Kerbart

I'd say can be different. My roommate, who was attending the Erasmus University of Rotterdam (which I would not call a third tier university) experienced that the advice I gave him on a subject was 180° from what his professor was teaching. He tended to stick to my advice (as I was trained by people who made an actually living on the particular subject) but he had to grind his teeth to complete his project in her way to get a good grade on it. I considered it a life-lesson for him.

Actually you don't have to find the center of the reaction wheels. They deliver pure torque and that is quantity that works regardless to where it's delivered in relation to the COM. It's hard to wrap your head around it because it's counter-intuitive but that's how torque works. In general though we get confronted with off-center forces which results in torque, and to calculate that torque the distance to COM does matter. So yes, the calculation work does remain for RCS and control surfaces. A simplified approach though would be to use only the mass as a parameter for auto-tuning. It's not perfect, but assuming sane builders will add more control authority (be it bigger/more reaction wheels, larger control surfaces, more RCS ports) to heavy vehicles. Or maybe leave it to the user to set the P-factor for the autopilot (I use a PID controller for ascent velocity and I don't have to bother with the i and d parameters) with some guidelines on how to tune it in.

Yes. As a result, do not attempt a Kerbal rescue mission from a lower orbit. I thought hilariously that if I entered a 70.5×70.5 orbit I could approach the Kerbal from that direction. I then had to watch in agony how my orbit deteriorated relatively rapidly into a 69.9×70.5 orbit. As I was waiting to get out of the atmosphere and passing through my periapsis it deteriorated of course to 69×69 and worse from there. And of course I couldn't jump to rails to “fix” the rounding error...

I don't think it's reinforcement. It looks more like decoration. Not my kind of decoration, but just remember how the VAB looked like in 0.18

While we're at it, ever noticed that the Mk 2 Lander Can doesn't spin around its central axis when you select it from the part panel in the VAB? And yes, in full agreement with @GoSlash27; they need to be fragile. As their description says, the lander cans should not survive any atmospheric re-entry. Or ascent, actually. That's why we have fairings now. Then reduce their weight a lot (they're made of glorified tinfoil, after all) and we're cooking with gas and the game stays balanced as they're not a lightweight alternative for the normal pods.

Your arguments have merit. Do keep in mind, that similar rationale was used about steel ships, heavier-than-air-aircraft, steam trains, the tunnel under the English channel, etc, etc. What are limitations for one, are challenges and inspiration for out-of-the-box thinking for others. Whenever a bunch of academics declare that it's impossible, not just economic, but also physically, to build something, there's usually a guy who shows up saying "I just built one." Not that I'm optimistic enough to bet on this one though. I agree that it seems improbable. But that never stops the dreamers, and sometimes they succeed.

If the potential for money is there, why not? Squad made the noble but unwise promise to never charge for an update, so they've cut themselves off from that income stream. A version 2 using a high performance game engine would be viable for various reasons: There is an existing market (as KSP 1 has proven) It would generate fresh income from existing players, and I'm sure a large amount of those will happily fork over new money for a totally awesome remake with various improvements Existing content can be reused to a large extend (reducing initial development costs) It offers the ability to make game changes that cannot be made currently (rescaling to Earth sizes, revamping career mode, etc) Of course there's a good chance that Squad totally had it with KSP by the time the final 1.x version is released. On the other hand, Microsoft's Flight Simulator (or SubLogic's if you want to be strict) went through various iterations, so why not?

And get rid of the staging one. As long as you can't specify what stage a certain action needs to happen, it's pretty useless.

Admit it, you're asking for it...

If you're going straight up and down, then yes, it's a problem. I've never encountered problems when blasting off on a column of three Hammers (no need to bother with decouplers in between them). Yes, getting that contraption at an angle is a bit of a challenge (right after launch; don't wait until you're doing Mach 3) but the basic fins will keep you going after that. And the science and funds of that suborbital trip are amazing (at least for the stage of Career you're in). Now, a 45° re-entry is far from perfect and the window to open your chutes isn't that big, but it doesn't require lightning fast reactions either. Is it easy? No, but nobody ever said spaceflight was. Is it hard, let alone exceptionally hard? I'd prefer “challenging” but nothing beyond that.

Wow. It's hard to find a better illustration of Poe's Law. I suspect you killed this thread right after it's started; it'll be pretty though to top this one.

