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More formally known as the Prestigious Association of Kerbin Explorers Being as, and whereas, a number of us have gathered together and discussed the present matter, that a deplorable number of Kerbals, eager to explore the confines of Space, are yet insufficiently familiar with our own dear habitat. Kerbin. And in order to raise consciousness, and preservation, of our own natural environment, we have decided today, to form the Prestigious Association of Kerbin Explorers. Membership is Strictly Limited and by Invitation Only. I.e. open to all who qualify according to these, the rules, of our association. Rules of Kayak Club: Do not talk about Kayak Club. Post herein this topic a screenshot of some pretty location on Kerbin. Should be panoramic enough for others to identify the location from some angle upon arrival. Explorer (poster) must not reveal coordinates until acknowledgement of visitation of 5 Adventurers. [Recommend simply Like the post if thought to be correct; else abstain.] Give some clues about how to get there, couched in terms of (e.g.) an initial heading from KSC, followed by flowery description of landmarks along the way. Adventurers will respond with a screenshot of the target location including their own Kerbal or vehicle in such a way as to distinguish that Adventurer from other exploiteers. Adventurers do not give away coordinates (disqualification). First five arrivals will be awarded 5,4,3,2,1 points, as adjudicated by the Supreme Judges (@Castille7 and @purpleivan). Poster of the initial Landmark Screenshot will be awarded 10 points for the post, as soon as the first Adventurer proves visitation. A Leader-board of point scores shall be kept. Do not talk about Kayak Club. NEW: Some Suggestions for Explorers and Adventurers is recommended reading. Who says Kerbin is boring!? Bah. Let's get out there and show us what we've got! Standard disclaimer: yeah, praise be to the rules of the forum in ascendancy... nobody break 'em. Kayak Club Leaderboard Explorer Score Hotel26 229 swjr-swis 124 Pds314 120 purpleivan 88 Klapaucius 56 Castille7 53 TheFlyingKerman 45 Smokey the Bear 34 Sir fulgur 25 Koolkei 20 Paaaad 16 AlienWall 15 SuicidalInsanity 14 oAsAo 14 Akagi 10 Chequers 4 Chryssalid 8492 3 Retro Starship 2 Kayak Club Landmark Discoverer Visitors Kayak River Castille7 purpleivan Hotel26 Chryssalid 8492 AlienWall TheFlyingKerman Great Wall purpleivan Klapaucius Hotel26 Lost Valley Klapaucius Hotel26 SuicidalInsanity Valhalla Hotel26 swjr-swis Paaaad Lake Dumbell SuicidalInsanity purpleivan Hostel26 Estuary purpleivan Hotel26 TheFlyingKerman Fake Victoria Falls Hotel26 fulgur Klapaucius Lake Klapaucius fulgur Klapaucius Castille7 Lake Excalibur fulgur Hotel26 Castille7 Klapaucius TheFlyingKerman Grand Rapids TheFlyingKerman Klapaucius Heavenly Valley Hotel26 Fire Escape Island Klapaucius AlienWall Swiss Cheese Seafronts AlienWall Kamp David Hotel26 swjr-swis Chequers purpleivan Kwitzerland TheFlyingKerman Footstep Island swjr-swis Lake Omaroo Hotel26 swjr-swis Chequers Mt Keverest[2] Castille7 swjr-swis Mt True Keverest purpleivan swjr-swis Smokey the Bear Jeb Atoll Klapaucius swjr-swis oAsAo Hotel26 Ben Creag ***** Hotel26 purpleivan swjr-swis Point Break Hotel26 swjr-swis purpleivan Target Island Castille7 swjr-swis Klapaucius Hotel26 Venice Beach Hotel26 swjr-swis Cape Stinger swjr-swis Hotel26 Lake Zamboni Hotel26 oAsAo Mhole Koolkei Pds314 purpleivan Summer Lake Pds314 oAsAo Hotel26 Mt Brutality Pds314 Hotel26 The Spine of Dres Pds314 Smokey the Bear Mt Pinocchio Hotel26 Pds314 Mt Imposition Hotel26 Pds314 Lac Eve Pds314 Hotel26 Iceland Hotel26 Castille7 St Andrews Hotel26 Pds314 Gravity Lake Hotel26 Standrews Pds314 Hotel26 purpleivan Lake Zero Koolkei Pds314 Madness Meadow Pds314 purpleivan Ice Ridge Koolkei Long Drop Mountain Hotel26 K2 Hotel26 Pds314 Tylos Coliseum Pds314 Smokey the Bear Hotel26 The Amphitheatre Hotel26 Pds314 Peak 6038 Pds314 Hill 303 Smokey the Bear Hotel26 Ross Bay Smokey the Bear Hotel26 Davey Jones (Left) Locker Smokey the Bear Null Bay Paaaad purpleivan Great Barrier Reef Hotel26 The Three Sages chequers Airstrip Sandbar Pds314 Hotel26 Loch Inverness Hotel26 Safe Harbor Hotel26 Explodium Sea Akagi swjr-swis Von Kerman Outlook TheFlyingKerman swjr-swis Ginormous Twins swjr-swis TheFlyingKerman Bank of Einstein-Rosen swjr-swis The Philadelphia Experi-Truss swjr-swis Note 2: controversy over name ***** Mt Majestic Trophy holder Please note: the first 15 rows of Landmarks are being painstakingly reconstructed from the journal. Your patience is appreciated. Scores are certified correct. This notice will be removed when work is complete. [Updated to this point on April 22, 2022.]

