something

I couldn't resist, doing this: 'Ok lads, I gonna make this one quick and painless - we do have a huge PR problem. The public does have the distinct feeling that nothing changed in the past years. Society is bored of just being told of the 42nd landing on Laythe or Eve. We need something new. We need the WOW-effect.' the CEO started the meeting. The employees were overwhelmed and for a short time which felt like half an eternity nothing was heard at all. In fact, you could have heard the vacuum fluctuations if that was possible. Finally an employee, apparently a scientist, raised his voice 'We could discover new planets and moons every now and then.' The crowd agreed quickly, although tempting, this proposal would lead to a landing on a planet which is just like Duna. The wow-effect was completely missing. And anyways, there is only one solar system out there. A software engineer proposed, now they had invented communication and the not bouncing wheel, it might be of particular interest to investigate the speed of transmissions as a first proof-of-principle experiment in order to determine the speed of light, should it have any. While this idea certainly was brilliant, it lacked the wow-effect. A physicist then proposed to build huge scale interferometers in space in order to research space-time disturbances. This and many other ideas were proposed but then a trainee, who had studied economics analysed the situation 'Guys, according to a survey, most of our viewers on TV tune to other channels, as nobody knows when the actual action - the launch - starts. We can adress that problem by telling them how much time is left until the next launch.' 'Well and in the mean time we do show footage of explosions and add exciting contests. We make the launch an event that is entertaining' a woman from the Marketing Department proposed. A sociologist asked which language was to favor for those contests, still a bit sceptical. The CEO raused his voice. 'All of them. Just translate it to all the languages' This was a truly amazing idea, everybody agreed. From now on the company would directly contribute to the understanding of peoples and maybe even win one of those famous Peace Prizes. The thundering applause in the meeting room did not go unnoticed - several kiloparsecs away, a pair of three satellites, orbiting a main sequence star in a distance of 152 million kilometers, noticed a tiny disturbance of its laser links...

So you want me to write a piece of satire in just 300 words? Oh man. I don't know what to say about this. I mean 300 words are barely enough for a scientific article and such a piece of literature doesn't even need to worry about playing with words. How to sum up the contest rules? Maybe this way? Difficile est, satiram non scribere....

Conducted first simulations of the new interplanetary transfer vehicle...apparently four big reaction wheels are enough to keep the vessel dead straight under acceleration... The final product will come with an included garage and a rover for free. Nonetheless, there will be a variety of options: The environmentally aware customer may purchase the "eco-blue" package which replaces the engines with Poodles and an additional three Ion engines, additionally the dangerous RTGs will be removed and replaced by solar panels... For the dynamically flying customers a bigger engine might be an option. Why dealing with 4m/s**2 if you could have a triple S3 KS 25x4 drive? Afraid of electro-smog? We'll remove the antennae for no extra charge...

when your 1st stages impact on Kerbin causes a tsunami that wipes out the KSC. when you measure thrust in multiples of Krakatoa

I've never been to the badlands. I mean it's just so far away from the KSC, that I never really bothered to go there...

Kerbulans use Hyperedit, Kerbals use the persistence file. Interesting duel. However, I tend to slaughter the Kraken by editing, instead of growing it, like Bill and Bill do. But yeah. Everyone as he prefers...

Wow, that helps a /lot/. Thx for that piece of information. The Moho slideshow now became an action movie and Duna is doing pretty well as well... Although, I have to say, the Legacy shader has a less realistic terrain shading. I guess I gonna switch it on and off as needed. Will the calculation of the terrain shader improve with a graphics card? 'cause I guess the bottleneck I am experiencing is caused by my integrated GPU then..

What kind of OS / processor / graphics combination do you use (and what's your FPS?) to get these images? They look pretty stunning and I guess that comes at a certain requirement, concerning your hardware...

Alternatively mount a crew cabin at the bottom and get your crew up and down by the transfer option. Saves quite a lot of parts which might be an issue in any big mission...

With a Jool window coming up and essentially having the technology to send Kerbals out there, I started building a ship which gets them there. Doing so, there are a few points to keep in mind: The rule of cool dictates, you can't build any given ship but need to assemble it in a way that allows for maximum awesomeness. After all, I guess, I will have to live with it for a while - my last Duna trip took me about 10 Months real life and Jool seems to be a bit further out....

Using kubuntu as well. Using integrated CPU graphics, I realised that framerate is a function of planetary surface. Moho sucks computational power like nothing. The result is a slideshow, which is (almost) unplayable. Same thing goes for Duna. Eve, Kerbin, Minmus, Mun and Laythe run relatively good with yellow counters. While framerate increased in 1.1 most of the gains were compensated in 1.2, especially on Moho and Duna.

I don't know if that'd be possible easily. After all I had to come up with a political map, an economical map with resources and then derive an infrastructure out of that. To see where certain resources are locate, I needed to derive the history of the planet Kerbin back several Megayears including continental drift etc.

Kerbals aren't native to Kerbin. There is no evidence on Kerbin supporting the evolution of a society that developed space worthy equipment. There are no harbours, cities or other centers of civilisation. In fact there are 4 structures on Kerbin: The KSC, Baikonur, the old airfield and the Pyramids. Several of the DSN stations are built in locations that obviously are not accessible by road but need airlift. The most prominent hint supporting this theory is the saucer in the northern hemisphere. Furthermore the superior Kerbal construction methods are worth a note - they don't even need factories or construction sites. All they ever do, is miraculously generating components in the VAB.

