Kerbart

Yes, it would be really nice to start in an absolute pioneer setting. Career mode as it is will need some work though, in the current manned-flight-first setup the barn would be a weird place to start. Bring on the stock sounding rockets! Aaah yes, the Bac9 artwork... undeniably pretty. I hope there will be a time we'll see it, but a lot of miracles will have to happen for that... It's a good illustration of why you should never show something like that as a preview. Had the barn been showcased as paper+pencil artwork we might have it today. Showing unfinished work is risky: It sets expectations, realistic or not, both positive and negative, as we've seen If the artwork is received as low quality and it's updated, some will complain that it's not as promised (you can't win) If the artwork is implemented as shown, some will complain we expected something better, “but we showed it to you and you liked it!” The biggest problem with the barn, I think, is career mode. To me it feels like you need a progression from cardboard tubes to V2-style sounding rockets as the “end game” for the barn, and stock offers nothing that even remotely resembles that.

@Red Iron Crown Aah, now I see. It's the Popular This Month section that throws me off!

Please bring not up what is obviously a necro thread

It's an introduction to a 13 minute radio broadcast. Aside from that, consider it an article written by somebody who knows (or is supposed to) about communication but nothing about KSP or video games (aka a journalist). And in that universe headlines need to draw in crowds, not be 100% correct, hence the dropping of the word "seemingly". Keep in mind that for most news sites, a title like "Did Putin disband Roscosmos based on playing KSP?" (answer: no) would have been just fine.

Wasn't career mode supposed to start with a barn? What happened to it? The barn as was shown in the previews was generally not received in a positive way by the community for various reasons, and thus left out in Career mode. Most complaints where about bad quality rendering (especially the textures), out of style with the other buildings and haphazard use of objects that didn't make sense (roads leading nowhere, etc). Why is this post not a sticky? The required sacrifices to please the forum gods haven't been made yet.

Part of the problem was that if the wing was inspected and did show damage (which it would), then there was nothing that could be done about it. So the decision was made to not inspect the wing, as it wouldn't make a difference. With hindsight that was maybe no the right decision, but that's what happened. It's not like mission control knew there was a problem; but they closed their eyes and put fingers in their ears, so to say, and hoped for the best. It makes you wonder how many similar situations there were where "hope for the best" was the chosen solution and actually worked out.

Even if there would be, assuming you picked the best engine for the job (with thrust being a large factor that is irrelevant to the rocket equation), why would you pick that design?

Discussions on the feasibility of manned missions are cute, but seem to ignore the fact that we base that feasibility mainly on the data we got from those unmanned missions. It's not like the Russians were insane and decided to scout out a planet with a 90 atm, 400°C atmosphere because they wanted to go there. We learned about that atmosphere because they sent those probes. I read somewhere that the ways they operated, the Russians tended to to better at Venus where simple pre-programmed autonomous probes lasted longer, and the Americans did better at Mars (because of atmospheric conditions) where remote controlled probes (like Viking) did better, which is why both countries had different success at the different planets, but I'm not in a position to gauge the validity of that statement.

The world would be an awesome place if that is the worst kind of insanity encountered!

There have been many complaints about the new forum software. But not to take advantages of what it does offer is plain silly. Why not write: I think the modularity of the Cygnus is appealing. They can add extra 'sections' to make super enhanced etc (at 8.1 m3 for 300kg = 27 m3/ton), it's 3 m diameter so I guess they could 'pre cluster' them into larger diameter structures (stacking them on an airlock EVA prep 'hub' for example). Bigelow 330 delivers 16.5 m3/ton vs Cygnus 15 m3/ton but their design looks less finely modular - it seems harder for them to engineer a 'stretch 330' than for Orbital ATK to stretch the Cygnus. I thought the inflatable would be much more compelling m3/ton, probably/maybe the 330 is already counting a bunch of 'Hab services' and Cygnus is 'just a shell'. (Sorry to go off-topic but that “^” crutch drives me nuts)

I doubt “She did fine last week, and we just gassed her up” will count as man–rating and I know you didn’t mean that either. On the other hand, not every launch needs to be man–rated and Musk has been very adamant that while NASA is a big customer, it is not SpaceX's only customer. The obvious business model for individual Falcon 9 boosters will likely be something along these lines man—rated launches top—dollar unmanned launches (large communications satellites, etc) ISS supply runs lower grade unmanned launches (irridum, gps, etc) cubesat launches college-sponsored satellites cubesat sponsored by a forum of wannabe-space-agency simulator nerds fuel depot for Elon's Mars mission For each subsequent launch the going rate for the booster will drop (as it wears out and the chances of failure increase) but it will also allow launches to parties that couldn't afford them in the past. Surely you'd be insane to use a booster on it's fifth flight for a crew replacement flight to the ISS (not until there are dozens of such launches proving that there's no risk, at least). But with a booster that's been paid for many times over you can offer launches at extremely competitive rates to parties who are more than happy to run the risk of a failure at that point.

