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Randox

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Everything posted by Randox

  1. Winter is starting with a bang in Eastern Canada. The weather is a bit hilarious with the dramatic temperature shifts (were foretasted to go from -11 to +10 inside 24 hours), and it's too windy, but the abundance of early snow is quite atmospheric. The chances of a white Christmas look good, and I'll get around to resenting the snow in the new year, as per usual.
  2. IVA is the obvious choice for most people because VR IVA would be about as close as any of us will ever get to flying a real rocket. Also, for the IVA view would be a lot more viable as a means of actually controlling the ship with a motion controlled camera so that we can actually see the information displays. TrackIR would also work, but at that point, why not just go whole hog and do VR. In any event, VR KSP would probably be enough to get me to actually give VR a shot. It's one of very few games I play that I feel would benefit enough from VR (from any view, but mostly IVA) to actually get me excited about a technology that wants nothing but to give everyone motion sickness. I'm still not sure why games need to be made for VR though. All the information for rendering 3D already exists in the output, it simply needs to be rendered differently (which is a solution for hardware and drivers). All the game developer needs to do is allow the camera to be controlled by head movement, which should not be hard. I assume I am missing something.
  3. I checked my local rules, and I'd love to see exactly how the law describes it, but yellow is indeed taken to mean stop. Running the yellow is a bigger issue for intersections that rely on the yellow to facilitate most or all of the left turns during heavy traffic. People running yellows can mean that only one car can make it through the left turn, instead of the 2 or 3 common to larger intersections during the light change.\ We have no transition back to green in Canada, but we also put traffic lights on the far side of the intersection, so anyone at the front can just look at the lights for another direction (or the pedestrian lights) and see what is happening.
  4. The problem is current. It's the same reason national power grids use step up and down transformers rather than sending everything at the desired end voltage. For a given wattage, as voltage goes down, current goes up. The natural resistance of the power line causes some of that current to be lost as heat, and as the wire heats up, it becomes more resistant to the flow of electricity. Assuming the wire doesn't fail, this means that a given wire can only carry so much current at a particular voltage, with higher voltages also driving higher currents. You can use multiple parallel wires to combat the issue, which is absolutely done as well, but it still made sense to make use of the 12V line, since it is more effecient, and can be easily stepped down by the motherboard and GPU.
  5. VEE-toll I've yet to hear it pronounced any other way. My favourite though is STOVL. STOW-vole is fun to say.
  6. You may want to take a look at a guide, like this one. It goes through CoL vs CoM placement, engine placement and angle (for asymmetric thrust), wing placement and angle, angle of incidence, and landing gear type and placement. The problem with planes that naturally want to nose up is that they aren't self stabilising, at least not in the vertical plane, and will actually want to nose up and over so that they are flying backwards . The Centre of Lift always wants to be behind the Centre of Mass; like a Wind Vane (same principle really). The further the separation between the CoM and CoL, the more stable the plane will become, since you are effectively creating a longer lever on which the forces that keep the plane flying forwards are acting. At the same time, you will need more control authority to counter the effects of gravity, which increases drag (and if you don't have enough control authority, can make it difficult to pull up out of a dive). You can also play around with the settings on the control surfaces themselves, including putting them on at an angle.
  7. That's a pretty amazing thing to do. Seriously. I was born with a birth defect that means there is a very real chance that if I live a long life, I could live long enough to see my own renal system retire early. Donating a Kidney is giving someone else a new lease on life, and too many people are in need. I feel the same way about donating blood, having benefited from a transfusion myself (unrelated, probably saved my life). My hat goes off to you
  8. I really like the idea of trying to erase the distinction between mobile and console gaming. Seems like it would be a really nice convenience to have, the sort of thing I would have loved when I was a kid (like being able to take the console with me in the car to finish up whatever I was doing), and could even be handy now (other people want to use the TV, so I can just take the thing to another room. The focus on being able to make that transition as seamlessly as possible also seems to have eliminated the change of using the second screen and it's touch abilities in obnoxious ways, which I consider a win. It also does more to separate itself from PC gaming. Even laptops don't offer the kind of freedom this thing looks to be able to provide (I can't be the only person who likes to lie down while mobile gaming. Try playing a game on a laptop while holding it upside down above your face). It's the first console I've seen since the Wii that I actually might like to own.
