Beowolf

"Borks" is a polite way to put it. I was using stronger words as my little rover went cross-country skiing across Duna...sideways. Thanks for the patch!

Oh, lord no! Like Random Tank just said above, career mode isn't hard, it's just grindy. Building a proper rocket, getting into orbit, landing on Mun, finding a good Duna transfer window...those all take time and effort to learn. But if you know how to play KSP, career mode is just more of the same. But I NEVER recommend new players go right into a career game. Start in the sandbox and learn the basics first.

All rockets, all the time. I hate the spaceplanes, but it isn't Squad's fault. I hate every single flight simulator or flying game I've ever played. I have 500+ hours in a Piper Cherokee 140, and no sim model has ever flown like a real plane, IMO, so I just don't bother anymore. Really, so much of flying a light plane is based in the sense of touch, I doubt I could be satisfied without, at the very least, a full force-feedback flight yoke and chair. Even in real planes, I used to get annoyed by "features" like electric flaps that take the pilot's sense of touch out of the equation. I'd get all sorts of data from the feel of the airflow as I pulled that big manual flap handle. Once, I got a bug stuck in my pitot tube during landing. When I took off the next day, my first indication something was wrong was when the feel of the runway in my butt said I was going faster than the airspeed indicator claimed. [edit: yes, I checked the pitot during preflight, but the bug went in too deep to see. Took an air compressor to clean it out, and there was almost an inch of bug remains stuffed in there.] Pilots of airliners and fighters may not have this fetish, but I have the soul of a bush pilot.

Poll needs 1.0.3 as a choice.

This is exactly what I do manually every time I install a new MJ release. I want SmartASS and all my info windows available immediately. If NASA had it for John Glenn's flight, I should have it too. Which reminds me: sarbian, is there any easier way to copy my custom windows to a new release than manually editing the config files? Not that it's a big hardship, but I worry there's already a friendly button somewhere I never noticed.

I have a very inappropriate brain that leads me to politically-incorrect places... Anyone else see his sample pix of rectangular glass constructs and think their spaceport needs a Kerbin World Trade Center as a spaceplane target? /Sorry.

I avoided 8.0, but bought a gaming laptop after 8.1 came out and am delighted with it. It's impressively fast in several ways, like power-on to login in 8 seconds. Then it's starting up the network interface in background while I'm typing my password, so I can immediately start working as soon as my desktop appears. I also use a custom app launcher, so I never have to see that silly new UI of theirs at all. But I agree with you about waiting and getting the latest, since it's so soon. Hope you're enjoying the new job.

I haven't done a tourist mission yet, so I'm just guessing. I suspect you need two pods, with an astronaut pilot in your first pod. Then add a 2nd one-man pod for the tourist to ride.

I suggest adding the word "flags" to the title. That's what I'd be searching for, anyway.

What are the advantages to mounting it on ISS vs. a freestanding satellite? All I see so far is perhaps ISS has surplus electrical power. But solar cells aren't that expensive, while mounting it on ISS will require EVAs, won't it? Plus, on a freestanding satellite, the laser could even deorbit itself for free, at end of life.

Arguing about costs between two nonexistent launch systems is just silly entertainment. Name any case in rocketry history when the manufacturer's cost estimates made before the engines actually exist, ended up close to the actual operational costs of the production vehicles. SpaceX is turning satellite delivery into a competitive marketplace. ULA isn't used to competing that way, but they're a capable company and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with it. I'm particularly excited by the later ACES upper stage. It'll uses hydrogen/LOX for electricity, RCS and tank pressurization, eliminating a lot of complexity and paving the road to in-space refueling. Besides, I read the original study it's based on and love the idea of internal combustion engines in space, making electricity generator-style instead of with fuel cells.

Yes, but scientists routinely get fooled by scammers...for a while. Scientists aren't trained to look for cheating, as the universe doesn't normally work like that. Okay, maybe quantum mechanics, but that's probably why it took them a generation to adjust to it.

This is a standard issue that comes up whenever someone talks about innovative rocket propulsion. There is "fuel" and there is "propellant". Rockets need propellant, which is any matter you've ejected in one direction to push the rocket in the opposite direction. Fuel is where you get the energy that's going to be used to accelerate the propellant. It can be chemicals, nuclear, or for ion engines, plain old electricity. Chemical rockets confuse matters two ways. First, their fuel and propellant are sort-of the same thing (the propellant is actually the combustion product of burning the fuel). Second, most chemical fuels are stored as two components that release their energy when mixed...confusingly called "fuel" and "oxidizer". Personally, I wish we could just stop using the word fuel in rocketry. Too many cool concepts, like beamed propulsion and our old friend Orion, just don't fit the term. It seems to cause a distraction whenever those concepts get discussed. Propellantless drives, like Cannae if it really works, will make things even more confusing!

