lazarus1024
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Posts posted by lazarus1024
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I just spent all 6,000,000 funds I had on 12 ships I'm sending to Jool. Currently in orbit they leave in 3 days.
Right now I can't put a satellite in orbit.
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always backup your saves!
This, this, this. I don't do it as often as I should, but I DO do it periodically. It has saved my bacon a couple of times. Beyond that, I sometimes port between machines. Desktop, laptop or tablet and it is nice to be able to take my current save, play on that and reload it on my main machine (desktop).
In a lot of ways, I am really looking forward to multi for this reason. Run it on my server and then I can (hopefully) have a persistent environment to run on any of my machines without tossing around the save files. That and so that my sons can start playing directly with me.
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I used some of the 1x6 panels for the first time in 1.0.2. No option to retract them once I had them extended...are they totally non-retractable now? Or are they only retractable with an Engineer? What about the other panels? Are they non-retractable now as well?
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technically Microsoft allow you to install your Desktop Windows operating system on your laptop, however I am not sure if it matters whether you do it in reverse?
Though it might be a good move to download an ISO of SteamOS which is Linux based. Make the most use of all that lovely RAM!
Err, no, you cannot transfer the license. It is locked to the BIOS. Try to move it to a different machine, unless you are desoldering the BIOS to take it with you, Windows will not activate. Calling MS to explain they MIGHT allow the activation if you are swapping boards within a machine. They likely will not give you a telephone activation code if you are swapping across machines entirely.
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To add my opinion to this debate. I work in IT and always build my own machines, plus I know Unity 5 quite well. This machine will do the job and do it well. But if you want to play anything a bit more advanced then you would need to get a new dedicated Graphics Card. yes Intel has better performance for their CPU, but for KSP you will not really notice a great deal of improvement between the two. It is a quad core, it has a lot of RAM. The power supply is perfectly fine. Even upgrading the GPU the 500 would be fine (especially if you go for nVidia rather than AMD).
edit: you will not notice any difference in performance from this cpu and an i3 (An i3 is not an ideal gaming processor at all. Always best to look at i5 or i7)
For the price it is good. But it will not future proof you. But in the future you could re-use parts (like HDD, RAM) in a better machine when you have more cash!
Since KSP is currently a lot more focused on single thread performance...that isn't true at all.
Also back to AMD versus Intel...yeah, you'll probably notice a big difference. My Laptop has roughly similar single thread performance to most of the newer AMD desktop processors. I can tell you I notice a BIG difference between my desktop and laptop with extremely low graphical settings (to ensure zero of the bottlenecks are the iGPU on my laptop). Yeah, my laptop will handle some fairly good sized ships, but my desktop is a beast in comparison. Which it should with a good 60% higher single thread performance.
Yeah, I've limited the threads on my desktop so I can ensure the "quad core" part wasn't coming in to play (technically, my laptop had more threads because it is hyperthreaded and my desktop isn't).
KSP relies heavily on single thread performance right now.
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Part of the confusion is that what are normally called "radiators" for cars or computers are actually convectors. They use airflow through a high surface area device to carry heat away through convection; very little is lost as actual radiation. We should take a note from the Germans, who just call them coolers.
Depends on airflow. Granted, even with still air, you are probably convecting 80% of the heat from the radiator as convection and conduction in to the bits of the vehicle touching the radiator, but a measurable and reasonable amount is still being radiated (by my math, using .20 as the emissivity of heavily oxidized aluminum, about 200W). This would of course be at idle. Spray paint that thing black and you'd up that significantly to 900w or so. Of course you'd also reduce convection...which would be a bad thing, since that is the primary way it removed heat (since your radiator is probably dumping 10% of the energy produced by combustion, with only about 30% of it utilized as workable energy by the engine and the rest out the tailpipe or in to outer bits, like radiated/convected from the engine itself, the engine oil, pumping air, etc.). Engine cranking 150hp means it is probably dumping something like 9-10kw in to the coolant. That is a lot of heat to move.
