SpaceGremlin

So gamergate supporters who have never harassed anyone have to eat the blame for every troll on twitter? Yet when gamergate supporters are doxxed and harassed there is deafening silence from the games media? Why are only the harassers signal boosted at every turn by journalists rather than the people in gamergate who actually want to have a discussion about journalistic integrity?

I can't think of anything more fake or manufactured than the media narrative surrounding #gamergate.

In 2009 while I was deployed to Iraq (Tikrit area), we were conducting patrols in the desert west of the city looking for smugglers. Due to a severe drought, Therthar lake had receded significantly, exposing the lake bed. We found tire tracks leading across it so we followed them out across the lake bed. What we didn't know, is that even though the surface appeared dry, underneath was mud the consistency of cheese. The lead MRAP broke through the top crust and sank up the top of its wheels. Now, its was the middle of summer, and it was about 120° out, and we were all in full combat kit furiously trying to dig out our truck. To makes things worse, while we were digging, one of our humvees sank through too. We were in the middle of nowhere, no support from friendly units, no cover from enemy attacks on the flat lake bed, most of us outside the protection of our armored vehicles digging. We would have been sitting ducks against an attack, but fortunately we were in such a remote location that I don't think the locals even knew where we were. So we called in for a recovery crew to come help us. Eventually, after many hours, we dug a ramp out behind the MRAP and used another MRAP to pull it out. But the humvee had sunk into mud that was more like yogurt. We couldn't dig it out because the mud kept filling back in. The recovery crew that was supposed to come help us was being slow as well. Took them hours just to put the convoy together, and they kept getting lost on the way (part of the problem was that our reported position was right in the middle of the lake on their map, they kept asking us if we were giving them the right coordinates, due to some miscommunication they thought we had sunk in water, and not through the dry lake bed). They didn't show up until around midnight (our first vehicle sank in before noon), by that time the sand flies were out in force. Swarms of tiny biting little buggers that apparently are not repelled by bug spray. I cannot remember a time in my life where I have felt so relieved as when that humvee was finally pulled from the mud and we got the hell out of there. Needless to say, future patrols in that area went around the lake.

I have not seen this with KSP, but in another sandbox game that I enjoy. There are certain modders who do "abuse" the community. Stolen art assets from other projects, users with legitimate bug reports being met with derision, even mods that deliberately break other mods. Just as users feeling entitled to a modder's time and energy is bad, so is a modder acting as if they're above the rest of the community. The respect has to be earned by and shown to both sides.

From a gameplay balance perspective, it would probably be easier to keep the costs of the reactors high and the supporting equipment lower. That way it would be easier to adjust the cost of just the reactor if its over/under performing. If radiators or thermal nozzles are "overperforming" for their costs, that's not a problem. They're useless without reactors and if the reactors are priced right, everything will play well.

This is one of those things that belongs in the realm of mods, and Kerbal Construction Time does it very well for those who want the extra layer of planning for missions.

When Shoemaker-Levy 9 struck Jupiter it released an energy equivalent of 6,000,000 megatons of TNT. No nuke is going to hurt Jupiter.

We have heat shields that can resist a more extreme reentry than that even (1). They endure incredible temperatures due to adiabatic heating, so I don't think the LV-N's waste heat is going to be a problem beyond point blank range. A laser can impart far more energy per unit of area than the LV-N's exhaust can at the nozzle (or at any range). It wouldn't even take much, just weaken it enough and the LV-N's own exhaust heat and pressure will take care of the rest. Engines make terrible weapons.

There is no way you're going to do damage with your propulsion system at that range unless the exhaust is as coherent as a laser. The gasses won't "spread out a bit", they're going to spread out a lot over 20km. Also, we already have heat shields that can protect against hot gasses impacting them at just about 8km/s. Not to mention that eating a laser beam, cannon shell, or missile to your primary drive system that you were exposing to the enemy will probably disable your ship.

Kerbal Alarm Clock: helps out a lot when managing multiple flights at once. You can set alarms so you don't forget important maneuvers Mechjeb: provides tons of useful information in flight and autopilot functions. It's like having a competent copilot. You can tell it to do as little or as much as you want. Kerbal Engineer: if you want access to the flight information but don't want an autopilot. Lazor Docking Cam or Docking Port Alignment Indicator: both make docking much easier Active Texture Management: compresses your textures so you can have more mods. B9 Aerospace: sweet looking spaceplane parts KW Rocketry: clean looking rocket parts Kethane: find kethane deposits, drill them for raw kethane, then convert into fuel/oxidizer/monopropellant/xenon.

The engines that represent newer technology should be better, two of them just happen to be bigger. I don't get how you thought I was making a "bigger is inherently better" argument. As for for all chemical engines being equal: not all chemical engines are created equal. Besides, LFO in KSP seems to be an abstraction for various fuel mixtures. Surely, the mainsail, LV-909, and LV-N aren't all using the same fuel type? They have wildly different performance capabilities. Yes I know the LV-N is not a "chemical engine", but the propellant you run through it has a huge impact on its ISP. Its performance is closer to pure LH than LH/LOX, so maybe the LFO being run through it is abstracted and doesn't really have oxidizer at all?

They spend a lot of time playing "hide and seek", and they're exceedingly good at it. I mean seriously, other than the KSC staff I can't find any of them!

