Archgeek

I too have been summoned by the password shenanigans, having last posted back in 2018, owing largely to work blocking the forum taking away my usual lunchtime activity, thus preventing me from ever catching up anymore. Nice excuse to poke around a bit before getting back to the ol' massive todo list. I've missed this place.

It took me a while to drill through that whole series, but holy schnikes that was cool. I like how the ships' capabilities got high enough that delta-v just turned into %c. It leads, though, to the amusing thought that absurdly capable craft could see delta-v values in multiples of c.

Same happened at my work. It's why I've been posting so much less, and am back at page 3, never catching up. I miss foruming while eating lunch.

What I'm led to wonder is what happens when you hit the chutes on that first dip -- do they pop in drogue mode and slow the craft enough to not rip off when you hit that denser atmosphere? Can we even get the min pressure low enough to get them pop out at that height? How silly must it look for the chute to be dancing around the plasma streamers?

I start seeing yellowclock around 120-150 parts on my adorable 10 year-old 3GHz Wolfdale Core2 Duo (E8400). Man, but 6 megs of L2 cache seems quaint today.

I'm more interested in what we can make black holes do for us, like storing energy by forcing spin or charge into them, or building Dyson spheres around small ones and harvesting the Hawking radiation for purposes, feeding a steady stream of matter in to keep the output from getting too high as the hole gets smaller.

Monkey blades, Bop has a feature height of over 21.7km?! And it's pretty near the equator? Treacherous.

Here is a place where opinions differ. Looking upon that machine, I see a thing of great beauty. Also, I wouldn't be so worried about that thrust angle. Cosine losses only really get icky around 25 degrees, this looks to be maybe 15, which gives a loss of barely over 3.4%

After the War o' Wrath, when Sauron's old boss and basically Lucifer guy Melkor Morgoth was defeated by the hosts of the almost-gods and elves of the West, Morgoth was bound, tried, and thrust through something called the Door of Night into the void beyond the "walls of the world", forever guarded by the great half-elf mariner Eärendil, who personally slew the captain of Morgoth's force of giant dragons, a massive jerk named Ancalagon (who crushed three volcanoes each 5 miles wide when he fell) with his sky-ship Vingilot. http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/War_of_Wrath This sounds to me like the elves o' the West were very very technologically advanced, Vinglilot was pretty much an armed starship, and the Valar hurled Morgoth into orbit for his crimes, with Eärendil as his jailer, tasked to never give him the chance to re-enter, as well as protect the sun and moon from him.

I'd call it a toss-up 'twixt the fireball from this escape tower test: and that of this staging test:

Huh, I thought it was Sauron's old boss that was trapped in orbit around the world, chased by a great elven mariner.

Hmmm, needs a more wizardly appellation -- "Sariban the Mad"? "Sariban the Automator"?

In a way, I'm playing both 1.3, (because I haven't bothered letting Steam update it yet) and .235

Thank you for that information. That "Insert other media" => from URL => imgur_url.png => ctrl+RMB => Edit => link URL = imgur/a/album path is probably the closest thing we have to a working album embed these days. Not quite as nice as what we had, and tricky in that you need to add the image file extension, but at least you can pick a link image to serve as the thumbnail of sorts for the album link, plus nicely control its display size and/or shove it in a spoiler.

Like this monstrosity?

Looks like .235, from the look of things, though my first version was .18, I think .235 is when I started saving old versions before updating, based on the earliest entry in my old Project Bring'em Home series. Edit edit: they did not fix imgur embeds, but it seems there is a way, sort of.

...You can't put one on the sun or somewhere in Jool's atmosphere, can you?

As I recall, there was indeed something approaching that a few years back. Some researchers had found that gold atom based "quantum dots" could be electrically induced to change state in a manner that seemingly leaked no energy. No energy loss means no heat dissipation. Needless to say they'd be expensive, but imagine replacing transistors with qdots in the highest-frequency places of chip, like the clock input and the main ALU pipe. That'd yield a nice chunky reduction in heat loss, which would in turn let us proportionally raise the frequency ceiling again. That in turn would raise single-core performance for KSP. I wonder what came of that research, or if it's even possible to make qdots anywhere near stable at CPU temps.

I like how the heat shield in the second screenshot is just casually sitting there like it belongs there, looking like a giant, naturally-grown mushroom.

Not the "craft wandering uphill because shenanigans" bug? Or was that one already fixed?

Holy heck, not only is that a better ratio than before, that's .05 more tonnes of xenon per tank! With no changes to the spreadsheet other than to the big xenon tank (were the other two likewise improved?), those two monsters achieve 116km/s and 68.3km/s respectively, or 103.4km/s in 19 stages for 92.7 tonnes and 63.4km/s in 12 stages for only 20.6 tonnes. Numbers that no doubt get a lot scarier if I optimize and move the S10 engines down a few stages.

HEH, yes, yes, that was cool, but I've had a brachistochrone Eve transfer in the offing for a while now. My pre-1.4 designs breach 100.2km/s in 22 stages and 170 tonnes using ~4500m/s stages, but only really need ~60km/s for the mission, which they can overshoot by 3.3km/s in 13 stages for for only 28 tonnes. I'm guessing the new tankage numbers aren't on the wiki yet. Where might I find them? I look forward to seeing by how much they beat the old .44 ratio.

ExtraCredits' "10 Games You Might Not Have Tried", by any chance?

Considering the level of control offered in the mission maker, I feel like this would work...poorly. 'Not too sure how well things like wildly out of control mission rewards/penalties, part failures, and the like would really go over. It smells great for communitity challenges though (save for the paywall of being DLC) -- set up ship constraints, control constraints, goals with point values, disqualifiying/point penalty causing action detection, zones for precision bonuses, character pop-up reminders/feedback, set the success banner as something that can be used as a forum badge or brag flag, and share the completed thing on the challenge forum. Lots of potential, there.

Holy crap! I can't wait to see how vastly this improves my 100km/s monstrosities.