Wanderfound

Yup, very much so. And, while they're at it, fix the wheel animations, raise the default brake torque, and enable steering on all gear.

Given enough time, a runaway greenhouse could potentially lead to total extinction, but that's not what I'm talking about. That's the long-term threat, but we're in deep trouble long before we have to deal with that. The short-term threat of climate change is that it is a risk multiplier: it makes all of the existing problems worse. Famine, pestilence, war; the danger of all of these is enhanced by climate change, and they all feed into each other. Food crops are both location and climate dependent. As the US rain band shifts north to the defrosting Canadian tundra, you can't just shift the crops with it; the recently-thawed mud needs time to develop into proper agricultural soil. Shifting climate also trashes pollination mechanisms for wild flora and drives extinction of endangered species. Changing watercourses exacerbate already-dangerous shortages of potable water. Expanding tropical zones bring tropical diseases with them; you can already track the march of Dengue fever etc. southwards along the north Queensland coast. For the most obvious example: almost all of Bangladesh is within spitting distance of sea level. On current rates, the country is likely to be largely uninhabitable (without Dutch-style water management, which the Bangladeshis don't have the resources to implement) within a century. Bangladesh's neighbours (India, China, Pakistan etc.) are all nuclear armed and have a history of military conflict. How do you think they're going to react when 100 million Bangladeshi refugees land on their doorstep? What will India do if China attempt to divert all of the Bangladeshis to the south and vice-versa? That's just one example, but similar scenarios recur again and again across the world. Throughout history, most military conflict has ultimately been caused by competition over resources. Climate change, in the near future, is going to substantially damage the global food supply and the already-running-short supply of potable water. Desperate people do desperate things, and there's nothing like hunger and thirst to drive desperation. Historically, starvation leads to revolution. If you go talk to the academics who specialise in conflict studies, they'll tell you that we're already seeing the first climate-driven wars. So will the people in charge of medium-term planning for the militaries of the industrialised world. Marginal environments like northern Africa are the first to go, but it will spread beyond that with time. We live in an interconnected world; everything affects everything else. The situation we are seeing now is not "the climate changing as it always has". Yes, climates change over geological timescales; the slow pace has historically given the biosphere time to adapt (and, in the rare cases of sudden change like Chicxulub, the slow pace afterwards has provided time to recover). What we're doing to the place is unprecedented in both its suddenness and its momentum. We're driving the change way too fast, and there is enough momentum built up (warmed oceans, melted permafrost, defrosted methane clathrates) that it's either too late to stop it or very close to that point. If you aren't frightened by climate change, you don't understand the situation.

On present trajectory, I wouldn't bet on human technological civilisation lasting 200 years. Humans yes, advanced society no. Climate change -> famine -> war.

I'm planning on reviving the race series: take off, loop, through the tight mountain passes then back to KSC. Get some practice in. Area ruling doesn't need to be perfect when the total area is so low. It gets a smidgeon toasty, but so long as you throttle down occasionally it's fine. Until you activate the spoilers...

Is there any way to tone down the graphics on the explosion effects without reducing the graphical quality of the rest of the game? My laptop can handle normal gameplay just fine, mods included, but every time I blow something up in mid-air (aerodynamic failures etc) the graphics load slows my computer to a drawn out slideshow. Even if I hit F9 the second it starts to blow, I end up having to wait a minute or two (literally, go-make-a-cup-of-tea type delays) for the graphics to process before it even registers the keypress. If the computer is doing anything else processor-intensive at the same time (such as, for example, recalculating the nuFAR voxel shape due to the suddenly altered airframe), it strains the computer so hard that the entire thing crashes with one of those "shutting down to avoid physical damage" warnings. The explosions are pretty and all, but they just ain't worth this much hassle.

...and the new Dynamic Deflection mod (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/116888-1-0-The-Plugin-Workshop-Small-plugins-of-varied-function) makes sustained high-G craziness a breeze, too: (OTOH, triggering the spoilers to try and tighten the turn did not end well...)

NuFAR certainly encourages vigorous Q levels at low altitude...

Stock aero is no longer as awful as it used to be, but it is still cartoonishly unrealistic. Heavy ships taking off in 1/20th of the runway, landing by power-divng at the ground before flaring 20m off the deck, no such thing as a stall, sustained 15G manoeuvres all over the place, any ship you build will fly so long as it vaguely resembles an aircraft. If you're satisfied with that, then that's fine. FAR is for those who would like their atmospheric Kerbal to be as believable as their space Kerbal.

