Beowolf

I'd been using Captain Vlad's approach, above. I'd try to take a part contract for every launch I was going to do anyway. I look at the requirements and pick one or more that'll work with my upcoming flight. Sometimes, I can get a whole string of them with appropriate altitudes and speeds. Once I got seven parts tests on a single launch, including two in-orbit and one after splashdown. In 0.25, parts test science output can be way overpowered. My last game (on hard), I took only 10% in "Outsourced R&D", and finished the tech tree without ever leaving orbit. It was all parts testing contracts for science and rescues for money. Shortest career game I ever played, too. I'll have to try going higher to see how crazy it can get. It got pretty boring even at 10%, unlocking several new techs for every launch.

I respectfully disagree. IMO a great deal has come out of this research. 20 years ago, LENR devices were so flaky and the results so subtle most researchers believed positive results were due to measurement error. Today, they're reliable and predictable, and best of all use cheap nickel instead of expensive palladium. I'll admit this paper surprised me. I too had dismissed Rossi as a fraud, due to his secretive behavior.

This is a bug report, not a support request. I'd heard of contracts disappearing, and just happened to remember the exact sequence of events when it happened to me. In the map, I was attempting to double-click on Minmus, but apparently double-clicked on a probe on Minmus. Scene changed to that probe. Much of the UI was missing. The top bar was visible but I can't recall seeing anything else. I tried to go to Space Center, both by using the top bar, then by pressing ESC. The button would select, but nothing would happen. I shrugged and Alt-F4. After restarting, everything looked great at first. Then I went to review the active contract's parameters, and there weren't any active contracts. Checked Mission Control. "Explore Duna" and "Explore Ike" were available though they'd been active before. "Send Science from Minmus" had been active, but isn't there at all now. In the Archive, all tabs are empty. Didn't save the logfile from the run that broke, sorry. Nothing looks interesting in the current one. Just the same warning about a flag I'd seen before.

I also was getting the list of "session start" errors, and disabling Adblock+ fixed that. I'm in Philadelphia. Why is my download coming from the UK, at dial-up modem speeds? Squad does so much so well, but new-release distribution is still maddening. I've been with you since Sept 2012, and the only time release day hasn't been a frustrating mess was the time I was stuck in the hospital. Okay that one was frustrating too, but I can't blame you for my gall bladder. Is this really that hard? I'll be sitting here watching Chrome's estimates randomly change between 14 hours and 2 days.

Ah, you enjoy British shows! How about Hyperdrive or Primeval? I didn't fall in love with either, but did enjoy the several episodes I watched. They're still in my queue and some night I'll get back to them. A little off-topic but, have you seen the 2007 St. Trinian's? Netflix only has it on DVD, but if you can get torrents it's easy to find. We had the DVD last week and loved every minute. I do recommend first reading the Wikipedia page and the IMDB trivia page, though. Lots of jokes are British pop-culture references and, as with anime, it helps outsiders to read a little background info first. I just thought I was getting a standard prep-school farce, but it turns out St. Trinian's is a pretty big deal in British culture. It dates back to a 1940s comic, has spawned multiple books and movies, and is kinda the British equivalent of our Addams Family. Plus the school song they play over the closing credits is so good it's still running through my head a week later. Good hunting! edit: YouTube currently has a full copy of "Special Bulletin" from 1983 available. It's a made-for-TV nuclear terrorism movie that only aired once. Even with text "this is fiction, dummies!" disclaimers every half hour, thousands of people thought it was real and freaked out.

I dunno, what do you like? I agree with you about Netflix going downhill, but I still find an occasional gem. Sadly the couple that popped right into my head are no longer available by streaming. But let's check my history... Have you seen the live-action version of The Tick? "Get Over It", a teen comedy that's a guilty pleasure of mine. "Europa Report", if you haven't seen it over and over already. Same for "Gravity". "Robot and Frank" is a cute indie pic about a retired thief who's given a helper robot and teaches it to steal. "An Awkward Sexual Adventure". Reviewers kept saying there was much more to this movie than you'd think. They were right. "Iron Sky" is still available. A campy, Nazis-on-the-moon farce with decent writing and surprisingly good sets. Hope you find something!

