Nuke

you know what i did, i just picked the last channel on the list. very few people change the defaults. never have a problem.

my textures range from horrible attrocities to great works. the former is likely because im a very old modder. i made content back in the day when games had one pallete. 256 colors. period. if quake was your game, these were all brown. then later on there were those pre-normal-mapping games where i got into the habit of baking highlights into the textures. my skills probibly peaked back in 2009 and have been on steady decline since then. most of the textures ive made for ksp are less than original, they were based on my collection of stock tile patterns, many were blatant cut and paste jobs from other textures i have done. il dump the uvw space as a 2d vector image, import them into photoshop and use them as masks for layer effects. the most atrocious thing ive done was use the nvidia photoshop plugin to make normal maps from 2d images, thats why some things bump out when the should bump in and vise versa. im just lazy, but technical enough to appear mediocre.

thats not how a video card works. before the thing actually starts rendering anything all the data it needs is already fed into its memory. most of the bus traffic happens at loadtime. you have index buffer objects and texture objects and frame buffer objects all on the card waiting to go. what the game sends every frame is not graphics nor is it texture data. its commands to render things already in the video cards memory. most of the arguments for those commands are pointers to those objects, transform data, ect. this happens unity or not (ive written some opengl applications). what unity does is throws in an abstraction layer so that it can support whatever native apis are used on the various platforms that unity supports, so that the same graphics calls that works on osx, works on windows, works on linux, or works on android or whatever. the video card does have upper limits on what it can do, but i dont think ksp gets anywhere close to those limits. most of its resources sit idle frame after frame. loding may have been a thing in the 90s, but i dont think its neccisary for most games today.

screw both of them, i want a starfury. i even heard a rumor that nasa also wants one.

the os is going to have its own ram as well. and if you have 16gb ram, at that point you might just make a ram disk and copy ksp to it.

since my psychological profile would be an indication that i just hallucinated it all or made it all up, i think i would ask these instead: 1. how many aliens does it take to screw in a lightbulb? 2. how do you breed? (obviously i wouldnt say it quite that way) 3. can i have a shuttle?

dpf is an interesting idea, and i think that it would produce the smallest fusion reactor possible to construct. the only problem is it seems to attract all the environmentalist nutjobs and make the whole concept appear to be bogus. but that may just be an attempt to get funding. from what ive seen its enough to make it worth keeping my eye on. i personally think the he3 reactions are overrated. i dont think you can do direct conversion with it. going the thermodynamic route will work well here on earth just fine, and for naval applications. for space applications direct conversion is especially useful because of how hard it is to get rid of heat. you would need a brayton cycle with the reactor being the heat source, and huge, bulky radiators, and the coolant in the loop as the sink. its a lot of heavy hardware. i believe one of the problems we had with space fission reactors was the limits of the heat dissipation systems needed for power generation. direct conversion gets around that entirely. you get these helium ions being flung out of electron cloud and high velocities, it picks up an electron and gets decelerated by a negative grid, creating electricity in the process (or something like this, its a little over my head). theoretically were talking an efficiency of around 80-90%, and getting breakeven is all about efficiency.

i rather like that you have to babysit your engines on launch to avoid melting them.

just increase the number of ways the player can screw up.

once the intake closes the point is moot. its a rocket at that point. saber will run up to mach 5, and i dont think they need to use scram tech to accomplish that. sabre essentially solves the major issue with scram, that it only operates in a vary narrow flight regime. you might be able to use scam in other closed cycle designs, but no point using it in sabre, since much of the design work is already done.

im just saying you will have less. one of the big problems with reactors will be the start up power requirements. so you will need some kind of generator to charge a capacitor bank to start up the reactor. this might just be a deisel generator, but i could imagine large naval ships also keeping a small fission reactor as a startup device. i think in practice we will simply have more than one polywell on a ship, and keep at minimum one running at all times. you will need to carry fuel for the start up system, and you will also have your hydrogen and boron, but only small quantities. compare this to thousands to millions of gallons of fuel oil.

what i would do use use an ice dwarf. i would use the ice as fuel for a nuclear water (or ammonia, or whatever) rocket, or perhaps some kind of fusion-electric. the important thing is that melted ice is either used as the propellant, or is used to make the propellant (which could be hydrogen or hydrazine or something). i imagine fields of engines all pointed skyward surrounded by open pit mines gathering ice to feed the thruster farms. the thrusters would be mounted on treads so they can be moved as areas are mined out, and to redistribute thrust as needed. any non-ice materials can be utilized by the inhabitants, or simply thrown overboard to lessen the "ship"'s mass. habitation would be in underground centrifuges, as any gravity will be too small to be useful. depending on how much gravity is available, you may need a more conic centrifuge to compensate. i imagine these being constructed in deep open pits (perhaps retired mines), and then capped over with a dome of reinforced ice, for radiation shielding.

