Ty Tan Tu

Valley Forge after the 1972 movie Silent Running.

The best place to follow what is happening is at The Daily Kerbal It looks like they have three different projects going on. The QA team is working to squash bugs in 1.3.1, and work on consoles. The programmers are working on the Mission Creator for Making History. The artists are working on modeling the Voskhod 1 IVA. In the meantime, here is a cool diagram of the Voskhod... Today is also the 53 anniversary of the Ranger 7's famous picture of the Moon! Did I mention I am kind of in to space flight history?

After my hard dive failure I lost a captured asteroid, so I thought I would catch a new one. Bucking best practices, I decided to intercept it in Kebol orbit well before it encountered Kerbin. It really does not use that much more Delta-V. The intercept went flawlessly, but for some reason I could not pivot the Advance Grabber to center of mass. While admittedly the consumption of certain zymologic beverages may have compromised my judgement, in a moment of frustration, I used the F12 cheat option to just put the asteroid in orbit around Kerbin. And then my ship, with it's nuclear powered engine, just disappeared... Maybe it was 'assimilated' in some Borgian like way, but it is gone? I can not find it anywhere even thought the 'ship' is still named 'Asteroid Hunter I". It is not a big deal. It had severed it purpose and I was just going to de-orbit it anyway. Anyway, the next mission is to dock a miner with my small Class E asteroid now in orbit around Kerbin

Is there a heads-up display that replaces the nav ball? In certain situations I find myself concentrating on the nav-ball and not even looking at the rest of the screen, i.e docking. I am not sure it is even possible, but it would be cool if you had a heads-up display in the center of the screen that allows you to see everything on the screen overlaid with a transparent display of all the information of the nav-ball.

I think it all can be explained with the help of H. P. Lovecraft. When Kerbin was still new, the Elder Things colonizing the planet about one billion years ago. The Elder Things were somewhere half way between animal and plants and capable of hibernating for millions of years. The Elder Things created most life forms on Kerbin simply to assist them in their colonization of the planet, which will ultimately lead to a human like race on Kerbin. But I get ahead of myself. After millions of years ruling Kerbin uncontested, other species arrived, most notable Cthulhu (represented by the Kraken in KSP) and the Deep Ones who are sort of frog like beings that live mostly beneath the sea but are amphibious.. Great wars were fought. Over the countless millenniums the alien civilizations declined. The last Elder Ones city was far to the south where the happy face can still be seen. Long ago having forgotten their animosity, the Deep Ones interbreed with the Elder Things given the Deep Ones plant like features and the ability to hibernate for long long periods of time. While all this is going on, one of the life forms the Elder Ones created evolved into human like creatures. The hybrid Elder Things/Deep Ones interbreed with the humanoids ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931)). Another dark age ensues in which all knowledge of their alien origins is lost. The current Kerbils have the plant like part of the Elder Ones, The frog like look of the Deep Ones, and the insipid stupidity of the humanoids.

In the real solar system it is Uranus, just because of its unfortunate name. We really need to rename that planet. Here is my suggestion. Since Uranus is the planet furthest from the Sun that is visible from the Earth with the naked eye, we should start the new name with the prefix 'a' with the meaning 'not' (as in 'apolitical') and logically follow the prefix with a reference to the sun. So, putting it together, I think we should rename the planet Asol.

I am running KSP on a AMD A8-8600P Radeon R6 at 1.60 GHz with turbo up to 3.0GHz with 8 gigs of RAM. I can get the fans spinning, but I don't drop frames all that often. The game is playable. I am thinking a cheap desktop that could work with KSP is the Lenovo Desktop PC 510A-15IKL 90GV0002US Pentium G4560. You can get it for about $300. The reason I mention this instead of a personal build, is you get Windows 10 included (Windows 10 personal costs $119.99).. It has the Intel HD Graphics 610, which is not great, but is better than what I have now. On the plus side, the 7th generation Intel Pentium G4560 is a decent two core CPU for gaming, and is cheaper than a comparable i3-7100. Since KSP is CPU intensive and mainly using just one core, the 3.5 GHz would work pretty darn well I think - at least for a $300 computer. But it is not very up gradable, limited by the 180 watt power supply. It has an open half-length, full-height, PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, but you would have to replace the power supply to use any more useful graphics card. And then of course you might run into heat issues... But for $300, I am sure it would serve for people on a tight budget, and it is the only pre-built Intel G4560 box I can find.

