Randox

As I get back into Kerbal for this version, my first space station received it's first Kerbol visitor (and also a docking port extension so it can host junior and senior docking clamps). If I hadn't goofed the design of the last rocket (wasn't ever intending on keeping the engine, in fairness), I could have snagged a jumbo and half fuel tank with a mainsail engine. I probably wont do a lot with this station. I thought about sending it to Minimum to act as my Kethane refinery, but I think I will make a couple changes and launch another one. I'm quite happy with the general design. It's light enough to get into orbit without much fuss, and it handles nicely. A couple of tweaks and it would be set. Ther eis also a probe there right now playing as a second senior port adapter. I think the Lander Can on the bottom is the best seat in the house. Good view of at least one docked ship, and it makes for a nice point to view the planet from, maybe rotate the station around a bit.

My current main cargo lifter (payload of perhaps 18 tonnes or a bit more on 5 mainsails) could do it. Assuming you goal is to deliver something under maybe 10-15 tonnes to a 100km orbit, it would be perfectly serviceable as an SSTO (with a TWR of perhaps 5 or 6 once the tanks are pretty much empty). By definition though, if you are using rocket engines, you can always do it better by shedding parts you don't need anymore, so it will never be the most practical solution. Same thing with the space planes though.

As a point of interest, NASA adding the colors is both true and false. The cameras used by things like hubble or the Mars Rover aren't color cameras, though I don't think that black and white would be correct either, not by conventional usage. They are broad spectrum, capable of seeing a massive spectrum of light, but record only the magnitude, not the color, and instead take pictures through filters allowing only specific wavelengths to pass (and the single images are usually displayed in black and white). To get an image like the one we might see, they have to use 3 filters on 3 different shots that correspond to the colors our eyes are sensitive to, and then combine them. The Mars rover actually had 8 such filters (for seeing things outside the visible spectrum), while Hubble has 40. You can see the explanation and some pictures here if you like. And of course, all this is done so that they can create images that provide whatever is considered the import or desired information, by using specific filters and filter combinations.

I might give the chase cam a go myself, though I feel like, since I am not using any cams right now, that being able to move around and see my distance as well as my alignment would be useful. I always mark 'up' on my ships anyway, and will usually orient then while docking. I spent some time this afternoon getting back into this, and on that ship, I actually marked 45* up and right, which was interesting. I just forgot to think about it. I also spent some time turning it around and running into the station with a senior port to see if I could get that to work. No dice of course. At least I have so far put on all the docking ports in the right direction. Tomorrow, I send up a manned rocket to the 'station' (station is a generous term. It's a high capacity crew module with docking ports really. It can fly itself using it's own engine). Beyond taking a look around the station itself, I am towing a new hub into orbit to accommodate the other port sizes. For me, it's getting close enough to the station that I can use linear flight. I find it easier to approach from behind, I think because you can more intuitively hit the brakes in the right direction. I really enjoy the docking part, but not the getting to it so much. As for control, I think the docking system would be fantastic for letting me access all the controls while using the mouse (ignoring that my mouse could accomodate them). The problem is that the RCS is almost never going to be perfectly balanced, and it really helps to have both control at once to deal with that.

I would consider the alpha to be done when they stop adding new features, and stick entirely to overhauling the current ones and bug fixes. As for how far through the alpha stage we are, I'm not sure even Harvester knows (unless he has a time machine stashed in his office), since no one knows what the final feature list will look like. I think the base game is, at least superficially, almost complete. Off the top of my head, resources are probably the last major base game piece still missing, and I'm sure people will be happy to remind me of all the wonderful things I just glazed over. I say superficially because there are things in the game right now that are only placeholders, like the aerodynamics system. I'm also sure there will be other things like the SAS that were perhaps considered done at some point, and Squad will ultimately go back and do again. Once all that is done, there is still the campaign system to do, and I figure that we are close to that partly because it seems they have really started to lay the groundwork for it, as well as doing features that would be useful for it (like the test flights). Once the campaign is in the game will probably mark the beta stage.

