Seret

Depends what your objective is. Games can be educational, but they also have to be fun and engaging and offer the player some kind of reward in exchange for the risk of failure. So you want to simulate rocket engines more closely, ok, but to what end? Simply running a good simulation isn't inherently fun, if it was people would play with engineering simulation tools instead of games. Games are always a trade off between simulation and playability. There's nothing wrong with a game being more towards one end of that spectrum than the other, but you need to be aware that increasing simulation often decreases "fun". You need to have a think about what are the main points about rocket engines that make a difference. Things like: Different nozzles perform differently at different altitudes Different fuels are available Some engines are more complex than others, due to the type of fuel Engines may have a limited number of starts available Ullage and other fuel feed issues Thrust vectoring People can probably add more to that list, that's just off the top of my head. Once you've decided how much of that stuff your game needs you can look at how to implement it. You also need to think about the fact that a good editor does not a good game make. Spore is a good example. The editors in that were amazing, but once you left the editor and played the game it was, well, underwhelming. Simply having a "better" VAB mini-game than KSP wouldn't make a better game overall.

According to the game's forum there's a 50% chance that "dead" soldiers are actually just critically wounded, modified by -5% for every point below 0HP that they go. So at -20HP they're the permanent kind of dead. So yes, that is less brutal than the original. Sounds like they've made the early game slightly easier and the end game much harder (by getting rid of psychic powers for humans).

Isn't that the same guy who built himself some Wolverine claws?

Installed it and had a play last night. Lost one dead two wounded on my first mission. In Scott Manley's video above he loses a soldier in his first mission too. What level of difficulty you playing on? It does seem marginally easier though. It used to be very rare for unarmoured troops to survive any hits from plasma weapons. Taking any wounded was unusual, it was KIAs all the way. I do get you about the aircraft though. It was almost impossible to lose an aircraft in the original (you'd just disengage) so I was a bit shocked to have an F-17 wasted in about half a second when it tried to engage a "fighter" UFO solo. But lo and behold, it seems to be back in the hangar getting repaired.

Totally. Not just Australians either. Makes me s...... every time someone uses it. "I got 10,000 roots!" Did you now? You must be knackered.

Ok, so you've got an idea for a game, but can't write it yourself. Is the point of this thread to try and gauge interest in your idea? Are you looking to assemble a team that can actually write it, or do you intend to write it yourself? Or are you just bouncing the idea around at this stage? I think your idea of doing simulation of fuel flow and combustion is a bit ambitious btw. These things are quite computationally intensive and it's questionable how much it would add to gameplay IMO.

I used to be an armourer in the military, so guns used to be my day job. I like guns, but I don't see any need for civilians to have access to them for use against other humans. Target shooting is fine, as is shooting vermin on farms. Shooting people is not ok. If you live somewhere so dangerous that you need a gun to protect yourself, the best way to protect your family is to move, not buy guns. Short range firefights between poorly-trained combatants in built up areas with your loved ones nearby are a dumb thing to want to get involved in.

I really wouldn't expect anyone who was enough of a KSP nerd to register on the forums to have any trouble completing contracts and earning shedloads of money.

That's where the advantage is, I reckon. Even if one process goes mad, everything else keeps working.

It's a sleep disorder where you fall asleep suddenly and randomly. Obvious not a good thing to happen while trying to land.

Actually I don't think we disagree SeaDog. My point was that the abundance of resources in asteroids can't be used as a potential trigger for a vastly expanded utilisation of space, as Ralathon was trying to assert. As you point out, the economics of mining asteroids is unlikely to be guaranteed. If you can't shift enough of it back to Earth you can't make much money, and if you can you crash the price. It's not a good argument for a significant expansion of activity in space either way IMO.

If you actually bothered to read the thread properly before interjecting with another of your content-lite prepackaged criticisms of pop culture you'd see that I gave examples earlier of how sexual selection results in some pretty ridiculous things. So congrats on being both correct and completely redundant.

I think that's what's stopping them. I would be happy with a rough approximation (it's better than what we have now), but clearly if they want to implement something a bit more involved if they implement anything at all.

The loading screen for Terror Sites still gives me the heebie-jeebies. So many good soldiers dead.