As everyone else mentioned, radiation is how they work. Which takes a great deal of surface area and/or a very high temperature. I haven't looked at cooling systems for space vehicles in AGES, but my guess is a lot of the manned ones use heat pumps to make this more efficient. If you are only trying to cool something like 80F coolant a few degrees, it is going to take a HUGE surface area, even in space. However, if you utilize a heat pump and can heat that coolant up to 200F on the hotside, you just doubled your radiative losses. Heat it up to 400F and you've nearly doubled it again. So what might have been a 10m^2 radiator, you can bump down to 5m^2 or even 2.5m^2.
This is a big issue with generating and utilizing power in space. You have a 1000w electrical system in a space ship, you are going to need to radiate 1000w of heat. Give or take of course. The shell of the ship will radiate heat. Then again, in sunlight it'll absorb heat. In orbit, the balance is generally on losing more heat than gaining (because half your ship is in sunlight on the daylight side and at night the entire ship is radiating heat). At least from "room temperature". Hence why "shut down" space stations stablize at something like 0F or so.
However, start generating electricity and using it on the station and you can quickly "bake" the ship if your radiators are not working. A few kw of power can seriously heat up a station if you cannot dump some of that heat. Space shuttle had radiators in the shuttle bay doors and the shuttle would orient itself so that the radiators were generally facing away from the sun to dump heat. If they bay doors failed for some reason, the shuttle would have limited time in orbit before it would have to return to Earth, because it would have no way to dump the dozens of kws of heat being generated.
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I'd stay away from AMD, especially for KSP. With the transition to Unity 5, things may change a bit, but right now it is single threaded performance that means a bit more for KSP and AMD's single thread performance is abysmal in comparison to Intel. On multithreaded, well, things may be somewhat closer there. I can't really speak to whether KSP leverages a lot of integer or floating point calculations, but generally in most gaming comparisons, Intel has quite a lead when you include any discrete graphics card in to the mix.
Honestly, KSP is pretty graphics light. I have a $100 Nvidia GTX750 and it runs KSP smoothly at 1080p and all of the nits turned up. Where I can get stumbling is truely massive ships. My i5-3570 running at 4GHz however can lift most of what is KSP pretty easily however. I can't say I've run a spaceplane with 150 parts in any circumstance, but multi hundred part rockets and space stations don't really cause issues for it.
Frankly if on a budget, I'd look for something like an Intel i3-4330 processor with 8GB of RAM and something like an Nvidia GTX750 or 750ti to drive it (frankly AMD's current GPUs are also energy thristy without great performance and prices aren't super attractive either). Assembling it yourself you could probably put it all together for $550-650 depending on exact choices in case, SSD/HDD, power supply, etc.
At a price point of $300, you aren't going to be able to assemble anything decent. Really $500 is the starting point for a "decent" gaming system. Obviously an uber awesome one is more like $2,000 but you can make a pretty respectably good one for $500-600.
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This stuff kind of makes we wish we could tinker the autosave feature and have the ability to restore from X number of previous autosaves.
I rarely feel the need to restore from my own muck-ups. Having 3 kids under 8, there are enough times I've run because of "insert liquid where it shouldn't be" and accidently didn't hit esc to pause, or had to parent, head turned and look back at my screen and...crunch.
Well and I'll admit the occasional time I've invested tons of time in to something only to be 12km off a Mun landing with some impressive lander and realize...it is the night side...and Jeb forgot to pack his landing lights...opps.
Please note, that last one I managed a guess work suicide burn and managed to touch down while only crushing my engine, but the lander survived and it had a seperate ascent stage. Manage to get back to my orbiter, dock, transfer the trickle of fuel I had left in the ascent stage and get back to kerbin with 1 unit of fuel left in my TMI/return stage.
Cutting it a little close...
I've had it where things didn't work out with night landings.
I guess for me, I don't mind too much if it is pilot error, but when it is a straight up engineering boo-boo, I tend to revert. Or if I can't revert, restore a quick save...which I often fail to do often enough.
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I don't think I've gotten within 5km before at such a distance, but I have gotten within something like 50km and tightened it up after that and gotten dock. As you found, you sometimes have to tweak several times on you way towards your meeting place. I doubt I've had the distance within 1,000km at anything over half an orbit away. Time warp to a quarter orbit, tweak a little. Time warp a little more, tweak a little more. Rinse and repeat.
