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FleshJeb

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Posts posted by FleshJeb

  1. Guys, read some critiques of the Gilded Age, or why a high Gini coefficient is bad for economies and societies. None of this is theoretical, there are observed effects.

    Or at least realize there’s a logical conflict between “Daddy billionaire will pay for it” and There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

    In any case, here are some known stats:

    • Without service, Hubble will die sometime between 2030 and 2040. That’s at least an additional 20 percent of its existing service life. I don’t think trying to do a high technical risk maintenance mission just to get private astronauts some training is worth getting it for free.
    • Hubble can only serve 1/5 of its requests for scope time.
    • We have much better instruments available than were originally installed or retrofitted onto Hubble.
    • The Nancy Grace Roman telescope will be going up soon, and it’s built on a KH-11 spysat that NASA got for free. There’s a spare KH-11 just sitting in storage. The optics are great, it just needs different instruments. We can put an additional better quality, longer lifespan telescope up for comparatively little money. (Caveat: NGR is slightly worse at some things than Hubble)

    Wait for Hubble to be much closer to end of life before allowing private maintenance/training on it, and have replacement ready to go if they screw it up. It’s not worth the risk to a public resource, yet.

  2. 4 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

    Um, no? People are giving KSP 1 a free pass despite how bad it is because they see KSP 2 underperforming. I'd rather give neither a free pass.

    I’m in the same camp of, “Even KSP one is unacceptably buggy.”

    My two best arguments are:

    • Do you still have to manually slow your timewarp before an SOI change so that your trajectory doesn’t go to hell?
    • Do you still reflexively quicksave before doing almost anything? Not because you’re afraid you’ll screw up, but that KSP will.

    I tried playing pure vanilla about 5 years ago when mechjeb was in bad shape. Was doing a very simple, very standard mission to the mun. Did the transfer burn, set up my capture burn, punched the stock Warp To Node button, and the damn thing blew right through the SOI. I pretty much quit playing after that.

    That kind of thing should never have survived ten minutes of QA. Between that and my experiences with other games, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of the game dev industry has very little respect for player time and energy.

  3. 31 minutes ago, Skorj said:

    With this much silence, it's reasonable to conclude that the game has been carried to Mount Doom by a couple of Hobbits and chucked into the volcano.  It has shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the bleedin' Choir Invisible.

    Look, I came here for an argument…

  4. 2 minutes ago, K^2 said:

    So? A lot of studios are WFH now. The only reason I've been in the same room with some of my colleagues is because we used to work at another studio together previously. A bunch of others aren't even in the same state.

    If you contributed to the game, you're part of the team. Don't take that away from people. Not yours to take.

    Absolutely correct. I was responding to the implication that Jim viewing this thread was somehow nefarious or a gotcha. I object to the notion that he’s in any way culpable for the state of things.

    now, back to reading emiko, because it was still in progress last time I caught up.

  5. 1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

    Define "us" and "them" if the distinction is not employment at Intercept.

    A dude who, as far as I know, works from home part time, and has probably never been in the same room as anyone else from intercept. Not someone who is involved in making decisions, privy to gossip, and may know even fewer details than the janitorial staff at the office.

    edit: the legend 

     

  6. 5 hours ago, Flush Foot said:

    Hello KSP Team member!

    512MUPE.jpeg

    Jim has been one of US for at least a decade. They just hired him to write some flavor text because he’s damn good at it. You’re being creepy and weird, knock it off.

    edit: my mistake. Ff was just making an observation.

  7. 18 hours ago, Shpaget said:

    I would presume, if not IRL, certainly if Sci Fi, evolution would have taken care of that. Whatever lifeform evolved in the environment would be well equipped to deal with that environment.

    Oh for sure. I just wanted to bring up that the effects of different/changing atmospheric composition are way more nuanced and complex than the usual discussions around them.

    As to the lower nitrogen concentration, I’d expect that it would require more metabolic energy to capture each unit. I think this would tend to favor the evolution of slower, more efficient organisms all up and down the chain. On Earth we have creatures that have fascinating adaptations to poor nutrition environments, such as Koalas, Pandas, and Elon Musk. But, they’re all slow, stupid, and require external help to mate.

  8. Really pleased to see that you’ve taken this as far as you have. :D

    As noted, one of the major issues that keeps KAL computing from being really useful is the lack of sensors (other than KAL destruction).

    Well, I had an exceptionally stupid notion: The Making History Mission Editor has triggers for various flight events and parameters. It can also activate action groups and staging… That gets you 11 responses to “sensor” data. Now, if I understand the power of what you’ve got here, you could treat those action groups as a bit field, and activate 2^10 ish possible other KALs. (x sensor condition activates bits 2 and 5, bits 2 AND 5 activate KAL34)

    There’s some decent potential for fully automated, fully stock mission execution (with a boatload of hard work, caveats and exceptions).

