Archgeek

Yup. What's really funny is it'd actually be great in real life -- my 84km/s extremis test has 12 ion engines, which get it an acceleration of 5.1cm/s^2, which is actually more than the Hermes gets in the Martian. With these kind of number in the Kerbol system, we could get away with crazy torch-ship trajectories -- periapse kick out from Kerbin until escape, then aim just barely in front of Jool and burn to the halfway point, turn around and burn away from it 'till capture. Would be terrific if we could have the game apply super-low thrust sources like ions in time-warp. It does get insanely expensive, though. That stage test would be 22.3 mil if I saw fit to build it, even more to get it upstairs...'looks like 9 launches with creative packing and some orbital construction.

Welp, this happened in light of this thread: (KER was failing at the staging for some reason, but each stage has been tuned for around 15.2km/s, save for the ship up front, which carries 8.2 or so, making for 84.2km/s total.) Considering how little the decouplers weigh, I've my doubts that the 15.2km/s stage rule quite works out here, especially for the very large tank stacks on S6. However, since the little KER bug means I have to lock all the tanks in the later stages to get an accurate read on a given stage's dv, I'll have to save that tedium for later.

I get by surprisingly well on a 3.2GHz Core 2 Duo with twin 2 gig DDR2 sticks of RAM, a single 1TB HD and a GTX5something platinum. 'Main issue is 1.1 eats enough RAM that I often have to restart my browser to release any memory being hoarded by bad actor tabs, or the swap file goes nuts. So the answer for your setup, would be a flat "yes".

By serial staging, do mean just sans cross-feed? My crazy ion experiments could stand to benefit from better droptank staging.

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

I think mine was either the lander of a single-launch to Laythe mission to its transfer stage that I'd neglected to put a probe core on and so showed up disturbingly as debris (and which I at one point bumped and sent spinning, further complicating things), or the fuel pod seen at the rear of vehicle in my avatar, as a strange bug that was causing it oscilate wildly with negative attenuation and tear itself apart, requiring I reload it. The pod needed docking because undocking it somehow stopped the problem, and the forward port wasn't working anymore so I had to dock to the aft port. The thing also had no control and was spinning, and I had to chase it down first, as it had significant momentum from the oscilation when I undocked it. A rather intense 40-odd minutes, if I recall.

Module manager just does that in 64b. That or it does that on April 1st. I forget which.

People began doing what now?

Due to an obsession with experimental craft, I largely play sandbox. I like science mode and career, as it can be fun to have to earn parts, and contracts/upgradable buildings makes for for a fun challenge mode wherein I get to be excessively minimal about things. However, I often find myself going back to sandbox to safely test things, like designing a set of standard lifters for a career at some tech level (a task I have yet to complete). In fact, I have not once completed a science tree or career mode game. Too much fun designing weird things and testing thermal equilibria with nukes and infinite fuel.

Since it doesn't deflate, my instinct is to attach it with a docking port or leave it on a mothership and come back to it if I wanna re-use it.

That's umm...lookin' pretty green, there. Kind of a bright lime-green on a darker outer-portion-of-a-lime-green. 1.1's definitely darker, though. Sort of that second green on a forest-green.

Yup, it's got a two-way payload adapter thing going on. Pointy side goes down, upper side sits whatever you're defending from the rigours. DIgitalPsychosis made use of one in an accidental 50g Jool aerocapture. Rather looked like the drag was high enough to enable a Jool landing, of sorts, or at least a gentle drift down to the heat killzone they installed to stop Danny killing the system by flying radio towers into Jool.

Just watched the Squadcast. Hype x10. WANT. Also, god DANG that connector system EJ had on that drive module. I need to clean drool off my desk. My box has less power than that i5 laptop, but holy PANTS that was some smooth kerbin'. I don't expect miracles, but I can't wait to see how my 700 part megabeasts do. Who else plans on spending most of Saturday afternoon/night on Twitch?

Hey, it runs dang ol' Elite Dangerous pretty well somehow. I suspect sorcery. A frankenbox is a custom rig made from parts of varying sources and ages. This thing has original mobo and RAM, but it's on its second HD, third video card (PCIe's lasted well), second network card, and second case (now a decent aluminium tower rather than its old open air fish tank with bodged to the side power switch). I've also twice re-lubricated a dying case fan bearing. I might've done that in my main steam install, but my serveral older/experimental installs I generally just run the executable directly. Currently I'm playing a .235 install, trying to bring my kerbals home (and also run around the system in an overbuilt ion-probe-lander for some reason). But to avoid getting kicked to the Astronaut Lounge or something, back on topic: HYPE~! Now I'll be able to use both cores when docking things!

