FleshJeb

Awesome! I love seeing stuff like this. I managed to do a very rudimentary one (without differential control) using the helicopter blades, and changing the deploy angle. You may want to check out DecoFox on youtube. He's done ornithopters of various styles in Stormworks, and some of his techniques/solutions may be useful to you.

Lick them clean and put them back in the drawer, you casuals.

If I'd released a game in this state, I'd be too busy dealing with gastrointestinal distress to do this. As I wrote this, I realized that these two activities are no longer mutually exclusive... Wash your hands, Nate, and good luck!

I had to put my little munchkin down this morning. Rest in peace, Cleo--It was a joy knowing you:

My running (completely unfounded) theory is that they somehow lost the entire codebase but still had all the art assets. Then they called in the maintainers of KSP 1 to help make a recreation in a hurry. That would explain a lot about both games being in the state they're in.

GLONASS/GPS

My tolerance is 1/8" but I can give it to you 500 feet away and over rough terrain. This is your friendly reminder not to rotate and translate the site plan, and use DVIEW TWIST and a viewport in Paperspace instead. (In my area, architects are notorious for having exceptionally bad CAD workflow.) Honestly, put the liability for that on your civil/survey sub. Picking on the architect aside, I agree that converting too many types of units is fraught with danger. The one where I have to interface with your discipline is feet and fractional inches to decimal feet. Especially if I'm staking a foundation plan and I need to do it in the field, in my head. Feel free to PM me if you want to complain about stupid surveyors.

You're right, I was reconstructing the experiment in my head late at night and somehow didn't realize it's the motion of the moon (plus observer velocity) CAUSING the rise and set. Which is why my number is approximately the same as your rise/set angles. So the source of my cognitive error is that my skull is an oblate spheroid. I understand the how the terrain heights and entry angle to the moon are having an effect, but I'm not sure what you're doing with the quantification--The units aren't working out (km rather than seconds), but I'm assuming you have some unwritten steps here. (I'm including the below for the benefit of readers who are less familiar with the science of measurement--I'm sure this is something you already know.) Generally speaking, the terrain issue is a "noisy/non-systematic error" and going to be difficult or impossible to quantify in a conclusive way. It's analogous to me looking down 500 feet of road on a hot day and trying to get an accurate angular measurement through heat shimmer/distortion. I can "eyeball average" the sight picture and take a guess at the error, but I'm better off not relying on it in my primary analysis and treating that measurement as corroborative rather than conclusive. The fun of doing science on a budget! Hmm, I thought the observer motion would be the source of error, but it doesn't appear so from your analysis. I'm at the point where I need to draw a diagram of the the whole experiment to make sure I'm visualizing it correctly, but I don't have access to AutoCAD at the moment. (I'm actually procrastinating on quitting my job today.)

Maybe these are all just references to my love life?

This why when firearms enthusiasts ask me my favorite caliber, I respond with "one micron."

First off, thank you all for doing this project--It's really inspiring. I love picking apart methodology and finding sources of error: The refraction problem: As a surveyor, I'm reasonably familiar with the effects of refraction on angular measurement. If this experiment relied on measuring right ascension and declination, yes I think it would be quite significant. (Each pair of observations are about an hour apart, so the sky position will have varied about 15 degrees, leading to different refraction corrections.) However, we're just looking at relative times, so it's not an issue. The moon topographic problem: Could be an issue, I need to quantify it better. I stared at a picture of the Moon's topography (I'm a professional!) and I think the worst-case scenario might be a difference of 4km. I don't know where you all saw Mars rise and set over the Moon, but the blue crater on the far right side (nearside, obviously) has a pretty big jump on the southern edge: However, I think the problem is the assumption I quoted: From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon "The mean angular movement relative to an imaginary observer at the Earth–Moon barycentre is 13.176° per day to the east" (We'll ignore the fact that it's the barycentre.) 13.176 deg/day * 1 day/86400 sec = 0.00015250 deg/s = 0.54900 arcseconds/sec. Over a 40-ish second observation, the Moon will have moved about 22 arcseconds, and that will definitely cause the times for Mars to rise and set to be different, as it's "pushing" into one, and "pulling" out of the other. I'm feeling a little brain-dead at the moment, so I'm sorry for not looking at this in more thoroughly, but it appears to be quite significant.

I'll second Factorio. It's just about perfect game design and execution. I have 2200 hours without ever touching a mod. Early game is a bit slow, which is why I have 1400 hours on one playthrough. EDIT: Also the demo is absolutely worth trying. I put 20 hours into it.

