pebble_garden

You might find some useful information in my videos, specifically Part 4 and Part 5. I strove to make the videos as brief and uncomplicated as possible, and show use of the maneuver nodes as a navigation aid.My Miranda Project Part 1 may also be of help, as it gives a more thorough demonstration of my "pushing the marble" method of using the navball to fly a rendezvous. With this method you can fly to within a few meters of your target using only the main engines, saving the RCS for the final alignment and docking.

Though it only features alien planet exploration in a shorthand form (with alien life, too, some hostile), The free Ur-Quan Masters HD is a smashingly good retro space exploration/combat game. I can't recommend it highly enough. It's basically the old 1990's Star Control 2, up-rezzed. It's one of the best games ever made, in my opinion.

There's a sandboxy freeware game called Ad Astra that was based on Elite/Frontier/First Encounters. Ad Astra allows you to fly down to planet surfaces, and it does have alien life. It hasn't been updated for three years now, but I found it kind of interesting and surprisingly feature-rich. Check out the image gallery. A search of the term "planet exploration game" pointed me to a game called "Outer Wilds" that might also be of interest to you. I haven't played it, but it looks neat. And just a couple days ago I saw a video review of a game called Lifeless Planet that, while more puzzle-oriented, does indeed let you explore an alien world.

My favorite DS9 episode would have to be "Trials and Tribble-ations" where the main characters travel back in time to the TOS "The Trouble With Tribbles" episode. I'll never forget the moment when Dax looks at the cabbage-headed Worf, and then at his smooth-headed forebears from the TOS episode, and asks, "What happened?" Whereupon Worf says (with great embarrassment) "We don't talk about it."

As someone who works in the games business, I feel this is one of Squad's shrewdest decisions. Their model of game development is the future, in my opinion, especially as the market moves away from massive AAA titles (two of which I've worked on) to more nimble indie developers funding their work with early-access buy-ins. Ensuring that each release can stand as a final version means extra work for the devs, but it gives the customer the greatest value for their money. But then, I'm one of Squad's/KSP's biggest fans, so maybe I'm biased. Anyway, if Squad stopped development on KSP right this moment and 0.23 was the only version we ever got, I STILL think it's one of the best games ever made. Everything else we get is just icing on the cake. I never expected multiplayer, simply because historically it's been an almost insoluble problem despite the combined brainpower of some of gaming's best minds. That KMP has demonstrated a clever way around the time-accel sync problem is no slam on Squad (who have to pick their fights carefully, given limited staff and resources), but now that it's been shown to be feasible I give the devs credit for putting it on the table. If they get it working, great! If not, well, I can live without it.

10/10 PenguinsMeep - Jeb Kerman in a typically heroic moment, with dramatic lighting to boot. Totally on-point for this forum (KSP themed, after all). Nice avatar!

FINALLY Space Engine supports emissive textures on models, for things like illuminated windows and the like. That Enterprise looks beautiful. Figures I'd be traveling and stuck with a stupid Acer mininotebook when the new version of SE comes out. Grrrr. And AVI renders too! Can't wait to try that out. It's nearly impossible to Fraps an SE video without some stuttering.

In Hawaiian slang, "Merry Christmas" becomes "Mele Kalikimaki", because that's as close as you can get to its pronunciation using the Hawaiian alphabet (the five vowels and h, k, l, m, n, p, and w). I just learned that a couple days ago, and found it fascinating.

I really liked New Orbit. I thought it was engaging and well designed.

