Thunder_86

dude they are so boss! I just tried them out, and they are absolutely incredible! This is now one of my favourite mods alongside MechJeb and Kerbal Alarm Clock!

I think I'd kiss you right now! Thank you so much man! Your mod and Mech Jeb are the best two mods ever for KSP! I simply cannot do without either of those! You are my hero!

wait, what? There is such a thing??? I've wanted that in the vanilla game forever! I don't assemble ships up there BECAUSE I couldn't do that! Attaching 2 big parts with only 1 docking port is too wobbly, and creating designs that attach using multiple docking ports between 2 parts id too fiddly to align them right in the VAB... I'm getting this mod tonight! Thanks for the tip!

actually, the mathematical explanation talked to me a lot more lol. But thanks for the second explanation anyway! I actually though it was linear, but I now see it's exponential, so burning at periapsis makes a ton of sense when you know this! Starhawk's explanation made me understand it, and the link you provided from you reply in another thread put actual numbers for me to easily see! Thanks a lot! At first, I though the most efficient way would have been to plan your encounter super high and circularize it way up there, as I figured I'd have to kill less speed. Now that I understand that the kinetic energy isn't linear, but rather exponential based on your speed, then it makes so much more sense to burn when you are going the fastest, to reduce your kinetic energy at a very, very fast rate! That completely opened my eyes! (I'm a very mathematical dude lol. I do lack some physics notions tho. Should have taken Physics in high school instead of Spanish XD)

although it doesn't answer your question directly, here is what I personally do to raise a Kerbal to level 4 very quickly. I use it with my scientists to make them more efficient in science labs. I create a big but simple rocket that has a drone (those large disks). I put a hitchiker module that holds 4 kerbals (you could put 2-3 if you need to, or even use more advanced, more efficient modules), and I send them to orbit the Mun, then, in the same trip, I go orbit Minmus. I then leave minmus and go orbit Eve. I then go to Gilly and land the rocket if the design permits it, if not I park in orbit an literally EVA all my kerbals to go plant flags on Gilly, and then bring them all back to the ship, again with EVA if needed. Once they are back on Kerbin, they are level 4. I know it requires sending them on a mission, I don'T know the details of what you are doing, but if it's just about taking as little time as possible, this is hard to beat I think... bringing 4-8 kerbals to level 4 in a single mission is pretty good If you REALLY can't make them go on a mission, then I don't know :(. But you can probably edit your savegame or something.

thanks for the tips people!

There is that. I don't know about the weight, but you do need to burn to raise the periapsis... but I think you'd save more DV by aero breaking than you'll need to raise your periapsis right? I could do itwithout the heat shield too I guess, maybe just not as aggressive... Anyway I'll have to experiment, but at least now I know what was my yesterday's blatent mistake. What I'm now wondering more than anything else is hot to plan a Gilly (or any other natural satellite) encounter directly from LKO... that is completely beyond me right now! It'd save a bunch of time and fuel I'm pretty sure! In-game time doesn't mean crap, but it'd save so much of MY time not having to first getting captured by a planet and then plan an encouter with one of it's moons... It would be especially useful with moons like Gilly... small moon, tiny SOI, and VERY eccentric orbit! Also, when I try to encounter Gilly and I don't have the same inclinaison and orbit shape, what I often do is to plan a route that goes exactly trough Gilly's orbit (not easy as you need to eyeball it in the map...) and then maneuver by making my orbit bigger or smaller exactly at that point so that when I come back at the same spot, Gilly is right there for me. it's fiddly, but then I don't even have to match planes with it. It sometimes need more DV to capture tho as you get in the SOI in a weirder angle, making me faster relative to Gilly... Is that the best way (once you are already in the planet's orbit)?

yeah those are new right? I'm yet to experiment with them. but sometimes the ship design doesn't really allow for it :S

Snark: yeah you're right. I am yet to understand the reasons behind the oberth effect. I understand a bunch of things about space, but the oberth effect ain't one XD. I don't fully get why burning at periapse is so more efficient. I know it but I don't understand it lol. in my mind, the slower you go (apoapse), the bigger the diffrence, percentage-wise a single m/s is. its kinda unintuitive to me to burn at a very low periapsis. but yeah I know that's what I should do. I just have a hard time to wrap my head around it. sorry if this message was unclear, it's 5:30 am, I'm typing this on my phone and English isn't my mother tongue XD

