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Eric S

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Everything posted by Eric S

  1. Right, the particles affect the other particles, he's saying that the entire mass of the planet has no effect on any part of the planet according to Newtonian gravitation as described in Principia. Another reason that I think this is BS is that one of the masses Newton used in his experiment was grain (or was it rice?), and at that point, any "identity" would have to be strictly conceptual. I can see what's wrong with that logic and I really doubt Newton wouldn't have seen it, but while I've read Principia, I haven't actually studied it in depth, so it's possible I missed something.
  2. I think someone is pulling my leg in a discussion on physics, and just wanted to get another opinion, if anyone cares to check my understanding. I've read Newton's Principia, and while I don't doubt that we've refined things since then, even disregarding relativity and QM. However, someone's insisting that according to Principia, a forming planet couldn't pull itself into a sphere because Newton's concepts at that time didn't allow a mass to affect itself. He claimed something about Newtonian mass having the concept of identity. I think that's BS since Newton himself said that all parts of the 'Earth are attracted to each other.
  3. You and I are thinking totally different things when it comes to multiplayer KSP. I'm thinking personally run servers, you seem to be aiming towards persistent (or at least semi-persistent) centrally operated servers. I'm just not interested in what you're pitching. And for what it's worth, to me, KSP already isn't about launching whackjob-style craft. And yes, I get the idea that it would be about teamwork. Get together with friends, plan and start a multi-craft mission to Duna (or Jool, or whatever), get the craft into a transfer orbit, then what, make an appointment with everyone to get back together in several months? Or schedule it around "warp windows" like you mention? I can see where getting rid of player-controlled warp might be necessary in shared persistent worlds that spanned more than one group of players, but as I said, not interested. It would be a case of start something, and then go find something else to do until the game catches up. Sorry, not living my life around a game. It really comes down to that. The whole timewarp issue is a silly argument in the case of personally run servers, because in that case, warping is not the technical issue that is keeping us from having multiplayer. We could argue which method would be more in keeping of the spirit of KSP, but even that misses the point. It comes down to which method would be more profitable for Take 2. Speaking for myself, I wouldn't be interested in your idea, and while I'm not going to generalize that too far, you can probably guess that I don't think it would be the more popular implementation. Which still kind of misses the point, as popular and profitable aren't tightly correlated.
  4. Totally different type of game, so I don't think the comparison works. The problem is that KSP is all about a few precisely timed moments. It doesn't matter if you don't precisely time your presence for a building completion. Turning up too late for a capture burn, on the other hand, is bad. Turning up too late for an intercept maneuver, possibly worse. Second, KSP is more about that one mission than CoC is about that one building. Saying you have to go do something else while your building completes is completely expected in that type of game. In KSP, that isn't the expectation. Finally, yes, I've done other things while waiting for a ship to transfer to the Mun. The problem is, the only thing that isn't mostly waiting for the right time to do something would be atmospheric flight or launching to orbit. I'm not that interested in atmospheric flight, and launching non-stop just to have something to do would be intensely mind-numbing. Not saying that that kind of game mechanic can't work, just saying that it's not remotely appropriate to KSP.
  5. They've announced that the DLC will eventually make it to the consoles, and the DLC requires 1.4, so it is most likely coming as well.
  6. I kind of have to agree that 75% recovery rate is pretty low. I'm disappointed if I don't land close enough to get 97% recovery, and that's with rockets landed via parachute, not even spaceplanes. Admittedly, I'm burning a lot of fuel so that's not 97% of the actual launch cost.
  7. I think that's because this mod does nothing by itself, it just allows modders access to the ability. You need a parts pack or MM patch that has parts or alters parts to use it.
  8. You have to be very careful with barycenters in KSP. If you don't implement n-body physics, barycenters become insanely good spots for burns. We're talking even without a burn, floating point errors push you to something somewhere beyond light speed. This is because gravity approaches infinity as you get close to a point source of gravity, and if the barycenter isn't inside a planet, you can actually pass almost directly through it. However, someone had an idea for barycenters that overcame that years back, though it never came to fruition, so I suspect there was still something being overlooked. While I'd like to see this in KSP, I have to agree that it would be a lot of work for little payoff for normal players.
