Eric S

I understand that, and I'm actually all in favor of something like this that helps people that use it to learn why it's doing what it is, but I don't see this doing that, and I don't see how to change it so that it does, short of popup windows that explain each step. I'd just rather not add a crutch to the game that makes it easier to not learn orbital mechanics as part of the stock program. Maneuver nodes make it easier to figure out how to do something by guessing till you get it right, but it still encourages you to learn what each of the six knobs do, just so that you can get it to do what you want faster. So as a helper mechanic with teaching potential, it works.

I know I watched all the televised Apollo stuff, but I don't remember watching it. My first memory of the news was Vietnam. I was pretty little, and they'd show a map of the country on the TV when they were talking about it, but never actually talked about where it was, so I was 8 or so before I learned that Vietnam wasn't somewhere on the east coast. My first memory of a political cartoon was of Nixon during the Watergate scandal.

I really don't see this happening. You may not call this an autopilot, but really, if all you're doing is executing the maneuver nodes that this spits out, then this is removing all need to understand orbital physics, so you might as well go full autopilot.

And the mass of the parts, so low mass parts need a HUGE drag coefficient in order to significantly affect the overall drag of a craft. No, I have no doubt this is as efficient as claimed. And enough of an abuse of KSP physics to feel REALLY creepy.

It's not a waste, the Oberth effect means massive differences between a Minmus burn and a barely-above-kerbin's-atmosphere burn. I'll run a few missions to measure the difference when I get the chance.

I agree with the first part, but I'm not sure why you think the second couldn't happen. Rendezvous can be done with anything with enough thrust and maneuverability. It wouldn't have been able to dock, but the astronaut in the CSM said that the astronaut in the ascent module would have to EVA over to the CSM.

I've played around with this a lot, and have generally found the most fuel efficient way to do an interplanetary transfer from Minmus is to depart Minmus in the retrograde direction, burning your periapsis down to about 80-100km, and then doing your transfer planet at your periapsis. The thing is, the timing of this can be a bit annoying. You've got a wide margin of error on your planetary phase angle, but your ejection angle is more critical, especially when most of your ejection velocity is in place before your ejection burn. Because of the tight timing margins on this, I strongly recommend quicksaving before you start your burn to depart Minmus, at least the first time or two. Boosting straight out from Minmus either directly into a transfer or out into solar SoI and then doing a hohman are both less fuel efficient, but easier to do.

Just watched it yesterday, and they didn't talk about the dark side of the moon. They were at the south pole of the moon, saying some of the craters there never had direct sunlight in them, which fits with what you said. There were a few other things that were wrong or made no sense, but they didn't fall for that one. Also saw Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon last night, and it did explicitly refer to the dark side of the moon that way, but I'm no more likely to expect scientific accuracy out of that series than I am intelligent dialog out of a political campaign.

That's the first thing I thought of as well, as soon as I saw the challenge name.

And when was your experience as an adult? You say that like we don't understand. We do. I remember people making this same argument back then. Heck, we all knew people that felt the same way when we were in school, and some of us may have even hated it then ourselves. The thing is, we've also made the transition from that environment to an independent adult one, so we know it's not all freedom and rainbows and unicorns. Some people will be happier after that transition, some won't. I'd have to say I have more friends that hate their job than I had that hated school, and most of my friends are professionals, so we're not talking about people hating working as a 7-11 clerk. The point isn't "school is wonderful and you should all be happy." It's that graduation is trading one set of impositions for a different set of impositions, and people that haven't made that transition may not have a very clear understanding of that second set of impositions. Anyone that thinks that school is prison and graduation means total freedom is in for a bit of a shock, even if in the long run you like it better. I envy people whose minds work that way. My memory holds on to every bad or embarrassing memory I ever had, so yes, I remember the bad things about school.