    I checked the manual, just to see if I’d remembered the features correctly:

    https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Mission_Builder_Manual

     

  9. I’m a coward, I’d pick Argon.

    The major problem is that the nitrogen cycle is necessary for life as we know it. N is a fundamental building block of proteins.

    You’d probably want lower concentrations of CO2 as well, because high CO2 negatively affects the uptake of Nitrogen and other minerals, making the plants less nutritious per volume (offsetting the increased volume from the CO2).

    Quote

    Protein concentrations in plant tissues are closely tied to plant nitrogen status. Changes in plant tissue nitrogen are therefore likely to have important effects on species at higher trophic levels. Performance is typically diminished for insect herbivores feeding on plants grown in elevated CO2 (Zvereva & Kozlov 2006). This can lead to increased consumption of plant tissues as herbivores compensate for decreased food quality (Stiling and Cornelissen 2007). Effects on human nutrition are likely as well. In FACE experiments, protein concentrations in grains of wheat, rice and barley, and in potato tubers, are decreased by 5–14% under elevated CO2 (Taub et al. 2008). Crop concentrations of nutritionally important minerals including calcium, magnesium and phosphorus may also be decreased under elevated CO2 (Loladze 2002; Taub & Wang 2008).

    https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/effects-of-rising-atmospheric-concentrations-of-carbon-13254108/
     

    Did I answer this just to dunk on one-dimensional climate change misinformation…?

    I would NEVER.

  10. One of the additional benefits of renewable energy is that it’s viable at multiple scales in ways that nuclear and fossil fuel power are not. (I’m still pro-nuclear, especially the small modular reactors.) A big topic in civil engineering is decentralization of necessary resources like electricity, water, and wastewater. Smaller, more local systems can be controlled by the people that actually use them. You don’t quite get the economies of scale of larger systems, but you get increased accountability and responsiveness. They’re also more resilient in the face of disasters, because fewer people are affected if a community-scale system goes offline, and this makes them easier to help.

    I have a lot of real-world examples showing the dangers of over-centralization, but the most stark one is from Dune. Paul is able to take control of the galaxy because he controls the single source of the Spice that enables interstellar travel. This is an example of what’s known historically as a Hydraulic Empire.

     

  11. I was on the team that construction-staked this: mark-west-quarry-with-solar-fo_10731156.

    The panels are on a part of the quarry that’s been tapped out and remediated. The power generated offsets 100% of their electrical needs for the year (which are substantial). They had to dig their electrical trenches with Primacord (I was there, and the explosions were awesome.) It’s running just fine and has paid for itself and then some in the 12 years since it went online.

    So, quit the whining and crying, and keep your fantasies about how the world works to yourselves.

  12. I’m not a lawyer, but I do have professional training and experience in interpreting civil code, as well as preparing arguments to local regulators.

    Whatever the state jurisdiction, it’s going to lean heavily on the Federal Trade Commission Act, Section 5.

    I found these two papers enlightening and informative:

    https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/supmanual/cch/200806/ftca.pdf

    https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements/410531/831014deceptionstmt.pdf

    I might write up a tighter argument later, but the summary is: Was it unfair? No. Was the marketing and communication deceptive? Almost certainly. Per the two documents above, what constitutes “deception” is VERY broad and consumer-friendly.

    If I were T2/Intercept, I’d be carefully archiving all their internal communications. I’m sure T2 legal sent that letter to Intercept in the same package they sent the WARN notice.

  13. Some very good ones in there.

    THE foundational mod: MechJeb. Learning why and how it worked is what taught me orbital mechanics. Without MJ and KER, KSP is still an alpha-quality tech demo. With them, it’s a beta (that I have 6000 hrs in).

    I know MJ was in bad shape after the “assistants” took over a few years ago. Has it been fixed yet? I had a long Discord conversation with Sarbian at the time, to clarify a few things I didn’t understand in the source, and I REALLY should have fixed it myself.

    For a more functionalist/engineering type player, my essential list would add Editor Extensions Redux, CorrectCoL (or Kerbal Wind Tunnel), RCS Build Aid, TAC Fuel Balancer, and Navball Docking Alignment Indicator (much more elegant/intuitive than DPAI).

    For automation, KOS or KRPC. KRPC is much more powerful but harder to start using.

    Janitor’s Closet for hiding or permadeleting parts out of all those bloated part mods. I think you can even take out stock parts.

    If you’re designing a comms network, I prefer this spreadsheet to in-game tools: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/149099-commnet-signal-strength-calculator-antenna-selector/

    OhioBob’s jet engine and atmosphere graphs for speed, thrust, temperature, and pressure on the wiki are essential basic references for those of us that like spaceplanes and/or really hot aerobraking.

