[Extreme flickering / black screen in fullscreen mode in 1.8]

Hello there,

In 1.8, I get extreme flickering and entire periods (seconds / minutes) of black screen when I am in fullscreen mode. Between the black screen periods, my monitor will usually return an "input not supported" message. It makes KSP unfortunately completely impossible to play.

I've tried disabling V-Sync, lowering the resolution and lowering the refresh rate on my monitor. None of this works.

However, running KSP in Windowed mode works like a charm, without any of the aforementioned flickering and black screens. I would be OK with this if -popupwindow worked, but that also seems to activate fullscreen mode (tho ''fullscreen" gets unticked in settings), with all its associated problems.

Downgrading to 1.7.3 completely alleviates the fullscreen problem. 

My specs:

Windows 10, 64 bit.

64-bit KSP, installed through steam, version: 1.8.12694 (en-us)

AMD Ryzen 5 2400G, with Radeon Vega 11 GPU.

16GB RAM.

AOC GV2460V Monitor, with default refresh rate of 75hz.

Player.log on fullscreen 1.8 can be found here (expires in a week).

[What did you do in KSP1 today?]

Contuing baby steps.

Spent an ungodly amount getting this contraption on the Mun.

After many, many attempts I finally figured out that having your probe core angled by 90 degrees makes for extremely awkward maneuvering. Ergo, decided to place multiple probe cores along the body, so I could switch. Ultimately settled on this rocket

After botching that specific attempt too due to .. ah... ''landing" too quickly ( ), I decided to only send one Kerbal this time. As I relied on the last stage actually crashing and exploding so the base would land on its belly, I had to come in rather hard.

 

 

Yay, Jeb's on the Mun! Except...... I broke my solar panels in the landing, meaning Jeb will slowly freeze to death. This requires a rescue attempt. Thankfully, I settled on a much, much simpler design for the rescue: just a large tin can.

[What did you do in KSP1 today?]

I'm retaking baby steps.

Landed a tin can on the Mun.

 

 

Launched a satellite into Minmus orbit, and have a probe waiting for a transfer window to Duna. Planning to start a lunar base.

[Can't get remotetech active]

After not playing for quite some time, I decided to pick KSP up again. I have the Steam version, so it is automatically updated to the newest version. I reinstalled the only two mods I have: MechJeb and RemoteTech.

Mechjeb is working as intended, but I somehow cannot get remotetech to work. Remotetech parts are available in the VAB, but I cannot activate any of them.  See here for the simplest probe design possible: no connection. Probes are also controllable even without a connection to KSC, even though that shouldn't be possible. The config screen says I do have remote tech enabled. I tried starting KSP in administrator mode, but that was to no avail. I'm on WIndows 10, 64-bit.

What am I doing wrong?

 

[What's happening with ksp 1.1?]

I have an Intel CPU and AMD GPU and since Windows 10 came out I too have been experiencing quite some issues with games, including KSP. Windows keeps installing an outdated GPU driver, so you might want to check whether you really have the latest drivers installed. Furthermore, for some reason completely unknown to me the CPU power settings were set to 5% even on performance mode (!), which made the CPU underclock continuously. Upping that to 80% was a world of difference. Perhaps this might be the case for you too? In that case, go to power settings --> select the mode you'd like to change --> advanced --> processor power settings. 

[The "You know you're playing a lot of KSP when..." thread]

I too have noticed, thanks to KSP, Minecraft, and a few other games, that I think in meters and m/s now. If only I could program my GPS to use m/s for speed measurements :\

You could perhaps make it divide everything by 3.6? ;-)

[Graphics bug?]

I noticed something odd going on at physical warp (4x) when rotating a simple spacecraft. Objects attached to the main body start detaching, and seem to rotate slower than the main body. To make matters more odd, is that some objects move at different speeds than others. I made a video: https://youtu.be/O0yc78fNskc

To reproduce:

create simple space craft, add some radial chutes and air intakes. Launch, and rotate at 4x speed.

