Jacke

I'm feeling very meh about KSP 2. I also can't vote because the options are no where near what I think about KSP 2. For an example, take the upcoming Odyssey update for Elite: Dangerous. It's just be announced this week that it will only be walking on planets that will be added. The feature people wanted more, being able to get out of the seat in the cockpit and move around their spacecraft, will be a no-show at launch. And there's other signs that far too little has been completed for something that should be releasing in a little over half-a-year. As for KSP 2, it's kind of the same. Sure, a lot of things have been shown. But there's also a lot of unknown. And to boot, there's all this drama that happened. We'll have to see KSP 2 in near-complete or release versions before we can properly judge it.

Never said it was right for the others. Never said I support Apple or Google here. I say a pox on all 3 houses. There's no such thing as a free lunch. I'm Canadian, so I don't have to pay directly when I visit a doctor. But my taxes pay for it. The benefit comes from being single-payer health care. And here's another cliché that's also true: who pays the piper calls the tune. Epic isn't giving away money. They're using their deep pockets to exert control. For Epic's benefit, not ours. Then why do people who know the game industry well and have followed it for years think this is not all sunshine and roses, like Jim Sterling and Yong Yea. <snip> I actually don't have a dog in this hunt, as I've not been interested in the games affected by all this flinging around of exclusives. But I see that this is all about restricting open marketplaces for games for these corporations own benefits. It applies to all parties. Google and Apple want to keep what control they've established (with Apple being more restrictive) and their revenue streams. Epic doesn't want to give Google and Apple a cut of their revenue stream. And Epic's campaign of being the people's true altruistic champion in 2020 is as honest as Apple's was in 1984, as in not at all for both. And both are insulting comparing themselves to far graver threats portrayed in _1984_. Anti-trust arguments are very complex here. Part of Apple's motivation for their tight set-up is security. It's true, but it also benefits Apple financially. I suspect the solutions that will be right will be very close to those that put limits on interest rates. I'm at least wise enough to know that all these corporations aren't my friend and very few of their actions are for my benefit.

This isn't so much about Epic particularly as about people and corporations in general. When they need to break into a market, when they need to compete, that's when they do the most for the end customers, the common people who use their product. But as both get successful and rich, most degrade into less altruistic behaviour and outright selfishness and greed. There are a few that remain more principled, but it's damn rare. Epic already crossed the line when they started bribing developers and publishers for Epic Store exclusives. I fully expect them to continue down the messy path well trod before. As far as I can tell, both the Apple Store and Google Play are not common carriers. They're not required to allow any to use their service and can provide reasonable restrictions on those who want to sell their games via their stores. There are problems with restrictions. But there are also benefits. I see no way that a legal decision for Epic in these cases will benefit us in the long run.

This is the act of the desperate. Never think the enemy of your enemy is your friend. They may do some things that benefit you, but never think them your friend. This is a complex situation. Even changing the base case isn't necessarily good. And this becomes a precedence that can go to surprising cases. I don't know enough about all this to be sure this change can't be twisted to make things worse.

Lots of interesting ideas in this topic. I definitely would like to change the stock tech tree to allow a more historical career. After much thought, I think a good way to do this is Don't change the existing nodes and interconnects, so it's more familiar. Move as few parts as possible to new tech nodes, like the Stayputnik and others to Start. Incorporate using missions to unlock new nodes and even consider removing science for this purpose. Avoid if possible creating new nodes and interconnects. If 4 can't be followed, go with something with wide support, like the Community Tech Tree and apply 1 through 3 to changing it. I think these limits are needed to keep upkeep of a tech tree mod manageable. While a highly customized tech tree gives great power, it's also a pain and an effort to maintain.

It comes down to having a production team with enough ideas + support + money to convince the owners of a franchise and a broadcast network to go for it. Sometimes they let a weak set of ideas go through. Prequels are especially difficult, worse when they're closely coupled to the previous series. Star Trek: Nemesis was part of the momentum of keeping TNG cast in films. The stories were all weak and flawed. Nemesis just was the worst one. It's been too long for Star Trek: Enterprise. Production staff and cast have moved on. Shows very rarely get restored this long after. "Twin Peaks" was an exception and it was a mixed bag of good and not so good and it started from a much better place.

