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tater

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Everything posted by tater

  1. tater
    Feel free to share some pics of the wilderness up there, I've not managed to get up there yet, Colorado is about as far as we can make it on weekends from Albuquerque... I can only assume it's a lot like Colorado, which is saying something, since CO is pretty stunning.
  2. tater
    Agena?
  3. tater
    Sounds awesome---black or brown bears? We only have black bears here in NM, and in Colorado where we go sometimes, and they're scary enough (black bears mean I only take trash outside the morning they come to take it away, lol).
  4. tater
    Hope your camping trip went well. Where'd you go?
  5. tater
    Seems to work OK in Mac OS as well.
  6. tater
    If nationality actually plays a role in using KSP, I can only assume Canadians smother their computer in maple syrup, then play as anyone else would... though maneuvering is harder with sticky keys.
  7. tater
    Back from Italy, and looking forward to mess around with SSTU again! Reading over the past several pages, things are looking good, indeed, great (sorry about wheel hell). The comment above about a parachute model has one possible utility I can see, and that would be a part to add atmospheric capability to some sorts of landers in a way that doesn't look as "kerbal" as many solutions. Past that, there's not a lot of utility for it. Adding an SSTU part for use with stock parts seems sorta pointless to me, I'm at the point I practically don't use stock parts---they are so profoundly inferior in every way to SSTU.
  8. tater
    Yeah, there are usually large ticket items that Congress micromanages from a budget standpoint. The current PBR also lumps some NASA spending into the Programmatic budget, which is bizarre (personally, I think that that part of the budget (over 2/3 of all Federal spending) should all become discretionary, except debt service).
  9. tater
    Yeah, and quick saving constantly just in case. On EVA, I tend to use KIS/KAS for base construction, and it's trivially easy to accidentally collide with a leg.
  10. tater
    Yeah, I agree, it just seems like with the new (?) LOS code it might be easier to do---it's like a "control from here" with the antenna selected, and the pointing target being "home."
  11. tater
    Yeah, I was thinking along the lines of the persistent rotation mod. That or you'd change scenes to the spacecraft in question, then it points the antenna along the LOS it is using (ISRU does something like this, right, it looks at the time interval that has passed, then catches you up?).
  12. tater
    Yeah, I pilot everything, I've never used mechjeb at all, for example. But to truly be a manager, and to have a game where the end-goal is a sort of infrastructure, I think this is required. I'd STILL do most piloting myself, that's why I play, but the ability to have routine service places would be really helpful. It's odd that Squad has not added KAC (or that functionality) since they require the player to do, well, everything, then they don't provide the tools to make doing that plausible for complex saves.
  13. tater
    Gotcha, that is what I assumed he meant, but it always bugs me when my high-gain is clearly pointed the wrong way, and the LOS calculation implies the ability to correct this visually (and possibly functionally in a mod).
  14. tater
    So all the stock antenna models are changing? 2 of them are parabolic as it stands (by definition, directional). Or do you mean that they will function as omnidirectional even if the game parts are unambiguously directional? Given that the game will be doing an LOS check, should;t it be possible to point an antenna along that LOS? Not saying it makes a lot of sense e for stock, but it would be pretty cool to watch a flyby with the dish actually pointing to Kerbin.
  15. tater
    If it's calculating LOS, it would be cool if there was a new "target" mode to point the directional antenna to where it is calculating LOS to. While I like the idea if even more serious restrictions on comms, I always found RT to be pretty awful, particularly in stock were Eeloo is less far away that Venus actually is (comms would never be a problem in the Kerbol system, aside from LOS, it's far too tiny for even delay to be of much concern). As was said above, we really need some control autonomy instead of having to pilot manually, that should be a trade off with probes, if you want a maneuver out of LOS, then you program it, and see what happens when/if the probe is back in communication with you.
