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Relax, we're getting asteroids soon. Then we can talk about comets. Though I don't know what kind of a graphical nightmare that logically could/should be. For a long time I've wondered what the tail of a comet would look like up close. Would it still just be a blurry haze like in photos? Or would there be tons of rocks and ice flying around like in Armageddon? The latter would be a rendering nightmare.

The KSC Has A Report: Bill: Meeting called to order... where is Jeb? Bob: Heh...err...where are we? Bill: Although problematic, we continue to our Science missions; we are moving on to space ventures and holding back on our plane construction due to cost limitations. Bob:...okies... Everyone Else: Is Not Here .... Bill: I have it on good talk that the Teams are doing well; I have been personally overseeing all Science operations; our primary objective is to find our Commander Zeta who on return from Earth encountered some odd space wave that misplaced him about a few parsecs or more ...does that constitute a joke? Bob: .... okies .... Everyone Else: ( voices heard over the intercom ... ewffochw h ed qodhdhfowe ndoewdh ....) Bill: Let's keep up the good work, and get those rockets flying ... ! Bob: ... okies .... Everyone Else: (silence over the intercom as all the teams are now on 'coffee' (!) break? ) End Of Report

There was a cluster of four orange tanks and mainsails onion staged to that single one. Those got the payload to apogee with fuel left for 2/3rds of the final insertion burn. The single mainsail finished the job. Actually, five LV-T45 would be enough for the core as any more would interfere with staging. The Novapunch and KWRocketry gives a much better performance level overall without creating frame rate killing additions of all the engine clusters. This 110 tons to orbit example shows that better efficiency even with SRBs Anyhow, it was a first effort to see if it could be done. I did this in stages. First was the test of the core and four boosters onion stage. Then, the second ring to a suborbital test to work out the bugs in bracing and fuel line placement. Finally, the outer ring to push this into orbit and having to fix issues with lost braces and boosters falling off on the pad. Final fix to brace the decoupler under the payload which broke during the insertion to orbit burn. Once done, a good launch to orbit. Want to talk about inefficient, check some of the other designs being used to place the same payload into orbit. In most, there is way too much fuel being thrown into lifting the payload into orbit with the results of launchers being way too big and inefficient. Last night's flight, at 1,452 tons during launch, placed 216 tons into 100+K orbit. That is a ratio of 6.7 to 1. If aimed at the payload of 185 tons to a 100k orbit, I am sure that this ratio can be brought down to six to one or less.

Loving this mod! Talk about opening up a whole new side to the game. I usually avoid new parts packs as they often seem totally unbalanced or unnecessary but I'm really glad I finally tried this. It took me a whole day of just having ships on the launchpad to work out most of what was going on - and I haven't even started on mining/refining yet. The Alcubierre drive initially sounds very over powered - it generates fuel easily and basically for free and you can skip around all over the system in seconds but actually it's NOT by any means OP. The fact that you still maintain your velocity and direction relative to Kerbol after you jump means some potentially huge Delta-V burns. As you begin to understand how to utilize this you can begin to use it more effectively and by altering your position then using Kerbols gravity to slow down or speed up you can begin to do some very low delta-v transfers = but at the cost of it often taking almost as long as a Hohmann. Anyway, a well thought out non game breaking addition either way. Three things I would like to see however! 1) Get rid of the god-awful massive power button on the right hand side! Consider making it a lot smaller and movable like so many others do (Alarm Clock, VOID, Protractor etc) or better yet integrate into the Toolbar API. 2) Would it be possible to integrate scanning for resources into Kethane - I think it has an API for doing so if I remember rightly. It currently has a superb scanning system! 3) Can we have a slower warp speed? The slowest is still way too fast for maneuvers around smaller bodies (Kerbin even!) An option for a 10th or even better a 100th of the currently slowest would be superb and would actually allow for precision jumps.

