Nikolai

Is there a chance you're using your forum login account instead of your Squad store account? The latter has a special password that should have been emailed to you.

Two things: * The attached craft (Stubby) is exceedingly simple. Why don't the fuel lines feed fuel from the central tanks to the engines around the perimeter of the booster? This kind of thing worked in 0.16. * What do I do to access internal cockpit views? Thanks for your time. EDIT: Okay, I figured out that switching to internal view is as simple as switching cameras (<C>). But the fuel line question still has me stumped. Does anyone have insight into the problem?

You should warn people before linking to TV Tropes! One troper on the page you linked to mentioned that a Trek novel posits that different alien races had wars that tended to homogenize the population before the race developed interstellar travel, and humans simply managed to avoid escalating things to that point before taking to the stars. I wonder if there's a strange kind of peaceful homogenization taking place on Earth, though, even so. I've heard that a handful of languages are on their last generation, for example, because the native populations that speak them are being absorbed into the larger culture that surrounds them. As media travels ever more quickly and becomes even more widespread, will national differences become blurry and largely disappear after a few generations? It's an intriguing thought, if somewhat chilling (I rather like the diversity of humanity). On the other hand, since geographical separation seems to deepen cultural differences, perhaps becoming a spacefaring race will merely cause the diversity of the human species to show itself more deeply along different lines -- Earth's differences will be closer to, say, the differences between modern-day provinces than between modern-day countries, but the cultural differences between Earth and Mars will be much more readily noticeable. It's also interesting to observe that certain physiological traits tend to crop up in geographically isolated populations (e.g., red hair). Some people even claim to be able to pick out nationalities based on facial characteristics. As genetic pockets in different regions of space develop, I wonder if certain physiological traits will be emphasized in certain populations, and what those might be. ("She's obviously from the Moon. Did you see her neck?") Finally, I think there's a certain element of natural selection in human societies. Unfortunately, the rate of change is very slow; radical ideas that might work are rarely implemented (and rightly so, given all the lives at stake). Perhaps traveling to other planets/comets/asteroids/moons/whatever is an important step in learning how to do society right. Each one of those habitats is going to need some form of governance; we'll be able to try out a lot more ideas, and ones that don't work will (for the attentive ones) be selected out, leading to (it would seem) much more robust societal models as the ones that manage to survive. Maybe spacefaring is what a species needs in order to develop really good, strong societies, since it really opens up the adaptive landscape. I'm rambling again, aren't I? Sorry about that.

Sure, in a heartbeat. I think "it's neither easy nor comfortable" is simply part of the understood job description of "astronaut" around here.

I suppose that's a fair point, but I enjoyed the fact that for a long time, Vulcans were mysterious. Having too much revealed about them was a bit like being disappointed by a recently-released prequel. Until the official people who get to add to the franchise weigh in, it's natural to speculate about your own reasons why certain unexplained things are the way they are... and Hollywood's reasons are never as cool as the ones in your own head. Having too much told about them also tended to reduce them to the one-note aliens that Star Trek became guilty of in its later incarnations. Originally, they had flawed humans (and a flawed human race) finding other multi-dimensional alien races, and interactions were complex and layered. Klingons could be violent, yes, but they could also be crafty, underhanded, frightened, impulsive, noble, and so on -- just like humans. After a while, aliens got reduced to a single character trait with glaring and enormous flaws, and it was up to humans to go around and correct them where they had gone wrong. Klingons became space-faring medieval Vikings (where the supreme ruler gets decided by knife fight, for Heaven's sake). Need a greedy character? Look among the Ferengi; no humans like that, nosiree. Need someone cunning and suspicious? Cardassia. Passionate and opportunistic? Romulus. And so on. Even the Borg went from technological scavengers to some kind of hive mind with a queen. And while Spock's human/Vulcan conflict made sense in the context of the prejudice he had encountered in his childhood, it soon became rare for a hybrid character not to lament their dual heritage -- as if someone could be compelled to act in a certain way in the heat of the moment simply because of the influence of their one-note race's DNA. It began to sound almost like genetic determinism to my ears after a while. But all this is just opinion. I'm willing to forgive a lot of wrongs in a story if the characters are compelling. A reduction in the complexity of characters felt like a genuine loss. But your mileage may vary.

That makes a lot more sense. Thank you.