Thinking about it some more, open ended probably works up to the point where the next level of education requires to to have some basic knowledge set. I suppose it really is the holy grail of schooling though, hence the highest level of education involves becoming a world expert in something new (this would be a doctoral degree). As for education methods, that can still get interesting. This is the one I hope to see start to change in my lifetime (hopefully really soon, because right now it's going backwards and I want it getting better before I have kids of my own). Things like cutting back recess and lunch are things we already know have a terrible impact on learning, and yet we do them anyway in the vain hope that you can just shove more things into a persons brain with brute force (see: Studying with Osmosis - How to Absorb Knowledge by Sleeping on a Textbook, because that's how much sense that line of thinking makes). What actually happens is that kids become restless and bored, stop paying attention, and disrupt the class thus ensuring that children with preternatural attention spans don't learn squat either. Another one is rolling things back into earlier years. The human brain has very distinct stages of development, again, this is all stuff we know pretty well. The human brain even transitions from stage to stage very quickly, before plateauing in the next one for some time, which makes it really easy to have a good idea where someone is at based on age alone. Perhaps the most important one is the capacity for abstract thought, the ability to comprehend a hypothetical scenario inside your own head, a capability that is fundamental to algebra among other things. What has been observed is that for children where algebra was first taught before age twelve (in grade 7 instead of 8 if I remember correctly, maybe it's 8 and 9), their math scores plummet and never recover, probably because you just spent a year frustrating them with concepts their brains weren't equipped to handle and teaching them that math sucks, and they suck at math. Oh, and NGTOne, same thing about the bird courses. I still have to stick with things that interest me, or my marks will crash and burn. What I have found is that things that are interesting and things that are easy tend to go hand in hand. I suppose part of that is people naturally enjoy things they are good at, things that come easily to them, but it also works the other way, people will work hard to understand things that interest them. Oh, and looking at the program I did for my first Java class still makes me want to crawl under the desk. I was experimenting with multiple classes before I really understood Object Oriented Programming, I was still treating them a lot like subroutines and sub-programs from my self taught procedural days, and the results are hard to read and pretty horrific, though it worked just fine. The one I have been thinking about is doing up an AI for cribbage. It's a game where I could easily write my entire strategy on pen and paper, and it would be an interesting way try different strategy tweaks and see how they perform. Would certainly top teaching the computer to play Bingo. For me, so far open ended in computers has mostly meant that you are at lest semi-free to decide how you want the program to work under the hood, and with a lot of flexibility for additional features.

I like the point about driving yourself. One of the more interesting ones I have come across is the Finnish system, as apparently their culture doesn't put much importance on academic performance. No standardized testing, no awards, no scholarships. One of the things you see coming out of this is that, with all the competition out of the way, and worrying about your GPA, it really free's people up to actually learn things. Things like bird courses no longer being a thing because people don't need an easy class to shelter in, or boost their marks with, instead going out and taking something that would be useful to them. It's the situation I find myself in, in University. Do I take something that I think could be really interesting, and perhaps useful, yet is outside what I know I can excel at, or do I find something less engaging and get my easy A? As for the primary education system, I think partly there is a pretty massive divide between how adults and children/teens see the world, much bigger than one might expect considering that all adults were once younger. I suppose that, as we get older, our memories are now processed through the eyes of adulthood. We lose our perspective, or at least a good portion of it, and are left with perhaps a few memories that we don't really understand, because they no longer make sense. Do I wish that perhaps I had more freedom in school? Perhaps, though I think there is a balance, especially for people like me who will take advantage of the system if they can. When doing things like papers, I never really liked being told what to do them on. I would much rather come up with some ideas, get them approved, and then be researching something I am really interested in. I did a couple papers on nuclear technology in high school. My first year of university I took the only history course I have ever enjoyed in my life (because there was next to no emphasis on dates, just culture and technology), and wrote my paper on the effectiveness of Gothic and Maximilian full plate armour (spoiler alert: really effective). Perhaps the most fun I have ever had was my grade 12 art class, where we had one assigned project, which was a reproduction of a famous painting. I did the penrose triangle for that, and then spent most of the year making wireframe skeletons for plasticine sculptures (my favorite was a dragon, which was also a pretty difficult one with all the thin bits on things like the wings). Made for a nice offset of the maths and sciences. What I definately have an opinion on are some more practical things. I got a bit of this from economics, and also from my parents and older brother (my brother in particular has been fantastic at making sure that I understand things like insurance, mortgages, bills, how much money I will probably be making and how long it takes to save up and so on). But there is other stuff, and if I can quote a cracked article: I. How to Patch and Paint a Wall So You Can Get Your Deposit Back From Your Landlord; II. Identifying Which Wires in Your House Will Kill You if You Touch Them; III. What to do When You Wake Up to Find Your Toilet/Refrigerator/Hot Water Heater/Air Conditioner/Sink is Puking Water Onto Your Floor; IV. When to Call the Repair Guy; V. How to Figure Out if the Repair Guy is Screwing You; VI. Foreign Objects You're Going to Try to Put in the Microwave at Some Point so Let's Just Get it Out of Your System Now. Stuff like that. That's the industrial repairs section, but also things like how to balance the household budget, how credit works, how to cook. I worked with a girl for a bit who used to run classes out of her house on how to eat healthy (as in, fresh fruit/meat/vegetables) for $10 a day. As for the whole sheltering children thing, I see it as a balancing act. I've seen people who weren't sheltered, people who learned much younger than most how to organize their entire life, and how to advocate for themselves because they had to, and I think it definitely robs you of some of the joy of being a child. Why should a 14 year old kid have to worry about the bills and what not? This is the part of his life where he is still learning, and still learning how to deal with people.. Maybe there is a best time to start bringing them into the real world, perhaps in proportion to their responsibilities. Which brings me to one last point, about removing the social aspect of school, and here I would have to disagree. I'm not sure what I have to say to bullying, but what I can speak to is that people need to learn to compromise, the skill that our society is based on. I have to imagine that most people have met someone who largely lacks that skill, the 'my way or not at all' attitude (I think everyone goes through it when their young, as part of the brains development. Without social interaction, you never grow out of it). Another way to put it is that the world is run by extroverts, and like it or not, us introverts need to be able to play the game too if we are to one day rule the world

