Starman4308

I suspect what the OP means is "are there any mission profiles, ones that aren't just about sending more to a place, that would make the 5m parts practical?". To that, I answer: Eve ascent. Even if the EAV (Eve Ascent Vehicle) itself doesn't use 5m parts, the stack to get it up into LKO might practically use 5m parts. Also, if you're playing with an upscaled system, even with Real Fuels or SMURFF, 5 meter parts are very welcome, as are even bigger parts.

So far as I understand, the strut theoretically had the capacity to hold that force, but had not been rigorously tested under cryogenic conditions, and SpaceX's usage of it didn't meet the manufacturer's suggestion of a 4:1 safety factor. I'm no engineer: I suspect in non-critical applications, a 4:1 safety factor is very... safe, but when failure endangers a rocket costing tens of millions of dollars, well... Well, in that case, using an industrial-grade strut end without much safety factor destroys your tens-of-millions-of-dollars rocket. You might get away with it initially, but if there is even a minor manufacturing defect, well, now your rocket goes boom. What's a little bit more troubling to me is the comments about the telemetry. It's not cheap or easy to redesign a telemetry system; while mechanical parts, you can sweep through and replace them with better-rated parts when you realize you've been trying to cut too many corners, redesigning a system intended to talk with every part on your rocket is a very nontrivial task. Assuming they haven't already done it, it's not going to be cheap or easy to ensure their telemetry system is up to NASA's standards.

Do not ignite the central Terrier on the ground. The Terrier is a vacuum engine: if used on the ground, it mostly just wastes LF/O. I suspect the earliest it should be ignited is somewhere in the 10-20km altitude range. The upper stage is significantly under-fueled. It burns for just 1420 m/sec; given that it's likely the relatively high-specific-impulse Terrier in there, you should be burning that upper stage for more. You may also consider replacing the Terrier with a Spark engine: it has a bit less specific impulse, but masses 400 kg less, which may overcome the loss of Isp. A common rule-of-thumb: stages with equal specific impulse should have about the same delta-V; stages with higher specific impulse should have more delta-V. Overall, I'd convert this to a single axial stack with a longer upper stage, possibly shortening the second stage, and having just a single LV-T45 on the first stage. If the single LV-T45 isn't quite enough, you can stick a couple SRBs to the side of it, or possibly one underneath the LV-T45.

To answer the thread title: Maybe. We don't know. It's possible you might have a situation where you have a hydrophobic solvent such as methane, and those organisms' proteins or protein-equivalents utilize a hydrophilic core instead of a hydrophobic core to fold up. To answer that sort of question, though, we'd need either to get more than n=1 on planets harboring life, or an extraordinary simulation effort that would probably mean sci-fi-level AI. Porting the genome of a water-based organism is going to be essentially impossible. The function of proteins, functional RNAs, etc, is all predicated on the existence of water as a solvent. Many enzymes do not function without coordinated waters. Biochemically, basically nothing works without the solvent it is predicated around.

My mind just got onto the tangent of "how cheap does space flight have to get before people stop making custom mission patches for each flight?". The $5M/flight cost of Electron would still probably cover enough for at least amateur art as a PR thing, but... when would that occur? When would making a mission patch for an orbital launch become as silly as making a mission patch for a trans-Atlantic 747 flight? Anyways, here's to a successful flight of "It's Business Time"!

He doesn't (not that he exists), and I find it unlikely that Take Two gets access to your bank account from the EULA. Once again, you are not a lawyer. Winning a case pro se does not make you a lawyer, reading EULAs doesn't make you a lawyer, only intensive study of the law, judicial precedent, and all the other things that can affect interpretation of the law does. Without knowing the details of the case you won, I can surmise a few possibilities: 1) It was such an open-and-shut case that even pro se representation was sufficient to carry the day. 2) You were lucky and got an agreeable judge and/or jury, or possibly the opponents' lawyers were really bad. Bad lawyers do exist. 3) You put in a lot of study into an area of law with very few gotchas that only lawyers would be likely to know. Who knows, maybe you're the best armchair lawyer in the world. Until I see any evidence of that, though, I'm going to chalk this up to a hefty case of the Dunning-Kruger effect, propped up by an n=1 anecdote about winning a case and a bunch of contracts that likely were never challenged in court. I've by now read a fair bit about rocket science and engineering. Does that make me a rocket scientist? Absolutely not. There are endless details to it that only get taught with dedicated training. In my own field, I see new researchers struggle to try to figure something out that I can crack in seconds flat.

