IncongruousGoat

What happened to this thread? Well, I'm having bad weather again, so it's time to bring it back. So, who else here is in the path of the big-S snowstorm currently chewing its way across the northeastern and midwestern U.S.? We're looking at 1 and a half feet of accumulation before it's done, and then a wind-chill temperature in the vicinity of -20 F on Monday. Shoveling the driveway is not going to be fun...

@zanie420 I'm going to second this. Nano-Diamond is relentlessly, brutally hard. It's been open for 3 years. In those three years, exactly two people have finished it. It took over 2 years for the first submission to show up, and the submissions themselves are literal months in the making. It's certainly possible (I can attest to this first-hand), but it isn't anything resembling easy. Try some of the lower difficulty tiers first. They're hard enough if you're going into the challenge cold.

Start with the default Hard settings. Then, under basic difficulty settings, turn every adjustable slider all the way to the left or all the way to the right, whichever is worse. So that's 120% re-entry heating, 10% resource abundance, 0 starting funds, 0 starting science, -1,000 starting rep, 10% science, funds, and rep rewards, 1000% funds and rep penalties, and a decline penalty of 10. EDIT: Also, best of luck. It's a wicked hard challenge.

This, to an almost scary degree. I've had it on repeat for far too long.

Not to mention, a lot of the screenshots contain old part textures that have since been replaced, notably: the Mk 1-2 command pod, the Terrier, the fuel tank textures, and the really old jet engines/intakes. Plus, the screenshots that use graphics mods (EVE, Scatterer, even Real Plume in one case) will give prospective players a false idea of the game's graphical capabilities (or lack thereof). Then again, I'm not sure how many people actually look at these screenshots, so it's probably not going to be super high on Squad's priority list.

Yep, the drinking age here in the U.S. is 21. Which, considering our history and usual policy towards mind-altering substances, is rather sedate. The importation, production and consumption of alcohol was banned by constitutional amendment for 14 years (1919 to 1933).

"No, no, it's supposed to do that" Or "It's not a bug, it's a feature"

*puts on programmer hat* Not really, no. The problem with KSP is that it has to compute accurate physics at enormous distances, beyond the capabilities of even double-precision floating-point arithmetic. This isn't something any engine is really designed to do, because very, very few games have a game world as big as KSP's and so don't ever run into floating-point precision issues. A custom engine using quadruple-precision floating point wouldn't help either, since the x86 instruction set doesn't natively support quadruple-precision floating point, or any 128-bit arithmetic for that matter. It's possible to get around this using an emulation library, but these are slow. That said, a good few of the notable bugs that have cropped up over the years (looking at you, wheels) have been due to problems with Unity itself, independent of the stuff that makes KSP not good for any engine. So a new engine would definitely help with at least some bugs, although it would almost certainly come with bugs of its own. It's hard to abuse an engine as hard as KSP has to and not have strange things happen.

Yes, although I would like to point out that this is only the case because there were a lot of problems with turbopumps in the early days. If you look at the early flight tests of the Jupiter IRBM, for example, about half of them failed, and almost every failure was due to the turbopump going kablooey. Turbopumps are a mostly solved problem nowadays.

Slight correction: The U.S. government is partially shut down. Defense, Labor, Education, Energy, Veteran's Affairs, the District of Columbia, and bits of other agencies are currently funded, with the rest being shut down. It would be really bad for the Army to be without funding. But, yes, NASA is shut down because of politics.