  16. tater
    I agree (assuming this was at all directed to me). The only destination for people off the earth needs to be entirely constructed. If humans ever live permanently in space, I suspect it will be in space, and spun for pseudo gravity. Still, we get people like Musk pushing to colonize, when as @juanml82 so aptly says, we have zero data on martian gravity and humans. If a spun hab somewhere closer shows martian gravity to be insufficient, all the Mars colonial dreams are just nonsense. Seems to me the very first step is not to build MCT, but to find out if the one part of Mars that nobody can change or engineer around is a total roadblock. If martian gravity is insufficient for health, then the rest doesn't matter, and the rest is still incredibly difficult.
  17. tater
    Assume for a second that the goal, as per Squad statements, is a "space tycoon" game. This requires that missions can be flown without the player having to do every single piloting aspect themselves. Without AI kerbals, there is no tycoon game, it's not even possible. To me such a game puts me in the CEO/Director seat, not the pilot's seat. For the sake of fun, I'd assume that I could do piloting, etc, if I wish to, but I should not have to. Set up a fuel deport/ISRU around Jool. Make a station there. Set up regular service there every time Kerbin is in the proper position for a transfer (in both directions). That should then happen---by itself---assuming I have dedicated the required funds for this crew rotation, etc. Short of that, any sort of infrastructure becomes incredibly difficult for a player, particularly in a game that does;t even have KAC functionality built in.
  18. tater
    SSTU Not just engines, but... incredibly useful, I've pretty much stopped using stock parts.
  19. tater
    Yeah, I've said before that the obvious precursor mission to anyone claiming "colonization" needs to be long-term testing of gravity values above 0, and below 1.
  20. tater
    Gene drives seem to be an application of crispr. The idea above is putting crispr inside the cells of the target as I understood the ted talk (beat me up if I'm wrong). Meaning putting the the molecular machinery to cut and paste your desired genes an animal that will target any cells it comes in contact with via sexual reproduction. So that with a small % of these individuals introduced to a population, you can rapidly (for things like insects) change the entire population. Add 1% mosquitos that cannot carry malaria to the general population, and in a year no mosquitos carry malaria any more. That was my take away, anyway, that you could change an entire species with this technique over fairly short time intervals (basically X generations, so it's more effective when the generation time is short). My neighbor is a molecular biologist, I'll ask him about it next time we're having cocktails, we talked about crispr a while ago, and he was pretty excited about it as a tool. Like I said, I welcome our new masters
  21. tater
    Seems like the best geometry would have to put the alien craft between us and their homeworld. The signal strength would otherwise be terrible... all that is aside from the usual Drake issues (that we happen to be looking at a time period when a signal could possibly arrive. It's so much harder than even paleontology, where taphonomy can tell us at least where to look to get that tiny window into the past (places where critters happened to die that also happened to be just right for fossilization).
  22. tater
    Think of the geometry required. We look at a candidate, and then we will need to be on a line between their craft using a DSN and their world as the communications both directions will be directional. There is beam slop, and of course the spacecraft moves (sweeping the beam over a wider area), but the transmissions are not constant... Seems considerably worse that a needle in a haystack. It's not impossible, I'm just thinking it's really, really unlikely.
  23. tater
    The idea of finding broadcasts is pretty far-fetched, IMHO. Any such signal would need to be beamed to get the S/N ratio up, and then we'd have to happen to look at the right target star as the transmission came during whatever time interval they sent it. The chances seem vanishingly small that we'd happen to look at the time a signal happened to arrive. Targeting via something like Keplar is sort of pointless, as we're looking at the small subset of stars where a transit is possible from out POV. Then of course there are the usual Drake equation sort of variables like do our civilizations even overlap, etc. The chance of contact, ever, seems unlikely, IMO. Note that the above statement says nothing at all about the existence of other civilizations, it only addresses the likelihood of making contact with them.
  24. tater
    You in ABQ?
  25. tater
    No, it's in their makeup to be... not terribly smart. (is that diplomatic enough? ) The one political thing that is likely safe to say, since no one likes politicians, lol.
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