You kind of, sort of have to do the same thing with asteroid rendezvous (unless you get one within an SOI of something).
Ignoring asteroids, I think I've done it 3 or 4 times over the years. Once to rescue a ship, once to try it and 1-2 times because I was building a space station orbiting between Duna and Kerbin. I only latched up 1 or 2 modules before I threw up my hands and said it was too much work.
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Oh, and a space telescope. Whether it is a "legit" science part that can be used for science in different places, or one that is pure functional, I think it would be cool to be able to have a 1st person view out of it (with pan/tilt capability and maybe zoom too). Nothing extreme, but a 3-10x max zoom would be cool. Be neat to do things like look up at your space station in Mun orbit from your Mun base. Or try to spot Jool. That kind of thing.
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Folding wings, so that you can do things like make a "sail plane" for Duna or Lathe (or Eve). Electrically powered prop engine for the above places too.
A nuclear reactor at some point. Big, heavy, TONS of electricity.
Heat sinks/radiators. Maybe a small fixed part as well as a bigger, more efficient, folding radiator part.
Robot arm with a grasper at the end. Maybe in two sizes and strengths (1.5m and 2.5m "sizes"). Like one that can pick up .5t on Kerbal and one that can pick up 1.5t on Kerbal.
Extendable/collapsable "accordian" type structual parts. So you can, for instance, mount an RTG and a high gain antenna on a probe core, stick it in a fairing and then in orbit, you can extend out the RTG and high gain away from the probe core. Or you can mount stuff in a plane/shuttle bay or equipment bay and then either use a grasper arm or accordian part to extend it out.
I am VERY much looking forward to SQUAD doing the Unity 5 transition as well as the full audio pass. Maybe more than any other thing. So far I am LOVING 1.02. The game feels a lot more complete between the new aero, the new parts, re-entry heat, etc. Granted, I am also in the club where I wouldn't mind if re-entry heat were turned up a little, so that on normal difficulty you had to actually worry about it a little (IE needing heat shields, at least for "beyond Kerbal" re-entry type velocities). At higher difficulty settings you should need to worry about re-entry angle, not just if you have a heat shield or not.
All of that said, two things I am hoping for eventually are multiplayer. That and hopefully either a release focused on "moar parts" or continuing the awesome itterating of parts. Both low level, mid level and high level parts.
One of the other things I've noticed is that there could be some more rover parts. Maybe a "capsule" or two that are dedicated rover capsules (A la, "Mars rover" type stuff). Maybe a scientific instrument so that probes can take soil samples as a very high level part.
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What is everyone doing with Duna? I am a ways away from going there, but that thought did just occur to me. Pre-1.02 back in .90, I had been setting them to 1,000 meters and things were good.
What about now? Should I be going 2-3k? I rarely rely on parachutes on Duna to actually get all the way down, but I do tend to rely on them scrubbing a few hundred m/s of velocity as well as letting me float slowish to within a few dozen meters of the surface and then turn the engines back on. Great for making multiple hops. Parachutes, brief engine burst, land. Repack, take off, parachutes, brief engine burst, land again. Rinse and repeat.
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My brother-in-law was fawning over it back awhile ago. 3 years ago now? I can't recall how long ago that was. I bought KSP back at .14 (it may have been .13.3). It is hard to remember that far back, but I think it was the first updated after the Mun was added that I bought it (or maybe it was the 2nd update after the Mun?). I've been active playing it all along from when I bought it. At worst there might have been a month or two where I didn't get any play time for personal reasons, but I'd guess I probably average at least 30hrs a month over the last 2 1/2 or 3 years now. Some weeks I might put in 20hrs in a week, others I just might not have the time to play at all.
As it stands I don't think he plays it much anymore. As it stands KSP is pretty much the only game I ever play. It is a combination of being addictive enough along with being a father of 3 and a job that sucks up too much of my time as well as some other hobbies that are a time suck (home brewing beer, yeah, that sucks up a lot of time).
