Accelerando

9/10 ayy lmao

Besides its niche appeal and among other reasons, KSP will never overtake Minecraft because of its shoddy construction interface. The great appeal of Minecraft as a "build game", in my view, is that you can build almost anything you can imagine with relatively little skill. KSP makes only a very narrow scope of rocket construction actually "easy" - it offers you the ability to snap pieces together at certain designated hardpoints, but aside from that you have no ruler and only some basic symmetry tools to work with. You want to design anything much more complex than a bundle of toothpicks, get ready to buckle down for several hours of work if you don't already know what you're doing, especially if what you're doing requires docking to accomplish. Regular cubic voxels are far easier to work with and, more importantly, they let you measure out what you need and what you're placing very accurately. Truly useful data in KSP is hard to come by and maneuver nodes are fiddly to work with, making it stupidly convoluted to plot out complex trajectories and get anywhere in the system very effectively. Personally I've been playing for years, I understand delta-V, phase angles, gravity assists, and after countless hours and hours wasted building things that just explode on Kerbin's surface or fall short of their destination on propellant, I burned out more than a year ago and haven't picked up the game seriously since. And sure, maybe I'll come back to it later, once my mind has rested somewhat - the relatively recent construction modes/aids are a mildly appreciated, but tiny gesture toward massive overhauls that need to be made - but that doesn't make the game's awful building system not a problem. It's not friendly toward new players, and the oft-expressed attitudes towards "as little automation as possible" and "failure is fun, so it should be a very major part of gameplay" are much more hurtful than nurturing to the growth of KSP's playerbase, I think. And before anyone makes the assumption, it's not that I think players should be unable, or even unlikely, to fail - but if you want gameplay to expand beyond the "shoot rockets at the planets" stage into really managing a (rocketpunk) space program with the satellite networks, stations, propellant depots and mining infrastructure that entails, to be able to plan stuff strategically and design large-scale, complex missions and the like, you need to have the tools to be able to measure stuff precisely, to be able to plot out (relatively) precise trajectories in advance, to have statistics and data available and to be able to precisely place components such as to make it less than a massive time-sink and/or headache for people without weeks of free time to set up a base on Laythe. (It'd also be much more interesting to have more things to actually do than just launch things, fly things, and fulfill contracts...) Lots of crashes, screaming Kerbals, and funny explosions may bring in the YouTube views, but they won't lead to better player retention and hours played except for people who are either really easy to please or really persistent. Most people I know who have KSP have barely played it for more than a few hours. Basically, KSP won't be reaching Minecraft status any time soon, but it could benefit greatly from adding a ****ing ruler or two.

They are very useful indeed. They're called Viruses, so far as I know. Perhaps we should preface our names with the tag [KSP] so we can identify each other and team up. I'm usually on as "VIRUS FARMER" I did a little writeup of Agar.io tactics for y'all: Gameplay Mass and Score: Your cell starts out with an (invisible) mass number of 10. Every little pellet you eat increases your mass by 1, and you lose mass over time at a rate which increases with your size, until you return to the base mass of 10. Your score is a record of the highest mass you have reached during the current play session. You can use score to keep track of your mass initially, but as you grow bigger/play longer it becomes less useful. The leaderboards display which players have the most mass, not the highest scorers. Viruses are the green spiky star-things. If you're smaller than them (generally less than ~100 mass) you can hide behind them. If you're much bigger, they'll pop you into smaller cells if you overlap them too much. Grazing vs. Hunting: Eating pellets, which I refer to as grazing, tends to be most effective when you first start out, up until you reach between 300-400 mass. After that, the rate at which your cell loses mass becomes too great and outpaces your grazing gains. After this point, you will need to hunt other cells in order to grow larger. In order to consume a cell you are hunting, you should generally have a radius at least somewhere (at a rough guesstimate) between 1/10 to 1/4 larger than the enemy cell. If you are significantly larger than the other cell, you can split (press SPACEBAR) to divide your cell into two halves and throw one half toward your cursor. If you are being chased and/or have been cornered by another cell, you can also split to try and save yourself from total destruction. As you grow larger, you become much slower, so it is easiest to run away from other cells when your components are small. Being very large also reduces your split-kill range. Pressing W ejects a small pellet of your mass. You can eject as much mass as you want, as fast as you want, until you reach your base mass. This is useful to increase your speed somewhat, but the mass you eject can be consumed by other players before you manage to reach it. You can also eject mass into a Virus to make it grow larger. If you grow a virus large enough, it will divide, launching another virus in the same direction that you shot the last pellet into it. The new virus will travel around 5 unenlarged viral diameters before slowing to a stop. This can be used to attack other cells, or to build a barrier against large cells, but be careful that they can do the same to you. It takes around ~8 to 10 pellets to grow a new Virus. Hunting tactics Since your prey usually moves faster than you do, you have to trick them in some way to negate their speed advantage if you can't split-kill them. You usually want your prey to be crossing your path diagonally, instead of trying to chase them in a straight line. This is because when they're moving diagonally against your path, some of their speed is used in lateral motion instead of escaping you, allowing you to close in on them. It's always best to try and chase your prey into a corner or at least against a wall, so they'll have the least directions to run. If your prey has a significant lead on you, you should try to stay somewhat away from the wall yourself, so your prey won't be able to dodge away from the wall without running through your path. Chasing your prey toward other large cells (especially other potential prey) can also be helpful. Getting multiple cells into a corner is very good, but beware that one cell doesn't consume the rest before you get there and get big enough to eat you back. You can also hunt larger cells, using your speed advantage to bait them toward a Virus and pop them. Once you pop the enemy cell, a cluster of varying-size components will explode from them, mostly small cells. In my experience it's best to be at least around 1/2 to 3/4 as big as your target in order to successfully hunt a larger cell, since you'll need to catch up with the smaller cells. Prey tactics You can reasonably outrun most threats until you reach size 100 and become as big as a standard Virus. If you overlap a Virus too much after this point, it will pop you (but you can still overlap a significant amount). If you're being chased, you can also try eating fast enough that you'll grow too big to be eaten. Viruses are your only "tool" in the game, serving as both weapons and a shield, so they are the only way to defend against hunters. It's useful to stay close to them if you think you're in danger; when you're small you can hide under them, and when you're large you can attack cells with them. If you're being chased, try to lure your attacker toward a virus; if they continue chasing you, you can "seed" the virus by feeding it with W, so you won't have to spend as much time making it split. Once you have a clear shot into your enemy's cell(s), you can split the virus and pop your attacker. If you can't make a clear shot, you can still use the split virus as another barrier. If you're a large cell being attacked with a Virus, try to stay around 5 viral diameters away from any viruses. If we all teamed together, maybe we can fill an entire server with viruses so nobody can get big anymore, haha.

