Randox

Getting back into the game with a fresh space program (but with a nice boost by importing many of my 1.2.2 builds). The first task was sprucing up my crew recovery plane, the Saguha. The genesis for this project was my desire to have a plane in KSP that actually flys and functions somewhat like a real plane I use it to air drop a rover for crews that land in rough terrain, which can then ferry kerbals to wherever the Saguha managed to land. The remodel consisted of trading in the 6 small jet engines for a pair of Goliaths, bigger landing gear, and a rework of the auxilary control surfaces (air brakes, spoilers, flaps). Stall speed is down to around 65 m/s. By firing the spoilers while flaring, I've been able to achieve controlled landings down to around 50 m/s (fairly hard landings, but it works). More tense have been preparations for interplanetary missions. True to tradition, I have placed a station in orbit over Kerbin to serve as a docking hub and staging area for craft that need to be assembled or refueled in space. A couple of things were overlocked, such as a probe core to manage the station in the event it wasn't crewed. The first craft I sent up for a mission to Duna was a fuel tank, which is just a Kerbodyne S3 tank with a couple liquid rocket boosters and an RCS system bolted on. The stations large solar panels are fairly close to the standard docking ports, the idea being I would retract them as needed. Except I had no one in space to do that. It's a tight fit: That shot was taken by the Kerbal I sent up to take control of the station. In case the perspective of the shot is making it unclear, that fuel tank is larger than the rest of the station (it's about the same length with the nose cap, and much wider). The boosters provide an impressive 230 dV. Enough for a burn to match orbits with the station and not much else (refilled, I think they get enough dV to deorbit the empty fuel tank though). And leading off the Duna mission is an interplanetary relay system. Each relay will place itself in a highly eliptical polar orbit, one above and the other bellow the orbital plane. The mission itself will have to be manned, as Duna will be on the far side of Kerbol when my ships arrive as I don't have relays on other planets yet, but it's nice to get this set up while the window is open. This picture is actually of the relays deployed for Kerbin itself. These relays keep Kerbin's moons from blocking the signal to other planets, as well as provide signals for craft orbiting Kerbin's moons at medium to high altitude. These relays are named 'Hyperion' because I think when joined together on the carrier it kind of looks like an orbital death ray.