I'm not good enough to calculate an Gilly encounter straight from LKO :S I'd have no clue how to calculate this to get there with the correct inclinaison. and correct timing (you want to get there at precisely the right time or you might pass on the correct trajectory... but with Gilly at the other end of it's orbit lol. You are absolutely right about burning at a periapsis of 100km tho... I feel a tad stupid right now... I didn't think it would make such a HUGE difference. I knew burning at periapsis is the best way to go, but I didn't think it's nooed 10 times as much... I burnt like an idiot, trying to get in orbit from way way too high I guess, and not even burning at periapsis. I have no clue at what height I was at... but it was around Gilly's orbit. And not at it's periapsis to eve XD. must have been what... 15? 20 000 000m? mabe even higher XD As for getting there at eve's periapsis to the sun, just like aiming straight for Gilly from LKO, I'm not sure how to plan that... you already need to wait for a transfer window... I doubt I'd be able to aim for a time frame for that :S Thanks for the reply, I'll try again tomorrow and get a 100km fly by instead of a 15 000 one and burn at Periapsis this time XD. That is definately something I'm easily able to do. We'll see what happens. Might try to use a bit of aerobraking as well (even tho my craft is really not designed for that lol). In the meantime, if you have tips to get direct encouters with natural satellites from LKO, it would be very much appreciated! Thanks!

I was doing a mission that required me to land a station on Gilly. I've see this image: It says you need 90 m/s of Delta V to get from an eccentric orbit to the edge of Kerbin's SOI to get to a Eve Fly-By. That was pretty much spot on (of course, I burned in one shot from LKO to an Eve encounter, but I looked at the maneuver's Delta V, and when my orbit reached the edge of Kerbin's SOI, i had pretty much exactly 90 m/s left to burn). It then says you need 80 m/s of Delta V to get from a flyby to an eccentric orbit around eve. Took me over 800... What am I doing wrong here? I've been playing KSP for a while now (returning after a 6-months to 1 year break), but never really got into trying to minimize fuel requirements, I usually pack way... way... WAY more fuel than I need, to the point where I sometimes drop almost full stages before a landing or a circularization. But I'm trying to go smarter now, with the bare minimum that I need. For my first try, my plan was all prepared, I was gonna get there with a maximum of like 100 m/s of Delta V left. Let's just say that these 700 m/s missing ruined the day of a couple kerbals... Jeb was sooooo angry!! I tried to apologize, but I think he's ignoring me Is that Delta V map wrong, or is it me who's doing something wrong here? Thanks!

but its way more than just "decent" :P With all the options, possibility to add an overlay, or webcam capture, or basically anything for that matter... Its really awesome! Not saying that there arent any paid softwares that are even better (I don't even know if there are, but I can't say there is none!), but for a free software, its actually quite amazing! I'm pretty sure if OBS wasn't from twitch it wouldn't be free either... The reason why its free, in my mind, is that its the perfect tool for streamers to stream, which in turn is profitable to twitch. If it wasn't for the streaming ability, I'm sure that OBS would be at least 20-30 bucks! (its weird to say that REMOVING a functionality would make a freeware a paid application, but I'm pretty sure it would!)

yeah audacity is awesome for a freeware! But as you said thats only for audio... If you have to record yourself speaking, if you are looking for sound quality, I agree you should record that sepperately with a decent microphone. But if all sound that needs to be recorded is the sound coming from the computer, OBS will do the job so nicely with that, no need to record the sound externally [COLOR="silver"][SIZE=1]- - - Updated - - -[/SIZE][/COLOR] looks like its pretty unanimous about OBS! :P

I third the last 2 posters! Go for OBS. You can do everything, layer a webcam over the gameplay if you want, setup the screen as you wish, then you can either record, broadcast(stream) live on twitch, or both at the same time (streaming is really fun too). Its no video editor tho, and videos are super big when they come out of OBS, but its gonna be the same with pretty much any recorder. You'll need an actual video editor to compress it correctly. I'd recommend adobe premiere, but that really expensive. I don't know of any good free video editors... But I'm pretty sure no EDITING software will be as good as OBS for capturing the video, since OBS is so easy to use and works so well! AND OBS is free! :P If you don't care about the size of the videos, then OBS is all you need!

