Three1415

Just paste the link in plain text, i can just select it and copy it to the bloody URL bar like i normally would with links anyways (i dont trust those clicky ones so i avoid em unless i have no other option). And yeah, squad banned mediafire (not that i care myself as i still use it, just forum will not make clickable links (you need to paste it in plain text). Edited 1 minute ago by panzer1b You can't--anything that looks like an address with "mediafire" in it (even in a code block) is auto-removed. Just append download/28tg50yhkql3jwl/Lachrymeum_Class_Gunship_Mk_III.craft onto the end...

Noted--it seems to not like mediafire addresses? Trying again...

I'm going to submit one of my own (albeit old and recently recovered--thanks Script for the tip) ships for weapons testing, because I make my armor rather differently from the rest of you, it seems, and I want to know better how it holds up in 1.1 (I can never must the malice necessary to attempt to destroy my own ships properly, alas). This is one of my old gunships, ~50 tons, 460 parts: See below...

I know I posted about this before, but does anyone know of a way to recover craft files from a persist containing them? There used to be a tool to do so, but it is broken as of 1.0+. I ask because my computer perished horribly a few months ago, and with it my entire fleet (I know, back up files, blah blah blah); however, I still have the persists in cloud-storage, and it would be nice not to have to rebuild entirely from scratch (although this might be advisable with 1.0+ anyway). In any event, nice to see some new blood in these threads...

Well, that's terrifying.

It's not really a lightsail; they are using a different and more specialized design, albeit one that works on similar principles (the original paper is here), so although it will technically ablate the lightsail over time, that's actually intended. With regards to the impracticality of producing large quantities of antimatter, it's not so much physically unachievable so much as beyond our current technology. If we could find a good way to contain the antimatter, and make something better at producing it than our current accelerators (they are highly inefficient at it), then a device attached to a 1 Gigawatt power plant could produce more than 100 grams/year--still very small, but not 10-20 grams small.

The problem with your mass-production idea is that there simply isn't enough demand to justify the infrastructure necessary to benefit from economies of scale. I doubt there are more than 100 or so launches a year, and those represent a very wide variety of payloads with very different needs rocket-wise. As such, companies like SpaceX are focusing on reducing the costs of launches on a per-unit basis instead, which at this point is much more effective. Add on to that the fact that even a Big Dumb Booster is mind-numbingly complex--real-life rocketry is far harder than what you see in KSP (even with RSS and RO), requires extensive testing and quality control, etc., to the point where the "Five guys and a rocket" will probably never be possible--and this means that simple industrial-style production might never be viable.

I hate to necro this thread, but I see no better option...Does anyone have a version of this tool that works in 1.0.5? Whenever I try to use it now, it throws a "MissingMethodException: Method not found: ConfigNode.SetValue" error (I assume this was broken in the 1.0 update). Thanks in advance.

Hello again, all. I was thinking of returning for 1.1, but what with even further nerfs (albeit unintentional ones) to armor, the return of NaNing, and the like, it seems little better, despite framerate improvements. Also, I have to deal with the loss of all of my ships (computer perished horribly, designs are gone) unless there is some method of recovering designs directly from a persist (still have those). As for quasar's discovery, this is a quirk related to how KSP does collision physics, which is far from realistic; it compares the impact tolerance, impact angle, and the mass of the colliding parts, and thus the Cargo Bay is superb primary because of the latter. The same goes for missiles; panzer probably still has his heavy tirepedoes lying around, which were banned due to their extraordinary and uncounterable damage potential.

