Streetwind

Constant? Nope. Influence of gravity decreases over distance. Quite a bit, in fact. I think it's quadratic or something similar. You can easily see that with objects in highly eccentric orbits. Almost all the acceleration from falling towards the periapsis comes in the last few percent of the way.

Yes, there are decouplers on them. I want to eject the empty stage below them, so I need decouplers. But why would the shrouds cause damage? Shrouds always disappear for me the moment I decouple the thing below them that causes the shrouds to exist in the first place...

Once you are in orbit, the orbit itself nullifies gravity and you are weightless... provided you thrust exactly prograde, retrograde, normal or antinormal. If you thrust in relation to the center of gravity of the orbited object, then you will still be fighting gravity. As for when gravity stops: that's what the "Sphere of Influence" is. KSP uses a simplified gravity model called "patched conics" in which you are only ever affected by the gravity of one single object at a time. Everytime you change into a different sphere of influence, you become affected by a different source of gravity. Going from Kerbin's SoI into that of the Mun means Kerbin's gravity ceases to exist for you and that of the Mun starts existing.

I've had these researched for ages, and never got around to using them, since my existing designs did everything I needed. Now I'm using them for the first time in a rocket, and promptly I'm having issues. For example, everytime I activate the stage they are in, they simply explode. Is that some sort of in-joke on the "atomic" part, or are they actually usable and I'm just doing it wrong?

Rightclick the panel and look at the info it gives you. It should tell you if it is exposed to the sun and if yes, by how much. Also it will show how much charge it is generating, if any.

Not allowed to clean up any debris that is not within Kerbin's atmosphere. In other words, if it's not landed on Kerbin's surface, or passes Kerbin at under 69km periapsis, it stays where it is, forever. I currently have 43 space debris parts tracked by mission control, 4 of which are on the Mun surface and the rest of which are in various orbits within the Kerbin SoI. And it keeps getting more...

Haha, I remember this! One of the best episodes in the entire series

Regardless of game design, as someone with a science background I'd like to point something out... Real science is excessively grindy.

Magnetism is a fan favorite when it comes to speculating about over-unity machines because it so handily produces a force without spending any "fuel". The problem with electromagnets, however, is that they need a lot of electricity to generate and maintain a significant field. This is not a trickle power application, it needs real wattage. That's largely what prevents this particular trick from working.

You may want to get in touch with the Interessengemeinschaft Modellraketen then. They offer training and certification programs for up to and including high-power rockets (quite a bit stronger than rocket candy propellant), and can likely help you both in sourcing fuel and in obtaining a launch permit.

Apparently the kethane jet engine intentionally works in unoxygenated atmospheres, so long as it has some form of IntakeAir to work with. Obviously this is from a mod and not a stock part, but if you happen to run it then you'll be able to have a legit Eve atmospheric flier with jet engines. Just gotta scan down some kethane to fuel it with.

The one reason to to turn a polar orbit I can come up with is to adjust the craft's trajectory relative to the sun. You can have a polar orbit that sees the sun at all times, and you can have a polar orbit that spends almost 50% of its time in the shadow of the orbited body. Clearly the former is better if you happen to have power-hungry devices attached and/or are far away from the sun. However, as the body orbits the sun (or the body's parent, in the case of a moon), your orbit won't turn along with its path, and therefore will slowly rotate relative to the sun. If your craft is reliant on always needing sunlight, prepare to adjust the orbit every so often. Thankfully, solar orbits are so large that this effect happens really really slowly.

There aren't any Kerbals either, yet we still see them ingame. Arguing based on what evolved within earth's atmosphere (and thus is very obviously not vacuum adapted) is splitting hairs with blunt axes and a non-sequitur to boot. Point is, this is a science fiction setting. There's absolutely no reason you cannot have strange vacuum-dwelling lithotrophs with silicate bodies that subsist entirely on temperature differences between sunlit and shadowed areas (a phenomenon which is very pronounced in the absense of an atmosphere). Think "space corals". Don't you have any imagination? Dream a little! We're here to explore a fictional solar system full of inexplicable wonders in every nook and cranny, after all.

I'm well aware Tylo has no atmosphere. Look up "anaerobic organism" sometime.