Thanks for the original post. I use to have vivid and sometimes scary dreams as a kid. No, this is not because I was a wimp (I'll explain in a second). So I had to develop a mechanism to cope. I found I could "lucid" dream to some extent, along with at the same time or later, figuring out I was dreaming. As far as I can tell, the main reason I get such vivid dreams is half the time my senses don't turn "off" properly. It seemed to start with just balance. I dreamed I was falling or lying on the floor constantly. Now looking back, that makes sense, I was in my bed, and my brain was telling me I was lying down, but my dreams were of different places. Later on, I can probably recall just about every sense at some point in some of my dreams. Visual ones are the worse, but thankfully very rare. Usually just brightness from the morning sun, but if I ever (supposedly I have not tested with recording/someone observing) open my eyes, wow that is scary as I cannot move or actually comprehend the information while asleep. But back to the lucid dreaming, I now just go "oh, I'm dreaming, cool" due to a few obvious clues/ques to the fact it's not a real experience. From there if I have a strange dream or some strange sensation (pins and needles etc while asleep is not nice!) I just sit it out. If I'm lucid enough, I'll do what ever I feel like. I've often re-written or "reversed time" to redo/undo a dream if I did not like it's events or ending. Other times I'm not lucid enough and I fail (like the "face plant" example you gave, my real balance/inner ear sensation takes over and tells me "no your in bed, flat on the floor, not in the air"). But when it works, there is only one limitation, and that's imagination. I actually cannot dream things I cannot imagine/recall/remember, for example flying higher than 20 feet. Which means flying is not as interesting as it could be, but can still be fun. The factor regarding "success" and "failure" I suppose is down to how lucid or conscious you are. The brain seems to loose it's proper memory, but also has it's "own" at times (I have specific "dream" memories that I don't during the day, and only occasionally do I get reminded of the reoccurring dreams, or my "dream house" or whatever). So things like inconsistencies and randomness can mean it just becomes a normal dream again quickly. It is both a blessing, as I can cope with problematic dreams or just have some "fun", and a curse, as it's very vivid/draining/emotional and somewhat undesirable (reality and less dreaming would be better than these constant annoying dreams). Hope you do well. I'd love to talk to a professional and help them record/learn/check how the brain works (especially in my case with my somewhat sensory ability while sleeping/half asleep) one day. PS, one difference is I sometimes do get consistency. A big problem is either regressive memories or new dream memories (as mentioned above), that kind of become a separate set of memories. Which I hope is a protection, as we normally do not remember dreams for good reason, we'd have trouble remembering what was real and what was not!

And, we did sort of bring it on ourselves with all that 'I'll form... the crotch!' talk.

57,303 m/s Happy? Have I successfully showed you the maximum delta-v? Now let's come back to reality, and realize that DV is UTTERLY DOWNRIGHT USELESS without an equivalent TWR stat. The two are entirely interchangeable, so giving one without the other is pointless! This craft I've made, while having a downright monstrous DV, has a TWR so useless that it could never ever be flown to anywhere. (and the sad part is, I've seen ships posted on these forums that have a TWR like this!) If we are going to talk about the maximum DV, we need to include TWR into our discussion, because otherwise delta-v means nothing.

Honestly I don't see why there would be any point in physically fighting with a civilization that we cannot actually reach. We can only talk to them. Nor would there be any reason to keep secrets from them. I imaging the two societies would communicate constantly and that this would cause them to converge to similar cultures and levels of technology. Even if they later develop the power physically cross the gap between them, they will have been communicating for hundreds of years and may not have any interest in fighting at that point.

