Corona688

They're completely separate questions, though. Even if it was one single fixed wheel, its torque would be the same no matter where it was mounted, it'd just be limited to exerting it in one axis. Whatever mental model helps you see it best though. It's not that intuitive, period. It's not the sort of thing you can easily demonstrate with ramps and wheels. KSP taught me something college-level physics hadn't.

someone in the fanfic forum could stretch an epic out of that one, I'm sure.

Well, not really. It can be clipped as far out into space as it will let you and still work. People have built space bases by clipping things hundreds of meters apart. I get your point, though. I misunderstood your post. I thought you were saying again that they should work better at the center of mass. I apologize.

custom user title: "Eats, shoots, and leaves".

Garbage-collected languages are among the worst offenders. Java for instance is infamous for it. Garbage collection is great for the programmer, but means lots of tiny allocations and deallocations for simple tasks. Fragmentation was inevitable anyway, but happens faster. Tracking use is insufficient to avoid fragmentation, it has to move memory that's being used. If it does that, I can certainly believe it'd be CPU intensive! This I really, really doubt -- because it shouldn't in most circumstances. Frequently allocating and freeing memory at the segment level encourages fragmentation in the OS itself, and generally a waste of time anyway. If the program's still busy doing things, it's going to need it right back. That's why the heap segment is used this way. It probably can't, either, unless it suddenly finds itself with a few hundred surplus megabytes all stuck together at the very end of the heap segment.

It still deals with the same memory interface, a "block" from A to B, probably managed by its own private heap. That's not a programming language artifact, it's just the way things work.

Wouldn't a radial fairing be a nosecone? Or do you mean something more like a cluster of grapes? Or warty things adhering to the side of the craft? ...I really think we need a picture to understand, sorry I deal with the twitch and spider by putting the entire craft, or at least that section of craft, inside a fairing.

Try swapping a radially-attached wing for an axially-attached fuel tank. Next try swapping a radially-attachable fuel tank with wings on it for a 2.5m ISRU, a part you can't radially attach to. This feature is possible, but having this many special cases would make it really annoying. I think configurable tanks would be an easier and better solution to this problem. The difference between 'structural fuselage' and 'liquid fuel tank' would become a right-click and checkbox. ...pandaman beat me to it. By 2 hours. Blurgh.

Not really, just the direction they point. You could break it up into 3 unidirectional reaction wheels, an X, a Y, and a Z, scattered on different points of your craft. As long as they turn in the right plane of motion they will act the same at any location. It took me a while to get over this bit: Lever-effect happens when the center of rotation is forced to be somewhere other than the center of mass. No fulcrum? No lever. No lever? No lever-effect. No amplification or reduction of torque. Every location is equally (in)efficient.

It's... difficult. It'd be nice to carry cargo instead of all that dead weight. The US has something close to SSTO now, but it's not useful for bulk cargo.

Unity, C#, whatever -- in the end, it's either C, or a language someone wrote in C, or a language in a language in a language someone wrote in C. At its very basics, memory is the same for everything. Ignoring details, a program gets an undifferentiated blob of memory from point A to point B which it can use however it pleases. It can also ask the operating system to extend the length between A and B. C manages this block of memory kind of like you would manage blocks on a hard drive -- giving sections to objects objects and remembering what sections aren't used. It doesn't give them back to the operating system when it's done with them, just keeps a record for itself of what points inside its assigned blob aren't occupied. This is called the heap. In short: Once a program gets memory, it doesn't ever give it back. The OS can page it to disk if it has to, but can't force it to not exist. If lots of tiny program objects are created and deleted frequently, the heap can fragment. This is nothing to do with hard drive fragmentation except that it's the same kind of problem -- there might be thousands of 64-byte chunks scattered around, but to find a 65-byte one, it might have to ask the OS for more. It just looks like the program's using more and more memory for no reason, when the wasted memory is really the too-small-to-use filler between objects in use. It's a major culprit of slowly bloating memory use, especially in high-level languages.