This sounds like a worse idea than nerfing the new engines to be inline with the old ones. They are meant to be outliers. The devs stated that they are meant to be an award for reaching the end of the tech tree (which they are badly placed for, but easily fixed). They would also make an excellent "money sink" at end game by being very efficient performance wise, but less efficient budget wise. Sure, players could still be frugal with mainsail asparagus lifters, but those SLS engines would always be there, taunting the player to splurge money on them. To draw an analogy to another open ended game: Simcity (2k, 3k, and 4). Coal power is reliable and cheap, but you're always looking at fancy power plants like fusion or a microwave receiver. They're costlier, and often produce less MWh per dollar than coal, but they take up less space and look very shiny in a city. Which is the correct choice? Getting even more speculative: I predict that breaking free of the narrow "balanced" performance range for current engines and allowing for economic balancing would be a good thing for mods. Currently, making a mod that has better performance than stock parts can get disparaged as "being cheaty", and one with worse performance falls into "why bother?" By allowing for a greater range of performance capabilities while allowing for economic incentives/barriers to using certain parts will increase variety greatly. One mod could make bargain parts with terrible part performance and it could still find a place alongside a futuristic part pack that has great part performance.

You do realize that the rocket you posted has about the same diameter of a real life Saturn 5 and about 2/3 of its thrust? That is a monster rocket even by real life standards so I see nothing wrong with its lifting capacity. Hopefully the inclusion of budgets somewhat disincentivizes bundling 7 KS-25's together for routine missions.

After obtaining my first tier 7 techs in my current career, I assembled a small science station. Eventually I'll haul it into a higher orbit and retrofit it for antimatter production.

Space "fighters" (a la Star Wars, etc...), probably won't be very effective. At that size drones make more sense. But I made no mention of "fighters", merely the use of a large carrier vessel to haul smaller vessels into combat. The missile buses carrying the kinetic kill drones may very well be drones themselves, or even the carrier itself could be a [large] drone, it doesn't matter. Using the carrier as a platform to leave unneeded mass/equipment behind while going into combat still makes sense.

Jet engines don't work on Duna or Eve. They have no oxygen in their atmospheres to run jet engines on, only Kerbin and Laythe have oxygen for jet propulsion.

Even in very hard scifi settings it makes sense to use a large ship capable of interplanetary/interstellar travel to bring many smaller ships capable of conducting operations locally. Having every combat ship haul its own fuel or have its own long range drive into combat only hampers its performance. If kinetic kill drones are the way of combat, would it be better to have them consolidated on larger long range ships or use a carrier to spread out multiple smaller ships capable of delivering them? In equal numbers the carrier based ships stand a better chance of winning because they could devote more of their mass to better defenses, more weapons, or use the mass savings to achieve higher maneuverability.

Back when I was learning more complicated mission profiles (like interplanetary returns), I used probes because the engineering hurdles were much lower. Once I had the basics down I was able to send kerbals quite easily.

Module Manager is used to alter the configs of various parts (usually to add modded functionality to stock parts). If you look inside your gamedata folder, you should see a .dll such as ModuleManager.2.0.7.dll. Make sure you have only one of those, its packaged with many mods so you may have installed it multiple times by accident.

Kerbal Construction Time In combination with TACLS, it really turns time itself into a "resource" that you have to manage. KCT also promotes using the SPH and VAB to construct different missions in parallel, so you aren't ignoring one building for too long. The default (they're adjustable to taste) build times aren't very harsh, but they still present enough of an obstacle to encourage out of the box thinking. For habitation systems, I suggest TAC Life Support and Lack Luster Labs. TACLS adds realism, and LLL adds great base components with nice TACLS support. Use Kerbal Attachment System to assemble and link up your base modules. For docking mods, get either Lazor Docking Cam or Docking Port Alignment Indicator. For really advanced colony projects, use Kethane and Extraplanetary Launchpads (they work best together). If your mod list grows large enough to crash your game (KSP has a ~3.5 gig limit on memory), use Active Texture Management to reduce your memory usage. It super compresses all your textures at a slight loss in quality, but allows you to have a massive mod list. I use all of these mods (plus some), and they are all 0.23.5 compatible. Hope this helps.

I got my info from the comments section of this article. To quote the comment (the response is by the author of the article): KSP is 168th in number of players, with about 645K by our estimates. Not too bad.

I saw on Arstechnica that they estimate 645,000 KSP owners on Steam. Obviously that doesn't represent the entire install base, but I think most players have KSP on Steam instead of the KSP store (it was mentioned in a Squadcast or something that the Steam release and the first Steam sale were massive spikes in KSP sales).

To build off this point, the majority of the technology on the tech tree is implied to already exist on Kerbin. According to the tooltips Jeb owns his own junkyard that he supplies the KSC with and Rockomax is a large corporation. The kerbals can take a shortcut to manned flight because they don't have to do all the inventing that NASA or Roscosmos did in real life. Right now, paying "science" for parts is a little counter-intuitive, it would be more plausible that the kerbals at the KSC are selling their data to get the funding they need to buy Rockomax parts, etc. Hopefully 0.24 adds some depth to this. Given the level of tech already existing on Kerbin, I'm sure kerbals have already landed on the Mun and sent probes to other worlds before Jeb, Bill, and Bob decided they wanted to go to space. Its just that right now, we don't have any content in the game that supports the "lore" in the part descriptions (which I would assume is canon). Except maybe the Armstrong memorial, I mean, someone had to put that up there.

I like to place a BZ-52 on the outside of my spaceplane and build the payload out in the open. Then I just pick the whole assembly up by the BZ-52 and attach it to the inside of the cargo bay. If the cargo is heavy I add struts to keep it from shifting around.