A nerf of the Rockomax 48-7S... it can keep its niche of having an awesome thrust-weight-ratio, but the Isp can probably stand to drop somewhere around 10-20 points on both ends. It's the Mainsail of the 0.625 world, after all. In general, while we're on the topic of improving career mode (which is apparently a goal for 0.24), I'd like to see the tech progression improved: - More nodes. Some nodes carry way too many parts/give way too much bang for the buck. Making the tree broader (not deeper) another step where it currently stops getting broader can provide this without having to adjust the science cost of each tier. The little bit extra this will cost to complete the tree is easily offset by further fleshing out the Kerbol system. It was possible to complete the tree in 0.22 without even leaving the Kerbin SoI, and then Minmus got biomes and now grants even more science. There really is more than enough to go around to unlock extra nodes with. - More sensible part order. Some parts do not make sense where they are now. For example, why do we have two final tier tech nodes (costing 1100 science) that do nothing but unlock largely redundant probe cores, side by side? You can scrap/repurpose one of them, move the QBE somewhere else, and combine the two "larger" parts (the 1.25m and the 2.5m cores) into one node which can stay highest tier. Then that one node at least has a credible reason for being there. Similarly, 0.625m engines and fuel tanks need to come much earlier in the tree so you can actually build a nice and small unmanned probe before finishing the tree. There's more of these cases scattered around the tree, so a little restructuring will help. - Progression parts. One thing that I found kind of a shame is the low amount of true progression in the tech tree. It's perfectly logical to understand why that is - KSP started with sandbox mode, and in a sandbox, every part fills a nice and a purpose. But in career mode, you end up with a tech tree that mostly unlocks sidegrades, not upgrades. A few low-performance early-tech items thrown in just so they can be replaced by better ones later-on will give the player a better sense of constant advancement.

Servers would be up for exactly one year after the game's release and then get sacked. In the meantime, they'll sell you KSP 2: Electric Boogaloo. It comes pre-unlocked with all the lens flares and atomic engines you had to buy as DLC in the last version. What a great deal! Of course, inflation is harsh nowadays and EA has to eat too, so the price will be higher.

Define "alien life". The "do not suggest" list merely states that there won't be "aliens" in the first final release of the game. Aliens defined how? Probably as the kind of large-eyed small-eyed green pink men from Mars Duna that abduct cows kows in their flying saucers. But that's a very unlikely kind of alien life anyway. What about the more likely kind of alien life? What about simple, non-sentient microorganisms? What about strange, slow-growing lithovore "plants" on Tylo? What about plankton-like swarms of tiny proto-crustaceans on Laythe? What about tentacled sacs of gas living permanently airborne lives in Jool's lower atmosphere? What about the fossils of things long dead buried under the sands of Duna? There's so much potential that doesn't center around classic sci-fi pew pew aliens, and it could be used to give content to planets and moons outside the Kerbin SoI that currently don't have more than a name and a single biome.

Couple of points: - Use a price search engine to look up parts even if you buy a prebuilt system. Sometimes OEMs charge more for an upgrade from part A to part B than part B costs on the open market. In that case, buy the system with part A, buy yourself part B, swap the parts and sell part A on ebay for additional savings. - For Minecraft and KSP, get an Intel i5 CPU. They're in the sweetspot between singlethreaded performance, future proofing, power draw/cooling requirements and price-performance ratio. - Don't spend more than $150 on a mainboard. - Don't buy a videocard for below $100. You'll get ripped off everytime. You either make do with the integrated graphics, or you get a videocard that's actually capable of running a game. There is no sensible middle ground here. $100+ or bust. - If anyone tries to sell you a "gaming PC" where the videocard is not the most expensive single part, then they're taking you for a fool. - Don't buy a videocard for over $400 either, you'll get ripped off again. Performance gains in this segment are only worth the price if you have very special usage profiles (Eyefinity etc). - Don't want a game bundled with your videocard? Get it anyway. Then ebay it. - 8GB RAM. Not because KSP/Minecraft need it, but because RAM is dead cheap and you will regret taking less. 16 on the other hand is a luxury that you'll struggle to utilize. For speed, choose in the range of 1600 CL9 to 1866 CL10. - Quality OEMs choose quality power supplies... and so should you, if you build it yourself. Don't try to shave off dollars here. - Solid state drives are the single biggest system speed increasing factors in this day and age. If at all possible, get at least a 128 GB one for the OS and the most commonly used programs, then toss in a magnetic disk for mass storage. Samsung 840 EVO is a great place to start. - Don't get suckered into a $100 watercooling kit for your CPU. Unless you overclock hardcore, a quality $40 air cooler will get the job done just as well while being quieter because there won't be a thrumming pump making noise. And if silence isn't your goal, the stock fan will keep you covered for free. - Don't buy a sound card unless you have quality speakers or headphones (i.e. better than monitor-integrated or that skype headset for $15). But if you do have quality speakers/headphones, do buy a sound card.

