Randox

It's a game I'll buy sooner or later. I'm just waiting for the CRPG mood to take me before I bother spending the money.

Foreward: I would be doing you a disservice if I didn't mention the unofficial patches. They're about as simple to use as you can get, and between them (one for each DLC) they fix hundreds, if not thousands of bugs. If nothing else, use those mods. I think you have to get them from the Nexus as well because they got too big. Steam workshop is the easiest, but can be problematic on a couple fronts. The first is that if the author updates the mod, that update will be pushed to you automatically and without notice, which can break mod compatibility. The other drawback is selection. Mods on the workshop can only be so big, which means many mods are either not available on the workshop at all, or only as stripped down versions. Once you are setup to use the nexus, it's really not any harder to use than the workshop, but you get a better selection of mods and no automatic updating. There is also a difficulty curve to the graphical mods. Your simplest mods are the ones like Clear Waters that are a single esm/esp file. Put it in the load order, activate it, and away you go. Mods like Climates of Tamriel have options and compatibility patches, and are a little more complicated because you are dealing with multiple mod files for a single mod. Still, manageable. ENB's are your top end graphical mods, and don't use esm/esp files at all. Instead, they exist in your main Skyrim directory. They require the ENB master file to be downloaded separately (very simple) unless they have distribution rights, and often have a list of other mods you need to be using for the ENB to look as advertised. Edits to the Skyrim ini files (located in documents/my games/skyrim if memory serves) are also common, or the ENB may not work at all. There are videos to help you deal with these guys. They can be worth it though, if your system can handle them. There are also texture mods which can be strait additions to the Skyrim directory, or file overwrites. Make backups as needed. Nexus Mod Manager will do this for you. I'd recommend Gopher's channel on youtube for videos covering a whole bunch of mods, including some great ones on graphical mods. He also covers mod installation, including for ENB's he has covered. Watch his installation stuff all the way through before you start, then follow along. ENB's require SKSE (Skyrim Script Extender, watch Gophers video on it). The program LOOT helps you load mods in the correct order. I find that NMM prevents it from ordering my mods, so I run the program and then do it manually. Probably just the way I have things setup though. Some of the mods I use (some of these are more immersive than graphical): Climates of Tamriel (weather, outdoor lighting) Consistent Older People (fixes some elderly people not having old people bodies) Enhanced Blood Textures (fairly self explanatory. Note special uninstall instructions) Enhanced Distant Terrain (better low res terrain textures) Lush Trees and Grass (fuller foliage) Prince and the Pauper (better clothing for children matching their station) Pure Waters (one of many mods that beautify water) Realistic Lighting Overhaul (I no longer use this. Deals with interior lighting) Enhanced Lighting FX (I use this instead of Realistic Lighting. Same type of mod, however ELFX removes most/all ambient light from interiors and dungeons) Supreme Storms (bigger and better storms) Waburgs 3D Paper Map (this map has no clouds, and shows all the paths. I use texture 2) Wearable Lanterns (my game is super dark. This allows me to wield a shield in dungeons instead of a torch) Wet and Cold (I think this is the one that makes you drip when wet) I also run Realvision ENB and SkyUI (better user interface), both of which require SKSE. I can't embed steam pictures, but my game looks like this at it's best: Forest Glade - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=386008302 Sun in Clouds at Dawn - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=242736269 Whiterun at Night (RLO) - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=242271941 Whiterun at Night (ELFX) - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=405267696 And no, I don't travel at night.

For the past year or so at least, I think the music production company Two Steps From Hell. I've always been a big fan of instrumental stuff, which is most of what they do (some stuff has vocals as an instrument, and a handful of songs have actual lyrics). It's music for stuff like movie or video game trailers. From an actual band, I might have to go with Streetlight Manifesto. I actually still need to get their latest album, but there is nothing in the first four that I don't like, and a few songs that I really like. Again, a lot of it is the instrumental stuff. I probably listened to each album two or three times before I paid any attention the lyrics. Honestly though, I pay very little attention to particular bands or artists. I like a song or I don't, and sometimes I'll look at a group to see if they have other songs, but collecting discographies or albums is the exception for me, not the rule. The criteria for me is usually that I like music that sounds fun to play. I was in bands all throughout school, and I have a special weakness for Saxaphones (my instrument). For example, my current favourite song would be "Everybody" by K-391 ( ). The Saxaphone and Trumpet combination is fantastic, and reminds me of the stuff I used to do when I had more access to other skilled players. It just makes me want to invite over a friend who plays trumpet and whip out my Sax and just jam.

