Nuke

this thread made me want to watch primer again.

when your framerate is better measured in seconds per frame rather than frames per second.

first the whats good about it part. its certainly making it a lot easier to control vtols. i made some hastily thrown together attempts at a helicopter and it got off the ground in kerbal fashion and then plummeted to its doom also in kerbal fashion. some other vtol attempts were more successful and its nice being able to bind that to an axis and have some control over it. i didnt really play much with the robotics controller thingie but it looks like i can do things like collective pitch and throttle control, anywhere where you need to control more than one thing with a single potentiometer. and the potential for control hacks (im going to need more hall sensors and arduinos) is just overwhelming. anyway this was a great little feature. onward to the buts. the first is i need moar axes. moar! axes are the new boosters. especially if you use them to aim the boosters. the second is that i wish i could control anything with a tweakables bar on it. like the engine throttle limits. i put a jet engine on the side of my tail to act as an anti torque rotor which i just ended up controlling with the throttle. the possibility of using k1s as rcs thrusters or being able to trim a vtol by changing the throttle of the engines independently. also maybe some forward thinking here, would be cool if you could do feedback driven robotics. say like you can get the control torques from the sas and feed that back into an articulated engine. another example would be where you can pull the angle of a rotor and feed that into a controller, mix that in with some physical input and use the outputs to control servos for cyclic control of helis. ability to take readings from scientific instruments as sensor input like using four thermometers as a crude heat seeking missile controller. there is potential here for the ksp equivalent to redstone. anyway im going to go see what else these things can do.

there is too much blatant disrespect for the english language these days that im not going to sweat the small stuff. but use the word chill wrong like so many millennials do and i will summon all my wrath. its also not cool to copy people who have blatant disrespect for the english language. write them off as an uneducated narcissist desperate for attention and move along.

nothing i can say here.

well i only have 17 teeth leftand they are all up fronts so i can reach em all with a buff wheel. ugh it sounds like i have a speech impediment.

i just use a dremel.

id just remove all the people and replace them with hyper intelligent cats. i would also make the moon habitable and inhabited by quasi intellegent mice. then id watch the cat equivalent of the apollo program take place. it would be really cute. unless you are a moon mouse. i would also summon infinite bacon. then i would get rid of all the bad writers who came up with such a lazy mcguffin.

if you have the energy storage capacity to go interstellar distances you have a bomb. theres no way around it. however i do think that any type 1-2 civilizations that manage to produce such ships wont put them under the control of single individuals. with a price tag in the trillions ownership by single individuals would be highly unlikely. especially if these vessels depend on highly controlled hard to source materials like negative mass or antimatter. its sort of the same deal with nukes. they require hard to get materials and expensive facilities and are out of reach of the average joe terrorist cell. as a weapon of war im sure there are cheaper ways to take out a planet than ram a several trillion dollar space ship into it.

unless your machine is air gapped id recommend using good admin passwords. whether or not you use a standard account or use the admin account is up to you. ive always preferred the admin account because i dont like having to enter a password for what i consider common tasks. on linux its not so hard to grant a user account rights for anything you might do on the machine and if not there is sudo. this kind of thing is more of a pita on windows and re-entering a strong password each time i want to do a task can get tedious fast.

drill a hole in the ground, add water and a nuke, cover with a steel plate. bolt on a lawn chair. instant spaceship!

jus adding a coupole zeros to the specific impulse of current gen engines is usually enough to suffice. usually such gains in isp usually mean less thrust. but if you can have your cake and eat it too then why not.

if you can go aneutronic you wouldn't have to worry about neutrons and charged particles are very easy to accelerate or slow down for direct conversion to electricity. you would probably want to do one or the other. in space it would be beneficial to spew the high energy alpha particles out the tail pipe as you would likely get more bang for your buck that generating power to run an ion cluster to do the same job the reactor is already doing. having the option to switch modes or to partition the output between power and propulsion would be good to have. if you have an isru capability the ability to pick up arbitrary remass and using it in ion engines or arcjets then you need power for that should your high isp/low mass fusion products be insufficient thrust. you can also have a lot of power for launch systems like first stage electric ducted fans, electric turbo pumps for chem engines and arcjet enhanced engines. of course you could argue that the reactors place is on the ground making carbon neutral cryofuel depending on the size of your reactor anyway.