Excellent, easily understandable discussion on this topic: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html I highly recommend everyone here read that series, as it is extremely informative and disambiguates a lot of potential sources of confusion on the topic. Its general gist is that AI is almost assuredly one day going to be far more intelligent, and thus far more powerful, than humanity, and that this transition holds great promise as well as great danger. My opinions (as well as those presented in the above article) concur with AngelLestat's assessment: It is going to be very difficult to ensure that an A.I. actually does what we expect, as humans are biased towards anthropomorphizing anything with human or superhuman intelligence, when more likely A.I. will simply be amoral, and utterly unlike humans. After much thought on this matter, my conclusion was that the only way to ensure our success here is to implement strict safeguards requiring human input on all actions undertaken by the A.I, as well as to give it a directive to not only improve its own intelligence generally but also to further its understanding of humans and their desires. If the majority of humans had their minds "linked" and available for data output to this superintelligent A.I., and it could only act on directives approved by some substantial percentage of the human race (we would not necessarily be required to give input directly; it could likely just scan our memories, personalities, and general experiences and extrapolate a conclusion as to what each of us individually would prefer), then it would essentially be the effector of the will of the human race as a whole, which would presumably be generally altruistic (negative actions will harm part of the constituency by definition, and as such will be selected against) and would thus ensure that the A.I. maintained positive, human-oriented morals. Personally, I think this may unfortunately be impractical, but I believe that such a scheme would be the best way of ensuring that the A.I. will remain our faithful servant, rather than, by accident or intent, annihilating us.

@AlexanderTeaH: I accept your challenge; these are the ships I am deploying: 1 x Dynastinae Class Bomber Mk III, the C3V Linnaeus, at 31.27 tons 2 x Lachrymeum Class Gunship Mk II Heavy's, the C3V Descartes and the C3V Fresnel, at 50.45 tons each 1 x Induction Class Battlecruiser Mk I, the C3V Tesla, at 165.95 tons Total Force Deployment: 4 ships, 298.12 tons Here is the persist: Persist Your move...

New thread, hooray... Anyway, although my time is admittedly quite limited, anyone up for a battle in the near future? It would be good to have one after such a long hiatus, and my newest generation of warships is almost complete (yes, they still have insane part counts ). For the specific parameters, I was thinking 5 ships, 300 tons, around Dres.

Personally, I highly doubt that larger vessels will participate to any great extent in combat. With regards to the "bigger ships are faster" hypothesis, the square-cube law strikes again: Engine apertures (e.g, where the thrust itself is admitted) may only grow as the square of their scaling, while the engine's mass and volume will grow as the cube. While this may be offset by superior propulsion mechanisms, it will significantly diminish the advantage thereby generated. Another square-cube factor to consider is the matter of heat dissipation; as ships grow larger, their surface-area-to-volume ratio necessarily diminishes, meaning that they will require enormous (and vulnerable) radiators to rid themselves of it. This also means it is likely that any high-energy weapons will be single-use only; it is much easier to have a disposable weapons system and make heat concerns irrelevant than it is to cool a megawatt laser or something similar, where even small conversion inefficiencies will compound the problem of heat generation. The above biases combat potential further towards fighters and smallcraft designs; they are better suited to both dissipate weapon heat and to fire disposable missiles or other weapons to that effect. An additional problem is that, at the end of the day, larger ships are just better targets. Say a capital ship is x times larger than a fighter; then to dodge a weapon it must move a distance greater by that same factor, which, assuming both are capable of the same acceleration, means a x^1/2 longer (technically x^2/4, assuming the weapon is aimed at the center) dodge time. If you assume capital ships have proportionally thicker armor to "tank" these kinds of unavoidable hits, then they will be very slow indeed, and thus it will be only a matter of time before weapon fire grows sufficient to completely obliterate it. As made apparent by the Naval Battle Club threads, armor is largely ineffective against even kinetic energy weapons, much less nuclear-tipped weapons; what are you going to do against a tungsten rod capped with a 30 megaton warhead moving at 5 km/s? The final nail in the coffin is Lancaster's Law, which states that for ranged combat an n^2 increase in quality (e.g, armor, weapons, etc.) is proportional to only an n increase in number of opponents, and thus it will be vastly more effective to have a swarm of small ships than several big ones. As such, there is no real reason to utilize large vessels outside of carrier craft, and as previously pointed out anyway, even fighters may be redundant with respect to potent drone-missiles. Beyond this, all interstellar combat will likely be MAD (mutually assured destruction); building a world-burning laser with interstellar range is probably more practical than amassing a large fleet, because once fired there is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it, and thus one can be assured that one's opponent will be obliterated in fairly short order. Simpler, if less effective, is to just construct a nuclear weapon of extraordinary power and ram it into a planet at relativistic speeds; this, too, is nearly impossible to defend against, and will likewise obliterate all life on that body. In short, capital ships are definitely impractical, and fighters possibly so; but it is more likely than anything that combat in space will simply not happen at all.