I want to make a point about the usage of friendzone. Be wary of the term, because it implies that there is some way to guarantee success. Sometimes girls just aren't interested and it was never going to happen. Some of this stuff I have no answer for, because middle school was a while ago and I wouldn't know how that works now, but some tidbits anyway. 1. Don't play the long game. You don't have to be totally direct about what you want from the get go, but don't embark on some month(s) long journey of trying to ask someone out or hinting or whatever. This usually ends in one of two ways. The first is that the object of your attention never catches on, because hints are only obvious to the people making them. Alternately, you'll just weird people out until they feel like they have to confront you, or start avoiding you so they don't have to do that. 2. Her friends are useful resources. If you want to know if someone is interested in you, or you want to know if someone is trying to drop you hints and you don't feel you can ask that person directly, then talk to their friends. These are the people next most likely to know what's up. There is no universal girl code, so asking your guy friends, or people on the internet if they think some girl is interested in you, or what she means when she says ____ is literally about as productive as consulting a magic 8-ball, so don't do that. 3. Middle School is awkward. This is just a fact of life at the age middle school happens to encompass. Everyone is learning new social skills, exploring new types of relationships. Be at peace with this fact, and don't sweat it if you can't become mister confidence. Take a deep breath and do your best. This is how we learn if nothing else. This isn't going to apply perfectly, but my typically approach is this. When I find a girl I think I might like to have a relationship with, I find a reason to talk to her. This is a good time to express interest by the way. Ask direct questions about her that invite more than a yes/no answer. Hobbies/interests are a good place to start, and with any luck this will develop into further conversation. If she asks you questions, try to avoid simple yes/no answers or short answers that don't invite more conversation. After a bit of socializing, if I still think I want to pursue a relationship after getting to know her a little better, I invite her out to some future outing. For me, that usually means coffee which combines simplicity, further social interaction, and is a fairly well accepted code for first date where I live for people my age. This is the part I can't help you with. When I was in middle school, asking someone out to coffee was instead inviting them to go see a movie. Maybe it still is. If the 'date' goes well, then I make plans for us to do something else, ideally something a bit more romantic. A pretty easy one for me is dinner and a movie (or dinner then a movie if I don't feel like cooking), but I've also used public gardens and sporting events. Especially if you have gotten to this point without making anything officially a date, you would ideally want to get at least a hug in at the end. This is part of being clear and not playing the long/creepy game. Failure to do more than hang out and talk typically means you are just interested in being friends. Hopefully something in all that is of use to you.

On probably my best run ever, I think I was sporting a Burst Laser 2 and 3, perhaps it was two 3's. Burst lasers are far and above my favourite weapon for their shield killing potential. I usually fly federation or stealth cruisers. I'd consider the federation cruiser to probably be the easiest ship, since it has guaranteed damage capability. I often don't use missiles or drones at all in favor of lasers since I dislike limited ammunition weapons (and can often trade drone and missile parts for fuel or scrap). I'll try to take down the boss ship weapons with a combination of laser fire and teleporting my crew over. I am reasonably successful. I do need to turn on the new stuff so I can unlock type C ships though. I have all the type A stuff and all but one type B, but none of the C's.

The AI follow two very simple rules: 1. Vehicles will always take the nominally fastest route. 2. Vehicles will always get in the correct lane as soon as possible. The traffic flow doesn't appear to be a driver AI, it's more like packages being forwarded in the postal system (I think the roads are controlling cars based on routing tables. It would be the simplest and least intense implementation for a system that has to handle potentially thousands of vehicles at once on road networks that offer thousands of possible routes. It just uses a lot of RAM, and might be a big part of the reason this game want's 6GB of it). So AI wont use all the lanes, especially on 6 lane roads, unless you design the road network to make that happen. The system certainly has some downsides, but it does make traffic flow very predictable. Once you understand how it works, you can make the AI use the roads in the way you want. Perfectly predictable traffic is a city planners ideal situation, so while the AI might be really stupid, they are also easy to plan around. I doubt this will be fixed, I think it's working exactly as it's supposed to.

