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No budget constraints. No political bullcrap. No program getting cancelled halfway through. No ground testing. No paperwork. No research. No material failures. No bidding on contracts. No systems testing. No worries of integrating Part A by one contractor with Part B from another contractor, running with System C by an agency in another country, all controlled by software from yet another contractor. No worrying about getting parts on time. No worry on not having parts in stock. No worries about crew health. No worry about the crews' Garn levels. No worry that the oxygen tank might explode. No worrying that the radio won't let you talk between two buildings. No kerbals hanging lemons on the simulator. No simulator. No training. No hatch blowing early. No torque meter to check that each screw is installed just right. No crew selection. No crew getting bumped for having measles. No pissing contest with the another country. No micrometeorites. No congressional committees when the rocket fails. No two year wait when a kerbal dies. No weather constraints. No public relations. No 1201 alarm. No trying SCE to Aux. But that's just a few differences off the top of my head.

*** PROLOGUE Welcome, this is Jeb speaking. I have something to announce – we are going to Jool! Yes, you heard it – the most promising mission ever will finally take place. Take your seats and relax, your minds will be blown by this news. Behold the jewel in the crown of Kerbal Aeronautics and Space Agency fleet, the biggest and mightiest ship ever build - „Kadmosâ€Â! Impressive, most impressive, isn't it? And it's me, captain Jeb Kerman, who will fly this baby to the very edge of Kerbol system. Years have passed since my famous first-Kerbal-on-Mun landing and technological development is significant. It's not like the old days anymore, when KASA (Kerbal Aeronautics and Space Agency, duh?) funded all the missions. Today there is a huge market of competing private companies, which are able not only of constructing parts for KASA but whole probes or ships as well. Though I have to say that sometimes I miss my old flights. You know, only you, your command pod, several tones of combustible explosives and joystick. Those were the days! Anyway, thanks to this private companies we were able to dream about unreachable – the Jool system. Gas giant, three moons, two asteroids – think about the science! Costs would be astronomical of course, but so the awesomeness. Launching one probe or one lander would be pointless, much effective and cheaper would be sending one big ship to make grand tour in Jool sphere of influence. However any manned mission to such a distant object would be impossible without three key inventions, which made it imaginable: 1. The engine The further you want to go, the more fuel you need. More fuel = more mass = more powerful engines = heavier and less effective engines = more fuel needed = more mass... you get the point. Travelling to the Mun is a piece of cake – you have to reach orbit, than burn for intercept, than burn for circulate orbit and finally burn for returning trajectory. Been there, done that. But Jool is completely different. If you want to investigate whole system, you need to repeat those steps few times. This plus trajectory corrections, changing inclination and so on results in a very challenging design requirements. Powerful engines are heavy and not efficient, efficient are heavy and not powerful. It was the Luecome Nuclear Space Industries which delivered this so needed technology. Just take a look how gigantic improvement their engine was: 2. The hull All motherships designs before K1 Truss Alpha were too delicate to support mass of the ship alone, not to mention surviving through aerobraking tensions. It was Fusty's project that finally was capable of meeting all the requirements. But because of a modular structure it was not enough. There was needed some strut-like solution, but without struts – you know, how can you separate modules if you connected them with steel in a first place? The solution – cutting-edge Quantum Strut technology. Now we're talking – no wobbling, no falling apart (I hope so), no structural failure. 3. The inflatable modules Ah yes, living space. Two days in a tuna can, I mean Munar Module, is ok but when the journey takes two years that's something completely different. Life support system is heavy and with crew quarters it means a lot of additional weight. Solution is simple and brilliant – inflatable modules! Light, safe (relatively) and even with some artificial gravity thanks to BobCat engineers. We will be sleeping in centifuge with nice 1G, but the rest of the ship is a non-G environment, included the 60m2 inflatable habitat modules. So, to summarize this for you guys, some facts about our ship: „Kadmos†- Interplanetary Mothership Vehicle Ares I–class crew - 5 height - 112m diameter - 5m mass – 399,29t (modular structure) TWR on Kerbin – 2.06 ÃŽâ€v (atmosphere) - 5227m/s, T 6m56s ÃŽâ€v (vacuum) - 10637m/s, T 15m10s engines – Z-Pinch nuclear fusion, two MPSS NERVA, two H.O.M.E. Radial aerospikes; during Kerbal ascent four Jool V boosters payload to Low Jool Orbit - est. 70T two Dragon Landers - with monopropelant-based engines two Thor Explorer Probes Kethane Miner – 36t vehicle launch separately, critical to the mission success MechJeb pilot assistant system ORDA docking assistant Romfarer's Lazor integration Protractor interplanetary navigation system Kadmos was an ancient hero who defeated dragon by sowing the dragon's teeth in the ground, from which sprang a race of fierce warriors. And so we will sow probes around Jool. I don't really get the analogy, but the eggheads in KASA find it cool for some reason. So who are those lucky Kerbals who will have chance to truly became a living legend? Except of me, of course, 'cause I already am. Not lucky, a living legend. Well, maybe a little lucky too. Anyway, here is the crew: Jeb – Mission Commander That's me. Pilot and navigator, top tier training, first Kerbal on Mun. I will be responsible for, what a shock, navigation, manoeuvres of „Kadmos†and probes and landers. I'm the boss, I mean if we somehow lost contact with Mission Control, my decisions will be final. No democracy in space, folks. Buzz – Flight Computer Engineer Buzz will take care of all those subsystems, namely Lazor, ORDA, in general all computer stuff. In case of unlikely event of malfunction, he will repair them. In case of extremely unlikely event of, uhm, well, let's just say he is second in command, ok? Nedfurt – Flight Engine Engineer Experimental fusion engine, two ol'fashioned NERVA's and H.O.M.E. Boosters. This plus fuel equals 220t of highly sophisticated machinery with possibility of big kaboom. Nedfurt will do his best to make sure this won't happen. Maclorf – Flight Medic Responsible for our physical and mental health, – I hope he would be bored. In charge of life system support and our supplies. Also responsible for contact with media and proper social interaction. Will be studying psychological and biological effects of prolonged space journey. Sidely – Mission Scientist He knows stuff. That's pretty much it. No, I'm kidding. Sid is responsible for experiment equipment, sample processing, logging and storage. He has a vast knowledge about Jool system in particular, he is also a specialist in geology, geochemistry, planetology and organic chemistry. That's it for now. See you next time on Low Kerbin Orbit! - And how was it? - Jeb, you were supposed to follow the script, we don't have time to record this again - Oh, gimme a break, I was trying. Ordinary Kerbals would prefer to listen about something else than all this science mumbo-jumbo. - KASA public relations policy.. - Come on, everyone will be watching this on TV anyway. Mission to Jool, man! I'm going to Jool! - Yes Jeb, you are. Turn off the cameras, will you? I have to talk with [...]