My graphic's setting:

• Render quality level: fantastic
  
• Texture quality: full res
  
• Fallback part shaders: false
  
• Aero FX quality: normal
  
• PPFX: yes
  
• Surface FX: yes
  
• 1280x720
  
• Full screen
  
• Anti-Aliasing: 2x
  
• Vsync: every Vblank
  
• Frame limit: 120 fps
  
• Pixel light count: 8
  
• Shadow: 4
  

[Blue Origin Thread (merged)]

From Ars Technica

Following the June anomaly, SpaceX reported that the Dragon cargo vehicle survived the incident and even received telemetry from the craft until it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. If the cargo Dragon had been equipped with the same software as the crewed version, the chutes could have been deployed and the vehicle and its over 4000 pounds of cargo would have been recovered. During today’s teleconference, Musk said that all versions of Dragon will be equipped with this software in the future

So the triangular shape we all saw was in fact Dragon. If they manage to recover cargo even in the case of RUD - because the likelihood of at least one more RUD occurring in the future existence of SpaceX is probably over 100% - that would be great news for customers.

[Hyperspace]

Wait, if a probe was moving the speed of light, could it send back telemetry at the speed of light? It would have to be moving 2C to communicate, unless you theorize using only Newtonian physics.

If I understand relatively correctly, it would still be able to, since the speed of C is fixed regardless of reference frame. Never mind the fact that one cannot send a probe at light speed. It will always be slower than C. Only in the case of superluminal speeds, communication becomes impossible. But that argument is mute anyway (since can't reach C).

[What did you do in KSP1 today?]

In a new career, I managed to do the Munar flyby without any maneuver nodes being available yet. Aka, just guessing where to burn! Went right on first try xD. Zipped past Mun, and was shot into a highly eccentric orbit with apogee further than Minmus. With the tiny bit of fuel left, I managed to lower perigee below Kerbin's atmosphere, but the descent would have been way too steep. Luckily, I got another Mun encounter on the way back, which got me a much shallower angle of descent. Aerobraked a few times, and got back to Kerbin in one piece xD.

[What is the definition of life?]

haha, you are just trying to define us "humans", and anything that is not like us (with our mechanism) then is not alive..

but let me see this from another perspective...

What if something naturally evolve with a different mechanism (this mean "not genes") and is intelligent..

Then you comunicate with this being, is that thing alive?

It would not enter in the "artificial life" definition because it was not created.

So by your definition, a coral would be more alive than this thing?

Erm... I think you are misunderstanding the word "genetic" as to only mean something in DNA-form. In fact, is just means any unit of heritable information.

Given the three points I raise, a zillion types of life are possible.

Let's take point one: heritable information. This could be in any form. I don't care whether this heritable information is in the form of DNA, entangled quantum matter, hydrogen plasma, source code or whatever. As long as this information is, in principle, transferable from one generation to the next (again, the mechanism of transfer is irrelevant), it adheres.

So most definitely, if something evolves (and then it transfers heritable information from one generation to the next by definition), and it somehow maintains some form of homeostasis (again, type and mechanism are not specified), I would consider it alive.

Even artificially created things can be entirely alive by these three items.

- - - Updated - - -

As one of the things you need to be life is to reproduce and pass information to the next generation, those of you who have not yet had children are alive but you are not life, merely a by-product of it...

A lot of people conflate being alive with being life. This is not always completely accurate.

You're right there. I should have named bullet point one as "It contains heritable information, which it is, in principle, capable of passing on to from generation to generation".

- - - Updated - - -

We had to throw a biologist in, now we are really screwed. A physical chemist would have a different POV, first off I posted this LN but it seems to have been lost. 80:20 odds that OP = troll.

Planetary accretion is driven by gravitational processes that ultimately only factor in minor surface processes such as when a star is sufficiently energetic that most surface processes are volatilized. Accretion process produces a large surface potential on planets, particularly those close to the star in which latent heat or EM can be diverted and there is energyflow in day/night cycles. The surface of the planet is in the margin between internal heat turnover, IR radiation, interplanetary interactions (comet and asteroid collisions) and EM absorption. Because of this there is a tremendous amount of chemical potential between non-homogeneously distributed materials and EM gradients, and the potential exist between temperatures where liquid (non-solid, non-gaseous) chemistry can occur. Both states feed into the liquid state (through ionization and dissolution). But are insufficient in activity to dissolve the thermodynamic disequilibrium that is created by planetary formation and external irradiation. To be specific there is no particular thermodynamic state that is stable, since impactors continue to arrive, radionucleotides continue to decay at the planets core creating tectonic turnover and radiation continues to arrive.