I understand that concern, and all I can say is that I don't think they would try it. I, for one, would get pretty upset about deliberately not attributing the fan contributor. I still haven't purchased Making History because the mods I use will likely take months to update, and if they start twirling their moustache, well... I suspect it's more for things like "oops, posted somebody else's screenshot by mistake" or "oops, we posted a JPG instead of the original PNG" and are trying to eliminate any source of accidental liability.

Before making absurd claims like "they now own my mods!" or "they now own my fanworks!", read through the primary thread discussing the EULA. 1: Licenses aren't ownership. Having a license means they can use item X, but not that they own it. Assuming there are no copyright-infringement issues going on, they cannot stop you from continuing to distribute that material with your own license indefinitely. If, tomorrow, they decided to release a DLC containing your favorite MIT/BSD-licensed mod, they could do that... but they would have to carry around the original license header, and they couldn't stop the original mod-writer from continuing to distribute the original mod. Fanworks such as stories, screenshots, videos, etc, are a slightly more complicated issue due to the implicit license the EULA grants them. 2: None of the changed language applies to mods. The language about "not modifying game files" probably means "don't touch stuff Squad wrote or try code injection: mods must simply be layered on top". I'm under the impression FAR, for example, has to let KSP calculate the stock aerodynamic forces, and then applies a force countering the stock aerodynamic force before applying its own aerodynamic force. The stuff about "content generated by using this software" also clearly does not apply to the external programs modders use: Blender, Visual Studio, Mono, etc. Because mods are generated outside the confines of Squad software, they're largely untouchable by this EULA: Take Two does not have an implicit license to them. An ARR-licensed mod is untouchable without your explicit permission, and something under GPL would force KSP to become GPL-license, which means KSP becomes open-source. 3: The very release post for 1.4 stated "The modding community is very important to the Kerbal Space Program team, and we continue to encourage and enable mods for KSP moving forward.". That doesn't exactly sound like "we're going to be shutting mods down now because we like twirling moustaches." 4: When it comes to fanworks such as fanfic, fanart, screenshots, etc, you've always been at the mercy of either Squad/Take Two not pursuing a copyright infringement claim, or hoping the judge agrees it's fair-use. The legal ground for that remains exactly as shaky as it's ever been. While the changed terms of the EULA do grant them a license to such, see 1: licenses aren't ownership. I'm also pretty confident it's just in case they decide to make a central repository for distributing Mission Builder missions: to re-distribute your missions to other players, they kind of need a license to do so. The sole moustache-twirling thing they can do now is re-distribute stuff like fanfiction, fanart, screenshots, etc. without attribution to the original author or his/her preferred license and without his/her permission, and that would be such an unpleasant move even I'd get upset if they didn't immediately apologize. The safe thing for them would be to ask, and somehow, I suspect the vast majority of fan content creators would be very happy to have their stuff featured by Squad/Take Two. If for some reason fan content creator X doesn't like the idea, they'll move onto fan content creator Y: it's not like there's a shortage of fan content creators. 5: They still haven't changed a whit of their practices. This is a storm in a teacup until such time as any of your fears are realized. Overall, a lot of the fears surrounding this EULA continue to support my belief that you really need a lawyer's expert opinion before jumping to conclusions. I've been through enough intellectual-property training to recognize the difference between a license and a copyright, but even still, my analysis may be flawed... other than point 5. EDIT: A very relevant post from the main discussion thread, finally, an actual lawyer's opinion: The principle of Contra Proferentem, for example, would suggest that the "we may collect data..." clause would not permit spyware. One could interpret that clause in two ways: "we may collect submitted data", or "we may harvest data from your machine using spyware, lololol". If the judge rules that clause was ambiguous, Contra Proferentem would suggest "go with the interpretation that favors the consumer", that is clearly the one that would forbid spyware.