Part 5: Onward to Bop After 2 months of leave on Kerbin, the crew takes yet another shuttle ride up to the Intrepid. This would be the flight the ship was always intended for, to reach Jool and survey its outer moons. It would take them further than Kerbalkind had ever been. After Bill safely landed the shuttle back on Kerbin (I really hope I don't ever have to do any more landings from a retrograde orbit any time soon) the crew got to work restarting all the systems that had been left in sleep-mode while they were away. Lofal: "Hey, where's where's the icecream sandwich I didn't finish? I left it right here between the life-support coolant tanks so it would stay frozen 'till I got back!" Bob: "I saw you leave it there and I threw it away, we both know you shouldn't leave anything in there" Lofal: *grumbling* "Whatever... but you owe me a dessert." Just before the transfer window to Jool reached its most optimal point, I sent the Argon tanker on its way to Jool. And now for the Intrepid itself. The engines are set to a higher thrust, lower efficiency setting than usual, but the ejection burn still needs to be split up between two orbits around Kerbin. You have to wonder, would the sight of your home world shrinking in in the window become routine after a while? Or would continue to have emotional impact every time? While the crew could simply go into hibernation for the long transfer to Jool, many Kerbal scientists have raised concerns that hibernating for extended periods could have adverse effects on the physical and mental capacity of Kerbalnauts. So, in between their hibernation shifts, the crew keep themselves busy with boardgames, watching and re-watching their movie library, and exercising in the centrifuges. Finally, after months staving off boredom, the Intrepid draws close to the majesty of Jool and its moons Lofal: "Hey, everybody get up to the cupola, Jool's moons decided to but on a little show for us" After a minute everyone crams in behind Lofal's seat in the cupola. Jonnie: "What are you talking abou- oh wow, they're all lined up!" BB: "Wait a second, whats that little speck by Laythe?" Hans: "It must be Bop!" Sure enough it was Bop, just barely close enough to be seen. Oddly enough, despite the Intrepid launching toward Jool a few days after the tanker, it arrived a few days before it. As the ship drew close to periapsis, the reactors were brought up to full power for the breaking burn. This brought the Intrepid into an orbit that was just inside Bop's. about a day or so later, the argon tanker reached periapsis, and performed its breaking burn. Rendezvousing the Intrepid with Bop would be tricky, just like with Gilly, and I didn't want to waste Argon. I an easy method would be to just match Bop's inclination, but I had another idea. If I treated Bop like a ship I was trying to rendezvous with, and payed close attention to the closest approach indicator, I could adjust the Intrepid's orbit to meet Bop at the ascending or descending nodes. I worked out fairly well, but it meant that I'd be coming at Bop from an odd angle. And by "odd angle" I mean completely vertically. The crew remark that, aside from the huge impact markings, Bop just looks like a much larger Gilly. Surprisingly, it doesn't take too much to turn this polar orbit into an equatorial one. From here at Bop, we can see all of the inner solar system, with the markers of every mission undertaken by Kerbal-kind. I kinda had a slightly emotional moment when I saw this, it reminded me of how far this space program had come. Just like on Gilly, the 2 landers would be used to investigate different sites on the surface of Bop. First to the surface would be Hans, who was feeling a bit nervous, apparently something about Bop was making him uneasy. BB gave him a pep-talk though and soon he was on his way down to Bop, bound for the center of the large impact site. Hans begins taking samples on the surface and reports nothing out of the ordinary. Jebediah himself will make the next landing. Originally he was supposed to visit a site of suspected tectonic stress to the west of Hans' landing, but yesterday KSC sent a message containing a revised landing site, far to the north. Ever since that message came through, Jeb hasn't been as talkative with the other crew... Suddenly, as he descends to the surface, something happens. Jeb: "What the heck!?" Bob: "What is it Jeb? whats wrong? Jeb: "Nothing, nothing's wrong I just thought I saw something is all, my mistake." Jeb makes a gentle landing between some hills Bob: "okay Jeb, everything looks good, you are go for EVA" Jeb: "Roger that... wait... I think I'm getting........ losing... ower..." Bob: "Jeb, are you there? Please respond!" *silence* --[THE FOLLOWING IS CLASSIFIED]-- Jeb shut down his radio, and deactivated the lander's homing beacon to make it look like he'd lost power. The rest of the crew weren't supposed to know about this. He exited his lander through the airlock, and lifted off with his EVA pack. Slowly, he flew over Bop's lumpy brown surface. And then, as he crested the next hill, he saw what he had been sent to find. He set down a few dozen meters from the object, and approached it on foot. There was no denying it, it was an alien life form. Or at least, it had been. It seemed very lifeless now... it must have crashed into the surface with enough force to kill it. Or maybe it had simply come here to die. Jebediah didn't feel like speculating. He had a job to do and he wanted to get it done as fast as he could. He jetpacked up onto the massive creature, took some samples, and placed a flag to mark the location. As Jeb jetpacked back to his lander, he wondered if his crew deserved to know about this find. But the orders were to keep it secret unless absolutely necessary, and he was going to follow those orders. Unknown to him, something small and curious had been following him since he had arrived... --[Classified Report Ends]-- Suddenly, after 20 minutes of silence, Jeb's radio was back online. Jeb: "This is Jebediah calling the Intrepid, can you hear me?" Bob: "Yes, yes! we read you loud and clear Jeb!" Lofal "What the heck was that about Jeb?! You had us all worried sick!" Bob: "Please disregard Lofal's comment Jeb, we're all very relieved to know you're okay. But what happened?" Jeb: "Looks like an electrical surge shorted out main power, I just spent the last 20 minutes replacing all the fuses." Bob: "Well thats no good, Hans is all done surveying his landing site, I recommend we get both of you back up to the Intrepid asap." Jeb: "Uhm, sure, yes. I'm taking off now, tell Hans to do the same." In short order, Hans and Jeb were back in space and docked with the Intrepid. (I've become somewhat of a pro at rendezvous and docking by now) After storing all the experiments and samples from the surface (including some strange ones in sealed black bags), the engines were brought up to full and the Intrepid departed Bop for its next destination, Pol! This update took a little while, probably because I've been playing other games and dealing with real-life things lately. As you can see, this one has a bit more going on story-wise than some of the other updates. Thanks for reading!