Science coverage in all news media is a terrible joke. Here's how I sort truth from fiction: 1. Saw an excited headline or blog post about some breakthrough: Probably false. 2. Follow the link to the actual published paper. Read the abstract. Note what they actually claim vs. what the media article said: That part is tentatively true. 2b. If there's no link to a real journal article, the media story is bull and can be ignored. 3. Once some other research team replicates the original results: Probably true. Note you have to go looking for this, as the media never reports on this step even though it's by-far the most important step in the scientific method. 4. Once multiple independent teams have replicated the results, I am willing to treat it as fact. Be aware that people pushing crazy agendas can say completely accurate things that are still intended to deceive. For example, the US 9/11 conspiracy theorists make a big deal about the melting point of steel being higher than the combustion temperature of jet fuel. This is correct. Unfortunately, they then use that verifiable fact to claim that explosives had to be used to bring down the towers, which is bull. True, steel doesn't melt at that temperature, but it softens, losing 80% of its strength. Steel doesn't melt abruptly like ice does. So fact-checking individual claims isn't very useful unless you get lucky and catch them in a lie the first time. For political stuff, I use independent sites like politifact.org and factcheck.org. I pick two, with different leanings. When they both agree, they're probably right. When they disagree, I consider them both wrong. If the issue was something interesting, like orbital mechanics, I'd probably dig into sources until I knew. But I don't care enough about politics to go to the trouble. And anytime someone tells you an anecdote, start by checking snopes.com. It's probably already debunked there.

Just saw this Ford truck sim: http://mashable.com/2015/04/02/ford-f-150-raptor-simulator/ Picture that seat paired with an Oculus Rift headset, and with a physical panel with switches and controls. So the headset is providing the outside view and instruments. What do you think, Neil? It sounds cheaper than the ones you work with, but more capable than any PC-based sim I know of. Where would it fall short?

IMO, bored in KSP means it's a good time to stop playing "stock only". There are a dozen completely new "KSP games" out there just waiting for you to discover them. Happy flying!

90% of the time I use the TT-70, but some of the comments about the others are interesting and helpful, so perhaps I'll branch out more.

Interesting. You got me thinking, and I can't remember the last game I played I didn't do online research on. On even the most trivial casual game I'll at least Google for "tips and tricks". Some sites like uesp.net become old friends. I've been using it regularly since Morrowind, and currently looking things up nearly every day as I learn Elder Scrolls Online. I'm not sure what you'd class as the "best games", but I like my games complicated. I'm finding the idea of playing games like KSP or Civilization V without outside references...disturbing. It just feels to me like I'd miss a lot of depth that way. But I'm the kind of obsessive who plays my favorite games for hundreds of hours. Maybe you're the type who plays through one time, then moves on to the next game? /not criticizing; just curious.

[snip] But seriously, I don't understand OP's scenario. If it's even remotely possible for people to leave Earth and independently survive, it's set in a fictional universe. We're decades from even being able to list all the stuff that's required, much less being able to do it. If it's a matter of emigrating to an established self-sufficient off-world colony, I'd encourage our son to go. But if it's a more primitive scenario, like a Mars One where we send a few people off to die horribly as soon as they run out of multivitamins or a critical piece of hardware fails, I don't see the point. - - - Updated - - - I think you made a math goof here, friend. Earth's "carrying capacity" in pre-industrial days was only a billion or so. If we can hang onto Norman Borlaug's pest-resistant and weather-tolerant GMO grains that changed Asia from "Think of the poor starving children in Asia" into a major food exporter, I can believe 2 billion, maybe even 3 billion after there were stable regional governments to safely distribute food again, but no more. I agree with everything else you said, though. Back when I was younger and healthier, I'd be stocking the bomb shelter next door to yours. Nothing's wrong with going down swinging!

I use this one to overwrite other songs that do that. Of course, now you're in a "When you give a mouse a cookie..." situation.

Googling "Free Steam Games" will give you lots of lists, of wildly-varying usefulness. The last one I tried is "How do you do it?", which only took seconds to download, and minutes to play. Warning: deadly cute and pointless... http://store.steampowered.com/app/353360/

YouTube's a division of Google, which is most definitely a for-profit corporation. If it stopped making money, they'd shut it down. Just like they did with Google Reader. From the 4th-quarter 2013 Google corporate quarterly report: "... which makes us confident about YouTube as an essential driver of revenue growth going forward." "Revenues from this division were around $3.7 billion in 2013, and we think that they will continue to grow and reach around $18 billion by the end of our forecast period."

How about an Oculus Rift plus an attachment for my future household robot so it can pick me up and spin me around? Seriously, I think it'll play out roughly like PCs and mainframes did. Independent coexistence for a decade or so, as both types of sim get better, but the cheaper ones can improve at a much faster rate. Then one day, one of the big players in your industry will decide the incremental benefit of the "pro" sims isn't worth it anymore, buys out the company making the most advanced "amateur" version, and foots the huge cost of having it certificated. That'll open the floodgates, and for the next decade, half the pundits will think your industry's doomed. But it'll survive, in a heavily-altered form. Alas, a few years later, the very concept gets rendered obsolete by someone inventing teleportation or sims based on direct brain interface, or something. Older hobbyists buy your remaining top-end inventory for pennies on the dollar, to install in their garages. They quickly learn they can't afford to properly maintain them, so instead of flying write lovingly-crafted blog posts about their gear.

1700 for me. I'm as surprised as you are by these results, OP.

No, Kuzzter's right. I'm too lazy to calc it, but the delta-v required to rotate, and then stop, a 3000t asteroid in reasonable time is going to be absurd. It isn't a job for RCS or reaction wheels; more like a full stage of main engine fuel. And you can't afford that, so you'll have to grab/dock with your engines pointing roughly where they need to be. Since his design has the engines pulling the asteroid, once anchored you can "free pivot" the klaw, then use reaction wheels to aim your engines, and have limited steering that way.