Back in version 19, I did some work on planes, mostly modded prop ones, thinking I might make one that could fly extremely far on solar power (I probably can, but I start dying of boredom at about 15 minutes, so no go). I also had a go with a quad engine VTOL cargo lifter (using a tow cable), which was just crazy enough to be able to lift it's own weight (tested by having one pick another one up). Now, the craft itself was crazy, since I could never get the balance quite just right (it was actually pretty easy to fly. Landing could be tricky, hovering was quite hard). But there are two kinds of winches. Electro magnet, and suction cup. The former can be turned on and off, but it also needs power, and this is what I used. This worked alright, with a bit of patience I could sometimes grab things from the air without crashing (it didn't respond well to what is essentially dropping an anchor), and having put in some batteries, and solar panels and the fact that the engines also made power), I never really gave this a lot of thought. I never worked out ariel grabs, since hovering steady enough, and in a particular location was pretty much impossible for me, and a flyby grab was like dropping an anchor, and didn't end well. The solution was to land, run out with a kerbal for a manual attach, climb back in and pray that the engines could get the cargo off the ground before the RCS lost a fight to gravity, pendulum physics, and sanity, needless to say that the first minute after a pickup was spent desperately trying to gain height and stop the cargo from spinning around on a 20m cable. After doing this a couple of times around the base, I decided to take a rover to the island. I'm not too far out when suddenly, the rover drops off the magnet. I look at my ships status and notice it's dead out of power, the magnet drawing more than the engines and solar panels could produce. Now, the magnet was still useful since it meant I could drop things. Still, after that, I made the switch to suction cups. This is the flying facepalm of a ship. This is either a few seconds before the rover falls into the sea, or the second run with the suction cup. I can't tell which grapple I am using.

Only because houses/buildings are built to the imperial standard. The metric equivalent to a foot would really be the decimetre (10 cm, 30.24 inches, or ~0.33 feet). Instead of an 8 ft ceiling, you could probably go with 24 decimetre ceiling (just under an inch shorter), and instead of 18 inch spacing on the wall studs, perhaps 4.5 decimetre spacing (less than a cm off if I am doing all my conversions right). Imperial is quite convenient, but metric would give you pretty similar sizing, particularly because the decimetre is almost a perfect third of a foot (it's a little bit less past the second decimal). That said, imperial does work quite well, since the inch divides into useful sizes (down the eighth's), but not being in base 10 is a royal pain. For the whole mass/weight thing, I find it easiest to keep in mind the units. Kg is weight, and the I'm going to say the idea of Kilogram-weight is literally going backwards seeing as metric already has the Newton. The Newton has units of KG*m/s^2, the units of force (mass times acceleration) which is what weight is. The force an object exerts because of gravity acting on it's mass. Looking at the actual units of Newtons, "kilogram meters per second squared", you can see why we just use N. Usually you only start expanding the units for the sake of conversions, or solving particular problems, where it's more convenient to have everything in terms of the base units, like mass and length and time (m, kg, s) all multiplying and dividing.