It's funny. When I was young, TOS was the only thing out there -- there weren't even any movies. I developed a love for it, since it was the only thing really like itself. When TNG came out, I was skeptical that another crew could be interesting. And to be honest, the first season kind of confirmed that. (Unbeknownst to me, Roddenberry had decided to rule that there would be no interpersonal conflict among crew members. That, and the fact that a lot of the plots were simple re-hashes of some TOS plots, brought me close to just walking away.) But as the series matured, it really grew on me. It evidently grew on a lot of people, since they started making other series in the same era: DS9 and VOY. I realized as I was watching it, though, that I missed the feeling in TOS of "We're out here and we have no idea what we're doing" that were in a lot of TOS episodes. By TNG era, they seemed to understand space travel pretty well. In TOS, they seemed to be flying more frequently by the seat of their collective pants. By the time ENT came around, then, my fandom had wrapped back around to TOS. I tried to get into ENT, but it seemed much more sloppily written to my eyes; your mileage may vary, of course. (Plus, TOS had a sort of campy feel to it that reminded the audience that This Was All Pretend. I'm still a little freaked out when people say, apparently in all seriousness, that Trek represents future history, or that its treatment of science is unparalleled in its accuracy.) And for my money, Mr. Spock is still one of the most intriguing characters ever to appear in American televised science fiction. I still enjoy Trek whenever I bump into it; the stories are often engaging, and certainly more thought-provoking than a lot of television. I don't go out of my way to watch it anymore, though.

I still remember the first time I saw Saturn in a telescope. Realizing that I was seeing something hanging right there, magically suspended in all that inky black, a tiny little yellow pea surrounded by a ring... it all seemed so delicate that I couldn't speak loudly. I had to whisper. It was amazing to think that I was looking at this entire world, the way it appeared right then, not just some photograph already seen by a million eyes and that would be seen by a million more. I wasn't just looking at this other planet; I was witnessing something. It could be that you were also close to a time when we see Saturn's ring edge-on. (When Galileo saw that for the first time, it drove him nuts. "Has Saturn devoured his children?" He didn't realize it was a separate ring -- I mean, humanity had never seen such a thing. He thought it was two things on the sides of Saturn somehow.) You're also right that things slide out of view surprisingly quickly in a 'scope. Nothing quite like that to convince you that the Earth is rotating.

Saw this in the 0.17 Status Update #1 (specifically, 0.17.0x3): Fixed the Sun flare effect jittering at high warp rates So, wait. Am I reading this right? The sun has dynamic flares? They're not just pasted-on irregularities that remain fixed on the surface? I should get used to Squad going above and beyond, but I'd have been perfectly happy with sunspots, and thrilled with a fixed flare or two. The idea of dynamic flares has me stunned and amazed. I could be reading this wrong somehow, and I know I'll be unspeakably grateful no matter what I get... but dynamic flares? Wow!

Venus gets closer to Earth than Mars ever does. EDIT: In fact, while I type this, according to Stellarium, Venus is 0.9315 AU from Earth and receding, while Mars is 1.865 AU from Earth and receding (more than twice the distance).

It's hard to tell how much of the general opinion among companies this represents, but I can recall various companies touting their latest DRM scheme as hacker-proof. Nolan Bushnell of Atari back in 2008 (at the link below), the designers of SecuROM, the designers of the Sony UCD, and several others. Every once in a while, some CEO will come out and announce the imminent end of software piracy. Some companies clearly do expect DRM to stop piracy in its tracks. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/84079-Atari-Founder-PC-Piracy-About-to-be-Eradicated From a technical standpoint, of course, claims like these are ridiculous, because software manufacturers can't wrest control of the end-user's machine. In the meantime, large amounts of money are spent (an article estimated $1 billion in 2007 and $9 billion in 2012; I don't know where to get accurate and more current numbers, but even a tenth of that seems disproportionate to the problem) that do nothing but jack up the price for legitimate customers. http://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/964 I expect that we'd be closer to getting piracy to stop (though I doubt we'll ever stop it completely) if we could shift our view from seeing companies as some faceless entity (so that it can be justified as "not really stealing"). From that point of view, I'm grateful for the willingness the devs have had to poke in here from time to time to say something, or to write an entry in their dev blogs. I think it makes them look more human to the end-user. But I'm not a sociologist of any stripe, so take my musings with a planet-sized grain of salt. EDIT: The report on DRM spending the blog post above seems to have gotten its information from is "Wireline and Wireless Digital Rights Management: Securing Content Distribution 2007-2012", published by Insight Research. http://www.insight-corp.com/reports/WWD.asp

So much this. When you operate on a business model that makes an illegally-gained product superior to the product you have to pay money for (because you don't need to type in nuclear launch codes or keep the DVD in the drive or whatever), you've set yourself up for failure. Personally, I wish the transaction were simple. I don't want to be a jerk; here, I'll give you my money if you give me your game. Done and done. But as long as we continue to treat piracy as if it is a technological problem and not a social one, I fear software companies are going to continue to waste piles of money on protection schemes that are cracked in a very short time and only serve to drive up the price of their final product. Long story short: Thanks for the no-DRM. I won't betray your trust.

