Nuke

simple, they want you to download things and charge it to your data plan.

i think one thing the devs are doing by not posting is that they dont want to have to debate their design decisions with members of the community who disagree with them. that could seriously cut into your dev time. its better to post a new topic and say this is what we did this week, as is done on the weekly dev notes. it avoids a lot of bad blood between devs, and members of the community.

i personally have never eaten at a taco bell and not felt like puking 15 minutes later. though i generally feel this way about most fast food places.

id make xenon strictly at atmospherically harvested resource, because thats primarily how inert gas products are made irl. it would require a cryo plant to separate the xenon from the atmosphere. it could also be used to extract oxidizer from kerbin/laythe atmo and lf from jool and condense them into liquids. what a cryo plant cant do is separate compounds such as co2. way i see gas mining it would involve doing this: atmosphere->intake->atmoresource->cryoplant->tank atmoresource is a resource that represents the atmosphere of what planet/moon you are running the intake through. on kerbin and laythe* this would be 'intake air', or 'duna atmosphere' on duna, and so on. this also means you dont need a new part module, just an intake that knows where it be. cryoplant can take one of several types of atmospheric resources and produce outputs based on the composition of that atmospheric resource. obviously only things we care about will be removed and the rest can be vented back into the atmosphere. i figure all atmospheres would have traces of xenon, since atmospheres are pretty uncommon in the kerbin system. however lf and oxidizer would never be found together in the same place (since they would react and form something you can't use without a chemical process). cryoplant is just a freezer on steroids and would only need electricity. *laythe might be intake air. another idea is it could be 'laythe atmo', and make engines behave differently based on what atmo its being fed. such as what resources it uses and its performance characteristics. you might also be able to run a reverse burning engine on jool. rocket engines could also have multi-fuel options, where they work on a wider range of fuel options at expense of performance depending on what fuel is being used. but thats kind of out of the scope of this topic.

my kitchen i make everything from scratch, even the tortillas.

the arduino leonardo can do that too. though getting the hid joystick to work takes a few modifications to the arduino libraries. i found a tutorial with a simplified example with 4 (8 bit) axes, 2 hats and 32 buttons. i didnt like it so changed the hid descriptor to support 8 (16-bit) axes instead. and it works great. got me an ads1115 i2c adc breakout as well so i can make use of those large axis ranges. it can do 2 16-bit differential channels or 4 single ended 15-bit channels. it has a prescaler that makes things confusing, it doesnt quite measure across a 5v range like the 10-bit adcs on the arduino. you can set it to ranges of: 256, 515, 1024, 2048, 4096, 6114 (clipped at 5000, because exceeding 5v would kill it) milivolts. so i set it to the 4096mv range, and simply put a resistor on the 5v side of the pot, of 1/4 the resistance across the pot. this lets the pot only output a value between 0 and 4 volts, and the adc is happy with it, mapping it out to the full range. if you wanted an extra bit of resolution, you have differential mode. it would require a 2v reference on one of the differential inputs, a voltage divider would work fine. the pot would be hooked up in about the same way as single ended mode. the prescaler would need to be set to 2048, since you are measuring in relation to the 2v reference, so +/- 2v. by playing with the reference voltage such as with another pot, you could do trim in hardware. analog is fun.

linux is definitely getting to the point where i could use it, and my skills with it are slowly catching up to my skills with windows. but what im really looking forward to is reactos, which is an open source windows clone which is meant to work natively with windows drivers and applications.

ksp is most certainly not orbiter 2. ksp has a thing that orbiter lacks: fun. orbiter was at most a challenge for space geeks. i would love if the orbiter code base was made open source and a community evolved around it. that would be great. but il probibly be too busy playing ksp to notice.

this kind of makes me think of the downsides of kethane/karbonite/etc. half your ship needs to be mining hardware and intermediate resources require tankage. so you have a lot of dead weight to haul around, but you set it down in one spot and get everything you need there. my way of adding 4 parts and no new resources might seem a little too easy. i think it would be more fun to have to do a bunch of leg work on the planet's surface and integrating with science. on top of that i think it can be balanced out through resource distribution. by limiting the availability of resources and force the player to go prospecting. you aren't told exactly where the resources are, you are only given an approximate location. and you might need to do science in that biome before your scanner can get a fix on resource zones located there. resource patches would be spawned in each zone, they would be of finite supply, but the more active planets/moons might respawn them. asteroids of course might only have a few patches on them, which are not replenished, so think of them more as a disposable fuel depot. also it would be rare to find resource patches that carry more than one resource, though you might find them on places like eve or tylo. oceanic and atmospheric resources would be much more abundant (effectively infinite), but these are in areas which are much more difficult to get to. eve and kerbin would have the most abundant oceans, producing multiple resources (oxy/lf). laythe's should be a little less (perhaps being all hydrocarbons and no water to make oxygen). other planets may be introduced with ammonia lakes to make monopropellant. atmospheric resources would require flying around in an atmosphere. to collect xenon on duna might burn a lot of fuel. jool might be all lf and you can mine there by bringing oxidizer to maintain your speed. the system would be easy to expand to do things like nuclear fuel, life support and off world bases. just add the resources to the system and they are spawned like the others in appropriate locations.

