Herra Tohtori

I need to test this, but I'm not sure about that. It might only apply to drag, but if it already works for dynamic lift as well, then that's awesome.

Hey, would it be at all possible to add hydrodynamics to FAR? It wouldn't need to be anything particularly complicated - just a boundary layer that changes "air" density to 1000 kg/m^3 when a part's altitude coordinate is equal or lesser than zero (sea level). Basically I was thinking of doing some experiments with aquatic vessels, like hydrofoils, propellers, submersibles with control surfaces, even sailboats with the wind mod - you'd need hydrodynamics to get the keel and rudder working, so that you would be able to sail into the wind. Accuracy-wise, the biggest difference would be that a simplistic implementation wouldn't take into account things like cavitation. Programming-wise, the boundary between air and water could be problematic if a part is partially submerged, since it would still only have one altitude value and it'd be either above or below the surface, but at the same time, I'm fairly sure that things would work well enough to be useable...

I have two little features that I think could be useful. Is it possible to tie crossfeed status of a part to the phase angle/position of a robotic part? Like this: It could be either boolean on/off switch as described here, with an adjustment option for the angle interpreted for "crossfeed on" and the rest being "off", or it could use a smooth threshold to reduce fuel flow to an engine. As to what possible use could this be, well... Another feature request: Servos. Basically, assigning a target position to a robotic part based on a controller axis input. For example, making a rotatron that would have a ±15 degree movement range, and would track position of pitch axis and try to match its position to the axis input. This would make it possible to build manually articulated control surfaces that respond to control inputs, which would be rather useful in certain cases... like this, but better. (If it's impossible to tie variables together like that, that's all right... disappointing, but I would be OK with it)

Optical infinity meaning the way reflector gunsights and HUDs work. They're collimated so that head movements in cockpit cause no parallax shift in the reflected reticle/display - which is what makes them useful. A reflector gunsight will always point at the same direction, regardless of the position that the pilot looks at it - within certain limits of course, you have to be looking through the sight. Similarly, an artificial horizon in a HUD would be rendered where the horizon is. Placing the HUD/reticle texture plane outside, ahead of the cockpit would work, but that technique requires sufficient distance and some kind of masking so that the HUD/gunsight is only visible when looked through the actual reflector. But it does sound like this issue is with specific cockpit IVA designs rather than RPM. Thanks for the answer.

Is there any way to make HUD appear at optical infinity rather than RTT on the reflector itself? Or is that something that depends on the individual cockpit layout/geometry rather than RPM itself?

Pretty much the only thing I would want to see is the ability to change the wheel size, and also general scaling with TweakScale. Current models (small and medium) are just a bit too small for some of my purposes...