The thing is, when you graduate, move out on your own, it's true that there's no longer anyone making decisions for you. However, you just traded all those decisions being made for you for obligations and commitments that you yourself have to keep. First, you have to keep a job. This really cuts into your free time. Most of my friends are out of the house for at least 10-12 hours between commutes and actual work. Then when they do get home, they have to cook for themselves, maybe do some yard work or housework, and then they're finally into their "free time." Some of my friends consider themselves lucky to have more than an hour of free time a day during the week. As has been mentioned, most jobs have dress codes that are stricter in at least some ways than most school dress codes. No jeans, shirts must have collars, maybe no sneakers, etc. That's not even getting into the jobs that require "business casual." As for money, $8 an hour 40 hours a week may sound like a lot, but between taxes, rent, car payments/maintenance/insurance/gas if applicable, and utilities, you won't have much of it left (depending on where you live, that may not even be enough to cover that much). Food comes next. You know that Allstate commercial where they talk about a "ramen noodle every night budget?" That's not uncommon for people out on their own for the first time. Spending an extra dollar a night for a better dinner may not sound like much, but that's $30 a month, and if your "luxuries/entertainment" budget is $100, that $1 for each dinner takes a big bite out of it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you're living in the paradise of your life and it will never get better than that. However, for most people, if it gets better, it's because of their accomplishments "out in the world," not the extra freedom gained from being out in the world. EDIT: "out in the word"? Yeah, fixed that.

The thrust is the same, but the acceleration is higher because there's less fuel, meaning less mass. Same thrust + less mass = more acceleration.

Yeah. That friend that I mentioned that lost his job? He had a daughter that had just left for college a month before. She decided to pass up a full ride scholarship to her second choice college because daddy could afford her first choice (and yes, I find his decision to agree to this at least as questionable as her decision). From the way she treated him afterwards, you'd think he had quit his job just to piss her off. Sometimes the spoiled don't realize that they're being spoiled. Most teens aren't this bad. As was said before, most survive the transition to real life, and some take to it fairly well. Those that equate school to prison, however, may be in for a bit of a shock.

Hope you don't expect that behavior to stop just because they graduate. It'll go on, just the reasons will change. Adults commit suicide or engage in other self-harming behavior over job or family issues all the time, and other reasons as well. Hate to break it to you, but all that will continue into adulthood, just in a different form. I've got got a friend that had a well-paying job he loved, and he got fired because someone that didn't like him went behind his back to get him in trouble. Want to compare bad grades to suddenly having problems feeding and housing your family? My girlfriend almost lost her job for a similar reason. Almost every friend I've got has one coworker like that. And these are all nice, honest people that all get their job done and then some. I won't say that school is extremely easy compared to adult life. Easier, yes, but not so hugely so. On the other hand, the stakes you're playing for in adult life are usually quite a bit higher.

It would be disallowed and never become available. The devs have already stated this. Which, if nothing else, will encourage modders to update their stuff when 0.22 comes out. My semi-related question is will modders be able to add to the research tree? I can see where someone doing something like a SABER engine wouldn't want to hang it off an existing node of the research tree. I belive that they'll be able to do this, but I haven't seen a definite statement.

Depends on whether you're using RT1 or RT2. RT1 enforces old-ASAS behavior, which does need to be turned on and off.

Did the demo show this? I ask because that limitation isn't inherent in subassembly manager/loader, but rather in the way KSP connects parts. Now, if anyone would be in the position to do a subassembly function that gets around this, it would be the devs, but until I see evidence that they have, I wouldn't count on it.

That's right. From what I've heard, and this is strictly hearsay, the reason Unity hasn't upgraded to a more recent version of PhysX is because they fixed some bugs in the version that they're using, submitted the bug fixes to the PhysX devs, who then refused to commit them back into PhysX. Unity has come to depend on these bug fixes, and at this point, PhysX has changed enough that they'd have to redo all of their bug fixes to fix the current version, rather than just applying their fixes to the current version.

Well, there may be more added than just money, but the real point is that it's career mode, not campaign mode, so as TCVM said, it won't be scripted, the goals are all still your goals, just with extra rules/restrictions added.

