Nuke

id say the "worth watching once" category is different from "classic" or "good" categories. it contains good movies, horrible movies, new movies, old movies, etc. star trek: tmp is also one of those worth watching once kind of movies. it was long and drawn out, it seemed to crawl. but its effects were pretty good for '79, and its not the worst trek movie (points at nemesis).

its one of those movies thats worth watching. once. its not one of those ones you can watch over and over again. some movies are just like that. doesn't mean its not a great movie though.

many polywell proponents usually focus on d-d or p-b11 as the optimal fuels for the reactor. the d-d reactor would need a heat engine. robert bussard pointed out in his that you would initially have a d-d reactor that could just be retrofitted to existing coal fire plants. i dont even consider he3 a valid fuel supply until we have much better space infrastructure (which likely depends on us having fusion). he3 isnt the magic fuel everyone makes it out to be, its just another option among many.direct conversion reactors are sexy for space applications. you need much less radiator area, which reduces your ship's mass. but i think you are better off with a power reactor running electric engines, because you now have energy for life support, hydroponics, active radiation shielding, centrifuges, and isru while landed. in other words a reusable space bus.

i was more pointing out that i dont consider humans civilized at all, and i doubt that other life forms in the universe would be any different. hence 'lots of barbarians'. frankly, humans still act like monkeys, monkeys that have gone to the moon, but still monkeys. we are not as civilized as we think we are. our social structures still closely resemble the natural pecking order of your typical monkey troupe. the only difference is a matter of scale, and possibly our tools being slightly more advanced. it also makes things interesting in a first contact scenario.

even in a direct conversion reactor you still have heat to deal with. coolant needs to go through heat exchangers. its not your primary energy source, but you might as well recover what energy you can. perhaps you can run it into a molten salt heat storage tank, so you can use it to restart the reactor should it decide to stop reacting, rather than drawing power for ignition from the grid. it was less making fun of thermodynamicists and more taking a jab at tokamak proponents.

i think polywells with direct conversion would run steady state only needing dc-dc converter between the output and the input (for the coils at least, electron and ion guns would need their own power supplies). dc-dc converters usually have efficiencies higher than 90%. im assuming confinement is the lions share of the power requirements here. crude heat machines are for tokamak people.

even if you loose magnetic confinement or whatever, you still have the vacuum chamber. loosing confinement still results in negative pressure with respect to the outside environment.

Issue 3: what does implementing the feature do for the game? unless you do it all the way, the answer is nothing. there might be diamonds there but you can neither get them nor are they any use to you when you do. if you do go all the way, you cross into the territory of completely changing the mechanic of the game, but it can be fun to have more rocks to screw around on when you get there (several months at fastest warp, unless you cheat, oh crap, i broke my descent engine).

we cant stop cold turkey because that will cripple the economy that funds things like research into better fission, fusion, renewable, more efficient technology and so on. it would be nice if those things got more money though.

im quite fond of the p-b11 reaction, which uses regular run of the mill hydrogen, and regular run of the mill boron, both earthly abundant and with no neutrons. of course i have a feeling all first gen reactors will be of the d-d or d-t types. this will make the hippies very angry and they will want to ban fusion. we will go through a period like what we are in now with fission where fear mongering results in no power plants being built. instead, continued death by carbon will promptly ensue. until we start to run out in which case we will use the last of our energy on wars. the survivors will be promptly hit by an asteroid 3 decades later, due to being unable to fund a deflection mission.

its a licensing thing. natural point's interface is closed source, to use it you need to sign an nda and the resulting code must be closed. that doesn't fly with squad's plugin release guidelines. however freespace 2 uses the natural point interface through a closed source dll to wrap it into the open source freespace engine. now the contents of the dll is strictly closed source, but the interface to it is in freespace's code, which is available (this is in 'trackirpublic.h' i think, its easy to get lost in that code base).

we dont get many gators up here. ive seen one some 20 years ago, in a pet store.

they are related because you want one, you need the other. why generate a solar system you can never get to? or why have interstellar propulsion and not have anywhere to go? id even argue that you would need additional features like stock isru and off planet construction to make it playable. its one of those features that opens a can of worms, and if you dont address that the game looks incomplete and squad would have wasted dev time on something that will likely never be used. game reviewers ridicule that kind of thing. to be fair there are mods for everything in that can of worms, but thats not the point. if you implement procedural galaxy as a stock feature you must logically include features that let you exploit all those other solar systems, otherwise they are pointless. if you use the "i want it so mods can use it" argument, well there is a mod to add other systems. tldr: a implies b

steak: grilled, rare halibut: beer battered and deep fried dolly: pan fried in olive oil salmon: grilled crab: boiled in sea water pork ribs: baked 6 hours, sauced, then grilled 6 minutes beef ribs: crock pot deer: in a pot of chili moose: in tacos grouse: roast over a camp fire chicken: infinite possibilities, all tasty pork chops: grilled, sauced spam: on a spamwich

just get your evil uncle to buy it for you.