After spending a few hours and getting a nice city established, I found the manual (I had looked for it in game files, forgot to look for the link in steam). It hasn't cleared everything up for me, but it's good to know things like families prefer low density residential, so I probably want to keep significant amounts of that around. Also, I think offices are sort of like a high density version of industrial (higher education demand, but very little goods production, so a bigger difference than you see with the others). I had been assuming offices were commercial (because they're blue). I think this makes more sense though, since commercial sells goods produced by industry and offers public services (like hotels), which offices obviously don't fit into. I've also figured out some stuff with roads and not creating intersections that I don't need to, but I think I can fit that into my current city. I'm basically developing a bunch of fairly isolated districts (they all connect, but I'm trying to build them such that people don't need to move between them too much), so my traffic systems should continue to work anyway. I'm trying to build the suburbs first and then develop a downtown later, so that I don't have to deal with upgrading early infrastructure (I learned from other games). I seem to be doing pretty well. Some residential re-zoning aside, I've been pulling a steady profit since like day 10 (lost it for a few days re-zoning). Some ups and downs, including a massive labour crisis in the industrial sector (no uneducated workers cause a lot of abandonment), but things are back to a nice balance and demand for residential and commercial is high, and I'm about to tap into the rail network to further relive the strain of industrial on my roads (right now I use districts and separate highway connections). I am however failing at property value and public transit, and it's keeping my property values pretty much at medium in most places, and my industry seems to be starting to freak out over services. Apparently commercial and industrial upgrade based on services, which seems to include transit, so its worthwhile. I think I have enough money to put in a metro instead of clogging up my entire city with busses, which also saves me from mapping out too many routes. Probably helps tourists too. I also feel like I might have gone a bit to far from "everything is grids" towards "everything is all curvey". I was trying circular designs to see if that would help traffic, and I might have taken it too far. I think I'm going to try and keep things more on the regular grid for high density, especially since they need large zoned areas to build in, and leave more of my freeform for low density stuff. Still, everything does look pretty nice, though what I have built may never look like a city. theres no large whole sections yet, everything is split up by highways, a river, and some train tracks.

I have never played career. I can see the appeal, but for me, it just means spending a few hours running a whole bunch of missions I don't want to do. Perhaps if I could jump into career with the first tier or two unlocked (so I could skip the early game and go strait to the middle) I'd be interested now. I still have things left to achieve in the game on my own time, plenty of them. I'm also absent minded enough in my designs that I already (happily) spend much of my time tootling around on shakedown missions and redesigning my ships. Design is much of the game for me, and right now, I see no reason to place restrictions on myself. It will probably be a very long time before I have any desire to play in career, if I ever do.

Both, Both?, and B. On a 4 or 6 way symmetry rocket, I'll usually gravity turn however it starts out and rotate it once I clear the atmosphere. For 2 and 3 way symmetry rockets, I rotate them prior to the gravity turn. I never rotate them in the VAB because it messes with the way I orient the camera for things like docking vs which way I perceive to be the top of my rocket. I can land one way or the other, but most of the time it's a combo deal I think. I come in on whatever angle pleases me with a trajectory that has me slightly overshooting my landing target. I'm still burning to kill both lateral and vertical velocity together for most of the landing, but I like to make the final descent pretty much vertically so that I can use RCS to zero out lateral velocity perfectly, and I have time and means to inspect my ship and landing site properly and come in nice and gentle. The majority of the time I am docking to a rotating target, so I need to be able to move laterally as well as rotate, so I find it easier not to use docking control. I'm also sometimes flying with a controller or joystick, and I don't feel the need for high fidelity RCS control.

I usually try to have it so the boosters nose out a tad on ejection. It's a lot safer than having them nose in (been there, done that). I'll add sepratrons to heavier boosters if they aren't getting pushed far enough away to avoid pants soiling. I also usually place the boosters so the engines are mounted a little lower than the central engine(s). This ensures that pushing the top of the boosters out wont cause the bottoms to collide with the rocket.

I find anyplace new to be...interesting. I've mostly just been to Duna and Eve and their moons. I probably do more Kethane mining than anything else, and from that perspective, Ike is probably the biggest pain for me, having the highest gravity of any body I mine on. Too much gravity to only refuel the miner on the surface; makes things less efficient. Not a super huge fan of Gilly's almost total lack of gravity either. It makes getting an encounter tricky, and landings become very touchy.

