Randox

I was looking at some of the screenshots in my old KSP versions, and I found the version where I had a VTOL quadcopter, so I spent some time playing around with it. I'm a much better pilot with it than I used to be, and I think .19 was the last version that mod worked with, so I'm glad I kept it. Picking up heavy loads is still terrifying (like a kite in a tornado), but it's great fun. I am thinking about recreating this as a vanilla craft with jets, though I have to admit that it would lose something without tilting engines. With this craft, I can angle the engines forward and fly it long distances quite nicely. Something with fixed engines would only be suitable for the KSC. Also, I don't have a winch mod anymore, so it wouldn't be able to carry stuff.

Yeah, that's really well done. I would rate rescues where the craft in peril is not in stable orbit to be just about the most difficult mission you can run. Mercifully, I've never had to pull it off. I can also sympathise with the tumbles. I've never run an SSTO, but I've put more than one plane into KSP's equivalent of a flat spin, and boy, in the cases where I have actually salvaged the situation, it's been too close every time. The solution for me was to play DCS world, which forced me to learn about Angle of Attack, and how to not die.

I don't think I would ever consider this to be plan A, but it gives me some ideas for tumble recovery that I might be able to use. I mean, if I actually tumble a rocket, I'm not going to deploy air brakes and continue on my merry way, but if they deploy fast enough, they might be able to salvage a situation before it goes pear shaped. I also occasionally have issues with overheating my fairing on ascent, but the heat warning doesn't show up until 5 seconds before disaster. Air brakes might be able to help cut speed fast enough to save myself in that situation. And yes, it happens because I am going to orbit way too fast. But it looks so cool. I think they have the most potential use to me as orbit abort devices. They could help a thruster less lander reduce the number of orbits before it no longer has the momentum to keep going, or to help seperate from a broken rocket whose engines cannot be shut down. As to the topic of fins, I love them. To me, it's just not a proper rocket until it has fins

You have reminded me of another couple of stories Gravity Re-Acclimation I don't land on the Mun that often. Most of my missions in the Kerbin system these days are mining expeditions, and Minmus is a much better target. However, I like the scenery on Mun more, and sometimes I like to go back, for old times sake. So one day, back in .90 I think, I decided to take a trip to the Mun. I don't really have a dedicated lander for that anymore, so I decided to take my Kethane miner, a ship which is fairly heavy (that ship was probably around 35-40 tonnes), and was equipped with 3 LV-N engines. The problem is that I hadn't landed on anything but Minmus in a while that didn't have an atmosphere, and I kind of forgot just how much stronger gravity is on the Mun. By the time I started burning retrograde, it was too late, though I didn't realize it at first. I started getting uneasy about the numbers I was seeing 30 seconds into the retrograde burn. By a minute, I was pretty sure everyone on that ship was about to die. I tried burning the RCS thrusters for a few seconds, but that didn't do much, and there was no way I could vent all the fuel (and lighten the ship) any meaningful amount before impact. Probably 60 seconds into the burn, I switched from burning retrograde to normal. Missing the landing site wasn't going to matter if my lander impacted the surface at 100m/s. It was enough, and the lander started to pull up with a pant's soiling 300m to spare. To give you an idea of how bad it would have been if I hand't made the switch, it took another 3 kilometers to kill off all my lateral velocity. Now, that was about a 60 degree burn angle from normal, but still. I figure if I had waited another 3-5 seconds before switching to a normal burn, no one on that flight would have survived (I might have been able to save at least one by going EVA I suppose). We need more lift Captain! This one is the most recent of my near misses, from this very patch, in my latest Ore Miner. The Ore miner is a very similar design to the old Kethane miners, though a bit heavier. 4 LV-N engines now, but she weighs 60 tonnes on the launch pad, and in theory, 70 tonnes fully loaded with ore (minus ~2-3 tonnes in spent fuel from landing). My point being, even on Minmus, she doesn't exactly have an excess of thrust when taking off to bring ore up to the orbiting refinery. So this leads into the first time I ever used this design on Minmus. I landed on an ore deposit in one of the Methane lakes, because tall top heavy ships on narrow landing gear don't like slopes. What I did not do was take a good look at the surrounding topography when it came to take off. When it was time to lift off and meet up with the refinery, I failed to take into account the 5km tall mountain that was not that far away, and directly in my flight path. I did spot the problem with plenty of time to avoid it, but the world map projected that I would miss, so I stayed on course. That did not however do anything to prevent white knuckles while I went IVA and watched the radar altimeter quite closely. The lowest reading I saw was around 600m, so I guess I managed to select the perfect launch angle by chance in the end on that one. This is the very ore miner that almost hit a mountain on Minmus. The landing gear was repaired once it was back in orbit (wasn't going to chance that on the ground):

For sure, though at least as far as passenger jets go, I think low engines are the norm. Off the top of my head, I am not aware of any passenger plane that has successfully completed a belly landing on dirt (start to finish) without breaking up/injuring people, though I am by no means aware of every case that has happened. Anywho, that's an interesting mod. I might check it out myself.

