DarkGravity

Best: Skyrim, Civilization V Worst: Farmville, Sim Tower (should have been called "Elevator Puzzle")

Clearly your name is not J. Howard Marshall

I was just dreaming I was playing a very fun real-time strategy game, and then I woke up. In the game, I started inside a sort of cave, like the Bat Cave. There was a front entrance, that was very near the starting point, and a back door that was a little farther away with some windy twists in between. I was there in the main chamber. This is something I've never seen in a video game: there was an avatar of me. It looked quite a bit like the rl me. Strewn about the main chamber of the cave were various work stations. In one of them was an off-line robot. A ten-foot tall hulk who could only talk at the start of the game, and even that only when I turned on his work station. Think Cyborg from Teen Titans, only slower and much more relaxed. And kinda stoopid, but really friendly and charming. He helped guide me along. As I'm figuring out how the different work stations worked, enemy units started arriving. I don't remember anything about the enemy except in one match they were identical to my units and in another match, they were different. Fortunately I got my robot working in time for him to take out the few small enemy units probing my base. The robot had the biggest damage spike in the game, very good armor, and quite decent dps, but he is slow and you only get one. If he dies, he cannot be replaced, but can recover if only wounded. My avatar on the other hand, had decent armor, mediocre hp and dps, but was fast. If this unit dies, Game Over. The other workstations around the cave created other units of various types, or had support functions. I remember quick little flying drones and some medium sized units. Maybe 5-8 different unit types in all, and maybe 3 or 4 support stations. One of the units was a turn-on-and-forget flying unit whose sole job was to follow and protect me, physically blocking the enemy's attacks and also firing back. One of the units looked like a quick little flying version of the basic solar panel from KSP. If you could get two or more of these things flying, they would generate a field of sparks between them (shaped like a tennis net), and any enemy that touched the field took heavy damage. And I remember I kept losing cuz I was always playing defense, never leaving my cave. There was no mining or harvesting of resources. It was like everything was powered from free electricity, but you only got a fixed (but upgradeable) amount of electricity per second to use to create your team. So you couldn't do everything at once - you had to choose a path. And the work stations took time to create or upgrade something. The goal was to either destroy the enemy base or kill the enemy's solitary human avatar. There was a lot of coordination possible between the various units -- various synergies available depending on if you could get the various units online and upgraded appropriately. But not too complex, there was only 1 upgrade available for each unit -- except the robot who had 2. His lumbering, friendly personality was the coolest part of the game. With each upgrade, he became more invulnerable but slightly slower. Anyway, it was a really fun dream, and I thought some of you might enjoy reading about it, and one or two of you might even be inspired to think about building such a game. Well, maybe in my dreams :-)

For rockets, if you have a very powerful rocket, you can get closer to your AP, or even pass it a small amount near the end of your burn to establish an orbit. With a weaker rocket, you want to keep AP ahead of you by a larger amount. If you pass your AP in a weak rocket with say, another 2 minutes of burn needed to establish orbit, you will be sinking into the atmosphere as you burn, so you will need to shift your burn slightly toward radial-out which means even less of your fuel is going toward establishing orbit, and since you're past AP, you're not raising PA as efficiently as possible, and you'll end up with an elliptical (possibly highly elliptical) orbit even if you do somehow manage to establish orbit. Also, you will have wasted a lot of fuel just establishing that funky orbit.

Another useful resource: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/124028-Altitude-boundary-charts-for-science-and-warp-speeds This one is very pretty and user-friendly

It is working now, thanks for the help! I was trying to merge the rover and wasn't using subassemblies.

Wow, I sure appreciate the help! I never would have figured that out! "Pick a set of two or more parts to attach" made it sound (to me) like "Pick two or more parts to attach to each other." I see now that is not what it means at all. Thanks again!!

OK, I saved my rover with docking port and batteries attached to the bottom as a subassembly. This bit screws me up. I click on the root mode button and I see text that says 'select a set of 2 or more parts to attach'. So I click on the lowest battery of the rover. And the text reappears. Nothing else happens. If I click the bottom battery on the rover 4 times, the text reappears 4 times. Nothing else.