I don't do well with not being able to move my arms. I'm not claustrophobic, but if I don't have a good range of motion for my arms, or if I have the perception that I can't leave an enclosed space, I will absolutely start to freak out. I'm also afraid of falling, to be distinguished from a fear of heights. I can barely stand up on a 10m diving platform. The threshold seems to be once I'm standing on something a little over 5m up. By contrast, I've been on a zipline that was easily 300ft over the canopy in the valley below on the side of a mountain, and I didn't think twice about hanging upside down with no hands. I trust the zipline. See the same thing with high bridges (think suspension bridges). I can drive over them no problem, but I get rubber legged walking (the bouncing doesn't help. Suspension bridges bounce constantly). I've never encountered a millipede in real life, but based on pictures, I don't think I could deal with millipedes. They get too big, and I don't really do large insect/bug life. Reptiles are fine, as are rodents as long as they aren't in the house. I also don't really do earwigs. They're gross and unnatural. I'm also totally afraid of wasps. Bee's are fine because they are pretty non-aggressive and the bumble bees are super cute, but if I am alone, wasps make me anxious and I'll usually just go inside in short order. But around other people, my fear of wasps goes away. It's not like I am sucking up my fear and hiding it from peer pressure, I actually don't feel any fear or anxiety, even when they are buzzing around my head (at that point I'll try to move away, but I'm not really that worried). It's weird. I don't care much for gardening, and this is a big part of that.

My parents have a timex sinclair that I've had the pleasure of using a couple times. It has no permanent storage (though you can plug it into a tape recorder and pray that it will be able to read that back properly in the future), and with the additional memory module I think she has 16kb of RAM. For a monitor, you find a very old black and white TV and hook it up (have fun doing this with a TV made after 1990. Thing uses a connection older than coax). We have a couple manuals for it that include some programs you can enter into it, including a fair few games (this wasn't the dark ages, computers could be fun too). No, to really hit close to home for me though, I have to think of the PC my parents got when I was in grade 3 I think.I actually found a youtube video with what looks like the same computer, and seems to be fairly similar. Ours was probably 60mb RAM, 350 MHz processor, floppy and zip drive, 10GB HDD, no GPU. I remember that at the time, it was a pretyt fast machine, much better than the school computers or anything my friends had. I also remember how massive that 10GB and later 40GB HDD was, and now I think about how my current PC with 12 GB of RAM could have loaded the entire HDD of that computer into memory in addition to windows. I think we used that computer until 2002 when I finally got my own, much better, computer with a top end AMD excalibur card. The chain of computers for me is surprisingly short. I used the 2002 PC for...well it was supplemented with a second hand laptop in 2005. The laptop was not stronger than the PC. At some point in there the PC fried it's GPU randomly, and got a new one. I got a new laptop 2007, and it was marginally more powerful than the PC and took over as my main computer. I guess I used that for 3 years until I got an HP h8-1011 in 2010, and basically at the start of 2015 I finished most of my upgrades into the lovely computer I have now. It's not that many jumps. Discounting the first laptop because it was barely an upgrade, I've used only 5 computers counting the one I have now (and the upgrade as a new machine, since it basically is). In the span of 5 computers, I've gone from the specs I listed above to a computer with a quad 3.5 GHz processor, 12 GB RAM, 4.25 TB of permanent storage, and a GPU capable of 2.7 TFLOPS (single precision). If I could take this machine back to 1998, it would be beyond a supercomputer. My younger self wouldn't have been able to comprehend how mind numbingly powerful this machine is vs the one my family had, or what I could possibly be doing with it that would require such power. I mean, the computer back then used less electricity than a 60W light bulb, and the one sitting under my desk now will draw probably 500W if you ask it nicely. The other one I think about is the internet. Now, the internet existed before it was born, but it didn't become mainstream until the late 90's, at least, not relevant to my life until then. I would obviously have a slightly different perspective on the development of the internet if I had been an adult during that time instead of in elementry, but instead I get to honestly remember a time before the internet mattered. I think that's kind of cool. Another one to think about. They make Mini SD cards that are about the size of my thumbnail in at least 32GB sizes off the top of my head, and I think 64 by now. And the phone in my pocket has more power than at least my first computer, and my tablet has more processing power than my 2002 PC. It's freaky.

