Beowolf

I happened to be on the Wikipedia page for Los Angeles-class submarines the other day, when the dimensions jumped off the page and grabbed my attention... I'd never noticed before, but the sub's the same diameter as a Saturn V, and only one foot shorter (0.3%). Just thought it was an amusing coincidence worth sharing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles-class_submarine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V The sub is considerably heavier though, even though it's mostly empty space. If anyone has plan drawings of both to the same scale, please share. I'd like to see how they look superimposed.

I watched a YouTube review of Destiny a few days ago. It looked kinda cool, and very pretty. Then the reviewer mentioned it was "online only", and I lost all interest and didn't even finish the video.

Until my mid-30s I had an extraordinary memory. Not photographic, but the next best thing, I guess. In the 1980s I was running an IBM mainframe. Outside my office was a wall of 3" binders with literally 100,000 pages of printed manuals. I used to routinely do tricks that'd leave everyone's jaw hanging open. For example: The computer is having a problem... Okay, I remember reading something that could be helpful...I have no idea when, where or what, though. Walked over to the wall of binders, and without looking I'd pull down a couple of them based solely on muscle memory of their location. I didn't even check the titles. Carried them back to my desk, and started flipping pages as fast as I can, until I run across the "right" page and stop. It freaked people out! What I remembered was the "shape" of the paragraphs and headings and whitespace on that particular page. But I'd have no idea what was going to be ON that page until I found it. In fact, I think I still remember the "shape" of most of the pages I ever read in my first 30 years, though there's no way to tell how many are actually just "memories of memories" now. Creepy, huh? When the superpower started fading away, my wife had to teach me how to take notes. For obvious reasons, I'd never bothered. These days I put everything into Evernote, and keep an Evernote-dedicated tablet next to my laptop. I bought the tablet specifically for KSP, in fact. Alt-tabbing several times a minute was getting too awkward. Between that and Google, I manage okay. Please nobody accuse me of bragging or respond with cruelty. This was hard to share. Yes I was a freak and yes it gave me some unfair advantages in life. And when I lost it I fell into a deep depression for years, and very nearly committed suicide. All I have left from that gift are detailed memories of exactly how much I've lost, and frequent reassurances that I "still have a pretty good memory for a guy in his 50s." Thankfully, the reasoning and creative parts of my brain have held up somewhat better. So what have I memorized? Darned near everything I encountered back then, whether I wanted to or not. Much of it's still in there, though to add new things I have to practice over and over just like everyone else. I think that worry stone I used to carry in my pocket was actually Kryptonite.

I respectfully disagree. While Win8.0 was usable with kbd/mouse, it was distinctly less efficient than the earlier UI. People who have to read the menus and hunt for the option they wanted anyway won't see a big difference, but obsessive power users like me who knew dozens of keyboard shortcuts, and automatically move the mouse to exactly where the control I wanted was about to appear, we noticed! And it wasn't just a matter of learning some new locations; too much of the UI became dynamic so you HAD to read the silly thing. There were a bunch of articles that compared UI speed and efficiency between releases that you can Google if you want details. The efficiency loss was even worse for those running a desktop with several monitors. It's also inconsistently designed. People documented FOUR completely different UI styles within Win8. Besides classic Win and Metro, many control panel apps have a third, webpage-like interface, and a few MS apps even deviated from that with what looked like the web interface, but worked differently and has flat buttons instead of links. This is more a MS problem than a Win8 problem though. This condition has existed, and gradually gotten worse, ever since Vista. Microsoft did a dumb thing, but at least they listened. Win8.1 fixed 95% of my problems. I installed a strictly keyboard-based app launcher, and haven't seen the start menu, the ridiculous "charms" thing (which MS has eliminated in Win9) nor the Metro screen since. Even better, the "right-click on the Start Button" shortcuts they added save me all sorts of time. Once I got past those UI issues, it was an awesome OS. The most reliable and most secure Windows ever, and I'll never forget the feeling when my new laptop did a shutdown/restart in 8 seconds total! SWEET! When they let me run Metro apps inside a window, supposedly coming in 9, I might even use them.

Nice work. Though at first glance I immediately thought of Fireball XL5!

I've tried stock and Better Than Starting Manned, but ended up not liking any of them and going back to sandbox. When I want to make things harder on myself, I have tons of interesting mods to do that job! To me, the tech tree is a whole different game, really annoying at first and then absurdly easy to exploit once you can reach the moons. Contracts improved it, but I still prefer roleplaying.

Giving feedback is great, but you don't get to speak for anyone but yourself. You don't know whether "the majority" have even tried a career game yet. I liked your new contract ideas, and agree contracts still need some work. How could it be otherwise? It's their first try. Personally I enjoy the test contracts, but they're too easy. I can usually slap together a quick test vehicle that lets me complete several tests in a single short flight. Once I completed eight contracts, six of them tests, in one carefully-planned launch. Took some serious work, but it all felt worthwhile when it finally paid off. Who said you have to take the contracts you don't like? There are aspects of KSP I don't like, and I just don't play them. I doubt I've spent more than two hours in SPH since it was released. I had to learn real aerodynamics to get a pilot's license, and hate KSP's arcade-game flight model. But you won't see me trying to get SPH removed just because I don't like it!

