JetJaguar

That's because once you've rescued them, IIRC you can no longer take control of the ship to rename them. You can fix them if you edit your save game, though. Open your persistent.sfs file (though I prefer to save the game and edit a copy of that, in case I mess something up) in a text editor and search for the name of the derelict ships. Underneath there will be a line where the type is defined, just change that to type=debris to make it appear as debris. In the future, remember to rename the vessel and change the type before the stranded Kerbal exits it.

That's how I used to remember where it is: on the east coast of "Africa", on a bump on the Equator. Now I use Waypoint Manager, with a custom waypoint I placed about halfway between the VAB and launch pad. Once I'm in visual range, I can line myself up with the runway well enough. Anyway, I don't play with airplanes much past the early game, but find them indispensable at the start of a new career because they are an excellent source of cash when funds are short. They are the most profitable type of early contract if you can land back at the space center, recovering 100% of the vehicle. Your costs are only the fuel burned during the flight.

Maybe try the Construction Time mod. It makes time a resource that also needs to be managed by making everything take time to complete. Vessels take time to build, building upgrades time to complete, research time to unlock, and so on. It will get you to focus on scheduling and fly concurrent missions because otherwise there will be long periods when nothing is getting done. A life support mod will also force you to focus on mission duration since you will have to think ahead and plan accordingly.

http://whillyard.com/science-pages/upload-images/betelgeuse.jpg (it's a link to a photo of Betelgeuse by the HST, for another thread.)

It turns out there are a handful of stars with images that have been resolved beyond a point source. I knew about Betelgeuse, being large and relatively close it's the first one to be directly imaged.

I built model rockets back in middle and high school, too. Fortunately, about half of my collection has survived and they are currently all hanging from the ceiling of my son's bedroom: My first rocket is there, an Alpha III (the red and white one at the back, peaking out from behind the ceiling fan blade). It was launched 8 times. I know this because I made small tally marks on the body tube near the nosecone. My Mosquito is there, it's the little orange one. That's the second Mosquito I made because I lost the first one on it's first flight. Oh yeah, I always launched all of my rockets at least once. Even the elaborate ones meant for display, like the X-Wing fighter back there. My friends all thought I was crazy, they had their launching rockets and the rockets just for looks. The big black one is the Mean Machine - 6 feet long. I understand it's since been redesigned to come apart in two section for storage, but this is the original one-piece model. That was fun to launch. Almost impossible to lose because it was so big it was easy to see, and too heavy to go very high to begin with. Of the rockets I no longer have, the one I miss was a replica of the Space Shuttle. The motor was mounted inside the ET, and at the top of the flight the orbiter came off glided down separately. It was accidentally crushed in the bottom of a box during a move. I also had an Estes Saturn V kit that I started but never got around to finishing. I'm not sure whatever happened to that.

That site looks like web pages did back in 1996, too. It's like a time capsule. I had a pretty large library of MIDI's back then. Most people think they sound terrible, but that's because of the crappy FM synthesizer chip computers generally come with. My computer back then had a soundcard with wavetable samples, and MIDI's sounded fairly realistic (though I remember it never could do a really convincing guitar). I would load them up in Winamp (remember that?) and leave them playing in the background. In the mid-90's I had my own personal web page, and I had a section on there where I posted up the best MIDI's I had, maybe around a hundred of them. Then one day I got an email from the Harry Fox Agency demanding that either the MIDI's be taken down, or I pay a mechanical reproduction fee that was something ridiculous - IIRC, something like $36 per download. So, that was the end of that. Kids these days, with the iTunes and the Pandoras and the Blueteeth, may not realize that at one time the music industry actively fought to keep music off the internet.

Some of my launches should have this in the background:

It was a cool launch. I live in Orlando, and I can watch launches from my backyard. Literally! The back of my house faces towards the Cape.

Rhymes with "drool".

It makes sense if the model represents just the external portion of the tailpipe. It's probably about where a jet engine's c.g. should be since the bulk of the engine is buried in the fuselage: Anyway, your plane looks almost the same as my usual early game observation plane: I use the AV-R8 winglet for the horizontal control surfaces, which is under the "flight control" node of the tech tree (at the same level of "aviation"). I do not bother with ailerons as the winglets have enough control authority to handle roll as well as pitch. I moved the center of lift forward by rotating the winglets and giving them a very slight downward angle - so small as to be barely noticeable. Try turning on the CL and CG display and play with the rotation yourself, you'll see how angle influences the position of the CL. This is with RCS build aid turned on, the CG moves forward as the tanks drain:

Lathe, like the tool. I suspect that if it were a real planet, everyone would pronounce it that way until one day all the astronomers suddenly decide the correct pronunciation is actually "Lay-thee".

At lunch today I overheard someone in the next booth espousing young-Earth creationism to a handful of people. He made a number of cringe-worthy arguments, but to minimize religious discussion and keep things on the topic of space, I'll offer this one nugget: He claimed that if the Big Bang really occurred, then the sky would be a brilliant, uniform explosion in every direction we look. Since we don't see this, it never happened. Actually, we basically do see this. It's called the cosmic microwave background. He was right in one aspect, it is remarkably uniform.