Part of what makes this so confusing is recovery... Most rockets are disposable, most aircraft aren't, and their roles are very different. The vast majority of rockets aren't manned, and most aircraft are. General complexity isn't a good metric either... In some ways they're getting simpler as time goes on, and there's always going to be a bigger rocket and always going to be a more expensive jet fighter. It's also quite difficult to define -- how about the Osprey tiltrotor, one of the most sophisticated aircraft to ply the skies? Is it a fair comparison or not? etc, etc, ad infinitum. We can one-up each other all day. There will be multiple answers for different roles, anyway. Making a craft manned means the sky's the limit on complexity, also. So, if I had to pick a criteria for "fair" answers, it'd be pretty specific: Two unmanned, expendable craft from the same era, with similar roles. How about: A) The V-2 rocket, grandfather of modern rocketry B) The British remote-controlled aircraft which was pressed into use as a suicide bomber. They had smaller drone aircraft, too, but they weren't comparable in size or function, being mainly things designed to loiter in the air and be shot at, not hit targets themselves.

Do I hear a goalpost being moved? I do believe I hear a golapost being moved. Insisting on the most complicated just because that's the only way your argument makes sense is entirely arbitrary.

Further, as previously mentioned, a sounding rocket -- nothing but a giant solid in 1 or 2 stages -- goes to space needing very little in the way of sophisticated controls.

After accumulating almost every single ship from this 100-day career save, I finally had to start weeding and organizing to put the things I reuse time and time again to the top. My scheme is 0[Letters] Name, 0 to put them at the top of the sorting order, and letters to designate the type so they're split into sections. A: Small, super-long-range high-DV craft like asteroid intercepts. H: Heavy lifting vehicles. L: Landers M: Mining vehicles R: Rescue/Orbital maintenance vehicles for grabbing and pushing other craft. T: Orbital transports and return-craft. Simple craft like the 0R Dragonfly and 0H Megadreen only have one designation but many have multiple letters like the 0LHM Armadillo heavy miner. How do you organize your ships?

Then you understand.

Try and give them a little credit for intelligence. What debate?

If you ever got the impression I disagreed, I have no idea what thread you were reading. Not this one.

This thread is getting exceptionally careful treatment if anything. Also, the moderators are mostly volunteers as I understand it. There's been short-lived "make the console port not suck" type threads all over, some in the bugs / gameplay sections have had dev/staff reply. (None too satisfying of course, there's no satisfying answer yet, but no echo chamber.) This is just the thread which caught fire in the "fun" section, it's disquieting to see it here. Hence me running around with a puny spraymister in the burning house. There's little reason for a PC/console divide to exist here; KSP isn't multiplayer, and the console game is nearly feature complete, possibly even save-compatible. So far I've seen them welcomed everywhere they try to participate. Screenshots get liked. Gameplay questions are answered promptly and helpfully, where possible, or with a "sorry, we're working on it". I haven't spotted a "master race" avatar yet. Then I see this boiling perpetually in the "fun" sections and caught myself wondering, "good god, is this what console players are about?" Then I took off the rose tinted glasses and remembered threads just as bad about the game not having a moon yet, probably in the wrong forums too.

I deorbited a ton of no-longer-useful satellites. So many satellites. Most of them were able to deorbit themselves. Then I sent up this save's first ion craft. This one's going to the mun. One like it will go to Duna. I might swap out the science jr for a mini lander of some sort.

Do you mean the communication range thing, or something else? They are indispensable if your game revolves around mining, but they don't open up options, they're just a status effect. Repacking parachutes isn't generally useful. It's handy for a few niche things but usually a parachute doesn't get used twice. Pilot gives you more options in flight. Scientist gives you more ways to use instruments. Engineer is just a luck charm you haul along to make mining happen faster. Perhaps an engineer aboard should be required to be able to transfer fuel from tank to tank.

It could be another kind of ground scatter.

The game saves are actually text files, so should be either compatible or easily convertible.

I see an ISRU up there, could you explain a bit more about the scheme you've got going on? I like that craft you've got docked below, too.

Interesting. The point of the c:\users\user\application data\... is so users don't have to write to c:\program files\, though. Good reasons not to do that, and potential problems if they can't.