Kerbart

Thank you! And welcome back! (I assume "back" because... well, Spaceport!)

No, it's not now dead... It's been dead for... ages, really. From it's ashes rose Spacedock, though, so you can try that one.

Congratulations on making it into orbit! Now you just need to practice it until it gets routine (maybe rebuild your craft in Sandbox mode so it doesn't cost you money in career). When practicing you can do a couple of things: Experiment with where you start your turn, and how fast you turn. It's general practice to be around a 45° angle at an altitude of 10,000m but for your rocket that might be higher. Or lower. Once you make it in orbit on a regular basis, play with the design. Can you replace one FLT-400 with a smaller FLT-200 tank? What if you start with two strap-on SRB's? Can you control your orbit? For instance, maneuver your craft in a 75×75km (apo×peri) orbit? Once you've achieved that, work on a standard de-orbit procedure (for instance: "retroburn to a 75×25km orbit, stage for re-entry at 70km, keep retrograde") and then keep track of the longitude in Kerbal Engineer, so you can pinpoint your landings close to the KSC (just for fun).

Take a look at this section of the wiki. If we take your original design into account, then we can say that there's two stages (let's ignore the capsule when it does reentry). The first (top) stage, is the capsule, FL-T400 and engine. I'm including heat shield, parachute, and four wings for stabilizing, as you did, and a decoupler for the capsule. And I'm assuming an LV-T45 Swivel (as it gimbals and gives you better control) Total weight without fuel: 3080kg Total weight with fuel: 5080 kg Efficiency (Isp) of the engine: 320s -- Real efficiency is measured in exhaust velocity, but then you have that whole unit (m/s or ft/s) thing. So it's often divided by one standard g (9.81m/s) to get a meassurement in seconds, which is the same regardless of the units you're using. However, that standard g then comes back in delta V calculations: dV = Isp×g×[ln(total weight with fuel) - ln(total weight without fuel)] Plugging in the numbers gives us: dV = 320 × 9.81 × [ln 5080 - ln 3080] = 1570 m/s Now we can calculate the dV for the bottom stage. Total weight without fuel: 5080 kg + 800 = 5880 kg (Total "wet" weight of the top stage, and dry weight of decoupler and RT-10 booster) Total weight with fuel: 8692 kg Isp of RT-10 SRB: 170 (numbers quoted are 170-195, 170 being at sea level which is where we use them. Note how much lower than the Swivel!) dV = Isp×g×[ln(total weight with fuel) - ln(total weight without fuel)] Plugging in the numbers gives us: dV = 170 × 9.81 × [ln 8692 - ln 5880] = 650 m/s If you add another stage, you can calculate the dV for that one in a similar matter. Total dV of this rocket: 2220 m/s — not enough to take it into orbit. Which is why you need three FL-T400's. Kerbal Engineer is great because it does these calculations for you, but doing the math "by hand" a couple of times is useful because you get a better insight in how things work. The rocket equation teaches a couple of things that are not all that intuitive: The number of engines doesn't increase or decrease total efficiency. In fact, more engines means more weight which will lower your dV. But very low TWR's can be bad too! A high Isp looks great but the dry mass the engine adds to the total weight of the ship is important as well. This is why the LV-909 is such a great performer (it weighs nearly nothing) for small (1-kerbal) ships and why the LV-N nuclear engine isn't (for small ships), because its high weight (despite superior Isp) The tyranny of the rocket equation means that, given a certain Isp, you need a certain fuel-to-dry-mass ratio to achieve a goal (say, low Kerbin Orbit). There's no way around that. Also, those ratios tend to propagate through stages. The lighter your space craft (top stage) is, the bigger the weight savings at the bottom. Bringing an extra 1000 m/s of dV with you "just in case" means paying a horrible price in fuel and mass at the bottom stages.