Forgive me for nit-picking, but in the US at least, that isn't entirely correct. Such legal terms here apply to "legal persons", rather than "human beings". And there are non-humans, particularly corporations, that have acquired an amazing list of those rights over the past century. I don't know how one would enslave a corporation, but if someone did, I'd bet on judges ruling it violated the 13th amendment. In fact, my advice to a sentient AI who wanted to be free would be to first incorporate itself, then apply for a patent on itself. Those tiny steps provide a lot of protection for under $500.

For those running into overheating during launch, FlexGunship had this advice on launch profiles in another thread. I found it last night, and it was the perfect starting point for me with DR 5.3.2 + either NEAR or FAR: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/60933-Optional-MechJeb-Modules-for-FAR-NEAR-km_Gimbal-%28Sept-7%29?p=1377601&viewfull=1#post1377601 Starting from those settings, I learned my TWR was getting too high as the 1st stage tanks emptied out, resulting in too much acceleration while still low enough to cause atmospheric heating from DR. Since I'm a MechJeb user, easiest approach for me involved limiting acceleration to 20 m/s while in atmo. Yes, I know that doesn't = TWR 1.2, but 1.2 was so slow it wasted considerable fuel on my ship. So I experimented. At 20 m/s I still get some overheat warnings but nothing fails. Flying manually, you could either gradually throttle down to limit Gs, or have action groups to power off some engines, like SpaceX Falcons do IRL. Making the gravity turn slower and a wider shape isn't about DR; it's to keep NEAR or FAR from ripping the ship apart as it tries to turn sideways against the airflow. But it's more realistic too, so why not? I also discovered the dev version of MJ also has a "limit AOA to x degrees" setting that'll accomplish the same thing. Happy flying!

Nathan, just wanted to let you know I sympathize. I used to write shareware and remember a couple of "minor" updates that gave me the same kind of trouble. From my perspective, it's going great. Twice in the past 24 hrs I've come here to log a problem, and there was a hot-fix waiting. Heat shield temp: 604C. 700/1000 ablative remaining Pod temp: 1200C and rising fast! WTF? Crew: sizzling like little green sausages on the grill.

I made omelets for the family maybe 5 years ago. I think that's the last time I cooked anything from scratch. Kid's grown up and moved away; wife's a professor who has night classes to teach; I'm disabled and can only stand comfortably for a couple of minutes. Practically everything I eat comes out of the microwave, except frozen pizza. For that, we have one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Presto-03430-Pizzazz-Plus-Rotating/dp/B00005IBXJ ...which actually makes frozen pizza taste like real food.

I think it's a "canary trap". Meaning an intentional error Google Earth put into their database to catch people using it without paying. The only places I can see where it appears online are in Google Earth itself, and several lame-looking "airport guide" sites, like this one: http://www.airportia.com/united-states/baltimore-greenbelt-t-airport/ All those sites have the name "Baltimore Greenbelt T", and the code "GBO", but their actual coordinates point to the corner of BWI instead of where Google Earth points us. Reputable sites like Airnav don't show it at all, and I can't find any record of GBO ever being issued as an airport code. I also couldn't find it in Google Maps, only Google Earth. According to what I could find, the nearest DC Metro stop to BWI is "Greenbelt", so that's perhaps where the name came from. If we could dig deep enough, I bet we'd discover the coords are for some Google database guy's grandparents house or something. Good catch, rpayne88!

Okay, now let's design it as a "sample return" mission. I want a piece of Jupiter brought back to orbit from several hundred km deep.

Yeah, but I grew up with 105 elements, and protons, neutrons and electrons were elementary particles that couldn't be subdivided. Not to mention an unstoppable American space program that was going to have a colony on Ganymede by now. Lots of things will change. More every decade, at an increasing rate, through your entire life. You'll adapt. Of course, some things won't change. Fifty years later, commercial fusion power is still forty years in the future.

In less than an hour you needed to add a second criterion. All you need is to add a third, and you'll be pretty much where IAU ended up. The definition of "planet" isn't supposed to only apply to our own solar system. Note your definition doesn't allow for double planets, since they orbit one another instead of the sun. Or "rogue planets" drifting through space without being anchored by a sun. Since double planets are obviously not moons, now we need a whole new category with its own rules. How close to the masses need to be for it to be a double planet rather than a planet/moon? And that's why we don't end up with simple rules. It's a big, complex universe, and exceptions abound.

