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Sir_Robert

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Posts posted by Sir_Robert

  1. On 7-11-2016 at 8:43 PM, Kerbart said:

    Suppose it hit the surface of some asteroid or comet that was covered with nitrogen "snow," guaranteeing a soft impact. Whenever the asteroid got closer to the sun, outgassing would create a thin nitrogen atmosphere and then it would liquify/solidify as the asteroid would be further away from the sun; it would come down as snow, covering the spacecraft over the course of thousands of years. Since it's now covered it's fairly well protected against cosmic radiation.

    Then some event happens changing the orbit of our asteroid, placing it closer to the sun. All the snow melts away, and out comes our spacecraft, in fairly good condition, to be discovered. Or mayne it's unearthed by our future ancestors when they are mining the asteroid?

    I'm sure that from a scientific perspective there's holes the size of Swiss cheese in it, but for the average layman it'll come over as plausible, without using techno-magic.

    A problem is that this would rely on chance to reveal the time capsule. Wouldn't it be better to have a beacon saying 'time capsule here'?

  2. Instead of trying to get 1 probe to survive for so long, wouldn't Von Neumann self-replicating probes be more practical?

    A potential problem with black holes is "how do you retrieve such a time capsule?" You can't very well go down there and pick it up, that'd mean the mission would take a very long time thanks to the same mechanism that preserves the probe. And it's not like the aliens that find it in 4 billion years can access it's systems and tell it to move out of it's close orbit.

     

    On 6-11-2016 at 1:05 AM, radonek said:

    I am afraid this kind of simplistic redundancy is of much less help then it looks. If you have merely hundred copies of data, error can be introduced by flipping a bit or two in unit managing the redundancy. So, you need to have hundred of those too. But then you have deal with situation of redundant redundancy units not in agreement with each other.  So you add some meta-redundancy… you probably can see where this is going. You have system exceedingly resilient to errors, but made it also more then two orders of magnitude larger and much, much more complex, which opens up opportunities for exciting new failure modes. These may be so improbable as to be otherwise ignored, but in this case, we are talking about time frame that makes "negligible" sound almost same as "plausible" to me.

    There are technological limits too. It may well happen that after you devise some reasonably failproof technology, it just wont fit within existing hardware constraints (it's not like nanobots have lots of computing power). You invent some method to split the load and that added complexity returns you back to square one… I am not saying it can't be done, just that it is really difficult problem to tackle. 
     

    Incidentally, this is how cancer starts. Mutations in the genes that check for mutations.

  3. Just now, tjt said:

    Hmm..I agree it can be worked around. I think your use of the term "annoying" is telling though. Would adding weather substantively improve the game experience or would it just add an annoyance to be time-warped over?

    One of the Mariner missions was stuck in orbit for months due to a freak storm on the Martian surface. Even NASA sort of time-warped - they left the lander in orbit until the storms died down and then commenced with the mission.

    Weather would basically boil down to 2 options:
    1) Insignificant winds/rain that amounts to a pretty picture.
    2) Weather that might hinder launches and force you to wait for the skies to clear.

    Situation 1 is effectively just clouds. Looks great, nothing more. Everyone here is already in favour.
    Situation 2 wouldn't add any interesting flying through a storm. It'd just force people to wait before launching. Or whip a capsule around on re entry, which either randomly destroys it (no fun), or does nothing but add a pretty picture of your capsule being whipped by the storm.

    The Mariner mission getting stuck in orbit is interesting in real life. In a game about space mission, it just forces you to not play and wait. That's the reason people are against it.

  4. 23 minutes ago, Alexology said:

    Dang I just came back to KSP after a break only to find that there has been a bug fix and now several mods are not working again (or at least are not on CKAN, this is not a complaint). Can I use the Github version/space dock version in 1.2.1? 

    This version works fine for me. Most mods still work fine, they just need to be updated to say they work for the new update.

    Use on your own risk, obviously. But it's not a very big change.

  5. 12 minutes ago, MOARdV said:

    No, there is no way to set defaults.  A feature like that creates many questions: How do you set the default?  I can't ship a "default setting", since each person has a different style of play. How is the default applied (per ship? per IVA?)? How do you change it once it's set?  And those are the issues I can think of off the top of my head.  For me, at least, setting up the cockpit (turning on lights, setting screens) is part of the immersive experience - I've got a mental pre-flight checklist I go through making sure everything is configured for launch.  Although I use much more complex IVAs than the basic RPM examples, so it leads to a different style of play.

    Yea, I mostly play in ship view, and love RPM for the looks. Some defaults would be nice for that. But it would indeed make it more complex for the target audience.

  6. I have a question about inclination launches. The way GT deals with inclined launches is to massively overcompensate in order to quickly get the right inclination, and then steer back (I think that's what it does).
    The problem is that this causes massive aerodynamic stress and almost always flips my rockets that are perfectly stable at 0 degree inclined launches.

    Is there a way to tell GT to just point in the right direction and launch, skipping the overcompensation? If I do that manually, it launches just fine at roughly the right inclination.

  7. 30 minutes ago, Dfthu said:

    You would need a lot because when you transmit it takes a lot of power, also you would need a lot of RTG witch cost a lot.

    That just needs a large battery and slightly more production than consumption

  8. 1 hour ago, Robje said:

    However, Squad could share only definative information in a way such as official cooperation with the ''planned features'' Wiki page (i also realise this is not, and should not be, their priority).
     

    There is no definitive information.
    That's the whole thing everyone is trying to explain here.

    Any kind of roadmap beyond 'this is what we are working on right now' is a wishlist

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