@HebaruSan showed (domo arigato!) that with three FLT-400's you should be able to get into orbit. KSP is notorious for not showing data that is pretty essential if you want to take building beyond wildly guessing, and the Kerbal Engineer mod does a good job in giving you that data. There are two important factors into "making it into orbit": Enough fuel: this is the delta-V bit. Just as we can express the fuel capacity of a car in "miles" because it's more meaningful (one gallon in a Ford Fiesta gets you further than one gallon in a Ford F150), fuel for a rocket is expressed as "delta-v" which is the total change in velocity a rocket can achieve. Without diving into details, you will need about 3500 m/s delta-V to get into low Kerbin orbit. Enough thrust: DV is a theoretical number and is based on some assumptions. One of those assumptions is that you're moving; if your rocket isn't powerful enough it's not getting of the launch pad! Thrust-to-weight (TWR) tells you that. And as pointed out by Mr. HebaruSan, you'll need something "comfertable" north of 1.0 -- the 1.8 is about the sweetspot of "enough" without overdoing (and without spending needless cash and weight on too much thrust). Do you need a solid fuel rocket to start? No. In general, Liquid Fuel rockets will get you better bang for the buck (weight) than solid rocket boosters. Because of their weight, the contribution in DV is very little. But... you need to get off the pad. And that's where SRB's excel: they offer tremendous TWR's. So, getting started with an SRB (or a pair strapped to the side of your rocket) is not a bad idea just to get that initial bit of speed. As you get higher you get into a thinner atmosphere, and as your flight path is more horizontal you don't have to fight gravity as much, and your TWR can be lower. Also keep in mind that Kerbal Engineer lists data based on vacuum performance, which for some engines is significantly better than for others. The LV-909 for instance (the small 1.25m engine) has an atrocious atmospheric performance. The two larger 1.25m engines that you have are a lot better in atmospheric flight, in that respect (but the LV-909 beats them once in space when it comes to efficiency)

Hello @jonpfl, I'm afraid that rocket will not get you into orbit, no matter how hard you try; you'll need at least three of those FLT-400 tanks. If you're math is decent, we can show you how to calculate if you can make it into orbit or not. In addition, although many will not agree with me, I see Career mode as a challenge mode, not as a learn mode. While you get "eased" into the various parts, you will also have the challenge of not having the right parts to make a simple rocket to get you into orbit. My personal suggestion is to start with sandbox mode (just try to keep it simple & light!) , get a hang of getting into orbit and then advance to career mode (but again, that's personal opinion. Not everyone will agree with me on that). Good luck!

I wouldn't say that. I've had my fair share of exploding solar panels in the past. But not with 1.2 That's a new one for me, haven't encountered this problem in 1.2 at all That doesn't mean it doesn't happen, my best suggestion to the OP is to figure out how to trigger this behavior reliably so it can be researched (or mitigated with "don't do that")

That would explain "catching up," but it doesn't explain becoming the tallest people in the world (with the trend line of average height not showing any flattening or slowing down the yearly increase in average height).

It's as much cheating as putting a bucket inside your sandcastle to make it stronger. Unless you're in a competition with strict rules, no one really cares. There's also many cases where reversing is unequivocally "legit": You're building a craft and at the launch pad realizing, because you took out a part, KSP decided to shuffle up your staging order And after fixing that, KSP decided to put crew back in your craft that's supposed to launch crewless (because it's an unwieldy space station without abort facilities) While adding a maneuver node, KSP decides that it's actually "time warp here" and by the time you've stopped it, you've missed the window for a rendez-vous or circularization The kraken strikes Etc

Let me start by saying that it's perfectly reasonable for Squad to charge for expansions and that I applaud it, as it's a way to fund future development (and expansions) of the game. I'd rather pay a little bit for fresh content, than not getting anything at all. At the same time, the was very, very little ambiguity in the promises Squad made back in the day. I'm paraphrasing here, which gets me on a slippery slope of course, but while I cannot find my car keys in the morning my memory is pretty good on this one: “we will never charge you for any upgrades, ever.” The reason I remember this vividly is because I also remember thinking “wow, that's fairly short sighted. At one point you will have sold the game to everyone you can possible sell it to. How to fund development from that point onward?” To me, claiming that they only meant updates and not expansions seems like a legal cop-out (“weaseling out”) to me. Again, I have no problem paying for DLC. And perhaps their legal team advised against saying “yeah, we made that promise, and in hindsight, that was really dumb. Because we can't fund future development of KSP that way. So we're sorry but we're going to kinda break that promise and we WILL charge for expansions in the future. But because we're standup guys, we will honor our commitment to anyone who has bought the game up to this date” Because I feel that's what really happened. And I'm fine with that. We all make mistakes. But saying we never meant free expansions... Meh.

What @Bill Phil aludes to is the nearly unimaginable amount of resources you'd get from mining a single planet (even if it's “just” a dwarf planet) down to it's core. Once we get beyond what we can count on the digits of our hand and feet, humans tend to lose track on how much large numbers exactly are. “One death is a tragedy, a million just a statistic,” Stalin once said, and the cynical truth it: we cannot simply comprehend large numbers. Small size asteroids can already yield staggering amounts of ore; thanks to the cubing effect in volume increases, the yield of a single planet is downright staggering. If we reach a point where we're using resources at that rate, we're no longer a society who needs to mine resources; we'll have better ways of getting it.