I'm not sure what you mean by the cat not needing to be alive, so I'm going to skip that. In a closed system, animals turn food into energy by releasing stored chemical energy, much like lighting a log on fire. Plants reverse the process, by turning animal waste back into things animals need by using solar power (photosynthesis) to generate the required energy to reverse the chemical reactions that we use to stay alive. We consume sugar for energy, and a plant turns the waste products back into sugar. The very best you can do is harness all the energy the animals create into useful energy for photosynthesis to turn animal waste back into animal food to sustain the process and maintain a closed system, else the nutrients for the plants will eventually be depleted. Under the laws of our universe, the best you could do is harness every last calorie from ALL the animals (which means the rodents you are feeding to the cat as well) to sustain the plants to create more food and oxygen (yeah, that depletes too). Animals do not turn most of their energy into electricity, they turn it into heat. So no you have to gather all the radiation being radiated by the animals, as well as all the heat that goes into the air itself through conduction, and turn all of that into electricity to power your light source for photo synthesis. Since you have to recapture all the energy or else deplete the system, the light source must be both 100% efficient (of note, light hitting anything but the plant will heat up the environment, which must be recaptured or lost as waste heat). So like every other infinite energy scheme that works in theory, the best you can manage is 100% efficiency (if you have 100% efficient devices, such as an air conditioned to pump out the waste heat for collection, and 100% efficient photovoltaics to capture all radiation to also be recycled as electricity and so on), and in practice, we can't manage that, thus the system must eventually be depleted and fail.

What I am reading now would suggest that rather than strengthen connections, NREM sleep weakens them to return the brain to a base state, and make important stuff stand out. REM sleep would be the point where the brain plays with combinations of experiences both recent and old to look for significant relationships and get an idea of what is important, and what should be discarded during NREM sleep (or something like that). Under that theory, screwing with the REM cycle by controlling it (and preventing the random associations checking) would inhibit the ability of NREM to do it's job, and if your brain can't return to it's base state, it can't feel refreshed. Most people find it easier to go lucid after waking up (and going right back to sleep), probably because the transition happens quite quickly. Also, REM cycles get longer each time, so you have more dream to play with (ideally, I would only be lucid in the morning when I just keep going back to sleep, and really only have REM cycles, no NREM to lose out on). That would neatly avoid the messing up your brain. Anywho, I think that something to induce lucid dreams would trump plugging a game into your dreams. The way I see it, a dream makes possible any experience your brain can imagine. While it's not perfect, you aren't going to see what higher dimensional perceptions would be like for example (since it's beyond the brains ability to process), feeding the data would have the same problem, since you are still using the brain as the hardware. Why go with something more complicated that is more restricted, and has a greater chance of messing things up.