  9. At the risk of being a cliche, I do a lot of thinking in the shower. Somewhat less cliched, I also do some of my best thinking while driving (especially night driving). I find both activities to be deeply calming, and they give my mind the freedom to wander and get some serious thinking done without the risk of falling asleep.
  10. Not sure I can help with specific songs, at least, not for background music. I did maintain a playlist for a while, but it's mostly high energy songs since I was normally listening to it during launches, or playing World of Tanks. That said, you might try Solstice and maybe Lovers. Your best bet though is probably to just go to a channel like NCS and play all for an hour or so while playing KSP. That will quickly expose you to a lot of different artists and you can see if there is one who might have a few suitable songs you like. Also, since it doesn't seem to get too amped up, try Fade.
  11. Saw NCS mentioned. Like a lot of their stuff. There is also Royal Trax. I'll also point directly to my personal favourite artist whose work is on NCS: K-391 (I think all his stuff on that channel is free).
  12. I actually just opened it up to take a look. The wiggle issue may be a 'me' problem, where basically I expect there to be absolutely no play at all, and that just might be asking too much from a $35 joystick. It just doesn't feel 'tight' to me. Also, like my wireless controller, the buttons are numbered starting at 1 even though every game ever made registers controller buttons starting at 0 But for all my whinging, it has been well worth the money. I needed a joystick, and it has worked beautifully. It's not the best stick ever made, but it's a solid buy for the money, and it gets the job done.
  13. I have one. It's a fair joystick, and I can't argue with the price (that is why I bought it). I got mine to play DCS world and it has worked find for that. That said, mine has been a little loose since the day I bought it, having just enough wiggle to the left to register as an input, which would be super annoying in a game like KSP where flying arrow strait for long periods of time is very important. That might be something I can fix on my end, and it may just be a defect in my particular joystick. I also get a kick out of the throttle, which seems to have been installed backwards. I always have to invert the axis so that I push the throttle forward to increase it (which is logical to me), rather than pulling it back, which seems to be how it was designed.
  14. I liked it just a hair more when there was no alternative to the centrifuge, and the line was never more than 15 minutes, and usually 5 Fantastic ride though. I always enjoy visiting there though. It's been a favorite vacation destination for my family for a long time.
  15. That's fair, and I should have qualified that better. What I mean is that if you are new to realistic or simulator modes, you probably aren't going to shoot many people down at first. For myself, I like realistic a lot more than arcade, but I've never played it enough to get very good at it. I've shot people down, and I've been shot down many more times
  16. 105C is the throttling point for your GPU. The temperature isn't rising any higher only because your graphics card is automatically taking steps such as lowering the internal clock rate to reduce power consumption and heat output. There is a second thermal limit, probably a couple of degrees hotter, that if reached should cause the GPU to immediately shut down to prevent permanent damage (this usually only happens in cases like the GPU fan failing). While running computer hardware against the thermal limit should not cause any permanent damage that would cause the hardware to malfunction, you will cause the transistors on the circuit board to degrade much faster than normal, shortening the lifespan of your computer. To be clear, all computer hardware will eventually fail. Running at excessively high temperatures will only cause hardware to fail sooner; at least in the case of printed circuit boards. For interest, the generally agreed upon safe maximum temperature to run computer processors (CPU and GPU) at seems to be around 80C. Above 80, the damage to the lifetime of your computer can become noticeable. At the end of the day, if your computer is getting that hot, something is wrong with your computer. Fans failed or being blocked, dust caked into the heat sinks, a bad thermal paste job, whatever. Waiting for your room to be a little cooler isn't likely to help, since you don't know what the actual equilibrium temperature is now (since your computer is throttling to artificially lower it). Even if it is maxing out naturally at 103, cooler weather is only going to bring that down to what? 98? You need to fix the underlying issue, whatever it may be.