When it comes to interpreting legalese, my brother (a lawyer) has thoroughly disabused me of any notions like trying to defend myself in court or drafting my own contracts. They don't exactly twiddle their thumbs in law school for three years. There are countless other factors: contracts do not supercede law, reasonable interpretations, judicial precedent, all sorts of other factors that can potentially render a plain-English reading of a legal document a spectacularly incorrect one. You have no evidence even of intent: no historical precedent, no expert opinion on what exactly was meant in the EULA and how broadly it could be applied, nothing. Just fear, an Internet connection, and other fearful people to produce an echo chamber. I've said it again and again: Take Two would be blindingly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly foolish to try installing spyware. The PR backlash alone would hugely harm their future sales, nevermind the strong possibility that a judge would interpret the EULA in such a way as to forbid spyware and force Take Two to pay an enormous class-action settlement. Half of what props up EULAs is that they've never been seriously tested, and Take Two isn't going to risk the EULA of not just KSP, but every single video game they publish under that same EULA by seeing how moustache-twirlingly evil they can be. And no, they are under no obligation to respond to your petition. The paranoia of a few people isn't worth Take Two's time. It's not worth any more of my time either. It seems that no matter how many times I point out "you haven't got a professional to read the EULA, and the sole point of installing spyware would literally be to prove how moustache-twirlingly evil they can be", nothing seems to stick. Every time the obvious motive of simplifying their legal status by applying the same EULA to everything is pointed out, people assume Take Two has infinite money to draft a custom EULA for everything. Every single time I point out this hysteria is giving potential new players a wholly unjustified false impression and splitting the community of existing players, you just get more hysterical.

I personally use a lot of Java. I used Python a little bit for scripting some time back: it was fairly decent, but the lack of strong typing really bugged me coming from a Java background. If not for the existence of Groovy, I might use Python more often for medium-scale scripting tasks, but for me, the overhead of getting good at Python makes it just not worth it to look back. Both, however, are very valuable languages to learn, and you can't go too far wrong with either or both.

Watching a television show is not three years of law school and passing the bar exam. Not by a long shot. If you came to me and said "I watch a bunch of science shows, I'm qualified to comment on this scientific paper", I'd have a hard time not laughing. I imagine much the same principle applies to the practice of law. Insinuating that Take Two is going to install spyware has no established basis in fact, and acts such as signing an uninformed petition are already starting to have impacts on KSP's ratings, impacting sales and causing real harm from an imagined threat. EDIT: This is probably what I was thinking of from the other thread. In this case: Squad wouldn't be able to release a statement: Take Two's lawyers might, but they're probably laughing too hard to take this seriously under the suspicion that any statement would just be further misinterpreted and is just not worth it, hoping it'll just die down soon enough.

Then you are continuing to engage in "social media justice" AKA mob justice. You have extremely tenuous evidence (layman's interpretation of a legal document), for which you are crusading against Take Two. It's a witch hunt that goes against fundamental principles of modern democracy and rule of law. Innocent until proven guilty. Not "guilty because I am reading this legal document with the scariest possible interpretation without any of the years of legal training that actually goes into interpreting legal documents". Until you come up with something concrete, I will continue to regard this as being an uninformed, unethical panic, using slander to attempt to hurt Take Two's sales.

It would likely do its job of protecting them so long as they don't do anything utterly stupid like spy on their users. For the N'th time, it is almost certainly not intended to permit spyware, it's intended to state "yes, we may need some data for things like in-game transactions, and you're giving us the right to collect the information as you submit it", except in legalese instead of English.

Get a lawyer and ask him exactly what that bit of legalese entails. Ask him if it would be legally enforceable for external data harvesting. Ask him if it's being used as some sort of technical legal jargon. Ask him if laws against things like identity theft would supercede that clause of the contract if Take Two actually installed spyware. Otherwise, I'm going to continue to regard this argument as fundamentally absurd.

It would be as binding so far as the judge agrees its binding, subject to: Local laws (of which Britain, at least, has a law that I'm pretty sure would force the most favorable-to-the-consumer interpretation). Legal precedent. Exact details of legalese: did they define what they meant by "collect"? Is "collect" being used as specialized legal jargon that would exclude outside data harvesting unless otherwise defined?. Potentially grey areas like "reasonable interpretation". EDIT: Furthermore, the judge may just decree that whole clause illegal. No contract saying "this EULA lets us kill you at any time for any reason" would be legal, and external data harvesting is quite possibly identity theft. Contracts do not supercede the law.