Thermodynamic disequilibrium favors catalytic processes that can accelerate toward the most stable state even if the stable state remains distal. Fire can accelerate progression but ultimately is self limited and cannot produce continuity sufficient to sustain an identity and thus cannot but through non-living process create itself (lightning, random chemical interactions). To continually sustain the process a system of information transfer qualifies life. The more efficient forms store information in one form, transmit the information in another form and actualize the information in primary and seconary forms. Because single versions of life ultimately transform one disequilibrium to another disequilibrium (e.g. plants and the snowball earth), the system that is more efficiently catabolic is noted for checking. This qualifies life into biotic states that can be differentiated based on function(s) and inheritance. The checking process occurs as the competition that allows a more consistent flow of energy from the sources of disequilibrium to the ultimate fate (largely infrared radiation). Life generally is multifunctional, meaning for example, multiple functions are required to sustain itself (unlike prions but like viruses).

For example, when a plant places a new leaf in the sun, it captures EM before it hits the ground, absorbs some of it, reflects some of it and transmitts some of it. It can store the energy and use it at night when less EM is incoming. It can trap heat closer to the ground allowing the ground to radiate longer (and creating a more homeostatic environment for itself). The next leaf comes along and grabs the EM sooner, a leaf on a different tree then captures the light sooner (competing). When there are too many leaves a herbivore comes along and degrades the leaf, when there are too many herbivores a predator comes and eats the herbivore, and when the predator dies scavengers eat him and eventually remedial bacteria get the rest. Each process is moving the thermodynamic state toward equilibrium gathering energy and using a small proportion to create order, the remainder to produce waste heat. Each process is keeping other parts of the system in a dynamic equilibrium. This is life, should one part of the system fail, then the system becomes less efficient at its task (and you end up with large amounts of O2 and buried coal). Fortunately for us, the disequilibrium created by the sun suffices to continually drive 02 at a faster rate than buried coal undergoes auto and catabolic degradation. Unfortunately for us we have decided to burn this coal to extract more thermodynamic energy. The informational system is driving this process also, and eventually informational systems will reverse the process and if not life will changed to adapt.

The structure function relationships are key to identify life, unlike simple catalytic reactions or high heat combustion, life ubiquitously relies on a complex set of structure/functional entities (gene/gene products/product effects) to sustain itself. Even simple viruses have multiple genes, each gene product forms one or more functions, and this can be appended by host cell functions the virus borrows to replicate itself. The functions can be divided into

1. Information processing (sensing and transmission)

2. Translative activity (structural genesis)

3. Secondary processing (oxidation/reduction reactions, structural interactions, modifications, cell building, etc).

The dividing lines between each are not strict.

This definition of life solves the basic problem of what life is. Within a conducive zone of energy density, thermodynamic disequilibrium can give rise to increasing complex catalytic processes that eventually can sustain a constant conversion of thermodynamic potential into kinetic potential, in a process required in draining some of the energy to create order which can also be sustained and modulated.

Interesting. I don't think what you are saying is at all mutually exclusive with my earlier three points. In fact, you seem to mostly describe (which I would call) homeostasis, i.e. the maintenance of catabolic processes - order, structural genesis - which will be utilized for metabolic processes - destruction of order, energy transfer.

- - - Updated - - -

< also an actual biologist.

For the certainty that post started with. note how it broke down at the end.

"Is a virus alive? In most cases no."

"Is a bacterium alive? In the vast majority of cases, yes."

"Are mitochondria and chloroplasts alive? Interesting question!"

You also didn't address if something is alive when it is dormant, and how dormant it can be.... because there are various levels of dormancy... like a hibernating bear on one hand... and dessicated tardigrades on the other.

