Marlin

Good gravy.. I know the planes are designed to handle such conditions, but my I know my wife would never fly again if we went through a landing like that! The sensation in the plane when the gear first contacted the ground must have stained a bunch of pants.

I ran into the Kraken when running two inter-planetary rescues at one time. I had one rescue ship returning to Kerbin and I was sending a 2nd out to another planet. Once the 2nd ship entered orbit around Kerbol on it's way to my stranded science probe, I switched back to the first ship with Bill orbiting Kerbol on an intercept course with Kerbin. When Bill's ship finished loading, I got the NaN velocity and scrolling altitude landing on 666666. I was able to load a recent quicksave, but every time I tried to load either ship that was currently in orbit of Kerbol, the Kraken attacked. Luckily both ships were on course for an SOI intercept, so I thought I could just accelerate time until one of them was out of Kerbol orbit. I closed the game and called it a night, though. Then I had an idea- I installed KSP on a slightly older laptop and tried my save file. Amazingly, the Kraken did not show up, so I completed the rescue missions and exited and brought the save file back to the original computer. Kraken has stayed away since then.. so far. SO- Kraken definitely seems to be a pre-determined thing, but also random in a sense, as it seems to depend on the exact hardware running the game. Perhaps if you run into a particularly damaging Kraken attack, you could send your savefile to another player, have then open the game and load up a few ships, and if the Kraken doesn't attack, they could then send the savefile back to you and you can see if the Kraken has been dodged?

Does the extendable port have any function, exactly? Like, is it a docking port that I can dock a ship? Or is it just an animated part that activates during the delivery of fuel?