LaytheAerospace

Didn't say we shouldn't make an effort. I'm saying that you're not going to eliminate the problem. All public figures deal with unpleasant people. And more will wander in and spout their vitriol to replace the ones that wandered off. You cannot stop unpleasant people from being unpleasant. You can, and should, refuse to give them a stage to shout their vitriol. But it is inevitable that you're going to deal with it anyway. If this really weren't inevitable, we'd be having a very different conversation. As it is, we're both discussing the inevitability of this issue. I just pointed out that this behavior should be expected, if not tolerated, because there are a lot of asshats and you can't stop them from being asshats.

I think you just found out why WinSXS is not useless. The OS needs it to function correctly (or at all in some cases). It's very likely a lot of things broke in subtle (or not so subtle) ways you simply didn't notice, or that later got fixed. The specific use of the WinSXS folder is to handle version conflicts in libraries used by the stuff you've installed. Deleting it will simply remove the libraries required by those programs, and they'll break. The more stuff you've installed, the more devastating removing the WinSXS folder will be. Right after a fresh Windows install, removing it probably won't have much impact. Do it on a computer that's been in use for a few years and you'll probably end up reinstalling the OS to fix all the problems caused.

That would be nice, sure. I also shouldn't have to deal with people cutting me off in traffic when there's a mile of empty space behind me, but I do. The world is what it is. Any public figure anywhere needs a thick skin. This isn't unique to gaming communities, though I'd argue that it's more important here than in some other spaces. Gamers tend to care very deeply, and when people who care this much get upset, they get really upset. Just look back to some of the responses the KSP community had to the Curse partnership. Or some of the particularly enthusiastic debates about the merits of MechJeb and whether or not people using it should be scorned. No rational person would think I was speaking for every single gamer. I'm speaking in generalities about the nature of the community, and being hyperbolic to boot. It's not meant to be taken literally. You didn't really think I was making an assertion that every gamer in the world is a bad person, did you? The truth is that the gaming community as a whole is a hostile place. Individual people and communities can obviously be different, but there is a very real problem. It's so ingrained in our culture that we invented our own word for people who intentionally try to ruin other peoples' experiences, 'griefer.' Gaming conventions are fraught with harassment (particularly of the sexual variety). New players are routinely victimized and given derogatory labels to highlight the fact that they aren't as good as the others yet. Sure, not everybody is part of the problem. But the problem is real. Congratulations on not being part of it. Didn't say it was. I'm saying: 1: It's impossible to please everyone. 2: Gaming communities contain some number of extremely irrational people. 3: Extremely irrational people do extremely irrational things when displeased. Thus, public figures in gaming are going to have to deal with irrational people at least occasionally, and it's probably going to be very unpleasant (the crazies don't come out in force to praise you). It's unfortunate, but it's not possible to force everyone to be nice. Crazies are going to be crazy. Of course. I never said the abuse should be tolerated. I just said it is inevitable.

You've got to have seriously thick skin to be a public figure in gaming. Gamers are brutal, vicious people with no tolerance for deviation from their personal idea of perfection. It's not possible to please everyone, and you shouldn't try. You'll spend the effort and still get yelled at by a bunch of angry teenagers in the end, plus some additional hate for "selling out," which these days translates roughly to "made a decision I didn't agree with."

