Kerbart

It's actually a misconception that you need parachutes to land at Kerbin. You only need them if you intend to make another flight afterwards.

n-body would deteriorate game play. Why would they want to do that?

Well, what we know is that they'll likely be introduced in .24 And when that happens we'll find out how it works. What's the point in fretting over it before then?

Wait, so every time you use a part that hasn't been "tested before" will fail? That's not an incentive to use it in flight. And once it has been tested it will never fail? What's to stop me from "testing" my parts on the launch pad?

Aside from Helldiver's response, even when you build a lot it doesn't mean there's no room for a "no frills" (and this one seems to have lots of them anyway!) shuttle for sake of shuttling crew back and forth to stations in Kerbin orbit. I suspect we all have our designated design for it and while it's fun to tweak the design of your crew shuttle I will have absolutely no problems with using a ready-made "stock" one instead. I get the impression that it doesn't have a docking port? That would be a bit of an omission though...

That is such a great idea. One can argue that even a language like Javascript is not "Kerbalesque" enough but the syntax of kerboscript always drove me nuts. Not that it was a big problem, since kOS was somehow not able to control any rocket once it left the launchpad I wasn't using it anyway, but it would be so much easier if it's just using a well-documented language without issues around operators, etc.

Which is even weirder considering that they show up as four pieces of debris when on the launch pad.

The shuttle was originally “sold†to its customers as a reusable vehicle that would be able to go to space on a high-frequent basis with minimal cost for the payload, revolutionizing spaceflight. It is hard to argue that the shuttle lived up to those claims. I don't think the Shuttle was a technical failure. It did what it was supposed to do, and when disaster struck that was more the result of a failing organization than of a failing design. The real problem is that NASA is a large bureaucratic organization divide into many factions each pursuing their own interest and each having their own stakeholders with different agendas. In 1959 NASA started with a program to put a Kerbal man in orbit. In 1969, 10 years later, they put one on the friggin' Mun. It's amazing what was achieved in those 10 years. But everyone was working towards the same goal and had the same interest. It's a well known fact that if you asked a 1965 janitor at a Nasa office who is scrubbing the toilets what he's doing, he would proudly answer that "he's helping to put a man on the moon." Nowadays that's different and that's not really NASA's fault. We've slashed the budget, programs have become politicized and without any doubt contractors are picked for other reasons than "delivering the best product for the best price." In an ironic way it's good. Would there be an incentive for companies like SpaceX to innovate and do what they're doing now? Commercial enterprise will increase reliability (accidents are bad for business) and drive down cost better than NASA ever could, even in the 1960s.

Your arguments are very reasonable. Problem is, religion isn't. Religion crumbling isn't the biggest problem. Religious leaders not taking very well to said crumbling is. And in some nations religious leadership and political leadership are the same. They might take it upon them to wage war against the godless dogs that harbor those alien abominations. Given that practically any country has nukes these days (not a bad thing by the way, basically the 2nd amendment on a global level, but I digress) that might be cause for some embarrassing developments here and there. The aliens themselves might not react very sportsmanlike either when they find nukes being tossed at them. Keep the aliens hidden from sight and you can be sure nothing will happen. The choice seems fairly straightforward. Possible chaos, or no chaos? It's a non-zero game with an obvious course of action.

No scientist is ever completely right. We build upon what we know and what we are able to see. Copernicus, with not even a primitive telescope at his disposal, brought our vision of how the universe is put together a thousand times closer to reality than the large hadron colider and its thousands of scientists ever will. Yes, he put the sun in the center of the universe. But the step of taking the earth out of the center was a giant leap forwards in understanding the universe. It's like saying that the Wright brothers weren't really flying "since they didn't cross the ocean." Well, given where Copernicus was coming from and how much his model improved things I'd say he grocked the solar system pretty well. I liked Macchollo's post. If all the information you have is the completely random movement of the "stars" (planets really, but even that was not known at the time), then figuring out how the solar system really works is nothing short of impressive.