The stage LED is to let you know if the next stage is locked (green = active, red = locked). Alt-L locks staging so accidentally pressing the space bar doesn't activate it.

Yes, they've heard that place rocks, and they want to precisely quantify how rocking it is.

I believe these may describe the same problem and in my case at least, I've narrowed it down to a conflict with Distant Object Enhancement because removing DOE corrected the problem. My workaround was to delete the detail_texture block from the citylights.cfg file in the BoulderCo\CityLights directory. My config file now looks like this: CITY_LIGHTS { altitude = 100 fadeDistance = 0 pqsFadeDistance = 500 main_texture { file = BoulderCo/CityLights/Textures/main offset { x = 0 y = 0 } } } This looks okay from a distance, but obviously you lose the detal texture up close:

Many of these were discovered by direct imaging in infrared by the WISE satellite when it compiled it's sky survey. As mentioned earlier, WISE has ruled out any sort of Nemesis-type brown dwarf companion, but there is still a possibility that terrestrial-massed objects remain undetected in the Kuiper Belt because they would be too cold for WISE to detect.

I suspect that's all the tidallock flag does, just automatically set rotation rate = orbital period. But when you flip the orbit retrograde (which I did by setting inclination = 180), the planet still rotates the same direction. So while the rotation matches the period, the planet is not spinning the right way. I'd need a way to also reverse spin. Anyway, I'm looking through the Kopernicus thread now. I can't be the first person with these questions, I might just be missing something obvious. (Edit: The explosion upon touching the atmosphere problem seems to be a bug precipitated by changes in 1.0.4 and the devs are working on it.)

I also had E.T. for the 2600. While it wasn't a great game, at the time I didn't think it was the train wreck everyone else now makes it out to be. - - - Updated - - - For me, it would be Pitfall on the 2600. I still remember some of the short cuts near the start (head left, not right, then take this tunnel...). On the PC side, I would say it was the Ultima series, specifically Ultima III through V. I played them again later in life and still remembered a lot of the puzzle answers and information gleaned from talking with NPCs.

I decided to try my hand at planet-making with Kopernicus. For my first planet, I thought to make a hot Jupiter. I came up with this: It's a Kepler 7b analogue. For scale, I keyed off of Jool (as Jupiter) and Moho (for Mercury's orbit). It's a little less than half the mass of Jool, but because of the heat of the Sun, it's puffed up to a 50% larger diameter. The texture is something I came up with by playing around with noise in Gimp. The black clouds are because hot Jupiters are expected to be as black as coal from sodium vapor in their atmospheres. The big yellow spot is because Kepler 7b has been found to have a reflective surface tidally locked to it's star, likely due to clouds made of vaporized iron and silicates (i.e. rocks). I didn't know what color that would be, so I guessed. I imagined it to be a huge cyclone like Jupiter's Great Red Spot, but because the planet is tidally locked, it's been driven to a hemisphere-spanning size. The red bands are because I thought they looked cool. In reality, hot Jupiters are believed to not have much banding at all. I'm no artist, but I'm happy with how it came out. It looks like a demonic eyeball, always staring at the Sun. I've run into a couple of problems. First, the orbital plane of most hot Jupiters have a very large tilt when compared to the rotation of their star, and half of those are actually retrograde orbits. But, they are also tidally locked. It seems that planets in KSP always rotate in the same direction, so when I give it a retrograde orbit, it rotates regardless of whether the tidal locking flag is true. I decided that it was more important to be tidally locked than have a retrograde orbit (which doesn't really make sense anyway), so it has a conventional orbit. Anyone know how, in Kopernicus, to reverse the direction of spin? The other problem is that the moment a spacecraft touches the atmosphere, this happens: Everything instantly overheats and explodes! I think the answer lies in the temperature and pressure curves, but I don't understand how those work and I haven't found any decent documentation for that yet (suggestions?). Then again, it's so close to the Sun that vehicles in orbit are already a toasty 900+ K.

I thought of another one. Right now I'm playing a moderate-difficulty career game where you have to pay money to unlock parts after researching them. Well, after unlocking a new section on the tech tree, I don't buy any of the parts until I'm actually going to use them. It just seems more fiscally responsible that way.

We got an Atari 2600 for Christmas one year. It came with Space War, plus we also separately got Indy 500 and Air Sea Battle. I don't remember which game got plugged in first, but I'd guess it was likely Air Sea Battle.

One light year is considered to be about the extreme limit of the Sun's gravitational influence. According to this article, a planet would have to be large enough to have it's own internal heat source to be detected by WISE, and even an Earth-sized object in the Kuiper Belt would be too cold to be detected. WISE basically ruled out the possibility of a "Nemesis" type brown dwarf companion, but not a terrestrial-mass object.

FWIW, the WISE satellite did a survey of the entire sky in infrared, and it would have detected anything Neptune-sized out to 700 AU, and anything Jupiter-sized to 1 light-year, so that establishes an upper bound on anything that could be orbiting out there.

Thanks!