It is simple. Say anything you want that abides with the forum rules in Zalgo text, and please don't make it too crazy. https://lingojam.com/ZalgoText B̶̳̦́e̸͉̰͠͝g̴̢̘͐i̶͖͉̓͘ṋ̴̯̊!̸̦̏!̶̙̂̋ (Begin!!) You do not need to add regular text of what the zalgo text reads as long as it is mostly readable.

THIS POST WAS MADE BY THE CALORIES SPACE EXPLORATION INITIATIVE (Thanks to @Kerbalsaurus for helping me with designing the flag ) We at CalSpace are proud to unveil a new vessel, the CS-38 Talon! Note: the photos taken were of an older variant, with less tweaks and lower landing gear. The version for "sale" has had these tweaks made and the landing gear arranged better for safer landing. The CS-38 Talon was previously a competitor against the Terror Bird for the UKA's supersonic airplane program. Now it serves an arguable more noble goal, to gather atmospheric science and train new Kerbonaut recruits. The CS-38 is supersonic and highly maneuverable, both of which are good skills for aspiring Kerbonauts to practice. It also features an advanced ejection system in case said trainee has to eject mid-flight. The CS-38, while small, can carry different science packages. The variant showcased has a wing-mounted science kit, but other variants down the line will have various more packages. We're planning on a sounding rocket and a science glider! A Talon buzzes the Mission Control Center, showcasing its impressive maneuverability. On full afterburner, the CS-38 can reach just over Mach 1. Taken from another Talon flying in close formation, this picture gives a good view of the Type-2 Science Pod (we don't talk about the Type 1). As mentioned before, the Talon is equipped with an ejection system, using four small SRBs and two decouplers to take the cockpit away from danger. Also, the Science Pod is decouplable, in case emergency maneuvers are required. Dropping the science pod will shed a couple precious kilograms off of the airplane. The CS-38's patented EJECT (Emergency JEttison of Cockpit Trigger) system in action. (Artist's rendition) After the inital ejection is complete, a drogue chute is deployed, allowing the pilot to egress the cockpit at safer speeds before deploying their own personal parachute. (Artist's rendition) The CS-38 Talon will be the first of many aircraft from CalSpace, and we hope to collaborate with Beyond in the future! *** KerbalX link is here: KerbalX - CS-38 Talon + Science Pod Also, for practical use, I recommend Atmosphere Autopilot, as the CS-38 is a bit unstable. Without it, it'll be quite a beast to fly, not unlike the real-life T-38 Talon.

Yeah I just think there is something wrong with having to put it off auto and set it to max dampning. Also It can be very difficult to tune it.. to the point were some times it feels like you break your leg off if its dampening. And I talk about landing with sub 10 m/s I just had a rocket bounce at 5 m/s. It just feels off to me. It would also be nice if it could bend a leg to keep its gravity center when on a slope x) Do you have any tips on how to adjust them? because I feel that when ever I make the springs strong the rocket flies off at the smallest touch of the ground. If i makes the springs weak and the dampers tough as nails.. it will fall/collapse under the legs if it does not land exactly level.

No I take your point. There's this gray area where economics and financing blur into politics, where for instance SpaceX can leverage the promised revenue stream from government contracts into its private equity rounds, and politicians have influence over those kinds of decisions. We can only really talk about one side of that coin here.

I mean, SpaceX is also a government contractor. The dragon program, HLS, numerous government funded satellite launches are also 'spending other people's money.' The difference here is economy of scale, iterative design, and vertical integration. I think we can leave the politics out of it. Its also important to not confuse initial manufacturing costs vs per-launch costs when we talk about reusable rockets. To date SpaceX has spent 3 billion dollars on Starship, so one could say the current per-launch cost is 1.5 billion. Of course the idea is that those initial development costs will be amortized over hundreds of launches, but lots of things could interrupt that: RUD on the pad, fundamental conceptual failures that make full reusability infeasible, lack of demand, or an unexpected disruptive competitor.