Warning: There are minor spoilers in this post, so if you haven't seen the movie yet, stop reading. Having earned my Orbital Mechanics Ph.D. in KSP (just kidding!) I went into Gravity fully expecting to pick it apart, and not enjoy it at all. Boy was I wrong. Yeah, almost everything about the orbital mechanics in the movie is inaccurate, but I fully agree with the director's choice to simplify that stuff just for the sake of the plot. Even if the high-level OM stuff is off, the movie really does capture the danger and strangeness of life in orbit. After the movie I spent a LONG time just trying to come up with a way to make the MMU transfer from the shuttle to the ISS (as depicted) more accurate AND intelligible to a non-KSP playing audience...and I couldn't. And if the two points had been in realistic orbits? Forget it. I don't think even Buzz Aldrin could work out that math in his head given the limited tools Kowalski had at his disposal, let alone have enough delta-v to manage the transfer. I did figure a way to make the "let me go" moment work with real physics, though. Imagine the parachute lines have gotten snagged in a part of the ISS that's been knocked free from the previous debris pass. So there's a big heavy thing spinning slowly, with some of the lines being pulled outward by centripetal force, Stone gets caught up in that and is under constant acceleration, and so is Kowalski once she has hold of his tether. The rotation needn't be too fast, especially if the lines are long. Of course, like a child's swing that's had its chain twisted, the module would eventually reach the end of its spin when the cords were completely tight, and slowly begin to turn the other way. But that could take several minutes, time that Stone didn't have. Some story points that would have to be honored are: The station itself has to be airtight, because otherwise Stone wouldn't have a way to switch suits and gain access to the Soyuz. Also, the station itself can't be rotating, or Stone would find it nearly impossible to get around inside the station (especially toward the outer ends). No matter how you slice it, Stone got really, really lucky. But that's movies. Anyway, I totally dug it.

One great game I got on Steam that didn't cost me anything was the Just Cause 2 Multiplayer mod. I already owned Just Cause 2 and have been dying to try that mod. Well...it's insane, and a lot of fun. I'm amazed it works at all, let alone as well as it does. The busiest server I've played on was 800 people, and it was absolute, random craziness. I also bought Strike Suit Zero because I'm jonesing for a good space game. (God, I miss TIE Fighter.) Oh, and I got Descent 1+2 on Good Old Games, and then downloaded DXXX Rebirth which updates the render and supports new input devices like my trusty XBox 360 controller. Amazing! Downloaded that fan-made, free Wing Commander Saga game and have to admit it's quite good. Also Euro Truck Simulator 2, but we don't need to dwell on that. I'm a sucker for niche games.

You're all going to laugh at my pedestrian tastes, but for the last 4 years or so I've been a subscriber/fan of Friskyradio. One set I heard recently that I really liked was Dynamic Illusion's "Mindfields" mix for Dec 2013. Growing up, I was big into classical, synthesizers, etc. The first (vinyl!) album I ever bought with my own money was the original "Switched On Bach" by Walter Carlos. Later I loved stuff like prog rock and science fiction movie soundtracks, and later, a detour into the minimalists like Steve Reich, John Adams, and Philip Glass. My favorite album from the 1980s was/is "The Pearl" by Brian Eno. My favorite album from the 1990s was "The Seduction of Claude Debussy" by Art of Noise (that band's swan song), though I also really dug Tori Amos's "Little Earthquakes" and everything by Nine Inch Nails. And now, well, you can see how far I've fallen.

I just read this blog entry on Alastair Reynolds' hard/epic SF, and thought of this thread. I haven't read anything by him yet, but this sounds like just what the OP is asking for.

Ah, Winchell Chung. I remember him from playing the old micro-boardgame Ogre back in high school in the late 70s. But later, after the internet had been invented, I found myself accidentally bumping into his web presence, again and again, following the most random paths. 1. First, of course, I wanted to see his Ogre artwork I remembered so fondly from decades ago. 2. Later, I was looking for some 3D starmaps. Yep, he has some of those too. 3. Another time I went looking for a web-based slide-rule simulator. Oh hey, Chung has links to those, and other antique instruments. 4. As a kid I had a model of the USS Leif Ericsen, a spaceship designed by Matt Jeffries, who also designed Star Trek's Enterprise. I went web-hunting for pictures of it, and Chung had that, too. 5. I am into constructed languages, and one of those that caught my interest was Lojban, which appeared in Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Went looking for info on that and....I found myself on a Winchell Chung page devoted to that. 6. The Atomic Rockets page is pretty awesome. I've been there plenty of times before, but I actually didn't realize that was Chung until now. Doh! 7. I recall running into another of his pages when I searched for information on Celtic knots...but I can't find that page any more, so maybe I'm misremembering this one. Anyway, the take-away is that I find my tastes curiously similar to Chung's. Maybe I'm his evil twin!

If want to use the Apollo Guidance Computer on actual Apollo moon missions, try out the NASSP mod for the Orbiter simulator. I believe they've modeled the AGC for that, in all it's 1960s glory. Be warned! Compared to KSP, the learning curve on Orbiter + NASSP is darned near vertical.

