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tater

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Everything posted by tater

  1. I've used rovers for this, but navigation is just "drive that way and hope you hit it." Navball doesn't help.
  2. It'd be a nightmare on fps I bet, rocks should make shadows as well so you can see them. Still, it would be cool to have to actually have landings not be trivial.
  3. Yeah, doesn't look like a habitual biped, more like capable of bipedal locomotion.
  4. Yeah, that was my real point. Instead of having the terrain set to make rediculous landings even easier, I'd prefer rocks, small craters (airless worlds, anyway), etc to make landing more tricky (even with a proper lander).
  5. Assuming everything they claim is pushed back 2 years, they have 4.75 years to build their robot lander. How's that going for them? Or are they gonna just order it using alibaba 6 months before January, 2020?
  6. I was of course referring to such a prop plane built for Mars... Multi-hundred meter wingspan and props the size of a Ferris wheel, perhaps It was a dig at landing a "space plane" anywhere except a runway assuming you could build one long enough for a plane capable of using lift to fly on Mars (erm, Duna). Even with earth's atmosphere, in other words, nearly any plane would wreck on "flat" Martian terrain given the rocks, sand, etc.
  7. Yeah, hence asking for mod let, but he didn't report using KJR.
  8. If you warp time, do they slide apart? I had a similar problem, but PF is the only mod shared.
  9. A rough-field capable prop plane would have trouble landing on that. Any KSP space place "landing" anyplace that isn't a runway… would not be taking off again.
  10. The primary difference being he can actually launch, well, anything at all. Mars One has zero capability to do, well, anything at all.
  11. Unless you landed a bulldozer first, and possibly a plant to make concrete, you wouldn't be landing a plane on Mars.
  12. Tesla S is a great car, I know about a half a dozen people who have one. They all have 2 other cars (one guy in the neighborhood has 4 other cars, the cheapest of which is a Cayanne). They bought them because they are cool, and fast. I'm not talking about electric hot rods, I'm talking about the people who buy a Prius to "save the earth." A couple economists at Berkeley studied hybrid car buyers, and checked based on zip code voting prefs and found that in TX, a Honda with basically identical specs to the Prius sold about even with that car. In the Bay Area? All Prius, nearly no Honda… the Honda looks like another Civic, the Prius flies the "hybrid flag." It;s all about signalling. In short, I refer to anyone buying an electric car for any other reason than cost-effectiveness. (take the Tesla S off the table, and "cool" disappears as a thing right now for electrics). If "carbon" motivates the purchase, it's a Sierra Club demographic that is reflexively anti-nuke. The Berkeley economists also found that in the Bay Area (and places with similar demographics) solar panels on houses are more likely to face the street---even if that is the wrong side for ideal placement (something virtually never seen in less "eco" zip codes). They care more about the PVs being seen by the neighbors than efficacy. Don't ever discount signaling, human psych matters.
  13. They also suffer transmissive losses. Doesn't matter, though, because the primary customer base for electric cars fails to understand your observation, and is generally speaking against ANY kind of power plant, particularly if it is anywhere endear where they happen to live. They want unsightly power generation in someone else's neighborhood. People in LA love electric cars, but don't care at all if the electricity comes from a coal plant in NM, for example. I'd like to see people more rational about power production in general so we could optimize it (making things like electric cars more practical as a widespread thing (assuming they can fix the range issue).
  14. All electric vehicles do is move the tailpipe from your vehicle, to a smokestack someplace. In a world of magical pixie dust, they get all their power from wind (LOL) or solar. In a realistic world where all cars are electric, they get it from nuclear (since this actually makes lots of power, and can be scaled without destroying vast tracks of land with unsightly windmills that make nearly no power, or solar. The latter at least can be done as distributed infill (roofs, parking lot covers, etc). Still, if cars switched in some short timeframe, it would be fossil fuels, nukes, or someone better find a magic wand since without massive increases in power generation, you need to charge off-peak (night) in summer (more slop in winter). That means predictable and on-demand power generation. Right now storage for wind/solar means dams (pumping water up and storing it as PE) which have their own environmental issues (and more efficiency loss).
  15. I'd like actual exploration. Meaning that I'd like to see the planets aside from Kerbin randomized in orbit, mass, atmosphere, etc. You'd start the game knowing what you should know from Kerbin, nothing else. You'd need to send probes, etc to know what you were dealing with. That at would be a good layer of complexity that is also good gameplay.
  16. I routinely have multi hour day trips here in NM. It's 2.5 hours to Taos, and another 30-45 to the ski area. Impossible in any electric car. It would take 2 days to just get to Carlsbad caverns, someplace I've taken people on tight schedules as a day trip from my house (it's totally worth a 9 hour drive, leaving at o-my-god-thirty in the morning, better as an overnight trip, though).
  17. I'd like to see all the parts have their size bumped up a few % as they are rebalancing anyway. The devs should take a kerbal in a helmet, and bump all parts bigger until they can fit through the hatch. That or slightly shrink the helmets just until they fit. It's a TINY change, but I'd like to see it. Those cabin IVA should have helmets someplace, at least a couple.
  18. This. It was brought up because of the claim some german test pilot was the first because she flew a jet at low altitude. BTW, it's Homo sapiens, the generic name is capitalized, the specific name never is (yeah, I'm being pedantic).
  19. Electric cars are fine as long as you never want to go on a long trip, then they are effectively useless (unless you are retired, and can take a week to drive someplace you'd normally go in 1-2 days.
  20. I'm well aware of what the V-1 is. How is that less of a rocket propelled aircraft than the Lippisch Ente (1928), or the Opel Rak.1 (1929), or the the He176 (1939)? All flew before, all rocket powered (all German). All manned, suborbital flights anyone cares about were in excess of altitudes possible by aircraft. If you do not set some altitude minimum, please set us a definition of what constitutes a "suborbital" flight, please. It needs to be universally applicable. Then see if the V-1 flight somehow magically makes it vs earlier flights (if rocket propulsion is to be the arbitrary standard, for example). Generally, we think of suborbital spaceflight, not suborbital flight (which is to say, ALL flight). Don't leave the atmosphere, and it's not a suborbital spaceflight. - - - Updated - - - Yeah, that's what I was pointing out, earlier, just not as clearly as you did.
  21. I agree. If the externals don't match the internals, they should scale up the externals, IMO, as the internals look ok size wise.
  22. V-1 was an aircraft. Using that as a "sub orbital" flight means all aircraft are suborbital flights. Even limited to rocket propulsion, the Germans did that in the late 1920s, anyway. All relevant to firsts in rocketry, but irrelevant to the Space Race which explicitly refers to the Cold War race between the USA and CCCP.
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