@StrandedonEarth, moved to suggestion. If you want to submit a bug report do not use it to talk about other things that this bug (here suggestions) The issue you had was reported here:

For Science! Update started off with a blast and I was eager to play it upon release! Once it released, I loved it instantly considering it levels the Game up to not only a sandbox simulator but to a full-fledged game playthrough! However, despite the many awesome and fun moments I had with this update, I feel like there is a lot of work to polish the new Science & Mission Mechanic alongside the already implemented tutorial system which I really wanted to talk about for quite some time now. First, let's start off with the Tutorials, I am personally not very good with Kerbal Space Program itself; I couldn't really understand how to create a rocket properly and usually ended up having stacks of them not launching from the pad or barely making it into orbit, let alone past Kerbin. And despite the help I got from the in-game tutorials, it did not significantly help as much as online tutorials. The section about rocketry feels obviously lacking, sure it mentions how a rocket works and the types of engines and other space components, but it does not help on how to make a proper rocket or at least understand how to make one for any specific task such as landing on the Mun or Eeloo. This can also be accounted for orbital mechanics; it leaves questions in my mind such as: "How much do you need to slowly turn your rocket over the horizon?" "Does it apply to every rocket? If no, how do I know when and how?" This is normally a major obstacle for new players like me (Kind of, started in 2016 but never really got past the Mun in KSP1 and never properly learned rocket design) because it forces us back into the drawing board by watching a couple of tutorials made from the Internet, although it isn't any bad either, it reinforces the fact the in-game tutorials really need more work. In summary, using this experience of mine, I would really like more tutorials about rocketry and an improved version of how to put your rocket past the atmosphere and prepare the steps for an orbital maneuver. Secondly, let's continue with the Missions in Mission Control, The Missions itself aren't bad, I actually found it as huge upgrade its original counterpart in KSP1, but it definitely needs more polishing. The first noticeable flaw I encountered was the mission briefing themselves, they seem way too centered on a specific scenario (mission briefing specifically) and less dynamic, by example, your ship ends up in a catastrophic failure when doing a specific mission, you absolutely do not get any major consequences rather than the loss of a crew, which normally under the default game difficulty, usually just respawn and probably also a couple of science points that you might have lost. I really wish upon a system where the missions actually do not cancel themselves when failing them, but give negative consequences such as more flavour text signifying the gravity and effect of the situation but at the same time balancing and incentivizing the player to keep continuing. Secondly, if your rocket launches, completing the first mission, and immediately goes to the atmosphere, I would really like it, instead of going again back to Mission Control and then going back to the ship to complete the second mission after the first, to simply have some way or form to complete both missions when you've done both already through one rocket launch at the start. To simply brief this, Mission Debriefing should get a separate system when the player fails the mission and you should be able to complete two missions at once without needing to go back to mission control to track the second one which went available thanks to completing to the first one in one rocket launch. Next, the Science Mechanic, which is the one here with the most need of polishing, I could also say the same for this one, the new Science mechanic is a massive overhaul to its original counterpart in KSP1. However, it definitely needs more polishing and balancing to make it less of a "Simple Magic Click and Reward" button which actually loses the value of it being a "Reward" as it gets too easy. I noticed the reports did not really have any unique flavour to them compared to KSP1 where crew observations and utilization of science equipment had unique flavour text depending where you did them (Also make the flavour texts larger and readable :D), I would actually really like if they weren't all generic and had an interesting one. I also found it quite boring when all a Kerbal can do and is meant for in a mission is simply to steer a Rocket when it's out of signal with KSC, do flags, generic crew observations and surface samples. I really wanted them to play a role on organizing Science like KSP1 rather than one magic click and it's all stored. Kerbals should perhaps have the ability to take the science reports or surface samples and store them in the Command Pod or Science Juniors. Both elements, describing flavour text and the further usage of Kerbals, would really incentivize the Player to do more frequently EVAs and learn more about science itself generally through flavour text, with some funny element in it considering Kerbals are Kerbals Anyways, apart from my feedback on how Science Points are acquired and Flavour Texts, Science Points should really get some sort of balancing because unlocking technology feels way too easy and feels really less of a reward. Maybe decrease science points on more generic tasks such as crew observations and regular planet scans or any other thing those science parts can do. Alternatively, increase the cost of the technologies in R&D. In conclusion, I would really like more flavour for generic scientific tasks and further usage of Kerbals alongside balancing on the ridiculous amounts of Science Points you'd get from 1 mission. Thanks for reading my Feedback and Suggestions if you have come this far down, I really want to hear what others think too!

