Wanderfound

Fusion generation is, infamously, twenty years away. It's been twenty years away since the 1950's. It's probably still going to be twenty years away in 2050. Climate action was urgently needed thirty years ago; we can't wait for 2070. Fukushima provided a relevant demonstration of why building your power infrastructure on the coastline isn't necessarily a good idea. Climate change exacerbates this issue; storm surges, hurricanes, general sea level rise, etc. There was a piece on Ockham's Razor a few years ago that should be of interest to some folks here: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/nuclear-energy-a-panacea-for-climate-change/3049300 If you have a dig through their archives, you'll find academics presenting opposing views on that argument, too.

With FAR, a single basic jet with two radial intakes can easily cruise at Mach 1 and 20,000m. Add some more intakes or use a parabolic arc and you'll hit 24,000m without much trouble. Aerial surveys get a lot more interesting once you've got turbojets, especially if you do a couple of them on a single flight. Pulling high-G turns at Mach 5 to avoid overshooting waypoints when you're low enough to be generating reentry flames can be quite entertaining: They do seem a bit over-generous on the science, though. I'm pulling in more science from a single survey flight than I would from a Mun landing. I'm not complaining, but they could do with a bit of a difficulty buff; maybe require you to install a camera part and trigger it while flying straight and level for a certain period of time.

Which is why nobody sensible is calling for "hydro everywhere" or "geothermal everywhere". As I said, you need all of them; hydro on the rivers, geothermal on the volcanoes, tidal in the oceans, solar in the deserts. Adapt the power generation to the local conditions, and decentralise it as much as possible in order to reduce transmission losses. This also reduces the storage issue; solar when it's sunny, wind when it's windy, pumped hydro storage when it's neither sunny nor windy, etc. You also can't use fission everywhere. As well as requiring a substantial amount of industrial, technological, economic and political infrastructure to maintain, fission reactors are also massive water hogs. Potable water is running short already, and if you try to use desalinated seawater to cool your reactors you end up wasting most of the power generated in the running of the desal plant. Not to mention the horrible effects that desal has on the local aquatic biosphere, which is another resource that's running dry due to idiotic shortsightedness. It would be lovely if fission was the solution to the climate problem, but it isn't. At best, it may be a somewhat useful temporary bridge on the way to genuinely renewable power. Uranium fission is 1950's tech; its time is done.

Speaking of aerial survey missions...something with altitude variations within the same survey would be cool. Rapid climb/dive cycles provide all sorts of opportunities for aerodynamic failures and DRE-related adventures.

For the cargo plane award, does it need to be carrying 20t during the aerobatic show, or just be capable of hauling 20t of cargo about?

Kerbal Flight Data; highly recommended. It allowed me to stop cluttering up my screen with Mechjeb and FAR information windows. Check out Kerbal Flight Indicators while you're at it; that's what's producing the artificial horizon in the distance.

Speaking as someone who used to work at a reactor... Fission has its own major problems, although they're not quite the problems that the general public perceives them as. Waste disposal isn't a major issue, weapons proliferation is a major issue, water consumption is a moderate issue, and safety...well, the problem there is again political rather than technological. A well-designed modern fission plant, run by sane and competent people, is well within the bounds of acceptable safety. But show me where we'll find a sufficiently large group of sane and responsible people in North Korea. Or Syria. Or Russia, for that matter. Chernobyl wasn't caused by fission, it was caused by Russian. That is not within the bounds of acceptably safe. And there is no need to take the risk; non-fission renewables can do the job just as well. Not any one of them, but all of them: hydro, geothermal, wind, tidal, solar (both thermal and PV), etc. And, most important of all, efficiency. Most of the problem is not that we can't cleanly produce sufficient power; it's that we insist on wasting vast amounts of power in ridiculously idiotic ways. Single use aluminium packaging; 24/7 lighting and aircon; single-occupant commuter vehicles driven by large-block V8's; etc. We're dying of stupidity.

It can be done, though; witness the rapid transformation of US industry during WWII. In just a few years, they went from an economy that was still largely agrarian to having the ability to pump out a few dozen aircraft carriers in a year. The USSR managed a similar trick, jumping from a virtually medieval economy that had been further impaired by decades of civil war to something that was able to spam T34's at a ridiculous rate. The problem is political, not technological. We have (or at least had) the ability to prevent this disaster; we're just choosing not to do so.

The JPEGs I've been posting are about 1/10th the size of the default PNGs, actually (about 50-200KB vs 500-1,500KB). And I'm using them because I was directly asked to do so; even today, not everyone has broadband. What does it cost anyone to let the player choose their default screenshot format? The game can obviously do it, as the Steam situation demonstrates. Sure, the "save the Earth" factor is hyperbole, but download times on dodgy connections are a real issue (for others, not me personally; my broadband copes fine either way).

Do you want a very fast, very economical spaceplane that can pretty much fly itself to orbit? Would it be a bonus if it were also capable of utterly ridiculous aerobatic nonsense? Would it be even better if it came with the vectored thrust capability to maintain that aerobatic ability even at the edge of space? You want a Kerbodyne Spacebat. Very fast, very silly, very fun. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/vksybewqpndi7u5/Kerbodyne%20Spacebat.craft?dl=0 Designed for FAR. Requires Spaceplane Plus for bodywork and Firespitter for landing gear. Optional paintjob by Kerbpaint.