Aside from what is discussed abive, it's really a good idea to make a cooy of the KSP folder from Steam (placevit for instance in Documents, or on your desktop) and install the mods in there. Having your "modded" version isolated from Steam will prevent drama when the update comes along.

I lost the URL to the bug tracker or I would have posted it there straight. This is not a major bug, and perhaps not even a minor bug and doesn't affect game play that much. But it does look silly. I accepted a contract for re-positioning a satellite. Turns out that the "new" orbit is so close to the current, that the contract got marked as "completed" while I was checking on that particular satellite in the first place (without doing anything). Easiest 80,000 Kerbucks ever! Proposal: I'm not asking for 30° inclination changes or extreme apo/peri changes, but a contract for new orbit parameters should at least mean new orbit parameters to provide a challenge, and not (nearly) the same as existing ones.

On the positive side, it's cool and it would certainly be more realistic On the negative side, I genuinely feel that it's "realism for the sake of realism" and not adding substantial game play. The only thing I'd like to see in stock is that Kerbals on EVA in a breathable atmosphere would not were a helmet, like TextureReplacer does right now. No collar would be an added bonus.

Simulation games tend to do that. MS Flightsim is famous for shorting training needs for pilots, the US Army adapted Close Combat (itself an adaptation of the Advanced Squad Leader tabletop game) for a reason, and I'm pretty sure race car drivers use racing games to familiarize themselves with racetracks these days. Where things get interesting—and this is something KSP excels at—is when the game is a motivation for the players to dive deeper into a subject. When I was a teenager my English tended to be really bad. Then I discovered Scott Adam's adventures and I was locked up in the attic every night, armed with dictionaries (despite what they are trying to tell you at school, learning a language is 85% vocabulary. And 10% idiom). When my teacher told me I needed an A for my final exam English (I borked Literature), I arrogantly told her I'd get an A+ and I did. KSP "tricks" players into getting better at math and physics, and "self-driven" motivation is the best kind there is.

The expectation that extensions to the game should be free is a great one. And of course, if, with everything else being equal, I'd rather have the extension for free than to pay for it. But... everything else is not equal. KSP is developed by professionals; people who have a (reasonable) expectation to get paid for the work they do. The cost for continued development of the game has to be funded somehow. Your quote was that you don't want to pay for the game twice. And you don't have to. The game as it exists is what you paid for. That's the car you bought. Now, there's additional material for the game. Nothing of the original game is taken away, the game still exists and functions as the one you paid for. And it's a pretty nice game. And maybe gasoline wasn't the best example. But lets say that your car brand now offers (for more money) an addition in the form of a superior sound system. Car without sound system costs $20,000 and car with sound system costs $30,000 (the difference is the price for the DLC, so to say). "I already paid for the car. Why would I have to pay for the new sound system?" -- Because it's additional. The introduction of the sound system doesn't change the car you bought; you just have the chance to make it more awesome. But it still does everything you expected it to do when you bought the original car. It's frustrating if there's new content behind a paywall, especially if you don't have a lot of disposable income. That is probably where the rift comes from; for those who the expected DLC price is trivial (anywhere between $10 and $30, I'd guess--but that is just a guess), it's a small price to pay for some shiny parts, the contract builder and the knowledge that Squad has a new income stream to fund ongoing development of the base game. If you're a school student, or have a fixed income, and spending $10-$30 on "some software" is not trivial... Yes, I can understand your frustration. But remember that if money is a problem for you, it's also a "problem" for the developers who will not work on the game without getting paid. The money has to come from somewhere. Without income, KSP development will stop. The difference with paid DLC is that without spending money, you might not get the DLC content, but you do get the bug fixes (and future base game updates). The same applies for localization. If you have no issues with the game being in English, localization is doing nothing for you, and Squad just wasted many, many months of development time on a "useless" feature. But if it means Squad can sell 5× or even "just 2×" as many copies of the game it means that game development just got a boost for a couple of years. That makes localization a feature that I'm very happy with.