A few years back when it was announced that docking ports were coming to the game, I decided to get a head start on practicing orbital rendezvous (before maneuver nodes mind). Since ships couldn't actually dock yet, the plan was to get two craft right next to each other and do a crew exchange. To complete this mission, I launched two very different craft. The first was an unmodified, 3 person, Munar Lander. This craft launched first with the objective of achieving a perfectly circular 100km orbit around Kerbin, well within its capabilities. Because it was a purpose built Munar Lander, it did not feature an RCS system. That will be very important in a moment. The second craft launched was a small on man craft built for this mission, and was to perform the actual rendezvous. Naturally, it featured a fairly beefy RCS system. Like the Munar Lander, it was designed to jettison the entire engine assembly for landing. Again, this will be important. The first launch went off without a hitch. The craft made it to orbit without issue, and easily put itself in a near perfect orbit 100km above the equator. The second launch too was uneventful. The launch was reasonably well timed, with the second craft inserting less than a quarter orbit behind the larger lander it was to meet at 90km to catch up. Thing proceeded according to plan from there. The small craft quickly closed the gap on the larger, and at the appropriate time burned to establish orbit at 100km. I briefly switched to the larger craft as I was waiting reach Ap for my circularization burn to make sure it was ready, and quickly switched back to the small craft, hit space to start the circularization burn, and watched helplessly as the engines I had just jettisoned floated away. This was a problem. There was no way a rescue craft was going to be able to match an eccentric orbit of 90-100km, and the craft had no way to get itself back into the atmosphere. The fully crewed Munar lander floating 2km away was the only help the pilot was going to get. Judging the 2km between craft in unsynchronized orbits to be highly risky for an EVA, the crew of the Lander decided that their craft would have to make the rendezvous itself. In a ~15 tonne lander without an RCS system. Without lateral thrust to provide course corrections, and a limited rotational speed, it took several attempts before the lander was able to get itself within 500m and reasonably stationary, and a quick check of the orbits confirmed this wouldn't last very long. The stranded pilot, who I'm pretty sure was Jeb, quickly went on EVA and flew over to the lander that was to rescue him, grabbing onto the ladder running the length of one side. This presented a new problem. The Lander was not equipped to support a fourth Kerbal, and establishing a circular orbit to wait for rescue could put everyone in danger. Or at least make them uncomfortable. A daring plan was put into action instead. The lander was basically a 3 man pod ontop of a standard fuel tank, to which the lander gear was attached. There was a parachute on the lander nose and a decoupler between the command pod and fuel tank. Attached radially to the fuel tank were 4 smaller diameter fuel tanks, providing some extra fuel, and mounting points for the 4 LV-N engines that propelled the lander. Each of these engine pods was topped with a chute. Two had drogue chutes, and two had parachutes. Usual landing procedure was to cut the engine chutes and jettison the entire engine assembly prior to landing. This was going to be interesting. The burn was made to bring the craft out of orbit; gently, to keep Jeb from sliding off the craft, and on a shallow trajectory. The landing gear was deployed and the engines used as much as possible to keep the speeds down, though decelaration had to be carefully managed so that Jeb didn't slide off the craft (I set the engines to a low burn and took control of Jeb through this part, and had him climb the ladder whenever he slid down too much). Once that was done, the drogue chutes were deployed very high up to stabalize the craft, and again, and the engines were pushed closer to full power to scrub speed (again, I would have to periodically take control of Jeb and move him back up the ladder). Parachutes were deployed one at a time at high altitude to minimize the chance Jeb would get ripped off the craft. Against all odds, all the chutes managed to deploy and open with Jeb still hanging on for dear life. The ship was coming in over water to help cushion the blow, and facilitate the crux of the plan. Jeb's chances of surviving the actual landing if still attached to the ship were not good. The craft simply didn't have enough parachutes and thrust to assure a safe impact speed. It could be done in theory, but had never been tested from orbit before. Instead, the crew killed the engines at 100m, and I took control of Jeb and had him jump off around 20m from the water, narrowly avoiding being hit by the lander which splashed down a moment later and promptly broke into several pieces. Another short story of a very close call. I am prone to underestimating the gravity on the Mun when I haven't landed there in a while. One such time when I was landing there for the first time in a while, I inadvertently left the deceleration burn quite late. As I watched the speed and altitude indicators, I started to get pretty worried that I hadn't started the burn early enough, and switched from burning retrograde to a strait radial burn. Turns out it was the right call. By the time it started to gain altitude it was so low it was barely able to clear hill it was screaming towards with a lateral speed north of 250 m/s. I figure that if I had more than a couple seconds slower switching to a radial burn, that ship would have been a pancake.

A long time ago I used to mount some of my fuel radially to reduce the length of my rockets, because the old aero model was stupid and bendy rockets are hard to fly. Some designs used the radial fuel tanks as mounting points for struts to add additional rigidity. And who can forget the tilt rotor quad copter from my brief foray into VTOL aircraft. I kept this version of the game along with the mods I'm using here. The engines rotate 90 degrees. Level flight requires around a 30 degree pitch from the engines unloaded. Grappling from the air is incredibly difficult and tedious, and only works with the electromagnet winch, which requires more power than I can supply, limiting how long loads can be carried (guess how I found that out). Standard procedure is to land next to the payload and attach a suchtion cup manually. The point where the winch goes tight is...exciting. So is landing with a heavy payload. I miss having this thing in my normal space program though. It's incredibly manoeuvrable and fun to fly.

I've flow United a bit, and it's been alright. Most of the problems I've had are the fault of the airport, not the airline (like holding us at the gate until our pilots reach their maximum hours and have to cancel the flight, or Montreal Airport's apparent ban on staff happiness or manners).

