softweir

Bah! Write it in Cuneiform on clay tablets and get armies of scribes to draw pictures showing what is going on!

If replace all the struts in a rocket with three dishwashers each, then that rocket can't fly. Too heavy! Or am I misunderstanding?

I understand that Testers have to agree to a verbal NonDisclosure Agreement (NDA). Under the law in many countries, this constitutes a contract and only those over 18 are legally able to enter into contracts.

That is an assumption. However: a) The existance of jets implies that this is not the case - if the surface of the comet was sublimating then it would be surrounded by a uniform halo of sublimating gas. the velocity of the jets and the fact they can carry dust off the comet further suggests that this is not mere sublimation. It should also be remembered that the ices are not on the surface of the comet, which is largely dust and grit. This would generate small amounts of resistance to the exit of sublimating gasses, increasing the pressure above the zero of vacuum. And if any of the gasses are sourced from deep inside the comet quite non-negligible pressures could build up. The reference to a bottle of oxygen is irrelevant. There is an entire continuum of circumstances from ices sublimating in vacuum through ices sublimating under a thin layer of dust all the way up to ices evaporating in bubbles of less volatile ice bursting their way out breaking the comet in half. Given the behaviour of the comet, I feel we are still at the low end of that continuum. I agree that any forces being exerted on the lander by a gas jet will be tiny, but so long as they are larger than the local weight of the lander (which is also tiny) then the jet would still be able to move it.

Indeed and exactly, except it is hardly rare - it takes only microscopic forces to change the orbits of small bodies! With minimal gravity to hold it down, any force on the lander greater than its local weight will move it, no matter how slowly. Mass doesn't stick things in place, it just slows itself down. It's the weight that sticks things to planets. Even a tiny force could lift accelerate the lander away from the surface, far enough that it could turn over or fall into a deeper crevice than it was already stuck in.

It was intact enough to be sending telemetry back. Also, it was probably the single most durable part of the entire assembly, given that it was designed to survive re-entry and a potentially hard landing, so if any part could remain recognisably intact, the capsule was it. OK, the heatshield would have been scraped off and other external damage - enough that the capsule would be written off - but if the cargo had survived then that would have been a fillip for its chances of becoming man-rated.

That's interesting, but I am sure Ferram would like more info, such as a complete list of the mods you have - or at least, the statement that you don't use mods!

OK, that made me laugh! I expressed my views in their entirety in my earlier post. That is all.

Did I say "massively inconvenient?" No. I did not. So why upgrade my complaint to "massively inconvenient"? I did not say "massively inconvenient", and I did not imply, nor intend to imply, that it is "massively inconvenient". So, have we got "massively inconvenient" out of the way? Thank you!

Nothing. This is the old thread, resurrected. I feel it needs locking.

Not really. Consider: It is very easy to ensure that a single-stage rocket is stable - the simplest way is to put enough fins at the bottom. Making multi-stage rockets stable is a lot trickier - to make the upper stages stable using fins, they have to be big enough to stabilise the upper stage, but those same fins will destabilise the lower stage. Secondly, an upper stage is only stable *IF* it is moving fast enough when it ignites. If the lower stage loses thrust before the "fuse" burns through to the upper stage then the whole thing will slow down, and could already be tumbling before the upper stage ignites. Just as bad, if the lower stage propellant burns unevenly so the upper-stage fuse ignites too soon then the ignition of the upper stage will destabilise everything. All these problems can be solved, but they either require genuine expertise, or else a lot of dangerous trial-and-error. For competions involving youngsters, single-stage is so very much safer!

Haters will hate, no matter how much a product improves. There are people who hate KSP, for heaven's sake, because it was an "early access" game and they hate them all on "principle"! Same hoes for antivirus products: once they get a reputation, people will hate them because they were, once, flaky. Norton is now fine. You need to know how to use it, same as all other antivirus products. They ALL have irritating habits, you just have to get used to those of the product you use. I don't need to repeat the advice about ignoring the KSP folder and subfolders.

The CONCERT instrument mounted on the lander is a high-gain, multi-spectral, low-bandwidth transponder. It isn't used for communications: all it can do is re-send signals it receives directly back to Rosetta so Rosetta can measure propagation delay as well as attenuation. The transmitter Philae uses to transmit to Rosetta is entirely different, and it is this which is only working intermittently. That CONCERT works is independant of this, and discussion of how it can transmit through the comet is irrelevant to discussion of the communications problems.