There's a free version of Rise of Flight which only comes with two planes. But it's well worth trying out. Then if you like it, you can pay for additional planes, which seems fair to me. I've played it a bit, and it's a damned good simulator, but I happen to like WWI style flight sims. My friend Lotus, on the other hand, won't touch anything that lacks an afterburner. (smile)

As for what races I play: I would play an Elf, but the Elves in Elder Scrolls are kinda ugly. So I stick with Human characters. From what I can see, though, the Elves in Elder Scrolls Online are FINALLY getting a much needed overhaul. Woo hoo! Though, back when I played Daggerfall, I had a Khajit thief (cat burglar! hehe) who could scale the city walls at night and leap from housetop to housetop, almost never needing to walk on the ground. That was fun.

Here is how my friend told me to level my Conjuration to 100 in no time: pebble: So this time I'm starting Skyrim with an emphasis on magic. Lotus: May I make a suggestion? pebble: Sure. You're gonna say go for illusion. Lotus: Actually no. Lotus: Well, yes, if you want to be really sneaky. Lotus: High level illusion leads to invisibility spells, but... Lotus: I'd say max out your conjuration tree first. pebble: I'm finding destruction satisfying though. Lotus: Destruction is BAD. Lotus: Not at first, but it doesn't scale properly into the high levels without mods. Lotus: By level 30 it's basically useless. (NOTE: I did find a mod that scales magic properly, and like it a lot.) Lotus: However, conjuration is a force multiplier, or a "sit back and watch my dremoras and atronachs kill everything in sight". Lotus: It's super fun and you can conjure bound weapons which are essentially daedric quality. Lotus: So you can rock and roll in melee whenever you want, without having to carry weapons around. pebble: Okay, I'll give that a go. Lotus: One more thing. Lotus: I will tell you a very fast way to level conjuration. Lotus: For conjuration to get really fun, you need to get it to near max or max. Lotus: Here's a really easy way to level it... (NOTE: Lotus forgot to tell me this works best if you wear everything you can lay your hands on to speed up magicka regeneration, so you don't have to wait as long.) Lotus: 1. Go see Drevis Neloran in the College of Winterhold. He's the short wood elf illusion trainer. Lotus: 2. Get his quest to "cleanse the focal points" with the mystic gloves. Lotus: 3. Go buy "bound sword" spell from the Conjuration trainer at the college, and learn it. Lotus: 4. Put on the gloves and clean the first focal point. (It looks like a glowing blue fountain.) Lotus: 5. Your magicka regen will now be 250% of normal for the next couple hours. Lotus: 6. Go down to the beach below the college and find some horkers. Attack them, and jump up to a place they can't reach. Lotus: 7. Once you have them aggro'd but are safely out of reach, spam your conjure bound sword spell, and as soon as they appear, sheath them. Use the same spell in both hands. Rinse and repeat, constantly. Lotus: You'll be at 100 conjuration in about 15 mins. Lotus: Once you're done you can finish the quest by cleaning the other focal points and return the gloves to Drevin. Lotus: The spamming of conjure-bound-sword-and-sheath thing only levels your conjuration if you have something out there trying to attack you. Lotus: The horkers are perfect as they're slow and can't really do hills properly. Lotus: You can do this at level 1, it's awesome. Lotus: And then you can "play" with all your other skills while your two conjured beasts/atronachs/dremora tank everything. Lotus: Oh, and once you reach level 100 in conjuration, make sure to go back and talk to the conjuration trainer at the college. What comes after that is very cool, very funny, and very useful. I like to call my two storm atronachs "Flash" and "Bang", as they make a great deal of noise while prosecuting attacks. Need to clear out that bandit camp? No problem! Hahaha.

