Seret

Good opportunity to brush up on your Filipino then.

Probably not something on the scale of a cruise ship, no. The Russian navy does have hydrofoil patrol boats in the 200-300t range. Why do you ask?

Crucially, Galileo's view was supported by good evidence. You'll be treated a lot more seriously if you did indeed strive to emulate him.

a) There's plenty of fairly intelligent life in the oceans. Having no internal support isn't a huge problem if you're just using them to manipulate things. An elephant's trunk, for example. That's purely muscular.

Tentacles would work fine, octopuses are pretty handy and not at all stupid.

Or maybe they're only opposable thumbs. Imagine that!

I only quick save at important milestones in a mission. If you do it too often you might just end up saving something that was wrong due to a mistake you made a while back.

Depends how you set your spreadsheet up. Mine's pretty basic, just thrust, ISP, dry and wet mass (generating min and max TWR, ÃŽâ€v, and burn time). A ship is a single line on the sheet, so you can break a mission down as if it was several ships, each on a new line. Granted plenty of folks would indeed consider that tedious. I find it handy if I'm farting around at work and don't have KSP available. It even looks like I'm doing something work-related. Don't tell the boss...

I'm completely ok with people calling how I play the game "cheating", because anyone who thinks that is clearly of below average intelligence, bad at telling jokes, and probably a bit smelly.

Was mid-20th century civilisation not "advanced"?

They're actually a bit more useful than that. They provide a lot more data than GPS (such as the aircraft's attitude and exact velocity) and it's continuous rather than discrete, so can generate things like HUD symbology. But yes, dead reckoning does need a kick in the pants periodically to stay in communion with reality.

Strictly speaking they use inertial with periodic updates from GPS. You do get some folks flying light aircraft straight off GPS under VFR. I've seen cropdusters with rows of lights on the engine cowl giving the pilot steering queues. They just fly around the perimeter of the field, plug in swath width and the GPS system does all the rest. Impressive stuff.

I do that too.

Annoying staging cockups are half the fun.

Pah, you kids and your "mountains". Back in version -0.63 we had to throw a quilt over a horse and squint so it looked like a mountain.

There's also a lot of RF navigational infrastructure still used by aircraft (VORTACs, etc).

Bang on. Dialectics is a skill, it can be learned.

What you're describing is how satellite nav is useful. You're not describing how it's essential. If all our satellites fell from the sky tomorrow we'd adapt and continue advancing. Satnav is extremely useful, but we were pretty advanced before we had it, and only a subset of tasks would be hampered by it's absence going forward.

Ah ok, that wasn't clear from the way you mentioned data cabling and comms in this post, and the way you were replying to NASAfanboy, who definitely was talking about comms. Satellite navigation isn't essential for modern civilisation though. Nice to have, but definitely not a prerequisite.

Spreadsheet FTW. Possibly my nerdiest post ever.

Actually our civilisation is heading away from broadcast and towards cables. It's recognised as an issue for SETI; not only will we be less visible but if it's assumed other similarly advanced civilisations undergo the same change they'll be less visible. Cables are far more efficient, you can carry a lot of data with very low losses and less interference. Cable-laying is also a simpler tech, we had spanned the entire globe with telegraph cables by the start of the 20th century, when satellites were still decades away. That's not to say satellite comms isn't useful, because it clearly is, but to say that it's clearly better than cables isn't correct either.

Ew, fractions in prices. Sort it out America. The UK did actually have a half penny coin until relatively recently. I'm all for getting rid of pointlessly small coins. Anything that only exists to be given as change and then cast into a penny jar at home should be given the heave ho.

If you want to guarantee hassle-free Linux compatibility go for Intel components and an Nvidia graphics card. Avoid Optimus. To be honest it's much less of an issue these days anyway.

KAC and KER are so useful I find the game a lot less interesting without them. No reason you can't just install those two and live happily ever after.

USA != humanity Good news for NASA though, I'm really glad to see a big chunk of it going to planetary science. Those are the folks doing the really interesting work IMO.