problemecium

0/10 for not posting a new spaceship. Also, this is a rouge scientist: I think you meant rogue scientist. "Rouge" is the French word for "red." And this is a spaceship:

*Twilight ZONE, you mean, right...? "Twilight" was a series of movies about a teenage girl and a vampire-like object.

When I have questions about how to play KSP, I ask them in the Gameplay Questions forum.

I've found that drogues can actually handle opening up to maybe 700 m/s, but for safety it is generally wiser to wait until you're a bit slower, particularly because ships scarcely ever have a terminal velocity much above 200 m/s. Also, to engage the brakes and keep them on, click the little button at the top that looks like this: {(!)} The brakes will remain on until you click it again or press "B;" I find this useful insofar as I often click it early in reentry so I don't have to worry about remembering to hold "B" when I hit the ground (or to keep the airbrakes out). Speaking of airbrakes... if you're trying to recover big orbital insertion stages, I've found them liable to burn up pretty easily if you don't watch what you're doing. They tend to burn when moving between 1000 and 2000 m/s, and will explode almost instantly around 2500 m/s. Yeah, maybe this counts as "crazy-orbital-fast," but that's the rap when you're reentering. To avoid this, the general solution is to just pull them back in whenever they get too hot (if you left them set to the Brakes action group, press "B"); they cool down pretty fast, so after a second or two you can stick them out again and alternate having them in and out until you get down to 1000 m/s. If you do have airbrakes, you're unlikely to need drogue chutes in addition, as something with airbrakes hanging out tends to go pretty slowly in the lower atmosphere.

Indoors, dark, 25°C, quiet or with rave music playing, depending on mood. As for outdoors, Winter is my favorite season, particularly when there's snow involved.

Well yes, of course they're going near light speed. A: Muons do that pretty often depending on circumstances. B: The arc reactor is a particle accelerator. C: Since the mass of a muon is tiny, you'd have to fling them pretty hard to get a practical amount of thrust.

That part's actually not so fantastical. Muons only need to live long enough to get blasted out the exhaust port. Once they've contributed to Newton's third law (or was it second? whatever), it doesn't really matter what they do as long as it doesn't involve chasing down Iron Man and slowing him down. It's also a convenient explanation of the blue glow: decaying muons emit blue light.

I'm with @regex. Neither CryEngine nor Unreal Engine is superior to Unity in any significant way. True, they have both been used to produce a number of AAA games with detailed graphics, while Unity is frequently used for simplistic indie games, and Unreal Engine jumped on the PBR bandwagon earlier than Unity; but Unity has caught up graphically, and the sorts of games that get made aren't so much due to engine limitations as the licensing system. Unity caters to indie developers, while Crytek and Unreal have historically tailored their software toward companies. So KSP on CryEngine isn't anything I would expect to automatically look or perform better. If KSP 2.0 does get produced, it will probably owe improved graphics and performance to advancement in the way the game itself gets programmed - now that they've done it once, SQUAD know what they're doing and can optimize it more effectively.

I'm not sure what it's doing in a new tab (it doesn't for me, but I did customize the tab settings), but since it's a direct link to the .craft file, your browser is likely recognizing it as a text format and displaying it as such. Just save the page (Ctrl+S probably) as a .craft, or right-click the link and "Save link as..."

Bump because I'm in the midst of another KSP live stream. Tune in at http://twitch.tv/parameciumkid I don't have any special plans for missions today, but meh. It's not like there's a lot of other people streaming right this minute so why not Zoidberg watch mine? xD

Nope. SQUAD is dead and the developers have taken an indefinite vacation from KSP development. Nothing whatsoever has been done on KSP. Oh, except for all that stuff in the weekly devnotes and SQUADCasts.

677: Bat Kerbal is forced to retire after taking a severe beating from Kerbane. He spends several months on holiday, then passes the torch to an enthusiastic upstart crime fighter, Krobin. 678: Krobin embarks on a grueling journey through the desert, whereupon he encounters a citadel under the despotic rule of Immortan Jeb (not to be confused with regular Jeb). Some craziness goes down and long story short there's a really long car chase in preposterously overengineered vehicles. 679: Taking a break from his arduous pursuit of Krobin, Immortan Jeb returns home and commissions a giant statue of himself. Unfortunately, he ends up with a statue of himself wearing a ridiculous hat, which is so embarrassing he flees to the North pole and becomes a hermit. Incidentally, in his later years he actually starts wearing a ridiculous hat.

Wow, neat! How'd you get the biome map? Made it yourself?

Unfortunately you can't. The eventual fate of all threads on this forum is to be locked by a moderator and then sit idle forever, buried increasingly deep in the thread archive. That's why you should only make a new thread if you're absolutely sure you need to

Isn't there also a stage with sodium and magnesium before the iron stage?