I started playing KSP back in v0.23, 2014 January-February. I was very turned off with the state of KSP career. Couldn't start with uncrewed probes ?!? So I soon found Better Than Starting Manned. Which became the way I played KSP for the next 2 years. It was an amazing community. Shame that a forum bug ate the topic, never to be seen again (of the hundreds of pages of the topic, only a few preserved by the Wayback Machine). But I struggled with KSP 0.23's very irritating weak joints and the wobbly rockets. Almost broke me getting my first rocket in a BTSM career to orbit (no struts available). So as I was metamodding BTSM, I incorporated MechJeb, which helped me keep my sanity until KSP fixed those weak joints. Alas, when the massive fiddling of KSP 0.90 to 1.0.5 wore out the developer of BTSM, it stopped development. And I watched KSP improve. Still trying to adapt to that change, now over 6 years ago.

I dislike simplistic tech systems that industrialize R&D into grind out points, put points into machine, get tech back. Real world tech improvements also need existing tech to be used to find out what works and what works better. I want that in KSP. The contract system and its missions give a mechanism to do this. I've wanted to put out a mod that would do this for a while.

Star Trek has always been of variable quality, some very good, some bad. But things started going bad overall when Star Trek: Enterprise was broadcast in 2001. People focused on trivial differences like the opening credits music when the real rot was deeper and widespread. I and others have gone over above where Enterprise started going wrong. It was a prequel that fiddled too much. Warped the Vulcans. Way too much stupid time travel plot lines. And then the break was spread with the film "Star Trek: Nemesis" in 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Nemesis As a friend of mine said, it was 90% a good Star Trek film. But that bad 10% was damning. Blow up Romulus. Silly Picard clone. Kill off Data with a lame out to perhaps bring him back. And then the damn "Star Trek" (2009) doubled down on this. Stupid red matter to make instant black holes. Destroy Vulcan (damn Vulcans can't catch a break) in a way that can't happen. And more stupid time travel stuff. And every time we hope there's going to be an improvement, new Star Trek just doubles-down on the wrong. This is a franchise that has had 2 decades of trashing. It's going to take something amazing to recover. It's still possible, as the Orville has shown. Maybe some day....

It's also Epic suing Google due to be removed from the Google Play store for the same reasons. These are all very rich corporations who are fighting over who gets all the money. None of them are good.

I wish Firefox had two sidebars (and I don't know why they don't do that), because I'd use one for tabs and the other for bookmarks. As it is, since every window has many tabs, I just have to put the tab bar in the traditional top position and the bookmarks in the sidebar. In KSP, I used to use the mod to slide the navball to the side before it was stock. And like @Superfluous J, one of the first things I do when setting up KSP to slide the navball to the side just to get it away from the valuable screen centre.

I find the best way to use the navball is to imagine it's actually a bowl. NavHud takes this even farther, projecting onto the sky around the craft. I also as much as possible build my spacecraft balanced to remove coupling between RCS translation and attitude changes. RCS Build Aid is great for help with this. I try to move fuel tanks to the middle of the spacecraft and balance heavy things like batteries above and below the Centre of Gravity. To keep what side is what straight on spacecraft, I use Indicator Lights. Red for left side, green for right, white for top, blue for bottom.

Sometimes it's just things wearing out. Most often, I'd say. But considering we reached peak toaster over 70 years ago, at least in this case, they really do don't make 'em like they used to.

I'm reminded of a comment by Mr Nobody, breaking the 4th wall, about the DC series "Doom Patrol" 1st series, paraphrased: You've put up with 13 hours of pretentious character development, here's the 2 hours of action you've been waiting for. And the Neil Armstrong biography film just recently as well. There's good stories that can be told about space exploration. Alas, it seems most of them are overdramatic.