[quote name='justidutch']Winnipeg, Canada. There's been snow covering the ground here for four days now. What is fun though, is that the company I do work for has recently hired a person from Bangladesh and one from Brazil, both immigrated in the last four months. They are aghast, and have absolutely no idea what is in store for them! I read, albeit a couple decades ago, that this city of mine has the greatest temperature variance during the year. In the summer it can get to +34 degrees celsius, and in the winter -36 (not including windchill factors). Some call us tough, but most call us stupid![/QUOTE] I feel you man... Here in Quebec its pretty much the same... I used to love it when I was a teen, I used to go snowboarding every single week. Then, when I gol older, I stopped snowboarding, but I got a Subaru WRX. Soooooo much fun drifting everywhere in the snow! But then life (read: my ex gf.) happened, ruined me completely, I now drive an old Honda Civic... and I haven't started snowboarding again. So I now properly hate winter! XD

I'm not sure how to say what I have. He we call it a College or Cegep, and its between high school and universities. You have to go through Cegep to get to university, and you have the option of doing a 2 year of "pre-university" or a 3-year program which is considered as an advanced degree. For example, I know our CEGEP is the equivalent to a bachelor degree in france. then our bachelor is like what the French call a Bachelor +1. I'm not sure how it compares to the US and the rest of the world. Its like the smallest of the advanced degree you can have basically So I'm a Programmer-Analyst, and have what we call a DEC (Diplôme d'Études Collégiales or Collegial Studies Diploma) in computer science from the Cégep de Rosemont in Montréal, Quebec, Canada. I graduated in 2007.

snows a lot here: Quebec. however, we didn't have any accumulation yet this year, it snowed 2-3 times, but it melted. next snow will probably stay tho. we usually receive around 250-300 cm per year I'd say. We had years with over 400cm.

From what I can understand, KSP isn't so hard on the GPU, but its REALLY, REALLY demanding on the CPU... Laptop CPUs are a lot slower... even with the turbo (at least in my experience). to give you an idea of my next machine, I'm buying it from a friend of mine who's got his own company. He's got machines (way) faster than that, but prices gets ridicoulous really fast when browsing his website lol. the one I want is that one: [URL]https://www.gamingpc.ca/best-desktops/thewarrior.php?pcID=4[/URL] He is the king of overclocking, he doesn't use the automatic overclock features, he plays with voltages and stuff... I'm a programmer myself and I have no clue how he does that, I did buy a machine from him a few years ago, and I swear I've never had a machine that fast for the price I paid! If you think you know everything about overclocking, well he stills knows more lol. That guy is litterally a magician! We are in canada so keep in mind his prices are in canadian dollars... so that 2600$ machine is like what... 2000 USD? And you get a 4.6 GHz quad core CPU, 16 Gbs of killer ram, overclocked to 3000MHz (yes, you can overclock RAM!!!), and a GTX 970... overclocked as well of course! Everything being watercooled as well to make sure everything runs cool and silent... This thing is gonna rock! (water cooling nowadays isn't that much better than fans as far as temperature goes as fans are getting extremely performant, byt the water cooling is more quiet. You have much fewer fans, and if you put the radiator outside the case, its easy to keep clean, and clean fans means silent fans! The watercooling to me is all about noise reduction. Systems using fans are silent at first but gets noisy over time as fans gets dirty... With a water cooled system its easy to keep cleaner as there are fewer of them and its easy to make a watercooling system where the fans are super easy to access, and even replace once in a while if they get more noisy) I understand that gaming laptops are fun... but in my experience, its a pain in the backside more than anything. They are expensive, they get outdated extremely fast, they tend to break (they are super bad with heat, they have super powerfull parts, in a very, very limited space, everything gets hot, and hot parts wear out fast. As a matter of fact, my laptop ws suposed to have a GTX 675M, but it blew up after 2 years, they replaced it with a 770M, and I'll be dead honest, it hasn't even been a year since I had the card replaced, the 770M is starting to do free games, I think its gonna blow up soon... I also had to have 2 memory DIMMs that also blew up... In the end its your descision, I understand why you'd want gaming laptop, as 3 years ago I really wanted one too... But now I really regret it. If I had gotten a desktop back then, I wouldn't be swearing at my computer every single day, and it would still be good for a few months to a year or two... But now I can't get newer games because it just won't play them... I lag a bit in GTA V because my GPU isn't powerfull enough, I lag in KSP cause my CPU isn't fast enough... So to me, gaming laptops: never again

