Randox

I've wanted to build a plane with a more conventional engine layout (not on the center line vertically) for a while now. After some experiments, I decided on this: It flies quite nicely. The top engines are throttled to around 70% to bring the center of thrust right in line with the center of mass, though the plane has a natural nose up tendency that requires 20-25% trim to counter, so I think I could increase the power a little more to fight that tendency, which will also give me some gains in efficiency and speed from the extra thrust and reduced drag. I'm still playing around with the action groups as well. The inboard and center ailerons are roll, and are also paired to extend in opposite directions to act as minor air brakes. The outboard ailerons are strictly for pairing with the center set, and both extend downwards to act as landing and takeoff flaps. The plane also has 4 full size air brakes to assist with landing, and emergency speed control while airborne. Lastly, between the air brakes and thrust reversers, as well as flying the plane with a 30% fuel load, it has a surprisingly short stopping distance. That said, this is not where I actually stopped on the island. This is just where I parked after rolling back with the reversers and changing my pants: No, when I stopped, the rear wheels were just past the dirt, and the front wheel had started down the hill. It was...a tense moment. But all worked out, and it even fits in the hanger: It still isn't perfect. There are some mass balancing issues I want to resolve, and I want the tail fin to be higher. I originally had it attached to the rudder, but it puts the center of lift way too high, and the plane will backflip on takeoff. Still, I think I can get them just bellow the engines. Oddly enough, when all is said and done, the rear engines might actually be angled up a bit (thrusting downward to lift the tail).

I don't see why you would need to block the hatches. Just deprive the prisoners of space suits and an interior route to the docking hub. This allows you to add new prisoners, and to release them when their sentence is up (or maybe they successfully appeal their conviction). In fact, you don't even need to isolate the prisoners internally (from administration/security, since presumably we aren't just locking people in a cage and forgetting about them, but running an actual prison), since that could require the use of incapacitating gasses just to conduct safe entry into the prisoner section. As long as there is a policy in place that all docked ships much detach immediately in event of a situation, even if prisoners take over the prison, they can't possibly escape. This is the idea behind Alcatraz, except even if you got a spacesuit, you still can't go anywhere without a ship. Presumably the prison would be assigned at least one or two armed patrol vehicles to defend it from this kind of rescue attempt. The connection between the prison and administration sections should also be easy to isolate, such as running it through a cargo bay that can be kept open to space whenever it's not being used. I don't think I'll build such a thing in KSP, but I might build a prison ship in space engineers sometime. That...could be interesting.

Apparently I forgot which key is my screenshot key...so that's a thing. Today I moved the landing gear on one of my small planes, and added a couple of air intakes to see if I could extend the altitude limit a bit, and apparently made it way less stable in the process. On the upside, it can now actually take off without driving off the end of the runway, which is nice because it was usually in a severe death wiggle by the time it got there (fishtailing about 30 degrees to each side very quickly, I don't know how it was surviving that). It might be time to send that one back to the drawing board. I also reached Duna for what is I think the first time I've gone interplanetary since version 1.0+, so I'm pretty happy with that. The central stack from my original launch stage ran out of fuel at the exact moment I circularized around Duna, which was awesome timing. Not really equipped to actually do anything there, didn't even think to bring some probes or anything, so yeah, I guess I'm just going home. Still, it's nice to take that plunge again rather than just planning out the missions and spending so much time testing my designs that I get bored before the actual mission. On the other hand, more testing might have resulted in bringing probes, so it's really a 50/50 situation. I am however massively enjoying the part where my standard heavy launch rocket has enough dV to carry itself and I think a 50 tonne payload not just into orbit, but all the way to Duna, and then insert into a 100km orbit once it gets there. I feel like I've been wasting its potential all this time. At the same time, I don't think it's enough for a Joolian mission, though I might just solve that by throwing fuel tanks into transfer orbits when that mission launches. There is a certain appeal in seeding all the Joolian moons with orbital gas stations.

