Nikolai

Regardless of where it originated, I think it "stuck" because -- well, look at them! Kerbals are 40% mouth! So of course they'd think about snacks a lot.

Because I don't want to do everything. And as Arthur Dent showed on Magrathea orbit, it's possible to activate things accidentally. (I'm also not really sure that it's as simple to get what I want as deciding what I want and waiting for the correct probability to show up. If it were that certain, it would not longer be a function of probability.) I know how to pilot a DeLorean and service it when the car part of it breaks, and the one that can travel through time does what I want.

Good news. If you're running Windows, you can play the game on your PC. If you're crafty, you can make a cabinet for it and stuff. http://www.roguesynapse.com/games/last_starfighter.php

Do vehicles count? If so, the Cygnus from The Black Hole(*), or the time-traveling DeLorean as we see it at the end of the first Back to the Future movie. If not, then, um, a neuralyzer, I guess. --- (*) The movie was kind of aimless, but that ship. Dang. Like a chandelier in space.

I saw the announcement that Squad is working to get the improvements to the UI offered by Unity 5.2 into the game. Thanks for working to make a quality product, guys. Take your time. I'm still enjoying the Sentinel mod, and I won't be upset if you need a little extra while to get it the way you want it.

Because their digestive systems can break food into useful components more easily when the food is heated, but too much heat can cause damage to their biological grasping and holding structures, so they invented a tool to carry a small amount of food to their food-hole (which is usually smaller than the amount of food they consume in a sitting) without hurting themselves with the heat. Really, it's a bowl on a stick. It's pretty utilitarian; we might not even expect that a spoon designed by an alien intelligence would be remarkably different from a human spoon. But this? This is not a spoon. It's a rock.

Not anymore. Taking a technique that is known to be unworkable (and that would not be used in any spacecraft designed today) and pretending that it represents our current technology on the matter is a little misleading, don't you think?

That wasn't a problem with the harpoon; it was a problem with the propellant (nitrocellulose), discovered some nine years after launch (and a little over a year before Philae was to use it).

The same way you keep a kite from plowing into the ground -- by changing the braking rate on the line. EDIT: It's not perfectly analogous, and I know that. Thinking about it with kites should get you started in the right direction, though.

I can see wanting it to be that way, I'll admit, though I really enjoy the higher-stakes feeling of putting it all on the line. It means learning by death for a while, but once it all started to "click", I came to prefer it the way it is. Oh, agreed! Just because I didn't think it needs a story doesn't mean that I don't enjoy the story. I think that what they did include is evocative, intriguing, and really slick. I just mean to say that I don't think the game suffers for having a sketch of a story rather than something more detailed. And as for the sequel -- yes, please! (I didn't want to give any spoilers.) There's some DLC coming out in the fall, but as I understand it, it's going to cover events prior to what we see in the game we have.

Invisible, Inc. is Klei Entertainment's latest. It's an attempt to do turn-based stealth, and in my opinion, it succeeds spectacularly. The idea is to infiltrate various megacorporations and get out with enough technical capability to take on the Big Bad at the end of the game. And they made it so that getting detected is bad, but not the end, so you always have room to make desperate strategies and try to get out alive even when it seems like all might be lost. Add in a constantly-rising alarm level (with rising risks along with it) and even though it's turn-based, you have a genuinely tense experience. Everything's mapped out and predictable, so that when you screw up, you have no one to blame but yourself; it's just how effectively you make plans and carry them out. It doesn't have much of a story/plot, but it's a strategy game, and (IMHO) as such doesn't really need one. I can't get enough of it. Just wondering what other people's experiences with the game might be.

As the rocket is cruising at constant velocity, both would appear slow to the other. When the rocket accelerates to match velocities with his point of origin, though, he will be found to have experienced less time than his origin. (Don't forget that there are also acceleration effects to consider as he leaves his point of origin, and/or if he turns around and goes back home.) Time itself.

For me: I'm the lone human on Kerbin. They kidnapped me through a one-use-only wormhole that they found. They did this because they really wanted a space program, and they knew that Earth has several; to them, it was simply inconceivable that a sentient being could grow up on a planet with a space program and not be generally acquainted with the basics of how space travel works. So I'm doing my best not to disappoint them. This requires a lot of experimentation, because they're way too excited about going into space to listen to my claims of ignorance. Every year, on the anniversary of this kidnapping, they celebrate the Ten-Fingered Freak Festival, which is a whole lot of fun -- but that's another story. (Yes, there are fireworks.)