...Umm. What. So the descriptions explicitly call the 1m converter inefficient and the 2m converter efficient... when in fact the only fuel type the 2m converter is actually noticably more efficient with is monopropellant? Oxidizer and Xenon are worse, and liquid fuel is just a minor (ca. 6%) improvement. That just doesn't seem right. Is it safe for me to edit the part configs if I currently have no converter parts deployed/in flight anywhere? I reckon that upping the power draw a bit on the 2m one in order to boost its efficiency so it can at least match and maybe slightly exceed the 1m one seems fair enough.

The space shuttle as a combination crew/cargo orbiter with atmospheric flight and return capability enabled many missions that would have been outright impossible with a less capable craft. Just think of the SpaceLab missions - carrying a pressurized, manned orbital research module up, operating it there, and bringing it back down gently with all experiments intact was huge. As such, the shuttle was not a mistake. For its time, it was the most advanced spacecraft ever built, and allowed science to learn more about zero-g environments in a few flights than in all manned and unmanned missions prior combined. The mistake was using the shuttle as a common satellite launch vehicle or for ISS supply runs (for which is was far overpriced) and using it well beyond its safe operating life (because the US had no budget for anything new and it was THE symbol of spaceflight).

Let's see... I would get the DLR. For the uninitiated, that is Germany's space agency stand-in. Summing up info found on wikipedia, the DLR is a scientific organisation that has been tasked with also fulfilling the role of national space agency by the German government. For this purpose it has a yearly budget of around 1.2-1.5 billion Euro, two thirds of which is Germany's contribution to the European Space Agency (ESA). Another 20% it gets to spend on space program related things. The rest goes towards managing several non-space research projects for the government on the side, mostly centered around traffic, transport, energy and security. Historically, its achievements include a small series of manned missions, such as two SpaceLab missions on US shuttles (which were fully paid for, staffed and conducted by the DLR, not NASA) and four missions to former Russian space station MIR. More recently, the DLR is responsible for maintaining ESA's Columbus laboratory, a highly advanced science module on the ISS, via its ground control station situated in Germany. The DLR's current strength lies in highly sophisticated sensor and detector technology, particularly for orbiters and probes. A good amount of research is being done on monitoring environmental health and pollution of our good mother Earth. The DLR maintains around 7,400 employees, including ten active astronauts. So what would I do with a space agency that is actually a research institute with a fancy hat and a somewhat "paltry" yearly space budget of maybe 300 million Euro to work with? Not an easy question to answer. It would of course be easier if I could also control what ESA does with the lion's share of the German budget, but technically that's a different space agency. Due to the considerable expertise in orbital sensor tech, it would make sense to push for unmanned exploration probes to outer solar system bodies. Budget constraints would make this impossible to mount on my own though, so I would need the cooperation of the ESA and/or other spacefaring countries. However the DLR as a research institute could also focus on enabling or assisting the development of key technologies. Vastly reducing the cost to orbit is a goal I think should be a major focus. The launch vehicles we have today are sufficient in terms of lifting prowess; there's little need to build more of the same just because you want to be able to say you have them (see: SLS). They are, however, way too expensive. And if you went and reduced the cost while maintaining current capabilities, you'd open up space access to a large number of private and public contractors which previously simply couldn't afford it. And the established players would gain the benefits as well - just imagine what your local space agency could do on the same budget if launching something was cheaper. Through that alone, you would increase the volume of launches to the point where existing spaceports would be brought to capacity, and mass production of rocket parts actually becomes economically feasible. Both of these factors further reduce launch costs as synergistic effects. I think it might also potentially be a smart move to enter a partnership with Planetary Resources. The premise looks farfetched at first, but once you actually look into it, the technology they require to pull it off actually already exists today - which to say the least shocked me when I realized it. I would at the very least order a careful evaluation of such a move. Being able to generate any sort of actual income from a space program is a completely unique proposition, which could vastly expand available funding. And then there's having first dibs on rare resources and the outlook of setting up an orbital fuel depot that could assist space exploration in a previously unprecedented manner. A very ambitious project, sure, but also a potential key turning point if it works out. And something I would really like to do... I'd fund a prize pot similar to the X-Prize, with the goal being to develop a manned space station capable of creating artificial gravity (assuming through rotation, but allowing any means that science can deliver). The ISS is currently giving us a great deal of data on life in a zero-g environment, but there are other factors to consider when it comes to life in space. For example, the separation of effects from zero-g and other potential problem sources, such as radiation and artificial environments. The most logical thing to do then is to have a space station capable of artificial gravity, and use it as a "control group" to contrast the results against the available data from zero-g envrionments. Further research could be going into low-gravity environments, such as those found on moon and mars. A spinning station could easily adapt its rotation to simulate the gravity on just about any planet in the solar system. The pot would probably be split, with an initial "first step" goal of designing and concept proofing the station. The winner(s) could then use the funds won to pay for actually launching the station, with the goal of winning the second part of the pot for being the first to actually put it into orbit. Obviously, a space station designed for at least medium term operation (even a small one) is not cheap, and not in any way comparable to the suborbital flight motivated by the X-Prize. The pot would have to be significantly bigger. However, it could be incrementally funded over several years, as it would take competitors quite a while to actually produce results.

