Sean Mirrsen

I am well aware of what causes flipping, but I did mean that not having front brakes means significantly less braking power - less than half, even, for precisely the reason you described. As the vehicle stops it shifts more of its weight to the front suspension, unloading the rear - and if the only brakes are in the rear, you end up with significantly less braking power than you'd otherwise have.As far as braking is concerned, using front brakes is preferable. It lets you stop faster, as long as you don't overdo it and flip.

Anything can tip over if you try to break(sic) it hard enough. Yeah, editable action groups would seem to be the way to go, although I mostly prefer to have extra braking power to having not enough braking power to tip over. It's a question of control. I think that adding the action to the rover wheels themselves will be superfluous. There are already quite a few buttons in their context menu, and when action groups can be edited - and it's a question of when and not "if", since there's already a plugin that does it - controlling the brakes from there would be best. Alternatively, just add your non-parking brakes to a different action group.

Not to mention how useful airships would be for returning from Eve. With the density of Eve's atmosphere, every kilometer of altitude you can gain cuts down drastically on the size of the launcher vehicle.

Might be even better without that typo in the title. ... I'm sure it might be useful for building probes, but Kerbals are not those kind of aliens.

Correction: Not continuous, or sustained nuclear fusion, and definitely not a runaway fusion reaction that engulfs the whole planet (somehow without destroying it). But it is still possible - well, theoretically - with a certain design of a clustered nuclear bomb - ironically, a nuclear fusion bomb - to create a small pocket of fusion in the hydrogen atmosphere. But all it'd be useful for would be a... well, a very unconventional approach to boosting a nuclear blast, for blowing a hole in Jupiter's atmosphere.

Indeed it does. But I have nothing better to do, and I like maintaining a collected disposition in the face of any inanity that gets thrown at me, so...Heh, maybe I should try working in tech support. Besides, I have my own plans for a magnetic field-driven propulsion system, so I'd be the last person to laugh at the premise itself. Mine is just less inane, and more technobabble. XD

Alternatively, putting enough energy into it from all sides at once would just compress it to about the size of Earth, at which point it might all fuse at once. The initial explosion (imparting energy) would toss its moons out into space like frag grenade shrapnel. The follow-up explosion would boil Mars, cook most of Earth, vaporize or toss away half of the asteroid belt, and strip the rings and a lot of the atmosphere from Saturn - assuming those planets are reasonably nearby on their orbits, and not on the other side of the system.There's no simple way to fuse Jupiter. You could perhaps toss an artificial fusion reactor into Jupiter though. Would make one hell of a powerstation.

Consider that we are currently using a nuclear bomb essentially wrapped around fusable material in order to create a fusion bomb. Even if you were to make a bomb powerful enough to incite fusion in the immediate surrounding material, unless it is powerful enough to similarly compress the whole planet, the fusion reaction will not be sustainable - as the fireball and the pressure wave expands, the pressure drops, and fusion will no longer occur - a fusion runaway is impossible. It would be possible with an already heavily compressed material - as it happens with Nova explosions of stars, when gravity has compressed helium into such a state where adding heat increases the speed of the reaction, and the reaction adds heat - a thermal runaway. In all cases you need a force holding the fusion zone together, or sufficient force to compress the whole thing in one go - fusion is a finicky beast, it needs the right conditions to work.

If you connected them by docking, then something went wrong. If you connected them in the VAB, then you did it wrong. There simply must be no difference between multi-docking connections, because otherwise a multi-docked ship would bend under thrust. Squad spent a lot of time making sure that multi-docked connections behaved the right way with undocking, especially in regards to the ship's root point.