That's pretty much what I did back on 0.23. I had two games, "simulator" and "live". On "sim" I could do anything, but once I copied the ship to "live", no reverts and no loads except when KSP crashed or seriously glitched. Lesser glitches I'd often play through as equipment failures. This was in sandbox mode. Doing it in contract mode sounds like it could be fun, except for keeping the tech trees synchronized. Anyone know an easy way? I did save a lot. I like a lot of mods, so crashes weren't uncommon. And I hate having to do things over.

$30 for an alpha is too much for me. I currently have close to a dozen "early access" games, and there isn't a single one I'd have paid this price for, including KSP. Yes I know KSP is currently $27, but consider it overpriced, too. To me, once a game passes $20 I want it "feature complete" and with real support. At least supported beta status, in other words. Below $20, it feels more like a toy and I can be nice about the kind of problems I've seen right here several times in my nearly two years. Much more money, though, and those (perfectly expected) problems would start making me angry and spoil my experience. Note my objection has nothing to do with whether the game's worth the money. It's about my subjective gut reaction to dealing with everyday alpha issues. Everybody will end up feeling that way at some price point. But at the same time, as these games get closer to release it seems reasonable for the price to go up. An interesting quandry for the development houses. Too bad. At $20 I'd have picked Rimworld up just based on your video.

Antimatter would be best, assuming you can acquire and contain it.

Yep, for about four months. I think it was in 0.22. Anyway I decided to try using Infernal Robotics and Kerbal Attach System. I spent maybe 50 hours designing a huge permanent Munar colony, cranes to assemble it, space trucks to haul the components from LKO to Mun orbit, and so on. Then many more hours were spent testing and revising everything, as I was playing Ironman and once the actual launches started, no loads or restarts were allowed. The whole thing filled eight 60-tonne payloads. I got them all landed and my colony assembled without losing a single module or Kerbal, though there sure was a lot of last-second improvising! It was magnificent, and immediately started falling apart. Parts would randomly move, or even just vanish. The station modules were on telescoping legs, and every time I opened that mission every leg would be a different length. Then, I think it was the third day, the whole station just exploded. Loaded yesterday's savefile, and that station exploded too. Loaded my oldest savefile, and that time it didn't explode for several whole minutes. I didn't touch KSP again until 0.23. Still haven't touched IR or KAS again, though I may try again as I hear they're more reliable now. //not intended as an insult to KSP, IR or KAS. I spent my whole career in IT. I know what "alpha" means.

I just saw Harv saying 0.24 will be using 64-bit Unity. That (hopefully) means multi-threaded physics that'll take advantage of the wasted 3/4ths of my PC. For that, he can break the save if it helps!

Laz's Falcons are overpowered (at least, by how many tons one can place in orbit)*, so if you're launching a fairly light payload like a Dragon, the first stage lasts way too long leading to flips once you're mostly out of the atmosphere. My two favorite solutions have been: 1) Delay the gravity turn. Boost mostly vertical until APO reaches desired orbital height, then stage even though there's still fuel left. 2) Edit the engine parts to give them their real-world Isp of 282/311, and the first stage burns fuel more quickly, also resulting in earlier staging. Either technique works for me, and both still put more than the rated 13 tons into LKO. By default, his Falcon 9 boosts...okay those notes are pretty old and I can't find them right now. I think it was about 25 tons, though. I do recall it'll actually fly as an SSTO with just a Dragon capsule and empty trunk. So you have plenty of excess delta-v to play with. With a Falcon Heavy, I never my start gravity turn until the ship's above the atmo. Not even after lowering the Isp. The huge payloads that monster can lift make it uncontrollable in atmo. If I start to turn in air, I can't stop and it ends up flipped. ------- *No criticism towards Laz intended. It simply isn't possible to balance everything so a KSP booster works like the real version. Compromises are necessary.

Laz, SpaceX just won't hold still! You're going to end up having a fulltime job trying to keep up with all their design changes. http://sploid.gizmodo.com/this-is-the-secret-of-spacexs-falcon-9-reusable-rocket-1593483305 Does KSP support grid fins? I've never encountered them, though some of the Soviet N1 models surely tried to use them.

I have no idea what that is, even after reading about it at Know Your Meme. "The current working definition is a video that has been made with appropriated footage and collage editing techniques for the purpose of either annoying or entertaining viewers." Okay either that's a poor definition, or 90% of Youtube is poop. Seeing what I just typed there, Sturgeon's law FTW.

I've been a PC gamer for several years longer than PCs have existed, and System Shock II is my all-time favorite. When it came out at GOG.com for $10, I bought half a dozen copies for friends. I hope you have a great time, FreemanGoran! Feel free to PM me if you run into problems.