there is another thing the railgun does for you: the ammo is just a hunk of metal, it doesn't need a warhead. how many ships in ww2 were sunk because their magazine got hit? lots, hms hood being the prime example. you get hit in your railgun magazine, its going to ruin some your ammo, but its not going to sink you. fusion reactors also mean you dont need to carry fuel so there is less risk of fire (except on carriers that need to carry jet fuel and air ordinance). from that point i wonder how long it will be till they cram a polywell into an aircraft and eliminate the need to carry fuel (or have carriers for that matter). you should be able to do that because the optimal radius for a polywell is ~3 meters (somewhere between break even and magnetic forces so high that the reactor blows itself to bits).

i dont think polycounts are an issue on modern video hardware. gpus eat polygons for breakfast. and mipmapping is a thing. physics is n^2 so more stuff == slow. rendering is not, you are just passing commands to the video card, and once they are sent you dont have to bother with them anymore. graphics' effect on performance is totally linear, while physics is exponential.

its really hard to say. gpu manufactures let the general public know as little about a gpu as possible. they wont even give us a complete instruction set reference. the compiler for shaders is actually built in to the chip (or possibly in the closed source drivers). cpu manufacturers are a lot more open about such things. id love a fully open sourced gpu.

optimism: fusion will become available sooner than expected, unfortunately the first reactors will be installed as part of the american war machine before being built and sold for domestic and international use. polywells <3

can you make the engine animation have separate start, stop, and running animations? because i have a couple engines that have a rotor that i want to animate, i want to do a spin up animation when the engine starts, then a looping animation while its running, and a spindown animation when its shut off. you can also link particle emmitters to those animations for some cool effects.* another cool animation would be a tweakable animation. you have a part with an animation. the animation is controlled by one of those tweakable bars. if you change the value of the bar then the animation will play from its current position to the new position. i can think of a million and one uses for this one. adjustable ladders, jacks, robotic arms, flaps, trim tabs, camera turrets, etc. have a bool that if set let it loop around the start/end if the distance is shorter, otherwise it would be forced to animate without looping around. *already discussed, my bad i think thats doable with a stock animation. ive seen a mod that has done that before. it had parts for nautilus-x and it came with a really awesome command pod, designed for docking/tug application. it had extendable rcs units. id love to see that mod brought up to date. i presume they did it by just sticking their thruster xforms and geometry in a game object and animate it with a translate.

ive considered doing some wing animations for things like flaps and stuff, i dont see why the wing cant telescope or something, then scale the collider as part of the animation. assuming the collider is used for aerodynamic calculations. makes me think of something like what is used on cruise missiles (remember the lets nuke the aliens scene from id4). you have a fuselage section with a wing that is rotated 90 degrees for stowage, and rotates out for flight. if the wings also fold at the midpoint between root and tip, you can fit a wing with a span 4x the length of the fuselage section. couple problems though first off i havent figured out how to put more than one control surface on a wing without moving them as one piece, i would need 2 independent ailerons for this to work. also the alerons need to move with the rotating wing segment. setting up the hierarchy in unity is easy, but im not sure the game would respect it. the wahy the game handles wings doesn't seem to be very versatile. as a stock part something like that would be great.

my setup sticks the swap partition on an old 2gb cf card on an ide adapter. its slow but it has better random access than a hard drive. would be better if i doubled (or quadrupled) it up as a raid0 in the bios, but my adapter is one slot and i only have one cf card (im not putting any money into that machine).

you will think differently when we encounter aliens, and dominate.

ditto. i tried it on a c2q rig with 8gb ram and a gtx260. old machine but still has some life in it. ubuntu 12.something.something. the game had a horrible framerate just running stock, and half the mods i tried crashed the game. it didnt let me run more of anything.

our insatiable lust for war.

currently my main holdup is the number of applications that do not have linux versions that i use. so far my big ones are 3d studio max, and photoshop, both of which i am quite proficient with, and for which i will accept no substitute. while i have installed wine on my linux box, i have yet to try to get either of those to work. i presume its going to be a long and drawn out process with limited success.

i use it so i can yell at it for not working. most of the time i just use it to point my ship in the direction i want it to point, and it even gets that wrong. i also use it for launch, especially when the launcher is one of my usual payload pushers that i use for putting hardware into space. it ruins my less conventional launchers. the only other thing i use is translatron, to assist in flying vtols.

most of our satellites are at geo, not leo. anything left in leo will not stay there long. those might accumulate if left to their own devices for a few thousand years.