Well, in the settings there is 'Max Physics Delta-Time per Frame'. It basically slows down the game clock, so if you have it all the way to the right, 1 second in game time can take as much as 15 seconds in real time. But people with high count vessels do sometime use it to make the game smoother.

My solution was a bit involved. Mining takes some time, so I started with that. 1. Launch a M700 Survey Scanner in Polar orbit around Minimus to find where the ore is. 2. Land a simple rover with a Surface Scanning Module to find the best spot on the surface for your base. 3. Land the miner. (Actually I ended up landing three. My first one kept overheating. So make sure you use plenty of radiators. The third one was for the mono fuel used by my shuttle) 4. Land my tanker rover to transfer fuel from the miner to the shuttle. That was the hardest mission. Tanker rovers are big and not very aerodynamic. 5. Land the shuttle that takes the fuel from Minmus' surface up to the space station. (I screwed up there too. I thought I could have a multi-functional shuttle that could transfer both Kerbals and fuel, but it was too heavy to transfer fuel efficiently, so I went with an unmanned shuttle.) 6. And finally put my space station in orbit around Minimus.

For people who do not want to go the whole MechJeb route there is the Docking Port Alignment Indicator which does make things a bit easier and is updated for 1.3

It seems to me that after your first mission to land on Mun, the next logical step would be to launch a second mission to Mun with a Mk1-2 Command Pod to rescue the Kerbal you stranded there after the crash landing during that first attempt to land on the Mun.

The main author of the book is Paul Fenwick, author of CKAN

I am not familiar with the book, but it gets a very positive review from Scott Manley which does go a long way with me. Teh authors are impressive. I myself am a intrigued. Here is the authors' presentation.

The only reason I ever use RCS thrusters is to dock. I suppose it is because it is what I am use to using. But as others have pointed out, RCS is more realistic - as are autopilots. The idea that you can instantaneously ignite liquid fuel rockets over and over seems a bit of a stretch. I am not a rocket scientist, but it seems to me once you ignite the combustion chamber, you are going to have to keep supplying it fuel to keep it burning, And if it is burning, I assume, it will produce at least a bit of thrust. If you turn it off, it is not going to re-ignite in a fraction of a second and give you a micro burst of thrust. That is what I need for docking and RCS can realistically do that.

The original story can be found here "The "plan", for a narrative loosely connecting easter eggs." It was a bit like J.R. R.Tolkien's The Silmarillion, the idea to create a "Sketch of the Mythology" for KSP. Having built stories for the city building series of Caesar (and its many iterations), small building blocks can be used to used to tell a compelling storie. The tech tree can take the place of chapters. At the beginning of the game a hint is given to the first easter egg, or even maybe the limited tech at the beginning naturally leads you to the first easter egg. The first easter egg gives a cryptic hint to the finally story's epiphany, along with hints to maybe two more easter eggs. Along with the hints, you gain a bit of tech on the tree. The discovery gives the player two or more paths to pursue, and each path gives more branches. Depending on which path you take, you gain specific tech resources and cryptic hints. Ultimately you need all the hints to find the ultimate epiphany, but the path you take you to find it will be unique to each player. True to the original mythology, you could put a huge space station so far out in the Kerbol system that it can only be reached if you know where to find it from the hints and have the technology gain to get there... Of course other stories could be told. Stories that send you to the far reaches of Eeloo only to find the answer back on Kerbin..

I just watched three different video tutorials on how to capture an asteroid. One by HOCgaming, another by Orb8Ter and of course the one by Scott Manley. Which leads me to my question. When making a KSP video tutorial, is it an absolute requirement that you speak with a British accent?

I wonder if it has to do with the language pact. Is it possible that the definite article is required in some languages and just to make it consistent, they added it to the English langue version too?

Of course KSP is bound to Unity, but NASA actually does write fight simulators utilizing CUDA. It would be cool if a future version of KSP used the GPU abilities to run parts of the general program. Of course GPU's work best on massively parallel problems, but I am thinking a GPU could make terrains more detailed at a further distance.

I don't know about KSP, but in some forums you can't really delete an account. You have over 300 + ratings maceemiller. The thinking is, deleting an account would also delete content that obviously has value to users of the forum.For instance, your answer to 'Location' is reason enough alone to not delete your account in my estimate. I would suggest just walking away for now and let the account basically go dormant.

