I can feel it oozing through the screen. Alas, software development is not that easy. It's even harder than rocket science! Patience will be the only thing that will soothe your mind.

Given that earth is, due to it’s very modest rotation period of 23 hours and 56 minutes, is no longer a sphere, I don’t think any optimism is warranted for a planet that rotates that fast to be a sphere. Not even recognizable as one, I’d dare say.

Of course you'd only see them scream, not hear. In fact, you shouldn't hear anything while in space. That would break immersion too.

You could use Funds to pay for scientific missions?

Haha, excellent piece of parody on all the hate a simple feature (likely with 0% effort by Squad) manages to create in the forum here. For a second I thought you were serious, but then you went so over the top... still, good job!

Seriously, if we're going to log all the errors in that article.. A hard disk big enough to contain them hasn't been made yet!

The story is that the Windows calculator got a major upgrade. Accuracy was doubled (or even beyond that), it could handle much larger numbers, a couple of long standing calculation bugs (every calculator has them) were fixed etc. Basically the entire calculator was overhauled, except the interface. Same thing for Notepad. As simple as it is, the newer versions can handle much larger files than the old version. And yet, the standard complaint about them is Microsoft hasn't done anything with them since Windows XP. Ironically that complaint goes hand in hand with the only improvements are optical, they don't change anything underneath the hood. Welcome to the fun world of software development. So yes, you would rather see bug fixes and nothing else. But that doesn't cut it for “the average user,” which is who you have to take into account when you're running a business and you want to keep it running.

Thanks for the laugh. I assume you've recovered by now from all the changes. I've always played (since 0.18 so not that early) as if the things that didn't matter did matter—no sudden 45° for me, always going for what seemed “realistic” re-entries to me. To be honest I still don’t know for sure what constitutes a realistic re-entry, but traversing a quarter of the globe in flaming ball of plasma seems more realistic to me then entering the atmosphere at a 90° angle coming in at 3000 m/s, open the chutes at 500 AGL with a blistering 35G and have the crew still smiling after landing. As a result, the various updates weren't that game-breaking to me. To be honest, I'd play without any mods first, to get a feel for “the new game” first. Maybe add non-part mods and none-physics changing mods first. KAC, chatterer, DPAI, etc. And then start adding back the mods you're used to, a couple at a time.

You're joking right? That green stuff around the KSC? That's not grass... Them are densily packed Kerbals! This is why they care less about safety. Or don't mind being "confined" in a Mk I cockpit for 8 years on a one-way trip to Eeloo. Because compared to being packed together with 75 other Kerbals per square meter on the Kerbin surface, it's roomy!

That's pretty hard to judge without knowing how much work is involved in each. If this is a Unity 5 feature and the amount of code involved to get this to work was about five lines for a button handler, then you have your answer. I don't know how much work was involved in each, but perhaps you do! My bet though, is that this didn't cost a lot of effort to code, and that Squad wanted to add some additional “sparkles” to have something “to show.” Because as much as everyone has their mouth full of “I wish they focus on just fixing the bugs,” you can be sure that “the community” as a whole will complain when, after such a long time, the only things implemented in this upgrade are just the Unity 5 upgrade (with perceived but yet unproven stability of the Windows 64 bit client) and some bug fixes. If you don't believe me, compare the Windows calculator in XP and in Vista/8/10. So, as Squad, you want something to show for. And this is one of those somethings.

I don't think rover wheels are particularly fragile; apparently they don't live you to your expectations but that's a different story. I can call the Mainsail underpowered as it doesn't catapult my craft to lightspeed in 5 seconds. Does that mean it's weak? Or simply that it's not meeting my expectations? Keep in mind that you're not driving on the road, but rather on bumpy, uneven terrain, littered with boulders. Imagine a dry river bed. Now imagine driving a sedan, or even a truck, at 30 mph through it. Do you expect your tires to survive? For comparison, the Apollo moon rover was designed for a maximum velocity of 3.5 m/s, although reportedly it went up to 5 m/s.

Hey, @Elon, do you see that? Time for some action, bro! When are you visiting Kerbal Space Academy?

Apparently the trick is to stay at terminal velocity at all times. I remember vaguely seeing the proof for it once though I was too tired to go through it and convince myself that it's indeed the way to go, but it seems to be repeated by many people. Now you have to figure out the terminal velocity for your launch vehicle at each altitude, but that should be easier.

You can counteract the torque generated by friction by mounting an electric motor in the space ship that generates torque in the opposite direction. Amazingly, this "surplus" torque can then be used to drive the centrifuge so it remains a constant rotation as opposed to being slowed down by friction. This also removes the need for a "counter centrifuge".

I'm glad I wasn't aware of that when I built a small transport rover for my engineers to operate my (otherwise unmanned) drilling rig.

Exactly! For me "hardcore" is only "hardcore" when one refrains from the biggest cheat of all -- timewarp

You mean like roman numerals? Because any ordinal system is based on the concept of "10" -- it just has different values depending on the chosen base (2 for binary, 8 for octal, 16 for hex, etc)

No no no, that is the other Das Valdez you're talking about. At least I assume. The Das Valdez I watch is hard to surpass as free advertising for KSP, so that cannot be the one you're talking about. Sure, he'll point out the occasional bug/annoyance, but it requires a huge leap to translate that to "one of the saltiest people towards the game"

The SpaceX mod?

Redstone and Atlas. Redstone was used for the early suborbital flights, the heavier Atlas rocket was used to send Mercury into orbit.