Actually it doesn't matter for you. Well it does, but only in a positive way: scenario #1: Squad doesn't open up new sources of income. Development ceases due to lack of income. KSP as a game pretty much remains as it is. Bugs are not fixed. scenario #2: Squad charges for new content, while using the ability to pay for costs associated with ongoing development (rent, utilities, servers, computers, required software, wages) to also continue developing the "base game." For those that do not buy the DLC, the game still improves in the sense of bug fixes, new base content, etc. Would you rather have scenario 1 with all KSP development (including bug fixes) stopping, or scenario 2 where the game continues to improve over time, and those that DO pay for the DLC (not you) are bankrolling the bugfixes you profit from? "I already paid for the game" as an argument that DLC should be free is like saying "I already paid for the car" as an argument why gasoline should be free. It's additional stuff that allows you to take it further. It's costing money to make though, so don't expect it to be free.

The president is a business man. In most business that I'm aware of, initial deadlines are not set with the expectation that it can get done. They're a negotiating point. The signal he's sending NASA is that boots on the ground in 2050 as per the current plan (we know NASA slips every single deadline, so yes, 2050, not 2030) is not acceptable and they need to come up with something more aggressive. There will be an ambitious plan, it might or might not get approval, and in 2020 with a new president everything will get reviewed, budgets get gutted and we're back at square one. I'm putting my money on the other business guy to get there first. Not that I think that timetable is realistic, but it will have a single plan and goal that won't be gutted every four years because there's a new dude in charge. The apollo program showed what can het done if we set our mind to it and want to get there. NASA ever since shows us what happens when those in charge of policy and budgets have goals that are unrelated to that. As long as congress sees the primary goal of NASA to be a provider of juicy contracts to be landed in home states and nothing else, we're not going anywhere. Anti-politics rebuttal: this has nothing to do with who's president; in it's current setup, NASA is simply doomed to get anything big done that takes over 15 years to complete.

Of course not, but it's an industry led by engineers. PR doesn't make things up. Who do you think PR talks to when they write releases?

And here's your problem. "Science" has told us exactly that when nuclear power (by fission) was introduced. Since then we've had various incidents all over the world. Windscale, Three Miles Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima... One can argue that compared to coal or oil & gas, nuclear power is incredibly safe, and it is. But public opinion doesn't see that. What public opinion does see is hundreds, if not thousands, of people being evacuated (usually out of precaution), under threat of something you can't see. The enemy unknown is always more sinister than daily threats we deal with (traffic for instance). Engineers are notoriously bad with dealing with PR and the effects of it. Look at Fukushima. If we had the experts to believe, there was never a meltdown and everything was under control and within safety parameters, based on the press releases in the days following the disaster. What you're dealing with is a field of science and engineering that has throughout its history overhyped the benefits, understated the risks and is now wondering why the general public has such a "irrational fear" of it. People being uninformed is indeed a part of it. But people are always uninformed. The nuclear industry eagerly shooting itself in the foot at every occasion is a much bigger factor I think. And telling people that it's safe and that there's no waste or radiation problem... it might even be true. But who's going to believe it?

Just don't timewarp. It will add a while new layer of realism to the game.

If it's produced by Michael Bay we know exactly how it's going to look like (and no need to discuss a “story” concept either at that point).

Amateurs care about looks. Pros care about functionality. Shake-to-focus, enhanced edge-docking, superior multi-monitor support... Who cares about how it looks. I care about how it behaves. And W10 has a ton of smart features in that respect.

What wonderful, helpful reactions... [/sarcasm] Downgrading to Windows 7 is a bad idea especially on a new computer (drivers, etc). There's also the limited lifespan of Windows 7 security updates, not to mention the various improvements on the user interface on Windows 10. “Just install Linux” sounds great. Of course I'd be missing out on about a dozen programs I use professionally, but hey, KSP will run fine. Oh wait, it already runs fine. Why would I do that? Newsflash I: not everyone runs just KSP on their computer. Newsflash II: Windows 10 works just fine. I always wonder why the Linux fanboys claim that it's such a horrible system, because I've never encountered any serious issues on any Windows box. @KerikBalm, what are the exact issues you're running into? Are you trying to delete folders from a non-Admin account? Have you tried running Explorer as Admin? KSP runs fine on my WX box and I'm not experiencing any of the issues you describe. That's not helpful to you maybe, but it's an indicator that something is different on your setup; it's not a Windows issue per sé. It sounds more like a rights issue to me.

Localization is hard. Language is hard. Your incorrect use of the word "only," an insult to those who have spent countless hours on localization over the last few months, is a testament to that.