Nuke

it might be something you can do for short periods of time, but i have a feeling extended periods of sleep deprivation will eventually degrade the performance of your day to day activities. i use microsleeps to extend my waking hours a little, but after awhile it just doesnt work anymore and you need to crash.

freetrack is stable software, it doesnt need to be updated. it also is really good if properly configured and with a well designed set of markers. the freetrack forum has pages of information about building your tracking rigs. if you want something that can work out of the box with no effort, then it is not for you. but it is pretty damn versatile when you know what you are doing. its also the only option i know of that works with wiimotes and trackir cameras that i know about. it is however nice to have other options. you need the optitrack sdk. you can get everything from here: http://naturalpointofview.blogspot.com/p/trackir-cameras-with-freetrack.html

mine the fuel from the moon. hell this is either going to be a post infrastructure build for an interstellar colony ship. that or a vessel for an omfgwereallgonnadie type scenario, in which case fallout be damned. this isnt going to be some little one off mission to somewhere for science. either way, this is not something we are ever going to see in our life times. maybe in a thousand years as some sort of backup humanity project. that is of course barring advancements in propulsion that make the concept obsolete. death to the notion of planning on human lifespan scale timeframes. i dont care what is going to happen in the next hundred years, i care whats going to happen in the next million. you want to build an aircraft carrier right after we just figured out how to build a crude raft? good luck with that.

when people seldom live to 40, 13 is more like your mid 20s.

i imagine orion as something to be built and "fueled" entirely in space. its going to be such a massive ship that ground launching the whole thing would be somewhat impractical. then id put it on an escape trajectory (with chemical propulsion) out of earth orbit and put some distance between it and the earth before detonating the first warhead. this should keep earth and its satellites intact.

im thinking a z aligned turret on the bow, full 360 degree rotation about z, with maybe 120 degree tilt, giving you near omnidirectional tracking with a small blind spot in back. then just stick all your high gain antennae on it. low gain hardware can just be bolted to the hull. this thing need not be very massive, and only a couple small cmgs to compensate for their motion. it might not always be locked on target when not in use. low gain traffic is probibly sufficient for most communications. if you need to transmit a lot of data, you can bring the dish to bear on the target. to initiate high speed communicate with the ship, send a wake up signal to the low gain antennae, allow the dish enough time to begin tracking, then begin transmission.

i dont see this as all bad. now if they need to have a custom asic made or if they need to have custom spec screens (such as rectangular pixels, or possibly even curved screens, whatever they need to better work with their optics), they can do that now, rather than just using off the shelf parts. its certainly better than being stuck with fpgas and cell phone screens. i even heard they may be able to knock a hundred bucks off the retail price.

i was under the assumption that we were discussing ships where the whole thing rotates along the z axis for gravity, no separate rotating and non rotating parts. you know like this:

if you can animate it in unity then its just a cut and paste job to make a cfg for it.

navigation is troublesome because all the sensors being mounted in a rotational frame of reference. but its fairly straightforward to go from the rotating ship frame to the orbital frame for example. thats just some pretty basic linear algebra. any high gain antennas (or anything with a dish) would need to be mounted on rotating platforms about the z axis (probibly on your bow), so they can stay pointed at the thing they are communicating with, in both directions. to save power on the turret (especially the z axis), you might have a low gain wakeup signal on other antenneas to tell the high gain antennea to lock on. omnidirectional antenna arrays mounted all around the rotating hull could provide the wakeup signal, or any low speed communications if high gain is not needed. thrusters are probibly the hardest problem to solve. you not only have to control thruster firings to compensate for the rotational frame of reference, but you must also compensate for gyroscopic forces as well. the control algorithms would be tricky but its something that can be done. but we already do spin stabilization in space probes, so this is likely all worked out already.

i have an old android tablet that my sister was getting rid of. ive yet to find one game or app with any level of quality or usability. apps are just half-assed applications.