    For whimsical and slightly overpowered ISRU, Karbonite. (I might be addicted to gas-giant diving, and a Tekto-Sarnus (OPM) dive is amazing.) AFAIK this is the only mod with atmospheric gas scoop refueling.

    Last and certainly not least, ZeroMiniAVC because miniAVC is functionally spyware; I don’t care how they try to rationalize it.

  14. I think it’s considered polite to let the body cool before engaging in necromancy. :D

    I’m just teasing, I know you’re doing it out of love, but I’d have been OK if the franchise died after 1.3.  It peaked there or in 0.25. People would have kept playing and modding, and we would have had a better end product.

    Maybe the future of space sims (preferably whimsical!) is better served by a different IP with less baggage?

    I’m fairly sour on the games industry as a whole. I can’t see myself buying anything for the next 3-5 years. My back catalog can easily sustain that, and I started reading for pleasure again. I killed 6 novels in one week, and it was fantastic.

  15. Thank you to the folks arguing back against the simplistic and ahistorical takes presented in this thread. My public school education 35+ years ago covered the development of consumer protections during the Industrial Revolution and how pivotal Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was in reforming the meatpacking industry. We also covered why all your consumer electronics have “UL Listed” stamped on them.

    Hell, the Romans were arguing about the viability of caveat emptor a couple millennia ago.

    The reason it doesn’t work is that there will always be informational asymmetry between sellers and buyers, and it’s impossible to do enough due diligence to adequately protect yourself. So sellers must follow a reasonable standard of care, ensure that what they’re selling is fit for purpose, and also not misrepresent their product or service. In the vast majority of circumstances, this cannot be signed away. If it could be easily signed away, it would just be another race to the bottom.

    I think there’s a decent argument to be made that KSP2 development was thoroughly and consistently misrepresented, and that it’s definitely not fit for purpose.

    I’ve seen a few people say, “KSP2 is so bad, I wouldn’t even pirate it.” I’m in full agreement there.

    Now I’m gonna screenshot some posts as embarrassing monuments to academic underachievement and share them with a friend who’s a middle-school teacher. She’s going to be laughing and crying at the same time.

  16. On 5/1/2024 at 1:20 AM, K^2 said:

    One day I'll get fed up with it and write my own. I really just need a simple expressions evaluator that has physics constants and units pre-programmed, which isn't that hard to make.

    This is how I know you don’t own an HP48. :D 

    My SX could do this in 1994. There’s a shortcut on the keyboard for the units menu.

    (Also, you can troll TI84 users by putting it in the soft case and punting it 100ft down the hallway of the math building. The 84’s suffer a full memory reset if you drop them a couple feet.)

    Absolutely glorious pieces of hardware—Every nerd should try one. I need to steal mine back from my dad.

  17. K ninja’d me (and did a better job, as usual).

    There are two kinds of letters in these equations: Variables and Units.

    ”How much” and “of what”

    If all the units are compatible with your final result, you can ignore them and just put the numbers in. The units only need to be accounted for if they’re mixed.

    For instance, if you wanted the end result for semimajor axis in km, you’d have to convert the gravitational parameter to km^3/s^2. (I messed this up the first time I started calculating orbits.)

    3.01x10^11 m^3/s^2 * (1km / 10^3m)^3 = 3.01x10^2 km^3/s^2.

    Exponent rules:

    (10^3)^3 = 10^9 (Exponent to an exponent multiplies)

    10^11 / 10^9 = 10^2 (Exponent divided by exponent subtracts, multiplied adds)

     

  18. I'm guessing the emoji parser might be having a problem with the :/ ":/" emoji and one or some of the other characters in the URL.

    I noticed the :1437623226_rocket_1f680(3): ":1437623226_rocket_1f680(3):" emoji has some parentheses in it. I'm shocked the parser can deal with those. I've used a bunch of software that fails in creative ways when dealing with special characters. Given that it's the last emoji added, perhaps the parser is seeing the emoji list as unterminated.

    If that line of inquiry is plausible, I'd test it by adding another emoji to the list and seeing if the forum software can actually find it.

  19. I was trying to link a video from youtube, and when I embed it and hit submit, the editor throws this error:

    yMtj2UT.png

    I tried just the text of the video id in the test thread, and it works fine.

    URL of video in question with a space added, and the link removed.

    https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6R8hdRiEWkY

    Another random video from the same channel, just to see if it works:

     

    Huh, that worked. I'll try the original video again:

    same error

    ...yep, it's that specific URL.

     

    Trying the short URL also throws an error, unless I remove the embed.

    https://youtu.be/6R8hdRiEWkY

     

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