<p><span><img alt="image" src="https://31.media.tumblr.com/0ff9377afa68dc3ad3fe6844aaf1bd38/tumblr_inline_n1xwau31LO1rr2wit.jpg"/></span></p> <p><strong>Felipe (HarvesteR)</strong><span><strong>:</strong> The whole asteroids mission is now been through QA, and even though it was another mad week (and weekend) to get it all together, we’ve now got a pretty well-rounded set of features for the Asteroid Retrieval Mission patch ready to face the experimental team. We’ve had to move some things around the release schedule though, to better accommodate everything we have coming this month, so stay tuned for some news about that soon. It’s good news. </span></p> <p><strong>Alex (aLeXmOrA): </strong><span>Checked that the server was managing well your Logo submissions. I also grabbed and showed them to the whole team, so we can now choose the winners. We received a lot of them and we have to say there are very good ones.</span></p> <p><strong>Mike (Mu):</strong><span> This week I’ve been finishing off the contract system ready for the testers to get their mitts on em. </span></p> <p><strong>Marco (Samsonart):</strong><span> Not a very productive week due to a computer swap, but fixed yet a few more tutorial bugs and started planning a new one.</span></p> <p><strong>Daniel (danRosas)</strong><span><strong>:</strong> doing more printed graphics stuff. Also, I’ve kept up with the lip sync and the details of the animation. Last weekend renders was a success, I only had to re-render 100 frames. Two more sequences to go.</span></p> <p><strong>Jim (Romfarer)</strong><span>:</span><span> </span><span>This week i have been applying the last tweaks and bugfixes to the new gui systems. I also spent some time making a new idle animation controller.</span></p> <p><strong>Miguel (Maxmaps): </strong><span>Videos for SXSW, a tutorial for the NASA mission, and a long, productive talk with a possible mod platform provider.</span><span></span></p> <p><strong>Jesus (Chuchito): </strong><span>Testing TCP and UDP *communication on OSX and Windows.</span><span></span></p> <p><span><strong>Bob (Calisker):</strong> </span><span>SXSW and GDC planning. If you’re in Austin and love <em>KSP</em>, hope to see you there this weekend! </span></p> <p><strong>Ted (Ted): </strong><span>QA all the things! We’ve been testing out the 0.24 features from Felipe and Chad, as well as the NASA Pack - which is looking incredible.</span></p> <p><span><strong>Anthony (Rowsdower):</strong> Picking my favorite contest entries. Writing docs, editing docs, swimming in docs.<br/></span></p> <p><strong>Eduardo (Lalo):</strong><span> Just watching around what my teammates do for becoming the best game ever </span></p> <p></p>