It sounds like you have no idea what you are talking about. Hop on over to their Facebook page. They are claiming to have shipped '20% of the units' by the week before last... but backers well within that percentage ARE POSTING THEY ARE LYING. Don't talk about it till you know what's going on. I posted to see if anyone here was actually involved. If you are not, then please refrain from posting about things you are completely uninformed on.

Update's been a long time coming.... Not really sure what's going on with the secret project at the moment, depending on what I can get done with the engine tutorial I have in the works and what 3_bit & Mekan1k can do we may or may not release what we have and expand as we continue to make mods (currently the engines are going nowhere, so we'll probably do that). In other news, I've gotten back into programming with Unity3D and I am considering switching to plugin writing once the Frameshift 2 and MonoProbe 2 are completed. I'm almost finished UV mapping the Frameshift 2's main structure, then I can move onto the "doors" and start texturing once those are done being modeled and animated. Plugin Plans: There is the idea for a magnetosphere and radiation plugin, suggested by nhnifong. It's pretty easy so I may start with that. There's also the Kerbal Colony Builder idea layed out by SwiftGates24. Unfortunately we lost the thread and links to the googledocs idea page, but it's similar to RTS for KSP– tech levels and building rockets off of Kerbin... There was a plugin on the forums that allowed for building rockets on other planets, but it was also lost with the Forum Apocalypse; if anyone can get me the link to that plugin I'll talk to the creator to see if he wants to help. *This will wait until the resources are implemented by Squad, to make everyone's job easier* Keep in mind that everything is subject to change and, as always, there are no ETAs besides "whenever it's finished." There will be an update livestream within the next three (3) days, expanding upon this info.