I hated the Q episodes as a child. I'd never choose to rewatch any of them. I do believe the actor did a great job with the character though. I think I hate Q episodes for largely for the same reason I hate most of the time travel and story episodes, or the holodeck episodes from Voyager. It's a way for the writers to do basically a completely different kind of show. Except, I tuned in to watch star trek, not a show about an evil space wizard tormenting helpless people for no apparent reason, and oh, the helpless people happen to be the cast of star trek? I also plain don't like Q. He's a nonstop prick. I dislike him far too much to allow the writers to make me feel any sympathy for him. The only Q episode I remotely enjoyed was the one where they had weapons that could kill Q's. Granted, sometimes these types of episodes do work for me, but I think only in comedies. Tearjerker is easily one of my favorite episodes of American Dad, for example. Community has some that I like too, including the only bottle episode I've ever loved.

It's too plain for my taste. It can work great if you have the right parts to show off, but your really getting into form over function territory I think. Especially if you didn't want your computer to thermal throttle watching youtube. Besides, by making it all about the stuff inside the case, you miss out on making the case part of the show. But then, I still like the look of my Phantom 410 and think all rectangular cases are kinda ugly. It needs weird angles dammit! But, to each their own. As I said, I still champion the Phantom, so who am I to judge In my defence, it looks sort of like a stormtrooper helmet, which goes really well with the stormtrooper decorations all around it.

Rise of the Tomb Raider come to mind, with the caveat that it has serious aliasing issues that will require a beefy graphics card to overcome (the solution is SSAA and/or 4k resolution in an already demanding game). Tomb Raider has that hair simulation which is a nice touch, and it does a lot of nice work with lighting. Far Cry 3 and 4. Excellent foliage in particular, and explosions. Skyrim, not for the graphics, but the landscape design. With the right mods to bring the look closer to the level of the world design, there are some truly breathtaking places of beauty in that game (I'm a sucker for waterfalls). And GTA V.

I always assumed that Americans had Boxing day...huh. I mean, we adopted Black Friday, how have American's not adopted Boxing Day? Oh, and stores don't actually open here on Boxing Day, so the Boxing Day sales occur on the 27th, so I guess that actually does kind of make the 26th a proper second day of Christmas.

Always. The preparation has lost some of the magic for me over the years to be sure (I'm not jumping up and down to decorate the tree), but Christmas itself is as enjoyable as it's ever been. In a first for me I'll actually be visiting on Christmas day rather than being visited (and of course it's going to be a stormy day). There are 3 pop radio stations where I live, and for the last few years one of them switches over to Christmas music for December while the other two largely avoid Christmas music right up until Christmas Day. I think it's a really good way of handling it since it gives you that choice of what you want to listen to, and clearly there are enough people either way for the stations to stay profitable under that arrangement. How does that work? Like would you normally divide the gifts into two batches? Two Christmas Dinners? Here in Canada and the US we follow up Christmas with Boxing Day, because the day after Christmas isn't too early to start buying new things (the best sales of the year are on Boxing Day). In fairness, Boxing day is often used to visit people you didn't have a chance to see on Christmas, but it's not exactly a 'second Christmas'.

It's not up there, but I think the F-14 would have to be in the run for the best looking (it's the prettiest of the variable geometry designs if you ask me). From the ones on the list, I'm going with the Su 27 (and it's derrivatives) largely because I like the control and information display systems the Sukoi craft use. It's also stupidly maneuverable. From playing DCS world I find the Su planes are better at displaying the most critical information clearly and concisely which is good when things go sideways, though sometimes a bit painful in ordinary use. I think the less advanced/informative computers would be a disadvantage without AWACS support though.

