lazarus1024

Very much so. At Againcourt the biggest deciding factors were weather and battlefield shape. The French knights effectively got funneled down toward the narrower front of the British army and the muddy ground both slowed horses and men once they were dismounted. Of course the English and Welsh longbowmen very much did their part, but if it had been an open dry battlefield the British probably would have lost in the end. One could say similar things about many battles through history though "If just X were changed, the other side totally would have won". Anyway, the vast majority of the French knights were killed or captured on the ground after being dismounted. A heck of a lot were captured. The Ransom a knight of even modest means could bring for a commoner longbowman was SUBSTANTIAL. With no horse riding experience I can't say from personal experience how nasty getting dismounted would be...but both watching modern jousting and then trying to imagine several hundred to a couple of thousand heavy horse all charging together and the effect that having your horse go out from under you...with all those OTHER horses charging right over/past you would have makes me cringe.

Okay, make a copy of your save before loading up any new version of KSP. Problem solved. I generally make a backup of my save about every week just in case I accidently screw the pooch in some enormous way. SQUAD generally seems pretty good at doing a follow on release within a couple of weeks of each release squashing the larger bugs that are discovered with the main release.

Actually for both accuracy, penetration and range. The English Yew Longbow plus English and Welsh longbowmen were rightly feared because of their long range, but also penetration and accuracy. As described by contemporary sources as well as some reconstructions, period longbows were AWESOME (which we've been able to determine seemed to range from 100 to as much as possibly 200lbf drawstrength at 30". A modern longbow is more like 50-60lbf at 28" as we are weak and sissymen who don't train from an early age hundreds or thousands of hours per year). The best longbowmen could fire an arrow four hundred yards! Sources vary on typical range of a longbowman company in battle, but estimates are from around 270-350 yds. By comparison a modern longbow with a 60lbf 28" draw can send an arrow about 200yds. Even at those long ranges a bodkin or broad arrow is generally effective at penetrating 3 or so inches through a jack coat (leather and padded coat typical of infantry without great means). A bodkin arrow would penetrate more than 2" through maile armor and would even be effective against poorly maintained steel plate or wrought iron armor. They'd also be capable of penetrating joints or eye holes of even the best steel plate armor...and keep in mind, thousands of arrows are being rained down on an army from (likely) several companies of longbowmen. So even the best armored, which would be VERY few, of an opposing army would stand a modest chance of taking an arrow in a joint, eyehole or other weakness in their armor. Let alone the vast majority of an army who would not be wearing the best armor. Even at Againcourt where the charge on the English army (composed mostly of longbowmen) was composed almost exclusively of plate and mail armored French knights, most of the knights were dismounted by arrow fire and many were injured or killed by arrow fire (or the dismounting) and then slaughtered while mired in mud. Some other modern tests show that the heaviest bows with the heaviest arrows and bodkin points ARE capable of penetrating even some of the better steel breast plates of the late medieval and early reniansance period at point blank range (average bows likely would only penetrate a very small amount, well less than an inch, meaning you MIGHT get hurt, but probably not at all as the point wouldn't penetrate far enough to punch through the padding you were wearing under the armor). Then you factor in that the average longbowman was provided between 50-60 arrows during a battle; then that the sustained rate of fire (factoring fatigue and a long battle) was 6 arrows per minute and you have an awesome, awesome spectecal. The average longbowman was expected to be able to hit a lone man some of the time at 200yds and an army all of the time. Lets not consider their accuracy at, say, 50yds (which was probably greater than a 95% chance of striking a man let alone a horse). Even figuring a typical sustained rate of fire a charging army on foot would take about 2 minutes to cross 300yds at a speed of around 8 feet per second (roughly 5mph. Probably about as fast as a full army could run in armor with weapons over open ground for nearly a quarter mile and have even a modecrum of cohesion). That means an army on foot would have to suffer at least 12 arrows per archer. If the force has a company of archers of only 100 men in it, that is 1,200 arrows. Figure an army of 3,000 might have 400 archers, which would be nearly 5,000 arrows. Then you also factor in that the archers will probably fire faster at first, especially seeing a charging army coming at them, they could probably fire off 20 arrows in those 2 minutes. Even charging knights on horse back could be riddled. Figure knights on Destriers and full armor on level, unbroken ground might be able to charge at 25mph (which is probably on the high end) over 300yds. That still takes them close to 30 seconds to cover that ground, or at least 3 arrows per archer and since they'd probably be firing as fast as they possibly can, maybe 6-8 arrows per archer. I am a weak and sissyman (actually I am not), but using my 60lb oak longbow trying to fire as fast as I can in to a straw target at 40yds with my arrows point down in the dirt in front of me like an English longbowman would do during battle and firing accurately enough to put every arrow in to the target (not necessarily a bullseye, but accurate enough to hit a man sized target basically at 40yds) I can fire roughly 14-15 arrows in one minute, though admitedly my rate of fire does start dropping off from my arms getting tired after that. Even with heavier bows, I'd assume these guys with their life on the line and a decade or decades of training and stronger, even if using heavier bows could at least be able to manage a similar rate of fire in a short burst. Yeowch. Guns only won out for two reasons. One, they did penetrate better than arrows and as heavier armor became cheaper, they had an advantage as things like steel cuirasses started to become wide spread in mercenary armies during the reniassance. Next was training. A couple of hours could train a musketeer (not the book/movie kind. I mean the kind that used a musket) sufficient to load, fire and care for their weapon and a couple of weeks could make then rather proficient. It took years and years to train a good longbowman. Longbows continued to have a significantly better rate of fire, more accurate and longer ranged until the advent of rifling and continued to have the advantage rate of fire until the advent of breechlock rifles and repeaters in the mid 1800's (though longbows went out as a weapon of war in the early 1600s basically).