My Avatar is (the center of) the flag I use for my space program. It's the Peace Flag of the Imperium, from Supernova X, with the colours swapped to make it blue instead of red. It doesn't have any special meaning for me, I just really like the design, like something you might actually see in a real space program.n

Sort of the same boat. The concept of helping someone with a let's play is generally appealing, but the last time I won a chess game was when I was 16 and playing against an 11 year old (because being a lifeguard is the best summer job ever), and I almost lost. The bike races tended to be more in my favor. They had me in the turns, but I could gain it all back on the straights. Anyway, I decided to end my chess career on it's highest note, so I've not played in years. I'd play checkers though. Just be warned that checkers is boring and I am stunningly bad at it. I figure I'm exactly as good at checkers now as I was when I was 5. Games that require me to think several steps ahead are...not my strong suit. Every time I try to plan ahead, I plan incorrectly and the moves don't work out (or rather, the moves aren't actually possible as I imagined them).

I could see that get pretty irritating. Never even thought about issues like that, where they put something a whole bunch of people need to visit in a random residential area. Yeah, that doesn't have the potential to get super creepy or irritating at all. More concerning is that it apparently took no time at all for people to figure out the game could be used to lure potential robbery victims, victims who are assured to have a smart phone at the very least (if you play your cards right, you can probably rob yourself a car). So you know, be wary of allowing the game to lead you to isolated places and whatnot. Beyond the obvious residential creep train and robbery facilitation, it seems like a neat game. Also, not to absolve anyone of well deserved blame (the above are not unforeseeable issues. Heck, the second one was pretty much covered in an episode of Numb3rs what must be almost a decade ago, and I'm sure by other shows as well), but I suppose it was inevitable that there are going to be teething issues with what is, so far as I know, the first really popular AR game (I expect some of these issues have come up with AR promotional stunts in the past as well, but I can't say I ever really paid a lot of attention to them because I don't live someplace where those have ever been run). Anyway, might be something I check out once I get a new phone in a couple months that can probably actually play the game. Gives them time to work out some of the kinks too.

Yes. It's partly because I also run darker nights, which limits my gameplay once the sun goes down, so I prefer to run a lower timescale so that I can get more done each day without needing to find a bed, or I can go and clear out an interior location without coming out and realizing that it's now 2am and I have nowhere to sleep nearby. It also has other effects, like a longer real time between needed to eat or drink, and enemy and loot respawns also take longer because my gameplay covers fewer ingame days, all of which are things I like (though they are things I can change independently with other mods to taste). I've changed the timescale from 20 down to 10, which is what I used in New Vegas, but I might bump it back up to 15, which is what I use in Skyrim (I should point out that the default in previous titles like New Vegas and Skyrim was 30, not 20, so Bethesda has already made their own move towards a slower passage of time). I am finding that 10 is too slow, and is out of sync with my own pacing. I think setting it at 15 would result more in my heading back to camp as the day is actually ending, instead of trying to decide if I want to head back really early and tinker with the settlement, or try to squeeze another quest in. EDIT: 15 turned out to be a little too fast, so I dropped it down to 12, which seems to be about perfect for me.

Yeah, I feel a bit silly about that actually. Apparently there are sliders in the display menu to change that, so while I reserve my right to be dissatisfied with the actual design (I respect the feel they are going for, I just don't like it), I actually can change the colour. This...might be a result of constantly tweaking bethesda games with ini file edits and mods. After a while, I just assume the in game options are all useless and jump right to looking for other options to get what I want. I even started looking for a mod to change the timescale before remembering that I know the console command to do this from memory.

I decided to buy Fallout 4. There are things I know I dislike going in, and things I want to try, and I felt the sale price matched what I felt the game was worth to me, so I'm pretty happy. If I decide I like it enough to play again, particularly if the modding community manages to develop things like a full featured script extender, then I'll probably go back and get the DLC as well. Waiting has also had the advantage of giving mod makers time to develop some of the mods I felt I was going to need going in, since I have decided to forego the initial vanilla playthrough. That has less to do with the game, and more to me getting very used to the mods I use in other Bethesda titles. Right now I just need to banish that sneak indicator to the dark world (I don't care if other people want it, that's cool, but I wish they'd just give an option to turn that thing off), and maybe turn the HUD brownish like New Vegas (I find the neon green a bit much).

