softweir

Congratulations! Richard.

I wouldn\'t be too bothered about the proportions, you get that sort of variability of proportions in the Human population!

Yes, this was a deliberate design decision. A lot of people complained it was the 'wrong' way round, ie, not the one they felt they expected, and that they kept putting fuel lines in back-to-front because they attached to the source first and the destination second. So HarvesteR had a poll in the Development forum where he asked how people would prefer it, and the very large majority of respondents opted for a change. So they got it ... ... to the considerable confusion of people who missed that thread! Unfortunately, at this stage documentation tends to be sparse, and if you don\'t read every single thread on Development then it is too easy to miss details like that.

The problem is that the server is overloaded, and becomes unreliable, and cuts off downloads at random times. The only solution I have found is to try again at a different time of day - if you normally download in the evening, try downloading in the morning, or very much later in the evening.

That\'s right. PayPal still earn a fee for taking the money out of your credit card account and putting it into Squad\'s account, but you don\'t need to have a PayPal account.

Great to hear things are growing!

Can you upload a screengrab?

What you can do is attach parallel tank-tank-tank-motor stacks to your main stack, with fuel feeds draining the parallel stacks. The additional stacks drain FAST, because they are fuelling their own engines and the main engine. So, for the first few kilometres of altitude your main stack doesn\'t get touched. Then when the radial stacks are drained you dump them and carry on up with your 100% full main stack. It works extremely well! It works better if you edit the radial decouplers .cfg\'s tgo switch them from fuelcrossfeed=true to fuelcrossfeed=false. At present they can end up draining the top tank of the main stack into the radial stacks, which rather defeats the purpose. Richard.

Brilliant!

Neat!

Nice !

Love it!

Kerbals fly energy-saving lightbulbs?

Ditto that - when will the store reflect my existing prepayment?

Very interesting idea, and I like it. You say it could carry 20,000kg of payload, but that\'s for an unmodified tank - and I suspect those have got walls too thin to be considered 'safe' for human habitation. My recollection of images of some ISS components is that they were surprisingly thick-walled units. So it may be you would have to make the walls of the tank a lot thicker, and use SRBs to push the Isp up far enough to carry the additional payload. Even so, that\'s one heck of a cheap space-station component launch.

Instead of using VABs to build ships and training centres to prepare Kerbanauts, there could be an alternative for the impatient - fake it, using actors, studios and props. The VAB would be replaced by a model-maker\'s workshop. Cardboard, glue, aluminium paint and transparent puppeteer\'s string would be the order of the day. Forget functionality, it has to look the part! This is the area of construction where the biggest savings are made - but don\'t forget to fit and wire-up the pyrotechnics! Flight would be very different. Instead of physics, you pull on the strings. In one small area of the screen you see the 'launchpad' and 'ship', in the rest you have various pulleys to lift the model and switches to fire the pyrotechnics. The more convincingly you pull on the strings, the better the illusion. And how good are your drawing and airbrushing skills? Producing a convincing, animated Orbital Map with paper, pen, a couple of telephotoes of Kerbin and Mün and an airbrush takes real skill. Actors can be a pain, but at least they don\'t need thousands of hours in a simulator to do their job, unlike real Kerbanauts. They do need a lot of dialogue coaching so the geeks out there don\'t pick up on their inability to get technical details right and consistent. Casting is easy: despite his ambition and good looks Jeb has never managed to turn up for a casting session in his life. Bill and Bob are aged child stars who specialised in being 'that screaming little kid in cheap alien invasion movies' who haven\'t done a day\'s work since their voices broke. They are desperate, and will do anything to get in front of a camera again... they\'ll even scream. The main problem is keeping Jeb\'s ego and libido under control. he will need to earn a lot of cash to give up the idea of another starring role ever, and a lot of 'bodyguards' to make sure he doesn\'t sneak off-base during 'mission time' to impress the chicks with his new-found stardom. Filming 'capsule interiors', especially during launches, will be surprisingly easy. Jeb is a hard-core petrol-head who owns a very fast offroader. Black out the windows and get him to drive hard-and-fast down a dirt track and you will have all the effects in one - vibration, exhilaration, screams... It\'s all there. And the zero-G stuff is even easier, just wait until Jeb has flipped the offroader, leave the 'crew' strapped-in and get them to film their lines up-side-down. The Mün itself is the hardest part. Nowhere on Kerbin looks right (it\'s all so very green) and what with the lack of roads there is a serious deficiency in gravel-quarries to use as stand-ins. (In some ways Kerbin is depresingly backward.) You could use a model set and puppets, but unless you are a VERY good puppeteer then it will look so very wrong. There\'s nothing for it - you\'re going to have to accidentally drop a nuke on some desert island and build a set there. You probably can\'t get the real actors to hop around on irradiated wasteland, but you can use stuntmen and get the actors to do voiceovers convincingly enough, once they\'ve recovered from the 'launch' and 'zero-G' sequences. All-in-all, even with all the minders needed to keep mouths shut, you will be able to divert magnificent amounts of cash from research, development, training and construction; and put them into 'entertainment': in other words, your private little retreat in the tropics. But don\'t invite Jeb. He\'ll steal all the girls and park an offroader in your swimming pool.

Happens to anybody if they don\'t visit or post often enough - that way, you tend to post on already moribund threads, once everybody has had their say. It also happens to people who are so wise and perceptive that every single person who reads it thinks 'oh wow, that is so true, that guy has said everything', and go away to think about what they just said so they can understand it properly, and appreciate it fully before daring to come back and try to add to the thread. And so, with this wise and perceptive post, I will bring this thread to a graceful and magnificent close.

You just have.

Ooh, looks fun! Jeb would love that game.

I\'m playing Skyrim, though nothing can keep me away from KSP! I\'d say it\'s a fair enough evolution of the Elder Scrolls series. Yes, it loses a lot of the fine detail in character generation, but arguably that makes it more approachable - which allows for a larger market. And these days any kind of First Person game needs a large market, because the amount of money that gets sunk into producing them is so enormous - the graphics design has to be so much more detailed, every single character needs voice acting, there have to be so many more ambient sound samples, etc etc. You can\'t depend on the rather small population of PC users who are prepared to spend 10 minutes creating a character before they even start the game any more.

Amazing!

When I caught sight of the title my immediate reaction was a not-quite-totally humorous 'BAH! HUMBUG!' But on reading the post I thought 'yes, nice idea!'

Fun. Silly, but fun!

You missed the ping-pong-ball reflector for imprecise measurement of the distance from Kerbin to Mün!*Richard. * Equivalent to NASA\'s laser reflectors for precise measurement of the distance from Earth to Moon.

Oh! Neat idea to deliver a package.