I more or less like it. The VAB seems a little buggier as I had a couple of crashes in the dozen or so times I hit the VAB last night. Also not a huge fan that the new loading frame seems to flash like it has epilepsy while it is loading stuff. That said, I do like the addition of it in general. Seems nice, but it does seem like a few bugs to work out in there. I of course quickly made an SRB with a seat on it. The launch was as hilariously flawed as I thought it would be plowing in to the ocean with the candle lit at about 250+M/sec about 20 seconds after launch.

Sa-veet! Thanks!

But they won't be counted as debris? I am worried I am going to create a mun buggy with just a seat on it and have it disappear on me because I have debris persistance set to zero.

What we do know for .20 is that the knowledge base is being added for .20, which is the first major step toward mining. They did also announce that they need/want/are going to work on career mode is a major focus moving foward since they realized they hadn't really done anything about it yet. So I'd half suspect we won't see mining even in .21, but maybe .22? I have a feeling that mining is probably going to be implemented in at least 2 or 3 more steps. WAG is that next we'll see resource mapping/scanning. Basically HOW to find the resources. That might not be in .21, but it'll probably the next iteration. Then we'll probably see the initial form of mining and resource refining/use. It'll probably take at least 2-4 revisions of this to get the "final" form. Or at least that is my guess. I am betting that .21 is going to be the initial implementation of career mode. Though it is possible SQUAD may need to implement something else in support for implementing career mode in .22. Who knows (probably not even SQUAD yet). It'll get here. I am sad it isn't in .20, but we'll get there. Until then we'll just have to content ourselves with more cool stuff that we do get in .20

I wouldn't be. I don't see them making the physics calculations more complex, and that is what is slowing things down. The worst you might see is that you'll never be able to build bigger rockets until you have a faster machine. They already announced that they'll load planets/bodies dynamically instead of all at once, so there will be little to no impact to having tons and tons of them floating around out there. It is questionable to me how much of a performance impact loading them dynamically makes other than a memory footprint issue as it isn't like they are doing physx calcs with them generally. I am sure they'll make improvements as they go along, I just wouldn't expect any "150% moar speed" to show up ever. Not unless Unity/PhysX fixes the issues with multithreading. SQUAD could potentially do some optimization though. I don't know Unity really, but I'd imagine they could give an option in game to simplify physX calculations by allowing things like bonded parts for solid connections as an in menu option. So when two parts are attached they behave as one part (of course then you have the issue of less real life interactions). I'd imagine they'll chip away at performance issues, but the big one is still allowing multithreading for PhysX. The good news is computers are only getting faster. Sad news is I'd personally prefer not to have to wait 3 more years to get a machine that can handle 30-40% more parts.