Oops, I forgot to talk about virtual forces and tie it back to TWR. Hehehe. Here we go! Remember back in the meadow when you threw your sunglasses into the air, and I said, "gravity isn't pulling the sunglasses down"? Well, it isn't - there is no force pulling the sunglasses down (other than air drag which we will ignore right now). But it sure LOOKS like the sunglasses are being pulled down, at least relative to where you are. Enter "virtual forces". These are things that make it look like stuff is being moved around you even though it is you moving around it. Virtual forces "act" in the opposite direction of the actual force that something ELSE is experiencing in relation to it. In other words, you are accelerating up towards the sunglasses, and you are the one experiencing force. The sunglasses are not experiencing forces, but it looks like gravity is "pulling it" towards you, so we call that "downwards force" a virtual force. Back in the car around a right-hand highway bend example, when the sunglasses appear to be flung to the left, that is the virtual force (centrifugal force) "acting" on the sunglasses to the left. But again, what's really happening is the car is accelerating to the right towards the sunglasses. Now to tie this to thrust to weight ratio. When your rocket has not yet ignited its engines and it's sitting on the launchpad, it is in fact being accelerated upwards at 9.8 m/s2 (remember because gravity = space flowing downwards but the ground pushes you up). If you want to get further away from the ground, you're going to have to accelerate at more than 9.8 m/s2. So let's say you go exactly 1.5 times that, or 14.7 m/s2. You are now actually experiencing 14.7 m/s2 of acceleration (or 1.5g). How fast are you accelerating relative to the ground? Well, the ground is accelerating upwards too, but at only 9.8 m/s2. Relative to the ground, you are accelerating at 14.7 - 9.8 = 4.9 m/s2. This is "gravity drag" but the name is so misleading. It much more analogous to two drag cars racing each other. They are both accelerating, but one car is accelerating faster and starts to pull ahead. The rate at which the faster car pulls ahead is the difference between their acceleration rates, and if you want to express that in terms of percentage better acceleration, you get "TWR"!

