NovaSilisko

I never said real gravity doesn't exist in the microverse, actually. It just usually is overpowered by the core forces. Dark asteroids look just like regular asteroids in our solar system, and will range from meter-sized to kilometer sized at the biggest. Maybe more like comets, since they will be extremely cold. For several confidential reasons, large planets are extremely unlikely, and stars are impossible.

I mostly diverted the flow to twitter, actually.

I remember the days when I was in the top 3 posters...

Handmade, intended to show what the ideal of the final game's look will be. Such a thing should be easily doable for the terrain generator, though. The bigger trouble will be getting nice lighting with radiance and such. That and nice rope physics.

There will be another rendering soonish. I just have to make it, which is an important step. It will depict the exploration of a "dark asteroid", a collection of debris held together by gravity as opposed to a central core, orbiting a galaxy at a considerable distance in near total darkness.

New concept render. Click for full size (3000x4000) Lossless full-size: https://www.dropbox.com/s/szmzq4h78lt9o7c/airless.png?dl=0 This is based off of a perfectly valid planetary configuration with the current gravity formula. Banana + hoverer.

I think Kerbin is backwards, too. That seems a common affliction in KSP renderings, mainly because the texture map is reversed left to right ingame, so extracting the map gives you something mirrored from what it actually looks like ingame.

So. The SotS blog gets a lot of spam. Most gets nuked by the auto-nuker. Some gets through, and goes into the moderation queue. This is what gets through.

Wikipedia has a good (if american-centric) overview of range-safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_safety The gist of it being: If something is putting the launch vehicle at risk of deviating from its flight corridor, blow it. Only in rare cases does the guidance get a chance to perform corrections. You do not want to risk an entire rocket smashing into anything important, so you instead convert it into as many small pieces as possible before it can do so. Sometimes the rockets take care of this themselves (see: CRS-7), sometimes they don't (See: Challenger's solid rocket boosters, those boosters were built very heavily, and survived the breakup of the rest of the stack) The late Conestoga rocket provides an excellent example of why rockets need a robust self destruct function:

Remember SLS has major political muscle behind it, for better or worse.

Anyway, it's good to see it in its true colors now. I will henceforth be referring to it as Carrot.

If you ask me, the white paint was a bit of a psychological ploy to help try and convince people in general that no, this really is not in fact Ares V Reborn (which it is, basically), as well as attempting to throw back to The Good Old Days of Apollo/Saturn

It's been orange for a loooooong time, actually. This is only the first time that public stuff on the NASA website has reflected it. Also, they're apparently painting the adapter orange to match the tank, for some reason.

I haven't seen the film but apparently this was the footage used: (Go to 1:50) In this case, the main engine cut out prematurely, removing its thrust vectoring capability and thus making the vehicle unable to correct for deviations. At that point, it began to tip out of being pointed into the wind and, as anyone who's ever played using FAR knows, that is A Bad Thing.

The planet terrains work by having first a base heightmap which covers large scale details. Then there's a small scale procedural noise map that's overlain on top of that, for smaller scale details. This is certainly some sort of weird fluke going on with the terrain engine, not any sort of "texture glitch". It's nothing to do with textures, I can tell that much. Something made the terrain mesh generator spew, for some reason.

Just was trying to give a general example. I know that Huygens was designed to float, just in case Titan turned out to be an ocean moon of hydrocarbons (almost right!)

Oh yes, I forgot this in my post. That's an absolute essential. Players should be blown away when finding out Laythe has oceans after finally probing beneath it's clouds, for instance.

Well, your perspective generally remains inside the HQ (and possibly wandering out to its parking lot), but you don't get to explore the town directly.

Oh I know. There isn't a good enough emot for "biting sarcasm" however, so I had to make do without in that sentence.

Well, control axes will be fully customizable on a per-vessel basis. You'll be able to flip them around however you like, each engine/thruster mappable more or less arbitrarily (or it can be set up automatically if you don't want to bother). Also, the only camera views will be first person, so there's no frame-of-reference shift like you get in third person.

Think a fairly subtle purple. Like venus, but with a blue-violet tinge.

Sorry. Other events have been dominating for a while now for the both of us involved. I will say the current goal remains to get the sandbox demo made and released. That will consist of the headquarters, basic editor, a selection of parts, and a portal to a single pre-made solar system. I will talk about a few things that have been going on, though. I started with a prototype of the terrain system a while back, with a level of detail system which will allow very high resolution terrain up close. And I have more or less decided on how planet gravitation works (it's more complicated than it might seem at first), and how matter collects on them. I also have decided on how to structure galaxies in a way that also hints at the origins of the gravity cores. The HQ town (St. Whalenson, Utah) at present borders a river and small butte, and contains a church, two houses, a water tower, two gas stations, two bridges, and a small group of shops (this will be expanded). I also made a nice cloud shader for it that slowly moves across the sky in a way that doesn't make it obvious that it's a dome overhead. The amount of cloud coverage varies over time, as well. The means of camera movement for the player being seated at the control console has been improved quite a bit. The old method got very disorienting as it was tied to the mouse, and actually started to make me motion sick when I watched videos of it. So now it's simply an arrow on the left and right that you can click on to view different parts of the console (which has yet to be re-implemented though, so this only exists as a camera controller) The website and this thread will be rebooted once things are further along.

The nearest ought to be premade, based on known exoplanetary systems. Beyond that is an unending span of space populated procedurally like space engine. If you assume the same speed of light in the Kerbal universe as in ours, even if locked to that speed, the lower scale of things means interstellar travel is a lot more feasible. Project Orion has been my favored means of Kerbal interstellar travel.

Yes, Tylo's lack of atmosphere has sat in the back of my mind for a while. It's cold out there which allows more atmosphere to collect, so... The planetary science knowledge possessed back then could probably have fit on a page or two. I've learned so very much more since then. Two things: 1. Duna has much more atmosphere than Mars, and 2. Real solar panels can't even hold up their own weight under 1g unless specifically designed to. The ISS solar panels would shred under a marginally stiff breeze, and something like Dawn's would flex and bend easily. They're very large, and very lightweight. Sails.