Social unrest would be a consideration. We're not talking about "The Jets win the superbowl" or "The pope has an illegitimate child" kind of upheaval, it goes way, way beyond that. Our own safety could be at stake as well, there might be some religious extremists who see this as "an abomination against god" and will do anything in their power to exterminate them. What do you do when a zoo animal kills visitors? If you're the zoo animal, you'd better keep members of your species in line. Similar considerations might come into play. Much more interesting would be the motivation of the aliens to keep up with this. Would they have a Star Trek like "Prime Directive" to keep interference with newly discovered sentient life forms to a minimum? The argument "with their technology why would they care?" doesn't always fly. Carl Sagan's theory was that any species that is able to travel between stars has to be inherently peaceful; with an aggressive nature and the technology at hand they would have exterminated themselves way before that. I don't know how right Sagan was on that but I know that he was a lot smarter than most of us here.

In KSP vessels are topologically organized as a tree, with the control unit at the top and all other parts as nodes or nodes of nodes, etc. That, in turn, makes it impossible to do what you want to achieve.

I sense a disturbance in The Force...

Congratulations. The shuttle looks fantastic, and we're all aware of the tremendous amount of work that went into it, and it shows. Personally I'm into customized modded crafts but this is one that I look forward to try.

I joined through the .18 demo and the .21 payware version. I can only imagine playing the game without manuever nodes. I mean, yes, I don't use them half the time now, but that's because MJ gives me orbital statistics and I know what's going on. Having to figure it out at first... I always wondered why they got rid of the launch tower. I thought it was cool. I'm sure after having a couple of rockets spawn inside the tower, it's a bit less cool. I'm sure you old-timers think we youngsters have it waaaay to easy

Science is more about gameplay than about realism. One can consider it a puzzle to figure out what to unlock in what order to progress the quickest way possible. At the same time by gradually introducing new parts to newbie users it helps to make it easier to master the game. I don't think that "science" was intended to be "realistic" at any moment for this game of little green men who need neither air nor food, living on a golf-ball sized planet in a society committed to spaceflight and nothing else.

Specifically for KSP CPU power is more important than GPU. My old laptop just died (because of KSP? Who knows?) and was running extremely hot with KSP and struggled mightily with the framerates. It did have a very decent graphics card and older graphic-intense applications like MSFS2004 (within reasonable limits, obviously) and Half Life 2 ran smoothly on it. I now have an i7 with crappy integrated intel graphics (not ideal for KSP but I use my laptop primarily for work and a suitable machine with a good GPU was simply not among the options I wanted to buy) and KSP runs much, much better. Added advantage: because the graphics are throttling the game now (instead of the CPU) the machine stays cool while running KSP. And most of the time I get good frame rates, the only exception is inside Kerbin's atmosphere when it needs to display ocean (that really seems to be bottleneck. Fly over the desert, or the poles, or switch to mapview, and framerates jump up)

That's like saying jumping from the top of a large building doesn't kill you. It's the impact at ground level that does, but not the jumping. Obviously the waves are causing side effects that are visible at high strength, but who's to say those side effects are not doing damage at low intensity but prolonged exposure? Personally my non-scientific opinion is that there are no such side effects. But I'm just pointing out that your reasoning is not exactly water-tight, which it needs to be when you're discussing this with those opposed. Because they'll use exactly the same arguments.

Eclipses, parked on the dark side of a planet, slow orbit that leaves you for hours and hours in the dark... there are plenty of scenarios where you can run out of charge (SAS gobbles up quite a lot). The easy solution would be to turn off SAS stabilization. Unless you start monkeying around with directional controls there's no reason why it should be using power at that point. Aside from that if there's a need to completely shut off the gyros can't you simply do so through custom groups?