Hey, everyone! As others have said, TWR is most important from takeoff from surface. Once you're in orbit, don't divide by the surface gravity. What you're left with is your maximum acceleration capability if you perform the calculation of Thrust / Mass. For example, for a transfer stage with a mass of 10 using one LV-N engine, you're getting 60 thrust / 10 tons = 6 m/s2 of acceleration (every second your velocity goes up by 6 m/s when you're at full throttle). This can give you a good idea of how long it will take you to do a burn. For example, escaping Low Kerbin Orbit takes 950 delta-V, so it's going to take a little less than 950/6 = 158 seconds = about two and a half minutes to do the burn. Of course, as you burn fuel, your rocket gets lighter and your Thrust/Mass gets higher, making the burn shorter. To answer the tangent about gravity, centrifugal force, and orbiting, the confusing thing about gravity is that it's not a real force. Warning: wall of text incoming Einstein has shown that gravity is space-time curvature. This means gravity is not a force, but a virtual force. This is not a trivial thing to explain as it is counter-intuitive to most people, but let me try here real quick. Let's start with an intuitive example about force. If a playground bully were to push you from behind, it's clear which direction the force is coming from and which way you accelerate (forward). The force comes from behind you and pushes you forward, and you end up falling forward. Okay, next example: If you get in your car and accelerate hard, you feel force pushing on your back. To be clear, there is no force pushing you backwards into your seat, rather there is a forces pushing you forward from your back. The car seat pushes you forward just like the bully was pushing you forward. If you left a pair of sunglasses on the dashboard while you floored the gas pedal, you'd see your sunglasses fly towards the back of the car, but did anything push the sunglasses back? Nope. The car moved forward while the glasses stayed still. Once hitting the car seat, it too gets pushed forward and appears to come to a rest (relative to you) but it is now feeling the same forward acceleration you are. STOP! If you don't quite get the above, then you won't get the next paragraph! Now to tackle gravity. You get out of your car, find a nice grassy meadow to lie down in, and lie on your back. Hm, you feel the exact same force on your back that you felt when you were accelerating in your car. Gravity is not actually pushing you DOWN into the ground (if it were, you would feel pressure on your front, like if the playground bully pushed you downward into the ground). What's actually happening is space itself is flowing towards the center of the Earth. You don't actually feel space flowing (it's like floating in a river) but the ground is pushing you UP through that flowing space. Just like the car was pushing you forward, the ground is pushing you up, and that is the actual force you feel. If you throw your sunglasses into the air, it would appear that gravity is pulling it back down to the ground, but just as in the car example where it slid off the dash, it's not actually experiencing any forces! When it hits the ground, however, it starts accelerating upwards along with you and appears to come to a rest (relative to you) but it is now feeling the same upwards acceleration you are. Being on the ground on Earth is like being in a car that is perpetually accelerating UP! In fact... in a microgravity environment, for example when you're in orbit, being in a rocket that is accelerating at 9.8 m/s2 gives you the same behavior as standing on the ground on Earth. If the rocket were wide enough, you could play tennis-- the players on the court, the ball, the net, everything would behave the same as on Earth as long as the rocket continues accelerating. Oookay, next lesson. Centrifugal force. It is not a real force. Centripetal force, however, is a real force. Back to the car example: You are going 60mph and you make a right turn around a bend in the highway. The sunglasses on the dash "get flung to the left" side of the car, and your body gets pressed against the left door. In which direction is the force accelerating everything? Hint: It's actually NOT to the left. It's to the right! The car moved to the right while the stuff inside of it wanted to go straight ahead. The left side of the car catches up to the inside contents and exerts a force to the RIGHT to keep everything inside the vehicle. Centripetal force is that force of the driver side door (assuming not in the UK) pushing everything to the right. It is a true force and always points towards the center point of the rotation. Even though it looks like stuff is getting thrown to the left, there is no actual force pushing it to the left -- instead the car is going to the right and the stuff is initially going straight! Now let's talk about orbit. When you're in orbit, you do not feel any acceleration (a fancy way of saying you are "weightless"). What's truly happening is you are traveling through space-time curvature. You are traveling in a "straight line" as far as forces are concerned, but that line just happens to be warped around the planet because of the space curvature. There is no centripetal force, either, because you aren't technically turning. Hope that helps

Fund it. Maybe if we all pitch in and talk to NASA and/or SpaceX we can get one on the next Dragon flight up to the ISS.

-55? ... why I need to reduce the temperature -55 degres? Or maybe that is not the question, what is the ambient temperature that you want inside the city? Also, what is the chart temperature that you are looking at? First, we can not talk until we clear the first question, becouse it seems that you have very different parameters than mine. In your 60km case, yes, we would need insultation to not feel cold inside the city according to some charts. But lets imagine that we want to have a low altitude. So we have to deal with extra heat. First, there is not need to get insultation, the venus atmosphere has no much water, so the calorific power of co2 molecules is not so high, you just need to have an IR reflective layer (that is very thin), the common layer made to day for windows reflect the 90% of the IR, (graphene composites promise a lot more and it can be variable and tune it). Also the heat of the city can escape, becouse the emitted IR has a long wave which differs from the one that you reflect. You can find a contraty behavior with a normal windows and sun, sun IR can pass, but the IR emited by the materials inside the room can not go out. Besides, even that the surface envelope it would be big, the volume of air inside the envelope is much bigger. Adding the fact that air is a good insulator and you have 48hr of night to release the heat. But this is not all you can do. You can encourage a stratification of the air inside the habitat. Hot air rise, cold air down, of course this is not simple, the low part of the envelope (city) needs to be insulated from external temperatures, and all city process which produce the bigger levels of heat needs to be channeled at the top of the envelope with middle points exist depending the temperature. Like you dont have air flows or winds inside the envelope, it would remains pretty layered. So there is not need to withstand high temperatures from the first sun day, also moments before the night, the heat would rise your altitude helping you to cool it at night. Then the process starts again. If still is the temperature level is not liked by some, they can cool their rooms, there is not need to cool all the city air. Yeah, I hear that the CO can be more usefull than the CO2. About your previous calcs, yes, if you try to keep cool all the envelope your lifting power decrease and you would be wasting a lot of energy. So for that reason, all methods needs to be as passive like it can be. Yeah, that is Landon Carisiam city if I remember well. The first time that I see that in the movie, I thought that was an unrealistic idea If you dont wanna buy and read all the book that Rubisco suggest you, You can check this post where you can find the graph that you are looking for. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/69572-Venus-terraforming-fact-checking-Chemistry-edition?p=970361&viewfull=1#post970361 Yes, you always need to be so drastic, but you know that if that happens it would take a long time with micro doplets. ------------------------------------------------------------- So? anyone? how you do imagine the different habitats and floating outpost that a colony would need at venus? How you would manage it to launch a rocket from that height and recover it?