Seat on an SRB and LIGHT THAT CANDLE! After that I'll probably build an as close as possible Apollo mission and plant my flag on the Mun. Then it is going to be re-visiting all of the keavenly bodies to drop a flag on each.

Yeah, I've traveled about 19km on Duna with the EVA pack. Rescue on a downed mission. My rescue lander didn't have enough dV to get a good landing as I overshoot by 19.6km. The crashed ship (actually just the capsule survived) was up on the crater wall and I landed down in the crater. I was able to jet the two Kerbals to within a KM of the landed rescue ship. Only way it worked is because they started probably 150-200m above the crater floor. They still landed rag doll and it took 2 attempts with one and 5 with the other (thank you quick save) as they died a few times in the attempt (too much speed landing). Most of my other attemps have been much more pedestrian, only covering 1-5km at a time in hops on the Mun, Minimum and Ike (I haven't done anything more than a couple of hundred meters on Duna. Duna just has too much gravity to easily be able to use the EVA packs for much other than grabbing a high ladder). I have orbited minimus from the ground once for the heck of it.

It is called basic research. You have no idea what something might result in with basic research. However, you keep doing it in as many fields as you can and as much as you can...because there are ALWAYS unintended benefits to doing it. Sure, you do not know you'll get a specific or ANY benefit out of doing research or undertaking an engineering/scientific mission/program. However, history has proved, the greater the engineering or scientific endevour, generally the greater the resultant societal and economic benefits are reaped. So you can say with a straight face that probably some people realized there would be long term economic benefit in the space race. No, the reason for the ISS and lots of other programs don't often have a lot to do with real tangible societal benefits, but not every single politician and not most of the people involved in the projects are looking at it from a purely political perspective and most of these projects DO have benefits.

Unlikely. Most of the time the longer the program of project the higher the costs. A lot of the engineers, contracts, etc are going to have to be maintained throughout the entire time period, otherwise you can lose talent and/or need retraining/rehiring. So if you stretch a project too long you are inefficiently utilizing resources, some of which will have increased idle time. So stretching it out by another 5 years very well could have increased the costs significantly. Compressing things generally can increases costs too as you have to overhire, waste through over capitolization and contract missmanagement, etc. However, generally "too short" of a project/program schedule is less inefficient than "too long" of a project/program schedule. On the whole adding 5 extra years probably would have increased costs significantly. An extra year or two...dunno? It might have increased the efficiency of the program somewhat. I doubt it would have done so in a particularly remarkable way.

Nope, I haven't figured it out. I just had it happen to me last night. After about an hour of tracking down a lag bug (I had to reinstall Mapsat. For some reason after jettisoning my first stage after take off with my probe, it would lag to one frame every 3-4s instead of my launch frame rate of around 25-30 or so FPS). Well I got the probe up to my Jool ship and every. single. time. I docked the ship would fly apart within about a second or two. Didn't matter if I docked with ASAS on or off on the Jool ship or the probe. It would just fly apart. So I gave up and burned for Jool without the mapping satellite. I'll send it along on its own mission. It seemed sort of like it is an issue with the dock connector between the drive sections and the station section of the Jool ship as that is where it would suddenly buck like a bronco the instant I docked. Anyway, I gave up after 10 attempts (quick saved about 5 seconds before docking).

I'll probably play around with other flags as well as some point. And I'll be honest, I'll probably make a dirty flag just the once. First, just because I am turning 30 in a few days, doesn't mean I can't act like an immature teenager occasionally. Two, those Kerbals are in space for years at a time occasionally and get lonely (I've never seen a female Kerbal...do they reproduce through asexual fission? That would explain how my Kerbals get replaced so quickly after they blow up on the launch pad). Three because...well...because, why not? If NASA can do this? http://i.imgur.com/eqOEDzw.jpg Why can't I?

