Beowolf

Yeah, but that's kinda like starting a sentence with "If we had warp drive...". We don't have rocket engines that reliable, and barring miracle breakthroughs in nanotech, won't have them in the near future. Reliable enough to carry passengers without an escape system is four or five orders of magnitude beyond the most reliable engines ever built. That'll take tech like building an engine atom-by-atom out of synthetic diamond. We've been building ocean-going ships for thousands of years and those still aren't reliable enough that we skip the escape system.

This post made me think. I thought, "Wow, was it really 1979? I haven't shaved since 1979!" 35 years of neckbeard. My beard's old enough to run for US President. Am I geeky enough yet?

1. With three players, I'd go with all fictional. 2. I actually like a mix; each country would have a development plan with AI room left for occasional surprise decisions. Adds to replay value. 3. In my opinion, that's the wrong perspective. Decide on how many hours you want a typical game to take, then work backwards. We have no way to know how long a turn will take yet. Think of the Civilization games for example, where a turn starts out taking no time at all, but by the end-game you're spending half an hour moving units around. Best of luck!

It really seems like a game I'd enjoy, but I'm too much of a grammar geek to pay money for anything with such an awful name.

To me, KSP and Orbiter serve completely different purposes. KSP's a strategy game about planning and designing ships; Orbiter's a flight sim. I've never flown a KSP craft from IVA, and perhaps never will. Mostly because I despise 3D cockpits where I have to scroll around to see the whole panel. Give me a good 2D cockpit any day. Likewise I've never built anything in Orbiter, though I know it's possible.

No. For some reason, fingers in my mouth feel more violating than a finger up my butt for a prostate exam.

Best wishes to you and your family.

No, though we're at the point where we can as soon as we have a good reason. The boost in scientific knowledge we'd get from a permanent moon colony isn't worth the cost to most people. Hell, I'm a space nut and even I don't think it's worth it. Until we have reusable boosters, a tiny colony would cost tens of billions a year. Much as I love space exploration other fields would provide a far better return from that level of science funding. But give us reusable boosters and some exploitable resource worth the investment, and we'll put colonies wherever we need them. Helium-3 for commercial fusion? Industrial quantities of anti-protons trapped in Jupiter's magnetic field? Increasing energy costs making orbital solar power a practical option? There will be something, and even if most of the work's done by robots having humans nearby to fix problems and eliminate lightspeed lag will be necessary to outperform your competitors. Geez, I just recreated the plot for the movie, "Moon", didn't I? Let's hope for a better solution than theirs!

Only from a specific perspective. Humans are much faster and much smarter. The Apollo 16 crew covered in three days about as much territory as Curiosity has in two years, and brought their samples home to be analyzed in a thousand different experiments. Let's not forget that manned missions come with sample return built-in for free (Mars One being the major exception). Getting samples back to Earth completely dwarfs the science that can be done in-place by either robot or man, so no fair ignoring it. Any robotic mission that doesn't include sample return is automatically producing far less science than an equivalent manned one. But most importantly, we fix things. Curiosity can't fix it's dying wheels; a human would patch that damage in an hour. Galileo's stuck antenna? One quick space walk, and done. Robotic missions are definitely more cost-effective, though. Life support's a real pain.

Cute little bug. I do hope they'll change the wheels, though. Looks too close to the troublesome Curiosity design. Though maybe they'd be fine on a lighter rover.

Ah, from long experience I was expecting something other than plain English. Thanks!

I'm unfamiliar with ARR. Been retired for a decade so I've gotten out-of-touch. Googling found me this... https://github.com/ustream/arr/blob/master/LICENSE but that isn't restrictive at all so doesn't match what you were describing. Someone else in the thread called it "AAR", but Google was even less help with that one. Thanks!

Good news and bad news: When I was hiring I wouldn't have cared at all which degree you had, or from what school. But... I'd hit you with a realistic math problem during the interview, and made you talk out loud as you worked through the problem. How you handled that was a major factor in whether you got hired. Job was an entry-level analyst position that involved stress-testing and identifying bottlenecks in client-server web applications. Well said! I agree completely. sedativechunk, this advice helped my son when he was having trouble with algebra so I'll pass it along, modernized: The thing about math is, it's just another game, like chess or KSP. What's different of-course, is it isn't entertaining! But it still works the same way. You learn 100 new rules that seem completely arbitrary at first. And then, quite suddenly, you discover you can put those rules together and your Kerbals are standing on the Mun! But you have to get over that first hump without a game making the lessons go down easier. Just memorize the damned things, backwards and forwards. Choke them down and trust me that when you've memorized enough of them, they suddenly become very useful tools. I hope that came across as helpful rather than condescending. Good luck!

"I've programmed things" isn't exactly the pinnacle of computer knowledge, friend. How about, "You could drop me on a desert island with a truckload of logic gates and I could design and build a working computer"? Or even, "Have patched a live operating system from the front panel binary switches"? Though one of my friends could say, "Turned a battalion of old M60 tanks into fully-automated shore cannons surrounding Taiwan". I know lotsa stuff, but that's way cooler than anything I ever actually did.

