Stargate525

Unity is a licensed engine already. It would be like Bioshock licensing their engine.

Basically, she wants to be able to, say, attach a fuel tank radically from its top, instead of halfway along its length. Or one of those long I-beams, being able to attach those from a point halfway along them.

Sir, you have been bamboozled by the growing trend for companies to sell off their games part by part, and app stores squeezing you for money. This is insane, especially during a pre-final game. EVERY update, all of these mods would have to be pulled, checked for compatability, cross-compatability, culled if they're now obsolete... In order for a dev member to make that a positive gain for the company, you'd have to charge a lot more than a dollar. Then there's the issue of setting up a mod store, setting some sort of criteria for making the store, setting up some sort of enforcement to prevent purchase and upload piracy...

Lasers don't spread like typical light. It is indeed possible to get that narrow of a focus.

The truth of the matter is that the last American war where tanks were relevant was probably Korea. They are the trench warfare of the modern military. Which stinks, cuz they're awesome. As for jaegers... Much easier to mount shore batteries or deploy battleships. And making one... not until we get very, VERY light alloys.

Because it's funny...?

On paper, sure. But you can't tell me that the plane piloted by Manfred von Richtoffen would perform exactly the same as the one piloted by Gunther Pastor. Similarly, you can't tell me that a ship crewed by crack engineers won't perform better than one staffed by part-time car mechanics.

Well, for heavy loads, staggering your parachute deployment at a touch of a button would be great. Being able to decouple a spent stage, coast for a moment, then engage your next stage would be great. Decoupling radially, then firing sepratrons after a small coast. Aesthetically, being able to retract solar panels in sequence would be awesome. Binding a brake key (don't know if you can do this, even) to brake with the rear wheels first, to prevent tumbles? Staggering gear deployment for rovers when you're trying to flip them?

Short answer, no. Kerbals tend to slide on ladders, and when in the atmosphere, that's even worse. If you have the time, your best bet is to get a lander can up there with dull capacity, rendezvous with your errant ship, and evacuate em.

I'm not implying anything. I'm outright saying things. We clearly don't play as whoever is in the command module, as that a)is often changing and b)occasionally absent completely. Not to mention that the way the camera, tracking station, science panels... the entire game is set up against the notion that we the player are an astronaut or pilot. It's the difference between a racing simulator and a racing rpg: in the former, there is zero game mechanic between your driving ability and the objectives while in the later there are skill, ability, and other mechanics that alter how the players' skill is displayed in the game. In a simulation, the driver might as well not exist. In the latter, the driver is very much an integral part of how the player interacts with the game. Squad has already added bravery and stupidity meters into the game. Unless they're very stupid, which I doubt, they will eventually serve some sort of purpose. You say it's designing your ship better; fine. Why can't it also be about crewing your ship with the best and brightest? I really, REALLY don't get your Edison thing, btw.

We still have no data on the long-term effects of zero-g to the human body. It's entirely possible that, after two or three generations of living in primarily 0g, that large gravity wells are closed off to us forever. I also don't see exactly why this is a good plan; you need to simulate the atmosphere, simulate the gravity, simulate the ecology... all of which would be much easier on a planet. The biggest problem is getting back out. As soon as we get a working space elevator, that single disadvantage is almost completely negated. Mining operations, I can see. Manufacturing too. But long-term habitations, commerce, civics? Best on solid ground, in my opinion.

Yeah, but you're not in the car. You're on the radio, telling the driver the corners. I mean, we can hire kerbals, have them die, assumedly have to pay for them... If we want them to be anything else besides a specialized, annoying cargo (which is what they are right now), they're going to have to have some sort of purpose.

Unlimited funding and resources? I'd head out to my nearest neutron star, harvest some of the gunk from it's surface.

Kerbits should be the unit of science data.

So it's, what? thirty seperatrons to the srb? I would be in favor of Kerbucks, myself.

