air805ronin

Interestingly the model world has adapted and there are many more 25mm model ranges from an assortment of publishers. A lot of people have either outright used them or modded parts onto citadel models (which is kosher even by tourny rules as long as a certain percentage of the model is original citadel). I don't disagree with you at all, I was just pointing out that NOTHING prevents you from 3D printing an army except the tourny rules. Mentioning lego, cardboard, or a heroclix army is all things I've seen in person at college and local tournaments as an example that people play with almost anything. I once fought a kid who used a teddy bear as a stand in for a tank, because he couldn't afford one yet.

Convoys were weird. Most problems could be alleviated by minimizing the number of nodes in the path. Still you could encounter some of the weirdest problems with pathing and logic. Coolest moment was getting 3 helicopters to fly in with the squads in training, drop them off, circle the area, and then land to pick them up again when they called for it. Also took forever to make it work right. They sure know how to make terrain from satellite imagery though. Take on Mars proves that they can make something look really pretty.

Really beautiful terrain is much easier when you're hand carving it and decorating in small designated mission areas instead of an entire planet.

With Dwarf Fortress you don't really get to manage the dwarfs, you have to build what they need to do their jobs. And dig and mine and build more. And eventually everyone dies from natural or unnatural causes. http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/v0.31:Stories/Bronzemurder Prison Architect is similar, in that the people in thr prison do their own thing. You have to manage the building more than the management (though you do make choices that affect budget). Then people start shanking other people and thats pretty much how that goes. Call in the riot police.

Playing minecraft on a server is a blast, especially if its a bunch of your friends. It's my favorite building game (if you don't count KSP as a building game). How loose a definition of building /sandbox game? Would Prison Architect or Dwarf Fortress count? You build things!

They already have a tournament rule that would discourage it, in that you have to use GW minis in tournaments. That said, they could also take advantage of the technology and sell templates for 3D printing of models that come out and don't need to be painted. And they'll always get revenue from the selling of rule books. You've always been permitted to just buy rule books and play with checkers or paper markers or even lego men. The GW minis have just been a perk in that the originals were hand sculpted and they were required for tournaments.

I'll tell you a secret. Buying 40k retail is really tough on the pocketbook (thats not a secret) but there are other ways to catch huge deals on minis. Ebay will work if you keep an eye out, but my habit was made easier when I discovered Bartertown (.net I think). Its a trading site where people basically trade the minis they don't want for the minis they do want. If you trade enough you can build whole armies for 30-50% the cost of retail. Over the last 14 years I've collected Space Marines, Imperial Guard, Blood Bowl, and Grey Knights.

You should try combining that with "significant other shining laser pointer at your thighs" plugin to get the true kneading effect. edit: I totally made transfers to Duna and Eve before the various mods came out to give you phase angles. I still have a real protractor in my house and I had the phase angle generator. Is it particularly fun? Not so much. It still didn't stop me from stranding a lander on Duna the night it was added to the public game which was incredibly satisfying. Mods make it much more convenient, not necessarily easier, but much more convenient. Yes I installed Engineer_Redux to get phase angles for said convenience. However, if it broke I could still reach the other planets and moons. Short version...yea...I agree with you to a point. I don't play with any mods most of the time though. They do need to add a flight statistic display to the map screen....

For added difficulty I only play KSP nude. Sometimes I install the mod "cat walking on keyboard" to really make it a challenge.

Swifty, BIS was a spin off company that used the engine from Operation Flashpoint to develop VBS1. It is still owned by BI. Advances in the commercial realm are shared with the BIS team, and vice versa. This includes engine advancements. I did use it professionally while training the National Guard. This included using just VBS2, using it integrated with a convoy simulator, and finally helping integrate it into command training via pushing its feed to the ERF simulation (and pushing ERF's JCATS feed down to create units in VBS2). It might not be the perfect tool, but its a good tool. I found the modding tools annoyingly dense but not unusual. My job was actually to train trainers in how to generate their own scenarios in VBS2 towards the end of my tenure on that contract. I enjoyed the some of the Arma mods that worked in VBS2, like a couple of Artillery call in mods.

I'll be honest, at 13 and 14 I was much more interested in kissing and or rounding metaphorical bases with girls than a game like KSP. The games I did play were things like Doom 2 and Heretic (maybe Quake?) at that age, and those required almost no thinking whatsoever. Just reflexes. I guess I was just seeking a different type of maturity, and lacking in another. edit: Compare my game selection then to now, and you see that I play simulations and strategy games much more than I play the shooters and the stress relief games. I think my interest in more cerebral games started when I first played Myth the Fallen Lords.