Just saw that thread now myself. Was really sad to see how fast it got derailed into insults. I really dont see how community managers can be blamed for anything of this when they clearly for some unexplainable reason cannot talk about it.

Call it greedy but personally, I just want updates/news so I can spend ALL of my free time on this game that I've been waiting my whole life for (I'm in my early 30s). Delay and/or not talk about it like you usually do upsets me, only because I care about it. If I didn't care, I wouldn't be here. Let's have a fresh start. Come back to us.

Pedonymous, You have every right to voice your frustrations about certain policy aspects, but when you do you should make sure that your criticism is constructive and that you get your facts right. Besides all that I would like you to show more respect for the people that run all major aspects of this community: the CMs are a combination of human resources, spokesperson, tech support and so on. It is often easy to criticise someone but be aware of all the tasks they have besides airing a stream or releasing updates on development; and in the end, even the Community Managers have a boss they have to answer to. For me personally Damion is the guy I wrote a small scientific essay for when I got here, he's also the guy that recruited me as a moderator and - more in general - he's busy working for the community day after day. He appeared on many streams, radio shows and other projects to promote KSP. He deals with the needs of the moderation staff and he's fixed these forums quite a few times. Every dev stream since I've been here I've heard him talk with the developers, relaying questions from the community to them to get an answer. I think he deserves more respect than you're giving him now, and the same goes for Captain Skunky. Calling them clowns is borderline insulting. Like I said, it's easy to criticise people. Contrary to what you're saying I believe that Squad as a company and the community managers included have been very open to the public about problems that have risen and the direction they want to take the game in. Sweeping things under the rug is something that happens everywhere and isn't necessarily a bad thing either: if everyone knew everything then serious consequences can come out of little things. In my personal opinion Squad is as open about things as they can be, maybe even too much so. I haven't encountered any form of censorship on these forums, so where your claim of silencing people comes from I don't know. Unless discussion go out of control, ending in insults or harassment the worst that will usually happen is that it gets closed. The information in that thread is then still publicly available. A community manager must indeed take care of the community but also has to adhere to company policy and the general interest. As such you cannot demand that they satisfy your every need, there is also not a single obligation for Squad anywhere to do so. Even though the KSP TV has been silent, and there was no KSP Weekly I don't think you can complain about the amount of information that has been released this week regarding development. It is well known which direction 0.20 is heading in and many development pieces can be found on the forums, on reddit and everywhere else on the internet. To get back to my first statement: it's easy to criticise, please remember that. You don't know what the job description for a KSP community manager is and your statement is based on many false assumptions and misplaced anger.

Sorry I don't buy this, its ok that Squad doesn't talk to the comunity because the company and project grows. It is bad manners to suddenly stop communicating without further notice. Even if Squad burned down somebody could manage to get a laptop and give notice to us. And we would support them after that.

Not guaranteed. Who knows, maybe their just messing with us. Please, talk to us!

I hope that Squad doesn't decide to stop talking to the community because some whiny idiots in r/gaming decided to complain about not being Squad's bosses because they bought one game. Dear Squad, We don't hate you. Please talk to us?

It says under the forum name what goes where. Like: General Discussion(110 Viewing) Anything and everything about Kerbal Space Program. or General Add-on Affairs(6 Viewing) A General Discussion Place for Talk of All User-Made Things

Actually, most SF universes have explanations that more or less sense in their lore, it's just that it rarely shows up in the visuals. Let me take Star Trek for example: One of the primary ship weapons in ST is the 'photon torpedo'. The lore says that it is powered by a small warp drive and moves at FTL speeds. However, watching any episode where they fire them they appear to be moving at a few hundred Km/h at most (basically at a same relative speed as an AA missile fired from a fighter plane). Also, in a few episodes during a battle scene, the crew members talk about ranges of several thousand kilometers or more but the visuals show the ships dogfighting at a range that seems less than a few kilometers. So, you can rationalize it by imagining that the battle does take place over ranges of thousands of kilometers and you are being shown a 'simulation' with ship sizes greatly exaggerated and visual and audio effects added so it would be more visually exciting and more easily understood... or something...

