Nikolai

ISTR from the books that Ceres is spun up so that people can walk around the interior under Earth-normal gravity. Other asteroids aren't. Most Belters spend their lives in considerably less than a full g. EDIT: If physics ruins a show for you, don't calculate how much energy it would take to spin Ceres up to that speed. It will annoy you.

I have four rovers on two moons with this problem. Generally speaking, any question on the Internet that begins with "Am I the only one who...?" can be truthfully answered, "No."

From the article linked to in the OP: Proxima is about 0.13 light-year closer to us than A and B are, and revolves around A and B with a period of about 550,000 years.

I approached an asteroid with some stuff clamped onto it and a few stages floating around in the vicinity. The Kraken grabbed my asteroid facility and started spinning it faster... and faster. Regrettably, I didn't react at all; I just watched in horrified fascination as docking clamps let go one by one and stuff was flung all over high Kerbin orbit. When I finally had the presence of mind to act, I turned timewarp on and turned it right back off, and the rotating stopped. But I had spent long enough building that asteroid facility that I ragequit. I was ready to return to it a few days later (as in a couple of weeks ago), but the promised 1.2.2 has made me hesitate. (I also haven't managed to get my "Kuiper Belt" by parking a Sentinel inside the orbit of Eeloo, for some reason. Maybe I just haven't waited enough time.)

Except that all that stuff is small, and orbits of small things decay rather quickly. (The more surface area you have in proportion to your mass, the faster your orbit will decay... and small things have a higher proportion.)

As long as we're picking nits: Harry Mudd. (Harcourt Fenton.) I seem to remember hearing that they wanted Harry Mudd for the job, but the writer of "The Trouble with Tribbles" didn't want to take any of the glory away from the other writer who invented the character of Mudd.

Or -- speaking as a parent with respect to Chuck E. Cheese -- new targets.

I can't recommend Steins;Gate highly enough. Sure, it might be my predilection for time travel talking, but I really thought it was exceptional, even if it doesn't fit your criterion for "hard" science fiction.

What if we "upgrade" this mod? I mean, if we're talking about increasing the potential number of asteroid locations one can have in stock, why not go all out? From the cheat menu (or some kind of option in the tracking station, or some other place that makes sense), the user can press a button that launches an asteroid "spawner". This spawner, once it starts running, will generate random asteroids -- with the randomness weighted according to options the user selects. Those options should include things like semi-major axis range, eccentricity range, inclination range, size ("class") range, resource contents, and the asteroid spawning rate. (It would be nice if we could have colored markers for the results from different spawners, so that we can see which asteroids we see in the tracking station were generated by which spawner.) Several spawners can run simultaneously. If a user opts to delete a spawner, the user is given the option of deleting all asteroids generated by that spawner or to allow them to "fade away" when they are not selected for tracking after a time (as asteroids normally do in the game). It would be nice to tie the ability to detect asteroids to the player's capability somehow, and the Sentinel telescope did that -- at the cost of making options available to the player like those I outline above. Perhaps someone more clever than I can come up with a way to include a capability-based asteroid discovery mechanic while preserving maximum player choice. And as long as I'm dreaming, more and different textures for different asteroids would be nice. Of course, I know that this represents a substantial amount of effort, and that I have no way to influence SQUAD's decision to include spawners like these other than to beg. (My financial resources are rather limited.) Still, I dream.

I know this probably doesn't help, but 1.2 has been slicker than snot on a doorknob for me. No crashes at all. I've had to restart some missions, but that's because I tend to forget things before launch.

The commander of Apollo 8, the first flight to orbit the Moon, was Frank Borman. (Armstrong commanded Apollo 11, the first flight to land.)

I'd be happy as a clam if they did update it for 1.2. I like having asteroids generating in places besides Kerbin's and Dres' immediate neighborhoods. (In prior versions where this mod has worked, I've really enjoyed parking a telescope in the outer regions of the planetary system and generating my own "Kuiper Belt" to explore. If I had any artistic and modding skills at all, I'd do it myself with some properly icy-looking bodies.) I saw someone try to use it in one of the prerelease versions, and according to the in-game debugger, it didn't work right.

<double-checks> You're right. Good catch. Thanks for the correction.

Cornu is Latin for "horn"; the word unicorn comes into English from the Old French. (Horn comes into English from Germanic roots, not Latin ones.) See also cornucopia, corner, Capricorn, and corn in English.

Yeah, sure. I just mentioned what I did because of the "Slow your drop with EVA" advice. He had no propellant left in his pack to slow his drop with. He'd have to jump it. Or send a rescue, like he ended up doing. Either way.

Note the remaining propellant in his pack. He's going to need to time a good jump, and won't be able to slow himself.

Verne was much more interested in the plausibility of what he was talking about than Wells. Wells was happy to handwave away inconveniences to make them sound plausible -- a man could become invisible by making himself have the same refractive index as the air; ships could be propelled from Mars to Earth with a green mist; and a time machine could be accomplished by moving at right angles to the three dimensions of space. After that, on with the story! Likewise, Space: 1889 was made for swashbuckling adventure more than scientific treatise. In much the same way as I'm happy to go along with Wells' tales with something that sounds vaguely plausible (with the understanding of Victorian science), I'm happy to play or host a good adventure after the rules by which something works are outlined and everything else follows logically enough.

It was based on a book that was pretty autobiographical with that title -- Rocket Boys, by Homer Hickam (the main character in the movie). Yes, it is. Holy monkey. I never noticed that. Good catch.

Here in the States, it's called October Sky. And yes, it is a great movie.

Leroy. Gordon. Cooper. His Faith 7 spacecraft was meant for an endurance test and ended up falling apart around him -- falsely indicating premature re-entry, losing altitude readings, elevating carbon dioxide levels, losing power to attitude control... he resorted to using marks on the window and his wristwatch to perform a manual re-entry and ended up making the most accurate splashdown in the entirety of the Mercury program. (This accomplishment is even more impressive in light of the fact that Mercury capsules were not lifting bodies like Gemini and Apollo capsules that could be "steered" to a landing site as they fell.) He completed all of his mission objectives in spite of a failing ship.

He also mentions that the physics improvement allows sub-sampling for higher precision, where "forces change rapidly over short time scales". This has an obvious tie-in to graphics improvements as well, but the mention of "forces" seems to indicate that calculations controlling spacecraft position are different from what they used to be. I'd be surprised if changes under the hood had absolutely nothing to do with aesthetic improvements. Of course, the definitive way to answer that one would be to take different snapshots of code and run the diffs on them. We're both kind of shooting in the dark otherwise.

Not according to the press release linked in the OP. Its physics engine has been almost completely replaced, and the surface collision model has been improved. (I'm especially looking forward to that latter one; I remember running a scenario years ago which involved landing on Phobos, and finding out to my surprise that the "surface" of the moon was a sphere. The press release claims it will help in making different kinds of spacecraft as well.)

Just the opposite, actually, if the planet in question has greenhouse gases. http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~strauss/FRS113/writeup3/

The missing rulebook wouldn't have been an issue; since it's hard to get a hold of, I'm putting a synopsis of the rules up along with my campaign. But if time is a constraint, there's not much I can do about that (especially now that my flux capacitor is on the fritz).

I was working on putting a campaign up on rpol.net when I was interrupted by the death of a family member. I should be able to wrap that up shortly. Moderators, is it all right to invite people here to an RPG on a different server?