problemecium

^ No, no, I get them. I can see where they'd come from too: A: We know that in at least one instance, life forms made of liquid water and carbon-based polymers can arise, which is better than we can say for any other situation, so it makes sense to look where we know life might be, and B: If we have any plans to make contact and establish some kind of galactic federation, it'll be a lot easier if they live in a vaguely Earth-like climate and we can identify with them in some sense. For example, in the Mass Effect series we found it much easier to ally with the Asari than the Rachni. So, again, might as well focus the search on those. Except I disagree with only looking at Earth-like watery worlds around 300K with 1 atmosphere of surface pressure, etc. I feel like it'd be wiser to consider any object that exhibits anomalous chemistry or emissions (e.g. Earth is green despite being made of gray rocks, and its atmosphere is full of O2).

Heh, I just saw that imgur album myself last night. I've had sleep paralysis one time in my life, and fortunately "The Intruder" did not appear. Whether that was due to luck, my own stable psyche, or having my head embedded in blankets is hard to say ^^; I experienced the oft-cited symptoms of being conscious, but feeling really heavy as if a heavy blanket were holding me down, but I found that if I mustered a bit of willpower I could make myself move anyway. It only took maybe half a minute to self-diagnose, conclude that the best recourse was to go back to sleep, and follow through on that. On the topic of my fears... I was an odd child who watched the Alien series when I was something like 3 and, rather than being scared, thought it was the coolest thing ever. But the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey gave me nightmares xD So conventional scary things like monsters, shadowy specters, darkness, etc. don't really scare me, but the laws of physics breaking down seriously does. When I used to be big on Minecraft, as another example, Herobrine didn't spook me nearly as much as did the Far Lands.

I'm all over the structural pylon - it's the only radial decoupler that doesn't leave an ugly little nub on the parent part. Unfortunately it's rather expensive and heavy for what it does, but the only places I ever find a need to use it are on huge motherships and station cores where a few hundred extra funds and kilograms are drops in the proverbial bucket.

Uh... I don't know where your facts are coming from, because from what I've seen 1.0 makes boats better. The water seems to be more tolerant of parts moving through it than before, and several of the new parts make pretty useful boat pieces.

Meh. I tried it out for a while when the option was first added, but I've found that it doesn't do much to save a bad plane design, and on a good one they'll do what they're supposed to without needing any modifications.

Goldilocks zone, schmoldilocks zone. There might well be creatures on Pluto that think the other planets are way too hot for life, since they can't sustain liquid helium on their surfaces or some such. Until we actually find some extraterrestrials, we shouldn't go around assuming they'll have the exact same needs as we do - we, who evolved on this planet and in so doing tailored our needs to match what was available. Keep in mind, when life first appeared on Earth, oxygen was a toxic waste product. They would consider today's atmosphere hellish, our Sun too bright, the tides too weak, etc. etc.

Here's hoping for 1.1 someone takes ten or fifteen minutes to adjust the other planets' atmospheres as was done for Kerbin xP

For that I use docking ports. Also, I noticed recently that decouplers seem to have tweakable ejection forces now.

As far as I can tell, KAC causes this. I only ever experience this bug when I switch from one save to another where the Universal Time is after one or more alarms are set to trigger - in which case it happens every single time like... uh, clockwork. The best solution is, when you know you want to switch to a save "in the future", close the game and then go straight to that save from the menu. You can go back to saves "in the past" with no trouble.

Yes, AMEN, infinite thanks to SQUAD for not imposing DRM on KSP! I make liberal use of the ability to make backups and of the ease and control over installation.

All I have to say is "called it!" A while back I had an idea that perhaps all pairs of entangled particles are effectively one-dimensional (insofar as all but one dimension are very small) wormholes, and that by generating a large group of them one might be able to form a structure that absorbs objects from one side and emits them from the other - essentially an extended wormhole or a "beaming" device. It's exciting that scientific data seems to be pointing that direction.

Neat! That is all. xD

Here's an idea: One day, barring another Dark Ages, annihilation in World War III, etc., we ourselves will be a space-faring society. In order to communicate over astronomical distances, we're likely to develop something based on wormholes, entanglement, etc. (Yes I do know why entanglement doesn't already work. But the basic idea at least.) - because light-based signals would be like snail mail. If I want a live feed from Jupiter, radio signals won't work, let alone a live feed from Proxima Centauri. We don't currently have this technology, so we have no way to pick up the kinds of signals our future selves will be using. If the extraterrestrials dropped by (as in landed on our Moon or something), we might be able to pick up their walkie-talkies, but their long-range stuff may well be passing us by completely undetected. Say they use a system where they build a small wormhole, put one end on a ship and the other at their base, and run a wire through it. Effectively, the distance to the ship through the wormhole is only a few yards at most, even if outside it's light-years. Thus it'd be easy to communicate with a distant spacecraft with negligible delay - and as a completely unintended side effect, the signal doesn't go dispersing all over space. Since the signal is inside the wormhole - inside the wire in fact - no amount of radio telescopy is going to reveal it out here, and it's not because anyone put any effort into hiding it. On a related note, imagine in the far future we want to land a rover on an exoplanet, but we suspect that planet has something living on it. Even today, we make painstaking effort to sterilize our rovers and not harm the Martian environment more than is necessary to land the thing (it's solar powered rather than gas powered, to put it bluntly). Mars isn't even inhabited, except mayyybe by a few microbes. If we knew there were a good chance of something like, say, a coral reef or a rainforest (equivalent - we obviously won't find a literal rainforest), we'd be all the more careful, to the point where, ideally, they'd never know we were there. So if we turn it around, if anything's been probing Earth, even if they're the careless, warlike sort of people we are, their scientists are entirely liable to have sent something so stealthy we'd never notice. The probability is small, of course (in fact my bet is it hasn't actually happened), but it's entirely plausible.