So the official thread hasn't appeared so I will bring this up. Maxmaps mentioned that he was talking with a person about "productive talk with a possible mod platform provider." What could this mean? Does anyone have experience with these types of things? My mind is going wild!

"productive talk with a possible mod platform provider" It's obviously about a replacement for the Spaceport.

well, all I can say is, make 4 more posts and you're free as a bird. Nobody except those who only do destructive negative talk is unwelcome, you are free to enjoy

There is no argument about which codebase we will use, all of the performance gains of the new parser with all of the features of v0.11.1 is a no brainer It just comes down to who will be charged as "maintainer" and which name the project will use. I would release these bits as kOS v0.12 today and deal with whatever bugs we find but i would like to talk to marianoapp first to be sure that is ok. there is a ton of good work in here and i want to be respectful.

The thing is, in my personal opinion, the Add-On and Releases subforum is fine as it is because it is the place to talk about mods that have been released. Now, I may be putting words in the OP's mouth, but the only real downside (to me) is that there is no way to tell apart mods whose forum threads have a post because they have been updated and mods that have on-going discussion. So, what about just making a "Releases and Updates" sticky thread that only mod authors post in when they release a mod or new version so that a person can find new mods? That would allow a person to every couple days (or week or whatever) to go to that thread and see what has been released. I know I've missed seeing new mods when they are released because they get bumped off the front page so fast so something like this would take care of my only real problem with the Releases sub-forum as it exists (IMO anyway). D.

You might look at KSPI or talk to the developer Fractal_UK about heat production and dissipation. His mod does a lot of that.

Neilbury radioed from the station early one morning and began to muse. "We know more about the Mun than we do about Kerbin. Why don't we launch a mapsat and map Kerbin!" he exclaimed. Shortly thereafter Wherney and Dunwig were sitting on the runway with engines running, ready to launch a mapsat into a polar orbit. Off they shot, screaming down the runway. Once they had reached takeoff speed Wherney pulled back on the stick and the nose leapt into the air and soon enough they were airborn, with Dunwig retracting the landing gear. Because they were heading for a polar orbit it was decided to perform the plane change low in the atmosphere to save oxidizer for the orbital insertion. Once they were on the appropriate heading Wherney pitched the nose up and proceded to a crusing altitude of about 10km. From here the flight profile was pretty standard, with Wherney leveling out at 10km to build up horizontal speed. Once the Atlantis had reached Mach 4 the jet engines were shut down and the rocket engine fired up for the push to orbit. Once in orbit it was time to deploy the satellite. The bay doors were opened and the satellite launched, opening its solar panels once it was clear of the bay. The satellite would adjust it's orbit and increase altitude to 300km, the upper limit of the mapping instruments. With their mission complete Wherney and dunwig prepared to go home. Then the radio crackled with an incoming communication. "Mission Control to Atlantis, Mapsats picked something up near the north pole. We want you to check it out." Dunwig gave Wehrney a worried look before thumbing the talk button. "Roger that Control, proceeding to coordinates." he said before inputting the target coordinates into the nav-computer. After the deorbit burn the ship pitched up to 40 degrees for reentry. There weren't any reentry flames (now I know why the Shuttle pitches to such an extreme angle) and the ship was began it's course correction to fly close to the target. The Jet engines were fired up to provide cross range capability and carry them to their target. Soon the duo neared the target coordinates. Wherney pitched the nose down to begin landing procedures while Dunwig lowered the landing gear. "Misson control this is Atlantis, no sign of it yet, but we're getting close. Beginning landing procedures." "What is that?!" Dunwig exclaimed as an unusual shape passed below the aircraft. Wherney nodded and put the plane into a steep bank to attempt to land as close to the target as possible. A loud bang reverberated through the air-frame as the drag chute deployed. Despite Wherneys' best efforts the plan continued to yaw right as it slowed after touchdown. "We've lost something, go and check it out Dunwig, and go ahead and mark that thing for future recovery." he said as he began to take a systems check. Dunwig clambered out of the cockpit and droped to the frozen earth below. "Seems like you've clipped the right wing on landing. The landing gear is shot too. There's no way you're getting airborne again." He radioed before making his way towards the strange object. The walk took about 5 minutes but soon Dunwig was standing next to what appeared to be a crashed flying saucer. "Hey Wherney, we didn't launch this. I've never seen tech like this before. I'm going to climb ontop and see what I can see." Dunwig then planted a flag on the object for later recovery before the rescue crews picked the two of them (And their damaged aircraft) up to return them to the Kerbal Space Center