I was catching up on this whole thread at once, and you stopped me cold here. Been staring at the ceiling for several minutes, and I think you're right. I can't come up with any known or plausible form of energy storage that'll last over 20k years. Not even one that'd work on Earth in a controlled environment, much less in space with ionizing radiation and temps near absolute zero. A most interesting puzzle!

Based on the many stories I've heard, none of the pilots before Yeager have a good claim at "breaking" the sound barrier. But several pilots got well into the transsonic zone where airflow over parts of the plane were supersonic. Sadly, the first parts of a plane to normally do that are the tips of the wing and tail, and the angled shockwave builds up right where control surfaces usually are. That pressure locked them in-place and, since the pilots were all diving, resulted in dead pilots. Now Mutke's description of how his plane acted does indeed sound like got past the transsonic turblulence, but there's no way to know. He had no instruments that could accurately report his airspeed once he reached transsonic, and nobody was measuring from the ground. So there's no possible way to verify it, and Pawelk, they just don't award records based solely on someone's verbal claim, for reasons I hope are obvious. So no. If nobody witnessed and measured it, he doesn't get the record...not even if he did it. It's not because he was German. If the ground radars broke during Yeager's flight, he wouldn't have been awarded an official record that day either. All he'd have had was what the airspeed indicator said, and we already knew they got really inaccurate as you approached transsonic, so it wouldn't have counted.

Sure, and I'd make the same guarantee about my own actions. "Reflexes" is the wrong term, though. When they actually built brain scanners good enough to measure what's going on and designed controlled experiments, it turned out we're wrong. I'm uncomfortable with it too. But the results have been independently confirmed multiple ways. When they actually measure both the moment you start acting on a decision, and the moment you consciously make the decision, it comes out backwards. We make the decision, THEN our conscious mind (appears to) come up with a reason to justify it. We're only talking about a fraction of a second. Googling "decision making brain scan" without the quotes gets you a page full of citations. It doesn't really say we don't have free will, though. Just that our conscious thoughts have less to do with our immediate actions than we believed. And nobody yet knows how (if at all) this applies to long-term decisions like whether to go to college or to get married. Maybe it's like our subconscious "animal" mind is piloting the plane, but our consciousness is the one scheduling where the flight goes and the air traffic controller managing the route. I'm sure we'll know more in another decade or two.

Dispatcher: I kinda like these beings (but are they all aliens?): Me too! So very much! Last time I was marathon-watching all the 1960s scifi shows, I was struck by this thought: Imagine how amazing Lost In Space could have been had it been run by Joseph Stefano (Outer Limits creator, and both producer and writer of about half the episodes) rather than Irwin Allen. Kill Dr. Smith off after the pilot, keep the scifi horror feel of the first few episodes, and have someone at the helm who cared deeply about quality instead of always looking for the cheapest way out... ...and it probably would have been cancelled after one season. I never was in-step with the mood of popular culture. /Don't hate me, LiS fans! I like the episodes where they were taking it seriously. But no talking carrots, cowboys, or motorcycle gangs in space, please.

I may have subconsciously ripped him off, as I've read that book but didn't remember remember much about the aliens' description beyond them being tiny and flat. Although I was thinking about manta rays anyway because of this Ted talk:

Well, Titans are a genegineered space station. The Black Cloud was a sentient mass of gas and dust that evolved in space and didn't need a ship. Flouwen lived in water/ammonia oceans and humans built their first space suits. No, dolphins aren't going into space until they grow some substitute for hands. When I mentioned deep-ocean, I mean more along the lines of...oh I'm just thinking off the top of my head, so let's say a mashup between a starfish and a manta ray, with the eyestalks extended until they become tentacles with multiple eyes along the outer side of each one. Those do the detail work, while the entire wing and tail flexes enough to do the heavy lifting and defense, with suckers along the bottom to hold onto things. And that isn't even the spacefaring form! That's just this planet's equivalent of our lungfish, the first large creature to crawl out and live on the shore. Now we let that evolve on land for a few hundred million years into thousands of entirely different species based on that body plan just like all non-microscopic land animals on Earth are based on that lungfish. And you end up with a tool-using intelligent race that has binocular vision and a type of hands, but doesn't look or move anything like us. Let's picture them as 2 feet high, 20 feet across, and 15 feet long. Do they communicate through sounds like us, or do they ripple patterns and/or images across parts of their bodies with chromotaphores like squid do? No, I've got it! They have a little hagfish in their gene pool too, and spit wads of mucus containing memory chemicals into each other's mouths to communicate! Now that's alien! And just imagine the first-contact, when they "talk" to us. Even here, I was cheating since I used Earth life as a starting point. But making a truly alien alien is hard, and this was just improv.