My view of Win 8 is rather colored by the fact that my girlfriend's Win8 laptop refuses to turn it's WiFi on. Yes, it knows it's there, it just refuses to use it. The switch to turn the Wi-Fi on is there, but greyed out. They've done such a good job at making the basic functionality available that I can't find the non-basic tools I need to dig into this problem. If I set that aside, it really comes down to the fact that Win8 is optimized for touch screens, which aren't exactly common or affordable on the desktop at this time, and even if they were, using a vertically mounted touchscreen for any significant length of time is an ergonomic nightmare. Yes, moving Win8 to be optimized for touchscreens may seem like a brilliant idea in the future, since desktop/laptop computer sales are being cannibalized by tablet sales at this time, but right now this feels like a real "New Coke" move, telling your existing customer base to take a hike because you're chasing the market you don't have rather than keeping the one you've got.

Slight correction, the Cassini RTG(s?) used -238, which has a much shorter half life (87.7 years). However, failed launches, reentry, etc. was all considered when the RTGs were designed.

That doesn't sound right. In fact, not blowing up in the case of an impact was one of the design criteria of the RTGs used. I don't remember anyone mentioning it blowing up at the time, and none of the articles I can find still online mention it either. If all of Galileo's plutonium were in the same place, this would be quite possible, as the critical mass would have been in the 9-10 kg range, and the two RTGs had 7.8 kg each. However, the RTGs were kept well apart, and even then, the plutonium was split up into 18 heat units each. Honest questions: Would there actually be any significant impact, since Jupiter is a gas giant? That also factors against this, I think. On the other hand, the pressure of Jupiter's atmosphere could be the trigger. How much pressure would it take to compress 433g of Pu-238 to critical mass? I know the shape affects critical mass as well, but only know that the heat units had cylindrical masses rather than spherical, but don't know the measurements. Depending on whether the RTGs maintain minimal structural integrity to this point might also be a factor, as having other plutonium masses nearby would help the plutonium reach critical mass. NSA Disclaimer: Not trying to create a bomb here, the environment of Jupiter would probably be more difficult to create on Earth than a conventional nuclear bomb. EDIT: Ninja'ed and derailed. That's what I get for researching a post like this while I compose it. Actually, the temperature levels we're talking about here would probably work against you. There's an optimal temperature point, given the material and pressure, past which thermal expansion causes the material in question to expand enough to actually increase the amount of material you need to achieve critical mass.

Yeah, the problem with DR is that we're doing reentry at a third the speed that NASA does, so they either have to fudge reentry issues towards being worse than reality, or just not be that hard. I've played with FAR, DR, and RT. Each of them added interesting challenges, but once I got used to them, were just different playing styles. Heck, my first RT launch was a three satellite constellation, launched with an unmanned ship. Did it two different ways. One with a ship with enough delta-v to manhandle the orbits, and one with just enough delta-v to pull it off. Both of those were different challenges. The first never lost contact with ground control, and the second passed in and out of contact, doing maneuvers only when it was in contact.

Heh, Eeloo was the third planet I went to, right behind Duna and Eve. Back during 0.18.X, I wanted to go there before it got turned into a moon. Turns out I had plenty of time, but at any rate, I got an unmanned probe there within a week or two of Eeloo being in game. I then finished up sending probes everywhere else but Jool, because there were just too many targets there, I didn't want to send six missions. I started with the idea of a single rocket with a payload of six independent probes, but mission creep set in. So my first manned trans-planetary mission was a mothership mission to Jool. I've been back to Eeloo twice, once for my grand tour (that was my first manned landing on Eeloo), and once for the reddit 50th challenge, which I never did finish. Had a lack of delta-v issue at Duna, and my second attempt hasn't made it into orbit yet, my 250 ton payload doesn't want to stay on the launcher. Amazingly enough, I'm having no problems with the launcher itself despite being the largest launcher I've ever built, and stock at that.

I landed quite nicely, thank you. And proceeded to hit the space bar, separating the capsule from the rest of the craft when it came time to launch. Now, the first and second rescue missions, of those there was nothing left. Somehow I lucked into my first landing, it obviously wasn't my piloting ability.