Geneborg

So...you'r going to 1.0. You just barely finished the structure of the house, living in it took alot of patience and handywork, you are making large last minute changes like ripping/replacing internal walls, are not done with the paint job, it's not decorated...so you are going to rent it out to complete strangers now. Hm, what reaction are you hoping to get here? I'm confused. The moment you lay off the "ErAc"-Label you are going to be judged way harder then now, you must realize that? I understand your zeal to finally finish it, but leaving the gameplay/balancing/bugfix pass out can't have been the result of a well thought out brainstorming at the office, no?

Yes, i did that a few years ago, works fine, just leave texture work for Blender, i don't know if the latest version of Sketchup got any better at all at texturing but it was really bad a few years ago.

Pacific Rim Alone, waiting to go home, getting sicker every day, then an accident happens...

Hm, didn't the new Engines like Cryengine/Unreal4 open up their licensing model? As far as i know you can pay a small monthly fee (<50$) to start with them and, if you later commercialize it, you will have to pay them a dividend. UE4 FAQ

Years ago when modeling i used: - Sketchup only for modeling (so much faster then blender, so much easier) - Mapping (UV unwrapping) and optimizing in Blender Blender is a really powerful tool, but quite confusing for starters, i never found it easy to model in it, not compared to Sketchup.

Seems legit...not. They will start thinking about what they sell and how much it will cost 2 years after they...well start selling it. Somehow thats not how i learned to do business... Kickstarter is becoming more of a scam every day, so much potential lost. Crowdfunding could be so powerful without all these snake-oil salesmen.

Ok, to give a serious answer to this: There is no PROTOCOL yet, but there are suggestions. There is no world leader either, but there are only 2 possibities: the aliens contact the one they deem worthy themselves, or they give us the chance to bring them before a council of mankind (like UN, but including even isolated nations). The US Military in the 50s has formulated the "seven steps of contact" protocol. Its obviously kinda militaristic, but it depicts how first you assess the thread level, then make "covert contact", then take samples and finally make open contact (interestingly the first UFO contact report 57 reports aliens doing exactly that, too, like the protocol formulated...well well). Seti Institute has a plan also, if they ever recieve a signal they will confirm it and then make it public as fast as possible so to not give one organization advantage over another.

This...was unexpected, AND funny

Well we only had to wait for Apollo 13 to get all excited about space again after Apollo 12 was sooo boring

Have to comment to this because it doesn't reflect reality: 1. they didn't lose it, they had communication and got all the data = not lost. 2. they didn't design for CONCERT/OSIRIS to find the lander in the dark because...ITS NOT NEEDED...let me emphasize this. Nothing is gained by it, absolutely nothing, its just for ppl like you who absolutely want a picture. 3. you don't just dual purpose ANY instrument for fun. every change in requirements changes the payload which effects the whole mission. There are stringent design requirements here. See point 2 why its was not needed anyways, so no, no dual purpose. As long as we can't launch as much payload as we want to space every mission will do a risk/gain analysis of features of the mission and implement only the most important ones. Even if Philae would have MISSED the comet the mission in itself would still have been a success, but we all know that thats not how humans work, right? We focus an failures, not on success, so we transform a 90% success rate (measurements of instruments) in failure because we don't have a picture.

Not far, there is no dedicated GPU in it, only onboard graphics. They don't mention the motherboard, but there should be a slot to upgrade one. The dualcore is a mixed bag. Sure, for KSP or other games that only run single-threaded it will work out, but more and more new games are now requiring 4 cores (not only on the spec-sheet, they will use them for real). So, will it be fine for KSP? Depends...the CPU will do fine, for nicer graphics you will need to add a dedicated card. It really depends on what you plan to play, so maybe you want to mention a few games. EDIT: we would need to know your budget roughly to tell you what GPU. Going value/money Nvidia 970 or AMD 290. Minimum would be AMD 260x, but don't expect wonders from that.

They will build something bigger once they need it. For now they need to go to orbit and maybe to the mun. Mun colonies are like...10-15 years in the future, who knows if they will do most of it with robots anyways, so its not certain they will need a new spacecraft for that. But 15 years is quite some time, could be an evolution like Soyuz (updated at least 9 times)

Laser communication is in experimentals, as far as i know they have done some successful tests form orbit, thats about it. All space communication is slow, and its far from trivial. But thats outside of common knowledge of course, ppl think they have far better stuff then we have on our cellphones...thats not the case, spacetech usually lags 10 years behind, rosetta was launched 10 years ago, meaning the tech is 15-20 years behind from what we have NOW

well they specifically said they wont use the legs yet, and didn't talk about how they would use the flywheel. the scientist on the stage did seem keen on using the drill, though, even if it's risky. we will see, i guess they only have about 24-36 hours left on battery in this orientation and getting a sample, any sample, would indeed be great, but probably won't happen. Who knows if they will risk to damage the craft using the drill/legs/flywheel/harpoons again or if they will decide to let it rest on the surface and hope for a new sun-angle in a few weeks/months.

"sliding down" is a bad analogy i think, there is simply not enough gravity to do that. think of it more like a toy-baloon filled with air that jumps around on the floor, every litte force applied to it will change its position/orientation. they even hope that using the instruments correctly will change the orientation again, that tells us how litte force is needed to make it move. edit: i also feel a bit sad for the team there, everyone is focusing on it not landing correctly, but most of the sience can still be done and we have pictures from the surface of the comet (like what we got from landing on Titan). still pretty good for a first attempt.