  9. I'm not horribly consistent for most things. I usually use a prefix for the range (LKO, HKO, Local, IP), then the purpose. Crew Shuttles get a notation x[X] for crew capacity (x8, for example), and if there are DERP pods attached to the outside, A "Rescue x[X]". Then there's Probe, Lander, CommSat, Lander or CommSat which can get suffixed by "x[X] Bus" if it's carrying more than one lander/commsat. Stations/motherships and craft assigned to them don't follow these conventions. Stationary stations tend to get named after SF Authors, first mobile station gets named Wanderer, and I have yet to have a second. Tourism Plus Hotels/Casinos get named "Hotel $$$" or "Casino $$$". Craft that exist solely to fulfill a contract are named "Contract Work [X]" starting at 1 and going up. When launching craft, I'll usually replace the range designation with the destination, so "Mun Crew Shuttle" for example.
  10. Depends on the payload. If it's not too bad, I might drop the fairing between 40 and 50km. There's a few craft I've launched with payloads consisting of so many tiny radially mounted parts that even dropping the fairing at 65km resulted in noticeable loss of momentum. Think of a lander bus with nine landers, each lander consisting of 20-30 parts, for example.
  11. I used to play with TAC, currently using USI. I also used one that predates TAC, but it's been so long I can't remember the name. I think it was the most common one prior to TAC becoming available. Not that it matters, development on it stopped a long time ago. TAC is highly detailed, but I didn't really find that added anything beyond detail and a few options for corner cases. On the other hand, it does nothing for living space, which USI does deal with, and that's an interesting mechanic for now. I may reach the point that it doesn't add much, but I'm not there yet. At some point, I'm going to try Kerbalism, but I'm not in any rush to do so.
  12. Agreed. In fact, the fact that some parts mods don't stick to that convention bothers me.
  13. Also, there's a mod that's working on fixing this bug, if that's an option. I don't remember the name of it, however.
  14. I have no qualms with using the debug menu to test something. I have on occasion used it to fix a bug if I couldn't get around it some other way. Recently, otherwise stable craft jumping off the surface has been the main trigger for that one.
  15. Ah, cool, sorry for getting the two confused.
  16. Haystack and Targetron are two mods that do this. Both work to some degree with 1.3.1. Kerbal Engineer Redux can also do this, but not as smoothly as it takes more digging.
  17. Principia fakes it by rotating the orbital plane, making all the celestial bodies have the same inclination, as I understand it.
  18. This was an issue a while ago, and I hadn't heard that they had fixed it, so it might still help. Try turning off gimballing on engines above the center of mass, at one time they'd steer in the opposite direction because they didn't realize they were above the CoM.
  19. I actually agree completely on this point, and my ongui-must-die attitude contributes to most of my "I should write a mod mostly duplicating that mod some day" thoughts, with misc efficiency concerns second, and just wanting to change something coming in a remote third place. As I understand it, GC in newer versions of Mono is better, but not hugely so, more a matter of optimizations to the existing routines, so not anything revolutionary or astounding. I expect writing code that minimizes the amount of garbage generated to be a much more significant factor even with the latest Unity.
  20. sebi.zzr's link is a good starting point, but be aware that USI isn't a single mod, it's a set of mods that can be used independently or together, so what part of that wiki applies will depend on which of the USI modules you installed.
  21. The only direct comparison I've found suggesting anything like this, an iPhone (the 8, I think, might have been the X), was beating a low end laptop by about 10-20%. Given that the same phone stomps all other phones by at least 30% in the same benchmark, I stand by my "too intense for most phones/tablets" opinion. Even if you take the phones that it was only beating by 30%, you're talking very recent high end phones, so not a significant market share. You can't just compare clock frequencies and core counts, which is where I think a lot of this speculation is coming from. As for running windows on a Snapdragon, it's a specific snapdragon that has hardware support for the task, not a generic software emulator, and I haven't seen any benchmarks of said Snapdragon running Windows software. So not proven practical, and again, not something that will provide significant market share at this time.
  22. Actually, as I understand it, kerbal engines are underpowered, it's the scale of the solar system that makes them feel overpowered. RL rocket engines have higher TWRs, real life fuel tanks have a lower dry mass. Of course, kerbal engines also have a lot of simplifications and abilities that real life engines tend not to have, like infinite restarts and infinite throttleability.
  23. Same here. No first hand experience with Mono, so I could be overstating the GC improvements, but I have hope.
  24. Same thing I did, I can only assume I mistook the death messages for the contract failure messages.
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