Perhaps I am wrong, but I would actually expect a plane to slide further on concrete than it would in a grassy field, assuming it was a belly landing. My reasoning is that grass grows in dirt, which is soft enough to become deformed even in a relatively controlled landing, and that will cause things like the nose and engines to dig in. At the very least, belly landing in a hard surface is probably a lot more survivable, because once the plane digs in, things normally go pear shaped. Basically, I would expect the deformation of surfaces like fields to provide more resistance than a hard surface like Concrete that withstand the impact without deforming. The other thing is that, at least for a passenger plane, without the ground deforming, there is remarkably little of the plane actually touching the runway when the gear is up. Here's a video from 2011 of a 767 doing a gear up landing. Notice that the only points of contact are the engines and the rear fuselage.

Back before docking was added, I used to practice orbital rendezvous, because we knew the feature was coming eventually, and without other planets to explore, it was something to do. After EVA's were added, I decided to do a crew transfer in orbit. First, I sent up my standard 3 man lander, and then I sent up a one man orbital interceptor, which notably featured RCS thrusters to aid in establishing an orbital rendezvous. It also featured a nose mounted parachute, and a stack decoupler to separate it from everything else so it could land safely, once on a landing trajectory. You can see where this is going. I very promptly accidentally jettisoned the command pod from the interceptor. No engines, no RCS, no way to establish a re-entry trajectory. It was time to stage a daring rescue! Getting that lander, with no RCS, into a close rendezvous is some of the best flying I have ever done. Once I parked about 300m away, I flew the stranded Kerbal to the impromptu rescue ship. One of the crucial features of the lander was a ladder running the entire length that was installed so that Kerbals could safely disembark on Kerbin. My lander was also mercifully blessed with stable re-entry aerodynamics. It naturally flew backwards in atmosphere. See, while there was no re entry heat to kill the guy riding on the outside of my lander, Kerbals don't have enough grip to stay in place during usual reentry deceleration, so I had to constantly take control of the joyrider and move him back up the ladder before he fell off the bottom. That the ship also had drogue chutes was a blessing. I burned the engines at full power the entire way down, because I knew that if I opened the chutes at too high a speed, the kerbal would be flung off the ship. Drogue chutes were gentle enough to avoid this, and helped the LV-N engines slow me down enough to safely open the main chutes. After that, there was nothing more I could do. I turned SAS off, and took control of the outside Kerbal. It's the only time I've ever landed a ship I wasn't controlling at the time. The ship landed in the water (which handily destroyed the engines before they could kill anyone), and everyone survived.

I've had lucid dreams a few times. Two were very good, in terms of control and duration, while the others have been short and lackluster. It seems to come down to how I became aware I am dreaming. In the two best lucid dreams, I became aware of myself in a dream world entirely from a first person perspective, and I found that the dream became extremely malleable to my will, but I couldn't actually control it. I wasn't creating the scenario, or deciding what would come next, but basically whatever I wanted to happen would happen. Conversations would happen as I wanted them too, I could fly, that sort of thing. More commonly, I become I am aware when I change something in the dream, from a third person, dream controller, awareness. I think it happens because I am already starting to wake up, and part of my conscious mind that I don't yet have an awareness of is starting to exert the desires of my waking mind on the dream state, if that makes any sense. Like, I'll become aware that I want the dream to go a certain way, and the dream world will change to accommodate that thought, but I'll wake up within a couple minutes tops. This normally happens when dreams attempt to morph into nightmares. At the point where I would come to harm, some part of my mind will change the dream, and if I don't immediately wake up once that happens, I sometimes become aware that I am dreaming, but the control is never as good as when I spontaneously realize I am dreaming. It's more like a directed daydream than a proper lucid dream. I used to keep a dream diary, which is supposed to help you recognise when you are dreaming. I'm not sure that was ever going to work for me, but it was interesting all the same. I'm not sure how it is for other people, but for me, I've noticed that I dream about things that I suspect my unconscious mind is dwelling on, giving me a window into where stress is coming from that I might not otherwise be aware of. However, after a couple run ins with Hypnagogic Hallucinations, I've been somewhat reluctant to pursue making lucid dreams more common (since it also tends to make the hallucinations more common). I very vividly remember lying on my side, knowing with 100% certainty that something was behind me, and that if I moved, it would see me, and I would die. I've had at least one other (why is my bed sliding into the closet?), but the terror of that second one is still etched in my memory, and I am reluctant to do anything that might cause that particular scenario to repeat itself. I never want to feel that way again.