At the moment the career mode is fairly simplistic and only tracks one resource which affects one thing - tech tree advancement. I know that contracts are planned, but regardless I would like to share my vision on how I think career mode might work the best. First of all, science should not be directly related to the research unlocks. I think a more interesting way would be to track the following main variables: Funding, and tech level (available parts). Funding would determine what you can do, of course. With good funding, you can do more missions, and if you have surplus funds, you can invest them into technology research to speed up the development of that particular technology. The funding could simply be the price of parts, although a more advanced system would also emulate mission upkeep costs (the salaries of ground control, maintenance crews, etc). Building re-useable spacecraft could be useful, however there would still be a cost associated in maintenance, repairs and fitting for new mission (space shuttle, awesome as it was, ended up hideously expensive to maintain in rotation). The amount of funding would be determined based on what kind of missions you do. Each mission could have three types of objectives: Political, commercial, and research objectives. The political objectives would mean high-visibility missions that can be used as propaganda tools. These would be done as "government contracts" and would generally be given by long-term goals - like getting to the Mun by the end of this decade some time period. Failures could hurt your government funding, while successful completions of goals before time limits would get you better funding. Commercial objectives would be simple: You get contracted by some company to deliver a satellite with certain parametres and once you've done that, you get paid for it. Research objectives would be split into two sub-categories. The first would be scientific research, and the second would be technology research. Scientific research would be done by doing experiments, collecting samples, and delivering results to Kerbin for further analysis. The science research would not directly affect the research of existing technologies. However, doing a lot of science would possibly unlock entirely new technologies faster (such as high-tech propulsion technologies) and would also slightly affect the funding you get, since the science community would be advocating for good funding for the space programme. Some scientific instruments could be very expensive, however, and could take a long time to fabricate so missions would need to be planned long time in advance. Generic science instruments (like temperature, pressure, gravity and seismic sensors) could be cheap, but again as you use them you start getting more advanced versions (like goo canister or materials bay or a mobile laboratory). Technological research objectives would be done in the form of experimental missions, both in spacecraft and aviation. These missions would have a certain goal to be accomplished, and doing it would accumulate research on a certain category of parts. For example, high altitude supersonic aircraft mission would improve airfoils and air-breathing engines. A high-altitude atmospheric rocket launch would improve the engines (solid or liquid), and possibly fuel tank types available. Basically instead of just getting research points to unlock specific groups of objects, you would gradually improve the parts that you're actually using. If you make aircraft and fly missions with them, you'll end up getting better wings of different varieties. If you use rockets, you'll end up getting better rockets. So instead of making a traditional tech tree with particular grouped unlocks, I would rather see a "basic" form of all the important parts available from the start of the space program. You would have small rocket engines (liquid and solid), small jet engines, small fuel tanks, some basic airfoils and control surfaces, basic electrical power supply and probably one jet cockpit and probe core to use. By using them, the game would then make more advanced parts available based on what kind of technology research you've been doing. This would avoid the annoying problem of not having any electrical power supply early on in the space programme - having a basic battery and APU (which when active would consume fuel) available would help with that. Old parts could also become cheaper to use as you unlock more advanced versions, since established technology is easier to manufacture by mass production than "bleeding edge" technology - so you could choose between having heavier, smaller capacity batteries with cheaper cost, or lightweight, powerful batteries that cost a whole lot more. And, using APU would eventually give you other power production systems - like fuel cells, RTG, solar panels etc. In many ways, this would be parallel to the skill leveling in Skyrim, which is probably the best way of leveling up I've seen in any game since you get better at things that you're actually doing. Completing tech research objectives would not yield any funds, but it would be necessary to complete them to gain ability to perform more objectives that bring in the funds. This would mean that exclusively tech research missions would be the most expensive mission type. Missions could of course share different objectives. For example, a scientific mission can also have political objectives, like sending a powerful new space telescope to take beautiful pictures of the universe - the Hubble Space Telescope is a good example of how a particular mission can significantly increase the popularity of a space programme. Or, you could deliver several commercial satellites and scientific research satellites in one launch. The important thing is that you should be able to assign objectives from a list to be completed on a particular mission, which would allow you to actually build your own mission with a specific set of goals, instead of flying pre-designed missions with fixed goals. The current Mission Control mod sort of does this, but I'd like to see it refined. This kind of "fleshed out" system for developing the space programme would in my opinion greatly increase the appeal of actually playing the career mode. You would have to choose between getting to the Mun as fast as possible in a Toyota Corolla, to collect the political reward for it and secure funding for your space programme - or getting funds more from the commercial sector, and developing your technologies using those funds before sending a more advanced spacecraft to the Mun. Note: None of this is necessarily a suggestion to do it exactly like that. These are mostly general ideas; specific execution and balancing would need a lot of testing to make sure the game is enjoyable to play, progresses at a nice pace, and doesn't put you into a "no funds" situation too often. Thoughts are welcome.

Since my Saturn launch vehicle is pretty much just as noodly as it ever was, I have to ask - does this work with the Stretchy Tanks? I read about some problems with the Procedural Wings, but I can't remember if the stretchy tank parts have similar issues...

