Scoundrel

I wonder how many colonial vipers we're going to see on the craft forums with that new inlet once 1.0 is released? Also, YAY for the Round8 surviving! Take that, Gnomes of Xenon!

This thread needs a poll, because any thread looking to form consensus on an issue needs a poll. Also I vote to keep the Round8 because it was such a useful part for my microlanders, EVA pods and tiny SSTOs. In fact, the change makes no real sense? Why does HarvesteR hate it so much that he couldn't simply make a new tank? Was he secretly crippled by a Round8 and now his heart is filled with nothing but seething hatred and a single-minded desire to see it destroyed? Or is it something more sinister? Perhaps he was kidnapped and brainwashed by the Gnomes of Xenon, a terrifying Illuminati organization who secretly want to replace all our LFO tanks with Xenon tanks as part of their insidious plan to control KSP? Some day we will discover the real reason... The Truth is Out There!

I had this crazy thought that a Helium-3 analogue (Kerbolium-3?) would be a better fit. Simply put: there is a power requirement for kerbalkind (the amount is irrelevant) and the starting price of Ke-3 would be $100 a ton (or whatever, the number I picked was purely arbitrary); as the player brings back more and more Ke-3, the price per ton drops until it is no longer economical to bring it back. As the Ke-3 on Kerbin gets consumed, the price begins to rise again until it becomes economically viable to mine Ke-3 once more. It has all the advantages of an economy without actually requiring one to exist, and the fact that it can be saturated eliminates the risk of exploitation. It also adds a lot of possibilities for gameplay expansion, both in the main game and in DLCs that pop out down the road: an economic incentive to explore beyond meandering from geome to geome for the sake of science points; and a futuristic resource for whenever the devs decide we're allowed to go beyond the Kerbin system. The best part: it isn't required. A player can completely ignore it if they want to. Or, they can alternate between contracts and mining depending on their mood. Or they can completely ignore contracts and just mine. Crazy, right?

I've worked professionally with Canons since the 90s (still have my 35mm body... too sentimental to let it go), and you are correct that the earlier ones were atrocious for white balance. I was simply pointing out that virtually all cameras have their sensor issues. And yeah, I too still carry around a white balance card set, but mostly because I exclusively shoot HDR now so I focus on shifting to true first before I start messing around with the image. I'm starting to think the banana-in-a-photo thing is some sort of internet meme that I haven't caught on to yet... or perhaps it's a photo by a Squad employee next to their paycheque. And I cringe at presets. I've always shot the first photo with the white and grey white balance cards so I have my temperature, then the next photo without. I then use my photo of the cards to get my balance (usually in photoshop), and apply the adjustments to the subsequent ones (because I don't ever trust my digital cameras... a hold-over from my days of pretentiously working exclusively in black and white film). That said, I would have liked it if someone took a photo of the rocket next to something called a "ruler" which has things called "measurements" on them so we'd have an actual sense of scale. At 200 bucks for the large, a banana for comparison isn't going to cut it. Also I'd like to see one with a custom flag on it, just to be certain that it's doable. I'd check the colour profile of the jpeg and adapt it for your monitor, but yeah, the original was a bit hot on mine even after I adjusted for the colour profile. I wonder then if the colours on the final product are more muted than what's in the photo? And what about part clipping? Or parts that are accidentally/purposefully placed so they're floating? Will that be automatically corrected?

The question was from Asimov's The Last Question. It was actually my introduction to him when I was a little kid, as it was a show at the planetarium, and it introduced me to the idea of critical thinking. Also a bittersweet bit of trivia: it was narrated by the late Leonard Nimoy. Doubt you can find it now as that was the 80s, and there's nothing on youtube.