I am super excited about possible Multiplayer, especially if it is multiplayer with personal server persistance (like Minecraft). Especially if it will be possible to do multi with Career mode at some point. My son is a huge KSP nut and my younger son plays a little here and there. I could probably even suck my brother-in-law back in at some point. To me the possibilities with multi are nearly endless, especially with resource gathering (I mine and refine fuel and then deliver it to my son's interplanetary ship as an example).
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Seriously guys, here I thought 1.0 would be the last major update and you'd only do some minor stuff. Then some day might come out with a big expansion pack of a KSP2 or something.
Why, why do you keep giving us things! You should cease this generous behavior at once*.
It is like you hate us or something.
*No, seriously, SQUAD you are awesome. Keeping giving us more. Unity 5 sounds like a horrible pain, but it also sounds like a massive positive overhaul. I like the sound of more effective multithreading. Should help it run on my Bay Trail tablet even better (I hope?) let alone my desktop/laptop. Audio pass also sounds delicious.
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Eeloo. Never been there. Been everywhere else. Since 1.0/1.02, I have only just played a little. Mun is as far as I have gotten so far.
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Sun shields and folding radiators that rotate away from the sun would be cool. Then maybe ramping up heat load so that Moho vicinity will cause a ship to slowly cook if you don't implement heat mitigation stuff I think would be very cool.
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I wouldn't mind seeing some dedicated radiators too. You don't have to use them. Something fairly light, with low thermal mass, but high heat dissipation. Maybe something retractable (I want to say that Nova made a part like that a couple of years back that was a retractable radiator).
So you can store it away in a bay and then open the bay and open some radiators before you light up a NERVA.
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Either as late game/end game content or a future expansion pack, I would LOVE if SQUAD implemented "exo-kerbal system" content and ability.
Even if we don't get "explore a galaxy", it would be whicked cool if another solar system was added at a good distance with maybe a drive technology or two to get there. Maybe a gate system. Build a gate on an orbit in the Kerbal system and one in the other system and then you can jump between them. Gotta slow boat it to the other solar system. Or you can build gates within the kerbal system.
Set it up so it'll take a LOT to build a gate and take a lot of resources for the gate to operate as well as that "shipping the components to build the gate" mechanic and I think that could be a really cool very late game mechanic.
Plus other solar system to explore.
Maybe it can be a binary system. With a ringed planet.
I mean, if I am getting requests in, I might as well make them grandiose.
Also optional and difficulty adjustable life support would be real nice. Then we could also have cool modules like air tanks, air scrubbers, hydroponics that can infinitely support a kerbal, etc. Maybe the options could be off, easy (depletion 1/4 rate), normal (depletion 1/1), hard (depletion 2/1) and very hard (depletion 2/1 AND life support is used when not focused on the vessel).
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No. You are using energy sources (be it solar cells or an RTG) that have a low power (energy per second) output and no reaction mass to turn some feedstock into an energy source that is very concentrated and includes reaction mass...just the sort of thing needed to run a rocket engine.
And people keep using the oil industry on Earth as an example of why ISRU works...but this is also faulty thinking. The oil industry works on Earth only because we have an atmosphere with lots of oxygen in it, so we have a source of free oxidizer that you don't have in almost all places out in space in KSP. The oil would be useless as a propellant without the oxidizer. Both the oil AND the oxidizer were provided to us by photosynthetic lifeforms, which used sunlight over long periods of time to perform the chemical separation to create the useable propellants for us. All the oil industry does is separate a fraction of the oil that is useful (for a particular purpose) from the rest, and bring it to us.
Ore is just goofy. Unless it is an explosive mixture of fuel and oxidizer, which is also goofy since any meteor strike would start a chemical reaction that would explode the crust of your planet (but which would explain why Danny can destroy a whole planet by hitting it with a kerbal). And even then, how can you have the option of turning one tonne of ore into either one tonne of liquid fuel OR one tonne of oxidizer?
If Ore were actually ice, all you'd need is electricity to melt it and then hydrolize it. Then you'd be 1:1 with rocket fuel/oxidizer and starting feed stock.
