Kerbart

Really? We got this far and nobody mentioned Chuck Norris?

Minecraft = building stuff. KSP = building stuff. When writing for a general public you want something people can relate to. People can relate to Minecraft. “Orbiter but with little green men” and no one reads the article as they have no clue what “Orbiter” is. It is safe to assume that journalists are clueless about what they are writing (sorry to any journalists on this forum). In their defense, they have to write about a lot of things, and in many cases they don't have the option to say “I'm not going to write about that.” Even if the journalist is a subject matter expert in a certain subject, he has to assume his or her public is not. Knowledge is sometimes more a hindrance than a benefit, as it leads to the use of jargon and incomprehensible abbreviations This is positive exposure. Enjoy it. On photography forums I encounter countless smart asses who take offense to a remark like “those are great pictures, you must have a nice camera” and then find it prudent to teach the person who gave them a compliment a lesson by saying things like “your husband writes great stories, he must have a nice typewriter,” totally missing the point that someone was impressed by their pictures. So what if the writer got some of the details wrong. The bottom line of the article is that KSP gets a glowing review. Yay!

Asimov wrote a short story about that. He did the math to show that no, even if you tried, you couldn't. That didn't stop politicians from using this "fact" and then the tables got turned on them.

If you want to go hardcore on this you also have to throw ROI into the mix. Sure, solution "A" might be $200,000 cheaper than solution "B" when all is said and done, but when solution "A" means coughing up $4,000,000 for a Duna mission and "B" means $1,000,000 it also means that you can run 4 "B" missions for the price of 1 "A" mission while your precious funds are tied up in a 2 year mission. If each of these missions can generate $300,000 in income then it's penny-wise and pound foolish. Cost effective is not always the most economic solution.

It that a TRS-80 model 4 in your profile pic?

It would certainly help if the ladder would line up with the ladders of the other units (lab, landercans, cupola, storage unit)

It might be good to know what the audience is. "Research paper" can mean many things. Is it PHD level? College grads? Freshmen? High schoolers? A demo for "back to school" night? The science fair? Boyscouts? A Toastmasters speech? Without knowing who the audience is we can speculate a lot about what the OP should tell his audience and what we need to tell him, but without knowing it's hard to give a correct response.

I'm sure you've heard this a million times before but this is an awesome mod that should be on anyone's "must have" list. It adds so more immersion to the game! THANK YOU!!

With Difficulty set to “Normal†I unlocked the entire tree in two Kerbal calendar days of gameplay and I haven't even gone beyond LKO. Makes me wonder what it takes to unlock the tech tree in "Easy." Put Jebedia in orbit? While I agree that “if you want it hard, put it on Hard†I also think that “Normal†should offer at least some challenges.

I'm going to be a bit pessimistic about your naval experience. Yes, a flattop can sail pretty fast, probably somewhere in the range of 30 knots. That's 55kmh or 34mph for you landlubbers and when you think about that, it's an amazing speed for such a large mass of floating steel. It's also about 15 m/s which means is does basically nothing to reduce the relative landing speed of the shuttle. But... you mentioned using a hurricane for headwind. First of all, to get an idea, typhoon Vongfong which is hitting Japan right now was pretty heavy for a hurricane. At it's peak sustained windspeed of over 180 mph. That's about 80 m/s so that would help. Now... do you think a carrier captain would be willing to steer into a storm like that? And do you think anybody who is sane enough to pass the qualifications as a shuttle pilot would even entertain the thought of landing at a carrier deck in weather like that? With any aircraft? We're talking about 50' waves here, and the vessel probably listing from 30° port to 30° starboard... Good luck!

The problem with that is that Squad doesn't get paid for how much the game is paid. Squad gets paid for new copies sold. FS9/X is still hugely popular and widely played across the world, but Microsoft doesn't get much money from all those copies sold in the past anymore... Sales will inevitably peak and drop, and at one point drop below a level where squad can sustain development of new features. Hopefully by then the game is in 1.0 but the lingering fear is there that the game, great as it is in its current form, will never reach a "final version" Attractive as the game is, in general it doesn't appeal to the facebook/sports/first person shooter crowd. Personally I wouldn't mind Squad monetizing the KSP universe (merchandise, advertisements on in-game buildings and vehicles, etc) as it would help to make the KSP future more secure.

