cpast

Rep power is not rep. Rep power is how much rep you give someone when you add rep to their post. The bars are: one dark green bar for every hundred rep (rounding up) until 500 (5 bars), at which point you get one light green bar for every 200 (rounding up), so 501 rep is five dark and one light.

Citation needed on drive themselves, and you don't use cruise control offroad, and not all cars even have it, and not all drivers use it (a fair number don't, in fact). The real difference between rovers and cars is that a gas pedal isn't on-off. If the pedal has a range of motion, holding it down can work fine. If it's on-off, then it's a lot more aggravating.

The issue I have with the current exploration contracts is that it discourages me from going out of the predefined order. I would have launched an Eve probe, but I don't have a contract for Eve exploration yet, and it seems like sending a probe too early would mess with my ability to get a contract later.

There's also one condition I expect from any DLC released, that they release a free update with them that includes the means to recreate the content. This is so that modding community can do their alternate versions of the DLC as well and don't get locked out. Note: I doubt squad would even consider locking the modding community out. Real game Example: Arma 3 released a Helicopter DLC, If you bought it you got to use the new helicopters and all the new features. If you didn't buy it, you just got the new features. How would that work? It seems like that's just turning the DLC into a content update, which means that it includes no gameplay features. While from a consumer standpoint "not having to pay for new features" is nice, an actual serious expansion pack (i.e. the best use for DLC) really makes no sense to spend the time developing if people aren't going to buy it. I don't have an issue with "if you want to use the new mechanics introduced here, you need to buy the expansion pack;" that's really the only way to make it worth buying, because otherwise it's paying for some parts and craft and stuff that does nothing you couldn't do anyway. If Squad comes up with some sort of new aspect, and wants to make an expansion covering that, and it seems interesting, I'd buy it (and I think a fair number of people would). If they release a game update and then offer for sale a particular set of parts and ships and other content, but nothing that a modder couldn't make for free, I probably wouldn't buy it -- after all, I could get equivalent stuff for free in a mod (and there would be a mod with exactly equivalent parts, just without the nice models, released pretty much right away). If you mean "don't make it so mods have to be for one or the other," that's a different matter - there can be a patch to add all the new API calls, just they don't do anything (and mods would be responsible for noticing that they don't do anything and that this aspect isn't present). But it's just weird to release the actual work that only you can do for free, and then sell the thing that modders can do just as well.

Second the throttle control. Having to hold down something to make it go works really, really, really well...but only if it's not a binary switch. Given that keyboards are binary, and binary motion control doesn't really work so well, we need a throttle. Particularly because it takes a while to rove somewhere; I'm not normally firing rocket engines on a trip, but if I'm roving the engine is always running (which is why I tend to control rovers via Mechjeb for actual trips: it lets me set it and do something else for a while while it roves, because I don't have time nor patience to spend 20 minutes or more holding 'W' while staring at perfectly monotonous scenery).

Would that help? The nodes aren't surface-attaching to the bay, I think; it seems they're attaching to the parts in front and behind. And you don't necessarily want to turn off surface-attach there.

I don't think it's that it's outdated; that (to me) says that it looks bad because of things that were common issues for older games (e.g. very low model resolution). The issue I have is that it's graphically somewhat monotonous at small and medium scales. At big scales, things are fine; planets look perfectly nice from orbit. At small scales (i.e. when around a landed craft, but not when you're actually moving some distance over the surface), there's some variation, which is not quite enough but isn't awful. But when you're moving over the surface, you quickly notice that you get whole swaths of obviously patterned ground, with no real landmarks or variation (or at least, not enough). To some degree that might be hard to avoid when "some actual distance" means "several kilometers at least," but I think it could do a better job. Mart: While people decide based on first impressions, I'm not sure how much that's a problem with the particular graphics issues of KSP: you could probably take plenty of perfectly fine shots, and it's more obvious while playing. The one thing that definitely does seem old-style is the obvious terrain texture patterns. Just looking out from KSC at the water, I can see that it's obviously a single texture repeated endlessly; there are rows in the water. Something to break the monotony would be nice. It wouldn't even have to be physical or persistent - just something to break monotony.