I've used quite a few different cameras, and the white balance issue isn't remotely unique to Canon. Even lower-end Nikons will smack me if I don't make the effort to get a correct white balance (ahhh takes me back to my film school days when shooting with ancient plumbicon tube cameras). In this particular case the camera was likely tricked by the off-white wall. Also, without knowing the light source (which looks like a late afternoon/early evening sun interior shot, judging by the amount of diffusion... but it could be anything at such a small area), it's hard to gauge just what colour that wall actually is. In the interest of seeing what colour that rocket really is, here's my speculative correction for white balance... hopefully GregoxMun (or whoever took the picture) could verify how far off I am from true... and hopefully won't mind that I messed with their picture. Unfortunately the rocket picks up some of the reflected colours so I'm not exactly how close to true this is to the final product, but it looks like it's pretty close to the colours actually used on the game parts... which is a bit of a relief since most of the photos make it look like it would be more sand coloured.

Lol fair enough. I'll reserve final judgement for when the goodies are finally revealed.

I'm torn. I really like the parts, they're very well done. My issue with these resource gathering systems is the reliance on radial parts that have silly limits. If the drills weren't some weird telescoping thing but a drum-fed turntable that simply connected pipe, then you could solve a few problems: 1. A player could have a spare drum of pipes on the other side to balance the radial mounting of the drill/turntable. This, for me, solves something of a bit of a pet peeve since finding something to counterbalance a radial drill usually ends up being something I didn't need or want to bring along. 2. A player won't have to worry about carefully designing a ship and spending hours carefully maneuvering to arrive at their destination... only to discover that their drill won't reach once they've actually landed; there wouldn't be a height limit to the drill so it would never really be an issue. Just loop the connection animation and you'd end up with a pipe that is as long as it needs to be. Sidenote: it would also allow us to set up drilling platforms on oceans for whatever reason, but I prefer DuoDex's idea of a "hose mode." And I'm totally not thinking of making Beer a resource. 3. It allows for an in-line variant that can be placed somewhere convenient, like, say, cargo bays if it was designed right. Also, the side benefit with having spare drums with pipe in them is that rather than focus on resource concentration (which has been pointed out to be kinda pointless in a game where you can time-warp, though RoverDude made decent counters to that point), you can have the resource map display it as depth, so players will seek out the easily accessible spots for their ships, but can go for the deep wells (if required) with their permanent bases. And, if resource depletion is a thing that the devs want for one reason or another, simply have the resource depth slowly change as protofuel is extracted so that the player has to drill deeper to continue to get it. Thus there can be missions to bring spare pipe to bases just so they can continue to generate fuel (oh noes! base maintenance!), and we can even go so far as to require an Engineer to "reload" the pipe drums. It's not completely realistic, but it solves some issues without creating new ones, adds but a tiny bit of complexity to base-building, and has the potential for some interesting contracts.

Lies! Lies! It's all LIES! Everyone knows that the Kerbol system was created when the Great Galactic Space Kraken sneezed! You see, in the beginning the Kerbalverse was without form and void (and orbital mechanics and symmetry and tweakables... luckily those came later). Then the divine HarvesteR created Kerbin, which the sun rotated around (seriously, Kerbin didn't rotate back in the day) and the Mün was merely a circle that floated in the sky. Then, one day, and quite by accident, the Great Galactic Space Kraken inhaled the both the Sun and the Mün!... and found out it was allergic so it sneezed them back out, but into a 3d form. However, as we all know, sneezes come in threezes (meh, it's a Kerbal saying, just go with it), and thus the Kerbalverse was sprayed with two more mighty spewings of Galactic Krakenmucous, which then coalesced into the planets we have today! As for explaining the extreme density, well, people have to remember that the Great Galactic Space Kraken also had like a cold or something the week before, and had been eating a lot of dairy because it read this thing on the internet that said yoghurt and cheese was good for you, so the Krakensnot was extra gooey that day. Well... it's either that, or the Kerbalverse is simply one of the many multiverses that has different constants for weak nuclear forces and such. Obviously one makes for a better creation myth than the other.