PC is far worse than the consoles for DRM. Consoles have nothing on PC in this field. Steam might be questionable for the licensing versus buying, but this is something you run into a lot on digital distributors. If you are actually buying the game, that's a gift. If you want to own the games you are buying on Steam, go to the store and buy a disc. On the DRM side, Steam is fantastic, because it actually works. Once the game is verified, you don't need an internet connection to play your steam games. Their system doesn't bug out, and it doesn't intrude. You never have to know it exists. What you have to watch out for is what the XBOne will be doing, and PS3 already does (I don't think the 360 does it, might be wrong) which is allow the game to add it's own DRM. GTA 4 for example has games for windows live, which is an irredemable and buggy piece of **** that will prevent you from playing your brand new copy of any of the GTA 4 titles until you find an obscure "oh, you have to go download the new version of the GFWL program or your game won't start" on google (seriously, go read the steam discussions on the games. They never updated those versions to have the correct DRM program, and the game is totally unhelpful about telling you what the problem is). Other publishers have their own DRM, like EA and does on Mass Effect 1 and 2 (it's on 3 too, but that's only on Origin). But Sim City 5 is in a whole other league of DRM, the same as Diablo 3 (just incase you thought you were safe with Blizzard/Activision), which is that you literally can not buy the game. What you get are all the game assets, and a client to interface with their server, and it's their server that runs the game. So single player or multiplayer, you have to be connected to their server, because that's where the game is. They do this because it makes piracy pretty much impossible. There are no DRM measures that can be bypassed to play the game, because there is no game to play. To pirate the game, you would have to reverse engineer the portion that is stored on their servers, or somehow acquire that portion of the game directly and set up your own server. Now, PC did it first, but the consoles are introducing the possibility as well. The PS4 and XBOne (I think it's both, PS4 for sure) are introducing the ability for 'cloud processing', which is offloading some of the processor work of the game to a big server bank, which allows you to run games on the console that it could never run on it's own. Your offloading some of that extra work to another computer. That's an awesome concept, but it's also the most draconian form of DRM, identical to Diablo 3 and Sim City 5. By making a game that the console can't run, and presumably does not have a complete copy of (it wouldn't have the part of the program the cloud is running), you can't pirate it because you don't have a complete game, so even a PC emulation can't overcome this problem. This goes above and beyond always online DRM because of bandwidth. It does not take a lot of bandwidth to tell the servers that you are still there and not stealing anything. To run the game itself through the internet means you now have latency in a single player game, and are at the mercy of your internet connection beyond simply is it working. Now it has to be working well, and it has to work well the entire time you are playing, because as soon as it can't cope with the demands of the game, the game lags, or disconnects. To me, there are two great ways to curb piracy. The first are the online retailers like steam, which make it convenient. It's the same as how being able to buy digital downloads of individual songs curbs music piracy. You make it really convenient, play to instant gratification (or as close to as possible), and more people will pay for it, because you've now made it even easier than piracy. The other are the more creative DRM techniques, which introduce subtle (sometimes less so, like drunk batman from Arkham Asylum), yet frustrating and game breaking errors when the game is copied. These errors are pretty much impossible to find before the game is copied, so they have to be found and observed, and then their causes found and repaired. When layered up multiple times, so that each fix reveals a new error, it can take months to get a fu;lly functional version going, by which time people are really angry because they keep getting versions of the game that don't work, and they stop trusting that any of them do. Developers can also help out by seeding defective versions disguised as working versions, to increase confusion and frustration that much more. This is pretty much perfection. You can inflict massive pain on thieves, while having absolutely no impact at all on legitimate users. You can curb piracy by reducing the number of people willing to jump through the hoops, and the longer people stick with it, the more vengeance you exact upon them wasting ever increasing amounts of their time.

(I'm paraphrasing an article which goes through this in a bit more detail, found here: http://www.damninteresting.com/outer-space-exposure/) Compliments of accidents exposing humans to hard vacuums in the past, we have a practical understanding of most of the effects, and science has been able to piece together a pretty good idea of everything else. First, as pointed out, if you want to survive you have to exhale to prevent your lungs from rupturing during explosive decompression. Your digestive system, being much more durable, should be able to cope. You'll also get a lot of swelling very quickly from the rapid evaporation of water in your muscles, causing bruising, but the skin should be able to hold. The nitrogen in your blood will boil (the bends), and if you have line of sight to the sun, your skin is going to suffer major burns. You have about 10 seconds of useful consciousness before asphyxiation starts to set it (without extra air in the lungs, your brian would rapidly consume enough oxygen to start having trouble. Anyone who has ever stood up really fast and gotten dizzy, perhaps with narrowing vision and a rushing sound already knows exactly what this would be like). It also doesn't help that the lungs are pressure driven, as in, they will work backwards in a vacuum and dump oxygen out of your blood to accelerate hypoxia even more. You expect unconsciousness to set in at perhaps 15 seconds. The body would be able to survive for about 90 seconds, and with intervention during this time (being placed back in a pressurized environment and being administered oxygen), you can make a full recovery. At around 90 seconds, your blood pressure will be so low that the blood will start boiling, causing cardiac arrest. No one has been successfully resuscitated past this point.