I think Pedar nailed a lot of it. The main, and perhaps only, advantage I would give to a gasoline engine is that they can be built lighter. They are burning their fuel in a wave rather than exploding it (knocking, which is what diesels do full time), allowing the use of much lighter pistons and driving rods. I'd also peg gasoline engines as being quieter (that is, it's easier to muffle the noise for vehicle occupants) since they are burning instead of exploding their fuel. By contrast, a nice big heavy diesel engine is capable of withstanding considerable abuse. Their higher torque is also of considerable benefit for heavier vehicles. This isn't to say gasoline engines can't be built tough. Marine engines for example are designed to operate at full capacity for extended periods of time. Running society exclusively on one or the other though doesn't make much sense. There is no way to totally control the quantities of outputs when you refine crude oil. You can steer it a bit, but you are still going to end up with considerable amounts of both gasoline and diesel, so from an economic point of view your optimum case will always be some mixture of fuels. When talking about one or the other being cleaner, it's always worth considering what the definition of clean is. Diesels were considered cleaner for a long time because they were held to the same standard as gasoline engines, which completely ignored particulates of a certain size that were the primary output of diesel engines. When it comes to places like california, I'd be interested to see if the regulations focus only on particulates that would settle, or if they focus on gasses as well. Also, do they regulate the replacement of the filtration systems? Diesels in particular have a problem where they can intake more fuel than they can burn, which is where you get the sooty black exhaust. It's form incomplete combustion, and it creates a whole lot of nasty stuff, including considerable particulate matter. That's why I ask about replacing the filters, since I would imagine that trying to capture all that particulate matter would actually clog up the filters within a couple years tops.

A while back I solicited opinions on which processor I should go for to upgrade my computer, and I figured I would post my results and thanks. A big thank you to the people who steered me towards intel for a CPU that could keep up with the HD 7950 I already owned, you didn't steer me wrong. I settled on an i5-4690k, and all indications are that it's a pretty good match up. My experience so far is that I can notch games up from medium-high settings to high (often maximum) and nearly double my frame rate while doing so, and I now feel like I have a proper gaming grade computer (the original h8-1011 wasn't bad when it was new, but it was never this good). My full build, as of now: Motherboard: ASUS Z97 AR CPU: Intel i5-4690k GPU: AMD HD 7950 Memory: 12GB RAM (3 x 4GB) @1033MHz (it's on the upgrade list for next year) Storage: 2x 2TB HDD (Western Digital Green, Seagate Barracuda), 1x 250GB SSD (Samsung) Case: NZXT 410 w/4 fans So yeah, thanks for the help. I ended up with a much nicer rig than I was planning on building with a little bit of budget expansion on my end thanks to all the great advice and resources that were given to me by this community. If I could do one thing differently, I would google 'replacing motherboard' before doing just that. There is a neat little trick you can do with command prompt to replace the mobo drivers so you can boot into windows, and it's more fun to know about that trick going into the build rather than troubleshooting why your brand new computer doesn't work.

As a criticism to the trailer, some of that stuff really looks like I am looking at people in costume. Something is off, but I don't know what it is. On the whole, the trailer looks good. I'm excited, and cautiously optimistic. As far as Abrams goes as the director, I do appreciate that he is a Star Wars fan and will attempt to do the movie justice. On the other hand, lens flares aside, I am going to be disappointed if he can't do a better job making Star Wars feel like Star Wars than he did making Star Trek feel like Star Trek. And I am going to hold onto the faint hope that he will not try to ruin this movie with Lens Flares.

I use chrome. When I upgraded from my laptop to my current PC, firefox on my laptop was having a lot of problems displaying youtube videos correctly (or at all, depending on the day). Chrome can run all the extensions I want, so chrome is what I switched to. Chrome also takes up less of my screen than firefox, and I am firm believer that less is more when it comes to web browsers.

I start at 100% and then start dialing it back between 100-200m, and I keep adjusting to keep myself on track with the terminal velocity. After I think about 25000m the terminal velocity becomes virtually unreachable and put the hammer down for the rest of the trip. A pretty typical launch will see throttle dip as low as 70% prior to 20,000m.