I discovered the internet in the late 90s when I went to work for an early dotcom to pay for my student loans from film school - except I didn't know what the internet was, or what photoshop was, or anything. I BS'd my way into a job and mastered HTML and photoshop in 4 hours. Amazingly enough I won a Yahoo! award for that site, which completely destroyed my career as a filmmaker (since I rationalized that making money fast would let me make my own films) and created a bunch of award winning sites... but then there was that dotcom crash and, yeah, here I am now writing sci-fi novels. Thanks, internet, for destroying my dreams, you b@st@rd!

The actual concept itself is ridiculous, but the spinoff technologies from pursuing such an endeavour would be staggering. Just off the top of my head: an actual fix for spinal injuries; a clearer understanding of nerve pathways that would allow cybernetic replacement of human body parts (including going "full 'borg"!); the foundation for a cure for motor neuron disorders; better techniques and approaches to repairing severe trauma in patients. These side benefits is likely why there's even remotely a discussion about the "ethics" of such an abominable procedure.

Destroying all cockroaches would be an exercise in futility. Simply "destroy" their habitat by engaging in OCD-level cleaning for a month or two should do it. As a former resident of LA (a town that has cockroaches big enough to look like they stepped off the set of Jurassic Park - yeah both human and insect heheheh) it is the only sure-fire way I know of. And yeah, they eat the microscopic food bits on your toothbrush, so even that is not safe. You seriously have to go all out and not leave even the tiniest crumb anywhere. With regards to rationalizing destroying humanity because certain aspects of humanity act irrationally: such a suggestion is itself an absurdity, thus making individuals who accept that rationale the equivalent of those who suggested an irrational act in the first place. There is no moral or ethical justification for extinction-level acts - only the imperative for survival can even remotely justify such atrocities, and even that is debatable.

I'm mostly in agreement with people on most points. IMHO, comms should be about signal vs noise rather than transfer speed, and while I could write a whole thing on how we could go from analog to digital and the % of science we could get from that, I think I'll save the energy and just wait and see what 1.0 holds.

IIRC, resources won't deplete, it's just the "concentration" of resources in that spot, which I presume means the amount of time to generate protofuel (it's what I'm calling it until the dev's reveal what the resource is actually named).

I like the drill. My only complaint is that it's a telescoping thing rather than a pipe-fed set-up so placement is an issue. As for the resource map, I would prefer some sort of variable transparency that we can set rather than a bright scanline. Nitpicking aside, I like the direction this is going in.

With resources being implemented, we could expand science and sample collection to include geology experiments that reveal resources besides the usual radar-dish-on-a-satellite routine. Also I wouldn't mind an early mission to a specific biome on Kerbin to collect Goo to unlock our Mystery Goo containers.

They should have added more polys to the mesh for printing so that round things actually look round. Seeing unnecessary 24 sided "circles" makes me cringe.

I hope this also means more (and slightly bigger) landing gear for rockets as well. With ISRU on its way, players will want to drop 3.75m tanks everywhere.

Nice job! The intake is behind the seat. Also, training wheels!

Rapiers are actually better rockets than aerospikes as they have a slightly higher specific power (258 vs 223), and coupled with their dual mode cycle, you'll find that Rapiers are the most efficient engine for getting things to orbit. That being said, the KR-2L's specific power (717!!!!) makes it the best engine in the game for getting anything into orbit, followed by the KS-25x4, the KR-1x2 and the 48-7S with their 500+ specific power.

Hey Broco! This baby brings back the memories, no? With all the new wing bits I bet you could redesign this puppy using a few less parts.

Shouldn't that be "Perhaps I happen to enjoy being vague... or not" ?