$600 is kind of a hard target to hit without compromising performance. it helps if you can reuse your case, power supply, monitor, and peripherals. then its just a cpu/mobo/ram/gpu purchase. last time i build a machine ram and mobo were both around $80 (and thats probibly as low as you should go). i usually spend $200 on video but you might be better off aiming a little lower, but not too much lower (think around $160). use the rest to buy a good cpu. you could probibly get an oem rig for that, but dont expect the same performance.

you can already do fans with the current part modules, you just cant animate the rotor (without firespitter). but thats just a basic animation issue.

id hate to write the control algorithms for the ballast distribution system.

id keep the water in ballast tanks and pump it around to stabilize the ring. you might need irrigation canals for agriculture though.

theres a difference betwen "it works" and "im a wizzard". on windows im a wizzard. on linux i spend hours pulling my hair out trying to do basic stuff.

linux supports everything, if you have the patience to use it.

yea you need a server os for that, its not really a desktop thing. win2k datacenter edition supported a whopping 32 gb of ram.

i think facetrack uses the same api as freetrack. but dont quote me on that. there is source for the dll but i think it was written in pascal.

i make it a point to start over every time, give the new features a stock run and then install mods. but this time, after putting an asteroid into kerbin orbit, i decided to start installing mods. since this is only a half-upgrade, i may copy my saves over as soon as the mods i was using get updated, not that i accomplished anything of value, i may just copy over my ships.

what 64 bit ultimately does is give you more precision/operation (and all the other goodies that make that happen, like bigger registers, and new instructions). you can always throw cycles at increasing precision, its possible to do 64 bit math on a 4 bit cpu if you want to do it over the course of many, many cycles. you can also pack multiple 8 bit operations to fill up a register, doing them all in one operation (string compare example i brought up earlier). it rather disturbs me that so many people think bits determine how much memory your rig can support. sure thats a rule of thumb system builders have been living by for 10 or so years. but it has become somewhat of a mindless mantra that people dont understand. i see laymen and worse, even some system builders, its and pc techs just accepting it as the way things are. ive built servers (back in 2002) with 32 bit processors that support > 4gb ram. the reason is that servers always need more ram than your typical desktop, and they were hitting hard limits years before the desktops started hitting it (and before x86-64 bit was a thing), so cpu manufacturers developed workarounds. for a lesser example, the lowly 8-bit avr core in your typical arduino would only be able to support 256 bytes of ram, when in fact it has 4 times that much. i can think of many situations where word size != memory address space. ive also run 64 machines with less than 4gb of ram as i said earlier. another example, the n64, which found reason to need a 64 bit cpu despite having nowhere near 4gb of ram.

that athalon 64 rig from 2004 (and the cpu were first released in 2003) only initially had 1gb of ram (common at the time), which i later upgraded to 2gb. so there was reason to move up to 64 bit long before we hit the memory wall imposed by address space limits. 10 years is a very long time to support the legacy crowd. i dont like to throw out old machines if they are reliable. i have a 486 machine somewhere, does that mean i should demand new software support dos? and i get the money issue. im somwhere between 1/3 of the poverty line and nothin'. i can still afford a 64-bit rig.

kerbal railroad program

can we also get a hidden = true/false. there are some secret resources used as go betweens that i dont want the player to worry about.

i want to know who these people are so i can go to their house and smash their 11 year old hardware. (my first 64 bit machine is 10 years old) disagree. people dont realize that you get twice as many registers (with twice the width) on an x86-64 instruction set. one place where this shines is in string compare operations, you can compare 8 chars at a time just by filling in two registers. in fact running a 64-bit cpu in 32-bit os is a waste, because many of the sparkling new features of the cpu just end up getting disabled. running a 64 bit cpu in 64 bit operating system, gives you the system performance, but 32 bit applications still only utilize the non-64 bit features of the cpu, which is sub-optimal. this is a thing. game physics just loves 64 bit code. you can push double precision floats all over the place for super accuracy. now take it a step further and go with the avx instriction set, which gives you 128 and 256 (and eventually 512) bit floats. then you are in for a world of precision. that means bigger worlds and better physics when games get around to using those. things like a more appropriately scaled kerbol system become possible.