I think I land too frequently in locations that are not at all close to the KSC to be doing this (as in, I like to land in oceans on the other side of the planet because I have terrible aim when it comes to atmo landings). I have however built a craft that is capable of completing this tast in any location, though I think it's fuel capacity was limited to probably 20 minutes carrying a heavy payload, perhaps 40 unloaded. Now that I have a joystick instead of just a controller, it might be worth checking to see if I can still get the mod and rebuild this craft. Or I can boot up version 19 and fly it there I guess. The prop engines can rotate. Unloaded, typically fly as a plane with the engines at 30 degrees. Can take off and land as a plane perfectly well. At high speeds with cargo, typically 70 degree rotation on the engines was possible, often flew them at 90 anyway. 90 degrees for all VTOL operations obviously. Maximum lift capacity was probably 110%-120% of the craft weight. More if the fuel tanks were running low. However, past about 80% it would take long enough to get cargo airborne that you really had to fight the craft tendency to slam into the ground instead. At 10 degree engine rotation, it makes a decent rover too (in 0.19, the engines at 0 degrees would pull the rear end up before the brakes became unstuck. Would probably be fine in 0.25). Lift is achieved by magnetic grapple. I think some modifications would be needed for indefinite carry. The batteries this version carries, along with the solar panels are good for 7 minutes. It is often much easier to land and attach the grapple manually then it is to land the grapple on target from the air. Used the magnetic version that requires power so that cargo could be jettisoned without the need to land, which saved a few crashes. Was a very fun craft to fly, of very limited use. It was less fun to build. Very touchy on the engine placement, and I never got it quite perfect because of the way the engines rotate (they are weight forward when in the down position, which makes them hard to balance for VTOL use).

Was doing some testing with an old design I haven't used since 0.24, landing it on the Mun. Expected a pretty regular flight there and back, with a landing, to make sure I had all the design flaws ironed out and that it still worked in 0.24 (and discovered two major design flaws in the process, so it was a productive mission). What I neglected was that this ship spent it's entire operational 0.24 and earlier history operating on Minmus in super low gravity, and that a ship with half the thrust and twice the weight of my regular Munar landers would need a considerable burn time to not crash. It was decided during descent that killing both vertical and horizontal velocity in time to land was a fantasy, and the ship was reoriented for a full vertical burn. This decision apparently happened with seconds to spare, as the lander didn't start gaining altitude until it was about 50m from impact (while moving sideways at about 200 m/s). Fuel estimations were also off, with the lander successfully landing in the middle of an ocean with 40L of fuel left in the tanks. Lesson Learned: The Mun has way more gravity from Minmus, and that's why I stopped mining there to begin with. Respect the gravity.

I'm a pretty big fan of landing on the Mun without doing any orbiting whatsoever. Just wait for the Mun to be in the right spot (45 degrees to the right) and fly straight to it. I learned how to do this before I learned how to do things like establish orbit or perform a rollover before during ascent, but there was no place else to go so it didn't matter for a long time. I still do this sometimes to save time (I used to do it for minmus too, but now I find going there from orbit is simpler).

Wow, kind of dismaying to see how poorly those FX cards stack up against the CPU I have now. I didn't realize that AMD was doing the 2 logical processors per core shenanigans, or that the per core performance of the FX series was so abysmal. I will hand it to AMD though, they overall benchmark very well. I will have to check, because an i5 is going to blow the budget out of the water no matter what, but looking around I made some new picks: i5-4960k: http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9085223&csid=_61 Would this be closer to the neighborhood of something that might keep up with the HD 7950? I would prefer that it not need excessive overclocking just to keep up, though I'm pretty sure I'm not going more expensive either way. Maybe I missed an opportunity to get a lot more power for a marginal price increase, or missed something much cheaper that is almost as good. And then I need a mobo, so: http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8992482&CatId=8586 Thoughts? I don't suppose that intel motherboards without an onboard GPU are a thing that exists? That is...not something I really want to be paying for.

Let's see. For a typical single use rocket (this is probably what I would use for any local use, unless I performing a dry run of a long range mission): Stage 1/2 (Liftoff): Stage 1 is the main engines + boosters, fueled by stage 1 booster fuel tanks. Stage 2 (Liftoff II): After jettisoning the stage one engines and tanks, the main engine continues using the stage 2 fuel tanks. Usually jettisoned just prior to establishing orbital velocity. Stage 3 (Transfer): Initial orbit is completed by the stage 3 engines and fuel. Stage 3 is then responsible for transfer to the next orbit, and establishing the second orbit. Stage 4 (Descent): This is the lander. It's responsible for getting out of orbit and then not blowing up. Stage 5 (Return): Re-establish orbit and return home. My longer range ships are simpler, but is technically 5 stages: Stage 1-3/4 (Liftoff-Orbit): Asparagus ascent setup. 3 pairs of boosters and a main stage. Stage 4 is the main engine. Stage 5/6 (Payload/Ship): The final stage in the initial rocket. LV-N powered command module/ship/tug. Perfectly capable of traveling to Minmus or the Mun, landing, and returning with the fuel it launched with. Typically used with the Kethane mod to facilitate refueling capabilities on longer journeys, with Kethane parts creating a 6th stage (the payload) docked to the back, which is typically where the landing gear is mounted.