Yes, it needed to be a slow, carefully managed transition. But it needed to happen thirty years ago, when the global scientific community told y'all that it needed to happen. All those researchers calling for urgent, emergency action back in the 1990's weren't doing it for fun. We're out of time. On a sane planet, we'd shut down the global coal industry today. Even if we do that, we're still probably screwed; the evidence of the last few years strongly suggests that we have already passed irretrievable tipping points. Sudden and drastic transition would cause immense economic and social harm. But the alternative is worse. We're well into "get it done now, whatever it takes" territory.

Heavily seconding Sirine's suggestion. Sure, keep the option to do it in png if we want to. But don't make it compulsory. Having to manually convert everything to jpeg is a major pain in the arse.

Meh. Make it compulsory to hold a motorcycle licence for a few years before they let you drive a car. Let Darwin take care of the careless.

Rep-worthy in a slightly different way than usual. Not super-big, not super-fast, not super-flashy, but super-easy-to-fly. I built this as a trainer for FAR. It's very stable, very manoeuvrable, and takes off with no control inputs at all. If you're having trouble with landings or just dealing with realistic aero in general, give this one a shot before you move on to your own designs. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1411614&viewfull=1#post1411614 And, once you've got the hang of that, have a go with the fast version: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1411623&viewfull=1#post1411623 Perfect for Fine Print aerial survey contracts.

Yay! (stupid bloody 10char limit)

Again, BTW, I'd recommend you use my trainer (or someone else's equivalent) while you're getting the hang of landing. It's tricky enough already without having to deal with potentially questionable aerodynamics at the same time. The trainer has slightly narrow-track landing gear, but that's a deliberate thing: it'll train you to level the wings before touching down. It has bucketloads of roll authority and wonderful roll stability, so getting them level shouldn't be a problem. See http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1411614&viewfull=1#post1411614 for the download, along with screenshots of the FAR analysis screens for it.

Current ModuleManager: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/55219-Module-Manager-1-5-6-%28Jan-6%29 Very many mods use the MM dll, and a lot of them package a copy of it with their own downloads. Normally this isn't a problem; MM is set up to ignore all but the newest version of itself. However, there are one or two MM versions that cause problems. You only need one copy of the dll; delete all but the latest one. If the mod maker did it right, MM should be in the top level Gamedata directory so you should be able to find them easily. Unfortunately, not everyone did it right; see Kerbpaint for example. That one has a seriously archaic copy of MM buried several layers deep in its folders. Just go to your Gamedata folder, search for ModuleManager in all subfolders, and delete them all. Then put one copy of the latest ModuleManager dll (2.3.4 at the moment) in the top level of the Gamedata folder.

Did the Firespitter maps mentioned a few pages back ever get posted?

Also available: Kerbodyne Evangelist II TJ. Same polished aerodynamics as the base plane, but with three times the fuel and five times the speed. Craft file at https://www.dropbox.com/s/j22zzgpzhil9ksd/Kerbodyne%20Evangelist%20II%20TJ.craft?dl=0

Now available: the Kerbodyne Evangelist II. Even easier to fly than the original. Thanks to Tetryds for assistance with the final aerodynamic tune. Craft file available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/5l3go4mgfrz2egj/Kerbodyne%20Evangelist%20II.craft?dl=0 Designed for FAR, but no mods required. Optional paintjob by Kerbpaint.

Okay: nothing terribly impressive, but just for the sake of getting some numbers on the board. Ready to go. Just cruisin' around. Alive! And with wings! 15.2G. Not great, but it'll do for a starter. Improvement to come.

Will the amused approval of your peers do?

Yes, I know that you can wind up Deadly Reentry if you want to. But it seems to have a reputation as an extremely lethal and difficult hyper-realism mod, and it just isn't when it's on the default settings. I'm not complaining; if anything, I'm saying this to encourage more people to give it a try. Toasting canards is way fun. I think it should be made stock, with the default settings at least as hard as they are at present, but retaining the ability for the user to wind it up or down as far as they like.

BTW, a couple of mods that are very helpful for this challenge, and for flight in general: Extended Trim: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90825-Extended-Trim Allows you to make "set trim to current inputs" and "clear trim" into action groups. Improved Chase Camera: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/80112-0-24-x-Improved-Chase-Camera-v1-4-0-(7-23) Gives a chase cam that follows the plane but doesn't have the hypersensitive pitch or roll of the original (but does invert when appropriate). Takes a bit of getting used to, but worthwhile. I'm also having a lot of fun with the IVA cameras of Raster Prop Monitor...

Unfortunately, no. Due to the existence of positive feedback loops and the substantial inertia of climate systems, climate change is in some ways analogous to a long-incubation disease like HIV. By the time you're obviously ill, it's too late to stop the damage. Over the last thirty years, the refined predictions and observations have been reliably trending towards the worst-case scenarios. The ice is melting faster than hoped, the methane clathrates are bubbling off as we speak, and "Lake North Pole" has been a reliable summer appearance for several years now. Severe climate impacts are going to affect people alive today.