I was trying to make an Apollo style CSM spacecraft with internal structure and separate fuel and oxidizer tanks (I'll leave to your imagination what I could do with such a spacecraft - for example, if I were to hide some decouplers under one of the oxygen tanks...), but I couldn't get enough fuel and oxidizer to physically fit. After a bit of confusion I realized that using separate LF and oxidizer tanks makes the tanks much less dense for some reason, so no wonder I was having tank volume problems. Combined LF/OX tanks are about three times heavier than a liquid fuel or oxidizer tank of same dimensions. I read through the thread and noticed that it is apparently a feature by design, rather than a bug. And I can sort of understand doing it to avoid making aircraft even more fuel-efficient than they already are. However this doesn't really make much sense, to be honest. There's only one fuel type in the game and it's most likely some equivalent of kerosene; Jet A and RP-1 are not fundamentally that much different in physical or energy density. Even more strangely, oxidizer seems to be also affected by this seemingly arbitrary compression, but not nearly as much as the Liquid Fuel tanks... Even worse still, the independent LF and oxidizer tanks actually have a worse fuel fraction than the combined tank, which means if you wanted to have your fuel and oxidizer in different tanks, you're taking ridiculous weight penalty. That means there's strong incentive to never use the Oxidizer tanks at all, since you would only need them if you have separate Liquid Fuel tanks. Pictured below is the extent of how much this is not making sense: Both fuel tank arrangements have about the same amount of LF and oxidizer. However the separate tanks require almost three times the space, and the combination of the two tank types ends up having about 78% more dry mass than the integrated LF/OX tank. If this mod gets updated at some point, I would request the author to consider making the amount of fuel or oxidizer more directly related to the volume of the container. If there actually was more fuel types supported (in stock game) it would make sense to have LH2 tanks have different properties than RP-1 tanks - they would be much more voluminous due to low density of hydrogen.

Clearly because charge is measured in Coulombs while energy is measured in Joules... and power is measured in Watts.

Rectangular texture can fit perfectly fine on a sphere with no distortion. It just needs to be counter-distorted within the map... which isn\'t really all that hard.

I have no idea what I should do with it. So far it\'s just a proof of concept - gears can be made in the game, and they will function as expected simply via collision bodies. I expect more complex mechanical works to be beyond the practical performance limits - like, say, making a clock. I tried, but the ratched worked very erratically and the pendulum didn\'t want to keep swinging. I suppose there must be some ways of making these things work, but might be better to wait for proper parts and more mechanical possibilities - such as axis throughput (put two AXIS rotators on a part with symmetry on, and the two rotators will have a linked position rotationally, for example), axles, sleeves, in general freely-rotating parts (with no set rotation velocity, no spring tension or damping), and so forth.

IT BEGINS

Well I haven\'t done any moment/torque optimizations at all. I\'m sure there are optimal dimensions that will allow the fastest launch at a given weight/thrust applied to the main leverage, but I can\'t really bother doing that kind of calculations - much easier to build stuff and see how it works. I\'m trying to figure out what to do next. I have a few ideas, but challenges would be welcome.

Moar weird stuff

My experiments with the Robotics parts so far:

Uch? Senkan Yamato? 8)

Dawkins agrees, apparently....I do have a bit of a hidden agenda here. I hope everyone who didn\'t know who Neil deGrasse Tyson is will spend next hour or few watching videos where he speaks on youtube. He delivers his words in such an immaculately enthusiastic and agreeable style and disposition that it is almost impossible to dislike him, and you\'ll likely find yourself wanting to learn more about the stuff he speaks, just to know what it is that makes him so giddy about it all.

