problemecium

403 Forbidden. :\

PSH YEAH. KSP is WAY better than Fallout 4. *dodges flurry of rotten vegetables* I'm serious though. Fallout 4 didn't turn out all that great, but KSP very much did.

I request an additional option: Not enough control surfaces / too unwieldy in general. Because that's the primary cause of failed test aircraft for me, particularly when using the heavy Mk3 stuff.

I guess we really can't be SURE it's an inflatable heat shield, but I'm going with the majority here xD I'm pleased about this! TBH I think it'd be cool if instead the heatshields were made procedural a la the fairings (pick out a base and then click to set the diameter, and perhaps drag it up to wrap the edges around the sides of the ship a bit). But this works too. It's sure to be very good for my Eve lander and stuff.

I should have checked this thread earlier - I'm in the OP! xDDD I feel so famous now. I shall download this as thanks

Nah, it's much simpler than that. Just say something along the lines of: "This ship could never be destroyed by the Kraken! It's indestructible."

Neat! I too am interested in whether it has a download, although turn-based strategy isn't generally my thing.

I got a gif of Benedict Cumberbatch in a mocap suit with white dots all over his face on all fours mouthing "don't be shy" (which I presume is him filming for The Hobbit). o_O

Color me surprised. I thought for sure I'd killed it with that random RTG xD Underneath the 2.5m probe core, I add a Mobile Science Lab.

People always seem to fixate on the logistics of there being a Santa Claus. I, however, had a hypothesis from an early age that there was no "a" Santa Claus - there were lots of them! A whole army of Santa Clauses in fact. Every Santa Claus you saw at the mall was in fact the real Santa Claus, even if they were different people. Perhaps in the beginning there was a single Santa, but why wouldn't he expand his operation over time as the population and his consumer base grew, subcontracting increasing numbers of Santa Clauses and eventually passing on the torch and retiring a la the Dread Pirate Roberts? With thousands of Santas, delivering toys to millions of kids would be easy - just send a whole fleet of sleighs from their various bases around the world in a big synchronized present-distribution operation.

Obviously it means "Single Stage To... wherever you want" ;P

7/10 wait WAIT A MINUTE THAT'S SPACEBALL ONE! PLAID OUT OF TEN!

A common mistake made by people in this community is to try and equate KSP's fuels with anything that exists in real life. We can safely claim that the properties of LiquidFuel are similar to those of Hydrazine and Kerosene, and even that they were probably used as a basis, but we shouldn't presume that LiquidFuel needs to be treated the same in any other way. My hypothesis regarding the current state of the LV-N is that SQUAD evaluated the possibilities and decided that this was a case in which realism had to take a back seat to balance. If a NERVA goes into production in real life, it will in all probability completely outmode all other vacuum engines (save for ion engines on probes) due to its awesome Isp. So anyone running a real space program would, for the purposes of their spacecraft, quit investing in chemical rockets altogether, and they would be reduced to fond memories. SQUAD doesn't want this happening in the game. Some of us would probably like a KSP where we can slap an LV-N on a mothership and instantly get 25km/s of delta-V, but then again we'd probably also like an Unobtanium Hyperengine that gives 10,000 thrust and infinite efficiency. But we must concede that while fun for a few minutes, it would ruin the game. If immersion-breaking is the problem, I personally think of it this way: the engine contains small nuclear fuel rods that do not generate significant heat individually (they may also be in insulated, thermally-controlled containers). When activated, it moves them all close together and runs propellant over them. Not only do they start to generate heat faster, but because the propellant is thermally conductive and has significant mass, as it rubs around the inside of the engine it heats up the whole thing. It takes some of the heat with it, of course, so we can surmise that a closed-circuit reactor made from an LV-N would simply overheat much faster. Or perhaps it's actually a fusion engine. It only says it's an "atomic rocket motor" in the KSP lore. As discussed earlier, its resemblance, even if intentional, to the real NERVA is no basis for extrapolation. Fusion is "atomic" just as much as fission is. So perhaps the LV-N really contains a fusion reactor that produces huge amounts of heat while running and none while off.

