GeneralVeers

Well, in the strict sense, the Moon and Earth orbit each other, each orbiting the system's summed-up center of gravity. The Sun and Earth orbit each other, the Earth and the center of the galaxy orbit each other, the center of our galaxy and the centers of the other galaxies all orbit each other. Everything either orbits everything else.....or is on a collision course with something..... Depending on your reference frame, it simply looks like one thing is orbiting the other. A few hundred years ago, for example, most people thought the Sun orbited the Earth because our reference frame was Earth.

I assume simply bolting the cockpit to the other end and calling that "forwards" wasn't an option? Here's my Big Happening for today, and this one's really depressing. No, really, this one's such a downer. I had to open the gamesave file in a text editor to double-check my latest crew of newbies, to make SURE they had acquired their PlantFlag events for Mun and Minmus. While scrolling through the roster, I found one Kerbal (instead of pilot or scientist or engineer, his "type" entry was "unknown"--never seen that and have no idea what it means). I did a serious double-take when I saw his name. Then the depression set in. His name was Karbel. KARBEL. Two letters. TWO lousy *&!?#*@ letters. I WAS SO CLOSE!!2!

Oh, hey--that reminds me of the.....well, I don't recall if there's an official name for this, so just call it the two-heads-are-better-than-one rule. Short version: the people doing the testing should usually NOT be the same people who wrote the code. In my personal experience, one tends to have biases about the code they wrote and it can be very easy to miss things. So even if "they" already did the QA, duplicate at least some of it anyway. If you catch something Squad missed, it'll make you feel like a million of whatever the Kerbals call the money you earn in Career mode.

Also consider the possibility that the right thing to do is "nothing at all". Humans have this instinctive need to be doing "something". When there's a tool available, we want to use it. Instead, maybe you should simply save the research points for something big. Like advanced science instruments......

As somebody who used to be a software developer and knows the ins and outs of testing software, here's a few essentials: #1: Begin at the beginning. Pull up the list of known previous bugs and start out by testing for the bugs Squad knew about and intended to squash. Because testing for bugs you don't know about is very dicey. #2: Unit testing. Instead of testing "every part with every other part" (a HUGE workload!) start by testing each individual part on its own. Make sure each one works. #3: Variance testing. Build some rockets and spaceplanes identically to previous models (which you flew before, so that you know they work) and see if they work any differently in the new version. The goal is to make sure the same stuff that worked, still works. If, for example, a spaceplane is suddenly acting differently when Squad specifically said they didn't change the code for the aerodynamics, something is probably wrong. #4: Clustered testing (a name I made up just now). Instead of testing "every part with every other part" (again) build test ships that use, say, 20-30 different parts. Overengineer, add useless parts, doesn't matter. Rather than build 227x226 different ships to test every part with every other part, test a bunch of parts at once. If the entire test ship works, you know 20-30 parts all work with each other, bug-free, with one test. If something explodes, you know the problem is somewhere in that group of 20-30 parts. #5: Watch out for intermittent bugs. While doing all your other testing, try to record everything weird that happens, even if it seems minor. If a glitch happens once and then mysteriously disappears on a retest, don't discount it right away--a bug that only happens some of the time is extremely difficult to catch. Be extra-vigilant for those.

Banned for banning the banner who banned the banner after the banner banner banned the banner. (trust me, I actually got the terminology right!)

Same reason people used to dump trash in the oceans. Because it seemed so big that nobody ever thought space pollution was going to become a problem. So here we are today, with outer-space environmentalists. Which has me wondering.....how can you have a "green" campaign in outer space??? There's no green out there, and you certainly can't call it a "black" movement because then everybody's gonna think you're campaigning for civil rights or something.