[snip] If Take Two decides that that clause means they can install spyware, and they're caught at it, a judge may decide in the ensuing lawsuit (and if nobody else does, I will sue!) that that part of the EULA, at least as applied to external data harvesting, is legal fiction, and what Take Two had done was not exercise their EULA, but rather engage in millions of acts of identity theft. Take Two does not want that scenario to occur.

Seriously. Why would they screw over one of the most tech-savvy, well-educated, most-likely-to-catch-them-out, and also smallest of their player bases? Get a lawyer before making the claim that the EULA lets them harvest data outside of the technical data they harvest (operating system, if it's modded, monitor resolution, and other non-identifiable bits of information that may actually be relevant to developing the game). I've had it with this assertion with no expert opinion on the EULA supposedly letting them harvest data. You have no idea about the legal context or jargon involved, you have no idea if the "we may collect data..." clause legally entitles them to harvest data outside of strict technical information available within KSP itself. I dunno about you, but I'm not in the habit of plugging my Social Security number, bank password, address, mother's maiden name in as the names of my craft files. How would they obtain such information without very blatant, easily-caught-by-antivirus spyware and suffering from a gigantic PR backlash at a bare minimum, quite probably followed up by lawsuits?

That's the point of an EULA. It exposes them to no liability. If they choose to use a 3'rd party company to store their customer data because it's cheaper than hiring in-house data security experts? They don't want to get sued because they transferred the data to a third party. If police knock on their door with a warrant? They don't want to get sued for releasing that data for a legal search warrant. In the event that there is a data breach? They want to not have to pay each customer more than what they originally paid from the lawsuit. Furthermore, people have seen no evidence of untowards data collection. Given the relative tech-savviness of the KSP player base, such uncalled-for data collection would likely be noticed very quickly, resulting in an absolute PR firestorm and a serious legal challenge to their EULA.

1) While Take Two may be a big company, KSP is a small IP for them. Why should they bother making a separate EULA to soothe the feathers of a few players for a small, small fraction of their customer base? 2) Most of those data items listed (such as geolocation) are a catch-all for things like surveys or prizes. It is not a declaration of intent to collect them, but rather notice that it might be collected as a part of KSP-related activities... and is really mostly just boilerplate from their other IPs. Do not confused "we may collect" with "we will collect". 3) The third-parties thing may be as benign as "we use this third-party company to secure our data rather than hire our own data-security experts". 4) Historical precedent suggests EULAs are intentionally written to be very broad in scope, to protect the company rather than to declare what they will do. "May collect", not "will collect". The wall of legalese is a legal document, written by lawyers for lawyers. To be precise in their communications with other lawyers, they may utilize jargon or phrases that mean something very specific in legalese and something different in common parlance. Furthermore, it's not a negotiated contract. Negotiated contracts between parties of roughly equal standing can involve some give, some take, and a bit of trust. A video game EULA? If they slip and make a mistake, they literally cannot afford to send lawyers to every single customer or even really a small fraction thereof, and in reverse, they cannot afford to be sued by more than a tiny fraction of their customers. $40/copy does not stretch all that far. This is very dissimilar to even a tenant-landlord contract where thousands of dollars wind up transferred, nevermind a major business contract where millions or more may be on the line for a single transaction. Before spreading panic and fear, please at least get an actual lawyer to read through the document. You have no idea whether or not "collect this data" can even legally imply anything more than storing the data you send to them for things like transactions, surveys, etc. While I am still not a lawyer, I could easily see a judge saying "it would not be reasonable for a document of this scope to permit data harvesting from anything outside the video game of interest, you now owe everybody whose rights you infringed $1000. And no, I don't care that each copy you sold was only $40, pay up for millions of counts of identity theft". EDIT: To expand on that, I think it incredibly unlikely Take Two would court the slightest risk of that happening with some sort of spyware. Even if their lawyers say "99% chance that $1000-per-customer lawsuit won't succeed", that's still a 1% chance of losing $1000 per customer, for an expected value of -$10/customer. I find it very unlikely they could sell your data for an average of $10/customer. Even in the limit of extremely unethical corporate policies, it's still a foolish business decision. Your only evidence for this is a couple paragraphs' worth of legal document, with no historical precedent and no other evidence to suggest they are going to nefariously collect and sell your data.

Any statement attempting to clarify their EULA is formal legal advice, and seeing as how they're the other party in the contract, that's a conflict of interest.