I wonder how many people realise that this thread is 8 months old? Still, it's interesting to check the member list and see that Sal is still well in the lead as regards post count!

He probably meant that the apparent cause could not, so far as they could work out, lead to what actually happened. Like: there was a slight overpressure; a relief valve opened to bleed O2 off; pressure soared and continued to soar even though the valve was wide open and there was nothing that could generate that sort of pressure. That would be counterintuitive.

Something I'd be interested to know is: what instruments could unambiguously detect life on a comet?

Mechjeb. Yeah, right, "it's cheating" - but there isn't a space agency in the world that demands pilots do all that stuff in their heads, and without it much of KSP would become incredibly boring.

I know that KSP attracts a lot of people with interests in rocketry, technology, engineering, flight (especially aerodynamics), astronomy, computing, astrophysics, pure maths, applied maths... OK, so most people are tech enthusiasts of one sort or another! My interests are mechanics, engineering, science and technology, with a heavy interest in medicine as an offshoot of my chronic health problems. I like building things and understanding things, and found KSP to be a great outlet for both interests!

Have you accidentally engaged docking mode?

My personal take on this: I feel that you can only go so far in protecting people from absent-mindedness and panic. ALL staging events are prone to error and disaster, whether they are SRBs jettisoned too soon (BOOM!) or parachutes opened too soon (FLOP!) or the player attempting to light an upper stage before the lower stage has shut down. (CRUNCH!) There is no mistake-proofing in the rest of the game. It's one of the things that KSP teaches us all the time: don't make mistakes. Of course in real life each and every damn staging event would have multiple safeguards up to and including safety-covers and sanity-checking by software. That makes real-world flying a lot safer, but more fiddly. A serious flight sim might attempt to duplicate this in order to help teach pilots how to use the real-world safety features, but that is not the KSP style - people aren't protected from life-threatening mistakes, because no player has ever died as the result of a silly mistake. Instead, it teaches them what the silly mistakes are. Can I suggest that you opt for the Least Surprising option, which is that the Service module is stageable. If anybody really finds they are jettisoning the SM by accident they can use the Stage Lock feature, or even rebind the staging event to a harder-to-access key combination. BTW, I can't remember when I last thanked you for all the work you do creating your mods. THANK YOU!

One quick mention about pasta: the starch in pasta which is cooked and then cooled changes so it is harder to digest. If the pasta is then reheated it changes further, making it even harder to digest. The same, apparently, goes for potatoes as well. If it wasn't for the fat they are cooked in, twice-fried chips (fries in America, frite in France and posh restaurants) would be an excellent low-GI food! But yes, freshly overcooked pasta is high GI and not good. I believe the worst is the very soft French breads such as is used in croissants - they have a GI higher than sucrose!

@ Pawelk: Sorry to hear you are at risk of diabetes. Something nobody else has mentioned is exercise: Part of the reason people develop type 2 diabetes is they eat more fat and sugar than their muscles burn up, and as a result their muscles start to ignore the insulin. Taking more exercise AND eating less sugar and fat will give your muscles a chance to become less insensitive to insulin. Eating less sugar and fat helps, exercise helps, but you really have to do both. Don't exercise too heavily at the start: build up the exercise slowly so you have a chance to improve your fitness. Foods made from unmilled grains are very low-GI and are very useful for treating early-stage type 2 diabetes. Examples are boiled rice, porridge made from whole grains such as rolled oats, and boiled barley are the sort of thing you need to look at. A lot of traditional dishes across Europe used to be cooked with unmilled grains, I assume Poland must have had some! So look out for traditional cookery books. It may help to avoid artificial sweeteners. This is because when you taste anything sweet, your brain tells your pancreas to manufacture insulin: if it is an artificial sweetener, then you get the insulin but no sugar, so your blood sugars drop, and you get hungry and eat too much. However, the important things are exercise, eating less, and trying to eat unmilled grains. Good luck!

The amber referred to in English-speaking motoring law is very strictly defined, and named as "amber". Best you read up on the wikipedia article, where the definition is given.

It's an official mod - check out the Daily Kerbal section.

I've not noticed the framerate problem. Try the same ship design without the StageRecover mod. This may be an issue with the mod, not stock! Try using [noparse][ing] tags and link to the image (not the album) instead of [/noparse]. It may be that the forum gets confused when it tries to parse the stuff in the spoiler.