Having done some unmanned missions myself, I agree that the lack of celestial occlusion is noticeable and is contributing (in part; I believe there are other ways probes should be nerfed) to unmanned missions being pretty overpowered for science gathering. The ability to go to Jool and do all manner of maneuvers, even sending sub-probes into Jool itself, without ever needing to worry about being unable to transmit data back, execute a maneuver, avoid being thrown into space by Tylo, etc. is not compelling. Also feels like it's worth mentioning that comms networks in KSP2 would (should?) still be relevant into the endgame as every new solar system is going to be a blank slate with absolutely no radio infrastructure. Imagine deciding a gas giant moon is the most convenient place for a starter colony but lacking the resources and kermans to wing it by building extra colonies everywhere, you choose to probe the system first to find the absolute best places to mine. With the current system, that would mean simply slapping the longest-range antenna on each probe and being done. But with occlusion you'd have the far more interesting problem of setting up robust communications first in order to avoid an eclipse from the gas giant completely shutting down every ongoing mission...or being risky/cheap and dealing with intermittent connection as it happens. And that experience could be totally different on your next playthrough should you decide to bootstrap on a different planet/moon. Honestly sounds way more interesting than just "use big antenna". Sure, that makes it more difficult, but there are reasonable ways to mitigate that, eg: a visualization in map view that shows comms deadzones as 3D blobs or something (bonus points for allowing this visualization to not only show the deadzones right now, but also show areas that are intermittent deadzones), or other similar ideas to demistify the problem of "my probe can't talk to KSC". Instead, the feature just gets simplified to oblivion with no option to retain the more complex version. It worries me that Intercept chose to take this route in 'solving' the problem, I hope it doesn't reflect their attitude toward other game mechanics.