You're writing a petition damaging Take Two's reputation without any real evidence, stirring up hysteria based solely on fear, asking for a clarification they cannot provide due to conflicts of interest, and referring to "social media justice". Pray tell, how does this not sound like mob justice? Get. A. Lawyer. First.

The issue with that Star Wars game was a clear cut issue of going way too far with microtransactions. Here, there has been no evidence of spyware, and you don't even have a professional legal opinion to substantiate your fears. This goes so far into mob "justice" that it's almost a bad joke. There's a reason we have courts, the principle of innocent until proven guilty, and lawyers: it's not so that the mob can crucify people.

Your average layman's reading is hardly definitive in the slightest, hardly good enough evidence to go off and demand mob justice based on a fear of something happening. You have no credible evidence that they could even legally install spyware, nevermind evidence that they plan to or even consider it a viable thing to do.

Something doesn't smell right to me. You claim to be a software developer who has read EULAs on behalf of his clients. That is definitely not professional legal advice; there's a reason why legal advice is offered only by lawyers who've been through years of training and passed the bar exam. Regardless, get a lawyer before claiming to have definitely interpreted the EULA. I am not convinced they even legally could install spyware, nevermind that they actually would do something so egregiously foolish.

Voyager V flew by Callisto. Unfortunately not much was seen, as I came in from the night side of the moon. Fun facts: Callisto is a very low-density, undifferentiated icy moon. Because of its lack of tectonic activity, Callisto's surface is remarkably old and well-preserved from its initial formation. My LEM design, slated to be launched on Saturn IIIB rockets, is... honestly a bit goofy thanks to the long, empty interstages. There's an Agena Model 8096L OMS to put it into lunar orbit; the descent stage uses the LMDE-J lunar descent engine (which can throttle down to an amazingly low 10% of max thrust!), and the ascent stage uses a slightly overpowered AJ10-118K. I decided against making heavy use of the replica Apollo parts from FASA, in no small part because I'd rather not leave a disappointed Kerbal in orbit of the Moon. Apollo 10, with veterans Yana Gagarina and Thomas Hudson, plus rookie pilot Elvira Ishutina, launched on June 14, 1994 for a lunar slingshot mission. While Apollo-C was adequate to this task, it too may wind up being a 2-mission series, as there is not a huge amount of value to a mere flyby, and margins would be thin for an orbital mission. Apollo-D, utilizing the Saturn IIIB launch vehicle, should be grossly overspecced quite capable for lunar orbital operations; in addition to delivering a fully fueled Apollo C/SM to lunar injection, the Apollo-D spacecraft is again grossly overspecced enhanced with a month's worth of supplies and much larger solar panels. The skip reentry, requiring two passes to land, was totally planned and not in any way due to botching the reentry window. Voyager 1 arrived at Uranus. I don't know quite why, but as I approached periapsis to begin the insertion burn, I got a feeling of being alone in the distant, empty unknown, sinking into an endless abyss. That feeling of sinking into an endless abyss is why, at some point, I'll be sending an atmospheric probe there, to actually sink into the Uranus abyss. Otherwise, Voyager 1 will probably not see much attention from me: Uranus right now has only a few generic biomes, and the RSS installation I have does not model any of Uranus's moons. Venera 2 worked better than Venera 1, and is off to the second planet whilst being possibly the most adorable probe sent out to date. One which... um... doesn't have a parachute, and is expected to be destroyed before it hits ground due to pressure limits. Last mission of the night was the Saturn-IIIB mass demonstrator flight. It was rolled out during the night, but had to wait about twelve hours for the lunar launch window. During the night, I pondered the majesty of Saturn-class boosters, to be so tall relative to the VAB. Then day came, and, well... Usually I'm careful to move rockets back down to the ground in the VAB before launching, but clearly not this time. Launch was very nominal. The NK-43 closed-cycle engines proved their worth, being significantly cheaper than a similar hydrolox stage. Looking forwards to testing the Apollo LEM: unlike the real-world Apollo program that launched them single-stack, mine uses a pair of launches (one grossly overpowered C/SM launch, a LEM launch that actually justifies the capabilities of the Saturn IIIB), similar to many of my other games. The stupendously overbuilt C/SM will help with any difficulties in rendezvous.