cantab

I'm not sure what we should send them. Once we've got to the point of mutual comprehension we've probably already covered a lot of logic, mathematics, and computing. The head says send them descriptions of general relativity and quantum mechanics. The responses to that will be hugely enlightening for the philosophy of science. Will the alien civilization reply saying they know these theories as foobarism and blargle arglics, thus strongly suggesting that these theories are natural, inevitable, and 'true' (whatever that means)? Or will the aliens reply that they've never seen that approach before and have totally different theories that nonetheless agree equally with reality, telling us that there's not only one way to describe the universe? I can't claim to know the answer to that. The heart says send them the footage of Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon. That's what I think we should send. What I think we will send, though, is bullets and bombs.

61 (-)

I'll just repeat my main argument from the devnotes thread. Almost anything is better than the current state of affairs where an object sitting in front of you magically has its mass three feet away.

You can also estimate performance based on knowing the relative gravity and atmosphere density between Kerbin and your planet of interest. For example you can fairly easily work out speed under chute descent on Duna if you know it on Kerbin. It's also not uncommon to test a lander on the Mun or Minmus before going somewhere further away. Of course that approach has limits, it's never a perfect simulation.

While KSP's runway is on the short side, the more common problem is people building planes that are unable to rotate because the main gear are too far back, and therefore unable to generate enough lift because the wings don't reach enough of an angle of attack. I've had a similar issue with tailed delta aircraft which need a high angle-of-attack at takeoff and landing, since they require tall landing gear to attain that angle of attack without the tail being underground. But if you do need a short takeoff, another good option is STOVL operation with lift engines. That can significantly reduce takeoff speeds, while requiring fewer lift engines (or alternatively carrying more fuel or payload) than pure VTOL operation.

If we interpret factorials literally there have been a lot of invalid posts in this thread. Down to 54!

It really depends what the OP wants. A plane that is technically awesome? A plane that's "representative" - produced in large numbers and widely used? A plane that's actually been in dogfights? Or just something that looks dead cool? Different aircraft would meet those goals differently.

Scissors?

Not sure.KSP is somewhat unusual for performance. The CPU load is dominant and that CPU load depends primarily on what the player does - specifically, how many (and which) parts you put on your spacecraft. That means that the usual targets and metrics of x framerate at y resolution and z detail may not be as meaningful as with most games. Even on top-end hardware, if you go wild and make a thousand-part craft KSP will suffer severely low framerates; conversely if you spend all your time flying simple low-part-count ships the game will run smoothly even on pretty poor computers.

Got the OSes installed on my new comp. Still gotta copy a boatload of files over though. Down to 51.

One thing that I've sometimes done: Let a bit of science accumulate, then decided what my next mission is going to be, and unlocked parts to support that mission.

Heh, I read the first line completely the other way round, interpreting it as changing things from order into chaos. A goal?

While it's true that the "lever arm" for the arrangement in roll is short, the moment of inertia in roll will also be small, compared to pitch and yaw. The effects should at least partly cancel, so I'm not sure that can be the problem. If the engine has a gimbal and it's enabled that will give substantial pitch and yaw control authority when the engine is thrusting. It can easily be more potent than any sensible amount of RCS or reaction wheels. However the engine will not give any roll control unless it's the rapier or maybe the mammoth. That might account for the discrepancy.

Since you're supposed to say if you're adding or subtracting, the character requirement shouldn't matter. Down to 40.

With only 2 GB of RAM I couldn't consider either of those suitable for KSP. Both those examples are "hybrids", with a tablet and an attachable keyboard. Portability and performance are like a tablet. If you really want a hybrid you'll have to either ditch the idea of playing KSP on it or significantly up the budget. Otherwise I think you'd be better looking at conventional laptops. If you shop around and check your specs you might get something decent in budget. The Core i3-4005U seems like a pretty common processor to see and is probably the best you can expect and will run KSP pretty well I reckon. As for "Windows 8.1 with Bing", don't worry about it, there's a discussion here and it's basically the same as normal: http://www.howtogeek.com/195934/what-exactly-is-windows-8.1-with-bing-do-i-have-to-use-bing/

39 (-)

I think I'd pick Aviation, with the landing wheels. Then you can make a jet (or rocket) propelled rover and drive around KSC getting science from all the facilities, easily making back the science you spent and more. After that, there's a strong case for a lot of the nodes, but I think my highlights would be: General construction gives struts, obviously useful if you want to make rockets of any noticeable size. I think you'll already know if you want this or not. Electrics is a requirement for any probe work. Space Exploration gives you new experiments.

A bullet?

If all you care about is KSP, you'd probably be OK with the GT 730 GDDR5. The range is confusing though, with at least three specifications of GPU bearing the same number; look for the model using GDDR5 which will also have 384 CUDA cores.If other games might be an interest then of course pay more, get more.

The vast majority of aircraft should turn by banking, which allows the lift from the wings to pull them round. If you fly without SAS you just need to roll to your desired bank angle and the plane will turn naturally. If you're using SAS it will fight that natural turn so you'll need to guide the plane round yourself. For a more aggressive turn, bank steeply and pull up, that's the "fighter jet" approach. The rudder is used to control sideslip - whether the plane's nose is in line with the airflow or not - and not to make turns. That was the crucial discovery and invention of the Wright Brothers. Exceptions where you would turn with the rudder include an emergency where roll control is unavailable, steering on the ground, making *tiny* course adjustments, and some unusual aircraft types that are designed for rudder steering.

40 (-)

The thermal system shows evidence of using a fundamentally flawed algorithm for the purpose. In less technical terms, it's a crock of dung.

Yeah, just make it empty or nearly so and treat it as payload. An empty Thumper isn't too heavy, though it's kind of long. Put it atop a nice stable launcher, and if you like add/enlarge the fins on the bottom of the launcher.

Yet another player has lost days of progress in KSP simply by loading an old quicksave. As has been discussed KSP is quick to overwrite the persistent file in such scenarios. It's all very well to say the player should make backups, but people don't, and frankly KSP is giving us the rope to hang ourselves here. I feel it should be reasonably straightforward for KSP to give some protection for the player against this. One very simple approach would be to make a copy of the persistent.sfs when quickloading, call it before_quickload.sfs or something. There are countless other ways it could be done that would be better than how things currently behave.

Squad have generally been good at avoiding save breakage. I expect your ships will load and unless they were already very marginal they should perform as required, since nobody's expecting major part performance changes. I think that ISRU will still work, it will just be very slow without adequate heat dissipation as the converter throttles itself back to prevent overheating.