OBS has options for GPU recording like ReLive/ShadowPlay. As for reading model numbers... Nvidia GeForce GTX XYY/XXYY: The first number, X, (3 digits) or first two numbers, XX, (4 digits) is series. A GTX 770 is a 700 series because it starts with 7, while a GTX 1060 is a 10 series because it starts with 10 (it's not a 1000 series because reasons; just go with it). Cards from the same series share the same architecture, and generally corresponds to year of release. The last two numbers, YY, are the model. A GTX 770 is less powerful than a GTX 780 for example. Some cards have a Ti postfix, denoting extra performance. A 770 Ti would have performance between that of a 770 and a 780. Cards with an M postfix are mobile; you don't want one. Same for AMD. Some models, notably the GTX 1060, have a memory size prefix (3GB or 6GB). Aside from the different memory sizes, there are other, significant, differences. AMD recently (by which I mean like 4 years ago) changed their system, perhaps because it was too consistent and easy to understand. AMD R5/R7/R9/RX XYY: R# is performance tiers and doesn't really mean anything concrete. This is followed by a 3 digit number: XYY. X is the series. For example, an RX 480 is a 400 series card because the first number is 4. Cards from the same series are (usually) all based on the same architecture. The last 2 numbers, YY, are model, much like Nvidia. An RX 580 and RX 570 are from the same series and tier, but the 580 is the more powerful card. Some models of card have a memory size prefix like RX 480 4GB or RX 480 8GB. Like Nvidia, expect there to be other differences than just memory size (for the RX 480, memory clock speed is different, and may not be overclockable to match the 8GB version). AMD HD XYZZ: HD XYZZ X is series. Cards from the same series (usually) have the same architecture. As above, this also generally corresponds to year of release. YZZ is model, where ZZ basically serves the same function as the Ti postfix. An HD 7970 is more powerful than a 7950, and both are more powerful than a 7850. I think there are a few instances of memory postfixes here too. Lastly, there are top tier cards like Titan and Titan X from Nvidia, or R9 Fury/Fury X and Vega 56/64 cards from AMD. They don't correspond to the same naming conventions, and you'll actually need to look up their specifications and benchmarks to get any idea of where they fit into the picture.

I can't say I watch much Anime, but Sword Art Online would be my hands down favourite. I seem to recall making it through most or all of the first season instead of sleeping when I found it. Watched the second season over a couple of days. Then I kind of wanted to watch it again, so I showed it to my housemate who likewise got hooked. She watched the second arc of season 1 after I called it a night because she 'couldn't wait until tomorrow night'. Anyway, this is one of my favourite scenes. It's the conclusion of I think the 4th episode. It's a bit of a spoiler for that episode, but doesn't spoil any major plot points. I think it does a pretty good job of summing up who the main character is.

Yeah, the first episode is...pretty bad. Frankly, I don't care a lot for the entire first season of Babylon 5. It has a lot of teething issues with the writing and acting, and it takes a very long time for the show to figure itself out and get a main plot going.

I think it might be Babylon 5, particularly seasons 2-4. I watched it for the first time maybe 4 years ago, and I loved it. The episode Severed Dreams (third season) is particularly awesome. More recently I've taken a real liking to iZombie and Dark Matter.

I've seen one of the episodes so far (the second one I think). Not sure what to think. The tone is very different. The Star Trek I'm familiar with put a lot of emphasis on understanding and looking at things from new points of view (I mostly watched TNG and Voyager, as well as the TOS movies). Peaceful resolution, mutual understanding, self defence. Not sure I'm going to get that with this show. I'm kind of biased against it though just from the visual design of Discovery itself. It's basically what the Constitution Class would look like if it were built by the Klingons, or if a Constitution and K't'inga had a baby. It's just...it's weird. It's more weird because the Federation and Klingons are at war, and as I understand it this isn't even an alternate universe. Oh, and there is a science ship from that era that with a modern look would actually be pretty cool (it's always been one of my favorites at least). It's the one from Wrath of Khan, the Miranda class. Given that the Akira class which was built to look like a warship has the same basic layout, I think they probably could have spruced the design up into something that would work for them.

Getting through the Churchill 7 to the Black Prince is an accomplishment That tank is flaming garbage, and had I not done the British heavies first, I'm not sure I ever would have gotten to the end of that line. But, I did do it first, and in all fairness, most tier 7 tanks in WoT are lemons anyway. There are some real standouts like the american T29, but I find the tier as a whole to be pretty meh. I go by SquareCanine in both games, and I'm on the North American WoT server.

