Kerbart

Well, I have the opposite. I was following a spent stage on its way to a fiery death on the surface of Kerbin. Except that at an altitude of around 1000m it started to move upward. Eventually it crashed, but... yeah.

Option 1 Build "rocket" consisting of three large kerbodyne tanks and put it on the launch pad Load her up with fuel gathered from the ISRU. This might or might not be an intensily aggravating experience, depending on how patient you are Recover vessel Profit! Option 2 Right Alt + F12

To the best of my knowledge the propellant used by the real world NERVA would be hydrogen. I'm not a nuclear physicist (and not a lawyer eitherâ€â€it never hurts to state that) but how would hydrogen pick up any radioactivity? What would make the exhaust plume dangerous?

Yes, I just completed registration (three emails, no less!) and supported the project! EDIT: I also asked my coworker to support it!

I'll try again tomorrow. I assume it's a server glitch. The model looks absolutely awesome, by the way.

I can't register. Well, I can, but then I have to enter a (valid) email address to activate my account, and Lego doesn't send the activation email (tried two different email accounts now).

What a great letter! Thank you for sharing that. To be honest whenever I see a subject with “An open letter to Squad” or something along those lines I cringe because it usually is some request for 64 bit/n-body physics/anything on the“do not suggest”. To see something like this instead put a smile on my face and made me feel better about Monday!

Your calculations are based on volume and area, not on mass. Kerbin is incredibly dense, so there are a lot more resources than your chart suggests. They're also a lot easier to collect. Dig a hole in the ground and the ores and oil is practically shooting out in a big jet.

As much as this is apparently a bug, if your service bay isn't protected by a heat shield, wouldn't it be normal to expect thing to overheat eventually? Your talking about 1 or 2mm sheet metal at best after all, that doesn't have a lot of heatshielding capacity.

I'd always invite people to pick a random product on amazon and actually read the product reviews. it's quite revealing. Truth is, individual ratings mean nothing.It's the overal mean score you need to look at. People give a certain amount of stars for the wrong reasons, as you already pointed out. I've seen people complain about notepads "being a lot smaller than I expected" and therefore giving only two or three stars -- when the product size was clearly listed. "it took four weeks for it to be delivered"--one star (the product, not the seller). "I expected the highlighter to be yellow"--one star (for a product called green highlighter). And the list goes on. You will always have "stupid reasons" why a single star is awarded. What counts is your overall score. 4.0 is better than 3.5, 4.5 is better than 4.0, and 4.98 is better than 5.0. It's as simple as that.

I'm not a biologist but an easy way to get around the soil problems would be to use hydroculture.

Simple. Take a handful of bankers and add a lawyer or two. Be careful with adding politicians to the mix or you'll end up with way more than what you aimed for.

This. Without any doubt, it will lead to claims that the game is broken. Also, people who seem to have been living in a cave and haven't played since 0.14 came out on a 5¼″ floppy will complain that their water vessels are now totally uncontrollable and that for that reason alone everyone should return to the 0.14 water model.

The truth is a bit more nuanced then what they tend to teach you at school... Understanding of the "universe" (at least what was known) was a lot more detailed and accurate 2000 years ago then we'd like to think. Even though the notion of a flat earth might have been the popular belief 1000 years ago, a round earth was pretty much considered a given by the people for who it did matter (sailors and astronomers/scientists). On the conquest thing: given the background of hunter/gatherers it makes sense to have, from an evolutionary point of view, to have (a) some territorial tendencies built into our character and ( a desire, as a clan, to move out to the unknown as it increases your chances to carve out your own territory not held by another clan. The humans that did not display this behavior wouldn't have a clean territory with abundant food and thus would die out; over the estimated one million years that the human race exists (and their more ape-like predecessors before them) the trait of "go yonder" has pretty much been promoted all the time. So yes, I think it's built into us as a species (not necessarily into each individual human, but as a species) to "go where no one has gone before" because we descend from the ones that have done that all along.

it's a good thing Kerbals don't get their names assigned by alphabet. I'd be stuck with Zzzzzefod Kerman, Zzzzzandra Kerman and Zzzzzztuart Kerman by now.