Every time they've put a vessel in orbit and expected it to stay there, orbiting spacecraft, comm network satellites, etc. Mass concentrations equivalent to the mascons on the Moon prevent stable low orbits.

Rightly so. It's a excrementse film that has real crap science all over. As mentioned in some video, often sounds like Hans Zimmer fell asleep on his keyboard. I did like some of the sound track. I wish it had been used on a better film. The science and engineering is so bad I really didn't like it at all. Another case of Hollywood not even bothering to do a bit of effort to get things right.

There's the reaction to something different. Then there's the reaction to the weakness of a new show that often has to have the writing staff and actors grow into and adjust the show and the characters. That does happen with almost every new series in a franchise. But succeeding shows can be very bad too. Example: Crusade as a sequel series to Babylon 5. That was obviously a writing staff forgetting those it was a successor show that still needed to make its name. And it died after 13 episodes. But Enterprise was much weaker than the previous Star Trek shows. It was a prequel and they are very challenging to fit into an existing franchise internal history without messing up. They also had a major time travel arc and time travel again is hard to do well (not so hard if done overall and glibly like older Doctor Who). Some Enterprise features I learned to appreciate after the fact, like the much different opening credits. But it was still a substandard Star Trek show in the most part. And then we've gotten Star Trek Discovery and Picard. STD, I gave up on that after a single series. As with any bad show, there are bright spots, like Anson Mount as Captain Pike, who I heard about despite the crappiness of the rest of the show. In fact, I think I heard that so much because people wanted to point at a good feature. But STD is a excrementse show. Reworked and destroyed the Klingons, etc. Well, STD is now likely effectively cancelled. Picard was marginally better, but still lacking and disrespectful. Willing to strip mine and destroy previous Star Trek characters. I won't expect to see another Picard series either. Red Letter Media have dissected both of these series if you want more details by people who know Star Trek well.

Good to have you back. I'm just getting back as well. That's going to be mostly up to you to change, as it is with everyone. Make a rover, fly rover to Mun, find a arc and drive over it.

Since we're talking about SpaceX suits, how about something I noticed back at DM-2 launch: those all-black suits the pad crew wear. Consider one of the greatest threats is a pad fire. I don't know what those suits are made from, it could be fire resistant. But unlike naval anti-flash gear.... ...the SpaceX pad crew are in all-black outfits that will get hotter faster in a fire.

Trying to make sense of "Interstellar" will only lead to crazy theories and madness because.... ...there's so much plot manipulation and deus ex machina it's not funny. It's an insult to science.

I can appreciate @Vanamonde's position on Enterprise. I hated that "Temporal Cold War" arc and it together with other things led me to not care about keeping up with Enterprise, so I didn't see most episodes. Sure, there were some good episodes. But so much damaged to Star Trek canon due to writing laziness or barely concealed hubris, hard to tell which. Enterprise only looks "good" when it gets compared to the recent films ("Star Trek" (2009) and its 2 sequels), Discovery, and Picard, which double and triple down on the bad aspects of Enterprise and totally ruin Star Trek.

Any spherically symmetric distribution of mass acts as if it was all concentrated at the centre of the sphere. And if you "spread" the mass around in a significantly non-symmetric way, you get the effect of Mascons on the Moon: virtually no stable low orbits. This isn't a good idea at all.

Try compressing it, especially with 7zip.

"Star Trek Beyond" worse than "Star Trek Into Darkness" ?!? Wow. I'd not watched Beyond as I'm no fan of this warped product of the Age of Abrams (I hated the 2009 starter) but I'd heard it was better. I might have to watch it. But pre-2009 Star Trek is so much better. Even that horrid last film, Nemesis.

This is the least of Into Darkness's problems. It's riddled through and through with bad characters, bad dialog, etc. O.o It created a past history out of so much stuff stolen from Star Trek TOS. I hated "Star Trek" (2009) but Into Darkness plunged right off the cliff. It's so bad that despite the 3rd recent Star Trek film not being that bad, the crap of Into Darkness killed everything off. There will not be a 4th film in this dumpster-fire series.