Mr. Scruffy

You just dont know the right games for that... ;P

Nice post. Not much to add, but i cant help wondering: When did they figure out, that the ratio of Screen size to floppy size should be >1? I mean: It´s so funny 2 (!) 5.25" floppies but something like a 3.5" screen - really? BTW: Would you mind naming the machines? The lower seems to be a c64 variant (what were the letters again?), but the above? About infocom: Do they still exist? I am wondering, because i kind of often see signs of one-man-companies wearing the name and wonder wether they´d be in trouble, if they ever make their way out of the garage.

haha - just clicked the link to their website. See that crane on there? Dont get anywhere close to it - cause you know who´s in the seat, right? And their helmets? Gosh, why invent franchise-products for your game, when it´s already out there? Jay Leno stuff.

Yeah, John Shepard is the guy from Mass Effect, isnt he? ;P

Capt. Kirk.

Star Control II Nice one indeed and there may well be some space-enthusiastic youngsters on this board who´d really miss out, if they´d not download the dosbox and give it a shot. One of the best Space Opera games, en par with Starflight.

I only read signatures which arent longer than my own.

Duh! - that´s what´s taking the chinese so long - to find where the one true blasted-off-on-relaunch flag is located on the moon, exactly. They´ll retrieve it, wave it to the cam, going ´oh someone lost something? is that yours? yeah? ;P´... Seriously: No, i didnt know that, thx for the info.

Totally missed this one until i saw some quotations of it. Yeah, that´s actually what space flight is all about and (wo-)manned more so than probes: To do to the whole of mankind what the pyramids did for egypt. A task to unite over. The Kennedy speech (´we chose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard...´) is pivotal. Huamns are just this way: They need something to unite against. The 13 colonies united against the british. Germany united against France... Mankind should unite against the challanges of space - and it offers enough of that to try the best of our skills even without aliens. If such an era of such globally united and serious effort (on a warlike-scale, so to say) would persist only for a few decades with enough to show for it to make it worthwhile, the term ´mankind´ or ´human´ would have their meaning drifted to a new understanding, afterwards, just like the inhabitants of the nile valley started to call themselves ´egyptians´ some 5,000 years ago. And just like with pyramids, that ´worthwhile´ can be utterly devoid of any rational function. Spaceflight, manned at least, is - or was - the modern tower of babel. In the end, we might end up learning more about ourselves, than about the universe. PS: Hopefully?

I pity you in all ambigiouty (i cant spell this word - possibly becaue i pity you so much right now)

Maybe the only valid sole indicator (that is if you only want to use one, and only one) for a comp´s performance in KSP is: (´calculated time for the launch´ / ´used time for launch´) * average FPS during launch

Well, have you ever met Umbra on the Mun? Or anywhere else in KSP? I dont think it exists (though given prefectly aligned planes and the given sizes it should occur regularily, right?). Which is forgivable, imho.

Haha - what if the chinese go to the moon, rip out the american flag, gesticulrily wipe their behinds with it and plant their own, instead? Would that make the US go there, again? Gosh - imagine, live-TV footage of taikonauts picking up the US flag from the Apollo 11 site and taking it home as trophy... then going on about how who doesnt put it in value doesnt deserve to own it and all that BS by which the west still... well going OT... Anyways: Best case scenario?

I really like what he says about history generation towards the end. I wish solar systems in KSP would be generated in the same fashion, so that you could guess, how this moon came to get its retrograde orbit (when compared to the other moons) or which crater of two is the younger one, to give but two examples. To tip it all of, it´d be totally awesome if you had a chance to actually watch the systems´ generations after you concluded a game (sort of like Civ-replays) to check on your theories.

Commenting on some on this page: System Shock II: It actually scared me out of it. I mean after ´we are here´, i started whisteling (that´s what i do, when i am terrified), but when the monkeys started screaming, i started to look frantically for the next hatch door from the Rickenbacker and went on flying solo.... Gunship: From a datasette?! Oh my! ´Please stand by...´ hahaha EDIT: Forgot my own entry: - Jagged Alliance II (though after all the school massacres that happenend meanwhile, i´d say it´s clearly for (mentally sane) adults, only!)

dp - sorry.

It was also a psychological stunt by the crew, i´d like to add. I´d guess, most so for the guy who did not land, but stayed in orbit, and lost all contact to any human being, when the craft swung around to the far-side of the moon. Imagine: The lonliness. And then the dim notion, that while Neil and Buzz down there will be remembered for a century or so, your name will be forgotten next week. Gosh - the return trip: They´ll be hoping aboard and be all bragging and telling stories of how it was on the surface and they´ll go straight on for all the hours it takes going home, while all you have to tell is: ´The dark side is really dark, you know.´ Then comes the parade and everyone will be like: ´Hey, there´s Neil! Hooray! Look, there´s Buzz, too! Yippieh! ... But who´s that third guy, there? What´s he doing there?´...

No, i am not gonna vote for having them start all over at this point. Not only because i wouldnt want to wait that long (presuming the project would even survive the incured lag in the developement process), but also because i feel sympathy for the devs and wouldnt want to put them through the frustration. EDIT: I bought the game on this engine ; cant expect them to port it to another. Not for the money i gave, anyways. I can only guess that the effort would be so much as to warrant a whole new funding process. So the question would be: ´Are you willing to pay the price once again and wait half a year (wild guesstimate, could be more, could be less) extra for the portation, or would you rather hope for optimization of the game and the engine (the later being out of the devs hands) and keep things going as is?´ I´d go for the later.

While sharing your praise in general, eclipses are a rather bad example, imho, cause, you see: A lot of sun-light coming through after all, uh?

Answering the thread´s title: Actually, no - it´s just that i am easy too scare and am terribly afraid of Orcs and Zombies. That´s why i cant play these games, though i´d like them a lot, i guess. I hate KSP, but there is just nothing else out there, except killing Orcs and Zombies - and thus i end up here. (Though sometimes, the kerbals remind me of orc-zombies in midget-format...)

I just realized: There is neither a ´report post´ nor a ´ignore user´ button on this forum.

That´s where you lost me, OP, cause, sepratons are perfectly usable as is, as post #2 demonstrates.

If possible, the idea deserves consideration, i think. I mean, if you imagine that the interior is well fixed to the fairing itself, then, shouldnt it even be considered one part for realism sake, more than not? Inside the fairing nothing should break off due to drag. Maybe due to high g-forces, but if you think of the whole interior filled with airbags or styrophor... The payload parts should still be loaded pre-launch, just not simulated physically before the fairing opens - their position is fixed relative to the fairings base, until it opens. I think ´we can launch anything´ is a gross overstatement, though. It should reduce lag during launch, not more, really, and the extent to which it would do that would depend on how many parts your payload contains compared to the rest of the rocket. Detail lovers would benefit most, i´d guess, as it would speed up the launch of high-part-count-payload launches while not making it to more easy to lift heavy stuff.

I propose to use the unit ´kerbal´ for all masses. They seem to be standardized concerning that pretty accurately.

Yeah, today, if they sent someone, they´d probably find out on the surface, that they dont get any ´bars´ to call mission control..