Agreed. If it had, the slideshow would be from 12 to 1 (best game at the end), not 1 to 12.

I only see three applications (those three) and zero grants from USPTO with him as inventor ("inventor" and "assignee" are different, and typically the company would be the assignee, as in fact it is in all three applications which list him as inventor). It might be a recent grant. Regardless, they've at least filed for patents, and while the USPTO claims only ~50% of applications are accepted, you're allowed to refile as often as you want and other people estimate most applications are ultimately granted, so it's likely that they'll receive at least one patent if they haven't already (and even while it's pending, the reason the application is published is to put others on notice that it might be patented in the future, which means other companies are less likely to work on things that would be infringing, which gives some of the edge you'd legally only get from the patent grant). The real question is going to be whether the things protected by those patents are enough to give Escape Dynamics a solid edge, or if other companies will be able to either invalidate one or more (which wouldn't be cheap), or find another way to do beamed power. I don't know enough about the topic to know how much of an edge the patents will/do give, but clearly they think it gives them an advantage over competitors.

Thrust reversers are irrelevant to runway length: under dry conditions, aircraft aren't even generally *allowed* to assume thrust reverser operation when calculating runway length. An aircraft's thrust reversers aren't what stops it; it's wheel brakes are what stops it. Thrust reversers are used to reduce wear and tear on the brakes; they only provide critical stopping power on contaminated runways (and are only allowed to do that because the idea is you avoid contaminated runways if you can, so you aren't regularly operating under those conditions), and unless Squad's adding weather to KSP that's not what we have ingame. The proper place to address stopping is in the wheel brake force and wheel traction (this is a major advantage real planes have, because they have spoilers to kill residual lift), not by adding reverse thrust. - - - Updated - - - The longest Edwards runways are unpaved; the longest *paved* runway there is a bit over 15,000 feet (runway length is not measured in nautical miles, by the way). TTS is not 3 nm; you might have been counting overrun area, but that's not actually part of the runway (it's there to take overruns in emergencies, and to keep jet blast from eroding the ground). Runway length is threshold to threshold, and TTS is only 15,000 feet, not the 18,300 that 3 nm would be. Actual runway length should depend on whether things fit there or not, but brakes should be beefed up and spoilers added if stopping is taking too long. A 3.5 or 4 km runway would make more sense than some oddball number.

You're missing conservation of angular momentum, unless your scheme is more complicated than you're mentioning. The spacecraft as a whole, including its reaction wheels, is a closed system. Reaction wheels don't change its angular momentum, they just shift momentum around within that system (they remove angular momentum from that part of the craft that isn't the reaction wheels, but that's because they move it to the reaction wheels). You can't convert angular momentum to heat any more than you can convert linear momentum to heat (what's actually being converted to head is kinetic energy associated with the rotation). Trying to use friction between wheel and spacecraft will just give the rest of the spacecraft all the angular momentum you'd transferred to the wheel; it'll spin, and quickly (unless it's much, much larger than the wheel). If you then spin the wheel up to stop the craft, the wheel's going just as fast as it was before we started this exercise. Because angular momentum is conserved, the only way to desaturate reaction wheels that doesn't just spin the spacecraft a lot is to interact with things outside the spacecraft. RCS does it by ejecting things from the craft; the angular momentum of (ship + exhaust) is the same, but we don't care about the exhaust. If you channeled the heat correctly, you might be able to radiate it in a way that produces a small torque on the craft (if radiation pressure from the Sun can cause a torque, I'd imagine you can radiate heat in such a way as to cause a tiny torque, essentially using it to power a photon drive).

The Shuttle Landing Facility (which is now TTS instead of X68) isn't 3 nm, it's under 2.5 (it's 15,000 feet), which is 4.5 km. Many runways for commercial aircraft are around 10,000 feet (particularly at sea level), which is only 1.6 nm (and 3 km).