Theories are backed by data. This isn't even a hypothesis, because those are testable. What you have here is an idea, one that not really new at all. In fact, there was a very popular movie back in 1999 that featured simulated reality as a central plot point. I bet you've seen it. Here's the short version of my response: Here are some of the most obvious issues, but it's by no means exhaustive. No we aren't. Not even remotely. Not only can we not simulate things with perfect fidelity, a hard requirement for this to be true (we could detect errors, and have been looking for decades), the computers aren't close to powerful enough to simulate anything of any real size. Moore's Law isn't magic, nor is it really a law. There are practical limits to what you can do with any technology, and we're getting damn close to the end of the road for silicon computer chips. Most industry experts, including Moore himself, are astonished it's held up as long as it has. It's very likely we'll see the end of Moore's Law at 5nm, which Intel projects will hit the consumer space in 2020. After that, we'll need something new. Graphene is promising, but expecting consumer products in time to pick up the slack from Si in another ten years, when not one graphene product is yet on the market, is a techno-polyannaism. The hard truth is that in the very near future, computers are going to stop advancing as quickly as they have in the past. But forget about the future, what about today? Just how far off are we from doing something like this? Let's think for a moment about how to store the data to represent the state of the universe. Let's say that we've got some compression algorithm that's so good it's mathematically impossible, storing all information about an atom with a single byte, with no overhead to read or write. Position, momentum, spin, charge, temperature, quantum states, chemical bonds, vibration, all in one byte. Further, we'll say there's nothing in the universe but atoms (laughably false, 96% of the universe isn't even matter, and atoms themselves are quite complex arrangements of even smaller particles, which are themselves made up of even smaller particles). So, for every atom that exists in the universe you want to simulate, you need exactly one byte of storage. I'd use bits instead of bytes to be even more generous, but I don't want to deal with the factor of 8. I'm going to write out each number the long way so the sheer size sinks in. Okay, so how much storage is that? Well, as it happens there are around this many atoms in the universe (10^80) 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 And the largest hard drives store around this many bytes (4 * 10^12) 4,000,000,000,000 So, just to store the data for the simulation, you need this many of the largest hard drives in the world (10^80 / (4 * 10^12) == 2.5 * 10^67): 25,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 That number is too big for human minds to comprehend. Literally, it's meaningless to us. Even a number like a million is too much for us, but that's a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion million. So let's say we can build these hard drives for free, and they weigh a nanogram. Just how much is that? Unsurprisingly, a lot. 10^67 hard drives at 0.000000001 grams each has a mass equal to this many Suns ((2.5 * 10^67 / (10^15)) / (1.98 * 10^30) == 1.25 * 10^22): 12,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 This is a billion times more massive than the most massive thing ever observed, which is a whole galaxy, APM 08279+5255. So just to store the data needed in this impossibly easy scenario stacked in your favor by a factor of more than a billion, you'd need billions of galaxies worth of hard drives. And what about the rest of the computer? How do you stop this thing from collapsing into a black hole? Just storing the state of your simulation will take up a much of the mass of the universe. We haven't even begun to talk about execution resources, how to power the thing, how to cool it, how to deal with the second law of thermodynamics in such an enormous, well ordered machine, how to deal with errors in the simulation, how to deal with the inevitable star crashing through your computer the size of a billion galaxies, how to deal with the propagation delay on a computer whose traces measure in the gigaparsecs, etc. etc. But all this was stacked in your favor. In a real scenario, you could never simulate a universe as large or complex as your own, because doing so would require more matter than there is. The lower bound on how much matter you'd need to store the state of the universe is actually the universe itself. At best, you could use each particle to represent itself, and run the simulation using the laws of the universe already in place. So to put it mildly, it's ludicrous to say we're anywhere close to being able to do this. That's very arrogant, don't you think? Why do you think determining the position of an object moving in a straight line is so hard? Simulating relativistic motion is only difficult because of the effects of relativity. It's a trivial matter to analyze Newtonian motion. And your simulation has to be perfectly accurate anyway, so it shouldn't matter how fast things are going. If there's a "time step" to the universe, it's the Planck time. Which, for the record, is the amount of time it takes to move one Planck length at the speed