NovaSilisko

Likely equipment for a moonbase, and eventually components for a mars mission. There was also the odd thing like this: http://www.astronautix.com/craft/voyr1973.htm

Nah, I don't think the Nova ever would've been built. They had other ideas for Saturn derivatives though, including shuttle-style SRBs, and a stretched-tank monster with four liquid boosters powered by 2 F-1 engines each, yielding something like 400 tons to LEO.

Not sure if it counts since it never happened, but the Apollo Applications Program. New manufacturing line of Saturn Vs, Manned Venus Flyby, bigger Skylab, Mars by the late 80s...

Nah, Dennis Tito proposed the mars flyby, and then some in NASA sort of adopted it, and tried to present it for congress, who produced a resounding "iunno"

A mod could do this quite easily I think, if you apply a random number to the epoch of every planet, then this would accomplish the same effect as offsetting the universal time, without affecting the ingame clock display.

Also with us is Rob (N3X15), who will also be working on web things, the odd programming job, as well as helping design AI systems for creatures and Other Thingsâ„¢

I'll let the one responsible for it explain... about time the other guys got introduced.

I've learned from robin (maker of that WIP N-body mod) that the only reason floats even really exist/are used still is because older CPUs are still around that can't handle doubles. Even if you're on a 32 bit OS, you can still use double precision values. So, in this case I guess it's just Unity trying to be excessively backwards compatible...

Only the orbital values. Unity and PhysX are still stuck with floating point positioning.

http://gifsound.com/?gif=i.imgur.com/C3hOzK9.gif&v=I_izvAbhExY

help

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ Some interesting statistics.

The following images are very important testing and not in any way me just dicking around with the new physics engine...

Nah, they just jittered around a lot. To make them behave semi-realistically I had them set to simulate in world space so they would be "blown" away from the sun (as in, the particle effect aiming away from the sun and emitting outward), but it really didn't like that. I think it could be fixed if you set their simulation mode to local and instead calculated the force being applied to them to fake the same effect, but that'd be a nightmare of mathematics figuring out what the force should be at what given time...

The plugin is (as all are) open source, so if anyone wants to... I remember ages ago I tried doing the same with a particle effect, and it ended up problematic. Particles don't like time warp, or the shifts in space that occur in the tracking station...

Because real comets behave nothing like how KSP's asteroids behave. They come screaming in from highly eccentric orbits around the sun, only very very rarely coming close to earth. Comet Hale-Bopp, for instance, never got closer to Earth than 1.3 AU. KSP's asteroids (to my knowledge) only appear in or around Kerbin's sphere of influence after you track them in the tracking station. Comets, on the other hand, would be discovered as they begin heating up and emitting gas - thereby becoming bright enough to be visible. I doubt most comets would be movable, though, even at KSP scales. Maybe the odd relatively-microscopic one could be pushed around, but that wouldn't be a very spectacular one. Comet ISON, for instance, was ~2 km across, and was barely visible from Earth before its untimely demise. Something 20m across wouldn't even be noticeable. Hardly, it would just be a particle system (or maybe some sort of shader?), and it would be simulated VERY slowly (only moving relatively quickly when at max timewarp). It would arguably be cheaper than the particles coming out of a single rocket engine.

I wouldn't expect U5 out until very late in the year, not worth holding your breath for yet. Plus it'd likely be a massive undertaking reworking everything in KSP to work with the new features...

Polygons are generally cheap as hell to render. A decent computer can handle millions and millions of them (plain ones, minimal shader weirdness) on screen at a time before slowing down. Try some ships of 50 to 500 or so parts with your high poly objects, vs the same stress tests using some low poly objects with the same texture (just overwrite the model, perhaps, so you can use the exact same test craft). I'd be interested in seeing how much difference it makes. While you're at it, maybe try the same tests with a 2048x2048 texture applied to those same high and low poly models.

Latest is 4.3.4.

There will be a demo at some point, maybe of just the terrain but more likely it will happen later and contain a full game experience, just with a limited area (as in, only one solar system available, no changing coordinates or interstellar travel allowed), and limited tech available.

Note the distinction between "procedurally generated" and "randomly generated". One does not imply the other - random generation is procedural generation with a random seed. The planets are procedural (or in most cases, a heightmap with procedurally generated detail on top), but always have the same generation seed, and always are the same for all players.

To properly conduct their spying, RORSATs needed to be in an ultra-low orbit - so low that they needed to be somewhat aerodynamic. As such, they elected to use a nuclear reactor instead of solar panels, because it has less drag. Bit overkill if you ask me.

No clue. Let's not talk about multiplayer right now, though

Another comparison, perhaps a bit more of a practical one this time. A 10 gram nanolander, about 20 centimeters tall, legs only 1 cm or so thick. Bullet: PhysX:

Performance is about the same, a little bit slower, but that's due to the modifications to use double precision. Physics systems won't be too complex in this case (with the possible exception of when you're crashing) so it shouldn't be all too noticeable in-game.