Older frankenbox. Thing was built back when the Intel Core2 line was new, has a core 2 Duo to prove it. Originally ran XP64, in fact. Pretty modern graphics card, nice mobo, but it won't take sticks over 2 gigs and 2 of the four slots are broken. I think the traces on their connectors got cracked when it was installed in its orginal case (intended as a full immersion oil-cooled rig, never completed, but the mobo was mounted on a sheet of lexan so it could be removed from bath for upgrades) and I remember it bending frighteningly under the absurd force needed to install the first two sticks. Very reliable box, but will bluescreen if there's RAM for it to try to use in the other two slots. I think I need a better box. </jaws_reference> DX11 most like, if not 10 for some reason. I've tried OpenGL, but it does...things.

Who in the heck wouldn't get hyped about a statistically significant performance increase? Faster scene changes, less yellowclock, a lot less redclock, all the mods your box can handle, a metric buttload less bugs, ancient bugs finally struck down by @Claw's well-honed blade. These things are all utterly terrific. This should invite a veritable hype-vortex, but I think people are just exercising their patience glands and letting the team bake this one to a nice golden brown, after which the open beta testers will get to cut into it and help remove any hairs or slivers of glass that got past 'em. In fairness, some of us have blatantly 64b machines with only 4 gigs of RAM. We still get the whole 4 gigs and not the 3.6ish one can address in 32b, but a few hundred megs per scene change would have my box slowing doing from hitting swap file before long, considering it's usually got around 2.4 gigs to spare for the game if I've got browsers and stuff up, and would crash outright after less than 40 scene changes, which can happen during iterative testing. On the other hand I run all of three mods, so that number's probably a bit extreme.

If I didn't know there were others worse about/better at it than me, I'd feel I was being personally called out on the delta-v ion engine thing. I'm glad you still have fun playing olde schoole style. I know I can't stand SSTO's too much myself. But before you knock it too far out of range, you should see that tiny blue glow under the influence of Stock RealPlume. They look even cooler than they did under HotRockets.

Also of note, ejection angle has a slightly confusing name (as you want your actual angle of ejection to be parallel to the orbit of the body you're leaving for a low-energy transfer), but it's just a convenience number, telling you where in your orbit to start the burn in order to end up parallel when you leave, based on how energetic and what altitude you're burning from, and is something you can actually kinda ignore in favour of moving your node around the orbit to get the ejection nice and parallel with the planet's orbit. Though it'll likely need adjustment when you reduce the burn delta-v to bring your encounter back, so the given angle remains convenient. I ran afoul of this planning a Gily => Eve => Moho => Kerbin assistravaganza last weekend, wondering why in the heck the planner was telling me to burn nearly radial to the sun in order to go from Eve to Moho, or telling me strange numbers like 178 degrees from prograde ("Isn't that almost retrograde? What's wrong with this thing?!"). I felt a bit dumb after looking up what it meant.

Erm, 'pretty sure doing the thing in question in a situation where one hardly at all needs to falls pretty well within the spirit of the question; and arguably as a rather extreme example thereof. In fact I would've burned harder, but I was a bit worried about hitting the atmosphere before finishing the braking burn and so losing my solar panels.

Bah, poll is butt -- What of those of us who usually mostly Hohmann, but have been known to go full torch ship just to get back from Minmus? (Well, not full torch ship, as burning all of that xenon would've been annoying, but cutting an eight hour transfer into 3 by ignoring hyperbolic trajectory warnings.)

A devnotes from a bit ago indicated that the current editor (both VAB and SPH) is comprised of like 5 competing scenes in unity, all fighting for control of the cursor, the focus, and ownership of various assets. This lead to stuff like annoying click-through, and the insane bug that cropped up when one clicked-thru the staging diagram to the exit button (KSC camera spawned low to the ground pointing in an odd direction and was completely unresponsive). It's also responsible for an amount of the editor's rampant squirreliness, like parts left floating about after undoing or struts/fuel lines sometimes deciding not to be attached anymore. The big rebuild for U5 should bring that down to just one scene, unless it was two, I don't quite remember.

I'm feeling such hype, myself. So many fixes, neat new features, the vastly simplified editor (no longer several separate scenes) implies soon building a large craft won't involve dueling the dang software. Broken mods will recover in short order, as modders often are quick. Such hype. Hypesplosion:

"It's pea soup, Jeb...but not as we know it."

Lithobraking. Lithobreaking is what you get when it's not actually successful.

Further adventures of the the "I was dared to fly this." -- Gilly edition! Tune in next time for Moho and the Questionable Gravity Assist.