Alto and Soprano saxophone. I'm better on the Alto, having played it much longer, but my Soprano is much cuter, having a curved bell like the bigger Saxophones. It's also silver (in color, not material). I really enjoy big band stuff, and I do that when I can, but in the later years it's mostly been Jazz (I haven't performed or played in a band in a while). Jazz music is less fun to play overall, but you get to do a lot more improv, so it all works out. I also have an acoustic bass guitar, though I've yet to learn how to read bass clef. I can play it well enough by ear though to get by for basic stuff. Went acoustic so that I don't need to rely on amps, so that I can take it camping and whatnot. I also dabbled a bit in singing, but my range is a bit awkward in terms of singing songs in the original pitch. When I was singing, my feature would listen to a song I wanted to do, work out how to play it by ear, then he would transcribe it into a lower key for me. Most artists sing too high for me, but my voice isn't low enough to drop their songs a whole octave (or two octaves for women) either, so that was really good. I do miss having that. It occurs to me though that I could probably set up my computer to alter the pitch on songs I want to sing, to be a better match. I should try that. Mostly do songs from the 80's and late 70's. I like plenty of more modern stuff, but I found those songs easier and more fun to sing. Piano Man, Sings, Africa (Africa actually needs two people or it sounds wrong, which is a shame), mmmm, among others. Key is a poodle though, needs to come down like 4 intervals to be comfortable.

Yeah, AdwCleaner is probably the program you want to start with. There is also the Chrome Cleanup Tool, if that doesn't work.

The last ones I remember were while installing Windows 10. I suspect it was drivers that were the issue. Bad things happen if you let Windows reach an accumulated run time of probably around 2.5 years, and you are using a clone of a a hard drive that was suffering physical failure (this wasn't me being a dunce, this was me having no way to reinstall an OEM version of Windows on a new hard drive). Someday, god willing, I'll have enough sense and disposable income to buy extra disks and run a RAID 1 setup so that I don't have to put up with that again. In the meantime, at least now know that if Windows starts loosing the hibersys file again, it's not a quirk, it's a sign of a very serious problem.

Oh, so very true, but at least I could get back to running my current setup at 60fps. It also occurs to me that I could always cheese it, and go back to using my 1600x900 monitor instead of the 1080p one. That's gotta be worth what, a 15% frame rate boost at least

I resisted the transition as long as I could, but technical issues with Windows 7 forced me to take the upgrade, and I have to admit that I'm sold on it. Sure, there are things about Windows 10 I don't like, and some principled stuff that I totally understand from a developers point of view, but oppose as a consumer. But at the end of the day, it doesn't take all that much time to trim anything unwanted, and a lot of the actual operation of Windows 10 is a lot cleaner than Windows 7, and they've really ironed out a lot of their features, as well as polished the new stuff they added. The only issues I've really had so far are these. First, I did have to install Direct X 9, because Windows 10 doesn't come with it for some reason. Fine. Take the two minutes to find the installer and run it. The other is the DVR function out of the Xbox live app. It's on by default, and you have to make an account to get to the settings menu in the app to turn it off, as I discovered when I finally tracked down the source of my constant GTA 5 crashes (it was the DVR function). I don't like buried settings like that; I had actually forgotten the DVR was a thing after turning off the prompt for it.

I've been thinking about upgrading this year, but with the new manufacturing process for this years graphics cards, I've decided that for now, I'll just sit back and watch to see what happens. I want to wait and see what this years performance and prices are actually going to look like, and what kind of deals we get on previous years hardware as a result. This kind of scenario, stagnation followed by large leap has happened with graphics cards before, before I got into hardware, and I think it led to all the old process stuff becoming obsolete very quickly, so while I am anticipating some better than average deals on last years tech, that might lead to wanting another upgrade sooner than I'd like, or at least change what I want to upgrade into. It also depends a bit on game development. Games take years to develop, and this should throw off the projections for how much technology will progress during development time, so there could be a noticeable lag overall before games start to take advantage of this. I mean, I really do need a new graphics card this year, since I still don't have something that can run my current Skyrim setup as well as I would like (the card I have now did the trick, but then I made my game even more demanding. Overclocking has kept performance reasonable, but it's getting old).

For this game, only two. Kerbal Engineer and a docking information mod whose name I can't remember. I just want proper information readouts, and for my computer to do repetitive and time consuming math problems for me. I've used mods that add parts in the past, but most of the stuff I used mods for has been incorporated into the game. The only thing I've had in the game before that has never been added are the parts for building tiltrotor aircraft. In the big picture, I actually don't mod all that much. There are a couple games, like Skyrim, where I've gotten really into it to the point of doing some of the mod work myself (that would be Skyrim and Silent Hunter 4), but for the most part I just collect small and simple mods that improve my quality of life.

