cantab

I take my mallet and whack-a-mole all your pieces into holes under their board squares.

Fox does a barrel role then shoots down your global hawk.

My Meta Knight "Smashes" your engineer.

First I would try and establish if you are crashing due to Out Of Memory (OOM) errors, or some other cause. You can do this by monitoring KSP's memory usage as you play, I think there are even mods that will help you. If you are OOM crashing, then switching to 64-bit KSP will help. Even if you only have 4 GB of physical RAM because the 32-bit limit includes other stuff too. On my old PC with 4 GB of RAM I ran multiple large planet packs on 64-bit KSP on Linux without a problem, and the exact same installation wouldn't even load to the main menu running the 32-bit version. Unfortunately going to 64-bit isn't easy. You could shelve KSP and wait for 1.1, but then mods will need updating for that too. You could install Linux and KSP on that, but an entire operating system just for one game is a rather big step. Or you could try the Windows 64-bit hack but that has its own bugs that might make the game crash therefore defeating the point. If, on the other hand, your current installation is crashing without the memory usage being at the limit, 64-bit won't help. I would first check the base KSP install isn't corrupted, Steam can do that or if you aren't using Steam just redownload and unzip into a new folder. Then check you have the latest versions of all your mods correctly installed - and I strongly advise *not* using CKAN because it has a record of messing up. Then you will need to accept that one of your mods is crashing your game, and identify it by trial removal. Finally if you do identify a trouble mod, try using a previous version of it instead! It's perfectly possible for any software at all, including KSP mods, to get an "update" that makes it worse.

KSP isn't your average game. It's very poorly multithreaded*, CPU-heavy, and GPU-light. CPU load goes up the more parts you have on your vehicle. That means your CPU's single-threaded performance is king, and that means that a modern fast-clocked Intel processor will run KSP much better than anything AMD offer. (* Contrary to widespread belief, KSP is multithreaded, it's just that 90% of the work is on one thread.) And to be honest the a10-7850 is a firmly budget processor. It's not awful, but you shouldn't be at all surprised when it has troubles running some games even if you have a good graphics card. And if you're relying on the integrated graphics, well you're pretty much on the bottom rung of the gaming hardware ladder.

Well, then The Force Awakens would have been released in 1999.

To me maths is fundamentally about proving things based on other things. You start with some "definitions" which serve to explain what you are talking about, and some "axioms" which are things you either think are obviously true or decide that for the sake of argument they're true. Then you work out what the consequences are. The axioms are often really basic stuff. For example one of the "Peano axioms" of arithmetic states that x = x. Or one of Euclid's axioms of geometry is that you can draw a single unique circle with any centre and any radius. But from that kind of thing entire areas of mathematics can be built up and surprising and unexpected results proven. In some branches of mathematics those definitions and axioms are based on real-world experience, and that usually makes the maths useful for solving real-world problems. But that's not required.

A good effort, but now it's time for my own entry in the fireworks contest.

I quit watching the sport after Ecclestone paid the German government to drop charges of bribery against him.

I reload my previous save before the nuke went off.

My pieces jump in their Formula One cars and make a quick getaway using their DRS.

My Queen uses steal, removing a key component from the B-52 making it fall to pieces. She then throws an Arctic Wind at the opposing position.

I skilfully steer the snake around gobbling up those three pieces then make for the enemy back rank.

The King fires off a quake up the track, knocking your pawns skywards and speeding past.

My King jumps in a JCB Fastrac and does a power lap of the circuit, easily outpacing your inferior slow tractor and getting points. Loo-zerrrrrrrr!

Yes, shining a light out the back of a spaceship will produce thrust. It will give acceleration that makes an ion drive look like a top fuel dragster, but it will work. If you power it using fuel stored on the ship, though, it's not the most efficient method. Much better is to contrive a way to use the spent fuel as propellant. If you power it using solar panels, I'm pretty sure the radiation pressure on the solar panels will necessarily be several times the thrust of the light.

Whereas me, even if I had a laptop, I'd still rather do my recreation and productivity with my proper monitors and keyboard. For what it's worth, http://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator reckons Norcalplanner's build will only use 300 Watts or so even under load, which puts my 550-650 Watt recommendation right in the efficiency butter zone.

Alphasus wasn't recommending 60% efficiency, he was recommending a system that under load draws only 60% of the PSU's rated wattage. That said, when you aren't gaming your PC may well be practically idling. PSUs tend to fall off in efficiency at idle, though the absolute wattage losses are necessarily small. Anyway, I'd say go for a quality 550-650 Watt supply. That will cover virtually any single-GPU system. There are many "semi passive" power supplies now, that only turn their fan on when they need it, meaning one less noise source when the PC is not heavily loaded.

... and down onto the atomic level. Which is kind of pointless really, because none of the buildings are useful for anything else. The building is a semiconductor fab ...

My side constructs additional pylons then sends a pawnling rush at the enemy.

You get paid your winnings, but then the casino's "muscle" push you out and tell card-counters like you not to bother returning. Bishop c5.

Callisto is probably the best bet because it at least doesn't need a radiation shield. Regarding global warming potential, keep in mind it's defined based on Earth. Many gases are effective warmers on Earth because they "close the window", absorbing wavelengths that carbon dioxide and water vapour let through. Building an atmosphere from scratch the considerations will be different and a mixture of gases will be needed. More direct, though, is a big lens or mirror in space. There may also be a significant contribution from the waste heat thrown off by whatever machinery is making the atmosphere. The next question is what is the atmospheric escape like? "Jeans escape" is the loss of gas molecules that are travelling above the escape speed of the body they are on, and so if they are in the exosphere they fly off and never come back. On Earth it is very slow for anything but hydrogen and helium. But on Callisto, supposing an Earth-like exosphere temperature of 1000 K, it will be faster. The full formula is complicated, but it looks like Callisto would lose oxygen a thousand times faster than Earth loses hydrogen. So I think around 100 million tonnes a year will stream off into space. Doing a little more maths, though, that is only about 1 millionth of the likely total mass of a Callistan atmosphere. So despite the atmosphere being totally unstable on geological timescales, if we can make it then keeping it "topped up" should be trivial.

I cast my line out and hook the opposing kingside knight, and begin reeling it in.

... but hasn't been maintained in decades and is almost falling down. The building is indestructible ...

However, my King gets a codec call tipping him off. Out of sight of the enemy, he disguises himself by hiding under a cardboard box while a few pawns lay claymore mines on the adjacent squares.