Moar Boosters

Don't fly straight up. The same thing happens without FAR if you fly a capsule + SRB straight up. The atmosphere is no longer thick enough to slow heavy objects falling straight down. Instead fly in a ballistic trajectory. You'll pass through more atmosphere on the way down, which should slow you down enough to safely deploy your chute. Don't deploy your chute at 5000m, wait until you're closer to the ground and going slower than about 250m/s.

If your plane has trouble lifting off from the runway, it could be a problem with wheel placement. For it to take off it has to be able to pivot it's center of mass around the rear wheels, and this means they need to be close together. If your craft is locked to the runway but is able to easily climb as soon as it leaves the end of it, your rear wheels are probably too far back. If you move them forward a bit until the plane is close to the point of tipping backwards when stationary you should have a much easier time lifting your nose up whilst still on the ground. It can be easy to smash your engine into the runway if you pivot too much, but you can always add another small wheel near the back which doesn't touch the ground to protect the engine from mishaps.

Well every landing has a small amount of lithobraking at the end. If the technique doesn't work on non-atmospheric bodies it's not really lithobraking.

Close enough. Even if you land close to 0.1m/s you'll still bounce upwards if you don't use RCS to thrust towards the surface. Kerbals can barely walk there because their footsteps lift them off the surface. Just carrying out a single jump can take several minutes they float so far.

I usually never bother with them, however I've in my most recent save I made one and it's been really fun. I built an SSTO which I used to construct the station, and am now constructing a jool-ship. It's a pretty efficient way of doing things, as the payloads to build the station vary in size. When I carry up a the lighter piece of the construction (eg girder segments), the spaceplane usually has quite a bit of fuel left over which can then be transferred to the station, to be used by the interplanetary crafts I dock there. I already filled a few probes to land on the jool moons, and I'm slowly filling the fuel tanks of my atomic powered jool ship.

I think both gauges either side of the nav ball could have some work done to them. The red area at the top of the throttle gauge needs to either be usable, or be removed. Every time I build a rocket that's underpowered I look at that little red area and wish I could actually use it.

There's plenty of material out there regarding nuclear energy and corrupt countries. The soviet union, North Korea, Iran, Israel and the American energy industry and all well known for corruption. There have been specific incidents where material created by nuclear plants have been used for nefarious purposes, but proving such a thing would basically require you to solve the entire Litvinenko poisoning case. Even that doesn't really outline the cause/effect mentioned in your question. Good luck with that!

Even if the power plant keeps pumping out power without problems (eg geothermal, or hydroelectric) eventually a blown component in a substation, or a branch falling on a line would escalate into a city-wide conflagration. A city without power is a death-trap all-right, but a city with power and no engineers is even worse.

1. Launchpad 2. First staging event 3. Run out of fuel and unable to get home. 1 and 2 are a direct result of my obsession with giant rockets. They're spectacular when they do work, but are usually death-machines for the first 20 flights or so. 3. Happens a lot since I stopped using mechjeb or kerbal engineer. Normally I realize I'm short and leave them in orbit for an easy rescue, but occasionally mess up completely and leave them stranded in solar orbit.

Name of record: Biggest stock rocket. (absolute, as opposed to usable). Version achieved: The first one with the SLS parts. Proof: No longer have the craft file. It wasn't a a usable rocket, unless you want a reliable way to make a computer freeze up.

Brightman is far from uber-rich anyway. Apparently she's worth something like $55m, and the space flight costs $52m. If she is indeed funding it herself it's almost cleared her out, although I suspect she was helped along the way by her billionaire ex-husband.

I wonder what the market would be like for commercial missions to the moon or mars. I know every time probes have been sent in the past by national agencies the instruments on board go through a very strict selection process, and many experiments don't make the cut and are left out. India made their recent mars probe useful by including experiments that didn't make the cut on NASA's MAVEN orbiter. The bottleneck is currently the launches. There's plenty of experiments we want to send to mars, so presumably if SpaceX was able to built a system that can reliably put stuff into Martian orbit or better, then I'm sure they would get custom from nations or academic institutes who can't afford a launcher themselves. Obviously something like Mars One is ridiculously over ambitious, but I could see a group of countries or universities clubbing together in a similar way they do for multi-satellite launches.

I dunno how they're going to raise the budget since their methods of financing seems very unlikely to work. The TV production company they were working with has already cancelled the plans for a reality TV series. If it was to be made, it'd be a fairly boring elimination style reality show. They type of show that was really popular a decade or so ago, but not so much now. They claim the rest of the money is going to come from sponsors, but I'm not really sure how that's going to work either. It won't take long before people are bored of a show about delusional mars colonists; and once all the money is in the pot, the best they could hope for is to put a tiny little probe into mars orbit, probably with all the potential colonists names written on it.

Turns out it's capable of landing submarines on titan. I don't think we guessed that one! http://www.newsledge.com/u-s-air-forces-x-37-spaceplane-help-submarine-explore-titan-13432

It's probably just dust being lifted by warm air. Those baby's vibrate a lot when they fire, so bolted to the ground it's going to cause a mini earthquake.

Plenty of my giant rockets have made the KSP program lock up, but this one managed to freeze the whole computer when attempting to launch.

I think your best chance of escaping them would be to apply for a long-term exposure experiment on the ISS. If we killed them all, if we're lucky other detritivores will take their place and your dirty kitchen will still be full of bugs. If we're unlucky, the nitrogen cycle shuts down and kills all life on earth.

I imagine there are different advantages and disadvantages to different application techniques. The reason they use gold is because it's got many unique properties, but unfortunately has the undesirable properties of being fragile and heavy; so I expect they're still developing new techniques to get what they want from it without suffering the penalties. I guess it's easy to see where the confusion comes from as well, as most of the components that are actually covered in gold are then encased in something else, to protect the gold.

I have the option turned on, and I do try and design my launch systems to put stuff into a 70x30km orbit so I can deorbit the dead stage passively. If a rocket is overpowered and ends up leaving a booster stage in orbit, I just leave it there.

They do use gold to protect their equipment, it's just not the same as the big areas of gold mylar you see on the outside of spacecraft. It's for internal components which use gold either for it's shielding or anti-corrosive properties. I'm not sure if it's classified as foil, gold leaf, or something else, as it's usually applied with lasers. I'm sure you can find more information about the scientific reasons on this website. http://www.lasergold.com/

I wonder if fully comp insurance would cover you if you accidentally crashed your car into a $50million rocket.

Yes, but only with the crappy old mk3 parts, so I guess it's retired at the moment. It's got the correct shuttle engine configuration. but I had to use liquid boosters because the solid boosters supplied with the game are pathetic. They effectively ran as solids though, it flew into space just fine with the throttle maxed out all the way to orbit. It lacked a cargo bay because I never quite got the hang of building them out of structural panels, but it could carry quite a bit of weight stuck on top of the external tank, and had enough juice to carry a payload to the mun and still return home. It also had a working launch escape system, so in that regard it was better than the shuttle.

Another reason for the way the Soviets worked was due to how closely linked their space and military programs were. They were racing with the USA to develop long range missiles so the military had different parameters for success. If you're developing a long range missile, and do a series of tests which each in turn is more successful than the next; that's going to make the military confident you're actually going to deliver what they want. If NASA blow up test vehicles of something that's designed to carry people, that's going to make the government lose confidence in them.

I'm pretty sure they're still using the demo version.

Over a thousand hours. My most played game on steam. I think it was about £15-18 when I bought it.