I have a particular soft spot for penguins, the Emperor Penguin in particular. Then I found out about the Adélie penguin, and my heart melted: Apparently they have quite the personality too. I'm also a pretty big fan of the Orca.

There's nothing in there so surprising I wouldn't be willing to take PD at his word on it, though I think some distinction between the company leadership and the vanilla developers would be nice. The only point I am really prepared to disagree on is the firing of Damion. I'll give the man credit where it is due of course, but for all he did for this community, his conduct on the forums should have seen him sacked much earlier. As far as the rest of it goes, I'm sure I'll never understand the realities of everyone involved, so that makes me reluctant to form any strong opinions. As I said, from everything I know about this industry, I would fully expect the working conditions and pay to suck for everyone right across the entire board, and I'll not condemn a developer for that, because they aren't the sole driving factor behind that state of affairs (it's also largely due to us refusing to pay more for games, and a glut of people who want to work in this industry). At the same time, it's been pretty clear for a long time that Squad has either been firing people at an impressive rate, or is utterly unable to retain staff. Between the PR/media team, and the modders they brought on to help develop, they've publicly lost a lot of people, and that's not normal, even for an indie developer. As for the salary, I suppose it depends on where you live. I do of course realize where Squad is based out of, and I'll not blame them for paying everyone what they consider an acceptable wage and not jacking up the pay just because you happen to be in the States. But for people wondering why the rest of us are laughing/crying at that figure, $2,400 a year is a fraction of the poverty line in countries like the USA, or Canada (where I am). It's not even close to a living wage that will cover food, housing, utilities, and clothing.

You don't seem to have any Canadians yet. I was in Scouts Canada from Beavers through Ventures, and am happy to say I earned my Chief Scout Award (our version of your Eagle Scout).

I don't have OBS anymore, since I uninstalled everything with Windows 10. In terms of video quality, OBS is mainly oriented toward steaming, and the quality options reflect that. In one of the tabs, there is a dialogue box for special commands, and one of them can be used to get much better picture quality. I think you'll have to good for it, but it was something like mrf=# (any number from 1-20, with 1 being highest quality. To keep videos at a reasonable size, you'll probably want to stay someplace from 12-14). As far as the actual capture, does it work for any other games? If not, have you tried watching someone on youtube show how to set it up correctly? I ask because if you're just trying to wing it, OBS has a very neat system for selecting what you capture, but it's only obvious if you already know how it works. The capture system is again very much built around streaming, so it has a lot of options for overlays, and setting up multiuple different captures that you prepare ahead of time and switch on the fly. The other option, if you want to deal with something a bit simpler, is to use ShadownPlay (Nvidia), or Plays.tv (AMD), depending on what graphics card you have (strictly speaking, Plays.tv works on both brands, but it's intended for AMD, and will run worse than ShadowPlay on Nvidia cards). Both programs use the GPU as the encoder, instead of the CPU (GPU's are better structured for this), which could be particularly beneficial for a game like KSP which is very CPU intense (conversely, OBS will probably perform better in a game that taxes the GPU but not your CPU). Also as a side recomendation, it's a good idea to not record to the same hard drive your games are on. KSP isn't a huge deal, since it loads everything when it starts anyway, but recording should be done to a disk that isn't used by anything else so that you don't have write conflicts, especially with a game that might try to read a large block of data while the hard drive is busy writing your footage (leading to problems with the recording, or very slow loading screens in game).