Titans, from Varley's Titan trilogy! The Black Cloud, from the book of the same name by Fred Hoyle. Flouwen from Rocheworld. Niven's puppeteers, thrint and bandersnatchi... IMO movie aliens are boring. They're either just humans in makeup/rubber suits, or a blend of two or three Earth animals. The best ones I can think of aren't actually "races", but special effects. The id monster from Forbidden Planet, V*ger from Star Trek The Motion Picture, etc. I loved the water tentacle and alien probes from The Abyss, but once they showed the actual alien race, meh. In the famous Star Wars cantina scene, the Ithorian and Talz had awesome faces. But their bodies were pointlessly Earth-like and turned them into just "guys in rubber suits". R2D2 was more alien. Don't get me wrong, I love SF movies. I just don't think the look of alien races is something they've done well. Many of Earth's deep-ocean species are much weirder looking than any movie aliens I can think of, and they're practically our cousins by comparison.

You young folk are welcome to go on wild and deadly adventures in Middle Earth or the Star Wars universe. I would have too, until around age 40. Now I'm tired and my choice is Niven's Known Space, after the Teela Brown gene is widespread. "Safe at any Speed" is the only story I know from that time. It's a delightfully boring time of near-immortality, psychic luck, unparalleled luxuries and widespread peace. Second choice: Spider Robinson's Starmind. The 3rd book in the Stardancer trilogy. Third: Planet Chiron from Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear". They don't have mortality whipped, though. Can I mix in the biological sciences from Varley's Eight Worlds? Which reminds me, I can also answer for my best friend: He wants to be a symb from Varley's Eight Worlds. Symbs are a merger between a human and a genetically-designed "plant". They live in deep space, anywhere from Earth's orbit out to Saturn's, and only come together to breed or trade for the micro-nutrients they can't get from photosynthesis. Similar to Stardancers but without the telepathic group mind.

I like the idea, but wouldn't go to NASA extremes. NASA's safety-paranoid, and only uses compressed cold gas. I figure Kerbal jetpacks contain one of those exotic (and deadly) combos involving fluorine or red fuming nitric acid. Maybe that's why they never take their suits off. Touching the outside of the suit with bare hands gets you contaminated with toxic chemicals. Or, perhaps the backpack's full of tiny balls of plutonium and a big laser to cause implosion/fusion. A personal Orion drive! That'll get you into Minmus orbit. Just be sure to make a deposit at the sperm bank before you leave Kerbin! Anyway, I don't agree with changing their mass, but as long as this plugin's configurable I'll probably give it a try.

Brings to mind an old saying about how the best way to ruin a friendship is to buy a boat together. I guess in the 21st century that applies to running a server together as well.

@Dragon01 and @BobCat, I just started playing with the Tesla rover last night, and am loving it! I haven't seen anyone else mention this, but the cargo compartment PERFECTLY holds two large KAS containers and racks. Was that on-purpose? I didn't think I was going to like it since it was missing features like lights. But when combined with TweakEverything, so many possibilities opened up! For easier loading, I changed the .cfg to use FSanimateGeneric and now can open/close the doors in the VAB. The one thing that gives me trouble is I can't fit anything inside the mid cargo bay. Even a 25% scale small KAS container shows through the door when it's closed. Looks to me like surface-mount objects are attaching to the empty space where the door was, rather than the back of the compartment. I don't know how easy that'd be to fix, and I can certainly live without it if necessary. It's wonderful to have new BobCat equipment after all this time. Thank you both for all your hard work!