boriz

"Dictators ride on tigers they dare not dismount" - Churchill.

I'm thinking of purchasing one of these. I'm not planning on creating any accounts or going online or connecting to wi-fi with it. I do not have a smart phone and will not be 'syncing' with it. I just want to upload some e-book files from my PC and read them on Kindle. And hopefully, not be constantly bothered with 'reminders' that I'm not logged in or registered. Will it do that? Or will I have to 'throw in' all of my private and personal details first, just to get it to run? (I was stung by this before, after purchasing a DJI product. Once bitten twice shy.) Will it accept PDF, TXT, and other formats or will I be tied in to buying stuff from Amazon? Thanks for any help.

Banned for saying it's a responsibility when it really is a compulsion.

The toilet absolutely needed fixing, everything they did needed doing. It was a tough job, and a thorough job. I observed them, and there were no "horizontal" sales. Every time they uncovered something, it too was rotten. Everything except the porcelain really did need replacing, including some pipework. £60 in hardware + one days work for three guys? You think I should have offered them less?

Had a handyman over to replace my broken toilet seat. (Still isolating. Can't go get one myself). Shouldn't take long or cost much right? He confirms my suspicion that the flush mechanism is faulty, and asks if I'd like him to look at it, and I agree. He leaves, returns with a new siphon mechanism. Can't remove the old one because everything is ancient and rusted solid. Eventually manages, but in so doing breaks other corroded parts. Leaves, returns with parts, and a colleague to help ... "Do you have a Dremel? I need to cut slots in these seized screws" ... leaves for parts, returns, with another colleague ... A couple of hours later, the entire toilet and cistern are completely removed and sitting in my bedroom, the bathroom floor is soaked, a leak has wet the wall and carpet downstairs ... Long story short, changing my toilet seat took three people all day and cost £200. LOL. To be fair, the toilet is very old, was on it's last legs, works great now, and it's a lot cheaper than a new one.

I have a webcam pointing out of my window. It doesn't record anything, it's just so I can see who's at my door before deciding to answer it. Yep. Tried to pause and rewind it. Several times.

I have been experimenting with a 'permaplane'. A plane that can remain aloft permanently, never needing to land or refuel. Entirely solar powered (no RTG). Enough battery capacity to make it through the night, and solar panels to recharge during daylight. Most of the flying is done with MechJeb Autopilot, though there is a crew of two, and I have done a lot of manual flying, perhaps not a complete manual circumnavigation, but I have sat and watched it when not flying hands-on, and diverted manually to places that looked interesting. I don't know how many hours I have watched this plane, but I'm certain that I'd be embarrassed to enumerate them here. By sheer accident, I discovered the cruising speed of 175m/s seems to be approximately sun-synchronous. So while flying West (in daylight), the sun remains pinned above, and the solar panels do all the work leaving the battery fully charged continuously. Indeed, were I to only fly west, I could save a lot of weight and carry no battery at all. Flying east leaves the battery about 1/4 full when the sun rises and begins recharging. 6000m was chosen as a compromise. It flys faster at lower altitude (200m/s@5000m), but you have a much higher chance of hitting a mountain. Note the mission elapsed time. I don't know how many circumnavigations that is, but I did leave it going while I slept. This was essentially my screensaver for a couple of days. Also, at reduced performance, it can carry 1200u liquid fuel anywhere for free, and with a very low stall speed, can land quite safely pretty much anywhere vaguley flat for refueling missions. Also Note, time acceleration does not work with these props, so by necessity, it was all realtime. (Thanks Squad) (Respect to the OG, Solar Impulse 2) P.S. Please please please, can modders add propeller/motor sounds? Hearing nothing but a slight rush of wind just annoyed me eventually, so I turned the sound off and listened to an audiobook instead.

Did you flashy-thing me? Banned.

And here I was, thinking it was just me!

Could you post a picture of your plane, in the SPH with CofG and CofL on?

The smaller boosters don't gimbal unfortunately. I had to reduce the fuel and thrust on these.

4 x Ramp intake (radial). Rocket assisted takeoff.

8:24 Same craft, different ascent profile. 56k Apoapsis. Max speed over 2100. Riding the edge of thermal destruction is the key I think. Note. I am using rocket assisted take off.

Check out KOS. You can access internal variables and write control programs for just about anything you can imagine. You can control KSP over serial from external devices (home brew physical control panels etc), and there should be ways to achieve what you want but it seems redundant to me.

9:08 I landed with enough fuel to return to the KSC and I forgot to tweak the break strength, so lost a couple of seconds stopping. I think sub 9 is possible.

Doctor WHO died with Capaldi. Chris Chibnal saw to that with his simpering ideology driven retconning. Now that Disney is calling the shots, things can only get worse. RIP Doctor WHO. We miss you.

PTSD. They are disgusted at the trauma of having touched KSP2. You can't hear it, but they are saying "eww!"

Sound for motors, propellers and actuators. I have been known to add a completely superfluous Juno, just so I don't have to fly in silence. In terms of immersion, a little sound goes a long way.

Bottyjelly. Everything Chris Chibnall has ever written for Doctor WHO.

"Ghghthtaaaaag!" (Forgot to seal helmet).

Thank you for your help. Followed those links. Very interesting, but no luck. I used VR as a shortcut for Virtual World. This story was almost certainly pre VR in the modern sense. I had maybe a hundred SciFi anthologies. I inhaled them as a teenager. All were destroyed by damp after I moved out of the family home and they were put into cardboard boxes and stored in a garage. I'm over 50 now, and I still miss my collection.

This has been playing on my mind. Please could anyone help me identify this story? I used to read a lot of compendiums. This was probably a short story. Read around 1980-ish. No idea when it was published. It begins with this guy seeing an ad in the newspaper about 'happiness guaranteed' or something like that. All you need to do it sign over everything you own, and they will put you into some sort of sarcophagus that keeps your body alive while you live in an idealised/customised VR world. He goes off-world I think, then years later returns to earth to find it deserted, like last man on earth stuff. Eventually he breaks into a building and finds that everyone has taken up this happiness offer and the whole planet is just people in these sarcophagi. Ring a bell?

"You're nobody!" - Thick44. Human man warrior.