I should have been more clear that the build is the current computer. I do like that CPU though, that would be quite nice to have. For the comparable performance, the 660 is certainly tempting. Exactly what I end up with is probably ultimately going to be dictated by price though. I'm not anticipating price drops enough to really move up any higher than those two. We'll see in October/November I suppose. And Corsair it is I think. The hope is that with an upgraded GPU and PSU, the computer might live for another couple years, at which point I could salvage the upgraded parts for a new build.

This isn't an immediate plan, but something I am thinking about before years end. Right now, I have an h8-1011 computer from HP. Motherboard: H-RS880-uATX (Aloe) CPU: AMD PhenomII X6 1065t (6 core @ 2.9 GHz) GPU: ATI HD 6770 1GB GDDR 5 RAM: 12GB DDR3 (3 x 4GB) HDD1: Western Digital 2TB (WDC WD20EARS-60MVWB0 SCSI) HDD2: Seagate 2TB (Seagate ST32000542AS SCSI) My problem is the graphics card. It does a pretty alright job, and it always has, but I'd sort of like something that does more than a pretty alright job. I also don't have the fund to rebuild the computer from the ground up like I should have done with this one, so I am looking at a mid life upgrade. I'm pretty sure that even by winter the 79XX will not be in my price range, so right now I am thinking of an HD 7870, which currently depending on which one, I could get for as low as $230 after rebate. Since I am aiming for more like November/December (I am thinking christmas present actually) I could probably get one for a nice low price, or something a bit better. My understanding is that even though the 7xxx series use PCIe 3.0, they don't really care if they use something older, since I have no plans on upgrading my motherboard (not that a PCI 3.0 uATX card that supports an AMD processor is a thing that exists). Second, while I expect I will ultimately get something that can measure this properly, I have to assume that my computer is already pretty close to blowing the 460w PSU, seeing as it was off the shelf and I stuck another hard drive in it. Unfortunately, my favourite power calculator will not work for me, and the ASUS one is suggesting I need 500 to 550 watts, which I obviously don't (I might if I tried to charge 6 cell phones with my computer while playing GTA IV). On that note, I know pretty much diddly squat about power supplies, but given the power jump from a 6770 to a 7870 I'm gussing I want to go to at least 600w, perhaps higher if I am counting on reusing it in a future computer (in that case I might aim for 750). Now, right now there is this 700 watt on for just under a hundred, plus a rebate, but I know absoutely nothing about which ones are prone to conking out or frying things (http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4362115&Sku=O261-2018). So any advice there would be appreciated. Also, am I just being stupid with upgrading the computer now? I am hoping that I could get another couple years out of it with the new GPU and PSU, maybe 3, and by then be in a position to bargain hunt myself a new one. The 7870 looks to be a pretty substantial upgrade over the 6770,so my hope is that it will provide nice service for a while.

I've flown in things in my dreams more than I have flown by myself. To the best of my recollection, I have only flown entirely by myself without difficulty once, in a dream that became lucid (both before and after that point). In the only other case of my flying effortlessly in a dream, I had wings attached to my back. I've never flown in anything while lucid though. A helicopter might be fun.

I'll throw another one in for Irfanview. I mostly just use it for cropping and converting between file formats, for which it is perfect. I also enjoy playing around with some of the other settings, making it a program that perfectly matches my needs.

You can and you can't, and I expect it gets much easier with practice. To me, it feels like the dream is still coming from the same part of the brain, the massive creative powerhouse that lives in the subconcious, and I don't get to directly influence it. I control myself, and my actions, but the rest of the dream and the people in it are like computer simulations. That said, by being aware, the subconcious seems to respond very well to my desires. People say what I want to hear, I find myself in the places I want to be, and I can at the very least levitate a bit by willing it really hard, though the time it worked really well it was something I could do pre lucid. That's hit or miss. The next chance I get, I want to see if there is a possibility for non human 'simulation'. More limbs, maybe more eyes. Dreams seem to hijack the brain to play pretend. You see in a dream exactly how you see in real life, just with the information coming from the mind rather than your eyes. Same with all the other senses. So I would think you ability to say, have 360 degree spider vision would be limited by what your visual cortex can handle. The ability to have 4 arms is subject to your brain, your motor cortex's, ability to figure out how that would work and what it would feel like. I think extra limbs would be pretty easy. I can sit here and image that, but I can't imagine what 360 degree vision would look like.