At first I thought: "I'll just get to the Mun and back. That's it. Then I'll be done." Then it was: "Just plant a flag on Minmus, that's enough." "Just see how mining and refueling works..." "Just rescue my Kerbalnaut stranded in Munar orbit..." "Just plant a flag on Duna..." And for a while, that was enough. I did the rendezvous and docking tutorial. One go at that tedium was more than enough. I was even getting a bit bored babysitting every single burn. Going elsewhere with robots was unexciting, and flags and footprints meant docking. Nope. Crew transfers or rescue missions for me meant either planting both parties on an airless celestial body, or MAYBE a orbital rendezvous. Either way, it involved a LOT of EVA propellant and a long space/moonwalk. Then I heard about MechJeb, and KSP took over my life again. I got misty-eyed as my three, helmets-off, intrepid explores watched Jool phasing overhead like a giant lava lamp / clock (waxing quarter at nightfall, full at midnight, and back to a waning quarter near sunrise) in the Laythian night. So, Hi. Nobody in my life plays KSP and I just can't keep all this wonder to myself any longer! I'm also too impatient to wait for moderator approval. So now I'm going to write a book (feel free to not read): LAYTHE 1 - 2-part launch - Grabbing (not docking) in Kerbin orbit - Flight to Minmus - Grabbing and refueling from a Minmus miner/refinery ship. - Then off to Jool's SOI! Jool Aerocapture My first mission to Laythe blew up 6 times (and ended up sub-orbital once) trying to Aerocapture into Joolian orbit because: - I designed and built it wrong: Fully fueled lander W/asparagus staging being pushed by a single-engine nuclear intrasolar transfer vehicle (that was also pushing a lab module) with insufficient fuel. - I'm too impatient to figure out all the parameters for the online Aerocapture tools, so I just kept trying different periapsis until I found one that was sorta manageable. - I docked the lander to the NERV-powered transfer vehicle using the AGU rather than a proper docking port. My engineer kept having to spacewalk to reconnect broken struts that I installed post-connection. At one point, she had five minutes to get outside, climb down a ladder, repair the broken strut, climb back up and get TF back inside before they hit the atmosphere. - I didn't put enough AIRBRAKES (and RCS thrusters and reaction wheels) on to compensate for the 10M heat shield waaaaaaay up front. The whole stack (more like a train) was pretty unstable and I just barely managed to keep it straight even after pumping as much of the fuel to the forward-positioned lander tanks as they would hold. The tail got pretty cooked and I ended up rolling the entire ship (during my successful-enough Aerobrake altitude) at periapsis to keep everything from going completely sideways. Something exploded, but I guess it wasn't important. (I don't know how to access mission logs to see what broke). But I made it! With a small retro burn right after exiting Jool's atmosphere, and jettisoning a full RCS tank (whoops, ended up needing that later). Laythe Aerocapture I think I only blew the ship up twice during the Laythe Aerocapture. All this time, I was just guesstimating the amount of fuel I needed to get the crew home. - I also don't know how to calculate delta-V for vehicles before I've dumped some of the stages, so I didn't know how much DV I'd need to push my much-diminished stack home. Laythe Landing Turns out that a 10M heat shield is unlikely to make a stable reentry when you undock the 100-meter lab, fuel tank, and NERV engine that kept it sort of stable during aerocaptures. I was doing okay until I ran out of monopropellant. Then my lander went Mary Poppins on me much higher and faster than I had planned. Funny, but terrifying. Good thing engines have a pretty high thermal tolerance. I think it took me 3 tries to actually land in one piece, on land. I wanted coasts, but I ended up on a mountain after mashing the "LAND SOMEWHERE" button in desperation. Laythe Jool is SO PRETTY! I love the noon eclipses and the giant green nightlight! I landed on the rim of the big crater so it was almost directly overhead. All my Kerbalnauts developed neck problems from looking up. Also 90 degrees is not easy to pan to. I wanted them to have a swim, but I didn't have the patience to watch them hike for however many physics-warped hours it would take to get down to the water. I disembarked all 3 crew at the same time. What could go wrong? Ladders. Ladders that don't work the same way after a save on an uncrewed vehicle (or something). I tried everything to get my crew back onboard, including welding a solar panel as a "catch plate" for them to jump to from the top of the ------ ladder. Didn't work. And that's when and why I "discovered" the gravity hack. Laythe Launch The lander had launched just fine during a practice run on Kerbin. Not so on Laythe. Probably because I used up all my monoprop trying to survive reentry, and none of the ascent engines, I chose, gimballed. Yikes. My engineer pulled off every piece of "unnecessary" equipment she could reach, tried to compensate for a nasty yaw defect by rebalancing the amount of propellant in the various tanks and changing the staging order. It worked well enough that the lander limped to an orbit above Laythe's atmosphere with just one somersault along the way. Needless to say, Mechjeb was useless for the ascent on my catawampus ship, so it was all seat-of-the-pants. The intrasolar transfer vehicle was able to dip down and rescue the MK-3 reentry pod. Yay! Homeward bound! Jool Escape My Kerbalnauts didn't have enough remaining DV to escape Laythe, then Jool, then lower Periapsis to Kerbin's orbit. Not even close. Whoops. MechJeb said I needed 6000 m/s if I waited 300 years. I had maybe 4K. Luckily Tylo happened to be wandering by when I was playing with impossibly-expensive return trajectories. - The first time I got too excited, did a mountaintop-clipping swingby, and later realized I had dropped the ship's periapsis into Kerbol's corona. Whoops. - Second time I got it right-ish and made it back to Kerbins SOI for around 1000m/s. WOOT! And that was that. - I had enough fuel to straight-up decelerate into Kerbin orbit with a 60km periapsis. - Jettisoned the MK3 pod - Had the intrasolar transfer vehicle climb back to a 400km orbit. As a bookend to the crazy mission, the pod bounced off the atmosphere for 3 orbits and ended up running out of battery (I had left the solar panels on Laythe), and coming in totally dead stick with the ablator on its heat shield completely burned up. Still, any landing you walk away from.... especially one with 6K worth of science! ... which I promptly sold out to finance LAYTHE 2: This Time We're Staying! Laythe 2 Design: - Minimize aerocapture. There are sooo many Joolian moons, and sticking a 10M heat shield on every lander just sucks. - Permanent Laythe Base - Miner/Refueling Ship (probably aiming for Bop) built similar to my overpowered Minumus miner and refinery - SSTO dropship with no ablators. It's supposed to go down and land fully fueled, exchange crews, then fly back up and meet with the Miner/Refueler. It will make the transfer to Jool empty and need to be fueled prior to the first drop on Laythe. - Each component gets its own Intrasolar Transfer Vehicle (ITV) with 3 NERV engines and 14K deltaV (when not docked to something) - Docking to be done with REAL docking ports (the large one), except when refueling. The miner/refinery has a couple of AGU's and LOTS of RCS. Launch: - No problems with anything but the ITV's. Those launched fully-fueled from KSP space center and were heavy as sin. Mechjeb couldn't handle it, so I manually pushed them into orbit. The first one took a couple of tries until I got the hang of it. Currently I have all 3 ITV's fully fueled and docked to their respective mission components. I started building this mission with $9,000,000. Now I have $745,000 left. I have full science and am selling 95% of any new research for cash. A lot of the cost came from hiring Kerbalnauts. 3X ITV's each with Pilot and Engineer + Laythe Base: 4 Scientists, 1 Engineer, 1 Pilot + SSTO: 1 Engineer, 1 Pilot + Mining Ship: 1 Engineer (4 stars) , 1 Pilot. So that's 16 crew in total, and I think I hired 12 of them just for this mission. Lots of greenhorns. Current Issues: - MechJeb keeps blowing up mid-burn for long-duration burns. I have good alignment with the Mun to launch the Jool fleet with a nice flyby gravity assist, but I noticed the target drifting on my first attempt and I had to scrap and restart to a pre-departure save point. This isn't the first time this has happened. - I don't think it's possible to do simultaneous burns and keep the fleet together. Even if I could get a mod that let me fly all the ships at the same time, they have different masses and probably won't stay within physics distance during the long nuke accelerations. That means I'll have to space the ships' departures out by 30-40 minutes or so. Not a big deal, but kind of a bummer and a hassle to re-rendezvous outside Kerbins SOI, if I want to for some reason (like . - I am out of money! - Not super confident that I can land the base and the SSTO within a reasonable distance of each other. The SSTO has wheels but I'm not great at building rovers and it's pretty tippy. - KSP has taken over my life!

