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Rocket Witch

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Everything posted by Rocket Witch

  1. I mean people with English as their first language, born in an English-speaking country. Data, no. It has only been my experience that the majority origin expressed by users is Americans who watched the Moon landings, mostly in their childhood. Simulation games tend to have very large German playerbases, and I have seen significant Polish and Czech representation in the playerbases of other games, but these aren't apparent when it comes to KSP. Is my claim spurious? Just as a little experiment, I looked at the first five pags of the Steam forums for KSP: all good English apart from two Russian threads. Then looked at the Steam forum for Euro Truck Simulator 2: 6 cyrillic, 5 German, 1 Turkish, 1 Chinese, 2 hispanic, 1 romanised Arabic, 1 French. Some of the English threads have noticeably worse English than the KSP forum, probably either machine-translated or written by non-native speakers. I think it is reasonable to say that if you make a game about driving, people from many walks of life can easily relate to it and participate with a low barrier to entry. But a game about going into space? Who cares about that? Well, Americans and Russians competed in the Space Race right? And that's reflected in the forum activity.
  2. 1½ inch cubes with the consistency of royal icing and a slightly chocolately taste. Colour can be anything; packets contain a bunch of cubes with random colours and Kerbals trade for their favourites. Most Kerbals like green and dislike purple, so the former always run out on the first day of a mission and the latter are found three days after capsule recovery half-melted under someone's seat. I feel like Kerbals have this weird duality of being really fun (design and mannerisms) but also really cynical (company activities in part descriptions), so their food might be sweet and cute but also very commercially optimised.
  3. This one's a job to explain... Humans already have a very good idea of the physical nature of their fellows, so among ourselves it is more pertinent for us to communicate our subtle differences in culture, rather than our evident similarities in physiology. The 'planet-lings' naming of species' is a sci-fi trope presumably rooted in how humans identify each other by the lands they are from, as in the Eng-lish being the people of Eng-land. This kind of thing is unlikely to persist far after societally integrating with aliens though, to a degree depending on our differences, as the physiological distinctions then arise to the forefront. To them we will be 'human' and to us they will not be named after their homeworld's present-day name. However, just to complicate matters, humans are in fact from human! Historically, 'beings of planet Earth' has not at all been a description of the human experience. However, we are beings of the earth (not capitalised), with the etymology of the word 'human' tracing back to 'humus' or soil, dirt, mud... earth. One thing to remember also is that terms like 'Earthling' or 'earths' or 'eathinians' are clumsy, as they can refer to any or every species originating from Earth. This isn't completely wrong though, since wherever we venture, we will bring with us all the other lifeforms we depend on.
  4. I think it's pretty obviously a joke based on being spelt differently but actually still pronounced the same as 'Moon', so the native-English-speaking majority of players are bamboozled into taking a double-take at it. But of course ü and oo are technically not the exact same sound, and the international audience approaches it from a hundred different directions, so the joke is lost and speculations abound. I expect the lack of an official explanation, apart from the likelihood that anyone 'qualified' to offer one probably left Squad 5+ years ago, is partly due to the curious human compulsion to avoid explaining jokes.
  5. Ah. Thanks! But no, don't worry — KS3P locks up my PC.
  6. @purpleivan Mind if I ask what ReShade config you use? That looks like a cool place! What mod is it from?
  7. See: Indeed, 2D scatter objects (trees; grass) can't have collision, but most scatter objects are are 3D models — namely rocks.
  8. 1466.47t while experimenting with SpaceY's 7.5m parts. Note external reinforcement of the stage; square cube law hits hard at the kiloton scale. And then SpaceY got 10m parts. I still haven't touched those!
  9. Lowering ground scatter density may help due to the collision checks on many objects per frame, if you have a mod that enables their collision. Lowering or disabling aerodynamic FX seems to improve framerates a lot. I think the shape of the shockwave might be physically calculated.
  10. SLS was as dead as Ares from the start. The post-Apollo government aerospace jobs retention treadmill is coming to a natural stop as spaceflight becomes increasingly commercial and routine. Governments don't generally design their own cars; they purchase commercial models and modify them — in time they will do the same with spacecraft.
  11. The texture itself is undistorted. ...\GameData\Squad\Parts\Aero\fairings\FairingBase.dds I think it's intentional for the 'Kerbal hazard stripes' look that defined the old stock aesthetic. It's also easier to draw a seamless texture to wrap around a 3D model if you draw straight lines. It can be distorted later during mapping. It also saves resources, allowing a single texture to be used on various models with different diameter-height ratios (which alot of older parts have) while retaining the same degree of slant for the lines... but, as you can see in Geonovast's image, someone didn't do a good job of that (again, probably intentionally because Kerbals or something).
  12. Aircraft are more similar to watercraft than ground effect vehicles are, I think it can be argued. GEVs are more like hovercraft, sort of like a "ground-plane" equivalent to the hovercraft being a "ground-helicopter" insofar as the entire vehicle has to travel to generate lift.
  13. Oh, no, that's the one, I see now. It's a lot flatter up close than it looks from orbit.
  14. Are there any large surface features normally hidden or is Kerbin's undersea terrain mostly flat-ish? What does the crater rim area look like?
  15. There's an entire forum section for this already: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/forum/16-gameplay-questions-and-tutorials/
  16. Mainsail looks entirely out of character without the orange, or is that a variant?
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