You'd be shocked how import face-to-face meetings still are in modern day business. A vacation can always be combined to meet a few customers or vendors. Unless said customers/vendors decide to join you in the space station... Not so much.

This looks amazing, can't wait to try it out! Does the crumpling affect drag? Could it? It'd be great to see a craft start yawwing heavily because the port engine pod is crumpled up (not to mention the lack of thrust of course).

Propellant, by definition, has mass. However, as a "fuel" (energy provider) it can certainly exist. So I assume what you mean to ask is: how do MJ/KER account for the amount of electricity available to provide for propulsion? So if you only propellant for 5 minutes of burn time, but only electric charge for 2 minutes, the amount of DV available would be, say, 200 m/s and not 500 m/s? I don't write mods but I suspect inspecting the available charge in the batteries will go a long way.

Unless I'm wrong, physics calculations for a vessel are still single threaded, but if you have multiple vessels inside the physics bubble they'll each run in their own thread, or something along those lines. I suspect that the biggest disappointment most players will have with 64 bit Unity 5 is that they'll now run out of real memory, instead of addressable memory.

There are some practical obstacles to this, but yes, it would be cool, especially when tied to a contract. Obtain a surface sample from an orange rock in the East Crater of Mun. Not everyone has scatter objects Some players have a real low scatter object count, making the "required" ones stand out Might lead to science grinding But working properly around these concerns could add an interesting game dynamic.

Another way of interpreting a “dead horse” question is that the poster couldn't be bothered by doing even the most minimal amount of research and expects the community to cater to them, and spend time and effort to reward their laziness. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle but that's where the aggression is coming from. Should the general subforum be populated with 150 is mechjeb cheating posts? Should the support forum be filled with a dozen I've upgraded finally to 1.0.x and suddenly my rocket flips over when I do my gravity turn at 10k? questions? While the correct way would likely be Shrug and ignore, it's not outlandish to see a self-correction mechanism in place either.

…but it works in KSP!

The human species not. "Humanity" as we know it, with Facebook, The Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo? Yes. I expect civilization to collapse in a spectacular fashion to a point where we could lose all modern technology. Computes perfectly.

From within KSP? Or afterwards? If you want to do it once, Photoshop. If you want to do it a lot, you could look into Imagemagick. A bit of work to get started but then you'll have a one-click solution.

I agree with "species." But stating that "Our society would likely change" is overly optimistic since I think that will be wiped out completely. Cities will collapse first (as they require an extremely complex infrastructure) and I suspect we'd be thrown back to medieval times or even stone-age. With the challenge of kickstarting a technologically advanced society without easily accessible resources as we've already used those up.

Sadly that knowledge has gone out of the window with the general public. The amount of easily dismissed hoaxes that seem to perpetuate on Facebook is simply staggering, and rather depressing. Instant gratification is key, and why delay clicking "share" with ten seconds doing boring "research" when you don't have to?

I watched episode III as a torrented version. As it started with the titles in Cyrillic script, I assumed this version was dubbed to some Slavic language (I'm not going to say “Russian” although when it’s Cyrillic it all looks Russian to me) and then redubbed back to English with some third-party uninterested voice actors, before I found out that it had the original English dialog. That’s how bad the voice acting was. So, yeah...

Part of the problem is that “science” does not have a good track record in the eyes of the public when it comes to declaring technology safe. Far too often that has more to do with bad journalism in the first place. And then there’s large corporations whose first concern is profit and who will not refrain from putting a lab coat on someone (perhaps even someone with a title) to declare that there’s nothing wrong with product x, whatever that product is. So just as your high school teacher who has heard every story imaginable on why you didn’t have your homework with you, and just as every judge who has heard way too many sob stories to assume defendants are innocent, “the public” has developed a sense of cynicism and the assumption they’re lying and just using fancy words to intimidate us. Smoking, nuclear power plants, thalidomide, leaded gasoline, asbestos, an endless list of pharmaceutical drugs... things hailed as perfectly safe, often by middle-aged white men wearing lab coats and glasses, often using “science” to explain why their product was perfectly safe and all those stories of things going bad were highly overrated... Of course, there’s technology like nuclear power generation that can be safe. Chernobyl and Fukushima have proved that when things go wrong, they can go wrong badly. So why trust AT&T when they put up a “scientist” telling us that their towers are using “low energy” and “non-ionizing” radiation? That tower is not there for my health, it’s to make money for AT&T. Can I expect them to be honest about health concerns? Is there a history of corporations shunning profit over public welfare? So, now we’re stuck with vaxxers who will give humanity the return of deadly childhood diseases and activists who will block powerlines and cell phone towers (convincing equally uninformed councilpeople). Sad and wrong? Yes. Understandable? Perfectly.

Time to quote Clint Eastwood: “Do you feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?” You fool! Don't you know why Val always has a smile on her face? Oooh, he went to Kared!