Accelerando

attack the antenna? you might as well just say chip off a piece of the armor and the thing is a goner,; i mean, if it's so easy to pick off yet such a small component as an antenna then why don't you pack a bunch of them? some mechanism to replace them, extend new ones, etc. additionally how are you going to deliver a powerful enough EMP to kill a spaceship between planets? nuclear is the most effective way to deliver EMP, and without a nearby ionosphere to excite you'd have to practically contact the hull with a nuke, at which point you might as well be destroying the ship outright... and then there begs the question of shielding, even if a pulse manages to get close enough but not destroy the ship, how are they going to be able to target anything worth a darn when the sensors powered by electricity that are needed for quick sky survey and tracking enemy spaceships are blown out by EMP? what are they going to do, look out the telescope? not to mention that, indeed, if your electronics go out on a giant 10,000 ton antimatter spaceship and only your meatbags are left functioning, how are you going to control the ship in combat situation? without serious targeting computer power, how will you get good firing solutions on spaceships that can accelerate so fast that "detecting these craft far enough ahead of time to launch missiles or interceptors becomes next to impossible"...? ships with such, as you say, quasi-magical drives will surely be able to maneuver far faster than any human brain could ever hope to account for... also superpowered reactor technologies are at least as far off as any strong AI, why is the assumption that we won't have near-sapient disposable computers if we have antimatter thermal rockets? and about the whole morality of sending sapient drones into battle, if we're willing to send humans to die for us then what's to stop us from using drones for the same purposes? and while humans should be making the high level decisions for such drone AIs, i find it hard to believe that a human can truly outsmart or in any way outperform a computer as costly as the habitat equipment needed to house the fleshy meatbag, in heat-of-the-moment combat maneuvering and firing situations... if your habitat module gets blown out then you're just as much out of luck as if your computers all get blown out, you can store a lot more number crunching power on a ship than you can store meatbags. additionally the meatbags are a lot less easy mass-wise to carry lots of redundant copies of and shield individual habitats against weapons, and magitech antimatter drives will just make this even more the case, because now you can carry hundreds to thousands of redundant targeting computers and considering technology advances, probably even better and smaller ones. that said, indeed, railguns and lasers are good investments, cheap to fire once you have enough reactor power, but i disagree that lasers are the instant kill you speak of. especially if/when you have drives that can accelerate at constant 1-10G, duking it out with lasers over 1+ light-second interplanetary distances is going to give plenty of leeway for the enemy to start preemptively dodging your beams and, truth, fighter-scout style spacecraft could be used for patrol within cisplanetary/translunar orbital space, investigating spacecraft arriving and departing on daily basis from space stations + planetside edit: about target identification also, for spaceships coming in at interplanetary velocities, you will be preferably tracking all of them at once. since there's no horizon to hide behind, you will be able to see all of their orbits, all the time. so why would you rely on ID signals? not to mention why would enemy ships use broadcast ID signals at all? tightbeam laser comms are more secure than broadcast radio for military purposes, and in battle they're not going to be pointing those signals at you. and then about detecting relativistic torchships - for one, they're putting out enough thrust to accelerate to fractions of lightspeed well within the time it takes chemical ships to get to Mars. not only will the Martians see them coming long before they ever made it past 1% C, but those engine flares will be seen halfway to Alpha Centauri. any advanced enough civilization to carry out space wars is going to have an advanced deep sky survey program, and we can already do a complete survey in less than a day. you seem to think that future combat spaceships aren't going to be much more advanced computerwise than missiles or predator drones, but even if computer tech stayed the same, why wouldn't they be? a predator drone sized ship or a missile alone can't get that much ∆V while being survivable, and a nuclear or antimatter powered rocket would be able to cart server farms around without that much extra effort...

"Nothing Could Go Wrong"

i'm just gonna go really off topic here, but i've been dying to know for years: why do people replace the second "that" with "what" here? i have never seen this written anywhere except in colloquial internet writing.

i can't agree with this. everything has precedents in general concept, but that doesn't mean there's nothing unique left to be made. if that wasn't the case, there would never be new genres. shouldn't worry indeed, but please stop with this "it's all been done before, everyone's already seen everything you'll ever make, etc".

tell me everything please

Thank you. ^^

Designer, or MGUARN, may I be promoted to Officer for the time being?

Ah, true... dagnab that guy Big Johnson. Indeed, it's a good buying time

Truth. Driving the price down by selling low to alliance members...

Huzzah! Thanks to everyone who voted  and next comes the formulation of the Konstitution. I've posted to the Konvention thread. Around what timeframes will you all be most available for the drafting in of the Konstitution, and voting people into newly created positions? With Genebree MIA for 25 days now, we should indeed form a new alliance, as well. Would you all be interested in a new name?

Mould our Gros some thunder thighs.