For landing, no, never. It would be kind of neat to have them introduced to KSP at some point. I think it would be difficult to model them realistically, since the biggest ships in KSP are typically on the order of maybe 50-70m. However, that doesn't mean KSP can't cheap have something like a 100m diameter unfurled solar sail and just ramp up the thrust by a factor of 10 or something. KSP has some realism, but not a boat ton (I am looking at you Ion engine). So maybe it provides 1/10th of the thrust of an ion engine, at the same weight, but unlimited fuel, but can only thrust away from Kerbol up to perpendicular to kerbol, with reducing thrust the more you are angled toward perpendicular (this is already modeled with solar cells. As the point closer to perpendicular their power production drops towards zero). It would be a cool future addition to the game.

Here we go. I'll probably work up a fancier flag some day, but till then, this'll do. In rocket we trust

I am torn. I am really looking forward to it all. I think I'll probably tend to play in sandbox mode primarily, so I am looking forward to resources/real bases more than probably anything. That said, since it doesn't even exist yet, I am also really looking forward to career mode as a totally new way to play. To lump in with that research would/will be really cool as well. If career mode is more of a "sandbox with objectives and costs + research" than honestly I'll probably play career mode the most. Hopefully career mode won't simply be "play a mission", but is basically sandbox mode where you HAVE to pay for the parts for the ships you launch, you need to complete missions/do research to unlock new parts, you need to complete missions or do something in addition to missions to earn money for parts (maybe you have a certain income per day/week/month/year and that income goes up as you complete missions or something). It would be kind of like sandbox with defined goals and costs/research incoporated.

Actually it looks like SQUAD has partially solved that. Resources outside of the planet you are in orbit around (or maybe it is everything within the SOI or something?) are not actually loaded in to memory in the next update. So within reason, you could add as many planets as you wanted, and it wouldn't greatly increase processor or memory footprint signficantly. Or at least that is what it sounds like.

Exactly, it is pretty much just useful for large plane changes. Otherwise wayyyyy to fiddly to use and rare instances it saves much in the way of dV for the effort. For plane changes it can save a huge amount of dV though, especially if you were already in an eliptical orbit to begin with. Two good uses for it then are when you want to initally map a planet or moon, especially if it has a low rate of rotation. Then when you enter the SOI you just make sure you leave a high AP when deccelerating for capture. Then change plane at the AP point for fun and profit. Map away.

Well, it isn't a warp drive, and it is potentially feasible. Not terribly so. I am not 100% sure where the number is derived from (though I know WHY there is a limit), but supposedly the fastest a bussard ramjet can hit is .119c. Which is still pretty darned fast, but supposedly that is the upper limit of drag vs. thrust. I assume that is using a stupendously high output powersupply. CNO fusion is the current thought on how to achieve it as H+H fusion is just simply not feasible. You are also talking probably needing a power plant on the order of several MW at least, if not a couple of hundred MW (good luck disipating the thermal energy from that, though you could use that for some additional black body thrust). Any conceivable design you could possibly construct in KSP is probably going to have a fraction of the thrust of the current ion engine, though "unlimited" fuel. Probably a couple of days just to tack on a few m/sec of dV. I think if we are going to have interstellar drives, they are either going to have to be jump/space folding drives or space warp drives. That or for sub-luminal drives, maybe a fusion plasma drive (and probably limited to a few tenths of a % C). Anything else is pretty much beyond the realm of likihood in the game unless we are going to get ships in the hundreds of meter range or more.

Okay, so for whatever reason my accounts seems to have cratered. Or, well, it seems to still be there, but I can't access it. I blame hotmail, I get the password reset notification, but I never get the actual new password. This wouldn't be the first time. I had issues with Steam and hotmail doing the exact same crap months ago. I gave up. All Gmail for me. So this is my new account (I consider the old one abandoned). I used to be azazel1024 (in case any Kerbals cared). Mission for tonight is getting my Jool mission boosted out of Kerbin orbit (currently in 300x620km orbit after the first stage booster pushed it up. Now it is all NERVA time all the way). Though I need to strap on a couple of probes first.