cubinator

Did you update your drivers? Waiter, my soup is on the ceiling!

That's quite true. People are always frightened that everything is going to turn upside down and go wrong, but really it's not that bad, unless we're talking climate.

Hail sextant+tables+calculator!

You know, I've never really noticed this but...are those lawn chairs? Makes me feel like they should have been drinking lemonade while sitting on that thing.

I think I chanced upon it while browsing the Steam store. Got the demo, got hooked, got the full version, struggled to find other games to put significant time into since. I've been playing for over 2 years now, and I think I'll keep playing it forever, if I can!

I have played a lot with KER, but before that I learned about delta-V and transfer windows with a calculator and a protractor at my side. It was really informative, and I like tapping out my KSP-oriented variant of the Rocket Equation mid-flight to see if I can go a little further. Now I choose not to use KER because I like having to use my calculator during flight. I would be ok with a stock delta-V meter in the VAB/SPH only, because I don't like having to empty all the fuel tanks to see my dry mass. As for "The KSPocalypse is coming!", I see no reason to assume that. The player base grows every day, and those who have given it a little time find it to be great fun, and many of those have gone on to do really cool, elaborate things in our little space game. "The future will be ok!" -xkcd

I know, I know, I was just poking fun at the size of KSP's planets.

Spaaaaaaaace!

Too small? It's almost as big as Kerbin!

Someone just had to say it.

I was very little when I first saw Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon. It was pretty cool and I was hooked! Now I like to take my telescope out often, and look at the stars and planets. I'd like to catch a color-contrast binary star sometime, but never got around to it. Any suggestions? I'll be out in an area with very little light pollution in a couple of weeks, at the lunar minimum, so the stars will be pretty neat and I'll have a small telescope, a 4" reflector.

The Great Red Spot one is pretty cool.

That's part of our Build-Your-Own-Helicopter-Soup Special! Collect them all! Waiter, soup.exe is not responding!

Granted, but every other post ends up being yours. I wish Sol-3a had a ring system visible from Sol-3.

Banned for pixelated avatar.

Not so scary now, huh?

I finished up my second Rubik's cube and made a challenge for it!

Well, I've always been obsessed with space. KSP brought out the engineer in me some, I guess. I love making myself challenges, building and designing machines to accomplish them, testing them, refining them, and finally completing my goals. I also really want to go to space, so this is great for the interim. I consider myself an engineer and a scientist, by personality.

"Time to quicksave!" *presses alt-F4*

So a while ago, as many of you saw, I decided to make a stock working Rubik's Cube. It worked, but took like an hour just to do the checkerboard. Today I finished brushing up the second version of that, which is a lot smoother and actually usable now, albeit still turns like a snail stopping to smell the flowers. I figured I'd post a challenge to see if anyone would take the time to actually do a solve on it. It's pretty simple, but there's a few points I should clarify: I only did the Square in the Middle pattern, which takes 8 moves. It proves that all faces can turn independently, but some of the docking ports don't always lock when a turn is completed. This may or may not cause problems later in the solve. I really don't know. A typical solve for me takes between 60 and 70 moves, and I've only done eight on this cube. We'll just have to see how it goes. Just scrambling the cube would take a long time, as it takes 20 moves. I'm expecting several hours of effort necessary to do this. Because of the "several hours" thing, I can't really expect everyone to submit a video proving their solve. What I will ask for is screenshots clearly depicting each part of your solve, i.e. each time you insert a corner, edge, or F2L pair, each time you perform an algorithm, and show which pieces you are manipulating/which algorithm you are performing. While I'm not asking for a screenshot every time you complete a turn, I won't frown upon it, and it should be less than 150 screenshots, unless you mess up your OLLs and PLLs (which may very well happen, as there's no muscle memory here ). This is designed as a stock challenge. You can use Hyperedit to move the cube before the solve, but mods such as Ven Stock Revamp or Kerbal Krash System may render the cube unusable. Any mods that don't alter the stock parts are allowed. Just from my small experience with the cube, I might estimate that this challenge would take maybe 1/2 to 2/3 the time of an Elcano challenge. There will be a lot of right-clicking involved. Here is how to turn a face: Press space to release the bearings. Press "[" or "]" to switch from the core to the rest of the cube, the part you will be manipulating. Pick a face to turn, and release all the docking ports connecting that face to the rest of the cube. If you don't undock eight docking ports all on the same plane, you're doing it wrong. Change focus so that you are focused on the layer you want to turn. (This usually happens automatically, but make sure first!) Rotate the layer with the rotation keys (If it's not [Q] and [E], right-click on one of the docking ports you undocked earlier and select "Control From Here"). Make sure that you keep pressing the rotation key until you are absolutely sure the magnets have kicked in! You may have to turn on the second reaction wheel (right click on the outer "bulb" of the bearing inside the cube to select it) and/or rotate the face back 45 degrees to try again. It needs to be going pretty fast to get over the docking ports! Wait for the layer to dock to the rest of the cube again. Repeat steps 3-6 until the desired permutation is reached. As you can see, it's pretty complicated to turn, but you'll get the hang of it pretty quickly. Note: You should either use Hacked Gravity mode, or transport it to an orbit (I don't care how you get it there, Hyperedit allowed) before using it. It also requires that Infinite Electricity be turned on. You can add RTGs to the inside and make a shuttle to transport and dock all the individual pieces in orbit if you want to be more authentic, but I think it's enough hassle as-is. Here is the download link for the craft: http://www69.zippyshare.com/v/4UvwYgFt/file.html And here is the thread for discussing the cube itself: Please try to use this scramble for the first solve, just to standardize things (remember, scrambles are performed with white on top and green in front): F D B' D' R2 D' B' D2 R L' B U' R2 D F2 L2 F2 D B2 R2 Good luck! I'm in the process of scrambling my cube right now, doing the fifth turn without much trouble. I really think this is doable! BTW this scramble took me 59 moves to solve using CFOP on my real-world cube.

It's finally here! Rubik's Cube 2! This one was aligned with lots of Snap mode in the VAB, so it is actually usable! Here is a screenshot proving all faces can be manipulated: It's reasonably easy to use, as long as you don't look at it the wrong way. Here is the download link: http://www69.zippyshare.com/v/4UvwYgFt/file.html Let me know (a) how well the download works, (b) if you experience the "quantum entanglement" bug, and (c) how well it works in 1.1.3 as I built and tested it in 1.0.5. Here is a challenge for those who wish to solve it:

I *really* need to get the second version up so people can really start using it. It is still very buggy, and I have to basically hand-pick each piece that is magically stuck, by trying to turn all six faces, finding out in the middle of that that there is _another_ quantum-entangled piece, having to go back to the VAB and fix it, then do it all over again. I think I'll work on that right now!

Banned for being amused.

Red Five

With butter. "Everything's better with butter." Does sound exist when I'm not looking?