go to basement with a bag of cat treats. shake. when they all show up dump em out and run for the door before one of them gets bored. though i question the logic of putting cats in a basement during a flood warning.

rip grumpy cat, your unbridled disdain for all things has come to an untimely end, and you will be missed.

mechwarrior living legends makes a lot of the other vehicles kind of powerful. unfortunately nobody plays it. there are a few who still work on it. mwo, my other game, has developers that don't seem to want to develop and are just farming cash at this point. give squad $15 bucks and you get unlimited dev and free dlcs, give piranha $300 and you get more mech shaped skins. mw5 looks like its going to be the same stuff over and over, vehicles are just there for you to trample or swat down. living legends got almost everything right though, damn those demolishers. as for the books im only a few books in and there are over a hundred or so, im reading it in chronological order. as for dune the first is all you need. the next 2 are kind of meh, then the final 3 are good. the kja/bh books are all pulp. monopoly on shipping was held by the spacing guild, they kept their navigators a closely guarded secret (contrary to the '80s movie). but they themselves were dependant on the spice. the holtzman drives they use are pretty common knowledge but without a navigator they are very unreliable. you can also use a computer but those are illegal in the duniverse.

up to 5 g for combat drops. i like their space stuff, but realism kinda drops off the second mechboots hit the ground. also nobody really knows how the jumpships work and they are somewhat irreplaceable. so instead of space battles you get mech battles. the zenith and nadir points are were jumpships usually go. not in orbit just hovering above the solar pole at about a distance of 1 au, and you need to provide thrust to avoid falling in. its kind of an unorthodox way to do things. of course they have torch ships so all is good. dune is another great example of one thing a lot of scifi glosses over. if you go ftl you are flying blind. and it really helps if you have a mutated navigator doped up on spice that can see the future (at least far enough in advance to avoid collisions). though in some of the kja/bh books the navigators can make some incredibly accurate jumps. like into drydock, on ix, underground, with no room for error. in the pre-navigator days it wasn't uncommon to slam into a star or enter a black hole because you couldn't account for everything you might encounter, death rates were like 1 in 10 for each space fold.

i may be getting tired of ribeyes walked through the kitchen. i can now make incredibly impressive pork ribs. day before i rub them down with smoked paprika and seasoned salt. wrap in tinfoil so they are ready to go. give them a four hour precook in the oven at about 200, low and slow. then you stick em on the grill slather them in sauce (i use my own) and grill it low and slow.

i warn you there will be zombies!

we require more minerals! does this mean we also get to construct additional pylons? oooh and i get it for free too. ksp may very well have been the best game purchases i made in the last decade.

with the way game of thrones is ending im not sure i would trust another hbo series. of course i was wrong about the expanse. which i avoided because of how repetitious that space opera had gotten, and yet it has turned out to be one of my favorite space shows.