I'm in High School- I should talk to my Planetary Exploration teacher about this, I have no idea why it never occurred to me to do so

Well, there are a couple of problems. For space exploration, you want a high Isp engine. For space combat, you want a high thrust engine. An ion drive can reach up to around 210,000 seconds Isp, but you'll be lucky to get a miserable 10,000 newtons out of each engine (while a single Saturn V F1 engine can easily do more than seven million newtons). Maybe an ion drive can give you a much higher delta V, but it doesn't help you in combat if it takes a few months to accelerate up to speed. But the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about is the fact that anything a space fighter can do, a missile or drone can do better. For many reasons. Like the fact the drone can use accelerations that will turn a human pilot into a thin layer of red goo covering the back wall of the crew cabin. And the fact that the fighter has to carry fuel to delta V to transit to rapidly the target, delta V to match velocity with the target, delta V to transit back to the mothership, and delta V to match velocity with the mothership. A missile just has to carry fuel to delta V to transit rapidly to the target, period, because the missile does not have to come back home. If manned fighter only carried that little fuel, you'd soon run out of pilots. There are more reasons here: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunexotic.php#id--Space_Fighters *Having said that* I know that space fighters are too irresistibly romantic for science fiction writers and fans to avoid. So please carry on with what you were doing.

I need to talk to you as well. Shame I'm barely on while you're awake. Um, I'll PM you now, and wake up around 3-4AM CST which is 8-9AM UTC. So yea, sending PM now..

Isn't that small black ring beneath the decoupler and the ASAS a SAS unit? As for the rest, I think she'll work it out. She likes to experiment. And we still talk about how she wants to do stuff. She told me this morning that after she learns to dock, she plans to put a docking port on each stage and de-orbit debris so that her near-Kerbin space won't end up as cluttered as mine. Actually, shortly after her orbital success, she put some landing gear on it, took it out to the pad to try it out... and was disappointed to find out that the demo's landing gear don't reach past the end of the engine bell. So she's looking forward to "better" landing gear, too. The "improvement" that immediately occurred to me was to ensure that the radial decouplers fire after the four tanks/engines around the core and before the engine on the bottom of the core. But hey, she made it work. I'm sure she'll try to make the design even better.

Alright, so I think I'm not alone when I say that I spend a lot of time thinking about what missions I want to do, and building/testing for them, and actually less time /doing/ them. I think there should be a thread where we do just that. So here. Let's talk about all the things we want to do/have done in attempts to formalize our missions. I'm not saying anyone is actually going to stick to what they post here, but I think it'll be interesting to see how people want to progress through the game. Maybe you have more scattered missions in these alpha versions, and want a more structured mission plan when 1.0 hits, I don't know, but I think it would be fun to design a basic outline for what you hope to accomplish, in an ideal world. So, I'll go to give you all ideas as to what I'm talking about, in chronological order. -Design a craft that can perform a sub-orbital flight. -Design a craft that can place a satellite in some type of orbit. -Design a craft that can place a Kerbal into sub-orbital trajectory and return the Kerbal safely. -Design a craft that can place a Kerbal into an orbit and land the Kerbal safely back on Kerbin. -Design a reliable launch vehicle that can be quickly built and launched for repeatable results of similar missions. -Design a reliable launch vehicle that can be quickly built and launched for repeatable manned missions. -Perform an orbital docking. -Perform an orbital rendezvous. -Send an unmanned probe into orbit of one of the local moons. -Send an unmanned lander onto the surface of one of the local moons. -Send an unmanned rover onto the surface of one of the local moons. -Send a manned orbital-only mission to one of the local moons. -Send a manned surface landing to one of the local moons, returning all Kerbals home safely. -Construct a set of launch vehicles capable of lofting payloads of varying mass to LKO. Use these basic "skeleton" launch vehicles for all relevant missions on out, making improvements as they are realized. -Send an unmanned probe on an escape trajectory of Kerbol. -Send an unmanned probe to every subsystem in the Kerbol system. -Design and construct an orbital station in LKO. -Maintain station in LKO. -Send an Ordan Industries Telescope into high orbit and gaze upon the stars and planets. -Design a very compact single-launch station outpost with long term self-orbit-keeping ability and place it in Kerbinsychronous orbit. -Send an unmanned lander to Duna. -Send a series of unmanned rovers to Duna. -Send a series of unmanned probes to the Eve system. -Send an unmanned lander to Eve. -Design a single-stage-to-orbit craft designed for re-use during crewed missions. -Design a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane to cut costs. -Send an atmospheric probe to Jool. -Send a manned mission to land on Duna and return safely. -Begin preliminary intense surface study of Mun and Minmus. -Construct an orbital Mun station to act as a go-between for frequent Mun surface missions. -Construct a large fuel depot in LKO. -Send parallel unmanned missions to Duna to construct an orbital station relatively quickly. -Send an unmanned rover to Laythe. -Begin long-term habitation of the Duna station. -Construct a surface scientific base on the Mun. -Construct a surface scientific base on Minmus. -Begin mining/habitation operations of Mun. -Begin mining/habitation operations of Minmus. -Send parallel manned and unmanned missions to Duna to construct a scientific surface base, while also changing out the original station crew with new members. -Send parallel unmanned missions to the whole Jool system to scan for resources. -Construct a high-capacity LKO habitation station. -Construct a high-capacity fuel depot in very high Kerbin orbit to act as a refueling station for passing missions. -Send several more unmanned rovers, landers, and probes to Laythe. -Send parallel manned and unmanned missions to Laythe to construct an orbital station with a docked single-stage-to-orbit vessel. -Use the single-stage-to-orbit vehicle to perform a manned descent to the surface of Laythe. -Take off your space helmets and breathe alien air for the first time in Kerbal history. -Send an upscaled surface base to Laythe. -Send parallel missions to Duna to create a mining and habitation base. -Begin preparations for a Grand Tour of the Kerbol system. -Send an unmanned probe as close to Kerbol as possible. -Send parallel unmanned rover missions to Eve. -Scout Eve for the highest point possible in preparation for a manned landing. -Send a manned return mission to and from Eve. -At the highest point on Eve, construct a self-sustaining very large surface colony. -Perform regular missions to visit the Eve colony. -Design a non-atmospheric lander with mining capabilities that is able to land and take off from Tylo or Moho, in preparation for the Grand Tour. -Design a very efficient SSTO to couple on to the Grand Tour vessel in order to use on Laythe and possibly other very low gravity moons. From there.....? Who knows.. Maybe interstellar if that gets implemented... As you can see I have plans. I've already done half of that in a mismatched order, but I'd really like to follow a structure. So does anyone else have a wall of text they'd like to share?