Town of Salem is an online browser based game, based on the concept of the party game Mafia (aka werewolf) that I assume most people here played as a child (and if you didn't, then your childhood isn't complete yet and this game offers a chance to fill that hole in your soul). The game is about deception, trust, teamwork, and limited information. Town of Salem massively expands on that concept, with 30 different roles (~15 in the simpler beginners version of the game) that are divided up between town, mafia, and neutral teams. The goals of the various neutral roles are quite carried, and may find themselves allied with the town, mafia, or no one. In the Normal (classic) mode, mafia and neutral will each get 3 set roles, and the remaining 9 people on the town team are dived between 7 set roles, and two random town roles (meaning there can be duplicates, or almost one of every town role). Every player is assigned a role at random, and every role has a specific goal. For example, anyone who has a town role will have the goal to lynch all mafia and evildoers (everyone on the mafia team, and some of the neutral roles as well). The game takes place in rounds, with each round consisting of multiple phases. Communication is limited in different ways at different times. For example, no one can talk at night except the mafia, who talk privately to each other, and the medium, who can talk to the dead. Through most of the day, everyone can talk to other living players (except during a lynching, when the accused will be allowed to give a defense. There are also things like last wills, that are revealed when you die (along with your role), and killer notes, that can be left by anyone in a killing role when they take a life. There are also some really neat roles, like the Jester, whose goal is to convince the town to lynch them (and they get to kill someone who voted guilty on them in revenge), or the executioner, whose goal is to convince everyone else to lynch a specific player (always a townsman), and if their target gets killed at night, they become a Jester. Anyway, the game is a lot of fun, a round takes around 20 minutes to play usually, and it's totally free (there are micro transactions for cosmetic things, and scrolls which give you a greater chance of getting a certain role). If you loved mafia/werewold as a child, or just need to fill the hole in your life from having never played it, you should give the game a shot.

With the roller? Probably as many times as necessary. I do imagine that compressed soil is a stresses on grass, it is for any plant I've ever encountered, but thinking about it, the roller probably isn't heavy enough to do any real harm. Heck, I drove a zoom boom onto mine last year without thinking about it, and accidentally put a couple 3 inch depressions in lawn where it was particularly soft, and the grass survived. Was just thinking that you don't want to add more stress to the lawn than you need to, you want a good healthy start so the weeds don't take over (that's the theory anyway, though I have to figure anything good for the grass is good for everything else too, so who knows).

Cut it after. If you have bumps, a ride on is just going to cut everything on the bumps super short anyway, so flatten first so you have a better final cut. Also, as good practice for the beginning of the season, and hopefully before you mount the blade assembly on your mower, take the blades off and sharpen them. You'll get a better cut, and your lawn will be healthier. I'd go for the highest cut your mower can manage, so that it's not extra stressed during the occasional cold snap and having the soil compressed by your roller.

I'm interested in how other people upgraded to Windows 10, specifically if they uninstalled all their programs or decided to keep everything. For me, I've had no problems. All my games, including Silent Hunter 4 and Skyrim (heavily modded) work beautifully, or, at least exactly as well as they used to (SH4 still demands that I load it from an SSD to avoid as many looping sounds when loading games as possible). However, when I made the upgrade from Windows 7, I had the upgrade process remove all my old programs and drivers. For me, it was a necessity. My Windows 7 installation had end of life issues, and attempting to carry over old programs was causing BSOD issues, so I decided to cut my losses and upgrade without them. If you decide to make that choice, which I feel is probably a good idea if you want to make absolutely certain that everything will work on the other end, you should know that Windows 10 will make a list of every program it uninstalled. It also doesn't actually delete very much, and things like your old Programs folders will be renamed so that you can still access all the old program files they contained, and reinstall them locally if you wish. It does seem to delete that stuff after a while though, not sure how it works, though I am now down a significant number of screenshots taken in steam (though I've been uploading all the good ones, so it's not a big loss for me). Windows 10 has also been very good about finding the correct drivers for everything, including vendor specific stuff. There are privacy settings you will want to tackle to personal taste once you have Windows 10 up and running, and some things like the start menu will take a little getting used to, or you might decide to roll with the new style. The only things that are really getting on my nerves are the loss of the desktop widgets, and their insistence on calling all programs 'apps' now. I grew accustomed to having an easily visible readout of my GPU and Network states, and I've not found a suitable replacements yet, particularly for the network monitor. As for 'apps', I just don't like the name. It's a name for small, inconsequential programs, and having the term applied to my PC seems...demeaning.

Decided to start off with something that should be fairly simple, sticking a flag on the Mun Arch. Pretty sure I used an embarrassing amount of fuel for the task. I actually ran out of fuel just before landing, since my original landing spot was too far away, and also a 40 degree incline. Decided to do it old school with separate landing and ascent stages, which is fun, though it does leave debris behind.