i dont mind some fudging in the chemistry as long as we dont do alchemy. i really dont care whether liquid fuel is hydrogen or kerosene or whether monoprop is hydrazine or peroxide and there is really only one thing xenon can be. i like location based resources with resource agnostic parts. i think it can be done with 3 maybe 4 parts tops (a drill for ground/asteroid, a pump for liquids, and intake for atmosphere, and possibly a scanner). if you stick a drill into the ground and if there is a particular resource there you get that resource. same for oceanic and atmospheric collectors, you get whatever its composition is. and you might need to power the thing differently based on what you find where.

i think we should eliminate converters entirely. you drill for resources, what you get depends on where you drill. you can handwave all the processing equipment into the drills, and ignore chemistry all together. the drill just outputs one of the game's usual resources w/o any intermediate compounds and certainly not a magic resource that you can turn into anything. i think the challenge should be in the prospecting. rather than be told exactly where the resources are with a scanner, you are instead told where they might be. you have to get closer to find exactly where they are. perhaps have a visible indicator of where they are, such as a patch of odd colored soil/ice/whatever (different colors might yield different resources). these patches are limited in resources, but there are many of them, so you are encouraged to explore more to find them. this system should work on both asteroids and planets/moons. atmospheres may be where you get xenon (i think thats where we get xenon irl). kerbin and laythe have oxygen. you might get lf from jool, and co2 from duna and eve (not useful as a resource but perhaps for a reaction mass). simply make intakes resource agnostic so that you get whats in the atmosphere. if you have storage for that resource, you tank up. oceanic resources would work about the same way. i figure most of the oceans in this game are water, but you might also have ammonia or hydrocarbons. the latter two can be monoprop and lf, respectively. water can be a reaction mass, or a resource for life support, or split it for fuel (this is the only place where a converter makes sense because you need a lot of power for this). for balance concerns id make laythe's oceans not water, because otherwise its an infinite fuel tank. it makes sense on eve because its really hard to take off from there so why not free fuel.

hype: no, and heres why. first off the point of a dev board is to give you the bare minimum of parts of which base an electronics project. this board is a very bare minimum, pretty much just an mcu, crystal and a voltage regulator (and same can be said about earlier arduinos). it doesn't do anything new. you get an arm mcu with native usb. this is the direction arduino seems to be going in its newer boards, and they arent the only ones. with declining price of arms, using something like a pic or avr would not offer much of an advantage unless you are making a big production run. most of these newer mcus support usb natively. another major selling point is its size. its small, this can be useful in some situations, such as when you are bread boarding, or for ultra portable applications. but again, this has been done before. the last thing that this brings, javascript, is not really desirable on a mcu platform. arduino gets a lot of flak from pros about its libraries being bloated and slow. its true, they are slow, they have a lot of overhead to make sure they work as advertised, and newer users certainly appreciate it. as slow as they are its still native c, and would run circles around a java script interpreter. another popular board which pushes another popular scripting language (were talking about the pi and python respectively) is very good at making very slow programs, unless you code on it in c/++ like i do. finally, if learning is your thing, obscurity is the wrong direction to go. you want something with a big community and lots of tutorials. i know for a fact a lot of the supported dev boards they show already work on arduino, and libraries exist for them. they want another 10k for usb hid support, my arduino leo has that and i didnt have to spend more than a couple hours getting it to work, idk if its worth siphoning another 10k pounds out of the kickstarter community. i think a lot of these kickstarter projects are just reinventing the wheel at everyone else's expense.

i just automatically spell out acronyms. its the easiest way to sound smart, even if you dont actually know what your talking about.

not quite what i think of when talking of retro computers. i usually think of older 16 and 8 bit computers (and 32 bit machines < 486). i used to maintain an old dos rig but i lost interest and scrapped it for parts.

