vencaslac

So a few of days ago I ran into Creatures 3.. FUN STUFF. If anyone here has played it thumbs up to you. Well I'm a bit late to the party (about a decade, give or take a couple of years). I have been interested in AI for a while but somehow I completely missed the fact that Steve Grand existed. It turns out he's been working on a new Creatures game called Grandroids. It's a life sim based on mimicking biological systems in very fine detail (down to the DNA and biochemistry that come with these systems, and how all of this affects the way the brain works) with the goal of creating an artificial life form (yes really) that thinks to a certain degree, in the real sense of the word, beyond winning jeopardy or beating kasparov with brute force computational power. The goal is to create something akin to a mammal, a creature that plans ahead - as opposed to the Norns of Creatures 3 which were just reactionary systems in that they were able to react to novel situations and respond to certain base drives like wanting to not starve or kicking a ball around for fun. This paragraph cannot do the project justice though so I encourage everyone to visit his blog at http://stevegrand.wordpress.com There's a whole section devoted to Grandroids, even though it's fairly old. The thing that made me post this here though is that he's doing this using the Unity engine. Procedural planets and biomes are cool and all KSP but they are lifeless... How amazing would it be if instead of going places to gather science points we actually went there to check out the life forms. /discuss

the manufacturer does not have a forum so i can't ask this there =/ i am basically unable to calibrate this thing in windows in game the axis' are messed up and at neutral (when not moving the joystick) roll and yaw are all to the left on the indicator to the left while pitch is completely depressed. i can achieve neutral control surfaces by moving the joystick and using the rudder controls incorporated in the thrust control thing on the joystick itself. another issue is windows (7 ultimate) does not properly install it for some reason, it's detected as an SM bus controller but i can't see it under game controllers. there is however a HID-Compliant game controller under human interface devices and the thing obviously works in game... any tips on how to calibrate it properly? i know some of you guys use it edit: just tried it out in a different game, i'm not sure whether that game's deadzones are set up better but it doesn't behave the same way, in fact it seems to be functioning normally. could this be a game/unity thing?

your plane is in a very slow orbit (it's powered by engines)... it is not changing pitch... the inclination of kerbin's surface varies beneath it just like it does on orbital craft due to the fact that your sas is keeping the plane in the same orientation in refference to the skybox and there's nothing you can do about it except mod a dynamic orientation sas edit: to put it another way: you're flying a straight line over a curved surface, the artificial horizon indicator assumes kerbin is a flat surface so what follows is that you're flying a curved trajectory. depending on how fast you're going the effect will become more and more pronounced as you move away from the surface faster, it's not lift - it's geometry. your constant downward readjustments just put your plane back on a trajectory that is parallel to kerbin's local surface

Second episode: http://youtu.be/XjdFqjDclc4

A while ago i posted a thread on this forum showing a few images of my project to explore the Joolian system with a mothership design. I didn't actually have the time then to follow through with an actual mission but now that I do... Here is the first installment: http://youtu.be/2uk-JG03HHw Just in case you are actually interested the payload to Jool is: 1x Heavy Lander for Tylo and Laythe 1x Light Lander for Vall, Bop, and Pol 1x Plane for Laythe 1x Rover for Laythe 6x Automated ion probes (one for each body in the system) 1x Lab for orbital processing of raw science 1x Orbital platform framework to be used in possible future colonisation efforts and last but not least, as much spare fuel as I can muster I'll just update this thread when i'm done processing and recording the rest of the mission but stay tuned!