Interesting cognitive rationalizations in the OP and its respondents about an issue which I have spent the last two weeks figuring out (I'll eventually be blogging about when 1.0 comes out, but let's be honest, nobody really cares). Also I probably shouldn't have drunk a bottle of wine before replying, so this will likely end up being a big wall of text. IMHO, the problem isn't what is and what isn't LF and O, or even that KSP engines follow stoichiometricly perfect operation throughout their performance envelope with thermal efficiencies bordering on 99%. The problem is that the engines blatantly flaunt the laws of thermodynamics in some really weird ways. See, cognitively we understand that KSP engines don't equate to any real world analogues. We, as human beings, have a certain pattern recognition that kicks in when we start to educate ourselves on a subject that immediately senses incongruities... colloquially we call that our "BS detector." What the OP and many of us have/are starting to notice is that the engines obviously fail to follow the various laws of thermodynamics, and each of us has a differing viewpoint as to where and what that failing is. The OP has what he/she thinks is an obvious answer (make the stock engines hypergolic engines) and others have their opinions (differing for various reasons), all of which are actually, IMHO, symptomatic of a system that is based on bias rather than science. If we were to run the engines through the actual thermodynamic formulae used to design rocket engines, we would be shocked and flabbergasted at exactly how bent the engines are (I have actually done this, and yeah, they are very, very broken). This has nothing to do with the choice of fuels or needing real world analogues from which to draw our conclusions. Rather it reveals how flawed a system based on biases actually is, and how desperately we need objective, unbiased mathematically derived engines in this game. See, the fact that oxidizer and fuel are volumetrically the same and share the exact same density actually isn't that relevant. Nor is the Isp values, which are arbitrary anyways. What is relevant is that the engines do not follow any form of logic or mathematical formulae in their execution. Engines in KSP have no Pe value, or even a specific power rating that follows a logical pattern, which are the core of any real engine comparison for anyone who knows anything about rocket engines. Instead we are dealt with arbitrary various ratings that are derived from "QA feedback". Think about that for a moment. The engines we will end up with in stock will be engines that a handful of people say "feels" like they're balanced... a result based on perception-based consensus rather than consistent numbers based on actual formulae. If their performance were derived from the actual thermodynamic formulae that we build real engines from (which is readily available), we would have a set of engines that even the most irrational of players would be hard pressed to find one to claim is OP. The engines would, by the inherent nature of thermodynamic principles, be balanced. In fact, they would be so balanced that we could apply subtle biases towards increased tech levels and even radial size that would feel like a logical progression in engine tech without making things remotely unbalanced, which I think is something that many of us would like to see. So rather than argue about whether or not we need more than one type of fuel or oxidizer and the various merits/complications therein, IMHO, we should be asking for thermodynamically consistent engines and mechanics, and go from there.

I made this 1/4ish scale replica of the Space Station V when I first saw gizmos, but I didn't want to release it until I had the other 2001 themed craft files done. Believe it or not it the craft that gave me the most trouble was that damned Orion III spaceplane and its @&$%ing booster, which I ultimately abandoned for 6 SRBs. The Discovery, which I rebuilt maybe 3 times, was nowhere near as frustrating. I'll be posting the craft file (assuming anyone is interested) once my new computer comes in and I have everything working, as this old beast is on her last legs (10 years old this year!). Fun facts: It was put into orbit in 1 launch (1857 parts and starting mass of 13,374.1t) atop 16 launch vehicles It has a maximum capacity of 2306 kerbals (don't try to fill it up... seriously it takes forever to load at start) Despite its 1062.6t mass and a completely unnecessary amount of detail (okay, I admit it, it's pretty much just a vanity project), it only has 589 parts, most of which are crew containers, struts and batteries. It was originally a two part ship, with the rear ring built with just the framework like the movie, but attached to a docking port so I could swap it out with a completed ring if I wanted to. It was abandoned when the part count for the incomplete ring went past 800.

These statements are certainly true for launch vehicles pre-SpaceX, but the era of the bespoke rocket as the norm is slowly coming to a close. From http://www.spacex.com/news/2013/09/24/production-spacex "...production of the Dragon spacecraft has increased significantly... No other American company is mass producing spacecraft at the same rate... Each Falcon 9 is identical, regardless of the type of mission it will fly..." The trend is that the cost per ship (dry) is going down thanks to a combination of economy of scale and improved component recovery methods, which in turn translates into reduced launch costs. That said, I think the Skylon koolaid is tastier, but that's just me.