Before I read the rule of thumb posted that one should launch towards a moon from a circular orbit as it rises over the horizon, I worked it out accidentally as I was idly mentally playing with the idea of phase angle while drifting in a circular orbit, hoping to boost towards Mun. My thoughts went roughly like this: "Hey, there's Mun coming up. I wonder how high that should appear to get if I want to swing towards it in a higher orbit. I mean, it can't be as easy as just aiming at it, right? Let's see... if I boost from a circular orbit, I raise the apoapsis right across from where I am. And if I ignore Kerbin's size, my semimajor axis would be about half that of Mun. If we normalize it, T^2 = a^3 (where T is period and a is the semimajor axis), so roughly speaking, half my period would take... a fourth of Mun's! I gotta go now!" And it worked. I didn't even think to check my math and go around again, I was in such a hurry to hit the throttle. I felt stunned and amazed that it worked out so nicely. It still feels like a crowning moment of geek awesome. My current favorite lander is four-way symmetrical; one of the engines fell off when I headed back toward the lander from a distance on Minmus (there's this thing where it re-draws the physics when you're 250 meters from the craft, and that makes it go off the surface somehow), and it ended up on its side. I got in anyway and lit it up -- there was nothing to lose -- and to my surprise, it left the surface (though it was tumbling pretty well). With judicious engine power applied only when the craft was more-or-less pointed up, managed to leave Minmus' sphere of influence well behind me... and when I finally made some serious distance, cut the power, and checked the orbital map, I found that my trajectory was just right to enter an aerobraking orbit around Kerbin. I've never felt so lucky, or so strong a desire to claim that it was all intentional somehow.

Technically true, but it's also the case that if Minmus' lakes were actually frozen methane, that should be sublimating at Kerbin's distance from Kerbol, right? I think the devs are concentrating more on making the Kerbal System fun more than worrying about simulating chemical state transitions accurately. Different things break different people's sense of mimesis; I'm sure there's someone out there still muttering to themselves about Kerbin's impossible density and insisting that the game makes no sense on that basis. As far as I'm concerned, the devs can do as they please. They seem to be making good decisions so far.

I'm not sure what you think the difference is. If you're within a body's SOI, you'll accelerate toward its center according to specific formulae. The SOI is how it determines that you're "within x distance of body".

Excellent stuff. You've heard of "Apollo Applications", right? The idea was to brainstorm all kinds of uses Apollo could be put to. One of my favorites was replacing the LM in the Saturn V stack with a pack of consumables and using it to dock with an NEA. (Some of those NEAs require less delta-vee than a Moon landing!) That sort of thing really tweaks my own imagination.

In theory, that's good. In practice, it's much more difficult. You have to match position and velocity with the debris you want to clear. Then you have to move you and it to a velocity that will eventually fall into Kerbin, using nothing but the Kerbal's jetpack. Then you have to move the Kerbal to match position and velocity with the rocket he used to get to orbit. I don't think it would be at all easy to do if you don't plan to use any cheats. As I type, though, the idea of designating a bunch of Kerbals in strategically-placed capsules to stay in permanent orbit and clear debris is kind of appealing, just because of its audacity.

Love your points, Nibb31, and I absoltuely agree. Have you heard of the plans to use Gemini to land on the Moon if Apollo didn't work out? The most ambitious involved using a Gemini in place of an Apollo CSM and having the Moonwalker land in what amounted to a rocket-powered lawn chair: http://www.astronautix.com/craft/gemnilor.htm ... or we could have used a Gemini with a booster stapled onto it for landing: http://www.astronautix.com/craft/gemander.htm http://www.astronautix.com/articles/bygemoon.htm It would seem that Gemini was the vehicle that really got creative juices flowing once it proved itself as a spacecraft, and for that reason, it will always hold a special place for me.