My medium-weight manned rover (pressurized module as the core, so I feel fine assigning crews to spend a night or two in it) has OX-STATs on the roof to provide some power while moving. It uses heavier panels to power it while stopped, but while it's rolling I often retract those to prevent them from breaking if it rolls. The roof panels aren't enough to sustain it indefinitely (it's drawing from its batteries), but they significantly increase its range before it has to stop and extend its charging panels.

Wait, did I miss something? Where did they say life support's being added?

But what's the alternative? If someone chooses biometrics alone for convenience, their alternative was likely either a really weak password or no password at all. The real benefit of more convenient things that aren't as secure is that they mean more people will use some security at all rather than almost none.

No. Scientists do research into what the world is like. Orbital guidance is not a research task; the scientists' job is to decide what the goals are for the craft and to define its mission, the engineers' job is to achieve that mission in the maximally efficient way. Flight dynamics officers have engineering backgrounds by and large; it's not a task done by scientists, because it's not a task involving finding out more about the world (it's instead applying known scientific principles to solve a specific practical problem in the best way you can, which is squarely withing the domain of engineering). Where scientists would play a big role is in helping you figure out where you should go, e.g. by showing you biome data, and finding anomalies, and that sort of thing. Scientists should help you find anomalies; they should help you tell what biome you're in; they should be involved in science experiments that aren't clickfests; but they shouldn't be needed to deal with orbital parameters.

They are not. It doesn't matter what the CTO says in interviews when the patents database is public record. There are no patents assigned to "Escape Dynamics" in the US, nor in any country included in Espacenet's database (Espacenet is run by the European Patent Office, and includes many countries' patent databases and published applications, including the US's). There are 3 results in Espacenet for "Escape Dynamics," all of which are US patent applications (not patent grants, and something isn't patented until you have a patent grant).

But the whole point of voting is you don't have to know the fine details of fifty gazillion fields -- you just need to elect people who can pay attention to it (or, as it happens, who will hire people who know where to look for the specialized knowledge and know how to put everything together). Knowing how to make a torniquet actually helps you in some situations; it's hard to think of how knowing details of space exploration would help you in some practical situation, where you wouldn't be able to spend some time asking people who do know about it to get some background (as opposed to first aid, where you need it *now* and can't call a friend). Not caring about space exploration is a far cry from "bragging about being illiterate." If you have down that "I don't know how this works," you're actually better off than many people (keep in mind that people who think Apollo was a hoax think they *do* know how to evaluate the evidence, and think they *can* determine for themselves that it was fake, which is worse than knowing you don't know how to evaluate the evidence).

It'll also have Pinto-level gas tank design, because it lets them make the car a little bit lighter and smaller. (I work on Macs, and that's a reasonable summary of Apple's battery philosophy)

Incidentally, my view on this has evolved a bit reading responses. I now agree that some sort of procedural thing is ultimately the only workable option, especially as compacting payload is a lot harder in KSP when you don't have the proper tools. However, I still think it makes sense to have a bit of "trying to make it fit," which one good way to do that is to have procedural fairings at fixed size increments - say, 0.625 m increments of diameter with increasing cost as diameter increases, so you get an outsized advantage making your payload fit in the next-smaller size without actually needing multiple parts, but you don't have to worry about that unless you feel like it, and you never pay too big a penalty for having a slightly-too-large ship. - - - Updated - - - Sort of the opposite, actually - it seems like the more vocal people are on the side of proc fairings. However, I really don't think "crusading" is a useful word in describing any argument, really ever. It's fairly pejorative, and doesn't contribute to constructive debate.

An argument that has been advanced, many times, for procedural fairings above procedural other parts is "in real life, it's not that hard to just build a bigger fairing, so there's no reason it should be that hard in KSP." Basically, people conceded that procedural engines don't really make tons of sense, and that in real life tanks are built to fixed sizes and can't be tweaked that easily, but maintained that fixed-size fairings present a constraint that isn't there in real life. You see it when you see people talking about why procedural fairings makes sense but aren't willing to say other procedural parts make sense. Earlier in this thread, I've been pointing out that that's blatantly untrue, and procedural fairings is a major departure from real-world rocket constraints. That's not to say there aren't arguments that it's more fun to have procedural fairings, but...well, it's been a discussion topic lately where the line should be drawn between fun and realism, no?