For all I said, I do have a lot of faith in Bohemia. I like the Arma series and I've trained soldiers with thier VBS2 simulation software. They know how to make good products in their own niches. --edit: and I'll probably buy this to see how it works out.

The developers are Czech so...well..the English isn't as bad as it could be. I think its a pretty game, and a neat idea, but that its currently just a step up from a facebook game. Building yours crafts gives you X number of places to place things. Once you select go mission you're automagically coming in for landing. Camera missions involve panning and taking a picture of every green X. This is the space equivalent of replanting a plot in Farmville to me. Once you finish your objectives, immediate payout. Limited sites on Mars to land on. They're probably modelling just those scenes and who knows if you can even endlessly drive your rover to another site. All that said, its early access too. Right now it could be looked at as a very nice tech demo with the meat of the game still to be produced. Time will tell with Take on Mars.

That feels, as a concept, far too limiting. If I have fuel tanks an engines, then I should be able to strap those on and do whatever is possible with them. edit: Most of your concepts seem like they'd be more realistically set as player missions, not unlike how NASA progressed their goals with each Gemini and Apollo mission until they felt comfortable sending people to the Moon. Besides, if we want true realism we should have a good budget and incredible progress for about 10 years and then steadily decrease the funding vs. inflation, finally cancelling manned missions completely.

Being a fan of 18th century naval warfare, I have to admit I think it would translate to space quite well with one person trying to execute a timed transfer behind the other craft and predict whether the other captain would decrease or increase speed to counter. Naval battles in the Age of Sails had much the same as both had to rely upon the same source of propulsion (the wind) and the battle could include a chase that lasted hours. Often such a long chase the ship being hunted may be trying to just stay out of range until darkness when it could slip away and take a new course away from it's hunter. Obviously the space analogue of this wouldn't be able to wait for nightfall..... (or would it?) Plus I think missiles would still be quite useful in space combat. So much for epic rows of cannons along the hull of my starship. Though if Squad wants to get the rights to make a Battlefleet Gothic game next, I'm totally cool with it.

70-120 usually, varying for the payload I'm trying to take up or how far its going.

How did you install KSP on an Etch-a-Sketch?

I'm particularly excited about this. I can't wait to see how you balance it and how it affects progression in the career mode. I'm also interested to see how much I can do in career mode without doing any unlocks.

Were you looking for a mini-ATX motherboard? I think you'll be able to find a decent full size ATX which may afford you more ability to upgrade in the future.

I'm thinking he may have had that discussion in person. edit: Especially after checking out his post history: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/member.php/67937-Maxmaps

I can't really speak for the low range options, but I got an XoticPC laptop last year and its been a godsend. I have to travel pretty often and enjoy bringing all my gaming with me. Nothing like running KSP at full on a plane and having people ooh and ahh over it. I would at least check out their low range. They can be expensive but they always have a sale going on that can net you some good savings. I know my PC dropped from 1300 to 1100 thanks to a promotion and a discount for being ex-military, and I picked every part that went into the shell. Darn thing ejects heat like a madman and cools down a couple minutes after running a game. I upgraded the heatsinks.

I have my doubts on how little a change that would be. Both of us not being privvy to the code, neither of us can tell one way or the other how big or small the required changes would be. Or how well they'd work. Or the bugs that would be introduced.

I'm cool with difficulty options almost like the survival difficulty you could bolt onto any difficulty level in Fallout: New Vegas. Not a huge issue with that. bring in life support, comm links, reentry heating... (2/3 of which are on the development roadmap). I do have an issue with "n-body orbits" being a check mark in that it would require two phyics models being coded in. Thats been my whole thing so far, not wanting them to have to revamp all the base code for the physics. Its great for the people who really want a hard core simulation, but doesn't bring much to the crowd that are fine with the patched conics approximations and resulting 100% stable orbits and lack of n-body issues/anomalies. I personally want a "good enough" simulation that allows for a lot of fun. They have that coded in already. it doesn't break with timewarp. No need to delay the eventual 1.0 release to change to N-body calculations, in my opinion.

The other folks are giving you some interesting advice on building a rig that can run a lot more than KSP. Honest opinion....you could probably scrap together another $100 and buy an Acer or similar laptop off of Newegg and be able to competently run KSP. Make sure it has a decent GPU and not running integrated graphics. Usually one can be found for roughly that price. It won't be a beast, but it will work better than what you've currently got. Real opinion...save up for a build and homebuild a new PC from your old. I'm better its a full ATX case which is good. New motherboard, new memory, new cpu, new GPU. if you don't go all out I'd bet you can build a really decent current PC for $600. You'll just have to really shop hard.

I personally don't see a point since orbits under patched conics don't decay Lagrange Points lose a bit of thier usefulness.