of light. The Planck length is the distance between which it's not possible to measure a difference in position between two points. So there's no need to slow things down that are moving quickly, because even if they're at the maximum possible speed, they won't produce an error in measurement. But anyway, wouldn't it make a lot more sense for the folding or proteins, complex gravitational interactions (n-body problem, black holes are easy because they're singularities) or the motion of an object through a fluid to cause time to slow down? They're far, far harder to simulate. But wouldn't that slow down the whole universe if it were so hard, not just the offending participant? And this doesn't even match up with what lag is, because lag is a delay between initiating an action and it happening, not the slowing down of events. Lag is also not caused by processing load, but latency. This is commonly confused, and is a huge pet peeve of mine. Doubly so when somebody uses the nonsensical qualification "frame lag." There is no latency, just a reduction in frequency. This metaphor is tortured, and makes no sense. The idea of an "energy particle" is an oxymoron. Particles are not energy (though you can convert a particle into its energy equivalent), they have energy. If energy was made up of particles, then how do things get hot? How do particles vibrate? Wouldn't globbing on more energy, in the form of mass in your energon particles, just increase the momentum and reduce the vibration rate? How does an atomic nucleus capture a photon and later re-emit it? Is the photon breaking down into its base energons, then later recombining? Why doesn't it turn into different particles, or stay there forever? Really, all of the forces you've been talking about have been the same one, electromagnetism, and it needs no invented "energon" because its force carrier is the photon and science already has a good idea how all this works. Using pixels as a metaphor is even more tortured than the last one. Pixels are a method of displaying something, what does it have to do with the forces that drive the universe? I seriously can't follow your logic. You hypothesize a new fundamental particle with no reason, then abruptly declare them to be the same as pixels for again no reason. And if you think the fundamental building blocks of programs are pixels, and not, you know, data, then you have a lot to learn about computers as well as physics. A pixel is an abstract concept related to the particular way in which we tend to display images to the end user using an imprecise grid of finite points and mapping continuous space onto it. There are formats that use continuous curves, have no resolution and can be scaled infinitely with no loss of quality (vector graphics). Pixels are no more fundamental to computer science than printers are. It's just a way to visually represent the underlying data. I don't want to sound rude, but it's clear you have very little knowledge of physics or computers. Do you really want to be weighing in on a cosmology rooted in a computer simulation when you don't seem to understand either subject? Nope. Because each universe simulation must be less complex than the last, you have an exponential decay of the complexity of nested universes. No matter how complex the first universe is, somebody has to build it out of some amount of material they spend a finite amount of time collecting. Even if the first universe is infinite, the computer they build must be finite. Even if you were able to gather up all the matter and energy in your universe and were able to simulate a universe 99% as complex as your own, in only 1000 generations of universes, you have 0.004% of the complexity left. You can use some basic algebra to determine how many nest levels you can go with a given starting complexity and efficiency. Assuming a universe of our size and the impossibly high efficiency of 99% (0.01% would be impossibly high, but again, I'm generous), then the complexity at a given generation x is given by the equation: 0.99^x * 10^80 == complexity When the complexity hits 1, you're done. That comes out to a paltry ~18,000 generations. After that, you're unable to simulate even a single atom with the resources available in your universe. Because of the nature of exponential decay, it doesn't matter how big the first simulation is, you're going to come to the end very rapidly. This is known as "special pleading." You've just claimed, with no justification, that reason doesn't apply to your argument. Pleading for a special exemption from logic, as it were. I'm sorry, but the rules of logic apply, and if your idea isn't logical, then that just means it's wrong. Thinking up magical duct tape to patch over the holes in your idea just compounds wrongness with nonsense and more wrongness. It makes no rational sense to discuss the actions of things you've accepted to not exist. If something doesn't exist then it has no impact on the universe. Deciding that god, or anything else, can simultaneously be imaginary and real is absurd. Things that don't exist don't do things, because they don't exist. If god created the universe, than by definition god exists. If god does not exist, then by definition he cannot have created the universe. This is just a tortured redefinition of the word "exist" to try to escape the grasp of science and logic. No, and that's the nicest way I can put that.