Lighten up, Francis.

I respectfully disagree. I run out of action groups all the time! My last large design was a Duna colony ship. Once in Duna orbit it drops 4 different unmanned landers and 2 identical manned ones. Each of those landers used 4-6 action groups. The 2 manned ones each used 6. The mothership initially used 8. Overlapping all the landers worked, but the mothership AGs had to be unique since the landers would be docked to it. So 6 for landers + 8 for mothership = I didn't have enough. I ended up using the right-click menus for some things that would only happen once. I sure wasn't going to give up my "signature" lighting scheme, with separate circuits for nav lights, strobes, docking lights, and floodlights. That's 3 action groups plus a customized "U" key just for my lighting. Back around 0.19 I built an enormous mobile crane that could handle full 3.75m fuel tanks. I put so many moving parts on that monster I ran out of AGs. And back then I only had 2 lighting circuits. I've seen a mod that allows for 250 AGs. I've been giving it serious thought. It isn't like I can share my ships anyway, since I use over a dozen mods.

I agree with Felipe. Procedural solar systems would make it harder for players to compare experiences. We all know it's hard to get to Moho, so can meaningfully discuss it. With procedural planets you'd have to list a dozen properties of the world and its orbit before anybody begins to understand how awesome it was you landed on it. This is a case where I think it's better left out of the stock game. But now I'm interested in taking a look at the mods that provide it. Do any of them let you design solar systems and share them? I was just picturing a "hot Eve": Orbiting Kerbol super-close, plus in a high-inclination orbit just to be mean... LOL, I've never made it home from Eve's surface yet, so doubt I'd be up to that one. Still, it's fun to imagine.

Loved your phrasing. From now on, when I crash a plane I'm blaming the altimeter for running out of digits!

Yes, please! I've wished for such a key many times.

I had a similar conversation with my son recently. He's in grad school specializing in quarks and the force holding them together. He said his professors now consider the whole concept of "particle" to be obsolete and merely an illusion. They don't even think in quarks. They see the universe as probability fields, each representing a single property, bound by forces represented by other probability fields. This changed because those particles aren't nearly as permanent as we thought. It isn't just electrons that move around, what you and I were taught were individual properties of a particle can move around independently too! So the photon that left Andromeda isn't necessarily the same one that hit my retina. At times, due to vacuum fluctuations, there wasn't a photon at all. Those properties represented by the photon mixed with something the vacuum did to form an entirely different "particle" for a while. They've even "split" an electron in a lab! Working near absolute zero, they somehow separated it into an orbiton, a holon, and a spinon, each containing a single property. That's the perspective K^2 uses, if I understand him/her correctly. Wonder if he knows my son.

I admire and even share your enthusiasm, but math and physics aren't being cooperative. If aliens landed and handed us a gift of an Alcubierre drive, we couldn't use it. Let's just ignore the requirement for "exotic matter" and only consider the antimatter fuel. The theoretical minimum fuel for your drive is 750 kg of antimatter per warp. Even if you just want a quick trip to the moon and back, that's 1500 kg of antimatter. Quoting from Wikipedia: Recent data released by CERN states that, when fully operational, their facilities are capable of producing ten million antiprotons per minute. Assuming a 100% conversion of antiprotons to antihydrogen, it would take 100 billion years to produce 1 gram or 1 mole of antihydrogen (approximately 6.02×1023 atoms of antihydrogen). So, to fuel this drive for a single round trip to anywhere would require 1,500 x 1,000 (grams to kg) x 100 billion years. According to NASA, the electricity for that would cost $62 trillion x 1,500 x 1,000. And we've only been able store antimatter for about 20 minutes. I'm sure a big global push could find ways to improve those numbers by 10, maybe even 100, in a single lifetime. But as you can see, that isn't even a single drop in the bucket. We walk before we run not as a choice, but because it's the only way. In the movies, mad scientists work alone and build incredible wonders. But in the real world all technologies are tied together in a billion complex ways.

Thanks! 10-char

Don't have to think about it, I kinda live it. I've been largely house-bound from disability for a decade. Right now, I haven't been outdoors at all for (I think) 3 weeks unless you count stepping onto the front porch to pick up a package. Medications make me highly sun-sensitive, so I haven't sat in the sun since my accident. And you know what? I don't miss any of it. The only thing outdoors I miss at all is flying. I used to own an ancient, beat-up Piper Cherokee that I adored. People talk like it's horrible being stuck inside, but I honestly don't think I'd bother going outside if I was healthy long as I still couldn't fly. Everything else I want is right here. Heck, I even prefer the curtains closed and artificial lights on. When I had 3 limbs in casts and was stuck in a single room, I did get some cabin fever, but it took over a month. Now that I can move around a 2500 sq ft house, I've never been bothered by it again. I don't get claustrophobic even when stuffed into an MRI scanner. People differ. Some live for the wide, open spaces, while others couldn't care less. Hopefully those volunteering for Mars One are more like me in that respect.