Jaxal1

RTGs are a good power source for that type of mission. (Mars/Duna Direct, not Spaceplanes)

I'm glad the two-nacelle design worked out. Bicouplers do tend to look a bit silly on planes anyway. Strange they'd have different behavior.

That's certainly a bug that Squad needs to fix, but are GasStations still a big deal now that you have the refueling Fido?

IIRC, gravity assist has less to do with relative speed or which 'side' you pass on: and more to do with what direction you're headed after: if gravity bends your trajectory to be closer to the direction the body is moving, you get a gravity assist. If you're headed the opposite way, you got a gravity brake. Edit: And apparently you already knew this, and I was looking at the wrong page.

Apparently one of the other changes to intake air is that the throttle is automatically reduced when intake air runs out so that you consume it exactly as fast as it is taken in. So the meter reads zero, but the engine is still going at 1/2 or 1/3 throttle (or even 1/10 throttle in the air is thin enough)

Opening my old career save, I can see the new lab in the parts list in the VAB. But it says something about needing to buy the tech from the research building before I can use it, but I can't find which upgrade to purchase. I'm probably missing something obvious, help?!

I did a vertical takeoff plane when (due to SCIENCE!) I had access to landing struts but not landing gear. Took off from KSP with gantries holding it upright, landed on its tail with parachutes on the nose. Not sure how you'd stabilize it to stand on its tail in the water, though.

Emilynn is going to be dangerous if she gets into the cockpit of a BirdDog.

Unlocking a built-in transfer calculator would be pretty sweet.

Why would you need to make a part self-destruct? Just to shed weight? Something like that should require a Kerbal to EVA with some tools.

And Jool is green, which tinges the sky greenish rather than rosy. If that helps. They're fantastic, and I really appreciate the effort you put in to make them compelling and entertaining.

If the game was going to have a limit on reaction wheel torque, the best way to do it would probably be to make control surfaces and RCS lower on the tech tree than reaction wheels (yes, this would mean the 1-kerbal capsule would not have reaction wheels). First launch is uncontrolled, get science to unlock fins with control surfaces, which is enough for a long suborbital flight to other biomes, unlock more science to get RCS, which is enough to steer a craft outside atmosphere to orbit and go to the Mun. That gets plenty more science to unlock in-line wheels and better capsules that have their own torque. They're bit more intuitive than reaction wheel limits. (Instead, currently reaction wheels 'just work' on any craft and the incentive to unlock RCS and in-line reaction wheels is to effectively maneuver larger craft.) Desaturating reaction wheels using tidal forces makes an interesting thought problem, though since tides can't be used to produce torque around the major axis of mass (usually, this would be 'roll'). If you assume you're using a 4-axis tetrahedral setup (like NASA actually uses), there has to be a way to shift momentum to the three non-parallel wheels (if you couldn't that wouldn't be a redundant setup), which can then be desaturated... Oh! I know how you could do it: tidally lock your craft, then use your reaction wheels to bleed off your 'roll' momentum into a precessional movement (so that the nose and tail of your craft are making tiny circles.) The tide will be attempting to fight that precession. Desaturation achieved.

And one of the simplest is to use RCS to provide angular momentum, and RCS thrusters are pretty far up the tech tree compared to piling on capsules for their reaction wheels. Magnetic torque rods coming before peroxide rockets in the tech tree strains my disbelief more than just handwaving it in the first place. (Maybe like batteries and solar panels? You can add torque rods to desaturate your reaction wheels the same way solar panels recharge your batteries? Or use RCS to do it in a hurry?) Maybe, though having a different resource for Pitch/Roll/Yaw could get weird when you dock together a large ship and gyros that had been 'roll' are now 'pitch' for the larger craft. Ultimately, I think the game is more fun if we just ignore that constraint (same as how SAS now is standard with just about any capsule, no matter how primitive on the tech tree, because the game is just more fun when you can count on the computer to diagnose your three-axis tumble and correct it. Just like it's more fun with small planets and small interplanetary distances that make orbit attainable and trips short.

There's a reason I flagged this as Discussion instead of a Suggestion. I really doubt the game would be more fun if you had to pay attention to gyroscope saturation, or debating if Kerbals use control-moment gyroscopes or just straight reaction wheel. But it does bug me a little bit, because I know the real physics and I know reaction wheels are not a (permanent) solution to landing on a 20 degree slope and that they can't actually hold a spacecraft sideways during reentry. And it would encourage landers with a broad footing and low center of gravity. (If your center of mass is above the area defined by your landing gear, you don't need SAS to keep from tipping over.)

This is probably 'more realistic' than KSP really wants to be, but in reality, the amount of angular momentum you can get out of a reaction wheel is limited: eventually the wheel is spinning so fast that it will break (by seizing a bearing if you're lucky, by exploding violently if you're not). For most spatial maneuvers, this is a non issue: any momentum added to the craft by the wheels is also removed by the wheels. Things only get weird when you're counteracting an outside force with torque from the reaction wheels. Fortunately for us, KSP doesn't simulate most of the ones real spacecraft have to deal with: magnetic effects, off-center drag (minuscule at orbital altitudes, but adds up over time), solar wind, light pressure. There are a couple examples of this: 1) Spinning/despinning a craft with RCS, then using reaction wheels to reverse the effect. This leaves the reaction wheels spinning either faster or slower than when the process was initiated. 2) Stabilizing a craft after an impact/explosion using only reaction wheels will also have a net effect. 3) Using reaction wheel torque to avoid problems with off-of-center thrust. 4) Using SAS to keep a lander upright when it landed on a slope. 1 is someone deliberately trying to break the game: I can't think of any good reason to do this, other than running out of RCS fuel - But assuming a reasonable rate of rotation at run-out, we can imagine that the gyros absorb the momentum, even if they hum at a worrying pitch for the rest of the mission. Unplanned explosions and collisions (2) are rare enough that you probably have bigger problems without the game reminding you of conservation of angular momentum, and like example 1, above, this is bounded, so we can just assume the wheel have enough 'peak capacity' to handle the crisis. Even problem 3 is usually indicative of poor design or an emergency - the game doesn't need to punish you more in that circumstance. (Engine gimbals explicitly address this problem, as well. Their whole point is to be able to point the engine relative to the center of mass.) But I see people comment on on the 4th case all the time. If you used reaction wheels to keep something balanced on a slope, when it would otherwise tip over, you have a time limit. Well-designed and controlled gyros could keep it upright for a time, a computer-controlled spinning top. But the necessary spin speed of the wheels will only increase, with the lander attempting to precess in ever-widening circles, until it falls over or the gyros fail or both.