OK, things have been going fairly well. Been to Minmus and Mun, but still missing some basic concepts. 1) how do you save something as a subassembly? 2) What the heck is the root tool? Every time I play around with it, I can only click on one thing, but it tells me to click on 2. 3) Why can't I attach the rover in the picture to the lifter in the picture? I've tried angle-snap on/off. I've tried upside down, approach from every angle, tried with various pieces connected to the rover before trying to mate the two. Nothing works. The lifter will not accept the lander/rover.

I'd settle for "Take this one result? Y/N" and thumb through them one at a time myself.

I remember it like it was yesterday. Trust me, it is not something you forget. Start at the 2:40 time mark.Why they had to take such a dangerous trajectory I don't know, but I do know that every single aspect of the mission was nail-biting dangerous. It was unknown if the landing site would swallow up the lander in a pocket of quicksand-like powder or if maybe the astronauts would succumb to such a fate on EVA. Only a few years before, 1 in 5 Titan rockets blew up. Astronauts and test pilots were dying with alarming frequency and only 5 years earlier some bookies were offering 1000 to 1 odds against man setting foot on the moon in the next 6 years. This was not a high-tech society, and Robbie the Robot was nearly state-of-the-art for science fiction cinema, and pop culture held that the moon was made of green cheese. This was long before Star Wars ever came out and before pocket calculators even existed. Imagine a time when a simple pocket calculator (that could only add, subtract, multiply and divide) was revolutionary -- this was before that! Slide rules were in common use and all telephones were corded, and it was a big deal to get a "long distance" telephone call (one from another area code). People talk about how 9-11 changed the world, but not nearly so much as the moon landing. As Walter Cronkite said 4 1/2 minutes before Apollo 11 touched down "4 and 1/2 minutes left in this era." The way I look at it is that they probably choose such a dangerous trajectory because that was the safest path they could achieve given the incredibly limited technology of the time. And compared to the other risks they were taking in this mission, this risk didn't seem out of line. This was an era when all recorded music was analog, and 8-track tapes were nearly as common as 12-inch vinyl records, and senior citizens were confused by the new term "stereo." Cars did not have air bags, anti-lock brakes, fuel injection, front-wheel-drive or even seatbelts that went across the shoulder/torso. Even watches with a digital display were cutting edge exotic and hadn't yet been perfected. If you wanted to change channels (there were 4 to choose from) on the T.V., you got out of your chair and walked over to the T.V. Anyone who was alive then can tell you where they were and what they were doing at the time of the moon landing. Going to the moon and back was incredibly dangerous, and there was no small measure of luck involved. That is just the way it is when you push the envelope that hard.

Wow. Harsh! Maybe we should go back to talking about the MPL. Is there any way to selectively remove experiments stored there? I recently sent my MPL to Minmus and then came back to Kerbin. I had a few experiments stored that I couldn't process into data right away that were worth quite a lot of data, and several other experiments stored that weren't worth much data. Once back in LKO, I wanted to remove the low-data-value experiments and leave the few high-data-value experiments, but I couldn't figure a way to do that. Is it possible?

It might be helpful to look at an extreme situation. Imagine you have a very high AP, and the trajectory is nearly straight up. Let's say once you reach 10km, your AP is 225km and your projected crash site is right next to the launch pad. If you wait until you are at AP to start your burn, you won't have enough time to circularize your orbit. So you will want to start your burn before AP. But the problem here is that even a short while before AP in this scenario, the prograde direction is essentially radial-out (straight up) and won't do much to circularize your orbit. So you need to aim for a more radial-in trajectory rather than true prograde on approach to AP and slightly radial-out after passing AP. Only during the center of the burn should you be heading directly prograde, and even then only if you are interested in keeping your AP where it is. This scenario is present (too a much less extreme degree) in many launches, so keep it in mind when you try to find a balance between getting more energy into the orbit vs. shaping the orbit to your desired specifications. At least, that's the way things appear to me. I'm not a rocket scientist.

It is still possible to cheat even in solo games. But since the whole point of a solo game is to amuse yourself, there is no wrong way to play a solo game, including cheating.