Part of the issue you're ignoring is that there is exactly one power-hungry item in the game; the ion drive. Once I get batteries of any kind, I'm never hurting for power with a single rtg, as there's nothing that requires my 500+ energy storage with enough speed to outweigh my ability to run an orbit and recharge the banks. I guess what I'm saying is that there needs to be a reason to worry about spending electricity before we really start arguing about relative effectiveness of the different types.

Seconded! For the omnis, too, I'd like to see an alternate view that, instead of the network of lines, makes a 'cloud' that shows covered area. If that's possible.

It's adorable... I needed to be more specific: The Reliant Robin was the largest non-commercial rocket launch undertaken in Europe.

nope; quantum particles are, for all intents and purposes, in both places until someone looks at it. A single photon, given a chance to go through one of two slits, but not watched which one it goes through, will go through BOTH, interact with ITSELF, and form a wave-pattern on the card behind those slits. There are also some electronic gates, or something, that utilize the fact that a particle can be in two places at once. And by 'not make sense,' I mean that they are far from intuitive conclusions about how the world works, and are in many cases very, very convoluted.

You know I've never, ever seen a community use that particular clause of a TOS as a bludgeon as often as this one... To the point, they release fairly regularly, and fairly quickly, considering their dev team size. Minecraft's dev cycle is about the same length. Its that, or have a new version every month that completely borks your saves and, since we HAVE a career mode, that's even worse than before. AND that means mods need to do a version patch MUCH more often...

Directly contradicted by the presence of a stupidity meter.

And one can hardly say that quantum entanglement, light acting as a particle and a wave depending on whether it's being watched, and Shrodinger's Cat make sense!

Over one kilometer. It's still the biggest rocket launched by Great Britain, I believe. "How are you supposed to re-use THAT?!"

I'll admit that a LOT of this is way over my head... But isn't the main evidence of a space-time expansion the fact that everything seems to be red-shifted more as it gets further away? IE, the further it is from us, the faster it's going away from us? But wouldn't that also be what you would observe if you were looking at a shock-wave from its point of origin? From the little skimming I've done, it looks like almost all of this is taken from some very, very derived mathematics based on relativistic equations, then blown up to galactic scale. Since we now know that very, very small stuff seems to do some very freaky things that disobey regular scale physics, I see no reason to think that very, very large systems don't behave in the same way. I don't really see enough experimental or observational evidence to corroborate any of these models.

How would I do it? Agreed with everyone else: that is a VERY long time... For location, I'd put it on Proteus, the second-largest of Neptune's moons (Triton is unsuitable due to its geological activity). It's far enough away to survive the Sun's red giant phase, and big enough to store the drives. On the surface, you have a large obelisk, clearly artifical, perhaps made of plastic or some sort of refined material in order to mark the thing. Beneath that is a spherical bunker made from depleted uranium/lead/gold/whatever we can in order to shield the contents from as much as humanly possible. The only things breaching that bunker are a single entrance and the needed feeds for the telescopes and power supply. Power is via RTGs. We'd need a massive amount of them, with a very long half-life material powering them to get anywhere near the required length of time. The only thing it does is run the writing device, a clock to keep time, and the telescopes. Data is stored on a series of diamond plates, encoded in the densest compression setup we have access to, and backed up with triple redundancy. If we store the bytes of data using nano-scale bites from the crystal, we should be able to get the needed storage space... Near the entrance are human-scale writings in every language, as well as mathematical and symbolic messages, which provide an explanation as to what this thing is and how to decode it. As a repository, that should hopefully last. To continue to ADD to it... as long as we're still around, we do it manually. Every hundred years or so we go out and install the newest archive data and top off the RTGs. Once we're gone, there is a reader in place (powered by the RTGs) which, either on a timer or as a function of the charge it has, takes images off of the telescopes and writes them directly onto a set of plates. To be honest, though, I don't see the hardware needed to do this lasting more than a millenia or so.