  17. As I remember it, the American and German planes all broadly tend towards Boom'n'Zoom fighting, while the Japanese are pretty much pure turn fighters (the Americans have one or two turn fighters as well, but I can't remember which on. P-47 maybe?). For the Brits, the Spitfires are turn fighters, but Hurricans and Typhoons are more biased towards energy fighting like the Americans. Also, I think they list some altitude stats don't they? A lot of the earlier American planes for example are complete and utter garbage at any significant altitude if I remember correctly, and I think some of the British planes have the same issues. Keep in mind, if you are playing arcade mode...none of this really matters. The flight models in arcade are so washy washy that basically everything except the non Beaufighter attack planes can do anything. By that I mean that energy fighting (BnZ) is basically impossible in arcade, because things like the zeros and spitfires can just stand on WEP and they'll basically accelerate to match you in seconds. By the same token, you can totally out dogfight a spitfire in a P40, or fly circles around one in an F2A. I don't know which mode you are in though. If you get shot down every time you engage a plane, that sounds like realistic, and that is expected. As a thought, if you are playing without mouse controls, particularly in realistic mode, take a plane out in arcade mode with mouse controls on and pay attention to how the computer flies for you. Turning a fighter using only the ailerons and elevators is wrong. You must use the rudder as well, or you'll scrub speed in your turns, which is bad for all combat styles. If you go in the cockpit on any plane with a slip indicator, it's really easy to compensate; you simply turn the rudder to zero out the slip indicator (I think most of these planes have that indicator. It's honestly been so long I can't remember if I just had to wing it). Also, never make a level turn in a dogfight. It's harder to explain without pictures, but basically you can execute a tight turn by flying up for the first half of the turn, and then going back down through the second half to end up at the same altitude. It's sort of the flying equivalent of banked turns on a race track. I think they have a wiki with a bunch of maneuvers on it. Some of them are extremely useful.
  18. I've overheated mine more than once getting into orbit. Something like 1,600 m/s around I guess 30-40km seems to do the trick. Can't say I ever thought to note the speed and altitude (so I am totally guessing), I just know that if my rocket lights the air on fire and keeps accelerating for long enough, I'll get a heat warning on the fairing about 10 seconds before it explodes. I now refrain from hitting 'air on fire speeds' on ascent, since I figure that wasn' great for fuel economy anyway, so it's not happened to me in a while.
  19. Runescape. RuneScape updated a few years back to a whole new combat and user interface system, and it's the worst combination of not being able to find the options you want, and not even knowing that certain options exist. There is a method to the madness I suppose once you are used to it, but I still find that options tend to be poorly organized. Most of them are scattered through poorly organized menu windows, while others exist entirely as little buttons in the game UI that don't have obvious connections to the UI elements that host them. It's also cluttered with a lot of the promotional stuff that currently helps fund the game with falling user count, which includes fewer paying members, and those elements aren't neatly sorted into their own thing, but infringe upon the main game UI as well. I also worked retail for a bit for a company that was primarily a warehouse distributor, and so their system was built on warehouse management software. It made sense, since that accounted for almost the entire company, and it was great for it's intended purpose (stuff like ordering things from our other warehouses, or dealing with purchase orders was super easy), but it was something of a nightmare for point of purchase retail use, since the system just wasn't designed to rapidly process small orders, nor did it have any native ability to integrate with things like bar code readers or swipe card readers directly. Instead, we were just using those tools to input text strings into appropriate boxes directly. It was compounded by an esoteric product database full of items we hadn't carried in more than a decade and various naming schemes, so every time we had to deal with items that lacked barcodes it was an adventure. Gift cards were the worst though, since they couldn't be integrated with the system at all (I doubt the software designers ever anticipated that need), so we had to run that through a whole different program at the same time.