I sorta halfheartedly went with someone who took me as maybe a joke and we ground together for a nice long while, then we partnered off with other people and I ended up partnering up with someone very attractive. I was rather warm (oho), if very awkward, that night.

Time to wait, I guess. In the meantime you can be a cell and eat everything. http://agar.io/

Ayyyyyyyy

No signature could be more appropriate.

Haha, that's so awesome. Yeah, strange cool things happen in eRepublik. I was there for a few weeks to about a month-ish when it first came out, back when I used to lurk /v/, and back then they were obsessed with Pakistan. /v/AKISTAN OF GLORIOUS WORLD LEADING FOREVER. I'm happy that your homeland has made it to the top!

Staaaaaaaaaaars

I've been trying to hardmode it the entire time and play with only the Kestrel. I haven't fared too well, but I did make it to the second or third stage of the final boss once. That drone rush it unleashes on you is probably the most ....ing devastating thing I'd ever faced in the entire game, so if you have the scrap for it I'd tool up for that.

It really is just like that for this game I'm playing: http://politicsandwar.com/ Honestly, I haven't really thought about it too hard; I just like smashing other peoples' infrastructure every now and then. But it's definitely all staged, all based on definite percentages and everything. You might like http://ars-regendi.com/ - I've heard good things about it being a good politics simulation game, although I've yet to try it myself, and I'll rectify that soon. And there's also eRepublik, where you play as a citizen of a country, have a virtual job and participate in your country's/international politics. http://www.erepublik.com/en Definitely feel you on NationStates. Mostly I have an account there to write a factbook about my country - for world building purposes - I might go into international RP but I'm not sure. They rolled out NationStates 2 for a time, which was supposed to be all the issues and roleplay plus actual economics and war mechanics, but they rolled it back for some reason and I've never heard a peep about it again. A shame.

Of course I wouldn't like to be abducted. I'd like to ride with them on a consenting journey to the far reaches of the Fun Sector

Plainly denying that issue exists, which is what Xannari did, is not the same as saying that there might be a solution that someone hasn't tried before or that the issue may not be what they had thought. Assuming idiocy does nothing to help. I think this should be patently obvious. Talking at someone as though they were a fool is not a neutral action or a simple misunderstanding, it is just unnecessary denial. I'd say this was around .22 in my own experience, around the last time I seriously played KSP - I haven't been on much since then. Granted, several times it was when I used MechJeb on my builds, but other times it was not. I'm not claiming that I've rigorously tested this myself, however - just that I've encountered the problem myself before, and most importantly that it's a fairly simple concept to entertain that a part in a video game might remain stuck to another part; and that entertaining this concept need not be an obstacle to recognizing and/or solving the bug, as some here seem to believe. At any rate, I agree with Greening's assessment - separators are definitely what you want if you need a little more kick when you toss off a stage. And the record agrees, too - without the TR-XL, we wouldn't have had our good friend Plaid.