Ken Block crushed himself under his snowmobile. I wasn't a huge fan, but he sure made the art of driving fast look very, very pretty. Also he was very supportive of his daughter getting into racing, which I think is a heck of a good dad move. Here's Ken tearing it up in a $10M electric Audi:

Have you considered extending this to games beyond the KSP franchise? The Steam Workshop is 98% drooling morons, and other craft/building game communities would really benefit from having an alternate site.

Just to support you in your future endeavors, this thread has some excellent intermediate to advanced advice: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/165435-basic-mk2-spaceplane-guide/

Try using the CorrectCoL mod to show your stability at various AoAs, speeds, and altitudes. It's saved me a lot of time getting things right the first time. EDIT: CorrectCoL also accounts for non-wing drag, unlike the stock indicator. The link for it is in my signature.

I believe the bug still exists that cargo bays used as the root part do not occlude drag. Follow Moe's advice and put something on both the internal nodes. I'm pretty sure the bays DO work on surface-attached objects, as long as the center of the object is inside the bay. The "center" is not necessarily the visual center, so try tucking it in farther, or flipping it around.

I'm assuming that stand has the ability to rotate the rocket so that they can even out materials creep (as well as make it easier to work on)?

CyberBride has a warranty, dude. EDIT: or whatever CyberSpouse floats your boat. Robots, man…Can’t live with ‘em, can’t unplug them since the Android Rights Bill of 2032.

This is good advice both for both MJ and stock. For MJ, I also found going into the PID-tuner and quadrupling the default Kd term helped quite a bit. It's been a few years since I played, but I think the default was 0.5 and I set mine to 2.0.

I think it was Feynman who said (paraphrasing) that the Space Shuttle was an insult to Tsiolkovsky because the heavy part went to space. I'm in the minimal-downmass camp. Most of what you launch to space should stay in space. Someone will come by to reuse the material eventually. I've had this on my office wall for a decade:

"Several studies have been conducted in recent decades on the effects of eCO2 on vegetable quality, including parameters related to taste, flavor, nutritive value, and industrial processing. These studies show that eCO2 can promote the accumulation of soluble sugar including glucose and fructose, and the accumulation of antioxidants including ascorbic acid, total phenols, and total flavonoids, but reduce the levels of protein, nitrate, Mg, Fe, and Zn in products. In practice, it is advisable to enhance vegetable quality by (1) selecting species or cultivars that respond well to eCO2; (2) providing optimal environments together with eCO2; (3) harvesting vegetables earlier than standards set at ambient CO2; and (4) combining with moderate environmental stresses. The promotion by the increased carbon fixation and thus the precursor, dilution effect, stress induction, and limitation by transpiration or N assimilation can generally explain the shifts of vegetable quality under eCO2. However, research is still required to reveal the underlying physiological and molecular mechanisms more specifically." https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2018.00924/full

I'm arguing that it SHOULD. I remember when games never got above 1.03. They were FUN. As it happens, I left them a very nasty note on their bug tracker asking them why the "heck" there were now blue LED lights and robots in my pastoral beaver game. All they needed to do was provide some good colony management tools, and it would have been perfect, but they decided to add marginally useful food items and ROBOTS. We still don't have adequate colony management tools. I quit playing Timberborn too. Oh no, I have to go outside more. Tragic. I might re-install Ghost Recon 1, or just keep playing Factorio. DSP is one of those games seems more fun to watch than it is to play. Especially since they added the proliferator mechanic. I really want to play ONI because the gas mixing and thermodynamics are fascinating, but I understand it's really buggy and non-performant. It doesn't really matter because I have the wiki memorized, a base theory-crafted and drawn on paper, and all the math done--Purchasing the game and building it would be redundant.

I'm never buying an early access game again, including this one. Between perpetual feature creep, lousy performance, and abominable QA/QC, I'm just done with supporting that method/culture of software development. Call me when the game is finished and at a high standard (and I don't mean 1.0). I quit KSP 1 after 6000 hours because I just couldn't take being an unpaid software tester for an increasingly bad product anymore. This game is easily going to make 10s of millions, you can afford the staff. I also remain convinced that 99% of UI designers of the last 15 years are blissfully unaware that people actually have to use their product to do things. The execution of what you've got is really good, but it's still noisy, flat, and has transparency, so it's flawed at a very fundamental level. A pig with great lipstick is still a pig.

I chatted with a fellow behind my office today. He works for a neighboring business that makes some fairly mundane/everyday electrical components. He told me that some of their sensor parts are on a Mars rover, and they’ve got some that are going on Artemis as well. I googled the company and it turns out they also have stuff on JWST. Mind sufficiently blown. Needless to say, I invited him to come back and chat ANYTIME he likes. ( I’d be more specific but I’d end up doxxing myself.)