Kerbart

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Isn't it written in the scripture? “And THE LORD spoketh, thou shalt not clippeth parts for enjoyment nor for reason, for thy part clipping is an invention of the satan. And when they went ahead and clippeth anyway, He rapidly and unexpectedly disassembleth their unholy craftsâ€Â

One of the things I like about rocket fuel chemistry (I just finished Ignition! by John D. Clark) is how it is casually mentioned that certain chemicals are way too toxic/dangerous to handle and that's why they're using Hydrazine instead (which in itself is highly toxic and unstable). That tells you a lot about the alternatives!

Big thumbs up for Chatterer. There are few mods that I regard "essential" and as trivial as it may seem, this is one of them, since it adds so much atmosphere to the game.

I'm not above spamming contracts, so Sherwise Kerman was the first to be on “flag duty†on Mun. Every hour or so he’d get an assignment, and was told to go outside, plant a flag (and name it “Contract Flag†with the name of the sponsor on the inscription). Around three dozen flag assignments were given to Sherwise, and Mission Kontrol decided that it was time to relieve Sherwise who spent a fairly long time in a Storage Container. And so the replacement krew came in. Behold their surprise, when they found Sherwise’s landing craft... but not the forest of flagpoles they were expecting. They knocked on the door of the storage container. “Sherwise, where are the flags?†“Not now!†came the answer, “This episode of Krime Scene Investigation is alsmost over!†A little while later Sherwise exlained that he got quite hooked to watching TV shows, and that putting on a space suit was such a hassle... and after all, who would know if the flags were really planted or not. And what on Kerbin does Rockomax want to do with TEN flags on Mun? Seriously? And with those words Sherwise climbed in his capsule, fired the engines and went back home, leaving a flabbergasted Midfred and Barzor behind. Seriously. I had like 30 or more flags planted. The replacements come in, and the flags are gone... all of them.

All of the above is correct. In addition, delta-V allows you to express energy (both as requirement for an orbit change as for what's potentially available for a vessel) in a way that takes mass out of the equation. It takes about 4500 m/s dV to get into Kerbin Orbit. That number is useful because it tells you what your requirements are, regardless of the size of your spacecraft. It doesn't matter if it's a one-Kerbal capsule or a 500 ton space station, the amount of delta-V required to get into orbit is the same. As such it's often used as it is such a convenient way to describe how much energy it takes to accomplish orbit changes.

Consider a river. On average water is flowing in downstream direction. But local currents and eddies still can have water that's flowing in the opposite direction; in the very least compare to the water around it.

Conceptually equip the excavator with buckets that get filled with moon rocks on site. Also, earth excavators are built to excavate as much material as possible in the shortest amount of time. A lunar excavator will be designed around a different set of contraints and the time factor will be less relevant (or even completely irrelevant if a robotic excavator is used). Perhaps a portal-style design with the excavating bucket going down vertically in between the two axles? 3D printing might be the way to go, but excavating does not have to be so complicated, and there are a lot of advantages to building underneath the surface (protection from radiation for instance)

There's friends worth having and friends not worth having. I leave it to you which category he's in but I know what I would pick.

Depends on the speed you're going at and the speed the wheels are rated for. One of the reasons it's hard to build high speed trains is because the wheels can shatter easily at high speed as they're already under a high load due to rotational forces. Those forces are a squared function of speed so they go up rapidly at high speed. Given that most Kerbal components seemed to have been picked up at junk yards I assume their speed ratings aren't that good.

The previous space race did bring us advancements but once milestones were reached and bragging rights were achieved things would stop. I don't think it would help us. If farming were a space race, we'd make sure we'd have the biggest field on the block, plant one square yard in the corner and scream victory when our cornstalk reached maturity. We'd then proudly show the corn cob we produced. Of course, the rest of the field was left unplanted and we'd never be able to feed a reasonable amount of people with it; but we won the race. If a new cold war would ignite a new space race (and that's a lot of “if's†daisy-chained together) I doubt things would be that much different.

Having 200 objects in orbit out of nowhere is also a pretty good indicator.

The further out the easier it is, best to fix it when you just enter the SOI of the planet/moon. Also, raising the apoapsis (in such a way that it coincides with the AN/DN) and performing the inclination change there really helps. Inclination change is all about changing the direction of your velocity vector, and the lower your speed, the less energy it takes.

I think the KSP one has addressed some issues that are still lingering with the real life one, the biggest being “it exists in working form.â€Â

Or your Action Group 1 items. Why did my solar panels fall off during launch?

At least you remembered the parachutes. The number of times where I have to tell Jeb & the crew halfway during re-entry “Ok, this may sound stupid, but trust me, your best chances of survival are actually to get out of the capsule right now, trust me...â€Â

Never wrestle with a pig. The pig likes it and you get dirty. In other words: ignore, smile, by nice. Does he claim he plays better? Good. Ask him how he plays so well. Can he show some of his techniques? Maybe he can teach you? You seem to have problems with this part (play a very technical part you do actually very well), ask him to show you how to do it. He seems to thrive on countering your arguments, and you take the wind out of his sails if you don't. You don't have to prove anything to him, so why bother?

We could send lawyers to test it out. If it's safe they can sue them. If it's not safe... Well, everyone wins!

In the Kerbal universe "cost" hasn't been around that long. On the other hand, “getting it into orbit†has been a consideration of tremendous importance for a very, very, very long time in KSP. And Asparagus does excel at that. Is it cost effective? Not in the current versions of KSP. But if you don't care about cost it's a great way of keeping your total launch mass down, which is a pretty big consideration in space flight.

No biggie then. F9, fix it, and land again?

THIS. It's safe to assume that if they come across Voyager and manage to intercept it their technology has advanced pretty far. It's not like we expect it to land on their doorstep after all. It's also safe to assume, unless the galaxy is teeming with intelligent life (and dozens of years of looking for it suggests we'd need to manage our expectations of that in a conservative manner), finding such an alien artifact would be a major MAJOR scientific event. Which means that it's unlikely that studying it is going to be left to Mrs. Rosenbergs 4th grade Science Class, but rather the top scientists of the world who will take a look at it. And maybe even release the images to the public to crowd source figuring out what it all means. Yeah, they'll figure it out. - - - Updated - - - As I said, it wouldn't be a very clever plan

Maybe a not-so-clever plan based on the assumption that they see us as a threat when we're able of space travel?

I'm not privy to how KSP executes code but I think that the larger the acceleration is, the less accurate SOI transitions are going to be. I think that your best bet is to use Kerbal Alarm Clock to safeguard those, and then as Miro pointed out, use max time acceleration.

If only there were tutorials included in the game!

As opposed to timeskip that instead of might overshoot an SOI change is guaranteed to skip SOI changes?