He doesn\'t. Richard Dawkins\' failing is that he is often a bit too confrontational and aggressive in his argumentation, which ends up being detrimental to his ability to act as a science educator as opposed to scientist. As to that comic strip - yeah, I don\'t agree with it, just like I don\'t agree with the stereotype that all Americans are illiterate buffoons (after all, there is more to America than USA) or that all Kerbals are crazy suicidal space Russians that care nothing for science, physics, or engineering terms like 'structural integrity'. I can still have a laugh about it. Stereotype jokes are fine by me. It\'s when people start taking them seriously that they stop being a joke. This applies both for people applying stereotypes in their actual opinions, and people getting offended at stereotyping. Because, really, there is no reason to get offended - if it is a joke, take it as a joke. If it is being submitted as a serious opinion, it isn\'t worth getting offended by - it deserves ridicule rather than scorn. Then again, I speak from the perspective of a white caucasian male living in a ridiculously wealthy Northern European nation... sort of hard to put myself in the perspective of a victim of negative stereotyping. The worst stereotypes about Finnish people in general are that we are moody, utility knife-wielding stabbists and manic-depressive drunkards who can shrug off extreme cold that would incapacitate other people, and slaughter invading (and freezing) armies with ease only rivalled by our suicide rates. Of course, it helps that all the aforementioned things about Finnish people are true.

Define 'fake', please. If your definition of fake includes all but raw, untouched photographs, you might find yourself in a situation where the vast majority of images in scientific publications are 'fakes'. Did you know that pretty much all pictures of Mars\' surface (as in, the ones taken by Spirit, Opportunity and other probes) have been coloured red because the public perception of Mars is that of a 'Red Planet'? Or that the cameras in said rovers are greyscale cameras, and the colour information is acquired by taking three photos through red, green and blue filters and then combining them in post-processing? Or that the HST (Hubble Space Telescope) images are typically combinations of three images, taken with three filters that correspond to elemental composition of the nebulas, rather than real colour? If these images are rendered, but the 3D model and textures they use are from the real thing, that doesn\'t make the images fake - it makes them visualizations.

May I just note here that persistency is officially all kinds of awesome?

Accolade Grand Prix Circuit Sierra/Dynamix Red Baron Early 90\'s.

Well, yes. But Nooblet68 sort of has a point. Not everyone CAN control the current plane through the course, and since there\'s only the 'default craft category' and 'free category', there\'s two problems that come into play. First is that since anyone can build their own craft and participate in the free category, the plane building skills become a factor in the time set for each plane piloted by its creator. Thus, people who can\'t handle the default craft and would require an easier aircraft to practice the flying maneuvers and the course layout have no way to gauge their progress, since each plane has its specific performance and thus the players have no idea if they are flying badly or well, or how much better their particular aircraft could be flown. Secondly, the people who find it excessively difficult to fly the default craft through the course are, most likely, also the people who don\'t have the expertise to build a better plane. There are two ways of building aircraft: First is by trial and error, which albeit effective is also somewhat slow and frustrating and doesn\'t necessarily produce ideal aircraft, just one that works 'well enough'. By contrast, applying basic aerodynamic principles in the process of building helps immensely in knowing what might be causing the unwanted behaviour, and more importantly how you might be able to fix it and improve the handling characteristics. If there were a standardized 'easy modo' aircraft for practicing the flying maneuvers through the course, it would perhaps make the challenge a bit more accessible for wider audience. The tiered system would be well suited for adding a vehicle with a bit more benign characteristics.

Then perhaps a plane that is easier to control and fly through the course? Biggest thing to improve the handling characteristics would be: -reduced wing loading (more wing surface area per mass unit); this would help making the aircraft more mobile and easier to fly slowly -slightly increased elevator response (so that pilots can pull higher angle of attack) -dedicated elevators and ailerons instead of combined elevons -reduced rudder response (the mobile canard is WAY too powerful a control surface for a rudder in such a small aircraft - a tail fin with small control surface bolted on it would likely do a better job)

Maybe they also have a life support failure that is connected to RCS failure, and they cannot wait that long to de-orbit...