That's nice if you have one them fancy new calculators, but that looks like it won't work on my 15C...

Here's how I do it (Mun specific but I don't see why the same approach wouldn't work on other bodies without an atmosphere): Set your target as "target" (just make sure your navbal is in orbit/surface mode or "going straight down" might not be as straight as you think) Get into low orbit (about 10km altitude) At a 90° angle in orbit adjust inclination. Adjusting incliniation at higher orbits is more efficient, but adds complexity, especially since it takes time to adjust your altitude and the planet/moon keeps rotating. Set up a navigation node to land on top of your target; go for a pretty deep descent Adjust navigation mode as you get close to adjust for rotation of the planet/moon While landing, aim to have the target marker between your velocity marker and the 90° inclination point. The longer you manage to do that the closer you'll land When building a base I consider anything beyond 1km a "botched landing". I usually get within 500m with my best result sofar 140m.

In reality there's a lot more to that. Given that it takes the extra fuel to gain altitude, you'll see that in real life jets on long flights will start cruising at a lower altitude (say FL350) and only climb to the optimal altitude (say FL420) after burning off a good amount of fuel. So if you look into optimizing the crap out of your flight path you might want to look into the optimal profile and not just "altitude."

Using the word "acronym" for what is really an abbreviation (if you can't pronounce it as a single word it's not an acronym. And no, "Kay Es Pee" is not a single word).

Not sure if that's realistic. You're writing it as if software that emulates physics on Mun (or Minmus, or even Kerbin) is readily available and can be used to see how Rockomax and Probodobodyne parts interact with each other. Next you're saying that something like that requires so little computer power that it could even run on home computers!

To my knowledge the big deal about part welding is not to make a composition of parts stronger, but to make it a single part, as part count is one of the bigger factors in low frame rates. A space station made of 1000 parts might result in horrible frame rates, but if you can reduce that same station to 200 parts or less through part welding it moves around smoothly.

Sjors weighs at least 75kg if not more. The space suit itself with life support probably something similar. The jetpack would double that at least, i'd think. So in total 300kg. Gravity might have been neutralized in orbit, Newton's laws of motion do not. It would require more than "a slight tug on the cable" to make him reverse direction. Could she still have done it? Maybe. Any "realistic" movie on any subject is riddled with inaccuracies. They have to or the movie becomes unwatchable. The ability of a director to make choices that give a reasonable balance between "gripping story" and "not completely BS" is what makes great directors great (ie. "Jaws" vs "Sharknado").

To be honest that has never been Micrrosoft's policy for any product. If anything, regardless of what you think of them, MS has always gone great lengths to support compatibility for older versions. When Office went to a new file format they even provided plug-ins for older versions to enable reading and writing in the new format. It is bitter for the Flightsim community though. Microsoft killed off FS (with a lively community and ecosystem) but is willing to pay $2B for the rights to a game that's in its golden years?

How many Potzrebie's is that?

Even if the room would have 100% efficiency, in order to hear it your ears would still be absorbing some of the sound. One can argue that you don't have to be in that room, but if a tree falls in a one day echo room but there's no one around, does it really make a sound?

The use of Kerman at the end of the name might have a different meaning in Kerbal culture. Maybe it just means "From Kerbin"

I think it aligns with the theory that our 10 dimensional universe is really just a holographic projection of a 2 (or maybe even one, I forgot the details) dimensional domain with suggestions that it's all just a simulation running inside a supercomputer. They had the math to prove it (the holographic projection part, not the simulation part of course) and given that the mantra in quantum mechanics seems to be "it doesn't matter how ##### crazy your idea is, if you can make the math work it's probably* true" well... that's obviously where you come into play. *never entirely of course; Heisenberg took care of that

Very softly?

You have to ask yourself what the purpose of these colonies is. If only there is some kind of place on earth with an extremely hostile environment where we do scientific research *cough antarctica cough*. How would we do it there?