Hell, a friend of mine says FA is the originals. His exact words: "it was like Star Wars all over again". And I'm inclined to agree, from what I know of FA: you've got Tatooine all over again (I'm sure "Jakku" was merely a typo), you've got the droid carrying the secret plans/map, you've got the Bad Guy dressed in black and wearing a mask and sporting a spooky voice (which, I'm sorry, DOES NOT hold the merest candle to James Earl Jones), you've got the Bigger Bad Guy working behind the scenes and pulling the strings (and who in this particular case has a name that makes him sound like he escaped from the Harry Potter franchise), you've got The Superweapon, which the above-mentioned friend (and I'm inclined to agree with him here too) described as "total cheese", and finally you've got the same idiot construction specialists who after thirty years still have not figured out how to fix these basic design flaws that allow X-Wing fighters to fly right up to the central cores of superweapons and drop proton torpedoes on them. Seriously, why were those people not fired?? We're not. We're not turning everything else into grey goo. We're turning some of it into cars and skyscrapers and blue jeans and beef jerky and pizza and Internet chat forums. Unlike the grey goo, we humans are actually productive. Well, sometimes. (seeing as how I'm not being very productive while sitting here typing this) Brainstorm! Seeing as how Phasma is a "she", why didn't they simply call her "Boba-ette"???

With my Ceres V mothership design, I actually used some serious overengineering to make the prograde/retrograde RCS system. The ship has twenty-four ion engines on it. Yes. Twenty-four. No typos there. Twelve facing forward and twelve facing backward. Each set of twelve is tied to an Action Group hotkey, so when I'm doing a dock or whatever else requires forward or reverse RCS, I use the action hotkeys to turn on the right engines. Does the job, great fuel economy, but massive addition to the ship's part count. Oh, and lately I've noticed my computer's CPU occasionally emits smoke for some reason......... It's a cheesy workaround, and it's not actually RCS 'cause you have to turn off the ship's main drives, turn on the right ion engine group, and then use the standard throttle. But I'm with Halo on this, there are a lot of times when an ion-drive RCS cluster would be real handy.

The statement that "only X deals in absolutes" is itself an absolute. Guess what, folks! The prequel trilogy made Kenobi out to be a hypocrite. This is why I hated the prequel trilogy, and why I haven't seen FA and don't plan to. DO NOT MESS WITH CLASSIC LITERATURE. (yes, Star Wars is classic literature, and a century from now in our schools, they'll be teaching Star Wars instead of Shakespeare!) (yes, that was off topic, and also this comment that the above was off topic is also off topic, and......you know what, this is just giving me a headache......)

Markush100, meet Quicksave. Quicksave, meet Markush100. I'm sure the two of you will get along famously....... (srsly, don't let me catch you killing Jebediah ever again!) My Jebediah is at Arclight Station orbiting Minmus, doing initial prep for my Career-mode mission to Duna. The flagship is incoming in six hours game time; Jebediah will be taking the helm, along with twelve other Kerbonauts and seven tourists, for a mission that will earn a cool two million in contracts and get thirteen Kerbals that third star.

Next little thing I wish for quite a lot, but only now realized I should post in here: Have the game retain the state of the NavBall. Whenever you switch ships and then go to the Map View, the NavBall is always in the tucked-away-in-the-glove-box-where-you-can't-see-it position. Which made me remember this other thing: when the NavBall is in the glove box, you can't change the top-of-the-screen list of ship types to display or hide in the Map. I don't see why that should be a thing. Those should be changeable regardless of whether the NavBall is up.

Of course I'm missing your point, because your point is malarkey. You say a flash drive that has been through a washing machine should be considered unreliable. My flash drive has proven to be extremely reliable. 100% storage accuracy, zero errors, for ten years. You say I got lucky. Based on what? How many flash drives have you run through washing machines? I'm gonna go out on a limb and say "zero". So your claim that I got lucky is also not based on any verifiable evidence. The only objective test here is "does it work?" The flash drive works, therefore your point is, as I said, malarkey.

Starhawk, is that a nuclear engine at rear center on your space plane? Looks like it, but hard to tell.

