NovaSilisko

Presumably there would be a large group of people claiming it was faked. The same would've happened if the Soviets had landed on the moon in the 60s to be honest... especially given the secrecy of both the USSR and China.

You could get it ALMOST at orbital velocity, but not at or above. At the scale of a planet, rocks tend to start acting more like fluids (well, crunchy fluids, but you get the idea. Io, for instance, is solid on the surface but is squashed and stretched by tidal forces). It would just shed and redistribute material until it was at a level below orbital velocity. Landing on a body with its surface moving at nearly orbital speed though is almost laughably easy. All you really do is just perform an orbital rendezvous with the ground, and make sure you're feet-first when you come down.

A good number of space probes have used solid upper stages. Being space probes they of course require the most precise of trajectories - and in most cases the solid upper stages are able to get them to within a few tens of m/s of the correct velocity. New horizons for instance has only expended about 20 m/s delta-v, so far, and it used a solid kick stage to help propel it to solar escape velocity.

Well, you can know exactly how much delta-v you have on that upper stage + payload, so depending on how big of a payload there is, you can shut the first stage down/ignite the second stage at different times. It's pretty common practice, arguably just as common as liquid upper stages.

It looks like it's canned with parameters. High up in space, low in space, high in atmosphere, low in atmosphere, surface. Sadly he thought wrong, MB was removed :c

I might try moving Bop further out and scaling it back up again... I'm just wondering if the lag has to do with its absurdly small size.

I'd totally recommend spore as long as you can get it cheap. Tribal and civilization stages are a joke, space is so-so, but microbe and creature stages are quite fun, if repetitive.

Okay, let me just emphasise this for everyone since nobody seems to actually have read it: Just because he's not back yet doesn't mean it's dead forever... seriously. Sometimes people have things go on. Sometimes things come up, and they have better things to do than use their spare time to work on a mod.

"Bullet" physics is the name of a physics library, not physics about bullets. It's just a name for it: http://bulletphysics.org/wordpress/

IIRC there's a version of the Bullet physics engine for Unity. I've heard a lot more good things about Bullet than PhysX. Of course, that all depends on how it's implemented. An aerodynamic system for instance still needs to be made from scratch, but from what I gather Bullet is generally much more reliable, and handles complex shapes better. Non-wobbly joints depend on setting the best settings for the joints themselves (which is all KJR does, I think?) But of course, the game's been developed for coming on three years now using Unity's default PhysX implementation, so it would be non-trivial to go back and undo all of that...

I really can't figure out why the damn thing is grey... I haven't changed any textures on it, it just decides it wants to be grey. The difference between local and scaled space though shouldn't cause lag... it's something else. The worst part is, it doesn't generate any errors, so you can't track it down. easily.

Well just because I use a mod to fix it doesn't mean it shouldn't be fixed in the base game... mod ought to only be a stopgap measure.

If you get rings working... give me a poke. I think I'll have some use for them.

Well, why test it with something subtle that might go unnoticed?

I believe it was said they don't want to fix it. I loathe the wobble, and can't play the game anymore without KJR myself... fix in stock would be certainly welcome, if unlikely.

Lighting mod now loading values properly, woo So that makes it saving and loading correctly. Next up: sun lens flare color, then loader GUI, then editor GUI

Watching SpaceX launch, work will resume after that

Christ, I need to start playing DF again. I hope I can escape it in a timely fashion though, otherwise I might be stuck there for years...

Well, what's different about the heightmaps is they're loaded using System.IO as opposed to GameDatabase. I guess something about that doesn't work on linux... (cttw, are you on linux too?)

wat You can play KSP with your machine and build what you build, but not Dwarf Fortress? That's... unusual. Or have I missed a computer disaster?

Not to mention once you've got the now-bricked ISS into lunar orbit, you now lack any means to get crew or cargo to it for several years. Without adequate station keeping, the station eventually drifts to an unstable lunar orbit and, after a few years, smacks into the surface with a spectacular flash visible from earth's surface. NASA, ESA, and Roscosmos collectively ask themselves "why the hell did we do that again"

GPU isn't the requirement, KSP's all about CPU and RAM.

I kind of have hopes to film the first SLS launch (if the thing ever launches) on a Super-8 film camera, of the type used to record the Saturn V launches. In the event SLS doesn't happen, the next biggest rocket (possibly SpaceX MCT, also assuming that gets off the ground)

1. Columbia had a hole in the wing, not Challenger 2. The plan was to keep the crew on the station and bring them home with normal Soyuz flights (I believe they would have been launched with one or two crew absent, to provide a free seat on return), then remotely undock and deorbit the shuttle. The payload bay doors would've been kept open to make sure the shuttle disintegrated completely on entry, so it didn't threaten anything on the ground. There's really no such thing as "no big deal" in spaceflight.

Making the ambient and sun light mod now. It will work off a preset system. Fairly minimalist normally, unless you enable the editor. Just a text box and a button to load the preset. When in-game, you can hit a hotkey to open up an editor GUI to play with values. Not made the GUI yet though, just working on the preset load/save options. Also, Alternis will have its own lightshifter embedded by default, but it can be disabled with the same options screen it uses to configure other stuff.