I think You guys overreacting, there are still regular dev-blogs and what is the point of making streams before is anything new to show ? There was long dev-talk only few weeks ago and everything has been told, so let this guys do their job peacefully and be patient .

I've gotten the impression from the dev chats that there won't be a campaign. Career mode isn't a campaign, and almost every time I've heard them talk about career mode or achievements, they've emphasized that they're not talking about anything like a campaign.

Seriously, people, this is effectively a thread posted for people to talk about how they jerk-off (give or take). But please, keep your fetishes to their own Forum.

SQUAD totally should talk to NASA about getting official "Approved by NASA" sticker. How cool would that be? And NASA could show KSP demo to visitors at their science fairs. A real rocket scientist helping you build your first rocket, and put it in orbit? Woohoooo!

so out of curiosity what is this site you talk of? it it http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/index.php ? happy launching

40k is my 2nd favorite sci fi series I just love the darkness. who ever designed the Maus deserves hero of socialist labor for helping the Soviets ending the war early.but if we want to talk about unstoppable tanks well the Maus cant penetrate this tank anywhere from the front.

True. I'm rather good a KSP but orbiter, well let's not talk about the dead guys. The user below me understands basic rocket scince.

Neither of these are valid. You can't say, "You are traveling at high fraction of c". You can only say, "You are traveling at high fraction of c relative to ..." And the rest of the universe travels at very different speeds. Now, what you can say is that you are traveling at high fraction of c relative to nearby stars. The stars within a few hundred light years, id est, all the visible ones, are not going to be moving very fast relative to each other, in general. So you can take their average velocity and measure speed relative to that. (Or the interstellar medium, which should be moving about as fast.) In that case you can say that if you are traveling at high fraction of c relative to these, they move at high fraction of c relative to you. And since these are going to be the only objects you see beside your ship, we can now talk about what sort of an effect this has on what you are going to see. So that's the answer to the OP's question. It's not the fact that you're moving at high fraction of c that changes how things look. It's the fact these particular objects you look at are rushing by you at high fraction of c that makes them look that way. And that's an absolute regardless of your chosen frame of reference. So there is no contradiction with speed of light being a constant.