You seem to be introducing arbitrary complexity cutoffs. Science isn't about making up rules - the rules are just a side effect. Science begins as experimentation and observation, and it deals in knowledge, first and foremost. The rules are our way of sharing that knowledge with each other. The cavemen didn't know exact numbers for tensile strength of mesopotamian oak, they had no units to measure the magnitude of kinetic force, nor did they have a published thesis on lever arms and transmission of force around a fulcrum. But they did, through experimentation and observation, determine that "bigger stick hit harder". Technology isn't "how you make stuff". Technology is a practical application of knowledge. Find a practical application for historical knowledge, and you can have historical technology. Cavemen, once they acquired and could communicate the knowledge of "bigger stick hit harder", created the first technology - the art of beating something with a stick. You can't really say that technology is way beyond such primitivism. What is a hammer, if not just a bigger and harder stick? Smithing is technology, right? Science and technology are two parts of the same loop. Science takes from the surroundings and processes knowledge. Technology processes knowledge and gives back to the surroundings. By enriching our surroundings with technology, we change the capabilities of our science, and by studying the surroundings with our science we improve the capabilities of our technology. It's a circle of humankind's development.

I think both of those are closer to truth than anything else proposed. The question, as stated, is not "why it was created", but "why does it exist". It exists, quite simply, because otherwise we would not have been having this discussion. We can try to find reasoning and scientific fact, but that's the simplest truth. In a Multiverse, a universe exists because it is capable of existing. Our universe exists because if it didn't, we would not be here. We are not the cause - but we're irrefutable proof.

A force exerted by one docking port is received by the other docking port. The force pulls both ports together equally, and even if two ports of different size reacted together (they don't), different forces between port models would still only mean something when two identical ports lined up - which would really only mean a difference in how hard the ports pull each other together. As it is, both ports are acting on each other with equal total force. Physics 101, or whatever course they teach Newtonian laws on these days. Action and reaction.Besides, what you are proposing is bootstrapping. A craft cannot pull itself with just two magnets. A magnet train works because of the powered track. (and in case you want to bring it up, in some cases an unpowered magnetic ramp track) Unless your pilot is a Munchausen rather than a Kerman, what you are proposing is not going to work.

All ports are really attached. Only one counts for the tree structure, but the attachment is real and equal in all ports. Disconnect the port that is the "true" connection, if you can tell the difference, and as long as some other point is connected, the tree will rebuild to conform, reestablishing connections before releasing physics.

And craft already can dock to themselves, what exactly do you mean? The multi-docking is enabled by that fact. If you add parts that can animate, like the Infernal Robotics mod, then you could make a robotic arm with a docking port on its end, that would be able to connect to any docking port on your own ship.

There's actually a massive difference between the "lock-in" I propose and the physics packing that objects beyond physics range undergo. The difference is that a locked-in object still physically exists, and all of its parts are still distinct and can be interacted with. The only things they don't do is move or check for collisions/stress from each other. A locked-in object is also locked into its gravity-deformed position, and will not suffer additional stress from unlocking, whereas a packed object is packed into a rest state. You can even put a Kerbal into and out of a locked-in craft without unlocking it, provided it stands on the ground stably enough and the Kerbal is not smashing into it at 20m/s. The lock-in is a much more dynamic state of being, and just making the physics packing distance shorter will do nothing good - it will just increase the lag if you have to switch between several closely standing buildings.

No, the game literally freezes all of the parts in place, and unfreezes them all once a sufficient force is applied - because the building's collision is not simplified at all, but the interactions between them, including the mechanics of stress and intercollision, are no longer running - saving massive amounts of CPU time, because those inter-part physics calculations are what comprises like 90% of the physics load of the craft. Basically, once "locked in", the craft becomes static. It stops in its last rest state, and does not run inter-part collisions because no parts are moving anymore. It can still run heat exchange, it can still run science gear and gather power (though gathering resources may not be so easy, as it'll force recalculations as the storage tanks filling will increase the stress on the craft), but the most taxing part of the physics - the treating of each part as a separate physics object and seeing if it collides with anything - no longer occurs.