I've tried it a couple times. I very much like the concept of Mechs, along with cool looking armour, but I've never really gotten into the game. I did have Mech Assault for Xbox. I've found the online game to be rather difficult to get used to. The gameplay is a bit fast, the UI a bit confusing, and the combat a bit disorienting. Not that I don't think I could get used to it if I really tried, but I'm already a big World of Tanks player, and not hot on the idea of putting in the time and energy to learn another game like that. Basically, I've put in my time and worked through the grind of one game already, and I don't really want to 'start over' in another game anymore. As far as designs go, I'd have to say the Summoner is easily one of my favourites from playing Mech Assault. It's not so much that it's particularly good, it just looks really cool.

I've played them all. I started in War Thunder, and was a tester for Ground Forces and World of Warships, but World of Tanks has easily become my favorite. I like cover based shooters in general, and World of Tanks is like a slower, more tactical version of that concept. World of Warships requires a bit more forethought than I usually bring to the table, and I'm simply not that good at War Thunder. I don't play either game enough to tolerate the grind very well, which discourages me from playing more often. In Tanks I recently picked up an IS-4 as my third tier 10 (I have a 215b and Centurion X as well). I don't feel the need to unlock things at a great pace anymore, and I find that more relaxing now. I play sporadically though, currently waiting on the next update since it should overhaul a lot of the British Tanks I'm fond of. This is the problem with update spoilers: I'm so sold on the future product that I'm just going to wait for that to come out

I was running two cards for a while, but I pulled the second card out for the summer for heat considerations, and because it was mostly making things complicated. In my case I was running two AMD cards. My main card is an RX 480, and I was running it alongside an HD 7950 as an independant second card. So, first problem is graphics drivers. Windows 10 (and I think Windows 8) don't allow you to install more than one set of graphics drivers. I discovered this when I tried to use an HD 6770 instead of the 7950. AMD drivers are sequential releases, each of which supports some range of cards. In the case of the 6770 and 480, there is no AMD graphics driver that supports both cards, so they cannot be used together in Windows 10. The 7950 though is one of the HD 7xxx cards that was rebranded for the R9 2xx series of cards, which makes it recent enough to still be supported in the most current drivers. Problem solved, though once support for the 7950 ends I would be forced to use an older driver to run the cards together. Second problem is how windows works. Windows will allow you to designate either graphics card as the Primary Graphics Adapter The primary graphics adaptor will, by default, do 100% of the rendering for every screen connected to the computer regardless of which GPU the monitor is actually plugged into, and there is a serious penalty for cross rendering (when one GPU renders the screen and sends it to another for display). Some programs, mostly games, allow you to select which graphics card to use. For all other programs, you have to set the desired GPU as primary before launch the program. The same situation exists for audio devices if you wanted to play background music over speakers while listening to game audio through headphones. As far as performance gains go...to my knowledge no DX 12 title exists that takes advantage of asyncronous GPU's. BUT, if like me you say, like to watch LP's on Twitch or Youtube while playing something like Euro Truck simulator then you can boost performance by having a different GPU take on each task. I could set my 7950 as primary, open Chrome, then set the 480 as primary and open up a game. Chrome is now using my weaker card, and whatever rendering it does will have no impact on my 480, which is now free to dedicate 100% of it's efforts towards my game of choice. In real terms though, video rendering was about all that ever got offloaded, and both of the cards I am using are more than strong enough to render videos while gaming. It was just a complicated way to use more power and interfere with airflow into my gaming card. There is also a small performance hit to both cards, the 480 in particular, since my CPU only has 16 PCIe 3 lanes (so installing a second GPU cuts both down to 8 lanes. It's enough to potentially shave 3-4 fps off the 480).

I went with Eve for two reasons. First, it looks cool. Love the purple. Second, it's a big tease. The risk of being unable to return to orbit is too great for a manned mission, so I'm forever stuck sending down various probes, planes, and rovers, but never sending down a Kerbal to actually walk on the surface and plant a flag. The surface is so close, yet out of reach; at least for me. My favourite body though is Laythe. Laythe is prettier than Eve, and jet engines work there, which is nice for exploration.