I heard this over break, and it's been jumping in and out of my head ever since:

Here's one that ended well, but was nerve-wracking at the time: I was flying a no-ISRU single-launch grand tour. I thought I had tested everything down to a tee - I tested the solar-powered ion lander on Moho as a TWR check, and on the Mun as a battery capacity check. I figured everything further out was smaller than the Mun, and that solar recharge in-flight at Kerbin was negligible, so if it worked there it would work anywhere, right? Yeah... about that. I was out at Eeloo, the last body I had to land on before heading home. I re-fueled the ion lander using xenon from the mothership, and then made for the surface of Eeloo. And promptly ran out of EC and crashed. So, I reloaded my quicksave in orbit, made a more careful run at it... and ran out of EC, and crashed. Not only is Eeloo slightly bigger than the Mun, but (as it turns out) the EC you get from solar power out at Kerbin isn't quite negligible. Both of which I had failed to take account of in my testing. Thankfully, the Kraken deemed it good to smile on my endeavors that day. On the third attempt, using every piloting trick I knew to keep delta-V losses low, I managed to make it down to the surface with my batteries completely drained: Not quite as good as most of the rest of this thread, I know, but I felt pretty stupid at the time.

Actually, it depends on your OS. On Windows, it's LeftAlt-click. On Linux, it defaults to Meta-click iirc (which isn't even a key on most keyboards), and I have no idea what it is on MacOS.

Yeah, it does.

I see the bit rot is setting in. I think you need to get your computer fumigated - once the little byters get in there's no other way to remove 'em.

And in many implementations of Python, although it isn't explicitly so in the language spec.

That's... odd. I just compiled (with gcc) and ran this tiny C program on my machine: #include <stdio.h> int main() { float f = 0; long a = *(long *) &f; printf("%ld\n", a); return 0; } And got '0' as output. Which is what it should be - Wikipedia is right on this one. Floating point is one of those things that is, miraculously, quite well standardized.

Or Lua, which indexes from 1 because of reasons. (Well, okay, actually it's because in Lua, all arrays (and all composite data types) are hash maps, which means the starting index is arbitrary since it's just the key component of a key-value pair located somewhere in the hash table. They chose 1, I think, to make it friendlier to non-programmers)

Nope. In C (and C++), it's because list indexing is just syntactic sugar for pointer arithmetic/dereference (for array a, a[3] is semantically equivalent to *(a + 3)), which in turn is because arrays devolve to pointers when passed to or returned from functions and can in many ways be thought of as a special case of pointers. In other languages, it's because indexing from 0 makes a lot of code a lot neater, most notably element lookup in multidimensional arrays (which are usually flattened to 1d arrays at compile time).

I'm perfectly fine with it, because it contributes no new information whatsoever. We all know that it's possible to compute delta-V and TWR in the VAB, and it's possible to do the same in flight using the wet mass provided by the map view. It's a nice utility, nothing more - and I still find myself going to pencil, paper, and calculator when doing this challenge.

@NorthernDevo The Caveman Challenge thread is here: The maintainer is (AFAICT) currently away for the holidays, but the challenge is still active. The best part is my mission isn't even the most impressive thing that someone's done. That would be the guy who took Bob on a continuous EVA from the surface of Kerbin all the way to Bop and then back (you can only go on EVA on the surface of Kerbin, but there's nothing preventing you from taking an already EVA'd Kerbal wherever you want).

It had darn well better be a thing, since I've been working on a 1.6 submission of my own. But yes, it's still a thing. The challenge maintainer is still around, people are still doing it, 1.6 didn't make the challenge substantively different (no new parts, new in-game information, or changes to the tech tree)...

This thing: It's just a single-use ship for a Duna-Ike mission. Except that it was built and flown using a fully T1 space center, in a career with 10% science, funds, and rep rewards, no quicksaves, no reverts, and 0 starting funds. It took 18 (successful) launches to assemble due to part and mass limits, and flying it was an exercise in precision eyeballing due to the lack of patched conics, but it worked. Somehow. Here's the career I built it for, for those who are curious

Don't teach the player. Instead, make the player interested in learning. To address the general point of this thread: No, stock KSP should not be made substantially more realistic. The game is already very realistic from the point of view of a new player. Us seasoned veterans might be able to list every minor point where the game diverges from reality, but a new player is unlikely to notice any of them other than maybe the size of the solar system. The game is hard to approach as it is. Do not make it harder.

Well, yes, but you need to mess around with start chambers and pilot flames and so fort, which makes starting the engine take a little bit. For RCS, it should just be possible to set them off with a spark in the combustion chamber.