There's this absolutely insane little thing called Detonate, which is entirely about constructing and blowing up buildings. This game has a very noticeable function, wherein any connected collection of parts "settles in" once it no longer experiences any changes in stress. This means that you are free to look at a complete skyscraper as it is standing, and at a partially destroyed building or pile of smoldering rubble once it's all over, but as soon as you hit the structure with enough force that it could create a change of stress, you are seeing a massive slowdown (relative to the complexity of the building) as the physics on it start up and start doing their thing. Something very similar could be done to landed or orbiting craft in KSP. Once the craft's parts' movements fall below a certain threshold, and the force acting on the craft remains constant (i.e. gravity), the craft could "lock in", turning off the part interactions and locking all parts in place for as long as no force is being applied to it. This would allow stationary structures such as bases and stations to be far less CPU intensive, as their physics would consist of only the collision meshes of the whole craft checking against any moving objects and the terrain - provided nothing is being done to them, i.e. docking.

Semantically different maybe, inasmuch as "modern science" and "modern technology" are defined. Technology is any systematic use of an... anything, with a certain expected result. Science is determining said systematic use through observation. The first caveman who picked up a club may have done so out of idle curiosity, but the purpose and practical uses of the club were determined through experimentation - the earliest and most basic form of science. The first banging together of the first two rocks was a result of natural hands being found insufficiently hard and durable for the purpose of delivering kinetic energy. Science and technology always went hand-in-hand, with new technologies being made as either developing old ones through deliberate improvement or random experimentation, or through observing nature and attempting to recreate its features.

The thing with saving fuel on landing is the same thing as with saving fuel on takeoff - the less time you spend fighting gravity, the better. Ideally, you must time your one full-thrust burn exactly so that your velocity hits zero a meter or two from the ground. That's ideally. In practice, you are unlikely to time it that well, so do a quick experiment and see how much acceleration you are capable of. 1G is around 10 m/s per second. If you can pull 1G, you will cancel 100m/s of velocity in 10 seconds, and travel around 600m down - meaning around 650m is a good time to start slowing down if your speed is 100m/s. So the exact point of where you start that burn is dependent on the exact rocket and trajectory, but it's usually best to start earlier than later. Just remember how fast you can slow down, and how soon you'll be hitting the ground, and try to not make the latter be sooner than the former.