you should have went to the school i went to. it was the dumping ground for sociopaths and other failed attempts at humans. everyone was a bully so it made an interesting dynamic. sometimes it was their turn and sometime it was ours. students bet on the fights. i hung out with two of the crazier students. one was a crazy russian with a blackbelt in tae kwon do, and the other was fond of self mutilation and bb guns, he killed himself about a dozen years ago. it was the 90s but we all listened to 70s and 80s metal and we all wore black trench coats (columbine had just happened and we had more in common with the slayers than the slain) while everyone else just wore flannel. its ok because the school had metal detectors and a security guard for every 10 students, a couple of them were former nfl football players. because of all the hostility it was common for students to get tackled and dragged off to an isolation room (much like the ones you find in mental institutions). kids who got floored by they one day would often be talking sports with them the next day. we mostly got graded on behavior and academics were practically non existent, we were doing fractions on our senior year, they called it review, but we never moved on to anything beyond that. you could pass just showing up for class. later few years of high shcool they would bus us off to another school that did vocational training, i took computer science and then an electronics class. the electronics class had me doing math i didnt even know existed. all the time on the school buses led to other interesting shenanigans. the junkie thrash metal crowd (kind of an extension to our 3 man group though not completely comprising shared interests) used the interchange as a chance to smoke dope, i joined them once or twice. i ended up staying an extra semester after my senior year to finish my electronics class, and because my buddies were a grade year below me. on my graduation (being mid year there were only 2 students) my russian buddie thought it would be interesting to poke me in the buttocks with the american flag. the teachers weren't bad, many of them meant well, but they were shoehorned into a dumping ground for social rejects thought up by some politician who just wanted us out of the way. they were told they could do some good and help at risk students, and then got no budget to do it. the average low iq of the students allowed me to sweep all the engineering contests held by my science and math teachers. rocketry, egg drops, bridge building, marble floats, etc. i won em all. this was before participation trophies too. for winning they gave me a certificate printed off of an old dot matrix printer and was most certainly made on a mac se (one of the higher end computers we got to use). they were the dumping ground for the old apple 2s the school district was phasing out. because of my oddball schedule i had a whole 45 minutes of free time every day. and so for fun i slapped apple 2 parts together until i got working machines, i set up a computer lab with a stack of pirated apple2 games (the school certainly didnt buy them. i honestly dont know where most of them came from, the apple 2 was certainly well beyond its usefulness by then so it wasn't any of the current students at the time. but i made sure every class room had a copy of all the disks. except on thursdays when the weight room was open. we did more screwing around that actually pumping iron. if there wasnt a fight or unrelenting pranks, or students smoking, or doing a number of other things that were technically against the rules, then we would just sit around and chit chat and let the weights crash. the ta only looked in a couple times if we got too loud. the whole thing was in a converted storage closet and so there was no visibility to the rest of the gym. we didnt even have showers which is why no one took gym class seriously. the smart kids would have social studies first and gym last. the social studies teacher was an old hippy lady that ran class like a game show, with prizes. i won many. she always brought snacks and if you got there early you would get the lions share. all in all it was a lot of fun, despite the fact that it was a half step up from juvie.

if voting machines are to be used i would prefer them to: be air gapped. they should contain no hardware for network transmission. nor should they have any external ports for common data storage devices. they should be cased in a faraday cage and fail to operate if not properly grounded. the machine would isolate its local power to avoid any possible feedback path through the power line to avoid exfiltration. the whole box would be armored and locked while the machine is in operation, nor should it operate if unlocked. they should use some kind of uncommon worm storage like a big rom module installed at setup time. the machine cannot run without the module installed, nor can it be removed until the end of the election day. voting data would be encrypted with multiple keys with each one being provided by a specific campaign. officials for each campaign represented on the ballot would need to deliver the key and enter it manually when the machine is in setup mode. to set up the machine, a new module would be installed, the machine would enable all internal locking mechanisms, additional external locks would be added by the local election officers. the machine would immediately boot into setup mode. officials could input their keys, once all the keys are entered and verified the machine can be placed into voting mode and stays that way until the end of the election. if there is an error the machine would burn the roms and render it useless and you would need to start over with a new module. any attempts at tampering or power loss events will be logged to the rom. the machine should remain locked if the power is out, on reboot the module will be detected with a vote in progress and the machine either returns to vote mode or finalizes the rom if the vote duration has ended. when the module is finalized it will burn padding to all remaining space. the machine unlocks and the module can be recovered and sent to the voting office. the main security here are the officials. since the keys are only known by the officials (and the candidates) and are secret to that campaign. every campaign would be responsible for their officials to ensure they are trustworthy and incorruptible,and for keeping their keys secret, which is in the best interests of the campaign. the module cannot be read without all the encryption keys and is just a block of bricked silicon otherwise. the authentication process would be much like the setup procedure, all keys would need to be entered. once opened then you would review the audit data, then officials would have to agree that the machine was not tampered with and the vote is legit, only then will the final tabulation be computed. if the module was in question, a copy of the unencrypted audit data (no voting data, which would remain secret) would be sent off for a more thorough analysis. if that fails to please the officials then the whole election would need to be redone.

think about it, you cant trust any news unless its boring, and even then maybe they made it boring on purpose to confuse us. i heard a phrase the other day: "post reality world". now that i heard this phrase everything makes sense again. reality simply does not exist.

things are easier if you never had it to begin with.