As a thought, if you have an AMD card, try setting up an eyefinity display in the AMD Radeon Settings (right click desktop to find it). Eyefinity allows you to set up multiple screens as if they are one larger screen, which bypasses the need for software support. Nvidia may have a similar feature, I don't know.

I've never been one for the super large designs. This rocket is the largest I've ever used. She'll manage at least a 1,000 tonne launch weight. Note in the second picture that altitude is being measured from approximately the top of the widest point of the fairing (where the command pod for the space station payload is sitting). Payloads notwithstanding, it is the same rocket in both pictures. The space station in the second picture is the most voluminous payload I think I've ever launched (as wide as the boosters, and twice as long as the miner shown in the first picture), but thanks to the docking arms (widest point), it was actually quite easy to secure once I turned command pod gyro wheels off. Launch dV is ~4,500-5,500, depending on payload.

I seem to be in the majority on all counts I've always thought of my Kerbals being the true pilot in manned craft. They might all be exactly as well trained as I am, but it's them flying damnit! I do however consider the SAS to be the work of the computer, with the mode selected by the pilot. And lastly, given the signal delay to remote probes, I have always assumed that the probes fly themselves under the direction of mission control, who tells them basically where to go, and what to do once they are there.

As long as the sensor drone stays tethered to the ship, it would actually be very quick to retract in pretty much any sea state. All you have to do is haul it down with a winch while the drone keeps trying to hover; this keeps the tether tight and prevents the drone from being smacked into tiny pieces by the ship when it hits a wave. This would basically be the 'bear trap' system for landing helicopters Canada developed a while back, now used by many navies. I'm not sure what the advantage would be to a drone system though. It adds a lot of maintenance/point of failure to a critical system, and doesn't strike me as being much more durable, if any. Also, depending on the role, you still need to have proper helicopters, either for the load capacity, or people carrying capacity. Still, I think the idea is less "this is what naval combat is going to look like" and more "here are some outside the box things that might happen", and I think that's certainly a worthy exercise. Oh, and the scissor jack might be a turbulence thing? That hull shape looks like it could create some turbulence on the deck, and the scissor jack would clear it. I don't know if that's even a problem though.

And yet I lose my solar panels when errant Kerbals fly into them I don't think this kind of landing is for me. I seem to recall in the not too distant past landing an admittedly large lander on minmus and breaking one of the industrial landing gear (permanently compressed).

Can't say I have any particularly intact debris knocking around. An abandoned stage here or there, and maybe a few broken pieces knocking around, but for the most part, by a time a ship is in such rough shape that I junk it on location, it's probably already exploded. I also have this terrible habit of decommissioning obsolete designs via meteoric re-entry. I need to cut that out, as I am obviously depriving my Kerbals of valuable abandoned junk to explore.

To the first question, there are people more qualified than I to comment, but for comparing computer parts, anandtech is a good place to start. They have detailed benchmarks you can compare for many CPU's and GPU's. Ideally, you will want to find hardware you are familiar with that you can compare to hardware you want. CPU benchmarks will all be artificial tasks, how well a CPU does at a certain type of job. I usually focus on the cinebench benchmarks. GPU's have artificial tests as well, but they also benchmark them on a powerful computer (that is otherwise identical for all the cards) and get frame rates, so you can see real world performance. The downside to this is that the test computer changes over time, so you'll usually only be able to compare GPU's within a couple of years of each other (this is where you will have to rely more on the frame rate tests. Focus on games that you own, or would like to own. Don't just look at the results for one game). CPU benchmarks:http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/39 GPU benchmarks (2015): http://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU15/1248 For the second question, from scratch, if you've never done it before, I would set aside something like four hours. It depends on if you prepare properly, and how comfortable you are with tinkering. Most of the work is screwing things in. Plugging all the wires into the motherboard is also an adventure. You will want to read the assembly instructions for everything, and you'll probably end up reading more of your motherboard manual than you ever expected (good stuff, you'll want to hang on to that one). Definitely doable in a day though.

