Seret

Definitely. If an exoskeleton could be developed that had resistance to small arms, reasonable agility and long enough endurance then it could be useful. Conceivably walking robots on the scale of Boston Dynamics Big Dog could also be useful carrying a weapon that is normally crew served, for recce, or for IEDD/EOD. I'm not convinced the load carrying role the designers have in mind is going to find much support in military circles except for very niche use cases.

I agree. Since you're personally going to be affected by viruses in your life (a lot, they may even kill you) It would be prudent to maintain at least a basic level of curiosity about your enemy.

Tbh you'd probably be best off leaving it at that. You're not going to get through.

Yep, let's back the truck up and address sine points where the discussion has diverged from reality. Red Iron Crown is bang on. Minimising volume under armour is a key principle of AFV design. You aren't going to add armour weight to protect fresh air. You also aren't going to armour the legs to any degree. Every kilo you add to a leg reduces your mobility and takes armour away from the higher priority systems (crew if any, magazines, weapons and sights, power plant). Best bet for legs would be to forgo armour and go for redundancy. Combat experience shows his low down on a vehicle are very rare anyway. As for single crew mechs, again this shows a lack of appreciation of how AFV crews work. There's a reason that everything designed to fight has three or more crew. The gunner and commander work as a team, the commander searches for and identifies targets for the gunner, so the gunner can concentrate on engaging them as rapidly as possible. Modern tanks call this hunter-killer mode. Some early tanks had the commander do duty as gunner too, but combat experience put an end to that pretty swiftly. To claim that a single crewed vehicle would be quicker at engaging targets in stressful combat conditions is just balls. I believe someone earlier also talked about mechs climbing over linear obstacles. If the enemy knew they'd be facing that they'd just stack their hescos or concrete barriers double height. Mechs still wouldn't be able to cross road blocks like an abatis any better than wheels or tracks either. As for mechs being less likely to step on mines, that's pretty marginal. Many AT mines aren't pressure triggered anyway. Buried mines can be magnetic, and IEDs or off route mines are either command our use other sensors.

Sure. Probably not needed in this case though, as it sounds like he's not keeping his elderly XP install around.

Linux can read and write to a Windows NTFS filesystem, but Windows can't even recognise Linux filesystems (usually EXT4 these days). If you've set up a dual-boot you'll be able to copy anything still on your Windows partition over to your Linux one (but not vice versa). There is a potential situation you can get with NTFS drives where if you don't shut down properly you won't be able to access the drive again until it's been checked for errors. Windows would do that at boot time. It's possible to do in Linux, but isn't a point-and-click job. For this reason you should probably move all your data you want access to over onto the Linux partitions instead of leaving it on the NTFS partition.

Unmanned probes and modular interplanetary missions.

Natural gas is liquefied for transport by ship, that's an even bigger market they could tap into if the technology proved suitable. The volumes they handle I'm sure they'd be interested in improving their efficiency by even a few percent.

Sure, but a properly managed engineering team will often take a conservative approach to new technology. Unknowns are inherently risky, so it's not prudent to rush development. Some of the timescales I see people throwing around here do raise an eyebrow, I've got to say.

Indeed. I'm constantly amused by the wildly optimistic opinions many folks on this forum have of new and untested technologies. A lot of people seem to think that new stuff just flops effortlessly off the drawing board onto the production line.

The science lab is awesome around a body with multiple biomes. Getting a robot lander to shuttle back and forth to the surface caning goo and materials bay is an easy way to pick up tons of science in the early career game.

Booting from a USB won't generally allow you to install the proprietary video card drivers. If you've got a system that can handle KSP graphics without them then you could do it that way I suppose. It'd be a lot better to just set up a dual boot though. It's not like Linux will eat a big chunk of your hard drive. 20GB would be plenty if all you're doing is KSP.

I find what knackers me is escape pods. I've tried to keep them as simple as possible, but once you add pods or hitchikers with sepratrons for de-orbit burn, parachutes, etc the part count starts to stack up.

IIRC it does have to be a pod. My Mun exploration programme is based on a lander that hops back and forth between the surface and a station in orbit, where the science is transferred to a shuttle with a pod. Shuttle flies back to Kerbin, drops the pod, picks up a new pod launched from KSC and takes it back to the station orbiting the Mun.

You could, it just takes longer. No guarantee that you're drifting past on the right vector to be anywhere near a good approach for aen empty docking port either. You'll have to anyway. Rotating the station just saves translating onto the line of the port you're aiming for, and then aligning. Yup, or to put it more succinctly: dock. You can't really dock without docking! You have to re-target the station anyway, when you target a docking port for the final approach instead of the station as a whole that you had targeted for rendezvous. Aligning the station to the approaching ship honestly takes me about 5s on a small refuelling station (switch > target > rotate > switch), maybe longer on a big one if it's slow to rotate. I find my way much faster, and it breaks the operation down into steps where I'm only doing one thing at a time, which suits my simple one-track brain. I'm assuming you know about using [ and ] to quickly switch ships? I could see how you'd find switching tedious if you were doing it through the map or the tracking station.

As a mechanical system, obviously. Go build a robot that can walk and balance, then come back and tell us all how easy it was. Good walking robots are absolutely on the cutting edge of robotics.

If they were operating close to their mechs you'd definitely have them distributed, although it's conceivable that one team could operate more than one mech, even if it's only because that mech's own control team were out of action for some reason. The kind of roles actual UGCVs such as Black Knight are being developed for include recce, so you will see them in close combat on a battlefield somewhere in the coming years.

I don't think I've ever added more than about 20 struts to a launcher. Generally three per booster, and maybe 3-6 for wobbly payloads. I don't build really massive stuff though, biggest rocket I recall launching would have been six or seven orange tanks.

I'm not really an RF guy, but the modern equipment does hop around frequencies, so is pretty hard to jam. Civilian kit actual does this now to avoid interference too.

Fine, just as long as you're aware that it's possible we never will, because there's no such thing as negative mass. It's predicted to exist, but not confirmed. We could be wrong.

GPS is a bit of a weak link, it can and has been spoofed. Comms are pretty secure though.

Jamming is less of an issue than it used to be. Modern fighting formations rely on having a fair bit of secure reliable bandwidth at all times. Units have their own secure wireless networks. Latency is an interesting point, but it's obviously one the military have dealt with. Drones in Afghanistan are routinely flown from the US. There's no reason why the operators couldn't be within a few km though. It's not like we're talking about a system that would be deployed unsupported. Yep, although there's no reason some tasks couldn't be automated and some under human control. Driving is an obvious one to automate, firing weapons would need to be under human control.

If you're starting to get painfully diminishing returns from tweaking your rocket the next place to look is your payload. Most vehicles designed for operations in space can be broken down into sections, split over several launches and reassembled in orbit if need be.

My thoughts exactly. If you're bored with the whole design & launch phase of the game, just skip it.

Lol, but I meant the helicopter could drop the mech off, not that the actual mech itself could fly.