That's why biometric scanners work best when accompanied by a guard to discourage trying to fool the system. However, assuming passwords are secure is also not right; people tend to pick really, really awful passwords, and you literally cannot force people to pick good passwords (password complexity rules don't actually work to keep passwords secure, and if you make the rules too strict people will just write down the password). In contrast, biometrics can be awfully convenient, which means that people are more likely to use security features in the first place. For instance, while an iPhone fingerprint sensor can be fooled, you're more secure with a fingerprint lock that you use than a passcode that you don't use. Biometrics, when well-implemented, happen to be quite a bit more convenient than other schemes. They have limits, but for a lot of users they provide enough security for the user's needs without being too annoying for the user to actually use. For if it's stolen: That's really mostly a concern when it's deployed over an untrusted network. Biometrics with untrusted sensors degrades into "something you know," which is where it's really practical to duplicate. It's not practical to duplicate "something you are" and likely won't be for a very long time; attacks by lifting fingerprints or using a photo rely on sensors that don't fully verify that it's an actual human they're sensing. Proper biometric sensors have a lot of effort put into making them hard to fool by presenting something that's not a live person; that's what the guard is for in "guard+biometric" systems, but people are working on technological solutions. The actual way to implement biometrics is to have an entirely closed system containing both identifying data and the actual sensor; the sensor absolutely has to be trusted. This system would then output whatever it needs to (e.g. a password, cryptographic key, token, that sort of thing, or it could do something like sign data only when it gets the right input). The point is, the actual fingerprint data is only handled by the closed system, which makes it work against any attacker not disassembling the sensor.

Question: I know spacecraft sometimes use gyroscopes to maintain attitude. If torque is applied to the spacecraft, does that then slow the gyroscope, or what happens?

Actually, the people who calculate burns are engineers, not scientists. The line can get kind of fuzzy, but calculating burns is applying known scientific principles to achieve some specific goal, and that's much more "engineering" than "science" (science being more about discovering new things about how the universe works; if you're discovering new things about how the universe works during your burn, that's probably bad). Scientists might be involved in deciding what the spacecraft should do in general terms to achieve scientific goals, but there's a reason flight dynamics officers tend to have an engineering background. Very little about spacecraft *operation* counts as science in my book; the goals are scientific, but that's exactly how KSP uses its scientists (i.e. to do its Science, not as core people in charge of making and operating spacecraft that work through well-understood principles.

Ditto for you. Both of you are presenting valid views on creativity; however, you seem to not understand that you're advocating your view on creativity just as Jouni is advocating his. The game will have one approach or the other, but "just impose the limit yourself" is not actually equivalent to "here are the constraints, do wonderful things with them." You're trying to force your view on creativity as well, you're just acting like you aren't. As for "restrictions make a game a game," I don't think anyone here seriously disagrees with that. KSP already restricts you rather substantially - for instance, you have to build your rocket with lots of fuel in order to orbit, you will find it extremely hard to go from Moho to Eeloo in a day, you have to either launch your craft at around the right time for a transfer to a planet or build a very, very, very powerful craft, etc. Those are all constraints. Everything there is a rule the game imposes on you, and what distinguishes the game from a 3D modeling program. So stop pretending "no limits" has anything whatsoever to do with KSP or how it should work. KSP should have limits. Building a ridiculously wide rocket should be hard, because it should have a lot of drag with a decent aero system. You shouldn't be able to lift a 50-ton station into orbit with a single small engine and fuel tank (the rocket equation? That's a constraint). If you don't think fairing limits are a good constraint, that's one thing. If you don't think constraints should exist at all, your imagined game has little to do with KSP.