This topic is used to talk about flags created by everyday people and the largest modders in KSP alike! We welcome any flags, as long as they are Safe For Work. I guess that's it, keep sharing your flags! (eventually I will make a picture of a vessel with all the flags on the topic, to participate you must include a link to your flag in the description as well as the pictr) Posting NSFW flags on this topic will be reported to the moderators.

YEAR 3, DAY #̷̛̛̝̮͕̙͍͈͇͎̫̝̈́̆̍̅̂́͆̑̏̓̊́̉̊̾̾̂͌͘̚̕͜͠͠%̶̛̝̺̩̱͓͍͌̑͆́̽́̐̊͋̋̆̓̏̐̀̀́̈́͂̋͌͐̅̕͘@̷̢̧̤̯͍͉͚͖̱̟̣̩̝͓͕͓͖̹̤͚̠͕́͛̋̇́̀́̉́̽̿̽̉͐̑̎͗̍̈́̋̾͂̕͝͝ͅͅͅ#̵̡̺͂̃̔̈͝͝ - THE SECRET SPACE PROGRAM In the middle of the Desert, crews have been working tirelessly to make a spacecraft capable of lifting our crew up to the Mun. We need to see what's going on there. A mysterious bunch of lights has just been sitting still. The crew have been carefully selected (since they're our only crew). The goal of the mission is to plant a flag on the mysterious object, collect samples, and then bring them back to Kerbin. I will not talk for the rest of the mission, given the nature of what happened. I'll just use the verbal logs. CREW VERBAL LOG [REDACTED] KERMAN: [REDACTED], skies are empty. You are clear for liftoff. JOEMON KERMAN: Roger that. JOEMON KERMAN: Woah! Alright, mission control. Starting roll procedure. [REDACTED] KERMAN: Copy, roll program. [REDACTED] KERMAN: Alright [REDACTED], you're go for stage separation. ANFIELD KERMAN: Copy that, go for stage sep. [REDACTED] KERMAN: Alright, [REDACTED], you're in a stable parking orbit. In T- 20 minutes, you'll be go for TMI. TIM C. KERMAN: Copy that, [REDACTED]. Readying engine. JOEMON KERMAN: Alright, mission control, TMI burn successful. See you at the Mun [REDACTED] KERMAN: Copy that, [REDACTED]. See you at the Mun. *** [REDACTED] KERMAN: Good morning, [REDACTED]! How'd your trip go? JOEMON KERMAN: We are good. mission control. Waiting for the go for landing. ... [REDACTED] KERMAN: Your go, [REDACTED]. *** ANFIELD KERMAN: Alright, mission control. We are well on are way to intercept the object. [REDACTED] KERMAN: Copy. 9km altitude, in counting. TIM C. KERMAN: 45m from the surface. Continuing engine puffs... Contact! TIM C. KERMAN: I don't see anything, did we come here for nothing? JOEMON KERMAN: Look up, Tim. TIM C. KERMAN: Oh. I see it now! ANFIELD KERMAN: Okay, so are we not going to talk about WHAT THE HELL IT IS? [REDACTED] KERMAN: A- alright, [REDACTED]. You're g-go for EVA. ANFIELD KERMAN: Breakin' up a little there, mission control. TIM C. KERMAN: Alright, mission control. I'm on top of the structure... preparing the flag. TIM C. KERMAN: Alright, mission --ntrol. I'm ----bing ---- do--. [REDACTED] KERMAN: [REDACTED]? [REDACTED], we're losing contact. TRANSMISSION ENDED 1 minute later, [REDACTED] started transmitting to mission control again. Pictures from the lander show the crew are gone. Just entirely gone, with no trace. What happened? Many thoughts fly through mission control's heads. Everyone at once looks at each other, an realizes: this is no structure. What they're looking at is a full on portal. We need to dig deeper...