I haven't used KER in flight yet. But I do like the dV values in the VAB. I certainly don't want to have things like suicide burn time displayed in flight. Maybe to review data like that before the flight is one thing, but I like the game to have quite a lot of "seat of the pants" flying. As more and more of these mods take more and more of the guesswork out, I am seeing the need for a mod that introduces random explosions or other malfunctions. Maybe something like 0.01% per rocket the first time it ignites (defined to mean that you can have many rockets on one vehicle) on Normal difficulty, 0.02% on Moderate... during descent maybe one of your lander's engine's decides to only operate at 75% thrust... I believe in the days of Gemini, 1 in 5 Titan rockets were blowing up. And their total computing power for an entire mission could not power a single cell phone today. I've never played this game before release, but I do think the SAS retrograde is a bit OP. It would be OK if it put you very near (say within 3%) of retrograde, but the flawless reliability and instantaneous extreme precision is a bit overmuch for a game trying to recreate the days of Apollo.

I don't like Skyrim on the hardest setting. I don't like Civilization V on the hardest setting, and I'm sure I'll never play max hard mode here. At some point play becomes work, and what is the point of that? That said, the second-hardest settings on all those games are quite fun!

So far the only mods I've tried are KER and Chatterer. Never heard of TweakScale. Does the drag go down as you decrease the size, so you could put a bunch of them on a ship? Also I'm using Windows 8.1, so does it use much RAM?

@luizopiloto, I love the photo. I suggest you use it to hold a "give the funniest caption" contest. My entry: "O.K. The plane is dead, we're out of supplies and rescue is still weeks away. All in favor of sacrificing Ned for meat, raise your right mitten."

@selfish_meme, I like the vid! I'd like to suggest some background music: Z Z Top's La Grange.

Every time I send up a ship with lights, I play with the settings (right click the light). I'm pleased this is an option, and I just love fiddling with it. I just wish there were some really tiny lights that we could use to dress up our ships a little bit. Tiny red LEDs we could put anywhere, like the lander legs or something. The photo below is a bit dark and can't be brightened without ruining the effect. Best viewed in a darker room or by cupping your hands around your eyes. There are a lot of annoying bugs in this game, but some of the stuff that works is just downright pleasant!

I was actually practicing impromptu break dancing moves with my ship in this still photo. Spinning rapidly on my head at this particular moment (trying anything and everything to get back upright again).

I have had a similar problem with certain ships when I deploy the fairing. The ship reports as landed and the blue orbit track disappears. I posted about it and was told by a moderator that this is an old bug that happens when the remnants of the fairing don't fly off to infinity but instead remain touching the ship. (This is most likely to happen if you deploy while accelerating). I think it can happen with other detachable bits, but I know for sure it happens with fairings. I was also told that the Squad person in charge of this is aware of it and that any fix will be a bit tricky. In the meantime, I just make sure not to get fairing bits caught in my rocket when I deploy the fairing.

Some good ideas popping up here! I like what I'm hearing. The contracts could definitely use a little polishing. So many of them ask you to build something for the company offering the contract, put it where they want it, then use it however you wish. Satellites, Stations, Bases. Pretty unreal. Right up there with the SPH and VAB being different biomes. Also completely unrealistic. But for contracts, having the item become locked (maybe for a month, maybe permanently) or disappear after completing the contract is a good idea. So is needing to put a contract-specific item in its construction. And no ship/base/rover/plane can have more than 1 contract-specific part.

Is there a list somewhere of how many rep points equals how many green bars?

That Allais effect is very interesting. Never heard of it before. It would be interesting to know how the line formed by sun-moon-earth intersected with the direction of swing of those bobs. Although I must suspect they thought of simple explanations already. But I have said many times that good scientists remain skeptical about everything even gravity or the notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Since it has already been disproved once (when it was shown that they actually both revolve around their common C.O.M.) already. And that with all the questions raised by dark matter/energy I would expect further refinements in the who-revolves-around-whom issue in the future. That Allais effect is another reason to never get too comfortable with anything considered by most to already be proven. Even gravity. There is so much we don't know. Quick bring me an astrologer!