A virus outside of a cell vs a virus inside a cell?

There are many cases of life cycles at which at some point, the life form ceases to actively maintain homeostasis, but instead relies on a durable form such as a spore.

We don't call that alive or not alive... but instead invent a new term: cryptobiosis.

FWIW, I never see anyone debate what is alive or not alive in the lab or in scientific journals. These are biological entities with known properties.

Beyond describing those properties, you're just talking semantics.

FYI, responding to this:

"But, AFAIK they cannot survive outside of the host cell, i.e. the host cell provides for most homeostasis purposes."

They can remain viable for a time outside the host cell, long enough to be transplanted... but they certainly can't reproduce or be cultured.

Take the human mitochondria for example... its genome encodes just 13 mRNAs, 22 tRNAs, and 2 rRNAs.

Its proteome has >1000 proteins.

It must import a lot of nuclear encoded proteins.... yet the RNA components for a protein translation system are fully encoded by its genome.

The neccessary ribosomal proteins, DNA and RNA polymerases, many many many other enzymes, are not.

You're missing the point that there are always going to be things skimming the border. This is inevitable.

As for dormancy. Dormant cells or individuals do not cease catabolic and metabolic processes (i.e, homeostasis). They slow it down, sure, but do not cease it. So there is no contradiction here. When we take frozen specimens, you could say that they are currently no longer alive. That said, alive <--> dead does not necessarily have to imply a purely one directional process. Frozen bacteria could be considered as currently-dead bacteria which haven't yet lost the complete capability of being resuscitated (although it will only work in a subset), to give an example.

[What is the definition of life?]

Actual biologist here.

Those seven items we've all been taught in high school could better be named hallmarks in stead of defining properties. Yes, they are common to life, and if an entity has all seven, we would very likely all call it "alive", but it's not all that is to life. Especially at smaller scales, it tends to break down.

There are three key items that, to me, define life for a given entity:

1. It contains genetic information, which is passed from generation to generation

2. A body of highly-similar (genetically) entities evolves its genetic information and behaviours over time (this naturally follows from point 1)

3. It actively maintains homeostasis. The end of this homeostasis means the death of said entity.

Entities that have merely points 1 and 2 is what I would call not alive but nevertheless biological.

Especially that third item is what I have been missing in this thread. And it is oh-so important. I have seen someone mention "boundary between inside and outside" as a defining property. This forms the basis of homeostasis, but it is not the end of it. Homeostasis means that the entity keeps its internal properties (hence it needs outside/inside border) relatively stable by some means, regardless of its surroundings. There are many forms of homeostasis, and higher forms of live have ever more complex ones. The most simple is osmotic pressure. The concentration of salts and organic compounds (nucleic acids, proteins, metabolites, etc) inside a cell tends to be widely different from that outside, and the cell actively maintains this. More complex forms of homeostasis include such things as blood pressure, blood oxygenation levels, heart rate and structural integrity. Life must spend an arduous amount of energy on maintaining this homeostasis. When it ceases to do so, it will die. E.g. a human dies if blood pressure isn't maintained, blood oxygenation levels drop, heart rate drops, salt balance (i.e. kidneys) is disrupted, you name it.

An interesting property also arises from this homeostasis: living things seem to have locally lower entropy than their surroundings. The necessarily contain and produce higher-order structures. Ironically, these same higher order structures allow for extremely efficient energy transfer (e.g. photosynthesis is much more efficient at converting light into chemical energy than the simple radiative heating of the sun on bare rocks), which in effect increases the entropy of the total system.

So some practical examples:

Is fire alive? No. It doesn't convey genetic information from generation to generation (it doesn't have generations at all), and therefore also doesn't evolve. Very temporary homeostasis might exist for fire, but this is self-limiting, so not truly there.

Is a rock alive? No. It has none of the three properties.

Is a virus alive? In most cases no. It however is quite obviously a biological entity, in the sense that it most definitely carries genetic information and evolves. There are some viruses that skim the border, and seem to have some form of sustained homeostasis.

Is a bacterium alive? In the vast majority of cases, yes. However, just as with larger-than-usual viri, there are bacteria which are so small as to entirely depend on host species to survive, so they skim the border between alive and not.