... I could do this, but I so don't feel like it. In any case, this challenge seems like a good idea at first, but unfortunately Scott Manley holds a revered position in this community as the Best - surely you get the gist given the image in the OP. So the inevitable conclusion of this challenge is either that everyone will give up because it's either too hard or because they don't want to dishonor Scott Manley... or that someone will actually win, and everyone will argue over whether he or she is better than Scott Manley or the challenge was too easy. And after that, either the thread will be locked or the challenge will be made harder, bringing us back to the aforementioned "everyone gives up" conclusion. I acknowledge and respect your ambition (I too want to see Manley challenged for his throne), but be careful and try not to expect too much!

A similar train of thought is what led me to the evolution hypothesis I brought up earlier. The law of natural selection, in its most basic form, is something like this: In any space in which discrete entities can exist and have differing properties and some means exists by which new entities can be created, if an entity possesses a property that directly or indirectly results in an increased rate at which new entities with similar properties to it are created, relative to the rate at which those with properties similar to some other entity, then it is inevitable that over time entities with properties similar to that entity will comprise a larger fraction of the total population. It sounds a little bit like legalese, for which I apologize, but the important thing is that when formulated this way it applies to quite a wide variety of things in addition to living organisms. The "entities" don't have to be creatures or even objects - they could be computer programs. Say we have an internet with a bunch of computer viruses in it (which, incidentally, we do): the internet is the "space" and the viruses are "entities". They can have properties such as what they do, where they save themselves inside computers, how fast they replicate, etc. If a virus hides itself well and replicates quickly, then it will directly create lots of new copies of itself, and after some time anyone who goes around counting viruses can see that a higher percentage of viruses descend from it compared to slow and weak viruses. This even applies to things that don't replicate themselves: Imagine we have a cell phone store in which we sell cases in red and green. The "space" is the store, and the "entities" are the cases. We notice that people buy more green cases. In the interest of profits, it's only wise for us to make lots of green cases and fill the shelves with them. So a few weeks later, someone walking into the store is quite likely to find it filled with lots of green cases and not as many red ones. The other important thing about this is that it hardly relies on any physical laws at all - just very simple concepts like "things," "time," and "a space of some kind in which things can exist." As such, perhaps this is one of the "original" fundamental laws that gave rise to all the others, if not the original law or proverbial chicken itself. 'Course I am tooting my own horn here xP

I understand this to mean the Kraken created the universe. Works for me xD

Can you still add a parameter to turn off cloud layers beyond a certain distance please?

I'd advise you to trawl through the Tutorials subforum and see how many of your questions that answers.

^ That's "z-fighting". Long story short, the camera can only distinguish differences in distance to a limited precision, and your clouds are too close to the ground, so when you get really far away, to the camera they appear to be very, very close to the surface, so it gets confused and changes its mind every frame about whether parts of the cloud are in front of or behind the terrain. The simple solution is to raise the height of the clouds, although that will of course make them appear higher when you're at low altitudes too. Sadly it's a rendering limitation deep inside Unity and thus neither rbray nor SQUAD can provide a "true" solution. EDIT: Actually I did think of something rbray could do: Change the render queue of the cloud shader so that it always renders after planets, and/or disable depth testing. This will take away the "moutaintops poking through clouds" feature, but should eliminate z-fighting. Alternately, a workaround could be to add a setting for individual cloud layers to turn off completely above a certain distance, which is also desirable for performance reasons (I don't need to see every layer of Eve's clouds from Jool). Config authors could then add special high-altitude cloud layers that appear at high altitudes to replace the low-altitude ones, preserving the appearance and avoiding z-fighting.

I'm not sure it has enough RCS blocks o_O

Oh, THAT kind of metal and covers. Heh, when I read the thread title I seriously wondered if you meant something like a steel blanket. xP

I'm wondering why nobody else seems to have speculated on whether it's a rogue planet. They say there's billions of these things flying around, so maybe now we've spotted one.

One RTG underneath one of the Kickbacks, and BUILD IT!!!1

^ I too have heard "roots" having a claim to being the official name, although I like just sticking with "funds" as it sounds a bit less silly.

Okay apparently I made it confusing reusing the thread and leaving the old post up there. Ahem. I've "solved" (more or less) the problem with orbital velocities. Going by the multiple citations of actual galaxy rotation curves and their disobedience of Keplerian motion, I decided to leave out that part of the simulation. Now we have a NEW thing to talk about! Details in OP.