Truly, an outstanding performance by SpaceX. All systems nominal!

THEY DID IT! HAHAHAHA! Brilliant! First stage is back!

Stream just became active (nothing actually on it at time of posting, other than background music)...Suspense building....*Gnaws on fingers*

Gah, I've had no time to update anything, and I fear I shall soon fall far behind. Curse you, schoolwork! Anyway, I have a quite nice design worked out mentally; I shall try to complete it with expedience, and hopefully get back into the fray. Also, the wedge-ships cometh!

As of this moment, my time is incredibly limited, but I shall attempt to roll out a vessel or two by the end of next week--I have a few potentially interesting ideas, and a semi-successful prototype that I wish to revisit and improve. My opponents grow more formidable; I must fashion a response.

They are part efficient for me. Alas, the phasing rounds strike again. I have a few more tricks remaining before I effectively give up on defeating phased ammunition, and I have given up entirely on stopping XL3-based ammunition from pulverizing everything--it is simply too overpowered. As an aside, I wonder how difficult it would be to make a mod that, whenever a collision was detected with relative velocities greater than ~80 m/s, would revert to a second or two before in the gamestate and run the collision again with far higher physics delta, thereby reducing the incidence of phasing without severely affecting gameplay... I do hope you know ramming is banned, and for good reason... Actually, the smaller engines are usually much more effective; that is how my fighter/bomber chainguns work, and I have been trying to generalize cannons' applications to larger vessels, with a surprising degree of success. Practical mounting is still under development, however. A most interesting vessel. Highly distributed internals, I presume? This should be interesting to shoot at... Welcome to the world of strange-looking vessels--you have entered my domain. Enjoy your stay. It looks quite nice, and will probably be at least decently effective--survivability concerns are more or less negligible for fighters, anyway, as they are more or less "one and done" affairs. As such, it is probably quite decent. This is known, and is why using Physics Warp when firing weapons is banned--higher physics delta values make ammunition far more prone to phasing into things, whereas lower ones increasingly approximate reality; thus, adjusting the slider up will make things strange and inconsistent. Finally, has anyone ever experimented with stacking plate--i.e, connecting one layer of plate directly to another by simply attaching it to the armor plate's connection node, effectively making it much thicker? If so, what results did you obtain?

Thus is the weakness of large vessels. Anyway, here are my two most recent vessels, the 45-ton Lachrymeum Class Gunship and the 91-ton Photon Class Ion Frigate, both updated in terms of firepower and durability: Photon Class Ion Frigate Mk II Lachrymeum Class Gunship Mk II Any results from combat testing would be welcome.

Shoving the Popper downs its throat instead would have likely caused far greater damage, as that area seems extremely vulnerable to damage from shrapnel sprayed out from the initial impact. Would you perhaps allow us run to run our own tests to demonstrate?

You can try my updated "Wheel of Misfortune" rockets: 4 sepratrons, 2 ruggidized wheels, and an M-650 I-Beam (the short, H-like one) as a core--0.4 tons, 7 parts, and only slightly longer than the wheel itself, but fairly destructive at range. Also possible is to arm your warship with a cannon of some sort, and utilize a "kinetic saturation" (many small projectiles simultaneously) approach to damaging armored targets. It looks quite vulnerable to frontal shots, however--I could see the fuel storage exploding quite easily; I shall test it against my own weaponry. Also, would anyone be willing to combat-test my Gen. IV warships, the Lachrymeum Class Gunship and the Photon Class Ion Frigate? I shall post craft files soon...