Careful photographic analysis in this very thread has rather conclusively demonstrated that she had not halted his relative momentum. (Angular momentum is a thing.) So you can reduce the number of things that bug you about this movie to one.

You're not the first to hypothesize this. Unfortunately, Pluto's current resonance orbit with Neptune precludes this pretty effectively.

Except Hyperion, in orbit around Saturn. Its axis of rotation wobbles so much that it is impossible to predict its period of rotation. Also, Nix and Hydra circling Pluto. And a handful of moons circling gas giants at extreme distances. But the vast majority of moons are exactly as you describe. EDIT: Oh, wait, "from that list". Sorry. Yes.

Update: That did the trick! The orbit is entirely within Eeloo's, and inclined to it at 0.0 degrees. I brought the periapsis inside Eeloo's orbit first, which caused the telescope to complain about misalignment with Jool. Then I pushed the apoapsis out even further (but still within Eeloo's orbit), and it started mapping Eeloo! Asteroids spotted! Thank you so much for your help.

Thanks for your insight -- I think that might be it. (I was a little disappointed when Scott seemed to be flying to get to Eve's orbit, and I already have one of those doing its job rather nicely. When he went on to get inside Eve's orbit to start mapping Eve, I saw the wisdom of your words.) A circular orbit at Jool's distance from Kerbol is sometimes outside of Eeloo's orbit. Thankfully, I've got a fair amount of fuel and a nuclear engine on the thing, so I'll try bringing it completely within Eeloo's orbit and seeing what happens when I have time.

I'm trying to detect asteroids in Eeloo's orbit, so I launched a telescope out to approximate the orbit of Jool around Kerbol. It's approximately circular with roughly the right semimajor axis, and is inclined to Eeloo's orbit by 0.0 degrees, but when I right-click on the telescope the game informs me that the telescope is misaligned with Eeloo. Is there anything I can do to get more information about how I can line things up more effectively? Thanks in advance for any advice you can lend.

Not just "that much bigger", but "that much bigger" squared. The impact energy is proportional to the square of velocity -- so something traveling twice as fast delivers four times the impact. Not to mention that a long-period comet -- the fastest-traveling ones -- would give us much less warning than a nearby asteroid that we can track for years. Add to that the possibility that the Kreutz family of comets is more typical than we think, and comets are clearly the much bigger threat on a per-impact basis. (The Kreutz family are a series of comets which we learned a lot more about thanks to SOHO that are thought to have originated from a single parent comet, perhaps 100 km across.) The concept of impactor diversion fascinates me. Not just because it's so exotic, but because it's one of the only natural disasters we can do something about with modern technology (besides get out of the way).

HarvesteR noted on the latest dev notes that his new steering model (mandated by the upgrade to Unity 5) allows for Ackermann steering. Since this means less "slippage" for wheels -- all steering wheels are tangent to the curves they describe -- could this allow for "stickier" wheels, where steering is more responsive? If so, will the devs notice this potential benefit, or care to exploit it?

I grew up with the worm logo, but much prefer the meatball to the worm. It looks like it alludes to something, and as such is fitting as an emblem you'd put on vehicles, rather than a corporate logo designed to be plastered on buildings that just sit there. (Corporate names don't even need to make sense. What is a "Verizon"? Or a "Magnavox"? They're abstract in the extreme, and even though it doesn't fit as much these days, I like to think of NASA as potentially being known for doing stuff when it gets its act together.)

Best: Star Control II; X-Com (1994); Invisible, Inc.; Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space Worst: Star Control 3; Left Behind: Eternal Forces

Huygens was a Category II mission, and as such, the risk of contamination was deemed insignificant.

Having individually-targeted instruments is not without its delta-v costs. As the camera is trained to stay on objects, the entire spacecraft rotates in the opposite sense, and corrections need to be made to keep the high-gain antenna pointed at Earth. (Remember, nothing can be considered "stationary" except the center of mass of the system.) It gets surprisingly complicated rather quickly. Then there are the problems of making sure everything deploys correctly, and that everything points just the right way during a mission that is over relatively quickly. Since storage space is abundant, it's relatively easy to optimize pointing and then point back at Earth when we have to. That, and the simplicity of building a solid-block spacecraft over many independently-articulated platforms that might or might not go through different amounts of wear on a spacecraft that had to be constructed relatively quickly, meant that a single-block spacecraft won out.