[quote name='pTrevTrevs']It would be a good idea so long as the story was fictitious. I think if they named the shuttle [I]Columbuia[/I] and gave the crew members in the movie the same names as those on STS 107, it would be a little in bad taste, but if they made ileverything fictional it would be ok. In Gravity, the shuttle was given a fake name, and all the characters were fictional, and it was ok. Don't get the wrong idea though, I'm not saying Gravity is a good movie...[/QUOTE] The movie itself was pretty crappy, but when you love space like we all do here, you gotta admit, the images were breath taking! I watched it twice and loved it just for the visuals! When Georges Clooney opens the hatch while Sandra Bullock is in the lander without her helmet on, the first time I saw the movie, I went berserk lol. I was like thats it! They blew it! No way she could survive that... She'd freaking freeze instantly and probably explode because of the vacuum.. But then when you realise she dreamt that, I was like ok... pheew! Saved it! lol.

[quote name='EuSouONumero345']I have a cat, too. And as they're always so close to us, I can imagine how hard it must be to go through this. I've had my cat since he was born, and that was 1 year ago, I think. So he's young? I've never had a cat before, so it's a new experience which I've enjoined so far. Btw, do cats love candy?[/QUOTE] Careful with "human" food... Candies are already bad for a 150 pounds human... imagine for a 10-15 pounds cat... lol. There is also food thats super dangerous for animals. Example: never. EVER give chocolate to a dog. It can actually kill him. Grapes are extremely bad for them aswell... Not sure about cats, but I'd definately stick to cat food. If you want to give him a special treat once in a while, check with a vet that its not gonna be dangerous for him!

Sorry to hear that man. Loosing an animal, even if you only had him for a few months, is really hard... My dog is gonna go soon aswell. I've had that dog for 13 and a half years... He's my brother. I don't live with him anymore, as he was in love with my mother so when I moved out from my parents place a few years ago it's my parents who kept the dog... Now that my mom passed away, my dad is alone with the dog, and the dog has always been unhealthy, he always had weird (and super costly) issues... not he's a few months away from the inevitable if we are lucky, a few weeks if not... I'll miss that dog so much :'(

Well juste to give you a point of view: My laptop: i7 2.4ghz (quad core) NVidia 770M 12Gb of DDR3 Windows runnign on a SSD Game running from a 7200RPM HDD Everything is fine, but rockets with a lot of parts tend to lag a bit, and building a base gets aweful really fast as the first base module is fine, but adding more it starts to lag like mad. Space stations seems not too bad so far, but when they get big, it does start to lag a bit... I'm currently saving for a new machine... And my laptop has only 3 years... If you are looking at a laptop from 2008, I can tell you right now it won'T be any good in the game. sure you'll lauch 10 parts rockets... but you won't be able to do anything big... I would advise against that...

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time <-- best game of all times The whole Final Fantasy series <-- A few of them weren't as good, but most of them are absolutely awesome! FFX is king, followed by VI and VII (pretty much a tie if you ask me) close third: Gran Turismo 2 on PSX. I got big into cars because of that game. It gave me one of my biggest passions so yeah of course its one of my favourite!

You got me wrong I think. I'm happy for her. I actually heard the feel had changed. I'm not saying it has, I'm not saying it will. Thats just what I've heard. That information might be wrong. I was expressing my wish that it doesn't change, thats all! I do wish her all the best!

I honestly like most of the planes in the game. As with KSP, I'm not a huge fan of mods or whatever, I usually stick to the stock in-game stuff, but yeah I have the big version with the acceleration expansion. As far as records, I'm not really one to try to do anything really extreme, but I enjoy trying to do legit flights and also just messing around as well. I like going in small planes like the small Cesna and just pretend I suddenly got rich and got myself my dream toy lol. I usually just takeoff from the CYRQ airport in Trois-Rivieres, Qc, Canada (I actually work at that airport for an aircraft overhaul center), and get to CYUL (Montreal) airport as I was born in montreal and I'm going there all the time. Its definately faster to fly there than it is to drive there XD. I also like climbing in big airliners (anyone... depends on my mood), and do actual short flights from like Montreal to New York or something like that. I also love taking that F18 (I think its a F18? Its been a while I haven't payed) and land on the carriers. I got pretty good at it back in the days, I'm sure if I was going to try it out again it would end terribly XD