Anything you drop during launch is highly likely to go out of physics range before it lands. The devs have confirmed that there's nothing in the code currently to account for parts under chutes leaving physics range, they're just treated like anything else and are deleted when they land. Not quite sure why they haven't bothered, to my non-expert mind it seems like adding a check for deployed chutes and an arbitrarily low vertical speed shouldn't be too onerous. I guess the issue is modelling the descent trajectory while under chutes, but that's only a biggy for parts dropped at high altitude, low altitude descents could just be fudged. At the moment the recovery mechanism only deals with controlled landings. Time for some probe cores and spare fuel on orbital insertion stages? Watching Mechjeb stick a powered landing back at KSC is quite fun. Just about bloody impossible to do manually though.

Yep, I only have three wisdom teeth. I've not had to ever have any of them out, only having one on the top probably helps with that. A bit of variation between individuals is normal, some otherwise perfectly normal and healthy people have extra or missing muscles and bones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anatomical_variations When a person with such a variation has a reproductive advantage then you've got a gene pool in which that variation will predominate, and hey presto you've got evolution. So you could say that dentists are keeping themselves in business by removing our horrible wisdom teeth, if they just left them to cripple us wisdom teeth would eventually cease to exist.

It's probably worth pointing out than in practical terms you always have background processes. The OS will always be doing things behind the scenes and the user is almost always running more than one application at a time. So even when you consider an app that runs everything in a single thread it will run slightly faster if there's a second core available for the OS and housekeeping userland gubbins. IMO even just splitting out your UI into another process is about the bare minimum devs should be doing for any significant app. Multi-core is the norm, people should write for it.

Well, no one really knows since no one has built one, but essentially yes. You'd launch a drum of cable and a lot of counterweight mass up to GEO. You drop the cable down to the ground (easier said than done), and anchor it there. Then climbers ascend reinforcing the cable, with more counterweight being added to the top as you go. Note that doing this would require a lot of conventional rocket launches and stronger materials than we know how to make, so it's still very much sci-fi.

Which would be a bit of a problem. The thing is you can't base the economic case for mining those metals on the current value of rare earths. If you did suddenly have a viable way of getting them back to Earth you'd be able to flood the market. Essentially it would give you full control of how much you wanted to crash the price. It would probably be worth your while severely restricting production in order to keep the price artificially high. This of course would only work if you had a monopoly. As soon as you've got competition happening then you're in a race to the bottom, and there goes your margin. You'll probably either end up with some behind-the-scenes price fixing or both go bust.

Is it though? It was worth billions new, but I imagine the depreciation on a space station is pretty eye-watering. Especially when there's a very limited number of people who would buy one off you. Things aren't worth what the original buyer paid for them, they're worth what somebody would give you for them today.

Enigma is about as useful for keeping secrets today as a Spitfire is in air-to-air combat. Even during WW2 Enigma messages were being decrypted fast enough to be useful tactically on the battlefield. Allied army units would sometimes have advance warning of impending German attacks and be able to prepare their defences. The kind of processing power that governments had the 40's is now ubiquitous. There are even online enigma simulators. So no, nobody would use enigma these days.

Or can we? Here it is.

Carrying passengers would also require the spacecraft to be man-rated, which is expensive and laborious. It's highly unlikely the first version of it would be man-rated, they'd need to prove the commercial case for it with unmanned payloads first. Man-rating it would come somewhat further down the track, and only if there was a business case to justify the effort. The "passenger module" idea is somewhat speculative, not a concrete plan.

It happens more than you might think. If they had to route around every trouble spot on the globe they'd be flying in circles. I've flown over Afghanistan recently, for example. The thing is that civilian aircraft can 100% positively identify themselves to military radar. Since there's no sane reason to bring down an airliner it's not normally a problem. You'll be tracked by military radar entering most countries, but because they know you're not a threat there's no trouble.

Preventing photography of an aircraft you can walk up to and touch (and photograph) at an airshow is just silly though. They'd bought them off the shelf, it was the bog-standard export version of the Fulcrum. The only reason they were preventing photography was that they were super excited about flying a modern type, and wanted to create a bit of mystique to stroke their own egos. They were selling t-shirts with "MiG-29, pride of the nation" on them! Eejits.