Time is global in KSP, unless you haven't noticed. Even if you had your STL travel system and put a ship at 0.99c on a trajectory to a star 10 light years away, you would still have to spend ~10 years of flight-time before the ship reaches the destination. Because if you won't, then the game will have to track time differently in different reference frames. Modding. With planets and systems being loaded into RAM separately, resource-wise, the potential maximum limit of stellar bodies you can have at once is obnoxiously huge. Toss a procedural generation system into that, and you can have a whole galaxy.If you think it's impossible with our technology, go ahead and try to play Frontier: First Encounters. It was a game that ran in DOS, a sequel to Elite. It had planets moving on their orbits, and full newtonian physics for ships, with time acceleration and jumpdrives to facilitate travel... with a list of planets and systems somewhere in the hundreds. A game for DOS. If you're telling me KSP can't do at least the same, you're delusional. Simple: I like natural progression of challenges. I play an RPG, I like it when I don't have to do any more grinding around than is inevitable in all the walking/driving/flying place-to-place misadventures that take place during the story. So if I need an orbital shipyard to build myself a JumpShip, I will do so - because holy superstrings, it's a freaking orbital shipyard. I'm going to be using it for much more than just the JumpShip. Same with the infrastructure. It'll be fun to set it up and do periodical missions to the various bases sprinkled around the system, but unless it's for an immediate purpose it's not going to be fun at all. The project you're talking about, most of them really, are monstrous in size and scope. The amount of delta-V needed for a conventional rocket to reach significant velocities for time warp to even help anything is retardedly high, and the resulting rocketship will be so large and complex that you'll not only need considerable time and resources to set it up - but also a very powerful computer to actually allow it to show up on the screen. It's pretty much the same with that solar-panel parasol design - it won't be constructed in one piece, it will have to be modular, and about the size of Gilly at least - and the game's physics range is 2.5 Km. So in the end you have a slow, painful grind, bringing parts of the blasted thing together by hand, and enduring gradually slower game performance as you do so.With the alternative being ignoring an age-old physics postulate or making small allowances to make currently theorised technology viable, I think the logical choice is apparent. "A big crime against physics is preferable to a small crime against gameplay". Similar-size satellites IRL don't weigh as much. The Deep Space 1 ion-power probe massed in at 373Kg, 486 with fuel, total. The KSP in-game Ion Engine weighs 250Kg alone. Delta-V is inversely proportional to the mass of the craft.Also, small surprise there. The KSP 'verse is 10 times space compressed. You need more delta-V to make orbit from Earth than you need for a full mission to Duna. If KSP had Delta-V budgets appropriate to the physical parameters of the tanks, we'd be swimming in delta-V. When the "adventure" is staring into the void for ten years (and maybe not even that, assuming "magical" hibernation ), I'll take the wormhole. It might at least have something fun to see on the threshold. And wormholes are thought to be naturally occurring in certain circumstances, btw. It is impossible insofar as unicorns capable of flight have not been recorded to exist. And do keep in mind you're talking to an MLP proponent here. A carriage pulled by unicorns would be the way to travel the void if I had the option. Assuming they don't mind, of course. Not quite in the mood for actual research on the subject, but there is that document I linked above that got tossed at me in a similar discussion on another forum. That work? Well, maybe not you specifically. Personally I tend to forget what even goes on in these arguments. ("live in the now", so to say) But some of you people saying that FTL travel is imposible, Star Trek technology is never going to happen, yada yada. Remember that, at the root of it all, it's the oldest and most respectable scientists telling us that. We as a species are pretty dumb, yeah. Religion alone is taking a massive toll there - not any specific one, just in general. Or I should say "has taken a toll" - the damage's been done long ago. Anyway.Yeah, pretty much that's how discoveries are normally made. Scientific method and building on the works of others, that's the advantage we have over animals - we keep notes, and share them. I should also point out that a whole damn lot of the things we've ever discovered, were discovered by observing the things happening in nature. We were a tad too late to observe the natural fission reactors though, sadly, and I guess the scientific community as a whole isn't going to wake up until a freak naturally-occurring FTL asteroid blows up the Moon. Or "a" moon, or Mars for instance. Safer that way. I would prefer a way that doesn't involve needless waiting around. I would prefer to jump in, leave the jumpship on the fringes of the system where it can still work, and explore the planets of the systems the old-fashioned way. Manually created starsystems have a major drawback. They are few. Depressingly, vanishingly few. We, right now, only have the one. And adding every new body to it is taking hundreds of man-hours of work from the dev team. Procedural content is the future of gaming. It allows to build a framework upon which handcrafted elements - or procedural elements generated from handcrafted elements - may be placed, thus ensuring both infinite variety and replayability, and the close-up quality of detail.There's a reason fewer and fewer strategy games nowadays come without a random map generator. Unless you're going for cybersports and want your players to optimize the time between actions to a millisecond, turning strategy gaming into a patterned clickfest, having just a handful of premade maps to play in is going to be severely detrimental to the game's longevity. And the point - the point is that it is procedural, and in all likelihood at least a little random. You know what is the difference between a beautiful handcrafted world, and a beautiful random procedurally generated world? Even the creator can enjoy the sights of the latter. They're not just spheres in space. They're no more "just spheres in space" than all the planets and moons in KSP are "just spheres in space". They are all unique in their own ways. If I had a version of Noctis that had a KSP-like rocket constructor and physics instead of the instant-anywhere landing transporter, I would play the hell out of that.

My most horrible mission experiences, considering I mostly fly spaceplanes, usually involve trying to land in horrible places. Usually on planets not meant for landing normal spaceplanes. So far the most horrible place to land on for me is Duna. Thin atmosphere, no oxygen, and not a single stretch of relatively flat land in sight.