I'm not an artist or graphic designer, but I'm sure there's tens, maybe even dozens of people out there who could craft a more creative texture than what's currently in the game Thanks for the fascinating and intellectually stimulating conversation! I'm sure you're a blast to talk to at parties!

Reported Version: v0.2.0 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes OS: Windows 11 | CPU: Intel Core i5-8600K | GPU: Nvidia RTX 3070 | RAM: 64 Go So I think this is related to the following bug, but it only talk about rockets, so I'm not sure if it's the exact same bug or a very similar one: Before the bug happened I was trying to make a rover when I realized that the order you build things with structural parts plays a big role in how sturdy your rover frame is : Red dot is the root node, then construction order follow the red lines. As you can see while driving parts were either going apart or into each other. Then I decided I would make a sturdier frame, so I did this : Then as you can see in the attached video, out of 6 try : 4 resulted in immediate physic instability and violent vehicle disassembly, 1 needed a bit of help before getting attention of the mighty kraken, 1 was ignored by the kraken despite my efforts (I must conclude he is not omniscient after all). sturdy-rover-instable.mp4 sturdy-rover-instable.json

Here's today's talk, no tl:dr since I don't have time to watch it right now, and it came out half an hour ago (it's nearly an hour long)

I'm somewhat in agreement here - The commitment not being met sucks. But I think its because they chose a really, really bad metric to try and report on. Very few games use their bug log as their major development communications for a reason. Most games do some regularly scheduled feature blog, or developer touchpoint or design talk. But Intercept is extremely reluctant to talk about that due to prior delivery promises slipping, and the longer they go without talking about them, the worse the potential response gets. After all, if they come talking now about the absolute barebone basic design principles of science, people will assume that they're only now just nailing them down. And god forbid if they're playtesting and find out something they designed isn't fun and needs rework (this is a common occurance) and the community gets it in their heads that they're incompetent at gameplay design. I've mentioned before how the relationship has gotten adversarial. Every communication is carefully crafted, curated, and reviewed because they're frankly afraid of making it worse by saying something wrong, and a lot of us are seeking blood in the water - we're mad, some of us probably excessively so, and we're looking for justifications for that anger. We're well past the point that we could get a post from a science guy talking about this cool part he's messing with, because next week it'll be scrapped cuz it wasn't fun to design missions around, and the community will riot. They chose bug fixes to report on because nobody can get mad at a bugfix, and then I'm guessing the delivery keeps slipping because they're holding out for every last possible little fix - it may be seen as preferable to delay an update so that the update has at least one changed status, over posting an update early that just shows nothing moving 'cross the board.

Toby Li @tobyliiiiiiiiii Jan 6 Elon Musk to provide 2024 Starship Update on January 11. Confirmed on an X livestream, @elonmusk announced he will conduct a SpaceX company talk including a Starship update next Thursday. I'm hoping to hear details regarding Starship IFT-2's post-flight analysis, plans for IFT-3 & beyond, and updates on Starship HLS milestones. https://twitter.com/tobyliiiiiiiiii/status/1743529920322846812 This is supposed to be an internal speech to SpaceX employees, but in the past was released to the public. Robert Clark

So we all know that regions are currently pausing certain science experiments as they change underneath the flying or orbiting crafts. There has been talk that is a bug anyway, and that the regional part will be removed, but I think it could stay as it is with the following idea. This simple suggestion would be for the regions to have their own 'buckets' within each experiment so rather than pausing the experiment it just starts filling up the next bucket. As a working example - the orbital survey experiment around Kerbin will cover the 7 regions, each of which class as a different experiment. As you orbit conducting the experiment, it starts over water, so the generated science points start to fill the 'water bucket'. We can arbitrarily assign 100 points to each bucket, so we could say that the bucket gets filled up to 58 points, and then the orbiting craft goes over the highlands. Rather than pausing, it now just starts filling the 'highlands bucket'. Again it manages to fill 15 points and then it goes over water again and starts to fill the 'water bucket' again. Eventually, after many orbits the buckets will get full and will complete the experiments for each region. In a game where time can be fast forwarded, it would be easy to just send up an orbtiing craft, speed up time and all experiments will complete. I think this defeats the object of running the science so it could be that it only collects science when in no more than 3x time warp, or whatever number the desginers choose. The bucket idea can work for other region specific experiments. As a slight tangent, I also think that the science generated by orbiting craft should be non completing. The orbital survey experiment itself would be as once a planet is surveyed, they don't tend to change significantly, but there could be a science research exepriment (there may be one, I may just not have reached that point yet) that runs continually. Again there may be issues with time warping to generate science, so the same previous suggestion could be implemented.