Are mitochondria and chloroplasts alive? Interesting question! They do have genetic information, which they pass on from generation to the next, and also evolve. Furthermore, it is generally assumed both evolved from endosymbionts. But, AFAIK they cannot survive outside of the host cell, i.e. the host cell provides for most homeostasis purposes.

Are humans alive? Most definitely .

[A Guide to Steampunk Space Travel. (Please add your thoughts!)]

Take, for instance, the Spacecoach concept, which is intended to provide a cheap reusable, lower-maintenance, more liveable vessel for exploring the Solar System. Although driven, again, by electric propulsion, one of the critical elements of it is that it uses water, or ice-derived materials, for propellant. Water is probably (relatively) cheap in space; if you can hitch onto a near-Earth comet or mine ice from asteroids, you may have it made. Spacecoaches are additionally designed to use the ship's consumable water as their propellant - why carry your heavy wastewater when you can hook your engine to your toilet - a feature that may admittedly be specific to its electric propulsion design, but is interesting nonetheless as it vastly cuts down on propellant requirements, with a 40 ton ship of 6 crew requiring 54 tons of consumables and yielding 18km/s delta-v. If your steampunky setting can figure out ion engines, it may be worth a look - and I'd reckon that, at a mass ratio of around 2:1, you could afford to carry some extra equipment like a sufficiently miniaturized computer.

Interesting concept. I would think ion engines are rather complicated for steampunk, but there might be a way to utilize water in a more simple way: the electrolysis of water produces H2 and O2. Combine those and we have BOOM again. That of course does require you to generate reasonably large amounts of electricity (perhaps from solar heated boiler/turbine), but electrolysis itself is simple enough. Water electrolysis was first performed in 1800.

[Blue Origin Thread (merged)]

Yeah, but they're going to send lives (more importantly, human lives) on it,how much do you value human lives ?

As unethical as it may seem, human lives do have their 'price'. We are not going to invest 5B USD to try to save a single human being, sorry. Public risk management projects do take that into account. E.g., a Dutch life was valued in 2008 at €2.2 million with regards to the Delta Works

[New Horizons]

To quote Nature:

Update (9:49 p.m. BST, 6 July): The spacecraft went into safe mode because the flight computer was doing too many things at once, the New Horizons team has announced. While one part of the computer was compressing data it had already gathered, another part was burning a future command sequence into flash memory. The two tasks were more than the processor could handle at one time, said project manager Glen Fountain. No similar combination of tasks is expected between now and the 14 July encounter. Although some 30 science observations were lost because of the glitch, the spacecraft is on course to gather science as planned during the closest part of the Pluto flyby.

[Blue Origin Thread (merged)]

There's a change in design, basically you can't combine them.

My suggestion is to tighten (or increase) QC for the rocket and the rocket parts. Say, if every process is bound to 95% success, then an additional process (which the rule apply) will at least remove 95% from that 5% - leaving you with 0.25% chance of going wrong. Hope SpaceX and everyone else is learning out from this - maybe the shuttle did the same (24/25 success rate, then increased to 109/110 success rate).

That's probably ineffective. In basically any field, roughly 80% of problems are easily fixed by targeting the low-hanging fruit. Those remaining 20% are your bigger problem. You're going to have to spend ever increasing amounts of effort for just a tiny reward. If you were to plot effort spend vs success rate, it's probably going to be a curve that's asymptotically approaching 100%.

There is going to be a point at which further QC is more expensive in any terms than just having the occasional failure every now and then.

[Blue Origin Thread (merged)]

M-Vac, short for Merlin-Vacuum, the 2nd stage engine of the Falcon 9, they basically cool everything off before it begins running since its a cyrogenic engine.

I'm just wondering, how do they chill something to cryogenic temperatures when a few instants later there's a - i expect extremely hot - flame coming out of it?

[Blue Origin Thread (merged)]

Define "explode," then.

Technically speaking, it would have been a conflagration. An explosion is when a mixture of gases spontaneously combusts. But yeah, that's pure semantics here. For all intends and purposes, it was completely torn to pieces.