Frankly I think calling it ore is silly, it should just be called ice.
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If you look at it, just the command pod for Gemni was a fair amount larger, let alone the support module for Gemini.
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I'm perfectly aware of the physics involved, as I'm an astronomer by profession. The thing is, KSP has already changed quite a few other things for the sake of gameplay, primarily due to one single factor: only the active vessel can apply thrust, and only when it's not in time warp. While it sounds simple, in practice this has a couple significant effects:
1> Maneuvers are done at nodes. In reality a manned trip to somewhere like Mars could apply a low amount of thrust for the entire transfer, but in KSP the thrust is all done at once and then the vessel coasts until it enters the SOI and has to do an insertion burn. For a renewable resource like electricity, that means your vessel needs enough generation and/or battery capacity to handle the entire burn in a short period.
and more importantly for this discussion,
2> In the real world an ion drive has a ridiculously low thrust (several orders of magnitude below KSP's version), which also means they don't have to use huge amounts of electricity for a burn in the first place.
If you want to make something like an ion-propelled probe that can visit the outer planets using the real world's engineering efficiencies, it wouldn't need to stack a dozen RTGs and/or dozens of solar arrays just to power a single small engine. Primarily thanks to the 0.23 thrust increase (a factor of 4 difference), though, one KSP ion engine now uses about 8.5e/s, while one RTG only produces 0.75 and we've already discussed how ineffective the solar panels are. So, you end up stacking a ton of RTGs (at a ridiculous cost) for each ion engine, or use an appalling number of solar panels.
The point is, it all depends on what the developers' concept of an ideal unmanned probe is. If it's supposed to be something with an ion engine, one RTG, four small solar arrays, and a few batteries, then you'd get something that'd look approximately like a real-world probe. But, that sort of design can't even produce one quarter of the electricity needed to offset an ion's thrust. Sure, if we could set the probe to 10% throttle and timewarp (or switch to something else) then it'd be different, but we can't, and the developers already made it clear with the new resource scanning system that they're not fans of the "go make a sandwich" type of gameplay. So, for gameplay reasons the current electrical generators need to be boosted substantially just to keep ions viable as a propulsion system.
Errrr, umm, probably not. It is most efficient the burn your fuel low in the gravity well to take advantage of the Oberth effect. You'd only burn at a low thrust constant rate for the duration of the mission, then flip and apply reverse thrust part way through if your only option was a low thrust engine or were limited by something else, like electrical generation (ion/VASMIR).
It would be nice if the equation was tweaked slightly, or failing that give us another couple of options. Like a higher power/density RTG (maybe as a 1.5m size, but thin stack, 5-10e/sec) as a top option and maybe a nuke plant above all of those (but with a lot of mass, like 2-4t, 2.5m size but maybe producing something like 100 e/sec).
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It isn't bad gameplay if it is fun, and it is. If you don't like it, don't do it. You can refine it on the ground if you want, your choice. Stop trying to ruin it for the rest of us.
I mean really, if you want bad gameplay how about the asinine ways to connect modules into a base while landed on terrain full of hills? That is what I call bad gameplay. Base building is pointless in stock unless Squad adds someway to connect modules that are not level. Until they fix that, orbital fuel refinery, all the way.
I would be all over flexible connectors. Could use something like the claw logic, but with docking ports. Or you could just use the claw.
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No, it should not, because that's complete nonsense. As long as they are lying down, even an untrained human can perform simple tasks while under 20 g of acceleration. The only real danger is if you were standing up or standing on your head during the descent, as your body is far less resistant to acceleration towards your feet than in any other direction.
Not entirely true. Straight on your back, an average human will tend to pass out after just 10-15s at g-forces in excess of about 12-15G*. Average I say. One in very good physical condition might up that to 30s or more.