No; antennas have no direction based restrictions in the stock game. f you want to add some realism for your own enjoyment, relays should of course have more than one dish, though you may prefer to use one relay and multiple direct antennas to get the desired look without monstrous power requirements (relay antennas use a lot of power, and if you have more than one they all get used whenever another probe is communicating through that relay. This is particularly problematic around bodies like Jool where sunlight is weak). Alternately, you can imagine the single dish relay rotating to re transmit signals back and forth. I'm not sure why the connection strength would be off for the second relay. My best guess is that you have plasma interference turned on and the communication path was through the atmosphere of Kerbin for the second relay (I think that would do it. A lot of my probes loose connection at high altitude during launch briefly until I extend a longer range antenna and I think it's due to plasma interference in the atmosphere).

I decided to do an easy mission and go scan Minmus for a laugh, mostly because I wanted to work on rover design. It's obviously been a while since I did something like this or I would have remembered that the only reason you drive a rover on Minmus is because you hate yourself. What a nightmare. The rover is quite back heavy, which is on me; that's a legitimate design flaw. In my defence, it drove like a dream on Kerbin. On Minmus, I had to disable the rear motors to prevent the thing from just flipping onto it's back, and as it is keeping traction on the front wheels is an issue. It also stops like a freight train, but that's mostly a gravity issue. I think it would be happier on the Mun all things considered, even if that is pretty pointless (Minmus is the only body on which I would consider mining). Given the balance issue, I think I would retune the suspension though. I loosened the springs up for Minmus, but given the propensity for loosing front traction I think it needs a fairly stiff rear end to hold it stable if it does a wheelie. The rearward balance is also an admitted boon for braking. I had to bias the brakes quite hard to the back since despite the imbalance, the rover has proved quite capable of doing a stoppie when using brakes and reverse motors. Anyway, I plan on either moving this one to the Mun, or just putting it back in orbit and sending out a new one for giggles. These missions do have an end goal; I have every intent of sending these scanner/rover vehicles to some other moons once the launch windows come up. Yeah. Normally I would have them docked too, but I wanted that extra seperation to make sure there would be no cliping at the time of seperation. I've never used a separator before, and was worried about excessive decoupling force messing up the orbits, not about the seperator totally failing to do its job

This was yesterday, but I couldn't load up the image. Finally got around to launching a pair of Polar Orbit comm satellites for Kerbin (I've just relied on the Mun not blocking the signal in the past). However, I can't help but feel that the launch vehicle for the relays kind of looks like some sort of planetary Death Ray. If I were a better phtographer, I would have captured the 'red eye' on the SAS module that's visible between the two relay dishes from the front. I also learned that the TR-2C Stack Separator that is just barely visible, sandwiched between two junior docking ports, is not actually strong enough to separate said docking ports (at least, not using default force levels). Instead, the relays had to free themselves via the very Kerbal method of using SAS to roll forward so they can use the relay dish as a lever to get the docking ports out of range (for clarity, the docking port magnets were so strong that after blowing the explosive bolts the separator just got stuck between the two docking ports as they tried to mate with each other). I also launched a synchronous relay around the equator after discovering that the extra DSN stations on Kerbin don't cover the poles from a near orbit. At 6.5 tonnes, it's probably the heaviest relay I'll ever have, despite also likely being the shortest range. I realized while placing it that all the SAS systems were located on the booster stage, so decided to leave the booster system attached for attitude control. Oops.

I had a lot of fun building a plane that air drops a crew recovery rover for landed missions, then finds a safe place to land. Load the rover back on and take everyone home. I even use it from time to time if I land close enough to KSC. Mostly I find planes the fun of they can actually do something. Retrieve crew, gather science, stuff like that.

Ha, I like the car wash. I have a plane in my fleet designed for crew recovery. For craft that have landed in terrain where the plane can't land it air drops a rover to bring the crew to the landing site. I see no reason why the rover couldn't be dropped with a recovery crew and tools to dismantle the craft to be recovered. I also have this old quad tiltrotor design. It's equipped with a grapple for carrying cargo, so it could be used haul salvaged goods back to waiting transports, or even used in case of a water landing.