Stargate525

What was beneath the can? I sometimes have all sorts of unusual stuff live through lithobraking, depending on just how much other junk cushioned the landing.

To be clear, I wasn't saying that it isn't COMMON (Minecraft suffers from a terrible case of wiki-itis ). It's just bad design. And it's got nothing to do with being 'hardcore,' I just disagree with having to guesstimate thrust-to-weight ratios for different planets, guesstimate the number of drogues I need for my descent stage, guesstimate the number of batteries I need to bring to maintain power through the dark-side of an orbit. It's basically that there's no middle ground. I can flail around repeatedly hurling vessels out until I get it perfect (and have done 60% of the mission a dozen times), or I can close the game, go online, break out the calculator, and sit and do rocket science. What a simulator mode lets us do is give us a shorter iteration time for payload testing. Flail around but actually get something DONE before we get both bored and frustrated. -Sandbox doesn't give you anything remotely like what we're asking, and you can't port designs across saves without diving into the file hierarchy of the game. -Revert to launch doesn't solve the problem of those three hours you just wasted getting to your testing grounds, or give any functionality for multi-part missions. -Engine specs, yes. But the total mass isn't there. Nor is any functionality to provide dV or stage burn lengths without googling the formulas and breaking out the calculator. There's no way to test rover stability in lower gravity in the VAB, no way to test parachute effectiveness... -Again, a game which requires you to search resources outside the game to solve basic problems has a tutorial and ease-of-use failure, in my opinion. And how many times have we asked for something like this, or to get answers to this question, only to be told 'go get Engineer Redux / Hyperedit?' A fair amount of the time, the community tells us to go add a simulation-analog to the game. Why is it such a crime if Squad just DOES it? Did you just stop reading after the first paragraph? What part of 'dumps you on a giant cue-ball' makes you think I want anything different? I wouldn't say cubes, though, as close orbits will become impossible, and 2D doesn't make any sense for simulating a 3d world. Like I said previously, I think all that's really needed is a single body that can be set to emulate any body in the game, painted white (maybe with a grid on it), and an option to either launch from the ground or start in orbit.

A game should not require you to check an internet guide in order to perform basic functions of the gameplay. As it stands, in the game, the only method of testing anything is to launch, test, revise, repeat. That gets incredibly, stupidly tedious when you want to fine-tune TtW ratios on Laythe or Eeloo, or run power consumption setups for probes on dark sides of planets. I also don't think we're asking for a 'teleport to planet' option. Heck, I'd be perfectly fine with a 'simulate launch' button that dumps you onto a giant cue-ball that matches your chosen planet's gravity, atmosphere, and size.

This isn't a post about procedural fuel tanks. I was playing through career mode, and updating some of my designs to replace the smaller fuel tanks with the larger ones, and it got me to looking at the values of them both. Right now, the only difference between the large fuel tanks and their smaller cousins is that they are a (very very small) better value for money. To me that doesn't make sense. I mean, if you've got two separate tanks as opposed to a single bigger one, you have valves and pipes and casing that's doubled. It's inefficient as a function of weight as well. My suggestion is that either the smaller tanks get a slight dry mass increase, or the larger ones get a small mass decrease, so that doubling the size of the fuel tank only increases dry mass by 1.8 or similar. More realistic, in my opinion, and also gives you a little more incentive to choose between them.

I didn't read through the whole thread, but I didn't see this mentioned in the first few pages; am I the only one surprised and slightly confused that the simple crossfeed was outperformed by the two-stager? The only reason I'm coming up with is that it has to do with a sudden drop in TtW when the boosters cut out, but at twenty or thirty km, would that matter? What am I missing?

I'll second the idea of poofing the body, but leaving the helmet. It seems sufficiently in keeping with the goofiness. Especially if they're on ground.

The one most likely to lead to a massive expansion like that would be some combination of 2 and 5, I'd say. Getting off Earth needs to become much cheaper (space elevator, anyone?), and we need the tech and drive to do major exploration. Aliens would definitely provide that.

The only thing we humans care about as far as breathing is oxygen, and the gasses that are poisonous/corrosive. Assuming that the pressure isn't high enough to induce oxygen toxicity, a 50% oxygen atmosphere... would make you high. Eventually, you'd get used to it. But the human body doesn't care whether the bulk gas is nitrogen, argon, helium... As long as it isn't something nasty like sulphor dioxide or chlorine gas, we'll be fine.

A few off the top of my head: 1. Because we can: Aeronautics is FILLED with examples of people who did amazing things just to prove it was possible. The price-point for space stuff is just a little higher here. In a couple decades, I can easily see someone (with corporate sponsorship) going and homesteading Mars just to prove it possible. 2. Televisions: Iridium, Osmium, Palladium... Look no further than the top ten or fifteen metals on the exchange markets. These things are used in superconductors, processors, machinery... everything that we use in modern society. Find a single asteroid that has an abundance of this stuff, get it to earth, and you're looking at a 25-50 billion dollar payout. Not even mentioning a near-complete monopoly on that commodity. That figure is for a 50m asteroid made significantly of platinum. Bring that home, and you're the DeBeers of platinum. Enjoy.