Thought I would seek some advice on finishing up the upgrades to my computer. Looking to get a new CPU, mobo, and case. I am hoping to keep the total costs for this to $250-$300, and will try to use sales where I can if possible. See a couple posts down for updated CPU and mobo picks from intel Right now I have: CPU: AMD Phenom II 1065t 6 core ~2.9GHz GPU: AMD HD 7950 Motherboard: Some random piece of junk I'm not convinced is 100% compatible with my CPU (it adamantly refuses to use the CPU's turbo function) PSU: 650W RAM: 12GB (3 x 4 GB) HDD: x2 Case: Mid Size ATX Computer is originally an h8-1011, and still has all the original components except PSU and GPU, and I have added a seccond HDD: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?cc=us&lc=en&docname=c02874899#N92 The gpu and psu are already upgrades over what the computer came with, bought with the intention of finishing up the upgrades this year. For the CPU, I have decided to go with AMD but I want to double check my picks and solicit any better ideas: Pick 1: FX-4300 4 core @3.8 GHz - $130 - http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4904563&CatId=7339 Pick 2: FX-8310 8 core @3.4 GHz - $140 - http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9494388&CatId=7339 Now, when I look at the benchmarks, the 8310 is ~8,000 vs the 4300's ~4,700, but I'm assuming that over half the performance with half the processors would be a good indicator of per core performance. I'm not seeing any games on the horizon where more than 4 processors is going to trump better per core performance, so I am thinking that the 4300 would be the best buy for my purposes. I rarely do any video edited or 3D modelling, so games really are the paramount concern here, not maximum multitasking ability. Next up is a new case. Needs good ventilation. Was thinking this one, either for the $55 on Tiger Direct or whatever my local computer shop is selling them for right now (they're the ones who showed it to me): http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2817829&Sku=YYD2-VL800P1W2N Not looking for anything super ostentatious here, and certainly not more expensive. If anyone else has some ideas, feel free. Especially something a bit cheaper that isn't going to turn my computer into a furnace, because I don't think watercooling or more fans is going to fit in the immediate budget. And then there is the mobo, which is the really hard part for me. Given the price of the cpu and case is ~$200, I'd like to keep the mobo under $100 if I can. Right now, I am looking at this one: http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1963472&CatId=7244 It looks like it will be able to accommodate the USB3 ports on the front of the case I am looking at, and will be able to accommodate my optical and hard drives with room to spare for possible additional hard and solid state drives. I am wondering if there are any critical features I am going to be missing by avoiding anything more expensive? My future plans for the computer don't seem to involve anything this mobo can't handle until it comes time for a new CPU (probably). The next GPU upgrade might be a second 7950 instead of a single better card, and I would like to get an SSD and I'll probably look at getting some 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM at that time to replace the sticks I have now, definitely not anticipating the need for 32GB of it. To the final build would be: CPU: FX-4300 3.8 GHz GPU: HD 7950 Mobo: MSI 970A-G46 AMD 9 Series RAM: 3x 1333 MHz DDR3 And the hope will be that it can see me through at least a couple years of quality gaming without being required to touch any of those components, and will be reasonably balanced performance wise without either the CPU or GPU robbing one or the other of significant potential like my current CPU does.

I've played WT off and on a bit. I really got driven away from WT with the whole bomber dominance thing, where I couldn't use anything above my mid tier 2 planes without getting into matches decided by who had more bombers in 3 minutes flat. I also got really into WoT while waiting for ground forces to arrive, and then when ground forces did come, I discovered that I was just so much better at WoT that it was sort of sucking the fun out of ground forces for me. I do still play from time to time though, because I do really enjoy the game play with WT. It's a solid game, especially at the higher difficulty levels.