^ That's a tougher order than you might imagine. The current claim of most of the astrophysics community is that since the universe arose from a single point, all points in space can trace the expansion of the universe back to a point at their own location, and therefore the "Singularity" is wherever you are, wherever you happen to be in the universe. Of course in my book that begs a further question. That analogy only holds up in a spherical universe. In a flat universe, a hypothetical adventurer should be able to find a point beyond which there are no stars or galaxies. And if a bunch of such people were to share data, they could triangulate the exact center. Either that, or the universe is infinite, in which case one of the following must be true: - It is infinitely old - It was always infinitely large - For some non-zero length of time in its past, it must have been expanding infinitely fast To answer llanthas's question in particular, if such a hypothetical point did exist, refer to my previous post. The object would have a velocity of exactly zero on average when measured relative to all objects in the universe, but relative to any particular (moving) object, it would appear to move just like any ordinary object. If there is a "true" center of the universe, it'll still be hard to find because that point wouldn't appear special in any obvious way.

Okay but the point of this thread is not to have magical extra gravity, be that my graviton generators or otherwise. It's really more for the hardcore physics and chemistry nerds (sorry to say if you aren't in that crowd). IS Osmium or Iridium dense enough to pull that off? What sorts of dimensions would a sphere of Osmium have at hydrostatic equilibrium?

For some time now I've had a hypothesis that Kerbol is not in fact a magical tiny G-class star but an old, relatively cool white dwarf (such as a DC9, which is spectrally similar to the Sun). The planets would also be made partially of electron-degenerate matter, making them much denser than any known planets and making possible their high surface gravities relative to their sizes. But today I decided to fact-check myself and look up the lower mass limits for stellar remnants such as white dwarfs, and I found the following: - White dwarf: at least 0.6 solar masses, below which it will convert into a "carbon planet" and expand to a much larger size and lower density - Neutron star: at least 0.1 solar masses, below which it will explode in an event similar to a type 1a supernova, and any core remnant left over will be composed of ordinary matter of assorted elements. Kerbol has a mass of roughly 0.01 solar masses, and Kerbin less than a millionth of a solar mass. So nothing in the Kerbolar system could actually be made of electron-degenerate matter or solid neutrons, which leaves the question: Exactly what might they be made of? So can anyone else come up with some ideas for how to greatly increase the density of a planet or star, so that we don't have to go with "gravity is stronger in the Kerbal universe" or "it's magic"? Yes, I do understand that it IS magic, but for the sake of mental stimulation, I'd like to try to come up with a headcanon that holds water. As an example, say we take a planet like Earth. It has a certain mass, and since it's made mainly of iron, silicon, and oxygen, it has a certain resulting radius and density. But if we converted it into pure gold, it would become denser and thus end up smaller. Can we come up with some configuration of materials, possibly including degenerate matter, that could produce the necessary densities?

As mentioned, iron fusion isn't impossible by any stretch, but it is indeed endothermic. Thus a star fusing iron would fail to keep itself alive by that process. The iron at the core would continue to be compressed, eventually all globbing together into one massive pile of nucleons, and since the protons and electrons would come into contact and merge, we get left with a neutron star. So let's imagine a scenario in which we've cast a magic spell on the star that prevents atoms from being thusly crushed. I predict that the region of primary energy production will have to be the series of shells around the core fusing different elements. The star would have to continuously shrink in order to fuel these, and thus the iron core would continue growing. Eventually I foresee, when all the usable fuel has run out, the star will have turned into iron all the way up to the surface. Inside, some iron nuclei would probably end up fusing due to sheer pressure and effects along the lines of quantum tunneling. This wouldn't produce heat or in any other way induce further fusion, so it would basically only happen randomly like radioactive decay. The rate would have to gradually increase over time as more of the star is converted into heavy elements. Eventually the heavy elements being formed would themselves be radioactive and try to decay back into lighter ones, and in time the rates of fusion and decay would reach an equilibrium. From this point, elements in the star would continually reconfigure themselves until the whole star is composed of the heaviest stable element: lead. So my hypothesis is that the end result is a massive, cold, compressed, very smooth sphere of lead. Probably electron-degenerate lead, like a black dwarf made of lead instead of carbon and hydrogen.

Save humanity? Pshh. Humanity can go [REDACTED BY KERBFLEET SECURITY]. I'd try to save myself and perhaps some important friends (there'd be at least a few girls involved in case of a need to repopulate). So far my best idea is Ye Olde Bomb Shelter. Hopefully no large, ground-penetrating debris will happen to land right on top of us, and hopefully we can survive long enough in there to come out after the impact rate has tailed off some and we can try to start a self-sustaining colony.

Kerballine. Maybe she's born with it... maybe it's Kerballine.

Yes. Unity 5 is meant to be capable of running DX12, but can still run on DX9 and anything newer, as well as several other graphics technologies such as OpenGL and whatever Macs use. Most computers from the last few years have DX11, so unless you're running it on a dinosaur from last decade you'll be fine.

For the sake of informing the populace: KSP has always had PhysX. Unity 5 has a newer version of PhysX (3.3 if I recall) than Unity 4 had, and boasts multithreaded physics. Though the structure of KSP is apparently not being changed to leverage this particular feature, the new PhysX version that comes with Unity will indeed be present, and we can assume that the engine backend will attempt to make use of any physics optimizations wherever the game doesn't prevent it.