[What should the first Mars City/Colony be called?]

One obvious candidate for the first colony outside Earth:

New Jamestown

(Jamestown was the first permanent British colony in the New World ;-) )

[Orbit with periapsis inside event horizon]

Interesting theory. But I think such planet (if it's not made from hype-unobtainium thingy )would easily get destroyed by tidal forces. Also, when you take into account time dilation, planet orbiting at nearly speed of light would be literally created only few seconds before the black hole dissipates from Hawking radiation.

Does that still hold true inside an event horizon? Doesn't our 3 spatial dimension + 1 time dimension world break down at that boundary?

[Infinite Universe = Impossible]

I'd suggest OP reads this: http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0302131v1.pdf

It's old, but doesn't make it less valid.

In a nutshell, yes, OP, in an infinite universe reality repeats itself several times. That's not odd. Imagine the observable universe to be a Rubik's cube. A Rubik's cube can technically have about 519 quintillion states. Now, however, consider a room FULL of Rubik's cubes. Every single state in the original Rubik's cube can now be duplicated in any of the (probably thousands of) Rubik's cubes in the room. In effect, we have duplicted our observable universe with many instances of the same. Now imagine an entire house full of rubik's cubes, an entire city, entire country, and entire planet full of Rubik's cubes. The number of duplications of our observable universe is now, for all practical purposes, gargantuan.

This is exactly the case of reality. Within a bubble with a radius of approximately 10^10^91m, there should be a sphere of space exactly duplicating our entire stellar neighbourhood of 100ly. An identical copy of you is roughly 10^10^29m* away, and an identical copy of our entire observable universe should exist in a bubble of space with a radius of 10^10^115m.

Besides that, there is a much much much older argument for an infinite universe, known to the ancient Greeks. Consider the universe being a spherical room with a diameter of 5 meters. What happens when I step outside of it? I still exist, so my universe must have become bigger. And I can step further and further and futher, and each time I step further, I'll expand my universe. There is no end to this. You can always step further.

*: I've once asked a physicist about the following problem tho: I know the Pleiades exist, several hundred light years from here. An exact copy of me should also know that the Pleiades exist. Shouldn't that exact copy of me also be placed within an exact copy of the entire observable as it is known to me, to be actually an exact copy of me; thus necessitating the entire observable universe to be duplicated (10^10^115m)? I never really got an answer to this question. So, if someone here has an answer to this rather philosophical question, please tell me!

[Tallest Mountain on Kerbin]

So in theory, that mountain must be really high, since Kerbin is 10 times smaller than the earth. If that mountain was on earth, it would be 60 000 meters high, right?

Nah, that's not how it really works. In fact, smaller bodies tend to have more drastic surface features. For instance, the tallest mountain on Earth is Mauna Kea in Hawaii (Everest is the tallest peak as seen from mean sea level, but Mauna Kea is the tallest mountain from base to top), with a total size of 10.1km. Earth is the Solar system's largest rocky planet. Yet, there are 10 mountains in the solar system taller than that, the tallest being the Rheasilvia central peak on Vesta with over 22km.

[Weird behavior directly over North Pole?]

I recreated the flight, and you're right, it's only a camera thing and the navball. Guess I got confused with that the first time it happened. Of course, the navball flipping around makes sense, but the camera changing view is a bit misleading. Proof: the following pics were made with me not pressing any buttons (except printscreen ), camera shifted automagically.

Moments before reaching the pole

Weirdness starting

More weirdness

Hi there, sun!

Nearly completely shifted.

[Weird behavior directly over North Pole?]

Well, it did look like the view was turning around, rather than the plane doing anything. I had SAS on at the moment; could that be mixing up the two coordinate systems?

[Weird behavior directly over North Pole?]

Hi there,

For a survey contract on the other side of Kerbin I flew a plane over the north pole. Everything went perfectly fine, up until I flew directly over the pole. I suddenly spiralled left and fell from approx 18km to 14km in half a minute or so. Normality restarted a minute later or so. Is there anything special about flying directly over a pole? Or was this just bad luck?