Truth be told, I got bored with career mode after one night, and I'm back in sandbox. I've done most of the hard stuff I care to do (yes, even a stock Eve return), so mostly I just build stuff and see what I can do with it. Resurrected my spacedock project, and have been having a blast. 0.24 fixed some of the bugs that had been driving me mad (the undo bug, mostly), so I'm still very happy with the progress.

You can add a new game entry to Steam so you can launch KSP x64 from there without needing to go to the folder. Games -> Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library -> Browse -> Select KSP_x64.exe -> Add Selected Programs

Congrats on your first orbit! I remember my first spaceplane. I knew nothing about designing a proper spaceplane, and ended up just bolting more and more wings onto the back trying desperately to get the CoL behind to CoM. The wings were so ridiculously long that they actually flapped on takeoff, and I couldn't fly with SAS on because the plane would flap harder and harder until the wings snapped off. After playing around in stock for a while, you should give FAR a shot. Takes things to a whole new level of difficulty, but once you master it your planes will be so much more fun to fly. Also, try sending a plane to Laythe! Being the only other oxygen atmosphere in the system, it's practically mandatory if you keep going with spaceplanes. Orbital refueling stations will make this much easier.

I can't recommend FAR strongly enough, if you plan on spending any real amount of time building and flying planes. Makes it approximate reality far better, and you're rewarded for using realistic designs. Stock KSP planes can be pretty absurd.

One can dream...

Maybe. The final spacedock will be made mostly of structural components. Those tanks are just to add mass and stop the station from moving much as you shift the plane around with the bed. Currently you can't even get at the fuel in them. This weekend I'm probably going to see what I can do for a proper spacedock, and launch it the hard way instead of using HyperEdit.

I'm really lazy. Go up to a 605km parking orbit, circularize, and tell MJ to transfer to another planet. Kerbal orbits for 18 months, then I re-plot the maneuver to prevent MJ from doing silly stuff like burning directly at Kerbin until the tanks are dry. After the first burn, I schedule a "fine tune closest approach" to fix any steering errors, then once more when I get close. Typically I aerobrake at Laythe (my most common destination) and just fly around directly without ever bothering to orbit. I'm planning to put a pretty massive station in orbit there soon, which will mean most craft will orbit, dock and refuel before going down to the surface.

Posted a new thread so as not to hijack this one. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/87502-Spacedock-Proof-of-Concept-swap-engines-in-orbit-with-Infernal-Robotics?p=1292476#post1292476

A while back I was experimenting with what I've been calling hot swap engine bays, where instead of bolting an engine onto the back of your craft, you use a pair of docking ports then the engine. This would let you send your heavy LV-N engines up once, and reuse them over and over again by just leaving them in orbit. The problem was, it was a huge pain to swap the engines out by docking. I made a robotic arm for my Space Truck, but it was slow and hard to control because it tended to wobble badly, and it couldn't replace its own engines without getting even longer. I was already working on a station to hold the engines not currently in use, so I decided to make it into a full fledged spacedock. Here's what I ended up with as a small proof of concept. I used HyperEdit to get this into orbit, the full size version will either unfold using hinges, or be assembled in pieces. Don't pay too much attention to the time. I spent a lot of time trying to get good screenshots, it's really not very hard to swap engines. For future enhancements, I'm going to add a second rear arm to hold the existing engine so you don't need to drop it and pick it up again. I also plan to make the drum replaceable. Using a standard docking port, you could plug one of the engines into the port that would normally connect to the spacedock, and fly it around. It's also going to be made larger, perhaps with multiple bays so you can leave a ship or two gassed up and ready to go. This was made possible by the fantastic Infernal Robotics and Kerbal Attachment System.

I'm not so sure about that. I played that way, and my friend played abusing part contracts for science. My third mission was a successful Mun return. By that time he'd collected ten times the science I had and blown past me on the tech tree. I'm sure I had more fun than he did, but the part contracts are highly exploitable for ridiculous science grinding. He had some contracts giving him literally hundreds of science without needing to leave the pad. The one that stands out was something like 239 science for testing the engine cluster landed at Kerbin.