For the longest time I believed that activating time warp meant hands-off, no control. Then I discovered that you retain full steering and staging control during physics time warp (the 2x-4x one).

Jet engines are more efficient than rocket engines because of the way they work. A jet engine burns fuel to spin a turbine, which sucks in air and shoots it out the back. It is very cheap to spin the turbine. The downside is that it only works where there is air. Without air to use, the engine cannot produce thrust because there is nothing for it to suck in and shoot out. A rocket engine creates thrust by essentially taking the fuel itself and throwing it out the back. Any thrust it generates is a direct result of the amount of mass (and the energy of said mass, which is why the fuel is burned at the moment of ejection) it throws out the back. This is why rocket fuel is often called "reaction mass". Ever been on a boat in a lake, and jumped off the edge? Instead of pushing yourself forward, you probably pushed the boat backwards - you put the boat into motion by throwing yourself out. That is what a rocket engine does. It's horribly inefficient, but it works in places where there is no air or anything else to use instead. Like, for example, the vacuum of space.

Okay - mind blown. The small girders (octaconal and cubic) were another thing that never really attached the way I wanted them to do, but here they are, doing exactly the thing I need. Guess I still have a long, long way to go in trying to figure out which is the right tool for what situation. Many thanks!

This is actually an issue I have experienced a lot lately, now that I finished the techtree and unlocked all the "freeform" building tools near or at the very end of it. Expect, I find that every single time I have an idea that I want to build, I cannot build it because one or more parts simply don't attach that way, despite every other part coming before it doing so. As an example, ion thrusters and inline xenon tanks. I have spent the entire game attaching inline tanks to the sides of one another - surrounding a center one by multiple outer ones, for example. But now the game hands me the xenon tank, and it attaches in exactly one way only: at the top or bottom of a prescribed attachment point, green sphere to green sphere. You cannot stick the xenon tank to anything that is not a green sphere and strap it down with struts. It's not an issue with stability - no, the part remains transparent. It simply refuses to exist unless attached to a green sphere. The ion thruster is the same. Except, well, an ion thruster by itself is fairly pointless. I made a really lightweight probe, just 0.6 tons, and one ion thruster is still excruciatingly weak. I want to attach more ion thrusters. I want to attach five. How can I attach five? I only have one green sphere. I cannot sidestrap xenon tanks to make more attachment points. I'm honestly at a loss. Do you guys know any solution?