I missed this thread last night. When you say "go big," how heavy are you talking about? If you're looking for space planes the size of what is in your pictures, they look reasonable from a design standpoint. It leads me to think your flight profile might need some help. Can you talk us through how you're flying it up to 38km? I'll try and recreate some of your ships later (or if you want to provide a .craft for us) and try to get a sense of what you're flying. They look like they have plenty of thrust (maybe too much) and enough wing area though.

I don't think that their DevNote was about that. Squad hasn't approached Majiir about it (at least not that Majiir has indicated), even though he has offered to talk with them about it on a few occasions. I think them working with someone like Curse or Nexus would be more likely. That said, I just read all 10 pages of that thread since I hadn't heard of it before, and I am feeling motivated... only problem is finding the time... it would be quite an undertaking.

You should talk to BahamutoD about this. He recently started a thread in the dev section about a custom plugin for animation modules, and while it doesn't seem to include exactly what you are looking for, he does have a module for engines that have a stowed and a deployed state (which your request brought to mind, as they seem similar) He also mentioned that he is taking requests for specific animation modules for him to try making, so...

Yeah its my attempt at balancing and so dosnt have much of a place in real life. The mass of the small AHS is based on the Advanced Stabilizer (0.5T with a 9MS crash tolerance). As the Small AHS has a 30MS tolerance it seams fair to be 1.5T ? Im not claiming that the computer system is heavy just the container. Following this though the Large AHS should probably only be around 1.4T as the larger default control system is only 0.2T but this seams a bit unfair as it has a 60/MS tolerance with 6 node attachments and crossfead ability. Yeah true i was just trying to link systems to provide a reason for adding sensors to your craft. I think in real life i would want at least 3 or more gravity and accelerometer sensors but yeah to make things easier to use i should include them in the AHS. Thanks it also has the advantage of not loading any extra models or textures so shouldn't waste any memory (Theres often talk of a memory limit when using lots and lots of plugins) To reduce heat you must place parts onto the Part producing heat and these connected parts absorb heat and convert it into light dissipating it. Iv been using it to build my space stations without using RCS thrusters/tanks and iv been building a small 70T kethane mine on minmus. The plugin has become stupidly complex and should probably be broken into 2 different systems. After linking vertical speed control into the RCS forward/backward keys i just had to add a full RCS style control and they are most defiantly 2 different systems/plugins and should be split. So what im thinking is ill try to integrate engines into the default RCS systems and remove the complicated direction setup for the engines. Then i will add a simple on/off tweak for setting if an engine should be used to Hover. My biggest concern now though is not breaking my test colony but then i could just hack my save file and fix any compatibility problems. So far the colony consist of 7 parts. One of them is my low grav constructor better seen on the 2nd image attached to the stations core. It has been painful to get this far but the more it hurts me the faster ill get around to fixing it.