It's something you just sort of have to make peace with. Even if you wait for mods to update, every once in awhile the game loses forward compatibility (that is, the save files can't be read by the new version), such as when they overhauled the parts system. The game is still way in development, and Squad is gracious enough to try and space out compatability crushing updates when they can. But part of the development cycle is that you have ideas, but they are not wholly representative of the end product, especially when you're working on this scale. You find that something doesn't work the way it did in your head, or you get a new idea. There are also parts of the game created quickly as placeholders to make it relatively playable under the foundations are complete, such as the aerodynamic system we currently have. It's crude and unrealistic, but it's good enough for now, and it relies on things like the way parts are described, so that needs to be finalized as much as possible before significant effort is made to fixing anything that relies on it. This highlights some of the advantages and disadvantages of doing a live alpha like this. On the upside, the feedback is invaluable to a developer at this stage for making a game that will succeed, and better to find out what changes should be made during development than in Beta or upon release, when making large changes is difficult and expensive, often to the point of 'we'll try that next game'. Also, they get funding as they progress, so they require a lot less investment to get the game to the release stage. On the other hand, it adds a lot of time to the development cycle. Squad will have probably added at least 6 months or more to the games development cycle before we clear Alpha, mostly on bug fixing and issues like the patcher. At the end of the day, I find it helps to look at it like this. Treat alpha states as kickstarter. You are giving them money now to help provide funding for a game that does not yet exist. You are helping to allow that game exist, and contributing for the promise that you will get a copy for your support, often cheaper than at release price. As a bonus, the developer has been gracious enough to allow access to the development builds of the game for their backers so that they can get feedback. My point is, these versions aren't what you are paying for. That product doesn't exist yet. That you have access to these versions is a favor, and Squad does a better job of making them not a royal pain in the butt than most. This game, as it is right now, is a favor for giving them money now. Consider it the interest on your support if you like. I just find that, in that light, the issues that come up with alpha state releases are a lot easier to take in stride than if you approach it as a game that you paid for, because that would mean paying for what is essentially a broken game that is taking months to patch. All about your state of mind really

One I have been meaning to get back into is the dream journal. Chances of increasing lucid dreams aside, it's really neat to go back and read, and reclaim some of those memories. If your going to spend a significant portion of your life asleep, you might as remember as much of the crazy stuff that happens as you can. Besides, I find that my dreams present windows into what my mind is thinking about behind the scenes, which enables me to better deal with stress that I might not even be aware of consciously, or that I thought I had gotten past. I've had a few lucid dreams, a couple of which I remember better than the others. The first time, I wasn't prepared for it and I wasted it trying to set things up perfectly. Oddly, even lucid, my mind was skipping over the fact that I was essentially teleporting place to place. I tried to wrap it up once I felt myself waking up, but it was unfortunately largely wasted. The second time, I remembered the first time. This is also one of very few dreams where I have been able to fly at will (I've had the same ability in at least one regular dream). I felt that I had less impact over the surroundings, it was more passive in that the inhabitants of my dream world were extremely agreeable and forwarded the dream quite smoothly. Also, being able to take to the air pretty much at a whim was amazing, and I'll credit that to already having had that ability prior to realizing it was a dream. The third one I don't remember so well, but I know that I tried to fly again, and I ran into a common problem which is that I can't. I remember it not lasting that long, and I think I tried to hard to bend the dream to my will. The second one lasted longer than the first and third combined, and I think that's because I never tried to bend the dream, I was already enjoying it so much that I just played along and enjoyed the awareness. I suppose by not really doing much with my conciousness and leaving much of the dream as was, I might have avoided waking myself up early. I've also had dreams which I would call a sort of half lucid. I am not aware that I am dreaming, but at the same time I am attempting to forcefully exert my own will in the dream. It's like the concious mind is being engaged without realizing it. The first time I can remember it happening, someone tried to hurt me in a dream. Understand, that even in nightmares, I always have a level playing field. I've been hurt or defeated in a dreams only twice I think. I'll have god like intuition if I need it. Anyway, instead of being attacked, my mind seemed to give form to anger. Just up and created a guy with a huge sword out of thin air to cut the would be assailent into pieces a la laser grid. I'll never forget the feeling of that happening, though I can't really describe it. It did however wake me up quite quickly. Another time was trying to fly. Again, it's hard to describe. I was trying to fly, with conscious will trying to alter the dream to allow this and with limited success, but I managed to do it without becoming aware that I was dreaming. However, much like my first and third lucid dreams, exerting conscious will on my dream world like this starts the ball rolling on the wake up phase, and I woke up maybe 30 seconds later. Of course, an alternate interpretation would be that I was already waking up, which is why I was actively trying to alter the dream world. One thing that does make me hesitate though, now that I have gone through it, is sleep paralysis. At the time, I thought it was actually a lucid nightmare. I never actually tried to move, so I didn't notice that I couldn't, but essentialy what happened was my eyes opened and I noticed that my bed was sliding across the floor into my closet. Not enjoying the situation at all, all I wanted was to wake up, since I thought I was asleep. I also go the true to form malevolent presence, which is why I never tried to move. I realized that if I was dreaming, whatever I thought up was going to become manifest, and that I did not want to see what was behind me, nor did I want to close my eyes and open them again. It didn't last long, and under the assumption that I had willed myself to wake up, I took a minute to get a drink and a deep breath, and tried to go to sleep again. When the exact same thing happened, I decided that I didn't need to sleep that badly and didn't try again for another hour. I do however normally sleep with a sleep mask, to counter the ever increasing number of objects in my life with little charging lights, and any light that gets through my curtains at night. This does solve my largest fear with sleep paralysis which is that I might actually see whatever my mind can cook up, because I know that in that state, the only things I will create in my own mind will be whatever I least want to see at that time. It's like a custom horror movie. As I suppose another counter, I also like an audio distraction when I sleep, so I also have a head band with little speakers in it running the feed of any familiar show all night, so that should cut down on auditory hallucinations. Actually, that brings me to one more half lucid state, and that's when your ears never 'turn off', and instead feed everything you really hear into your dream. I think most people experience at some point with the alarm, where instead of waking up, they hear it in the dream. I once had a dream, that for the life of me I can't remember more than bits and pieces of, that took place to a family guy episode. I don't know if my brain managed to create an entire alternate coherent story or not, just that all the spoken lines made sense to me at the time. I also remember that the entire dream took place on an aircraft carrier.