Sadly I am so old I don't have to look it up. C ADVENTURES IMPLICIT INTEGER(A-Z) REAL RAN COMMON RTEXT,LLINE DIMENSION IOBJ(300),ICHAIN(100),IPLACE(100) 1 ,IFIXED(100),COND(300),PROP(100),ABB(300),LLINE(1000,22) 2 ,LTEXT(300),STEXT(300),KEY(300),DEFAULT(300),TRAVEL(1000) 3 ,TK(25),KTAB(1000),ATAB(1000),BTEXT(200),DSEEN(10) 4 ,DLOC(10),ODLOC(10),DTRAV(20),RTEXT(100),JSPKT(100) 5 ,IPLT(100),IFIXT(100) C READ THE PARAMETERS IF(SETUP.NE.0) GOTO 1 SETUP=1 KEYS=1 LAMP=2 GRATE=3 ROD=5 BIRD=7 NUGGET=10 SNAKE=11 FOOD=19 WATER=20 AXE=21 DATA(JSPKT(I),I=1,16)/24,29,0,31,0,31,38,38,42,42,43,46,77,71 1 ,73,75/ DATA(IPLT(I),I=1,20)/3,3,8,10,11,14,13,9,15,18,19,17,27,28,29 1 ,30,0,0,3,3/ DATA(IFIXT(I),I=1,20)/0,0,1,0,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0/ DATA(DTRAV(I),I=1,15)/36,28,19,30,62,60,41,27,17,15,19,28,36 1 ,300,300/ DO 1001 I=1,300 STEXT(I)=0 IF(I.LE.200) BTEXT(I)=0 IF(I.LE.100)RTEXT(I)=0 1001 LTEXT(I)=0 I=1 CALL IFILE(1,'TEXT') 1002 READ(1,1003) IKIND 1003 FORMAT(G) GOTO(1100,1004,1004,1013,1020,1004,1004)(IKIND+1) 1004 READ(1,1005)JKIND,(LLINE(I,J),J=3,22) 1005 FORMAT(1G,20A5) IF(JKIND.EQ.-1) GOTO 1002 DO 1006 K=1,20 KK=K IF(LLINE(I,21-K).NE.' ') GOTO 1007 1006 CONTINUE STOP 1007 LLINE(I,2)=20-KK+1 LLINE(I,1)=0 IF(IKIND.EQ.6)GOTO 1023 IF(IKIND.EQ.5)GOTO 1011 IF(IKIND.EQ.1) GOTO 1008 IF(STEXT(JKIND).NE.0) GOTO 1009 STEXT(JKIND)=I GOTO 1010

I play sandbox, but I would probably name it something like "Jeb's Toeing & Refrigerator Parts".

I think Ultimate Steve solution is pretty good. It explains why there are no house and cities on Kerbin. I have always imagined it was a bit more like K'n-yan in H. P. Lovecraft's "The Mound", From Wikipedia: Although, I rather like Snark's suggestion.

MechJeb recently landed a 15 meter tall resource extractor successfully 14 meters underground. The only thing above ground was the advanced nose cone - but the ship was completely intact - just 14 meters underground. Even the landing gear and RCS engines were still intact. I had left KSP in orbit view, thinking it might land closer to my target if I just left MechJeb alone after enabling it. I keep thinking it is a 'feature' and I just have to use my imagination to figure out why that would be useful. Maybe if it was a habitat module, you could put a MK1 command pod on top for a ground level entrance to your underground silo Mobile Processing Lab?

Well, I would probably upgrade to a keyboard that had more than one key. Since this happens with most updates to KSP, I have it down. I would, of course, just try to re-start the program first. Then after that inevitably fails, I clean out everything in the gamedata folder. Next I add the mods back in one at a time and until it crashes again. And now I think we all know what to do - you go to Add-On Discussion and curse at the unpaid modder for not having already fixed his free mod two hours after the KSP update which they had nothing to do with. But seriously, I lost my hard drive Friday night and I did upgrade to a SSD hard drive. It does help load the game faster. So to recap. When KSP crashes the steps to follow are as follows: . .. . ... . . ... >>>>>>!!!1!!

Crafts can get into orbit? I thought this was firework simulation software. So, are you saying you could put five fireworks in orbit at different orbital planes and synchronize their deorbit to form a perfect star of streaking fire from the sky that explode simultaneously over the Kerbal Space Center just as you use a plethora solid fuel boosters to blow up multiple Kerbodyne S3-14400 Tanks? That would be spectacular. And I do feel somewhat inadequate.