problem is for the authorities to do their job, they need proof of wrongdoing. bullies (and the same applies to criminals) are expert at avoiding detection. they can operate under the radar of any enforcement and are seldom caught. you might be bullied dozens of times before anyone catches them doing it. any organization which claims to bring order is likely under manned and under funded to do their jobs effectively. its mostly a deterrent that works to keep the bulk of society form breaking the law/rules, but there are always those people who see through the illusion and do their own thing. they know they might be caught, but they also know its unlikely, and even see it as a challenge.

also in the old skool boat. i had a beefy build and that kinda made me the antithesis of a target, and i grouped up with maybe 3 or 4 other kids of similar build. if a bully screwed with one of us they would meet all of us after class. these days you get expelled for that kind of thing. but i think dealing with a bully is a life skill every person needs to learn early on. you cant rely on schools and parents to protect you from bullies any more than you can rely on the cops to protect you from crime. you are your first line of defense.

i have a feeling colonizing the universe will be through snowball hopping. we will start colonizing the solar system, and slowly move out into the oort cloud. this will push humans out a light year or more. if the nearest star has a similar cloud, then its only a 2ly trip to the next cloud, which is achievable with a generation ship.

the best reason to colonize the moon is to use it as a shipyard. use as much local material as possible for industry and import only what you need from earth. construct spacecraft, engines, rovers, prefab bases for other colonies, possibly semiconductors. fuel is something we know we can produce locally, eventually moving into nuclear fuels for ntrs and power reactors for nuclear electric and for colony/station power. this would allow rapid expansion into the rest of the solar system. its better to launch multiple colonies in parallel so that nearby colonies can help each other in an emergency, rather than send help from earth and be too late (for example a colony at ceres may be able to evacuate to mars colony to avoid an asteroid impact). you also set things up for inter-colony trade so that colonies need not rely so much on earth to supplement their resource needs.

one problem that occurred to me is you are going to be releasing contaminants into the landing site, which might ruin your experiments. blobbing on adhesives might be a bad idea if you want soil samples.

im having a hard time finding any information about the workings of the harpoons, i personally would have stuck it in a shotgun shell and fired it with a solenoid. im rather curious what they used. powder actuated pitons might have been a better idea, thinking foot long rods of metal fired into the surface at diverging angles, this would also set off a powerful anti-recoil charge to keep the probe on the ground. you still want to use glue, take a laser and bore a hole a several cm deep, just a couple mm across. then insert a thin metal tube capped at the end and full of tiny perforations, insert it into the hole and inject an epoxy resin (vacuum would draw it out of its reservoir and you just need to turn on a couple solenoid/servo valves to activate). the epoxy would be mixed when injected into the tube, and would harden pretty fast. the laser bore would not be a perfect cylendrical tap because of focusing concerns, and this is perfect for creating a good bond with the tube, epoxy, and the surface material. small lasers are getting really good at puncturing through various materials, i think the best bet would be to use a 1MW pulse laser, firing a high powered pulse for a tiny fraction of a second, you would need to recharge the capacitors from the solar panels after each pulse, and it might take days to complete the bore. such lasers have been made very portable, for example this one, which can punch through sheet metal.

another solution would be to add the mass of the physicsless parts to the mass of its parent. if you have a ton of batteries attached to a ton of tank, the tank would weigh 2 tons. in cases where a phyicsless part is attached to another physicsless part, the mass would propagate up the tree until it found a physics part and be added there. you could also do more advanced nitpicking and adjust the center of mass, moment of inertia, etc so that the parent's physics properties best describe the whole system of parts.

you can already make electric-intake air engines with stock modules. only thing you cant do is prop/rotor animations. firespitter has a module for that, but squad wouldn't need to do much to get it working, just a new animation module or expand upon an existing one.

im a cat person. i probibly would qualify as a crazy cat lady, if i was the opposite gender.

the most terrifying thing about the dentist is the bill. pain killers are so effective that you dont feel a thing, and you usually get a prescription for something fun for the pain when its over. i could do with a few grand in work, but im flat broke and dont have insurance of any kind (not that it ever covers dental when you do have it).

oh thats new* (i only recently moved up to 8.1), but i didnt write a batch file for them to gui the feature. also they probibly put everything there, and not just the stuff i want to keep. so the feature is not only redundant but worthless imho. also using mklink makes me feel like a wizzard. *actually its not, you could always put the user folder where you wanted. but i still prefer to set things up manually since i can selectively decide what i want to keep and what can get nuked when i need to reinstall. i think it started with me locating the ch control manager profiles folder to my data drive. for some reason the software refused to load maps from there on startup, and linking seemed to be the only way to fix it. then i used it on my firefox profile, saved games, and eventually every one of my usual applications had its data linked over. the commands to do this became a batch file, and since the user folder structure didnt change much since 7, it still worked on 8. i dont like to throw away useful tools.