It sounds incredibly cruel, and please don't interpret this as my own opinion: A Space Ark has a very limited gene pool. Humanity can't afford to have negative double-recessives or inheritable mutations in that group; it's just too risky. Yes, you might be abandoning otherwise useful people, but that weighed against the potential of introducing a negative genetic abnormality into the common population is insignificant.

Let's not be too hasty here. Yes, you could probably code in a quick and dirty menu to retrieve craft files from subfolders. But if you want it to actually mesh with the current structure and not be a nineties 'we'll just pop up a windows default save box here,' they need to place and design an up button, a new folder, delete folder, rename folder... So I'd say much more than an hour to get it to their standards of release. I also like the idea of being able to select a craft type upon construction.

But he's not arguing possibility of formation, he's arguing possibility of EXISTENCE. It can be done. You could dump enough energy into a body's rotation to get it up to those kind of speeds. I don't know why a civilization would WANT to...

Well, you COULD... Hydrostatic equilibrium just means the planet is balanced between gravity and outward pressure; you could do that by having an incredibly wide planet. Spin it fast enough, and your planet turns into a discus, but it's still a planet.

Waitaminute... you need two... three if you want 100% accuracy... reference points to determine position. For almost anywhere in Earth's SOI, that's the sun, an arbitrary position on Earth, and a similar one on the Moon. That combined with known values of their separation could get you a fairly accurate position reckoning. It's, unless I'm missing something, three equations. repeating on a regular schedule gives you velocity, as well as acceleration. But yea, if you want full auto-pilot, you'll need to be sampling that very, very fast. But it's still not overly expensive. I think.

The only thing that could come close is a pulsar, and those are made of stuff that barely qualifies as atoms anymore.

Hey Malkuth, question for you: Have you thought about what you're going to do with this mod once contracts and such get implemented? Are you going to retool this to run alongside, replace the stock missions...? I mean it's probably a little early, just curious on your thoughts about it.

There are hydrothermic vents measured shooting out water at 464 degrees Celsius. Power generation shouldn't be any problem. Just release some of the atmospheres it's under and the stuff will explode into steam. But then you've got the problem that the stuff is so acidic you've basically got superhot vinegar steam...

Yeah, but with a fairly basic lidar system, you should be able to get relative velocities pretty easily. It all boils down to trigonometry and physics, which are super easy for a computer to plug through. Again, Environment control is an oxygen sensor, thermometer, and barometer. Rip open your air conditioner; that's the kind of processing you're looking at. Engine... It's a rocket. Less complex than your modern car engine; far fewer moving parts. Actually... Top Gear should have used a modern car for their rocket program; the on-board computer probably could have handled it all.

Soil made out of seabed silt SHOULD be fairly good for farming... It's almost all organic detrius. Might need some additional sand or something... And yes, a source of light. Though geothermal would be rather easy to get to as well.

When doing multiple missions, or keeping iterations of vessels made during testing and such, I find my ship list in the VAB and SPH getting really, really long relatively quickly. I think it would be neat if we could organize these a little better. I was thinking perhaps being able to sort them by 'projects.' For instance, if you're planning a series of mun missions, you could start a new project [subfolder], and name it Apollo. Then, when you save a rocket, you can choose to put it in the Apollo folder for easy reference. Ideally, I'd like a way to select a project as soon as I went into the VAB; the load screen would show only that project (with an up button to get out, of course), the save would automatically go into that folder, and the default name would be [projectname] [X+1], where X is the number of craft files already in the project folder. Thoughts?

Yeah you can, and really... I don't get why people think this is so surprising. It's basic, basic physics and geometry. Everything in space is parabolae and ellipses. You could, theoretically, do it with a slide rule. I believe they were actually prepared for that, come to think of it.

I haven't been with MJ in a little while, but if it's still like it was before, it HATES you doing any part of the task for it. IE, if you start from anywhere except a relatively circular orbit, it tends to freak out.

I think that might be part of the problem. Right now, the only things that NEED a kerbal are EVA and surface samples (the crew report, bizarrely, just needs a seat). Everything else overlaps. It doesn't help that those two aren't terribly valuable as far as effort goes.

Okay, I've got a little problem, and I can't seem to find an answer if there is one. Want to make sure I'm not doing something stupid before reporting it as a new bug. I'm orbiting Laythe. Every other planet's grid maps work fine EXCEPT for Laythe's. When I zoom out, the map seems to... 'explode' Is the best word... from my active ship and vanishes. I checked the log, and there's no mention of kethane in the errors. Thoughts?