Yup; it's not detecting the ship's axis correctly. Sorted in the dev build, apparently.

Anyone got any guesses as to what's going on here? The cross section curves appear very strange, I have no idea what those black lines are, and the position of the CoL appears somewhat suspect. Despite this, it flies just fine... My previous design was giving similarly strange things, although in that case the curves were shifted to fully vertical. It's almost as if it's confused about which direction the airflow is coming from.

At a guess: orientation irrelevant, same drag at all AoA's. One of the most broken bits of the old errordynamics.

Heads up for a possible FAR/DD problem: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/20451-1-0-2-Ferram-Aerospace-Research-v0-15-Euler-5-8-15?p=1923725&viewfull=1#post1923725 (it's working fine for me so far, however)

First suspect: asymmetric thrust if it's multi-engine. Second suspect: a broken fuel hose causing asymmetric fuel use. Third suspect: broken strut causing asymmetric flexing. Fourth suspect: control surfaces placed with radial instead of mirror symmetry, causing all sorts of weirdness. But, really, we do need the screenshots, if only to rule out what isn't causing it.

If you're wanting to up your game realism, you certainly want FAR. Stock aero is no longer as awful as it used to be, but it's still a long way from a simulation. However, given that the latest release represents a major overhaul to FAR, and was released only a few hours ago, you might want to give it a few days to get the inevitable bugs worked out.

Well done. As suggested, adding some control surfaces (ailerons or elevons out near the wingtips, more elevators up back) will make it maneuverable. (oh, and PS: Gerry Anderson, not Jerry)

NuFAR jet power seems a touch on the generous side; 90 seconds to 15,000m and 960m/s for a single-engine ship built with no attempt at area ruling. Was the FAR engine nerf removed?

It's still pretty soupy for aircraft. FAR is in no danger of becoming obsolete.

Possible, but this doesn't happen in any other circumstance. Decent quality but five year old non-gaming laptop, low ambient temperature (winter here). Even with stock KSP, the explosion effects slow the game to a slideshow until they clear away. I suspect that adding recalculation of the suddenly-changing airframe to the already high mid-explosion graphics load is pushing it over the edge.

Anyone worked out a decent set of PID tuner settings for NuFAR yet? I seem to be getting pitch wobbles no matter what I do.

Woo! NuFAR! Thanks, Ferram; saved us from the soupmosphere once again. -- In the department of minor niggles: anyone else getting lock-ups and computer crashes following aerodynamic failures? The last one didn't just crash the game, it crashed my whole PC with one of those "shutting down to avoid physical damage" warnings.

You're assuming that a technological civilisation is able to maintain cohesion for millions/billions of years without destroying itself through military or environmental catastrophe. While not impossible, it doesn't strike me as likely. So far, we've only managed that for a very short time scale, and it's entirely possible that we're not going to manage it for that much longer.

With the ability to mine fuel from asteroids, I'm waiting for the first screenshots from someone who's converted one into a ship and taken it on a grand tour.

On that theme, you mght get some useful ideas from this one... Pre-1.0 FAR design, but the idea translates to stock. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1809058&viewfull=1#post1809058

For the sake of heat, controllability and minimising drag, you usually want your launch TWR to be <2. Exactly how steep or flat a profile is ideal is going to depend upon the rocket; high-drag and low-TWR ships want a steeper trajectory than low-drag or high-TWR ships. Poorly controllable ships also call for a steeper launch, but that's more about avoiding disaster than increasing efficiency.

Echoing others: You need to keep your CoL below/behind CoM throughout the atmospheric portion of the flight in order to maintain aerodynamic stability. Heavy bits at the front, draggy bits at the back: think of a dart or an arrow. Adding fins to the bottom and removing draggy things from the top will lower the CoL. You may also be having CoM shift problems; tanks drain from the farthest first, so a rocket made of many small tanks will shift its CoM downwards during flight. Using the right-click menu to lock off a few of the upper tanks in the early stages of the flight may be helpful. Second stage fins can be helpful. For example, this rocket has fins on both first and second stage. If they were on the first stage only, it would lose stability after dropping the boosters; if they were on the second stage only, the CoL would be above CoM during the booster burn, again causing a loss of stability.