As for simple tasks, at 20G, heck no. One in excellent condition maybe. How much does your arm way...10-12lbs? Try lifting 200-240lbs with a single arm. Even most extremely fit individuals cannot do that. Simply moving a joystick with most of your arm's weight supported by a seat would be nearly impossible. At 10G or so, a very fit individual can do very basic tasks with great difficulty, but they can do them. At 4-6G an average person can do very basic tasks with great difficulty. At 20G even laying on your back you would quickly black out. Prolonged exposure to 20G would certainly cause brain damage/organ failure. Much above 20G would cause almost immediate injury. Doesn't matter the position you are in.
*This is for a supine position. Sitting with the G-forces straight down through your body instead of from front to back or back to front would result in an average person without a G-suit passing out in just a few seconds. Even a well trained individual in excellent health wear a G-suit cannot withstand G-forces in the 12-15G range for more than a few seconds without passing out. Stunt/race planes can often and easily hit 12-16G, however, they are generally only manuevering at those forces for a very small number of seconds (often 5-10s). The rough limit of "prolonged exposure" to high G-forces is roughly 9-10G, if well trained, in good health and wearing a G-suit (which is why most top end fighters have a G-force limit of 9G when running more or less clean, because the pilot can withstand manuevering at 9G for 60-90s, but that is basically the limit).
Note, the Mercury astronauts on their suborbital flights (the orbital re-entries were more gentle) hit, IIRC 15G max for only a few seconds during re-entry.
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First person mode on EVA as an option?
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I just found a thread there: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/112996-What-about-mining-expensive-resources
Looks like a lot of people have this idea. Hm... gold isn't really that rare on Earth, so it wouldn't be my first go-to. But, on the other hand, it's instantly recognizable as "something that's valuable" so it might be better from a game perspective compared to iridium or Rhodium. And, who's to say gold isn't far more rare on Kerbin than on Earth?
Iridium costs $580 per troy ounce. There are 32,151 troy ounces in a metric tonne, so $580 x 32151= $18,647,580. There's a thread estimating that one fund = $4, so $18,647,580 / 4 = 4,661,895 Funds. It sounds reasonable that I could do a mission to return 1 ton of iridium from Tylo for less than that if I did a little roving around. And Rhodium sells for twice that of iridium because it has more industrial and commercial uses.
It would be interesting at some point, as an option (or required?) if there are some resource you MUST extract elsewhere and return them so that you can use them.
One of my thoughts is that the NERVA engines and RTGs required extracting nuclear material elsewhere and returning it. So maybe a NERVA requires .5t of "nuclear material" and an RTG requires .05t. Well, you get zero of it on Kerbin, so off you go to find some if you want to power NERVA rockets or RTGs.
Maybe one of your first missions to the Mun is to grab half a ton of the stuff to return to KSC so that you can build your first NERVA to go off to Jool or something. Also gives more reason to make reusable ships, if you have to mine and return specialized resources to be able to make some of the parts.
I wouldn't make this terribly complex with dozens of resources that you have to mine just so you can build X part, but I do think it would be fun if there were 1-3 resources you had to mine and return to Kerbin if you wanted to build a small number of "advanced" parts. Like NERVA, RTGs, maybe Xenon has to be mined and returned from elsewhere. Maybe there will be a more advanced propulsion system/power plant at some point, like actual fission reactor that also needs nuclear material returned (and maybe also uses it, in very tiny quantities, like 1% per month or something). Maybe "exotics", like "Rare Earth metals" is something you have to find, and that is what Xenon thrusters need to operate. Maybe it is also used in something advanced like a VASMIR.
I don't think we'd want to go too overboard with it, but I do feel like it could be a fun game play mechanic if you keep it in check, but make it meaningful too.
It seemed like a good idea at the time...
in KSP1 Discussion
Posted
It has been awhile since I've made a rover to run missions with. About the only time I really use them these days is if I am building a processing/fueling base on the dirt. Need something to move fuel between the base and a lander.
Beyond that, yeah, IMHO, if you have to go more than about 3-4km, it gets painfully boring. I do build rovers sometimes just to tool around an area of interest. Example, I'll sometimes put a lander down near the edge of a crater and some mountains on Mun/Duna. Then it is nice to be able to get around a little. Drive up to the top of a mountain, put a flag up there, drive back, etc.
It would be nice if there was a cruise control option.