Streetwind

Sauce for you!

I actually have several boxed sets of the board game stacked against the opposing wall. But yes, "hard sci-fi" is something else. These 'mechs walk by the power of the Rule Of Cool alone

Aaaah, mass ratios! I learned something new today

That's because you're not defining absolute numbers here, but ratios. That means that your LiquidOxygen output is not 0.55 per conversion step, but rather 0.55 times something else. Usually the input, but I'm absolutely not sure how it works when you have two outputs. Maybe it's trying to create 0.55 times the amount of LqdMethane here, and the amount of LqdMethane is really 0.377 times the amount of IntakeAir... it's something I've struggled with in the past when using Module Manager (engines also do this a lot). I'm sure someone else can explain it better. In the meantime, I also have a question regarding custom conversion recipes. Namely, I had this idea to make a rare resource not a direct product, but rather a miniscule byproduct of every other kethane conversion recipe. My question being, is it a problem if I start dealing with output amounts that have three or more leading zeros? How precise is the floating point math here?

Chat is a multiplayer core feature. Without it, you might as well be playing with MechJeb (as in, MechJeb independently controlling its own space program). I can imagine nothing more redundant than a "multiplayer" mode that does not let me communicate with other players. In addition, it's a simple system that is easy to implement and render stable, which means it can be used to validate the client/server connection while testing game systems ("I am clicking the trade button and nothing happens, but the chat still works.") Another point: you don't even know what currently is and is not implemented to which degree. Why do you assume that no work has been done on other systems yet? And finally: Maybe certain systems simply cannot be implemented yet. KSP is firmly a singleplayer game, constructed as such from the ground up. Multiplayer was something that was started only very recently. Maybe the client team needs to do some yak-shaving in the base code first over the next 1-2 releases before the game can even properly accept the fact that it is interacting with a server in the way that Squad intends it.

They are intentionally this small in order to keep down the dV requirements to move them. Remember, we're talking about a solid three-dimensional and almost spherical object made of rock and heavy ores here... I can almost guarantee you that you're underestimating its sheer mass by an order of magnitude or two. It's no coincidence that we're getting giant new rocket parts along with it.

The C: partition also grows organically over time by such simple things as uninstall information for Microsoft security updates and user data ("my documents", downloads, desktop etc). It's a good idea to occasionally do some spring cleaning.

We can build something that can outrun Voyager today... provided that we can give it the same gravity assists. Which is fairly difficult, because it needs the right planets to be in the right place, which happens only every few decades. Other than that though, current electric propulsion should be able to pull off the trip to Centauri in roughly ten to fifteen thousand years, if we use a cubesat consisting mostly of fuel and power generation, and maybe a 1kg payload. I saw a paper running numbers on that sometime, currently trying to remember where. In that kind of timeframe, it's absolutely guaranteed that we will overtake it with newer technology before it gets anywhere significant. As I said yesterday in a thread that is pretty much a carbon copy of this one, if your Isp isn't in the six digits, you don't even need to bother thinking about Centauri (much less any other star system). And to get that kind of propulsion up and running, we need sustained nuclear fusion. There's pretty much no way around it.

Make sure that each engine can only draw fuel from one single tank. You might get the idea to connect multiple tanks to each engine for redundancy, but this will screw things up because ultimately, what draws fuel from where in which order is a round-robin operation. First one engine gets its fuel and computes its action for a physics tick, then the next one, then the next one and so on. And each engine gets to decide individually from which tank it draws. Now if there happens to be a rule in the game logic that says "always draw from the tank that is the furthest down in the Unity part tree first", then multiple engines may decide to drain from the same tank instead of splitting it evenly. EDIT: I think Kasuha made a guide on fuel flow logic, you can try and see if that answers your question.

Not necessarily strange... if the C partition is maxed out, and KSP goes on its usual RAM-gobbling frenzy, then Windows will attempt to increase the size of the pagefile but fails (because there's no room). This can lead programs running into OutOfMemory errors, which always result in a hard crash.

He's making a tutorial actually. We have tutorials for flying to the Mun, which is much much easier than this mission. But we can still do it (and even figure it out) all by ourselves in the game. So why should we not have a tutorial for a really difficult asteroid rendezvous?

