Nuke

you are going to have a number of math people on hand to solve problems as they arise. sota like mission control in the early days of space program. never underestimate a room full of geeks with slide rules. besides your ship is going to be so big that the time neccisary to orient the ship for a maneuver will be long enough to do any math you need. there will be computers but they wont be the powerhouse you are used to using.

or that 6 legged logging robot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBNjdwYdvE there are tanks and planes in the battletech universe. i hate fighting tanks in mwll.

i initially had trouble getting texture overloading to work. but then i just did the following: 1. in unity every material that is shared should have the same name across all models. 2. export all models that share a texture to one directory (the texture and all models that use it should be in that directory) 3. do not try to overload the textures in the cfg, i could never get that to work. this leaves me to believe that a system is being worked on, but is still too buggy for showtime. you cant use a chair texture from one url and a panel texture from another. but you can group several parts into a single texture atlas. this is in effect the same as just using more smaller textures of smaller resolution. for example, i got 4 wing parts into one 512^2 texture, which means i could have just done 4x 256^2 textures. but it worked out because i wanted seamless uv mapping, and doing this with a long object like a wing wastes a lot of space (unless you break it up and create a bunch of seams). of course in this way i still have space for another delta wing and another control surface, since i am a really efficient uv mapper. the first commandment of uv mapping: thou shalt not waste texels.

in a sea of serious suggestions its time for something a bit more silly. i decided kerbals need to have beard if they have been in space too long. capsule fever and such.

im of the opinion that almost everything should consume power. control surfaces should consume power, anything that moves should use power while its moving. if a kerbal is in it, consumes power. i dont think anything needs to be done beyond that.

i recently figured out how to share textures between multiple parts in my mods. i have 4 wing parts that all share one texture. i also had a set of structural parts, each one having a copy of the same texture, which i have resolved. its certainly possible to do this. it may just be that the artists at squad are busy with other stuff and have yet to go through and optimize all the old assets. or perhaps it still has some bugs that need to be resolved and they are being directed to not use it pending some bugfixes. it also seems that the devs would want assets needed to test new features that they have implemented would take priority. i think this may be one of those cases where the community's need for new stuff is taking time away from older stuff that needs to be worked on. saying that they are being negligent is kind of an overreaction. this is a game in development and as such it is expected that some things would be in a completely unpolished state. now if this game was declared final tomorrow, i would have words to say.

i dont think we would need to go that far back. besides complex mechanical devices tend to be maintenance hogs. one thing is different memory technologies are more suitable to use in space than others. dram and its derivatives are know for its tendency to bit flip when exposed to chargeed particles, sram is a bit more robust. im not sure how flash does in space. i was reading about fram the other day, which is essentially core memory on a chip, would work great in space. mram would be another one. thing is every time we invent a new kind of memory it takes a few decades for moors law to play out.

i think bt canon has mechs running off of a fusion reactor (running on water) and uses some kind of synthetic musculature. the gyro is some kind of 3 axis cmg. all weapon systems with the possible exception of the ppc* work pretty much the same way as the modern equivalent. * turns out we actually tried to build one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARAUDER if we use any mechs irl, they will have 4 or more legs.

rest assured the computers we use in space long term will have more in common with a computer from the 80s than it would with your gaming rig. i know there are things like the elevator hoists and the water pumps at the empire state building are all original equipment, installed in the 30s, and still work so good that the though of replacing them with something modern is outrageous. then there are various steel bridges and buildings that have been around a long time, even ancient structures like the pyramids and roman aqueducts teach us something about long term engineering. concrete is known to last a long time if you dont reinforce it with steel. steel structures also last a long time. we know if we build a structure more robust than it needs to be, it will last a long time. and we know stone structures are pretty much immortal. now granted we dont think of these things as space faring tech, but they are important. you can also get around the problems of radiation if your ship is really big, by burying critical system deep within the bowels of the ship. when i say big i mean asteroid/ice dwarf scale, using much of the object's mass as propellant. charon would make a good candidate for such a ship. with it you could take a city sized population and enough industry to fix anything along the way utilizing the natural resources of the object. the other side of it is that its going to be a very long trip, so the idea has merit even if its an emergency evacuate the solar system type mission.

i need to be able to detect if an arbitrary plugin dll is installed and add/remove some lines of one of my cfgs accordingly. such as discribed here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/72338-Conditional-%2A-cfg-Parsing im told this has been implemented in module manager, ive been reading this thread for 4 hours and i still dont know how to do this.

its not far fetched that an interstellar ship might have its own small scale fab on board. especially if it was a colony ship, you would want as much manufacturing capability you could muster to bootstrap industry at your destination. you could produce new chips and storage devices while in transit. that said you could go all butlerian jihad and just not use computers. people are plenty capable of running numbers in their head. you can use analog control systems, mechanical computers, etc. we might develop better optronics too, which should work well in radiation rich environments.