Would a three-stage approach make sense? The mothership stays in circular orbit near the SOI boundary. That takes the least amount of ÃŽâ€V to get into orbit and leave it. A second ship, call it the "expedition cruiser" would then detach and get into a lowest-altitude parking orbit A third ship, the lander, would then detach from the expedition cruiser and make touchdown. The lander doesn't need to carry the fuel needed for transfer from SOI boundary to low orbit and back. Of course that's only a few 100ÃŽâ€V but everything to keep the lander light helps, right? Whether you're using a 2-ship or 3-ship approach you will likely also need to bring a variety of landers along. Something that can return from the surface of Duna needs to be a lot different than a Minmus lander.

In speech they use it at the end of every sentence.

The logic is that the people who came to the convention used to refer to a date as, say, "January 15th, 1765" at a time where "logic" wasn't really a qualified discussion point in regards to writing down dates. The point in convention is that there's value in "using what everyone else is using," see VHS vs Betamax. It didn't really matter which system was superior; as a consumer you'd be stupid to buy the system that offered the least choices in hard- and software, and as a manufacturer you'd be stupid to manufacture the system consumers wouldn't buy. I happily invite you over to live in the US and consistently write your dates as DD/MM/YYYY because that makes so much more sense. Yes, it does. And your life will be an administrative hell. There are many definitions and conventions that have a historical origin and yes, other choices make more sense. But as long as the cost of changing is higher than the benefits change is not going to happen. At that point one can wonder about "how logical" a certain system is. If the benefits aren't sufficient, change will not happen. A good example is tau vs pi. When you look at it rationally tau makes much more sense. But no, we're sticking with pi. Why? Because everybody does so.

Language is always a compromise in clarity and brevity. While a "mechanical" language might be 100% consistent and produce sentences that only understandable in one (intended) way, it also seems to produce a lot of redundancy that is not needed in real world languages. "Aunt Barbara's apple pie was delicious!" or (type: pie, apple; consistency: baked; acquisition method: given; acquisition agent: family member, aunt, female, (name: Barbara;) pastry (verb: be; tense: present, single, third form) descriptor (type: taste; attitude: positive; quantity: delicious) emphasis (type: exclamation mark). While the second sentence might be a lot clearer and convey more information, especially for those not familiar with the situation or context, the first sentence clearly wins in being shorter and easier to digest.

A simple fix would be to delete the quicksave data automatically when you exit the game. I cannot imagine why someone would go back to the quicksave of a previous KSP session, and those cases where someone does want to do such a thing are likely far and in between compared to the cases where players lost hours of progress because of reloading the wrong* quicksave. There might even be the option of writing a script to launch KSP that will do that for you (it probably has to run with admin rights under windows since you're deleting files from a program folder). While technically not a bug it is behavior that has caused players to lose their progress on multiple occasions, and now with "science" it hurts a lot more when that happens. The fix wouldn't be too extensive so i can't see why the devs wouldn't pick this one up. * wrong: because it's not the quicksave they expected (since that one never materialized for whatever reason)

Programming is hard. Google "Dunning-Kruger effect". Aside from that: C# is a rich object oriented language. The concept of methods pretty much belongs to the core of that, as do the use of the “main†function or the use of libraries (“usingâ€Â). Now, what you need for making parts is probably a very small subset of C#. Good tutorials will teach you a lot of things you're likely to have no interest in: object creation and destruction, distributing assemblies, good programming practices, etc. So it's doubtful that a "good tutorial" will bring you what you need which is just a few key phrases to get you going. You'd get more out of some samples of KSP add-ons to see how the code is implemented. If you do want to learn more about C# be prepared that you'll spend a lot of time learning all kinds of good things that have very little meaning for KSP mods. But Microsoft's "Step by Step" series are usually decent tutorials. So is the "for Dummies" series. Not good reference guide but a tutorial is barely ever needed as such. Books from O'Reilly are generally of high quality as well. As Headhunter pointed out, don't stick to a single book or tutorial. You'll get far more out of the viewpoints of a few different authors; everyone has their own style and none will match yours exactly.