I haven't fully processed exactly what it is about KSP that I like so much. It could be the way that it simulates how space travel requires extraordinary patience punctuated by moments where quick action and a cool head are called for. It could be that it lets me exercise whichever kind of space travel I want at any given moment, be it trying to be a hotdog pilot or trying to meticulously calculate every little detail to optimize some resource (e.g., fuel or time). It could be the ability to create space exploration with constraints, and send things to explore whatever I want according to whatever priorities I dictate, making me the rocket and mission designer I wish I could be (with so many ways to get it hilariously wrong). Whatever it is, I want to thank everyone here. The people who put the program concept together; the people who continue to add content and new wrinkles in play; the people here, full of interesting ideas and thoughtful opinions; the moderators, who have to walk a tough line (keeping people with high-octane interests civil!)... I can't believe I found this corner of the Internet. I wish I had deep pockets and resources to give back to each and every one of you. Thank you all so much for being who you are, and sharing that with the group. In the same vein, I know I've been more contentious in some threads than I want to be. Thank you all for being patient with me. I tend to be my own worst enemy when it comes to people I treasure. I really don't want to be argumentative. But I'm rambling. Again, everyone, many thanks. Here's hoping the KSP community remains the same awesome community I've seen so far.

Even sadder if one considers how much easier it is to do that research now than it was then. Yeah, that's a very good point. It seems that the larger sticking point -- as you mention later on in this post -- is finding and keeping an audience willing to stay with something "realistic", especially when there's much outside everyday people's everyday experience. And, ultimately, if you're selling a show to people who would pay for it (and expect a return on their investment), the absence of that kind of audience seems fatal indeed. I guess we agree in the final analysis, but for different reasons. Still, it seems a shame.

I'd say that's a vast oversimplification. Simply because exploration can be done doesn't mean that people care or want to pay the bill. Do you think the man on the street knows what Apollo 17 found that other missions did not? Do you think the man on the street could name anything discovered by the Apollo missions? Do you think the man on the street cares? Like it or not, NASA runs on PR, not on pragmatism. The fact that its budget is limited and robotic exploration is all we can afford does not even imply that robots can do what humans can. Sure, for a narrow range of tasks. But I'd argue that those tasks are a mere subset of the tasks needed to conduct thorough exploration.

Okay. But we're still not at the point where robots can replace humans in exploration, and won't be without an as-yet-unknown leap in computing. (Reconnaissance is, arguably, a form of tourism, insofar as we know salient characteristics of what we'll find even before we look. That is, by definition, not exploration.) Moreover, insisting that machines might be as capable as humans in the future is not a reason for humans not to go now. Point taken. But the assertion I was replying to was not that we do robotic missions because we can afford them (and not their manned counterparts); the assertion was that robots can do everything humans can do, and at a fraction of the cost. That simply isn't so, even though we can't afford the full cost (and doing what we can afford is better than doing nothing at all). Yes, certainly, you're right. But in terms of the destiny of our species, it's certainly the most important (hence the "ultimately"). If we want to list secondary objectives of space exploration, we could be here all month.

Just to throw in a monkey wrench into the discussion, the new planets were named after Greco-Roman gods eventually -- but when the first planets were discovered that couldn't be seen with the naked eye, there was actually some discussion about nomenclature. When Herschel discovered Uranus in the eighteenth century, a lot of people wanted to name the new body "Herschel". Herschel himself wanted to name it "Georgium Sidus" (George's Star), after the patron (England's King George III) that gave him the money to build his telescope in the first place. Maybe the debates went a different way on Kerbin. Or maybe they were better at keeping track of people who first identified naked-eye planets than humans were, immortalizing them in song: "... and wonderful, smart, handsome Bobfern Kerbin / Who discovered Meander and made really swell blueberry pancakes." (It rhymes in Kerbish.)

Just a suggestion, since I'm currently trying it myself, something that occurred to me after running into the bug that causes my Minmus landers to pop off the surface if I go far away and return: EVA from a spacecraft orbiting Minmus. Land on Minmus using the jetpack. Explore. Return to the spacecraft in orbit and go home. The only cheat you're allowed is infinite EVA fuel. I'm currently in Phase III ("Explore"); I have to find a solid chunk of time to work out how to accomplish Phase IV using my altimeter and my Mark I Eyeballs. Later, I plan to see what I can do if I don't allow myself that cheat. I don't know how much total delta-vee the jetpack offers, so I don't even know for sure that it's possible yet. (Phases I and II turned out to be a lot easier than I'd expected.)