I use the Mk2 clamp-o-tron on spaceplanes for drag reasons, as mentioned above. Kidonia also has both several Mk2 clamp-o-trons and two of the Mk3 MonoPropellant tanks. Since they store 1000 units apiece, they're good for stations and motherships that need to store vast amounts, rather than spaceplanes. However, there are a few pieces I use extremely rarely: - I concur on the Not-Rockomax Micronode - and for that matter the Rockomax node too. It doesn't really do anything that some other part doesn't do just as well, and it weighs significantly more than things like the cubic strut. - Large drogue chutes. If I have anything big enough to make use of them, I need those nodes for attaching big regular parachutes. TBH a small drogue comparable to the Mk16 would be much better. - Stack separators of any kind. The only thing they do that a stack decoupler doesn't is detach radially-attached parts, which I find counterproductive more often than useful. - The Skipper engine. Its size, TWR, and efficiency are all too "average" and can be beaten either by a small cluster of Size 1 engines or a single Mainsail. - Those lousy white radial engines. The idea of radial engine attachment is great, but the implementation is inferior to simply using a nose cone and a regular engine in pretty much every way.

Here's what I do: - burn shallow and gently as you get high (no I mean literally), i.e. when the navball changes from Surface to Orbit mode, you should lower the thrust to about 1 G's worth and aim horizontally. - be going fast when you achieve apoapsis. When my apoapsis hits 70km, I'm usually going between 1850 and 2050 m/s. This means the circularization burn will be small and provide less opportunity to screw up your orbit. - achieve orbit in map view. This lets you see your Apoapsis, Periapsis, and general orbit shape without having to use MechJeb or KER. - the most important part: when BEHIND the Apoapsis, tilt the ship down; when PAST the Apoapsis, tilt up. If you hit the "magic" angle, you'll find that your Apoapsis itself remains unchanged. My circularization burns tend to start about 20 seconds before the Apoapsis with me angled down about 5 degrees, and end about 30 seconds after the Apoapsis with me angled up about 10 degrees. If you were already going fast as mentioned above, this burn will be small, so you can easily center it around the Apoapsis and precisely adjust your trajectory using low thrust without too much risk of sinking back into the atmosphere. I should probably make a video.

If it's true, then I'm glad to hear that carting Ore is more efficient, given the way I ended up constructing my Ore Bot and refining station:

Status update: no progress has been made for the last few days on account of busywork IRL, including getting back to work on my indie game project, StarBlast. And this coming week there's a big convention coming up, so Kidonia's voyage is on a small hiatus. Hopefully 1.1 will either not come out in the meantime or at least not break saves ^^; And Kidonia is currently at roughly 750 parts... and counting. Fully loaded it's projected to somewhere around 1200. P.S. I forgot to post it before, but I did send up a few ion probes aboard my new cargo spaceplane: Not really enough for a whole "real" update though.

If possible, could a mod merge this into http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/123458-Knights-of-Sidonia please? Just so we have one nice big place to talk about this without having to sort between physics discussions and general comments. So anyway, here's my answers to OP's comments: - Last I checked, the clasp formation isn't really to boost speed so much as keep the Guardians together. I suppose also it ensures that if one engine underperforms, that guy doesn't get left behind. - I don't think that Kidonia's engines are capable of producing more than 1 G (I may be wrong). My thinking is that the artificial gravity is running parallel to the engine. Assuming they don't have a way to flip it to negative, then as the engines power up, the artificial gravity can power down to maintain roughly 1 G. At full throttle, the engines' acceleration would provide all the artificial gravity - but if they went above that, yeah, people would get pancaked and buildings would collapse. Of course this only applies when both engines are firing symmetrically; fire one or the other and yeah, you'll get sideways gravity as shown in the manga / anime and the OP here. - I think they launched Guardians out of the front because they didn't have launchers in the back. Guardians can just fly around to the back anyway. - I have a bigger problem with the fact that the center of thrust on the Guardians seems to be way off center. - So they tried to save resources by making humans photosynthetic. But we still have the law of conservation of mass. Humans will still need to consume the same amount of matter to stay alive - it's just changed from conventional food to uh, other chemicals. 'Course I still loved the anime and the manga. I'm not a mecha person, but fortunately it's not overly heavy on the mecha motif.

http://parameciumkid.tumblr.com/post/127883215101

Nah, we're imaginary gamers. In fact this forum is entirely a product of your imagination. In reality, you are lying comatose on a hospital bed, alone, your family and friends having given up on you years ago. WAKE UP WAKE UP!

"rekerjiggered" xD Once either 1.1 comes out or Kidonia's mission finishes (whichever comes first) I'll look into trying this out.

-24 Go Team Zero!

24 / 10 for posting three ships. You suck.

312: Davy Kerman and his pirate ship, the Davy Kerman Krokodile machine, are tragically shipwrecked. The only remains found were of Davy Kerman's tongue. 314: Pie is invented (get it?). 314 (later that year): Kerbal shipbuilding techniques have advanced sufficiently to allow the construction of the largest and mightiest passenger ship ever. In honor of the recently invented new snack, it is named the Pie-tanic. Its maiden voyage goes well until it is suddenly attacked by the ghost of Davy Kerman and his crew. Due to Davy Kerman's lisp (as a result of his tongue surviving), he ends up pronouncing the word so that it sounds more like "pie-lets." From that day forward, people who drive ships are jokingly referred to as pie-lets (which would later have its spelling changed to "pilots").