I have not either; however, my Gen. IV warships (the Lachrymeum and the Photon) have vastly lower part counts than is typical for me (475 and 565, respectively), even though they are both battery-powered ion craft with decent TWR--if they ran on nukes instead, they would be significantly more massive, but probably almost 100 fewer parts. Certainly 375 parts with full munitions is acceptable for almost anyone, and the massive reduction came at a significant increase in durability: Both are capable of defeating all 0.625m munitions, are largely immune to lighter 1.25m munitions, and can survive several blows of heavier (Tripedo-M mass range) armaments while still remaining functional. This upgrade came after I had some thing of an epiphany regarding armoring and hull construction techniques, partially inspired by Drek hulls, AKS Tri-Fighters, and my own large-scale experimentation and intensive testing earlier this summer (i.e, the period where I spent days building ships and Panzer spent days blowing them up); I also figured out how to largely make part-clipping, even severe clipping, viable again. The technique is fairly complicated, and, for the moment, still proprietary, though it is not that difficult to figure out once you have seen a working design. Nonetheless, I am working on optimizing it further and extending its applications to better suit liquid fuel-powered vessels, which will hopefully allow us to start having real battles again (though I fear the XL3 wheel will always be undefeatable).

We already know such an "aether" exists, do we not? After all, the dispersion of hydrogen atoms/molecules throughout interstellar space could already be considered a sort of aether, so it seems logical that dark matter would exhibit similar properties, especially given its characteristics. The interstellar medium is so largely devoid of baryonic matter because of the latter's tendency to clump up into discrete, collectively massive objects, and thus most of what would otherwise constitute a diffuse but far thicker medium is bound up into clumps of many orders of magnitude higher density. However, at least as far as I know, we have yet to detect similar clumps of dark matter on scales below several kiloparsecs (i.e, objects such as "dark stars" or "dark planets"); if such objects were to exist, I would expect them to largely dominate gravitational interactions between baryonic structures on a much smaller scale due to the fact that their combined mass-energy exceeds that of the former by more than a factor of six. This we would undoubtedly have noticed much earlier and in a far less esoteric fashion than via the measurement of orbital velocities of billions of stars in large galaxies, or via distortion amplitude measurements performed on Einstein rings. So it seems to me that the only logical conclusion is that, for whatever reason (and I certainly cannot posit a mechanism for the difference in behavior between the two with any real belief in its accuracy) and unlike baryonic matter, dark matter is instead distributed, at least on the scale of stars and star clusters, in an extremely homogeneous, diffuse medium--the only real way we could not immediately discern its presence, and the precise definition of a "weakly interacting aether." And this should hold true regardless of the identity of dark matter, be it vast quantities of neutrinos or fewer and more exotic WIMPs. Thus, such a suggestion appears entirely reasonable (albeit in my mostly uninformed opinion), at least in comparison to such effective impossibilities as the violation of conservation laws; the only real issue is, as K^2 pointed out, that what is effectively a microwave in a box should be the last thing in which we would expect to observe such an effect--this is my main source of doubt as to the reality of the EmDrive's applicability. Had it been some beautifully engineered, complex hardware built on mostly sound principles and with the anticipation of causing this effect, I would be far less skeptical; but as of now it begs the question why no-one has ever observed this effect before, especially if it is reproducible with such a simple apparatus.

As far as I know, there is none, although it would probably be good to maintain, as would a formal tournament bracket. Anyway, I have been working on my own entry to this tournament; work on the as-of-yet nameless prototype has been progressing well: So far, the aircraft is 46 parts, 3.6 tons, and (obviously) a piston monoplane. I also seem to have disproven those who in the Top Gun AI thread asserted that control surface spam was impossible in FAR; in reality, it seems to work quite well, as this is my first aircraft in the latter mod, but yet it flies rather nicely...That is, at least for me; the AI is highly neurotic and always manages to stall it out (thus the prototype status), probably because I am far into "too much maneuverability" land--I have pulled 20+ g turns with it after a few short taps with fine control active. Likewise, much optimization remains to be done apart from teaching the AI to fly it properly; I can probably cut about 20% more weight from the airframe, if not more, and fine-tuning the actions of its myriad control surfaces should hopefully reduce stall incidence almost to zero. Additionally, combat "simulation" versus other entries is probably warranted, as I am uncertain as to the efficacy of its current armament (3 BerezinUBS .50 caliber machine guns, one in each propeller nacelle and one in the nose) against other craft. With luck, it shall be combat-ready by tomorrow night.