Dr. Robert Forward's books "Dragon's Egg" and "Starquake" are *incredibly* hard-SF (meaning technically/scientificially accurate), and that sounds like what you're asking for. You can buy them through Amazon in a single volume for pretty cheap. They involve the cheela, an alien race that evolved on the surface of a neutron star (!!). It's very imaginative stuff. Forward's science is fascinating and deep, but he's not the best writer and his human characters tend to be a little flat. Forward's written other books as well, I suspect you will enjoy those too. (Edit: I forgot about his novel Rocheworld, about two earthlike planets who orbit each other so closely they almost touch, and share a bridge of atmosphere, and occasionally oceans.) On the other hand, another writer who knows his science but also does good characters is John Varley. He was a rising star in the late 70s/early 80s until William Gibson came along and paved over science fiction with his cyberpunk fiction (I'm a HUGE Gibson fan, don't get me wrong. But he did derail the old-school space SF genre for a decade.) Anyway, I highly recommend Varley's anthology The Persistence of Vision and his related novel The Ophiuchi Hotline. Lots of spaceflight and world hopping there, but it all takes place in our solar system, nothing interstellar. Oh and his Gaea Trilogy is pretty awesome too. Another hard SF novel that I enjoyed was Wil McCarthy's novel Bloom, about a dangerous probe mission sent by the displaced human civilization living beyond the asteroid belt to scout out the inner solar system after it has long been taken over by out-of-control nanotechnology. It's creepy and absorbing. His book The Collapsium is quirky and pretty epic, and it is a sequel to a book called The Wellstone which I haven't read yet. Both involve brain-bending technology like programmable matter and traveling to other stars by sending copies of yourself via some kind of quantum fax machine thingie.

Skyrim is one of my favorite games of all time. (Others include the Zelda games (starting with Ocarina of Time onward), the X-Wing/TIE Fighter games, Flight Simulator, KSP of course, and Forza/Gran Turismo.) I'm a total carebear, so I always try to play the good angle. That means no stealing or killing innocents. If I accidentally do something that ruins my reputation, I go back to a previous save and try to avoid it. However, some of the plotlines in Skyrim force you to do bad things, and naturally I had some resistance to playing the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves' Guild questlines... But a friend convinced me to give them a go, and I'm glad I did. Those two plots were my favorites in the game, and you can still play them fairly honorably, because the people you're robbing/assassinating generally deserve it. And you meet some of the most fascinating characters the game has to offer. For my first go through Skyrim I played a stealth archer, with no magic. That was fun. But this second time I've played a magic user, and that has proven to be very fun. I learned a way to grind to 100 Conjuration Magic in about 60-90 min (and rose from level 6 to 21 in the process). At 100 conjuration you can summon two storm atronachs as your own personal body guards, and let me tell you, that makes a huge difference.

Am I? I actually got the link from another website I probably shouldn't name. (smile)

Since the video contained precise time/position information, I tried to recreate it in Space Engine. I had to fudge the position a bit because SE didn't quite recreate the photo perfectly with those values, but this is damn close. Impressively, Space Engine even has the Earth's rotation right, you can see South America on top and Africa on the bottom, just as in the Apollo photos. North (on the Earth) is to the right, and the Antarctic ice is on the left. Here is a version with the data overlay showing the time, lat, long, and alt for the image. Below is the original Apollo 8 photo, for reference. PS If you want to paste the location directly into Space Engine, copy this and use the F6 > Paste feature. (I think.) Place "Apollo 8 Earthrise - yet another approx" { Body "Moon" Parent "Earth-Moon" Pos (-4.851957621484007e-011, -3.117566084844328e-011, -1.528268803825325e-011) Rot (0.4354673060507831, -0.1841364446287674, -0.2359672377234427, 0.8489884909947362) Date "1968.12.24 16:39:17.45" Vel 2.8306346e-012 Mode 1 }

Apollo documentaries never fail to thrill me, even short ones. Any KSP player will appreciate this video, I think. http://youtu.be/dE-vOscpiNc

Not knowing exactly what's causing your problem, you could try this: 1. Press 'm' to enter map mode. 2. Move your cursor to the center-top of the screen and a panel will slide into view. You can use this to display different kinds of objects. 3. From that panel, click on the capsule icon and now you should should see the ship you lost. 4. Click on that ship and switch to it. If that doesn't work, go back to the tracking station and you should be able to see your ship listed in the left hand column.

Remember it's just a tool/guideline, and you must adapt it for different situations. For example, a ship with higher delta-v can land on the Mun (or perform a rendezvous) with a 20x or 30x rule--meaning, a faster approach. The most efficient landing or approach is the 'suicide burn', where you delay your burn until the last possible moment and then burn at full throttle, timed exactly so you reach zero speed at your destination. Calculating that time, however, requires some serious math, and there are threads devoted to it. My 10x rule (or 20x or 30x, whatever you use) sacrifices efficiency for ease of calculating desired approach speed. It's something you can do in your head, and it gets the job done. Yes, the rule works for other bodies...assuming you've designed a ship capable of landing on the body in question. It's a balance between available delta-v and gravitational strength.