cantab

Agreed. KSP still wants fast single-threaded performance, and that means a modern fast-clocked Intel CPU. When flying a single rocket I think more than two cores won't help, but with multiple ships around it might. So good CPUs for KSP at various prices including Pentium G3258, i3-6100, i5-6500, i5-6600K. And i7-6700K if you don't want to overclock (because it's the fastest around at stock speeds). Don't get an Athlon 860K, or any other AMD processor, if you play KSP a lot.

For Shuttle launches, the exclusion zone was a few miles. The launch control build is 3.5 miles from the pad.

What I really dislike are bad comedies. A bad action movie, sci-fi, thriller, or many other genres can still be fun to watch. But a bad comedy just falls flat. Being dragged along to a few too many such bad comedies by family is honestly why I hardly watch any films at all any more.

Yeah, isn't the smallest wheel more or less this? Though I suppose what there is a place for is a castering wheel, or option on the existing wheels. So it just pivots to match the direction the vehicle is going in.

https://flic.kr/p/GbwT2K See the "blister" holding the reaction wheel and battery? That's something I put on a lot of rockets, usually to mount a probe core (including on this rocket, round the other side) on either the first or second stage in a way that's aerodynamically streamlined but not completely hidden. Controlling from that probe core during ascent reduces SAS overcompensation when the rocket flexes.

"A black hole of 4.5 × 1022 kg (about the mass of the Moon, or about 13 micrometers across) would be in equilibrium at 2.7 kelvin, absorbing as much radiation as it emits." - Wikipedia What that means is that for a particle collider to create a stable black hole, it would need to be powered by a moon made of antimatter. Or, to put it another way, if you made a Dyson Sphere round the Sun absorbing all its energy output, and you waited for several hundred thousand years, you'd have charged up enough power for that particle collider to make one black hole. The speed of light squared is a BIG number.

It has to deal with the aerodynamic forces involved in super and hypersonic flight.

The most common one is about particle colliders in general, when someone says "It's like trying to learn how watches work by smashing two watches together." To which I respond, what happens in the LHC is like if you smashed two watches together and you got out the pieces to make a kettle and a toaster. The energy in the particle collisions is so great that it drives E=mc2 backwards and creates new matter. LHC didn't find a Higgs boson, it made one.

You noticed incorrectly. The first Soviet space capsules were indeed spherical, but the part of the Soyuz that re-enters the atmosphere is somewhat conical. Only the Red bit on this mockup re-enters the atmosphere: It's not as "pointy" as the American designs, but it offers some of the same advantages - such a capsule has a preferred direction to travel in and can be somewhat steered and even generate lift to reduce g-forces. A spherical re-entry capsule does work, and has the advantage that it offers maximum interior volume for minimum hull mass which is why the Soviets originally chose it and still use it for the Soyuz Orbital Module that doesn't survive re-entry, but it gives no control or lift during re-entry, increasing g-forces and reducing landing precision.

From an old roleplaying group I was in, a few of us worked together on the system with myself leading. http://facebooknations.wikia.com/wiki/Rocan%C3%A1-%C4%81-Megha And we have a few planet renders. Wesson: http://fineartamerica.com/featured/2-artists-concept-of-an-extraterrestrial-frieso-hoevelkamp.html Abdimant (storm-clouded) was my work. Habitable world with distinctive red vegetation, as has been hypothesised for worlds orbiting blue stars. The continuous equatorial ocean generates strong storm, though I don't know if this is realistic. It rotates just over twice as fast as Earth, and I devised a suitable civil time system for Earthling colonists, in which each civil day takes in two local solar days. The render isn't great, I just put a different colourscheme on the heightmap and then used that as the planet texture in Celestia. But it does the job. Map: https://flic.kr/p/GJMfgZ Monier. https://flic.kr/p/GJM2gR I don't know the source of the Monier image, it was found lying by the side of the internet.

Wiki has the 1973 DEC version as the earliest with graphics, and mentions that "Sophisticated players could achieve a landing on the mountain while cheaters learned the address of the word of memory in which the fuel value was stored. Later versions offered the ability to launch the game from RT-11 and added an Easter egg: a specific landing site offered a McDonald's restaurant." Deliberately going for the tricky landing, using infinite fuel, in-game Easter eggs - not much changes does it. The best known Lunar Lander is probably the Atari arcade version from 1979.

I'm going with the "blown back to the Stone Age" scenario. A dwindling species of tool-using, hunter-gatherers with no advanced technology to speak of, living on a planet stripped of the natural resources that would let such advanced technology be developed. I say nothing about how we reach that state though. It need not be a single catastrophe, but could be a more progressive collapse of civilization. And humanity could well have colonised the planets and stars before it all goes wrong.

There have been many space games with realistic physics, including the grand daddy of them all, Spacewar! But I believe KSP is the first game to combine realistic spaceflight physics with build-your-own-vehicle gameplay.

As I understand it most modern GPUs support *one* analogue output. It might be a VGA port, or it might be a DVI-I port that you can use an adapter with to run a VGA monitor. So running your monitor should be fine, but running two of them might be a problem.

Yes it does. Returning those experiments to Kerbin is quite the challenge.

Raindrops are "self-stabilizing" because they're fluids and will take whatever shape the balance of forces dictate.

Yo dawg, I heard you like to rocket, so I put a rocket in your rocket so you can rocket while you rocket.

And it's a customised one-off thing with all the extra R&D and manufacturing expenses that entails. SpaceX's approach is mass production.

1) I believe it's happened. You can argue it's bad piloting and the pilots should act differently, but bad piloting happens. 5) Truth In Television to an extent. People climb out of what look like huge wrecks in modern cars *because* the car has crumple zones to reduce the g-forces on the occupants.

For different needs, http://sqlitebrowser.org/ might be good. I think SQLite Browser will be more suited to learning, testing, and tinkering with database files. Something like LibO Base, or indeed MS Access, is more suited to making a front end application. (Indeed, if you want you can make Libreoffice Base use SQLite or any of several other databases for its back-end storage.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon#Variations Indeed the "easy" way to sort the aerodynamics out is to have the dense secondary in the nose, and the lighter primary behind it. The opposite arrangement allows a bigger secondary for more boom, but probably requires ballasting and makes designing the primary harder. (The secondary usually has a load of uranium, hence the weight)

I don't think anything is confirmed other than "Elon wants to drop a probe on Mars in 2018." As for powering a scientific payload, couldn't it open the hatch and deploy solar arrays that way, if the exterior aerodynamics need to be unchanged?

Oh, the GECK came out for FO4? Neat. But I'm pretty sure it's already had a very strong modding community. As for KSP, I'd say that while Squad haven't been specifically helpful towards modders, they haven't been actively obstructive either. That I think is the best approach for most game developers, and probably the approach most take. Squad had enough to do making the core game after all.

2012 or maybe The Core. Or most disaster movies really. The earthquake and flight scene in 2012 was so ridiculous I burst out laughing in the cinema.

A promising market I think would be business jets. Some of the kind of people who already own or lease private jets, in part because they let you avoid the checkin and security waits, might be prepared to pay more for something faster. There are currently several supersonic business jet plans, though none yet in production.