AlamoVampire, by sounding like an overzealous Orthodox church preacher, you are not really helping our case here. Especially not with glorifying (the already glorified) Star Trek. When you need to push someone's opinion on physics, not clinging to pop culture is usually a better way to go about it. I am also not happy about saving those whom nature would demand to die, and reverting changes that nature would inflict upon humans at birth, as that really causes us to stagnate as a species, but I know when not to be vocal about it, as that line of thinking is kind of unpopular. (understatement of the decade right there) Though this discussion does bring up that interesting point in how the "big names" in science tend to be used nowadays. "Glory be to Einstein the Savior and Stephen Hawking His Prophet" seems more and more appropriate as I read more of these discussions. Seriously, people. Science is not religion. We are not here to fervently cling to facts bestowed upon us in undying faith - true scientists challenge the facts, as that is the only way to keep the science going forward.

KSP will probably never have multiplayer because of the logistical difficulties of managing time warp of different players, and you propose it to tackle time dilation paradoxes. Eeyup. News flash: the time spent back at Earth is still important. The 70 years of traveling to the center of the galaxy will be 70 years to the crew, sure, assuming time dilation is what it is. Now imagine doing that in KSP. Time dilation is the same as time warp. When you're on the ship, you can make time pass very quickly, but Kerbin remains in normal time, and all your infrastructure is doing nothing for decades. IRL ion engines are much more varied than just "ion engines", and KSP does not specify which type they are (though they look kinda like Hall Effect thrusters). Plus IRL ion thrusters are much smaller and lighter than the 250Kg hunk of metal KSP has. Now you're just attacking me. I said I like a challenge, but one of design and skill, not timewasting and sheer manual labor. If you would allow me to return the attack, to me you sound like the kind of person who deeply enjoys playing World of Warcraft et al. There is no fun to be had in turning a rocket design and piloting game into a civ management simulator with a horribly unconventional UI. Maybe for you it is. I had a disused refuelling station core sitting in LKO. I sent a cluster of NERVAs up to it and moved it to orbit Eeloo, completely off-phase, using an inverse bi-elliptic transfer around Sol to avoid waiting for a window. I got there in under a year. With a station. On a whim.The mission frame with a KF drive will be around a year for leaving Sol vicinity, then jump, and then maneuvering around wherever you arrive at. I am fine with the requirement of building a spacebound assembly yard for getting the jumpdrive into space (or more accurately assembling it there), I am fine with setting up an infrastructure of resource gathering that fuels my normal rocket flights and research, but in any career game I will have been everywhere in the system by the end of the second decade, and will have nothing to do but wait for that blasted interstellar probe to be put together. With a "wormhole" or an artifact gate hidden somewhere, you will do pretty much the same except your ships will have to be threading a needle, being required to hit the target with their trajectory. Unlike any of the STL proposals, the discovery of a wormhole will not disrupt gameplay - once you build a ship capable of going through it, you will find a different system to explore, and gameplay will continue, both in that system and in yours, with no time spent twiddling your thumbs waiting for that ship to get to its destination. We do go somewhere, actually. The existence of those examples proves that you cannot outright dismiss the claim as false, until proven - actually proven, not theoretically - to be so. NASA seems to actually be working on an Alcubierre drive adaptation, so whether or not it's possible is a toss-up even now. Funny that you should mention Clarke as a reasonable authority figure in regards to science. I am assuming you don't know about the laws he wrote, then? Tell that to the people who discovered new substances, physical principles, and fields of applied science, by sheer bloody accident.

I find it easier to use HyperEdit and just plain put the test object at the exact point where it would need to be. So if you're testing a Mun lander, you can always put it in Mun orbit, or right on the Mun surface.

You do realize why a hydrogen bomb is called a bomb, right? Because it explodes?Even in a successful freak runaway fusion reaction scenario, you would get a fusion bomb the size of a gas giant. You'd get a bright flash, and a big expanding cloud of superheated yellow Jupiter, because all that energy would have no force - i.e. gravity - to contain it.