So it's impossible to comprehend the idea that both sides of a decoupler might sometimes keep holding on after you try to stage it? It is a bug, and I've experienced it myself on numerous occasions. Try using your imagination next time.

I would close the thread.

3 skellington 5 me

It's time to stop posting. Congratulations, Whack. Here's to a good relationship between the two of you.

I guess they won't be chopping your dollar.

Do tell us more.

Indeed, he did so well that the Columbia capsule was named after the giant cannon from the story. Moon expeditions go even further back, too - Kepler outlined a very well thought-out one for his time, in his novel, Somnium, and Lucian of Samosata much further back, in the 2nd century, with his True History.

I'm curious whether Magsail- or electrodynamic tether-style "thrusters" can be used as an RCS system to dump angular momentum into a celestial body through its magnetic field. Could this be used as an unlimited-∆L source of thrust, so long as the power stays on and you're within range of a suitable celestial?

I think there is a lot to fight over, if you have the tech to get resources from space but it's still hard to build. Earth is running out of rare earth metals, and will eventually start to run low on its normal metal reserves, but I suspect precious metals will be of greatest contention. Even with EmDrives, building the vacuum-hardened equipment to send mining infrastructure into space is going to be expensive, and you'll still need surface-orbit launchers to carry the EmDrive vessel into space, which will drive the cost up further. Space-extracted metal might be plentiful but I think it will still cost quite a bit, so you'll have at least some conflicts over who gets to control the infrastructure. Having missiles/kinetic/laser platforms in space to defend your mining platforms and threatening to destroy other countries' in order to gain access may be cheaper than building and launching an entirely new mining outfit. Granted, conflicts might be rare, and it wouldn't be war in any visceral sense, but it'd be intrigue nevertheless, although the conflicts might peter out when you have enough bases established and if/when global demand starts to level off, yeah. Edit: Ninja'd by Stranded Also, huzzah for more possible confirmation of the EmDrive's functionality! Here's hoping it turns out to work...

I'm sick of people pinching off a fat, smelly new thread every week or month or whatever about whether a particular feature, mod, debug tool, or anything else besides the stock game is or may be "cheating". With that in mind, I'd like to start a thread where we talk about the fun we have playing our games the way we enjoy them. I'm a mostly-stock player myself, simply because I'm not very patient with mods, but that certainly doesn't bar me from enjoying modded gameplay every now and then nor from "comprehending" how others can play with or without mods whatsoever. I admire RSS players, and I also muchly appreciate that sometimes a person can want to just go somewhere and putter about space without any messing with various challenges or obstacles. Sightseeing is just fine, too. With this in mind, feel free to share screenshots, stories, etc. what have you, and mod/packs or techniques you use if you use them; as well as why you enjoy that playstyle if you would like to talk about that as well. I'll start off with some examples from my own library. I rarely play myself these days, but here's a vessel I made in FAR once, long ago. I've always liked the sleek-and-also-squat look of Phil Bono's SSTO lifters with their plug-nozzle engines and their shell of drop-tanks, and the hills-and-valleys look of the blisters on the Soviet N1, so I wanted to make a lifter using those principles and aesthetics that could do some medium-heavy lifting in KSP. Used FAR and a number of other mods, including Dani-Sang's fairings. Although you, the reader, are by no means pressured to talk about why you enjoy certain gameplay styles, I'll also put my own thoughts in as an example. I enjoy FAR largely because I like puttering around space at times without having to worry so much about building a suitable launcher; I can light off and be bound for the stars on one stage without as much trouble. There is some engineering involved, to be sure, but it's a fine experience focusing on building stuff for operations in space, too. I'm not expecting miracles, but perhaps having our reasons for playing the way we do, for ourselves, out in the open, we can begin to defuse at least some of the vast powder keg that people debating about whether or not someone's gameplay style is or isn't "good" because it's more or less "casual". EDIT: whoops, critical album failure. EDIT 2: There we go! - - - Updated - - - Oh hi, anonymous mod. Since I don't seem to have been clear enough, this isn't just a place for people to put up their screenshots; it's meant to be somewhere out in the open where people can safely talk about the gameplay styles they enjoy using. Just because I didn't want people to feel pressured into talking about it doesn't mean this thread ought to be moved to the proverbial graveyard, as it were. Obviously I can't change your decision, but I would very much implore you to reconsider, as I think this thread is very much relevant to KSP discussion. I'd also like to note that the "What did you do in KSP today?" and "This Will Not End Well" threads seem to be doing just fine in KSP General Discussion. What am I supposed to change here? - - - Updated - - - Never mind. Thanks!

"X feature of the game isn't as challenging as Y feature, let's make another thread about forcing others to use or not use a feature because I like it better" I'll pass.