Only talk in binary. Oops I broke a rule. 01010111 01100101 01101100 01101100 00101110 00100000 01010111

I was playing KSP1 earlier and got to thinking about it. In my opinion it would be great for fixing things on outposts (like in the current KSP), exploring and just all around immersion. Have you guys heard anything and if not, what do you think?

I know it's too early to talk about real life cadence, but launching in February or March would put the time between two launches on par with that of the Saturn V I think. The average between Saturn V launches prior to Apollo 13 was something like every 3-4 months (I think, it's been awhile since I looked at the list of launches in detail). Meanwhile, prior to the second launch that destroyed the launchpad, the N1 took five months to launch two rockets. Not counting Shuttle, the only other SHLV to fly more than one time, Energia, had a year inbetween its two launches. SLS... even if Artemis II launches in 2025, who knows how long it will be until Artemis III? If it takes three years between two flights, how are they supposed to jump to once a year? By the way, this may be a dumb question, but will this launch license process be required once Starship is actually flying payloads? Or will things become more streamlined? The time between each test flight feels very guda guda (グダグダ), which translates as tedious or sluggish. Will people be watching the regulatory process when operational flights begin? They don't do that for F9 right now, as far as I can tell.

I missed the specifics I guess. I remembered the alternate seating arraignments, just not that the exact thickness of the trim would have to be different, even for a never seen latch. There's a flush outside latch on the real doors, for example, maybe just that one exists? A friend's dad (died years ago) was a Los Alamos physicist. Had done bomb testing back in the day, he was a detector guy, working on super high speed photography at one point (like blast starting to break the bomb casing fast). He also worked on other stuff, nothing he could talk about... Anyway, after he died, my buddy was going through boxes and found explosives in a few of them (C4 I think). He used to experiment with shaped charges in the backyard, apparently. He had notebooks with his experiments kept track of. Was a different time. Back in the 80s we'd head up to visit his parents' house (and get fed!), and his dad would have work spread out on the table on the other room. A couple decades later taking a laptop with work offsite gets you prison.

It's been ten years since the end of the Second Great Kerbin War. The country of Bismarck, after two attempts at world domination, have finally been subdued, and it's fascist politicians replaced with politicians focused on better international relations. However, after the war, much of the world laid in ruin from the horrible battles. Out of the ashes though rises a new age of technological innovation, and with this new innovation comes advancements in technology and science. To further these devlopments, the new Kerbin United organization has set up the KSRO, aimed at advancing Kerbalkind into the future and yada yada yada whatever. I'm sure you've heard the whole thing a million times. It's all anyone can talk about. Now, I personally believe this whole space program thing is a political stunt. It's not meant to "aid Kerbalkind in technology" or whatever. It's simply a distraction from the actual issues of the world, and a waste of time and money. We haven't even fully recovered from the war yet! Many of Kerbin;s cities still lie in ruin, the economy's whack, and our leaders are frankly incompetent. And Bismarck's politicians weren't replaced, they were lined up on walls and executed. While they had committed terrible war crimes, committing a terrible war crime back is not the way to go. At this point, it's puppet state for Victoria and Bonaparte. What are these places you ask? Well these are the countries of Kerbin. They're really the big guys of everything happening on the planet. And the living conditions in these countries are absolutely awful though. Bonaparte is a stones throw away from becoming a third-world country, and Victoria's two seconds from becoming a total surveillance state. Anyways, space program, space program... ah, yes. Where's all this technology coming from? Well, the KSRO isn't starting from scratch. Rocket technology was developed by Bismarck during the war. A horrible machine of destruction called the KV-2. Picture of said machine Granted, this was the machine that ultimately led to the downfall of the new Bismarckian conquest. Well, there were several other factors, but still. Adoofus Kerman, dictator of Bismarck and starter of the war, made this machine his passion project. And it scared the very life out of the allies... when it worked. Sure, parts of the Victorian capitol Lundun were destroyed, but this rocket had more failures than successes. Frankly it's a miracle its engineers weren't executed by Bismarck. Now, I'll tell you more about the story leading up to our first launch later. In fact, the first launch vehicle is still being built. There's a lot of story to tell, and a lot of my anger with this "new era" to be unleashed. For now, you all have a nice day. You can bet I won't have one. I have to write for this stupid agency.

Yeah, that is a fair take. I hate to indulge in the inevitable drama that results from this kind of ambiguous silly analogy, honestly, but regardless of what he meant, it still feels to me like that's what we're expected to do: Deal with what we have now, because sometime maybe eventually in the future things will be better. And I acknowledge the irony of saying this in the wake of a video where they specifically talk about short term solutions, but... I mean, why would we need to talk about short term solutions? I don't feel the damage they could cause would be outweighed by the sentiment of neglect that I feel has grown, at least in my own experience