No bites, huh? Okay let's try it another way: I WILL PAY for a model of a RASSOR drum. Contact me by PM first to discuss cost.

Well, IMO the best way to want to throw your computer out the window and ragequit life would be to dig into the internals and start writing your own mod. And if it still isn't hard enough, publish it and list Windows 64-bit KSP as a supported environment.

1) I went off to start counting vital Linux projects which, by your rules, started as breaches of this social contract, but it quickly got ridiculous. It was eleven of the first dozen I checked. Linux wouldn't exist; It's that simple. The original Berkeley port was challenged in court, so clearly did not have the approval of rights-holder AT&T. AT&T, and later Novell, have made it clear in court cases they disapprove of the very notion of a free Unix, yet millions of us are going against their expressed wishes, right now. It had already been established legally that one cannot copyright an API, or they'd have gone after Torvalds just like Ashton-Tate earlier went after Fox Software. 2) "Licenses are important. They tell us the boundaries of what we CAN do. But they don't tell us what we SHOULD do." This is really what I was wanting a citation on earlier. Not baiting you; I honestly don't understand why. Nobody's forcing our modders to use a standard license. Every modder gets to create a unique license that exactly suits their needs. Now if there was a forced choice, like you have to pick GPL3, MIT or BSD, you'd have a point. But that's not our situation. And that's also why the "noise ordinance" comparisons are invalid. Everyone in the neighborhood has to follow the same noise ordinance, so they're a compromise. But the only person who can put compromises in a KSP mod license is the AUTHOR. Licenses are just code, written in legalese instead of C. You claim to be a coder. Is it so hard to document how you want your code to be reused in the license, right there where everyone knows to look for it? They don't even have to be legally binding. I'm pretty sure our moderators would be fine with, "If you publicly fork my code, please change the names of parts, files and API calls, and put your own name in as the support contact." Even if it isn't really legally enforceable due to the boilerplate you pulled from GPL or whatever.

Don't they also teach in law school that demanding your opponent defend his position isn't the same as advocating the opposite?

The one example we actually have, Chris, tightened his license and stayed. That IMO is exactly the right thing to do. The license is where the author's intention is supposed to be specified. If that isn't the case, it's 100% the author's responsibility to fix it. And I'm talking ethics, not legalities. If there's a bug in a mod's code (within its intended scope), it's the author's fault, not the end-user. Well the license is a required part of a KSP mod. If there's a bug in your license, it's your responsibility to change it. It isn't my responsibility to scan everything you've written across a 1000-page KSP forum thread and decide whether what I do will make you happy or sad. From my perspective, it seems you're saying the licenses are just red tape that doesn't count. In my 30-year professional IT career, the only people I ever ran into who made that argument were the software pirates. No, I'm not implying you're a pirate; only that yours is not a mainstream opinion. The place we go to find answers to common questions is called the FAQ. The place we go to find out how we're allowed to reuse someone else's code is called the license. If this type of reuse troubles him (and like I said, because the names weren't changed it would kinda trouble me), Ferram can add one sentence to his license like Chris did and the whole issue goes away.

I guess I'm confused. I thought "touch a part and your rocket explodes" was stock behavior.

Yep, he is absolutely 100% correct, just like you said. I dare you to publicly ask Microsoft or Apple for permission to create and distribute .... using their operating system, and then forever abide by their public response. An author's opinion doesn't mean a damn thing ethically. I imagine Orson Scott Card would prefer only straight people read his novels...so? I'm sure Hunter Thompson wished that every cop who ever read his works would burst into flames. That doesn't make it a binding agreement! Hell, it's my position that everyone who reads my words here has to vote Democrat tomorrow. These authors CHOSE their license. You clearly think we owe them more than they claimed. Nope. You're welcome to donate something more if you wish. I've donated a matching $18 (what I paid for KSP) to nearly a dozen mod authors so far. But that was MY choice, not theirs. CITATION NEEDED. With all that said, I'm personally uncomfortable with forking these projects and redistributing different code under the same name. I'd prefer to see the project, parts and api calls given different names. That would of-course require persistence file editing to get existing flights working, but would eliminate any support crossover problems. Are some global search&replace commands really so big a hardship? But my personal discomfort does not equal wrong.

But childbirth would be easier if they were smallendered.

Back around 1972 I had a Vashon Valkyrie freon-powered rocket I adored. It was so much cooler looking than the little cardboard toys I'd launched before! It lost a fin on its maiden flight, flew off in a wide parabola, and was never seen again. Forty years later I still feel sick inside when I remember.

You can compensate with longer exposure times, but the amount of random noise in an image increases in long exposures. A decade ago at least, the last time I looked into such things, the noise grew in an accelerating curve as the sensor heats up during the exposure. Beyond a second or two noise grows faster than signal so SNL is indeed impacted. Pro-level cameras compensated by mounting the sensor on a big heat sink, but sensor-based anti-shake was new and exciting then, and incompatible with rigidly mounting the sensor to a heavy heat sink. Which I assume is why a quick search tells me those pro cameras now tend to have lens-based anti-shake. Lens-based is significantly more expensive, so I'd say they haven't solved this issue yet. edit: Stacking dim pics in software is a new solution. I like it!

Awesome, thanks!