I'm not going to lie, the colour change I go through each summer (or visit Florida/Hawaii for like 3 days) is pretty spectacular, as is my bodies adamant refusal to fully untan itself in the winter. I mean, I still revert to 'on the pale side', but not my natural "all my colour comes from flushed blood vessels" pale. I'm half healthy peach and half vampire pink/white

STO isn't cannon though, I don't think. I think they just took a fan theory and ran with it for their own purposes. Anywho, I get the joke, but you have to understand your audience. If you had posted this on a Star Trek forum, I might have gotten the joke on my own (but since I don't consider that canon, I might not have thought of that), but the Kerbal forums are a lot more focused on actual space technology, so in the context of this forum, it makes perfect sense that the first thing everyone here is going to think is "Both voyager probes are on escape trajectories and that's not a picture of them, what is this guy talking about?". I mean, I appreciate the effort to make us laugh, but I hope you can understand why no one here was in the right frame of mind to get your joke.

Hawaii. 25 degrees is pretty much my optimal temperature (77F). It's warm enough to be comfortable on it's own, and cool enough that I don't mind being in direct sunlight. Depending on the time of year, I prefer outside to inside, particularly in June and July when I find local insect life to be most pleasant for the warm months. You have a lot fewer of things like wasps and spiders (or rather, the webs they spin in easy to walk into places) before August I find. I'm also pretty used to ocean breezes and high humidity. I also like the occasional thunderstorm, mostly for the heavy rain. It makes a pleasing sound on the roof I find very relaxing (even more so than ocean surf). That said, I do appreciate a good winter, in small doses. I'm pretty fond of downhill skiing, and winter isn't complete without a good round of winter paintball. I am however not a fan of cold, really anything at or below -10 (14F) and I'm going to be unhappy.

For PC: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, Baldurs Gate,Age of Empires, and Age of Kings N64: Super Mario 64, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros, and Goldeneye 007 I remember when game rental was still a thing. That's how I got most of my Nintendo games. Rented them until my parents relented and let me buy them from the rental place outright.

I've been thinking about it, though I must admit I am still a bit wary of it. From a developer standpoint, I totally get the new monitoring and update systems. Being able to force people to stay up to date and give you feedback is the developer's dream, but as the consumer in this equation, I still hate it. It's my computer, and I am loath to give it an upgrade that will result in actions being taken without my permission. In any event, I've looked at the actual upgrade process, and unfortunately, my PC is well into the quirky phase of it's lifespan, and after some work over the last couple days, I think windows update is a no go. I was able to squeeze a bit more life out of it, but it's back to it's old problems and is once again disabled, probably for good this time. Fortunately, microsoft did create a standalone upgrade installer, so assuming my windows 7 install doesn't have any other surprises waiting for me, I should be able to make the change without windows update. I am however certainly not going to trust the installer to not both fail and absolutely ruin my installation. That seems like tempting fate. However, it turns out that my steam installation is just small enough to be migrated onto my second hard drive, which will shrink my primary HDD bellow half space used, so I am planning to do that, and then create an image of my primary drive to act as a backup (will be stored on the same drive, which is why I need to get under 50% usage). Wondering if anyone sees a problem with that plan? (other than losing a TB of storage space) I am also wondering if the windows 7 image would still be usable even if the upgrade goes through, or will Windows invalidate the old install on me (the product key)? Even if the upgrade works, I will probably never be willing to throw out the backup image "just in case", so I would like to create a dual boot, so that I can use either OS at my leisure (thus putting the backup to work). It's a simple matter of moving any programs/data I need to keep consistent between installs onto my secondary drive and then creating symlinks to them on both versions of windows (assuming my plan will work). Since I know it probably matters to whether that will work, my OS is an OEM version of Windows 7, so I am hoping that as long as I don't change out CPU's (which triggers the need to verify my windows installation) it will still work. I am hopping that the really weird way OEM versions of windows 7 are licensed will be a boon in this situation. EDIT: Something I just thought of. Does anyone know if I should expect to fail verification because I am using an OEM license on non original hardware? I think I can work around it if it does, since I have all the parts to reassemble my computer in it's original state, but it involves all the work of rebuilding my PC, finding drivers for that CPU, and then hoping that microsoft support will re-verify my Windows 10 install on the other end after I put my computer back together in it's much improved state (which they might not do if I change the hardware out immediately after upgrading).