I read recently that researchers had managed to produce self-reproducing chemicals. One of the things they learned form their experiment, they said, was that death was essential for the evolution mechanism. Change was only possible if the previous generation went out of the way. So with that in mind, perhaps it's built-in; species who die might, evolutionary, do better than the species who get stuck with "the old ones."

If it's another movie with Adam Sandler in it, civilization is served better by being wiped out by said asteroid...

Probably start with a labyrinth seal to significantly lower the pressure difference, and then use one of the solutions listed above. Perhaps finish it off with some rubber skirt, although I can see how the friction of that would cause problems (you'll have to provide more torque to keep the ring spinning, and that will cause your station to spin very slowly in the opposite direction)

That sounds like an awesome plot twist for an action movie or tv series.

I dunno... I've undocked parts of a station, rendez-voused and docked another part, and then redocked the first part that I undocked (I wanted the new part in between). Granted, it had floated away a few hundred meters but it was still inside the physics bubble.

A defense contractor who's been doing business with the government for over 50 years, effectively (maybe not ULA but the two companies that make up ULA, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, definitely are. The senators they have in their pockets have senators in their pockets. Unless the stars align and in some weird, inconceivable fashion these programs are going to be really monitored for financial accountability and effectiveness they will not go out of business. Period. Some contract will pop up and ULA will get launch assignments.

Time accelerate to "on rails"; shrouds tend to disappear when you drop back to physical

That. Right there. That sums up this discussion. I'm not a rocket scientist but I seriously doubt anything is simple at supersonic and hypersonice speeds. Something tells me that if it were that easy to deal with the consequences, rocket designers in the past would gladly of that large tank full of oxidizer that is either cryogenic, highly corrosive, extremely toxic and quite possibly all at once. And yet, somehow, that was a price Von Braun and Korolev were willing to pay. Maybe modern technology makes it easier but I doubt it will ever be easy. Of course, history is full of geniuses who thought “out of the box” and revolutionized an industry with an idea, so simple, it's amazing nobody else ever thought of it. But remember, for everyone of those revolutionaries, there are thousands of nameless failures, forgotten by history, who learned the hard way that and this is why we do things the way we do them.

Even if they're not trolling... there's nothing to be gained by leaving a comment. You're not going to convince them, and any, any argument or experiment that will disprove their beliefs will be cast aside as "part of the conspiracy" or be discarded with some conspiracy reasoning. Take them into space and they'll claim that the launch and "craft" they are in are an elaborate hoax and what they're seeing through the windows is just a movie projection. They'll even have an explanation at hand for micro gravity at that point.

Hey @troyfawkes, I think it's better to post that question in the new thread about using kRPC, so this thread can stay focused on development issues. It's a fairly new thread, so as far as I'm concerned you're forgiven for posting it here... for now.

As to be expected, a lot depends on how you like to play the game. I think there's room for a couple of mods that enhance the player experience without changing game fundamentals, like: Chatterer (apparently there are people who play KSP without Chatterer. I find the thought bizarre) Kerbal Alarm Clock. It encourages playing with less warping (as you can afford to do more things "in between") which can never be a bad thing EVE One can easily argue that KER, MJ and other enhancements are a dillution of "pure" KSP playing, so I don't think they need to be included as stock (disclosure: I cannot imagine playing without KER. But I can imagine other people doing so) The one thing I really, really miss are hinges. Having to fit stuff inside a fairing without the option to fold things out seems insane. And it's so much cooler to have a rover that unfolds itself before use. Sure, you can use Infernal Robotics. Which needs tweakscale (that I don't like) and comes with a million parts (that I don't want). Simply hinges, rotating plates and telescopic bars in two or three sizes, that's all we need and I'd love to see it stock.

Very interesting. The all-mechanical approach will please many engineers; it's simple, there's very little to break, and most important, nobody has to worry about a software bug that will suddenly open both doors, despite claims of the software vendor that something like that could never, ever, happen. Because we all know that there's no such thing as “never, ever” in software.

Might be worth reporting to Squad. I agree that the DLL being read–only should not be an issue. Not sure why it caught my eye but I'm glad I have kRPC back in working order!

I would recommend choosing a different font than Courier New to show your text. I realize you want to make it stand out from regular text, but monospaced fonts are in general hard to read and wear out the eyes of the reader. If you want to differentiate from regular forum text, pick Trebuchet perhaps? Or even Georgia (both fonts were constructed to facilitate on-screen reading, although Georgia does exceptionally well on paper as well).