If you have the engines there with you, then for sure using all 4 is going to be more efficient. The further you are from the optimal point for a burn, the more fuel is wasted. I'm unsure at what point it becomes really noticeable, I just know the math works out that way. However, if you really want to get into the math, you would want to look at the wasted fuel from a slower rate of acceleration using two engines versus the delta v lost to the additional weight of using 4. Without looking at the numbers, the heavier the rest of the ship, the less difference an extra engine or two makes. A very small ship with a bank of engines resembling the back of Tantive IV (ship Darth Vader is chasing at the start of Star Wars), the weight of the engines is wasteful. If you have a veritable star destroyer and a single engine on the back, that's a problem too.

I still fly to the Mun and land at the arch (favorite landing spot, like having something to look at) without nodes. Heck, sometimes for old times sake I don't even bother orbiting, and just go in a strait line (strait lines being relative of course, in this case to my rocket). I still know where the Mun needs to be to do that.

The fun for me is in over designing my rockets (so that they can handle things I didn't foresee, which happens often), and if worst comes to worst, the challenge of creating a rescue vehicle, which presumably has to be better than whatever vehicle got someone stranded in the first place. I've mounted a rescue a few times, and killed kerbals even more. But I don't leave them behind, they all have a ticket home, or one is on the way.

If you want to see crippling load times, go play Sims 3 (with as many expansions as possible). I've seen it take about 5 minutes to get into the game, and loading certain parts of it lead to load times that can be north of 30 seconds (that you get to go through twice if you go to another page). It's so bad it actually prevents from even wanting to try it, because having reading material at the computer desk would seem to be an integral part of the gaming experience. Granted, the computer I saw it happen to isn't the fastest (I think a 5400rpm HDD). But then, my primary is 5700 (secondary 5400), so yeah, not even going to consider that.

A memory stick is a very easy way to reduce load times. It's not as fast as an SSD, but it's several times faster than an HDD. KSP is not very big, so it's easy to fit it, and a few other games on there if you like for reduced loading time. Your gpu still has to work through all the conversions, but that doesn't take nearly as long as reading the initial textures.