Yes. It wouldn't be impossible, but there are a few challenges: Science was added to the game as an afterthought. Things go downhill from here. Most of the science used in spaceflight is not tested in spaceflight. Because you know... you wanna know it works before you launch your multi-milion dollar rocket, not during the flight. Scientific data that is collected through flight (say, the density of the atmosphere, arguably orbits of moons and planets, etc) is shared online so there's no intrinsic motivation to figure it out yourself. I can envision a version of KSP where: You get access to better equipment through testing it. Heavy weight metals at first, and low performing engines, and lighter materials later, together with better engines and fuel. Certain things are randomized (within limited bands) at the beginning of the game, like the mass of each planet, thickness of the atmosphere, the exact orbits, etc. You'll have to perform experiments to find out how much atmosphere kerbin has, what it's mass is, etc. In easy playing mode you can simply fullfill a contract by launching the right equipment within a valid envelope, in hardcore mode you'll just have to figure it out yourself by doing the right measurements and updating the in-game encyclopedia yourself. Only after "discovering" a planet it will show up in the tracking station. Your first Duna landing is going to be very exciting because you have no clue what the atmosphere is going to be like (send a probe with an atmo sensor crashing into the planet to find out) I don't think you could even mod the game to make it work like that; it would have to be build from the ground up with such an approach. I think.

Not really. Torque = Moment of Inertia × Angular Acceleration, just like Force = mass × acceleration. Note the complete absence of "distance to fulcrum" in the formula. It doesn't matter where you apply torque. Apply torque, and things start rotating (unless restrained). The amount of rotation (speed) depends on the moment of intertia and the amount of torque, and nothing else. The reason you want to be close to the COM is to reduce bending (for obvious reasons), not to "maximize" the effect of torque (unless you consider it "maximizing the effect by reducing the losses due to bending") We hardly ever create torque otherwise than applying a set of forces that are offset along a distance, and that is what causes the confusion.

Torque is indifferent to the location. We tend to think it is because when applying torque through a force, the effectiveness of that force increases with the distance to the fulcrum. But pure torque can be applied anywhere to an inflexible body with exactly the same result. Theoretically, for the effectiveness of delivering torque itself doesn't matter if your torque wheels (whose output is torque, not force) are at the top, bottom or center of your station. However, your ship or station is not inflexible. The less bendable material you put between the torque wheels and the center of rotation, the less your bending losses will be (which will merely result in parts swaying back and forth instead of being applied to the rotation). For that reason you want your torque wheels placed as close to the center of mass (so there's less material to bend), and not connected on external docked parts (as docking ports are extremely flexible).

Well, it's only completely ignoring the creativity when conveniently leaving off (without showing ... ellipsis to indicate cutting) a part of that statement: “unless you're unfortunate enough to design one of the craft it spoilsâ€Â

Ooh you had to use the C-word...

I don't agree. We need more parts do this: “hey bud, this is only the piece sticking out. There's more on the inside, so you can't just slap it onto a wing surface†It's adding a bit of visual realism that doesn't make the game harder to play and increases immersion as it's showing you that you're adding a "real" jet engine when building a plane, not just a magic nozzle. Now it does make VTOL's ugly. So maybe there should be a Harrier-style engine with rotating nozzles, or a low-profile ducted fan gizmo for VTOL's.

Can this be explained to the layman? I've been raised in KSP with Clipping=Kraken and this seems to induce part clipping on a major scale. Or does the lack of colliders mean that the humm of this engine is not siren call to The Kraken? Aside from clipping reservations I like the idea and I hope it will be extended to regular rocket engines (where applicable, most larger engines are self contained but the smaller ones could have some protruding inner works) and perphaps some other parts as well. The thought that you can't just magically slap a piece onto a piece of sheet metal without anything sticking out on the other side is plain silly, and this wonderfully addresses that.

It gets more doable by the minute!!

Ha! You're right! Those are totally reasonable assumptions!

While there is a resounding “yes, in theory†there are a few practical stumbling blocks that get too easily dismissed when you under-appreciate the simply vast scale of a lightyear. What we “see†from ourselves is reflected light which is diffuse by nature and fairly weak to start with. Light intensity falls off with the square of the distance. There's really not a lot of light left of us after traveling for two light years. And if we have a magical amplifier that can beef up that light that came back to us (more about that later), it would likely be drowned out by light from stars (direct light) in the vicinity that is many magnitudes stronger. Then there's the problem of aiming the mirror. It's late and I'm not in the mood to do the math, but given the distance I assume the alignment of the mirror only needs to be off by 0.0001° (and probably far less) and your reflected image will miss you by a couple of thousand miles, if not more. Then of course there's also the implicit assumption, following the above, that the mirror is perfectly flat (everything, in reality, is "bumpy"--we just don't notice it). Of course we can aim for "perfectly flat" but if, given the distance, we're talking about being flat on an atomic scale it's going to be a challenge. So, even as a theoretical exercise there are many roadblocks to be navigated.