Alright, thanks. I'll keep that in mind the next time I am looking for one, and hopefully I can find one with a feel I like

Out of curiosity, does anyone know of any joysticks with independant resistance on the x and y axis? What I mean is that most, like the one I currently have, only seem to use one spring to center the joystick, so if you are say, pulling back on the joystick, there is nothing to keep you wandering a bit to one side or the other except for your own coordination. I want something that has I guess two cradles and two springs, so that there is distinct resistance for left/right movement vs forward/back, like you would find in hydraulic controls. Like, my parents have a backhoe, and it's pretty much impossible to move the controls in a direction you don't want to because each controls two hydraulic valves, and they resist you independently. I want something that feels like that, rather than smoothly rotating in a circle (smooth rotation is really good for moving and aiming in a shooter, but I find undesirable for things like flying).

I don't mind the blatant fan service. You could tell who the Star Wars fans were at certain points because they cheered in the theatre. I have issues with some of the physical designs simply because I am familiar with the cross sections and know why they won't work, but I'm willing to let that slide. It was certainly a bit different, but I really like the angle they have taken with the story, and I really like the new characters, and I think the next two movies should do pretty well. Hoping to see it again in theatres actually with another group of friends. Accidently saw it in 3D (was wondering why the ticket cost so much), and it was worth the extra dollars in my opinion. I'll have to sleep on it, but I think this movie will be able to hold it's own with the original trilogy, and I don't think watching these four movies together would be a jarring experience like it is with the prequels. I'm still not sure I really like JJ Abrams, but I'm giving him a pass on this one

This will be one of the few times I break my general rule of waiting a couple weeks after release to see movies, mostly because I don't want spoilers for this one and I don't feel like cutting off all contact from the world. Still a bit loathe to do it though, especially with Star Wars fans being so notorious for showing up early (I don't feel like standing in the hall for an hour before the theatre is ready because we couldn't all be borderline late like proper grown ups :D). Ah well, some friends asked if I wanted to come along, and I figure why not.

My advice would be to be wary of anyone who swears by any one brand. In a nutshell, you're taking advice from people who haven't taken a serious look at all the options. Right now, neither company has a monopoly on the price to performance metric, and when you start looking at the comparable cards between the two makers, you'll usually find that one card will be the general winner, but the other card will be a better performer for certain games. So without a whole spiel about how the industry works, the best thing you can do is this: 1. Figure out your price point. 2. Find cards from both manufactures (all three for laptops/integrated desktops) in that price range 3. Figure out what games you want to play 4. Go to a site like anandtech and compare benchmarks for the games you want to play, and see what is going to work for you. For example, if I were to buy a new GPU today, I would probably be looking at either a GTX 970, or an AMD R9 390 ($450 bracket). I think most people would declare the 970 to be the overall winner. For my purposes, the only games I play in those benchmarks are Shadow of Mordor, and GTA 5, and I play them at 1080p. Shadow of Mordor is interesting because the 390 achieves a not insignificantly higher average framerate, but also the lowest minimum frame rate. So it's not consistent, probably a few stutters, but also a better overall performance. If I was really into Shadow of Mordor, I'd want to find a way to play the game for myself on the two cards. For GTA 5, the cards are almost dead even. The 970 gets a few extra frames on average, with a tie for minimum performance. If I were actually going to buy one of these cards, I'd probably see if I could find some other benchmarks for other games I play (done by the same people. Comparing benchmarks for one game done by different methodologies or on different rigs is a complete waste of time, not to mention misleading). Based on this site, for the same price, I'm going to by the 970 for sure, because it looks like the overall winner, and not all the games I am going to play are out yet, so that's a safe choice. But I'd also be very willing to buy that 390 for a good deal. It's actually a really weird year, where a lot of the benchmarks look like the one between the 390 and 970. AMD hasn't had to drop their prices, because their cards are stacking up very well this year, so Nvidia is also doing better on the performance per dollar than usual as well. Now, you want a laptop, and I don't really do laptops, so all I can do is advise you that everyone who answered this kind of question has an agenda. We're all cheerleading for our preferred method of buying cards here. I just happen to think that my 4 steps here are a better way to go than brand loyalty