softweir

Very unhappy. But that's at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum of quality control and expense that we are discussing, so not really relevant to the discussion.

Assuming that the two computers do communicate and that there are any known failure modes that the second stage computer can report to the first stage, that still doesn't guarantee that the SpaceX engineers had predicted the exact failure mode we saw, which they would have to do in order to program the 2nd stage computer to initiate an abort. What we can be certain of is that the engineers will have been very conservative in choosing which (if any) failure modes trigger an abort, because of the very serious danger that they will create too many false-positives and thus generate more failures than they save. It's a nuisance if they lose a 1st stage (one that they *might* have been able to salvage *if* it landed on the barge) due to an upper stage failure, but it's BAD if they lose a payload because their computers aborted due to an "imaginary" failure! It is quite likely the engineers chose to NOT preprogram in any abort modes once Qmax has passed. The only reason to abort a rocket is to save lives, ie people on the ground or flying the rocket. In a case like this of an unmanned rocket, they only have to worry about people on the ground, and once a rocket has gone supersonic it is so high and going so fast that a RUD event is as good as a detonation for protecting groundlings' lives - it *will* break up into small bits that *will* fall on water, not on vulnerable communities. Once they are flying passengers things will be very different: they will have many failure modes programmed to cause aborts, all with the aim of getting the Dragon capsule away from any big, bad booms and safely down to Earth. But until then, they are unlikely to bother with post-Qmax aborts, there's no point and they could be counter-productive. EDIT: This is sci-fi unlikely. It's hard enough targeting a camera at a flying rocket, but aiming a laser with such precision that it can burn through the rocket is orders of difficulty harder. If there *had* been a laser targeting the rocket, then on infrared we would have seen the rocket itself light up ahead of the exhaust trail for several seconds before it went boom. This is because it would take time for the laser to heat up the skin of the rocket sufficiently to cause structural failure. There might have been atmospheric heating effects, but we would not have seen them because the laser would be sweeping rapidly through the air, never heating any bit of air for long enough for us to see it.

Because he presented a concise, coherent, well-informed and well-argued analysis of the current situation. He doesn't say anything anybody else has been saying, but he said it better than anybody else I have read so far.

By bug-magic!

Squad have asserted that they sent the update to GoG on the day it was released. Therefore, this is all at GoG's end.

I'm occasionally getting that in stock, so I doubt it is due to any mods!

It was fixed - one of the effects used was disabled, allowing them to avoid using a buggy routine.

I wouldn't take it for a headache. It can cause serious damage to the immune system leading to a vulnerability to all sorts of infections, and can cause a form of anaemia in which all blood-cell types AND platelets are lost, leading to bleeding, infection, and severe exhaustion caused by loss of red blood cells. It can also cause a form of skin disease where the upper layers of skin detach from the lower layers, with the very real risk of severe skin damage, infection and death. I have, once or twice, been prescribed antibiotics which can cause similar side-effects: but this was to infections that were more dangerous than the antibiotic, and the docs made sure to check repeatedly that they weren't causing me harm. I would suggest that if you can possibly find a safer medicine to treat your headaches then do so, and if you can't, then it's better to suffer the headache: there's no sense killing yourself for a bit of comfort!

That depends on GoG. Squad can only send GoG the update, it is up to GoG when they push it out. The same goes for any other retailer who may offer KSP. Steam are extremely quick with updates.

Judging by what the developers have said (and assuming they don't need a hotfix after 1.0.3!) their first priority is the Unity 5 upgrade, and I think this is what we will see next - whatever number they give it. Reasons: The PS4 port requires some of rewriting on top of the conversion to Unity 5, so it will take longer than the port to Unity 5. Multiplayer is a big job! This might be the one they work on while we are all playing with the unity 5 version.

The actual "nozzle" part, yes, that's not excessively difficult, though making it strong enough and light enough has proved tricky. A circular-section nozzle is self-reinforcing: if it starts to bend out of shape then the pressure within restores it, but the curves of an aerospike (linear or circular) are shaped in such a way that if they start to deform then the pressure on them exaggerates that. Another problem is that the engines that create the flame that plays over the aerospike are very difficult to make. A conventional combustion chamber is simple by comparison - it just needs to be a heat-resistant, pressure-resistant approximately spherical chamber with opening for combustants coming in and for exhaust going out to the nozzle. Rearranging all that to create nearly flat jets of exhaust that the aerospikes need is very tricky. Some designs have had many tiny combustion chambers each leading to a small, flat nozzle that directs the exhaust over a segment of the aerospike, or they have required large, heavy, complex manifolds to do the job. Either way, the engines are large, heavy, expensive and inefficient.

If you ask in Add-Ons/General Add-on Affairs, somebody is sure to give you a Modmanager file that will disable smoke for all stock engines. (You will need Modmanager for it to work!) Good luck!

As has been mentioned above, Unity 4.x does very little multi-threading, so KSP is limited by that. In theory HarvesteR and co could try to improve the multi-threading a little, but that is back-breaking work and a good way to introduce horrible bugs and performance problems - much better to leave this sort of thing to the experts! I know that Unity 5 will be able to multi-thread physics, and that alone will be a significant improvement! It also has a unified, efficient UI package, which will improve matters when UI elements are active, and Unity Inc have claimed that Win 64 will be stable, which will have the Windows mod-collectors cheering.