i want analog action groups for this kinda thing. bind axis to one or more of those tweak bars.

i think there are zero civilizations in the universe. lots of barbarians though.

im of the opinion that modifier keys be reserved as modifier keys, rather than used for throttle control. throttle controls should be moved elsewhere.

destroy all humans. sorry thats the best i can come up with. im on hydro power and i dont drive. the only time we use fossil fuel is when the power company shakes down the town's backup generator 10 days every year, and when i grill my steak (which i eat rare).

i have to agree here, i cant remember a game of elite where i didnt start a new save by doing the diso->lestii run to get some early cash (at least till i got my fuel scoops, docking computer, and the beam laser). those systems would be generated perfectly identical no matter how many new games i played and this was a game that fit cleanly onto a 5.25" floppy. the frontier games also pulled this off in more detail. these are ancient games too, came out years before 3d accelerators where things. there is no technical reason why this cant be done while confirming to squad's notion that the game needs to be laid out the same for everyone. this still leaves the other problem about how to travel those distances without breaking the laws of physics. which is one that is kinda hard to solve. something involving an unrealistic/pseudorealistic warp drive or other exotic means of propulsion (q thrusters), simulating relativistic time dilation, extreme time warp, or reducing the scale of the universe to unrealistic levels (travel distances <2 ly) or some combination of the above. then if you manage to make that transfer, what do you do when you get there? while you can do the primary goal of adding more stuff, it opens up a pile of other things that you need to make it all work.

the only reason to send humans into space is to test things needed to make permanent human habitability of space a possibility. if what you are looking for has nothing to do with any of that, send a robot.

successful launch: unsuccessful launch:

core 2 duo/quad rigs seem to have reasonable performance in game though, provided you dont run integrated graphics. newish pentium and celeron cpus based on newer architectures (at least sandy) should be fine too. thats based on me running the game on those kinds of machines. but i think support should be limited to cpus currently being manufactured or their performance-wise legacy equivalents. today's low end might be equivalent to a moderate rig from 2 years ago or a performance machine from 4 years ago. im sure a current generation low end machine would run the game pretty well with a low end graphics card. this game is kind of the oddball in that its physics takes precedence over its graphics. almost every other game the video card is the bottleneck. its important to realize what ksp is asking your cpu to do, all those n^2 algorithms that physics require take their toll. this gets worse with more objects you have to simulate. most games impose limits that prevent you from giving the physics engine too much work, but in this game you can go nuts and give physics a rocket that is just too big for it to handle, so to speak.

there has to be a hard limit for how far back the developer is willing to support hardware. 5 years is an eon in computer terms. aaa titles and games utilizing cutting edge tech might support hardware that is 2-3 years old max. things get different in popular games, and indie titles, where it helps to aim for a broader audience. some games you absolutely had to have the current generation gear to get anywhere. but if you expect a 2014 game to run well on a 2004 rig, you may be asking too much. im going to play with the 5 year mark just to show that it is not totally unreasonable. 5 years ago i was running a core2quad with 8gb ram and a geforce gtx 260 (which btw still runs ksp quite well). the cost of such a rig today is almost negligible. now that cpu is no longer being manufactured, the only one i found on newegg was a referb c2d for $50. there is also an ivy bridge dual core celeron there for about the same and probibly better performance cause its a more recent generation. then the cheapest mobo for that chip is about $37. you can probibly buy/build a rig capable of meeting the system requirements of the game by a wide margin for around $200. that is not a very high bar for entry. some people have phones that cost more than that. just because you have a dumpster box, or a 4th hand nostalgia rig from the early '00s laying around does not mean that squad is obliged to support that hardware. im not saying you should throw those away, im just saying that if you run ksp on them, you are not going to have a good experience.

i was a system builder way back in 2002, building pentium 4 rigs. i still build my own rigs because i dont trust oems to not jack me. my formula always was start with the cpu and work your way out from there. i almost always get ram off of the mobo's qvl. then add whatever else you want. i usually choose the power supply last, after ive figured out the power requirements.