cantab

Those were the days. Back when ordinary-ish kids actually made websites. Sure, 90% of them were rubbish, but we tried. It was our own, we could do what we liked. Nowadays that's all gone, and everyone's just posting on Twitbook and whatever. Handing over our stuff to Somebody Else's Website.

While you're right, for Squad if they had waited until KSP was well optimised then they simply would not be selling a product today.

This is the attitude I think most non-conscription armies, and even some that use conscripts, today would take. Indeed, this scenario is pretty much exactly what Russia did after their pilots were shot down by Turkey. Russia sent out search-and-rescue helicopters, and one of those came under fire causing a further Russian death.

Where would I land, or where would I aim? Anyway, on a cursory glance Isidis Planitia looks like a good bet. It's the "bay" in Mars' northern basin, north of Hellas. It's one of the lower spots on Mars near the equator, and is a large flat area to target for the landing. Though not as deep as Hellas it's still pretty good. Gale Crater is a good bet if you can land as precisely as Curiosity did or better. The crater floor is actually pretty low, a shade lower than Isidis I think, and it's an area that has already been geologically characterised. If you can land in Gale Crater, you can also land in the Valles Marineris. That could be a great area to study. However I'd be concerned, is there a chance of ongoing slides on the canyon walls?

You know the round or sometimes star shaped "bullet point" next to the thread title? Yeah...that's the first unread post link. Yeah...the forum bans swearing, or I'd say what I really think.

Descending our stairway from heaven, the angels of the minus take the number down to thirteen.

Well I'm something of an ion man myself. If you're OK with the TWR and you have high delta-V needs they trounce the nerva utterly. You try getting 20 km/s with nervs. The original question of a "shuttle" that's making multiple trips does skew things somewhat. In that usage fuel mass per trip matters more, and that's where the nuke can shine even if it means a slightly heavier craft overall. But people are talking about 10, 20 tons. To me that's heavy for a lander. You'll run that with a big ISRU setup, a lot of Kerbals, or just being showy, but you can get much lighter. My Moho lander for example was under 4 tons, putting a nuke engine on that would just be plain silly.

I'll add the starting caveat that comparing specs is really no substitute for actual benchmarks. 128 shader cores is in the range of things not a lot. On desktops an R7 240 costing about £50 has more than double that. The assessment that you will be limited to older or less demanding games is a fair one. KSP and Minecraft easily qualify as such. If you crank the settings, including the display resolution, down you can play fancier stuff too - I've seen Skyrim running on that 6410 chip for example. But it's a bit marginal.

Did the forum move kill the Riddles? I suspect Nemrav got it with cookie cutter anyway.

Down to 17.

It's disappointing how vague and general LEGO have been, declining to say exactly why the individual projects have been declined. Means people don't really know how to improve things. The new mini-ISS looks like a great design but I'm left doubting it will see the light of day however many votes it gets. I think we're all better off just coming up with our own designs,

"Radeon" is just AMD's graphics brand. Any laptop with an AMD processor is going to tout "Radeon R-Whatever graphics" and some laptops will use a dedicated AMD chip and they run the usual range from merely-functional display to high-performance gaming graphics. So you need to do your research and find out what the actual performance of the specific processor is. With KSP as an interest I do think you'd be better with an Intel chip though. On the kind of money I would spend for a pre-teen you won't be getting a dedicated graphics chip, but decent Intel integrated graphics will handle KSP and Minecraft just fine. (So will decent AMD integrated). The main thing to remember with laptops is it's a case of price, performance, compactness - pick any two. So steer well clear of "2-in-1s" (which are tablets with keyboard docks), cheap ultra-slims and similar. As far as Unity development goes, I think he'll appreciate a decent resolution screen. You can just plug into a monitor when at home, but if that's not going to be practical then I'd really try and get a laptop with a 1080p display. Working on less will feel cramped and annoying.

Intel Xeons and AMD Opterons are marketed for servers. The actual processors run the gamut from basically-a-Core-i5 up to specialised many-core monsters and other processors designed for use in multi-CPU systems. But for your needs there's no real reason to choose a Xeon over a Core iWhatever, just get what offers good performance in budget. RAM speed I don't think is that critical to servers. RAM type is more important, you might want to use ECC RAM for insurance against certain types of data corruption. If server downtime would be A Problem, consider RAID drives for availability. Remember though RAID is not backup. RAID is for keeping your system running, backups are for keeping your data safe. If your users won't mind the server being down for however long it takes to replace a broken drive then you don't need RAID. If you rent a server then you probably won't be dealing with the nitty-gritty of the hardware. You just need an idea of the CPU, RAM, and storage needs. I would at least consider the 4 GB model. One review found the extra VRAM rarely made an impact, didn't often help, but in the AC: Unity 1080p test it did up the fps a bunch. I also expect games in future to want more VRAM. That said, I don't think it's worth paying over the odds for the extra VRAM. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-nvidia-geforce-gtx-960-2gb-vs-4gb-review As far as the CPUs go, the 4170 will edge it on single-threaded performance so will run KSP a bit better, though if the 4770HQ's full turbo kicks in the difference will be slight. Cities: Skylines might well run better on the laptop provided you drop the detail so as not to tax the Intel graphics. Anything with fancy graphics will be able to run much higher details on the desktop with the GTX 960.

If chutes are breaking when deployed below 300 m/s on Duna that does seem like a bug. Landing on Duna with only main chutes should be possible with a craft generating enough drag for its mass before chute deployment. Airbrakes are an excellent way to do that, or a winged re-entry vehicle could work, or just something very light such as most probes.

The ability to put nothing but the number, as was the case on the old forum, does allow a shorter link. That has its uses. To be honest it seems a bit odd that the new forum software is happy with the dash and then anything, but not happy with nothing.

Down to 16

RCS for emergency propulsion, now there's something every KSPer knows

If you have the relevant folders on a network share that all PCs can access then yes, no problem. In the Unix world symlinks are really routine.

Down to 17.

Favourite car? Now there's a tough one. The Jaguar E-Type is fabulous, that's a good one to start with: The Range Rover is a good candidate for all around the best car there is, but I wouldn't call it my favourite, it's nice to be in but lacks really appealing style to look at.

The forum is showing an embedded Youtube video in someone's signature. Probably not intended by the user and IMHO definitely something that should be disabled by the forum.

Whoever thought that was good interface design deserves to be taken out back and beaten with a clue-by-four. (Someone at IPS, I assume.) Who the heck expects to click on what looks like a bullet point???

Certainly possible. Simplest approach is whole KSP folder on the NAS, and map that as a drive on your computers. The chief drawback is one settings.cfg for all PCs, which is an issue if you have different OSes or hardware setups. Better might be to mount the Gamedata and saves folders, while keeping the rest of the install including the settings.cfg on the local PC; that will also speed up loading a bit.

Back on topic. As mentioned a fair few rockets can do this in theory. But will any do it in practice? It seems like Elon's making an off-the-cuff comment, I doubt there's any real plans, but I do think SpaceX has a better position than some because they've made their success by focussing on comparative mass production. If SpaceX want to move into the small-payload market beyond what they can do by offering "piggyback" rides on a larger launches, then a F9 SSTO might be considerably cheaper for them to develop and operate than a smaller multistage design.

I suspect, but cannot prove, that the 502 issue was down to load. That makes it difficult to catch in testing; you can simulate to an extent but it's hard to be sure.