Show us your rocket. Also, what mods are you using?

Star-tracking is the only system that is cheap enough, reliable enough and accurate enough to enable a deep-space probe to aim its dish directly back at Earth and to navigate successfully. Most (if not all) commercial satellites use star-tracking for orientation referencing. All other systems suffer from jitter and drift, especially the return signal which is too weak and too intermittent to be able to use that as an directional reference. (plus, even if they could use the return signal, they still need other reference points!) There are backup systems that enable probes to maintain a reasonably stable orientation in the event the star-tracking system loses sight of too many stars, but they will always depend on regaining starsight before too long or they will lose contact with Mission Control. I doubt anybody at Rosetta Mission Control is surprised - this is the sort of thing they would expect to happen. True, they couldn't predict exactly when Rosetta would need to retreat, nor do they yet know how far it will have to retreat, but they would have been looking out for this problem and would have programmed the probe in advance to deal with it. They are simply explaining to the public why this long-anticipated event is taking place.

Personally, I am very pleased to see that even more people will now have the opportunity to play some form of KSP. Why? It looks like Squad will be getting money for very little extra work: Flying Tiger are doing the hard work of porting the game, and Squad will get dosh for licensing the game to them. (Though we don't know the exact details, so my exact wording may not be legally appropriate.) This is only good for KSP. More money means more resources for development. While we can be sure Squad are in a healthy financial state, there is no such thing as too much cash when it comes to the long-term development and support of a game. Why should it? True, there are companies that are obsessed with a unified look-and-feel for their games across all platforms, but they do the development of ALL ports in-house and a unified look-and-feel simplifies their codebase. Flying Tiger are doing the development for the PS4, and Squad aren't bound by FT's decisions about any nerfing. While there is obviously some feedback - especially as regards the switch to Unity 5 - that doesn't tie Squad to chopping anything off KSP. EDIT: Worth reading This Short Q&A.

@B3boy: Maybe WinRar is misinterpreting the .zip data. Try using Windows to extract the files - Windows 7 has .zip capability built-in to Windows Explorer and you can just drag and drop folders from inside .zip files, no problem.

Always redownload damaged archives. At the very best, "repair" archive will fix a damaged folder by scanning the file-headers, but what is far more likely is that it will delete a damaged file from the folder. So now you need to uninstall, redownload and reinstall. Good luck!

It's been much discussed. Sarbian has threatened to remove the CoL bubble, because even when it works it is such a poor approximation of reality that it is useless. (It doesn't give any idea of how the CoL moves as you change airspeed or angle-of-attack or altitude.) Instead, he recommends we use the graphs.

IIUC, at the moment the aren't doing science, they are waiting until Dawn gets closer. The shots that are being taken are primarily for navigational purposes to help the mission controllers judge how fast Dawn is being drawn to Ceres by its gravity. These piccies are just a side-effect of this process.

You don't read the right papers. Try the BBC website, they mentioned it.

They should continue to go metric. The problems that can be caused in the Real World of engineering (not just aerospace) are enormous, and sometimes very expensive. I say "continue" to go metric, because in fact most engineers DO now use metric units at all stages of their work, except when sending out press releases when everything has to be converted for the press. An example problem: A stateside engineering company prepared plans for a factory to be built in the UK, which included a spreadsheet of all the ducting, piping and cabling lengths necessary. They sent the plans to the company that would be doing the building, and stated that all measurements were metric. The builders started pre-ordering materials. Then a kid on work experience noticed that the toilet cubicles were stated to be nearly TEN METRES WIDE! The US engineers had got the conversion back-to-front for many measurements, so a lot of linear measurements, for instance, were 3.28^2, ie. 10.75 times too big. That sharp-eyed kid saved the builders a ....load of money in over-ordered ducts, pipes and wiring. The builders had to ask for the plans in traditional measurements and do the conversions themselves. At least there is only one non-metric system to deal with - there used to be several different versions across the world! My grandfather was an engineering consultant and he had to carry tables of conversions for the different standards of foot, yard, pound and so on that he encountered during his work (and had to use a sliderule to do the conversions, but that's a different story). Nevertheless, two systems of units is one too many, and life will get a lot simpler if we ever manage to cut it down to just one.

I've recently rediscovered my adolescent passion for Lego Technic. Show me a decent Technic kit that costs less than £40! I would say that (for me) the replayability of KSP is greater than even the replayability of Lego, and doesn't require a potentially endless round of Real Life parts purchases to enable those ever more ambitious designs - once you buy KSP, you have all the parts, and a pretty good chance that Squad will continue to plug holes in the parts list.

But Ceres has got VERY low gravity, and only a very low velocity will take material on a suborbital trajectory halfway round its globe. The radials on the moon are far longer on a body with much higher gravity, those on Ceres are a fraction of the distance. What is really needed for radials that long are small impact craters, because the big ones will have been caused by impacts energetic enough to eject all the material free of Ceres' surface.

They look like impact-crater radials - debris from an impact can leave radial lines like that. They exist on the moon, for instance.