you will sometimes see me playing mwll. i tried mwo but the gameplay is too short and too basic for my tastes. mwll is much more epic. i somehow managed to get mech 2 to work under win 7 64 bit with glide, joystick, and trackir support. just dont ask how i did it i dont remember. i knew it took a glide wrapper an unoffitial patch and a lot of hacking.

my general opinion of documentary stations (with the possible exception of pbs) is that they are pandering to your typical armchair scientist. ive had to stop watching them because every time they bring up an oversimplified and often incorrect, imprecise analogy it made me want to put my head through a wall. it might make some people feel 30 iq points smarter for watching it, but you can get more information reading the wikipedia entry on the same subject, and those are shady, sketchy and in need of serious citation. also dont fool yourself, most people watch mythbusters for the explosions.

there are a few things i need to check off my list before i would be sufficiently satisfied with out ability to accomplish an interstellar mission. 1. we need lightweight fusion power reactors on the order of megawatts to gigawatts. we could do it with fission, but it would need to be some kind of breeder with online reprocessing, and with surplus nuclear fuel on board. whatever we end up with, it needs to last hudreds of years. 2. space infrastructure. any ship we build will need to be constructed and fueled in space. and assuming this is going to be a manned mission: 3. improved life support technology. we need a totally closed loop system that can operate for hundreds of years. this can be a machine, or it can be an engineered small scale ecosystem. if you have all that, then you are ready for an interstellar mission. note that propulsion is not on this list, we know how to do that, we just need to build it.

plants love death metal.

id go the generation ship route, using my method from the asteroid ships thread:

shouldn't the wheels be stationary initially. the only time they would need to spin up is to cancel out some angular momentum.

i want to say that hdmi lets you use larger resolutions, and higher scan rates. but i do remember some old crt displace doing 1600x1200 @ 120hz (granted this was on a graphics workstation). but consider that most displays now are lcd, which are pure digital technology. it doesnt make much sense to go through a dac just to go through an adc at the other end when you can just use the high speed digital goodness that is hdmi.

anyone whos ridden on the gravitron knows how to solve that problem.

i bought my router in 2006 and it still works fine. update your firmware.

use a gyro for feedback and then use a pid controller to control the wheel(s). you will probibly need a motor controller too. you will also need a microcontroller to run the show. it will get data from the gyro, feed it into your pid loop, and command the motors appropriately. you dont need a lot of io for your micro. most gyros are i2c, and thats 2 wires+2 resistors. your typical h bridge driver will use a pwm pin and 2 other pins per channel. so for a 2 axis reaction wheel system you will need 8 mcu pins or 11 for a 3 axis system. an attiny84 should be up to the job. an sn754410 is a good 2 channel motor controller you dont need that much current since the wheels will never approach a stall state. then just use any mems gyro. get one on a breakout board because they are really hard to solder (this is also convenient because a lot of them can be bolted to a hard point in the rocket and attached to the rest of the electronics with a few wires). for power just use a 3.3v regulator like a lm1117 and a small 2 cell lipo battery. to do this the easy way just get one of the small form factor arduinos, like the nano, then get some strip board and jumper wire and solder your motor controllers to it and some female headers to connect it to the arduino. you still need the pullup resistors for the i2c bus, 1.5k usually is fine (you may be able to use the micro's internal pullups, idk), then make a header to match your gyro board. you could make it small enough to fit in a tp tube.

if you have to choose between vga and hdmi, choose hdmi. there are stand alone transceiver chips that handle this interface on your graphics card without bothering the actual gpu. to do vga the same data that would go to the hdmi tranciever would go to a 3 channel dac (vga is analog). either way, no performance is lost. but the capabilities of the hdmi interface far exceed the vga interface.

well then all you can do is. 1. complain to isp, get someone to check signal levels. 9 times out of 10 they will lie to you and say everything is fine, and the tenth time they will try to sell you something. 2. switch isps and hope the new one sucks less.

im going to have to agree here. i started using 64 bit ~10 years ago. 10. 1 with a 0 after it. no, not 2 in binary, 10. ive been running with more than 4gb for at least 8. many members of the ksp community were still in kindergarten back then. i made a very early switch to 64 bit operating systems at a time where people were still needing 32 bit to run their old dos games (a thing long superseded by emulators). i used xp pro 64 up till win 7 came out. im still aghast about how much 32 bit software i still run. 32 bit should be legacy by now. im not even sure you can still buy an x86 processor (intended for use in a pc, were not talking embedded markets) that doesn't support 64-bit. also why anyone would cripple their 64 bit cpu by running a 32-bit os is beyond me.

i managed to catch it after the walking dead. i knew it was going to be on, but i didnt think it would be on already.