Jolbucley

A few words of mostly unsolicited and almost off-topic advice: Despite how frustrating this is, you should probably not poke around too much in the internal workings of the game. For one thing, you’re not really supposed to (unless you work for Squad); for another, you stand a good chance of making things worse. Upgrading your hardware might help, or might not; it’s unclear exactly what helps and what doesn’t, since on my gaming computer I can launch a craft with 400 parts and lock up the game completely, while on my mostly-factory-hardware MacBook Pro it takes close to 1150 parts to get the same result, with the same graphics and physics settings. (Although, to be fair, the gaming computer lags a lot less until the 300-part mark.) I think adding more parallel processors makes things worse, not better, but I couldn’t begin to tell you why. In conclusion, I stand in solidarity with your frustration. And the answer to your question is “yes.†Good day to you.

I’m trying to design a single-stage-to-Duna round-trip vessel, sans ISRU. Even with a payload of just a flattened OKTO probe core and a thermometer, that means an insane amount of fuel and a truly terrifying amount of struts. Sadly, I crashed the game before I got a chance to crash er, test the design. If I ever get this thing to work, I’ll let you guys know with a victory screen cap or something (probably of the entire setup hurtling out-of-control back into Kerbin’s atmosphere in a deeply misguided attempt at aerobraking).

I have had the first two problems, but the last one… does it count if it happened in the demo?

KSP’s fairings aren’t perfect, but they do a great job solving that problem of spacecraft disintegrating in the upper atmosphere, which is a very relevant problem for me. They also do a decent job of delaying disintegration during reentry, although I probably should never have tried this.

I have largely been a bystander to this “debate†for nearly a year, having long tired of shouting at people who refuse to acknowledge how science works. Yet your impassioned rally against ignorance has reignited my little spark of hope for an informed future, so I’ll contribute my two cents, though I doubt I’m saying anything new. The idea of pushing on quantum vacuum particles (the hypothesis to which I subscribe) has been around for a long time, as I assume most people who are even vaguely literate in particle physics have toyed with the idea in some form or another, and doesn’t really violate any laws of physics or common sense so far as I can tell; at most it bends the rules a little. I can understand why people would be (pleasantly) surprised to find out that something which fits the notion appears to work; I can’t fathom why anyone would be any more critical of this Cannae Drive than any other potential breakthrough in science, aside from a prescriptive notion of science coupled with extreme ignorance, the latter of which most of us have been guilty at some point or another but the former of which I can’t particularly comprehend. Criticism of this seemingly reactionless drive should be well-informed and limited to the cautious scrutiny with which one ought to approach ANY new technology. Less than a week after the Cannae Drive hit the media, the discussions to which I was party had stopped being about the drive itself and concerned themselves entirely with how things work versus how they should work. Whether or not the drive works and whatever produced the thrust, it’s good to read something about the issue that actually makes sense for a change, other than the actual reports  you can only read those so many times.

If someone tens of thousands of years ago decided to set off a really bright radio pulse in our direction from the center of the galaxy, it’s conceivable that we could receive that signal. But in order to keep energy consumption reasonable (and I use the term “reasonable†very loosely) the signal would have to be a tight beam, implying that the sender expected somebody to be listening at the right time and in the right place, or else just got astronomically lucky. The signal wouldn’t be very strong by the time it got here since space has plenty of things that could interfere with it; plus, the galactic core is a fairly bright region of space, so even if we picked up the signal we would have to sift through the naturally emitted signals we detect and notice the anomaly. But why would any alien civilization with sufficient technology to send that sort of radio signal ever bother? We aren’t broadcasting loud radio messages every which way like we used to; the window during which we shouted loudly enough for even the nearest star systems to hear lasted only a few decades, which means that even if a civilization developed around the Alpha Centauri system, it would have to be in about the same stage of development we are for us to hear it, assuming it does what we did  screaming into space for a few decades before directing more of our communications energy inward. High-energy radio signals waste a lot of energy, which is what another civilization would detect: the energy that we want to cut down on emitting. After all, why spend money to blast our talk shows into the next star system, let alone a quarter of a galaxy away? We have no reason to expect alien civilizations to behave any differently. Loud, eavesdroppable communication is an immature phase of communications technology, and with the speed-of-light delay, it’s unlikely anybody in the galactic core would intentionally try to contact us. If they have the technology to know we’re here, it would probably involve the transmission or reception of information superluminally, in which case sending radio signals now makes no sense; by the time they get here, we’ll either be long gone or operating on other means of communication. Is contacting a relatively primitive race like us really worth the bother? Couldn’t they wait until we have an analogously causality-violating transmission technology to contact us? And if the denizens of the core somehow pick up our radio transmissions once they arrive, which is exceedingly unlikely, we can’t expect a response for another forty-odd-thousand years; our would-be correspondents might even realize that and not take the trouble to reply at all.

I love 0.625m because it’s more difficult to assemble craft in orbit if their constituent parts are small, fragile, and hard to see.

“Leastar A1, meet Jool. Jool, meet aw crikey.â€Â

I build something and name it with the first phrase that comes to mind, sometimes with a number after it if it’s a phrase I use a lot (“Single Stage to Duna 4,†“How Do I Get Back 16,†“Nuclear Powered Jet 3,†“Bad Idea 117,†“WHEE-AAA-BANG 6,†“Oddly Freudian 10,†“Sponsored by StrutCo 1209,†etc.).

First of all, thank you for clearing that damper business up. Second, even if heavier is good, you still don’t want to have a heavier propulsion system, which I think is what Idobox meant. Medusa’s winch-style damping makes the drive system much lighter that Orion’s push plate plus piston dampers, which means even more of your ship can be payload than in Orion’s case. We should note that a Medusa-style propulsion system is not a feasible SSTO option, as the sail would have to be in the air before launch in order to avoid being obliterated. The system is supposed to deploy in space; if we want to use a nuclear pulse propulsion system for launch, Orion is a much better idea.

I am running x32 KSP 1.0 on OS X Yosemite, and it won’t close. I’ve tried force quitting, command line and AppleScript commands, et cetera. It won’t close and it won’t let me shut down my computer. Maybe I should just let the battery run out and see what happens, but now I’m curious: What can be causing this problem and has anybody else had it? Edit: holding down the power button works, but only when my computer is plugged into an external power source. Curiouser and curiouser. Yes, I’m still curious.

It looks like Torchwood got to this ███████.

Amen. I never use fins or launch stabilizers.

In my opinion, something is cheating at a given time iff it meets two of the following criteria: Somebody has enough of a problem with it to have a problem with you if you do it It’s against the rules You’re asking yourself or someone else if it’s cheating That’s how I measure it, and I figure unless somebody is complaining to you about your offset clipping habit, you aren’t cheating, since I haven’t seen any rules against it..

I think Isp is a little bit less ridiculous than your example, but I haven’t got any good reasons why, and it’s only a very little bit anyhow, so it’s probably not statistically significant at any reasonable α.