Sure. I'm at work now (yeah, I'm bad), but will be home in an hour or so. After tending to the wife and dogs, I'll get some pictures up. It's probably my favorite thing I've ever built. Goes great with my Space Truck Mk-II, which has its own articulating arm with a "winch cannon" on the end, and twin hot swap engines. Saw somebody on the forums mention using a probe core and RCS for a steerable winch, which sounds even better. Mk-III, here I come!

Something you can do to get around the launch weight problem is to make a "hot swappable" engine bay, with standard docking ports. Slap a docking port on the back of the ship, then another one docked to it. Stick the smallest same radius fuel tank on that, then attach the engine to that. I've successfully swapped engines in orbit just by decoupling and using RCS to move around, but you can make it a LOT easier with a proper spacedock. Took me a few hours to build one with the robotics addon. First, the plane (or rocket) pulls up to the spacedock, which has a moving "bed" with an electromagnet on a piston. The electromagnet grabs the plane, then moves it to the center of the spacedock, where it is rotated so the engines are facing into the spacedock and the nose is facing out. Next, an articulating arm removes the existing engine, moves it out of the way, then plucks the desired new engine from a rotating drum. It then sticks the new engine on, picks up the old one, and puts it in the now empty drum slot. Finally, the bed extends again, releases the plane, which can fly away with its spiffy new LV-N, having not bothered to carry one to orbit. By doing this, even my tiniest planes can reach pretty much any point in the solar system without much effort, though without another spacedock at your destination to swap off the LV-N again, you probably won't be able to actually fly around in the atmosphere (presuming you went to Laythe).

The liquid engine contracts I've seen have also been completable by right clicking the engine and selecting "Run Test" when the conditions are met. You don't need to wait for the conditions for the button to show up, and it definitely doesn't show up for all contracts.

What I really want to see are tiered "Explore X" missions. The first tier is what we have now, then getting progressively harder until you've done all the science there is to do on that body. Further, you could have contracts unlocked by discovering easter eggs, like "Try to land a probe on the magic boulder" (did it ever come back?). From there you can even have a story, collecting artifacts from the various bodies or whatever.

The Kerbal needs to be immediately adjacent to the ladder to grab on, as well as facing it. Like, really, really close. Frequently I have issues getting a Kerbal to grab onto something, even when I know exactly where he needs to be. With three axes of movement, it's easy to be off by just a little bit. Also, if you're using the plane style cockpit (I forget exactly which one) the door is on the right side, not left like you'd think. There's a totally decorative ladder on the left side that tricks everybody at least once.

I'm not even sure what language that's supposed to be. Looks kind of like C, but missing basically...everything. #include <stdio.h><stdio.h><stdio.h> int main() { printf("Hello, World!\n"); printf("This time, it compiles!\n"); return 0; } </stdio.h></stdio.h>

Sage advice. KSP bugs, unlike other bugs, are probably just caused by "tiny errors in the code." Now that you've pointed that out, I'm sure the developers can have them all fixed by lunch time. I don't think they'd have thought to check in the code for the bugs without your help. Seriously dude, just stop talking. You have no idea what you're talking about.

The Windows backup utilities have been solid for a while now. Windows Defender is pretty good, too, though not really a good solution as your primary defense, since it's got a massive target painted on it for coming installed with Windows. If only we can get Microsoft to make a half decent web browser. I'm not sure we can ever trust the company responsible for IE 6 with that task, though.

Games -> Add a Non-Steam Game to My Library -> Browse -> *navigate to KSP_x64.exe* -> Add Selected Programs You now have both x86 and x64 KSP in your Steam library. Or, if you really want to change the files, just rename the x86 versions. Then when you want it back, you just undo the rename.

I think it's a better idea to just make an entry in Steam for KSP x64. If you're going down this route, you should at least not destroy the files. It's nice to be able to revert without a reinstall.