  20. I've yet to get into building surface bases, so here is the method I used (I prefer to simply fly fuel into orbit these days, by my operation stands ready to be used again): To help guide me to my desired landing location, I use a small probe with a more detailed scanner and simply land it at my intended mining site. Planting flags works too. I picked this method because I can move it whenever I want. Now, here is the meat and potatoes of my mining operation (all the solar pannels are folded because I was docking, but you can see the big arrays on the bottoms ships engine pods, and radially on both ends of the station): The docked ship on the left side is a crew ferry there to move crew around and top off its tanks. You can ignore it. Docked on the bottom is my mining rig. The design could probably still use some improving, or I could make a clone of that central fuel tank that can hold entirely liquid fuel for the nuclear engines. Anyway, unlike most people, I don't refine on the surface because the ISRU is really heavy and I don't use a dedicated ground structure because I'm not that confident in my ability to land on a ground based facility without breaking things. Might try that some day, but for now, I use the drilling rig itself to ferry raw ore back up into orbit. Fully loaded, that rig is around 70 tonnes, hence the 2 tonne RCS fuel tank under the command pod and all the linear RCS ports. The station itself acts as an orbital refinery and fuel depot. While not as efficient as refining the fuel on the ground and not carrying around the weight of those drills, the ship can still pull more than enough ore into orbit to refuel itself and still fill up the station tanks, though I believe it's only about 50% efficient. This method is also a holdover from when I was using the Kethane mod, which was like ore but much faster and had more parts. In Kethane, my mining rig carried a small inefficient refinery that it used to top off it's own tanks on the surface, while using a bigger more efficient refinery in orbit to convert fuel solely for the orbiting base. Maybe someday I'll see if someone made an mini ISRU I could use, or build one myself. Or maybe I'll learn to land on things. Who knows! Anyway, as I said, I normally just fly the fuel into orbit back at Kerbin. I would only resort to mining around other planets. The current rocket that will be launching all my current explorations to other planets arrives in orbit with 1 and a half empty Kerbodyne 14400 tanks, and they need to be at least partially refueled to reach the further planets and return with my current designs, and that's just not a practical scale for refining. Works well for smaller ships that only need to return to Kerbin, or may only be designed to jump between a planet and it's moons.
  21. Tweaked the plane I was working on before. The main wings were massively oversized before, and looked dumb, so I redesigned them, and then put some angle on them for giggles. Shrinking the main wings allowed me to change the tail back to the parts I was originally using. I'm not sure it looks better, but the spade tail was certainly not conventional, and this version has more maximum control authority. Even with the reduced lift, it can still stay airborne at speeds at least as low as 70 m/s, with the landing flaps down. Probably the easiest plane to land I have ever come up with, doubly so now that the wingtips have been raised.
  22. I actually thought they already did, and that was why all the cockpits carry something like 15-30 mono propellant (I don't think they always have). I seem to remember reading something about that a while back. I've never paid attention to it though, so I'm not 100% sure. It's never been an issue for me.
  23. I have the same problem. I've actually had to abort missions because I did something wrong or out of order, and ended up close to the target, but not close enough, and the lines all end up so close to each other that I can't clearly see what is going on. I can also never tell which of the intercept indicators belong to which ship, which is...frustrating. Mostly I just rely on the fact that once I am in my grove and following procedure properly, I can usually count on at least a 700m intercept if not better, and that's usually close enough to make a linear approach, then sort out the actual docking. The worst part is I probably used to be better at this, in the days when I was preparing for docking ports to be added. Fewer tools to help me. That said, I was docking much lighter ships with a lot more control authority as well, so they were easier to chase from the 1-2km range. The stuff I am docking now just isn't up to that.
  24. Love this. It's been a great crash course/refresher for me, and reminds me of all the tools I have at my disposal to make planes better. I also wasn't sure that things like dihedral wings would actually make much of a difference, but I think I need to give that a shot. I'm currently ignoring my space program to construct a nice little set of planes, and this has given me some great ideas for making better designs.
  25. Correct me if I am wrong, but it looks like the 4 markings on each end of the runway are symmetrical to each others. The markers aren't equally spaced, but both ends of the runway are identical. It's only the middle(ish) 3 markings that are clearly not centered on the middle of the runway. I'd say the right most of that group seems to be in the middle of the runway, while the other two seem to be lined up with the other two access roads. So no, the markers clearly don't obey Earth rules, but they don't seem to be random either. The markings at each end of the runway are consistent with each other, so it seems reasonable to conclude that they do have meaning, while the markings in the center of the runway may have an entirely different meaning relating to access roads, or may be equivalent landing guides for planes that don't need the full length runway (guides for planes landing around halfway. Or has been suggested, maybe they didn't bother repainting everything when you upgrade. Also, I do wish the Runway followed the curve of the planet. It occurs to me that by making it linear the way they have, the runway actually falls away from you while your trying to land, since it is effectively lower in the middle. Besides, runways in real life don't seem to be level either, I've seen plenty of them that were clearly built over gently rolling hills with seemingly no effort whatsoever to level the terrain first. Besides, landing gear is so tough that I have literally hit the ground hard enough to explode the top level runway without doing any damage to my aircraft (today, in 1.1, with no problems placing landing gear whatsoever).
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