For interstellar travel within human lifetimes, you basically need fusion drives. No form of propulsion currently available to us can achieve the required delta-V because they are not fuel efficient enough. If your Isp isn't at least six digits, you don't even need to try for the Centauri system, which is our closest neighbor. Then though you need to ask if you even want to go to Centauri. If there's nothing there that we want (such as an earthlike world, which there isn't), we have gas giants and dead rocks aplenty in our own system. They might send a science team or two to research the highly unusual "binary plus extra" star configuration, but colonists are highly unlikely. This complicates the matter somewhat, because for science missions you don't want any arbitrary human to arrive there, but rather exactly the specialists you chose. Even if you picked people in their late twenties, which is exceptionally young for an astronaut, they would be approaching the end of their natural lifespan by the time they got there on a 40-50 year cruise - along with all that comes with it, such as failing eyesight and hearing, and an old and unflexible brain. And that's not even counting potential effects of long-term space habitation. Using a generation ship on the other hand could be tricky as well - you'd have to send a number of parent pairs who then conceive offspring in-flight, and from the first day on drill them to become scientists to study the Centauri system. These children would never have seen the earth, and would never live to see it. They would be born enroute, live their life in the pursuit of science for the benefit of a world that's as alien to them as the lifeless place they study, and ultimately die out there once the task is done. Trapped in a small spacecraft from birth to death, lightyears from a place that their parents might have called home but they never could. They'd never even have a choice. Morally a highly questionable affair.

By reading this thread you can answer this particular thing for yourself.

Lightweight fuel? At five tons per cubic meter, rocket fuel in KSP is about five times as dense as water and should by all rights sink like a rock!

Ah, sorry, my fault. I thought we would be talking actual science here. Carry on with sci-fi, then!

Errr... engineering? What engineering? The topic at hand is firmly in the realm of theoretical physics, and will likely stay there for the foreseeable future. And thus the organization employs theoretical physicists, who by definition do not engineer. Contrary to what you see in movies, you can't really just build something, not even experimentally. You need to establish the groundwork first. This is called 'fundamental research'. On average, it takes about 50 to100 years for it to transition into applied sciences, at which point you can start thinking about engineering. An example of this would be Maxwell's equations for electromagnetic fields. Derived in the mid-19th century, it took until the second half of the 20th century to really see widespread application. Of course, if you have practical ideas how to develop FTL technology without first creating a power source capable of running it... well, we're all ears.

It wouldn't be laggy, as lag is mostly induced by part count. Asteroids use the spaceship code, but they're just one big part. Fun fact though: Since they do use the spaceship code, this means that it's likely that KAS will allow you to attach parts to them at will... including docking ports... so yes, you likely CAN make them into a base you can dock with (And subsequently crash the game when it tries to merge your ship with a part that was never meant to be merged with a ship...)

Icarus Interstellar is a nonprofit organization with the self-chosen goal of enabling practical interstellar travel (that is, reaching other star systems within a human lifetime) before 2100. An Alcubierre style spacetime warp engine is one of the concepts they are researching. Some good keywords to look up are "quantum vacuum" and "casimir effect". Current work being done on the subject is less about how to make it possible and more about how to reduce the amount of energy required to make it possible. A few years ago they were at "one Jupiter worth of antimatter", while more recently they've brought it down to the size of a small moon. Or so I hear claimed. Still utterly impractical of course

With a Gerforce GT 610, that's hardly surprising. That is not so much a graphics card as it is a crude device barely capable of showing you MS Word without dropping frames at FullHD resolution. An Intel HD4000 processor graphics from 1.5 years ago outperforms it easily. Cards like these are aimed at office workers who need more than the one display connector usually offered by low-spec mainboards, not at gamers. Unfortunately that doesn't keep OEMs from trying to sell them to people in so-called "gamer PCs" anyway... I'm impressed it actually manages 15-20 FPS, to be honest You can multiply your graphics power by several times with just a small investment. A Geforce GT 640 for example is three times as fast, a Radeon 7750 four times, a GTX 650 close to five times. All of them run without needing dedicated power connectors (which your PC might not have) and should be available for two-digit sums of money (in US or European currencies at least). @ J.Random: I'm fairly sure that's total CPU load, with one core under load from KSP and the other two idling/supporting.

Huh. Are Kerbol's and Jool's gravity wells really that small? Kerbin must really be amazingly dense if it generates more gravity than the local gas giant, and more than half as much as the system's central star For reference, Jupiter has 24.8 m/s² compared to Jool's 7.85... and the Sun clocks in at 274 m/s² compared to Kerbol's 17.1. Take a moment to appreciate how easy the devs made it for us to get around the Kerbol system!

Keep in mind, the show is meant to foster interest in science and space. It doesn't need to be 100% correct if the few remaining inaccuracies are used to make the topic more engaging, and frankly the "real" asteroid belt is a surprisingly boring, underwhelming place. I'd rather see a bunch of people believe that the belt is a dense cloud of rocks and find that really cool, than a bunch of people believing that the sun revolves around a six thousand year old earth created by a deity only a small part of humanity even recognizes.

If all Mantle ever does is boot Microsoft out of its five-year hiatus from caring about Direct3D, then I will consider it successful.

He meant the KSP / NASA joint panel at SXSW Austin today where they talked about the asteroid retrieval mission pack. See the other appropriately named thread for a photo.

Is that actual rotation, or is it tidally locked?

Quiet week in space, it seems...