If you can't find a mod that will let you do the plan-from-launch deal, here's a cheap trick: Launch a satellite to low Kerbin orbit and leave it there. See, pretty much everything you ever launch out of KSC is going to end up in low Kerbin orbit at some point--so, if you have a satellite on permanent station, you can simply plot the maneuvers using the satellite. You won't be able to move those maneuvers to new craft, of course, but you'll know what direction you want to fire in, when, and with what delta-V.

Yeah......bad example with the smoking. The problem being this. Okay, yes: she lived to be 100--but, how long would she have lived if she hadn't been puffing? That's the test, and it's a test we can't do, for obvious reasons. With a flash drive, it's simpler and also verifiable. Does the flash drive work? Yes or no? If the flash drive continues to work for ten years after passing through the Dante-esque Hell For Naughty Computer Parts that is my washing machine, then the washing machine obviously didn't do any significant damage. Even if the flash drive does fail sometime later on, the washing machine cannot be considered a contributing cause to the failure, because there's no evidence that the washing machine was actually the cause. For all I know, the interior of this Chuck Norris flash drive of mine is epoxy-sealed and waterproof. But the only way to know for sure would be to tear it open and take a look, which would render it non-functional, and I ain't gonna do that. Guess I'll never know.

I told you--programming glitch. Actually, in this particular case, the figurative kill switch saves resources. As KAL 9000 said: why not program the nanobots not to eat other nanobots? That programming (the "don't eat other nanobots" command) takes extra code and memory and whatnot--it's the don't kill switch that costs extra. And, of course, any nanobot that doesn't have that extra code (or suffers a software glitch......) will have a competitive advantage. Actually two competitive advantages: less energy to replicate, because it doesn't have to replicate the extra software, and a much larger food supply--the other nanobots.

And there will inevitably be a programming glitch somewhere. The thing about non-sexual reproduction is that each duplicate is an exact duplicate, including all the errors. One glitch in one nanobot. That's all it would take. That one glitchy nanobot will look around for the ideal food source, and see a whole lot of exactly the right materials it needs to replicate itself. And it will proceed to eat its neighbors, replicate itself, thereby replicating the glitch, and very quickly the entire mass of grey goo will self-destruct.

My first SSTO space plane. I had been trying so hard for so long to get an SSTO to work that when it finally did, I woke up the neighbors. Curiously, when they asked what the ruckus was all about and I told them I'd gotten an SSTO to work, they asked me if I'd used R.A.P.I.E.R. engines.......small world!

The grey goo wouldn't get ten feet out of the test tube, because the nanobots would eat each other. (srsly, why has nobody ever thought of that before?)

Pssh. Did that two years ago. Got sued big time, cuz on the first test flight I failed to notice the open end of the field was pointed at San Jose. Those people have NO appreciation for science.......

Heheh. Yeah. It was Star Trek; they simply hand-waved the minor fact that element 483 is probably unstable as heck. Is there any hard evidence at all for the "island of stability", or is it hypothetical? (from what I've read of it, it's more an "island of relative stabiliity" whose elements merely last longer before going kablooey)

I think human science will one day reach a point where that's actually doable.

Uhh.....no. Saying "I like cheese" or something like that would be off topic (Manchego is delicious, by the way!). If the SAS is jittery, getting the ship to stop jittering and then turning off the system that causes the jitters is a solution. Probably the best one, in a game that's known to be glitchy. I have not seen the same problems with jitteritis that other folks in here have described. Not with Scott Manley's 2-ton Mun lander, not with space probes fitted with 15-torque SAS wheels. My problems are elsewhere. As the doctor said: "It hurts when I do this--OW--" "Then don't do that!! That'll be $40." (oh, and I like cheese!)

That was me dabbling in sci-fi. I did use the word "forcefield"...... (actually, such things aren't entirely fictional.....) My evil plan: confine a charge of neutron star matter at stable density, using a forcefield or whatever, transport the charge to where you want it, then drop the forcefield. The charge becomes unstable. Huge kaboom. With the added bonus of the explosion consisting of a large amount of actual matter which exerts a lot more force than a nuclear blast wave. (I mourn the demise of the Evil Superweapons thread......)