That's perfect. Please send it to land and let's have an adventure.

It must be spindlier. Raise our creature's body so it curls up and around in an r-shape

Let's keep those meat eating chompers on and give our critter some spindly legs

Cast her out into the wild blue yonder and let's cram down some more veg.

this time, put some faster fins on that sucka

True, a ∆V map won't leave room for maneuvers, only showing the acceleration needed to get from here to there on a certain orbit at a certain time. And, true, RF's ∆V map including L-Points suggests the map is basing direction on trailing or leading. Need a new system... About the realism part of the ∆V map, would it work better if ∆V increments could be scaled? Like you can drag a slider that adjusts the increments of ∆V you want to see mapped out. So for larger increments like 3km/s, you might see Earth and Luna compressed into the same hex, and targeting that hex will drop down a menu of bodies to transfer to. Triplanetary indeed looks good, giving a very intuitive feel for gravity assist and burn maneuvers, with gravity hexes tugging the ship around, and each unit of burn pushing the ship one hex in the specified direction, adding to the final velocity. I would love to see your map! And your explanation. I disagree that 3D won't matter. Especially in the orbital space around planets and moons, won't the differences be pretty significant? KSC launches from nearly 30 degrees north of the equator, and Baikonur 45º.

Put a new carnivorous mouth on there alongside those plant-eating frills. Then we can eat everything. Win win.

Make it thin. Sticklike.

Vulova (pretty colors!)

the FLOOYD dynamics yellow fuel pipe will transfer fuel from inaccessible tanks to your rocket engine. you can right-click on the solid boosters and activate them individually, or assign a keybind to activate the boosters only by clicking on the Action Groups button next to the Crew button in the top left of the VAB or Spaceplane Hangar screen to get to orbit, with a vertical rocket, you want to point straight vertical for the first 10-12km of flight, until you're going ~300m/s, and then gradually start pitching over. by around 30km up, you should be going at 1200m/s at a 45º*angle above the horizon. Pitch down till you're level with the horizon, and burn until your Apoapsis is ≥70km. Cut your engines and coast to Apoapsis, then burn until your Periapsis is also ≥70km welcome to ksp forums!

I'm designing a 2D grid-based video game that models orbital mechanics, and doing this alone is one of the most confounding parts. Part of the problem is that I don't understand how generalized ∆V maps work. Another part is how to model orbital combat maneuvers. For creating the ∆V map system, I used the hexagrid-based ∆V map of the out-of-print Rocket Flight, by Phil Eklund, as my basis. A hexagrid seems the most generalizable to me, since it breaks down ∆V into tiles of a standard size which can be repeated indefinitely, and offers the most connection points between each tile. Here is the map: It seems simple enough. The map radiates out from the Sun, with Mercury, Earth, and Jupiter descending directly from an unseen Sun tile. However, I don't understand why any of the other bodies are placed where they are. Why is Venus a tile to the side? Why is Mars or any of the asteroids off to the sides? I tried to rationalize it myself, but it always comes back to the hard math. Since Rocket Flight, its descendant High Frontier, and cousin Attack Vector seem to have done ∆V already, I don't want to re-invent everything. Rocket Flight has the Zodiac, which appears to be like a compass. I don't know what their real significance is though, leading to my confusion about the position of solar system bodies. I guessed that they mean something like, with respect to the Sun: • Up/down hex faces = Retrograde and Prograde • Upper left/Lower right = Normal and Antinormal • Upper right/Lower left = Out and In (from the Sun, like the RAD+/RAD- options on Mechjeb's Smart ASS) At first glance this makes sense to me, since it covers all three dimensions. Yet under this system, using RF's standard units of ∆V, it takes 3km/s to transfer from a prograde orbit to a normal/polar orbit... at the bottom of the Sun's gravity well. That doesn't seem right. Yet, at the same time, the Zodiac symbols appear to be used as directional indicators in RF's Tactical view of the Jovian system. See: That brings me to my other question, too. How can I create a tactical interface that offers players freedom to move and execute maneuvers while simulating orbital mechanics on some level? Does it make sense to model combat using a ∆V grid, and if so, is that what Rocket Flight's system appears to be simulating? Or should I use something more like the distance-based grids of Triplanetary or Attack Vector? And, finally, since I want to make this a video game, what would you advise in general to a very much newbie to game creation? I want to program this myself. bonus: The Rocket Flight image album, pulled from Boardgamegeek.com

So how about that Konstitutional Konvention? We still have 3 votes left unaccounted for - vger's and Nick's, and huehuehue who still hasn't signed up.

Why would you ever ask this question? I've had blackouts at home and uni, indeed

yes, something of real interest to go to on planets and moons would indeed be wonderful. simulating kerbals as little people too, not just life support but some measure of comfort vs disharmony. just flying around with them being basically cute green dead weight bores me