Population centers are the cause for roads. First people settle and then they build up an economy. By doing so, a lot of separate markets appear. Naturally then people appear trying to make their fortune transferring goods between those markets, essentially connecting the markets. In that process ports, roads and finally airports and freeways appear. Connecting two population centres which are situated at a river or road seems to be a bad idea in the first step. The waterways are way cheaper to operate. At a time when waterways can no longer serve the demands, railroads and roads appear. Naturally, always trying to build the best connection mountains are avoided (if feasible) and as few bridges as possible are build. Take Alaska as an example. The big markets are connected by road (Fairbanks, Anchorage, Valdez), while the small indigenous population centres don't even have a road connection. There just isn't enough demand to satisfy the investment of building and maintaining roads. The only reason the Dalton Highway exists is a market at the northern shore demanding maintenance of oil fields... Another example is France. The big markets are connected with a special focus on Paris, since a certain investor called 'the king' used to live there. Such a centralised system can be seen in Spain, Russia and the UK as well. On the other hand, a decentralised political system as Germany has kind of a fuzzy road network. With the invention of the railroad and cars first long distance networks were build and they connect the big markets... On the other hand a country like Norway features almost all population centres at the coastline, which is why - even today - a remarkable part of goods is shipped - by ship. Having said that, I think you should place cities first and then connect them with special regard to their geographical and political background.

Ok, so @Kuzzter accidentally destroyed the Enterprise and now he's trying to glue the parts together again. That is, right after he caught them from the debris field which is now canonically known as Kessler I . I understand this takes time....

Counting Geigers... While Geiger was a name of a person and subsequently, the Geiger Counter was named with that person in mind, the German word for violin is "Geige" and a person playing a violin could be called "Geiger". Now whatever you do with the Geiger Counter, it is counting violinists, obviously...

Currency and its value are religious affairs. Basically, any given unit of currency is worth, what its users believe it to be worth. If people started to think, the USD and EUR were overrated and act accordingly, then these currencies values decreases. On the other hand, if your local bakery would believe a sheet of used toilet paper to have the same value as one USD, your dad would pretty fast get very angry if you flushed them down the toilet.... It's just the way that people think of a sheet of paper...

There are quite a few opinions on Dres. Some people pretends it exists, some pretend it does not exist. I want to know your opinion on Dres and whether you are open for scientific evidence that might change your opinion. Please do not use this topic as a platform for your religious crusade in this question. Scientific arguments are ok, but we should keep it there.

It is still a bit under discussion, if there is an exchange particle of the gravitational force. This hypothetical particle is called Graviton. As it has been proven by Alcubierre et al. in their 1994 publication, it is - in theory - possible to build a warp drive and bend space time, given that exotic matter is at hand. The amount of mass needed to build such a device was consequently reduced due to more efficient designs of the warp drive (yes, we already did improve the warp-drive, although, nobody has an idea how to build one). The mass - or exotic mass - needed to propel the ship at warp speed - erm technically that is "propelling the space around the ship" - would allow to generate a contraction and expanse of space time itself. Hence, if used correctly, it would be possible to cloak the gravity field of a vessel by counteracting its own "Gravitons" (if they exist). Naturally such a annihilation must leave some sort of detectable output, which very well could be anti-gravitons or whatever it would be. Hence, the idea of looking for anti-gravitons or, as they are called in Kerban/Kerbulan "positive gravioli particles", is not that dumb after all. However, according to the laws of thermodynamics, the cloaked wessel must leave some sort of detectable output in some form. Knowing the Kerbulans do no possess the technology of RTGs, it might be the logical solution to look for their exhaust tip? So, probably, Leonard Nimoy should invent a far-infrared camera?

Back in a version upgrade (from 1.1.0 to 1.1.3, I think), I lost my base on Duna. Luckily, it was unmanned by the time, as the crew was on its way back home by then. However, the insurance company "Space Quarters Universal Association" (SQUAD) tried to invoke force majeure. Mort wasn't particularly pleased and the thing went to court. Squad lost the thing as the event was not unpredictable and could have been prevented by Squad, so the judge argued. With the money at hand the base was upgraded a tiny little bit and placed where the old base used to be, by the magic of savefile editiing... On the scientific side of the game, I tried to get a Duna space plane to LKO. Turns out I had to strap some fuel tanks to its wings in order to get off the KSC....

As far as I got it, the original usage of PCGMR was kind of a joke, mocking people to invest tons of money in order to be part of some elite which offered doubtable advantages at best. It was then recoined to its current meaning in a subreddit which apparently started as a joke as well. Finally, when kids came around who knew nothing of the philosophy of 1930s Germany (seriously, why do you let such persons browse the web? ? ) the term got its current meaning.. Apparently there's some thought police here, censoring the abbreviation of the word NAtionalsoZIalist to pedant... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Master_Race

0. No reason to keep Kerbals there permanently if you have a base on Minmus...

Obviously, being in a retrograde orbit gives you a higher frequency of passimg over a certain point on the planet. Hence the Kerbulans would have selected such an orbit unless they went for a polar orbit in order to cover the entire planet. No idea why Leonard Nimoy is searching for them in a prograde orbit...

That won't solve the mesh clipping issue. The smaller your parts, the less likely they are to end up inside of each other...

Also consider this: A rocket built in KSP powered by a RAPIER reaches speeds that exceed 1300m/s in the atmosphere. Intercepting that rocked with the RSD that tops at 300-400m/s gives you a huge problem. If I am not mistaken, KSP calculates physics in 20ms steps, that is 50 physics fps. Within 20ms at a relative speed of 900m/s the rockets approach at 18m per physics frame. As the displayed rockets are certainly shorter than 18m, but have a length of about 5m approximately, we do have a 5/18 =28% chance of a hit, otherwise the rockets will just clip through each other as the game never detects a collision. (A certain S. Manley once tried to crash two space craft in orbit head-on. It required quite some tweaks to not clip through the other vessel), @kuzzter will have to slow down the Kerbulan rocket quite a bit to get a mesh collision. ..Good Luck.