Hello everyone, I'm Kirk and I'd like to give you guys a little sneak peak of an upcoming series of a mission to Jool called Voyajool. It is a sequel to my previous . Here are a few shots of the ship I'm planning to use and the stats associated with it: As you can tell it's quite large and as a result, quite laggy indeed. The mission plan: 1) Perform a multi orbit Kerbin escape 2) Perform Hohmann transfer to the Jool system and necessary mid course corrections / discard any empty fuel tanks to conserve mass 3) Perform aerocapture at Jool and leave one probe in a polar orbit around the planet itself 4) Put the ship in a parking orbit around Laythe where I can either: a) Launch the plane on a recon mission to find a suitable landing site followed by the large lander reconfigured to piggy back the single seat rover Reconfigure a drive unit with additional fuel and the small lander to visit the outer moons first 5) Put one probe in a preferably polar elliptical orbit around each body (to facilitate both close in and far out data capture) 6) Land on each body and retrieve surface samples and return to mothership 7) Reconfigure the ship for a return voyage 8) Return to LKO and land both landers at KSC to recover data. Ship features: 6 Xenon probes equiped with scientific equipment Fully modular design that can be reconfigured to meet mission specific goals 2 Manned landers, one for high gravity moons and planets and one for lower (Munlike and below) gravity moons 2 Completely detachable and autonomous quadnuke drive units 11 fully autonomous fuel tanks capable of performing on orbit assembly of the ship - each tank can store 4000 units of electric charge giving it more than adequate operating autonomy. 1 fully autonomous payload deorbiting unit capable not only of this task but also remote randez-vous and recovery of on orbit assets that are either stranded or damaged. 1 Manned exploration rover designed specifically with Laythe in mind but which may be usable on low gravity moons where the onboard RCS is able to comfortably lift it off the ground. The build took 22 launches all together not including refueling which is under way and may take one or two additional launches. I'll be taking the fantastic three to Jool. Docking some of the parts was a real challenge (especially the probes) and magnet wobble has caused the small lander to clip into the large one... It will hopefully not tear itself and the ship to shreds when detached... That would be bad . Thanks for checking out this thread and make sure to keep an eye on it in the next few days as I'll be updating it as the episodes are released.

Even if it wasn't a poverty hotspot india should still receive some kind of reparation from the UK after the centuries of plunder (yes yes i know they did good things too, great things even)... Whether they call it aid or reparation is strictly political and IMO that's the reason cash is changing hands between those governments... Of course it wouldn't look good if they called it a reparation because it would make the UK have to admit more than its' willing to... diplomacy works like that. So the whole argument of India should spend that aid on x or y is invalidated by the fact that x, y are likely issues that may not have arisen should the country that is footing the bills have not done some of the things its' done...

Every nation on Earth that can afford to do so should puruse a space program... $75 mil is not flashy at all tbh... the company I work for has a higher yearly turnover i suspect so even though it may sound like a lot of money to the individual it really is pocket change on a government level... and i think India should be commended for doing it so cheaply... how much does a dragon capsule cost?

assuming what can take off and orbit from the mun can also do the same on laythe.... i learned to research stuff before comitting to a few hours of gameplay only to fail miserably >.<

on a side note the smoke graphic could use some improvement... it's pretty good as it is and there are quite a few other priorities tbh (mk2 cockpit interior >.< what's taking so long!) but yeah... that's my $0.02

<- this you don't need nukes... they make it easier but it's not mandatory... if your ship can land kerbals on the mun and bring them back to kerbin it's likely quite able to send a probe to duna

So i'm sure everyone's heard of this already but I just realised today after reading this article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24851242 that it would likely be a lot harder for me to understand why they're doing the trans martian injection in multiple burns if it wasn't for KSP... so thanks Squad... - /discuss

http://youtu.be/7wJsasE3oTs part 3 where our heroes return from Eeloo to LKO and land at KSC with their valuable scientific payload

well... my channel is linked in my sig... i do missions that i think are worthwhile showing because they're an achievement to me personally, my videos are long and painful to some because i make it a point to include the details of what it is i'm doing... in the hopes that someone will find some of it informative... see you there!

http://youtu.be/SXHc4KsWYbY part 2 where Jeb and Bill land on Eeloo and do some science

Hello everybody... Here's a 3 part series of my trip to Eeloo using a mothership design with a lander and probe. I'm uploading the first part as the second and third are being processed so I'll be updating this post as those come out of the cooker. It's fairly long, I wanted to show all the nitty gritty details of what these trips entail so that our newer players aren't too disappointed when they attempt to fly out there and realize that 3 minute video they watched of cinematic postcards had so much stuff going on behind the scenes. Let me know what you think and enjoy. http://youtu.be/SkdWSQc-c0E part 1

Ok so i don't know who you think you are questio... nah that guy was right! I did make a spaceplane tutorial a while back but people have been commenting on that video about how you can't call something a spaceplane if you don't take it to space so clicky here and let me know what you think!

do an f5 when you hit the SOI after using that calculator... duna's atmosphere starts roughly around 40k - it is quite tenuous and will not slow you down much unless you go deep (if your mind's in the gutter try and dig it out for just a sec) so if you do crash and burn just hit f9 and you can try again... aerobreaking is fun! EDIT: let us know how many times you crash into IKE... and how many times it makes you wind up in weird quasi-polar retrograde orbits

Yes, MJ does provide a lot of useful information on the fly and in one place... it does help - provided one is familiar with the terminology and with exactly what makes that information useful, so the question really is, is the new player ready to handle that information right away - if they're not familiar with orbital mechanics from prior experience with say orbiter or from just general knowledge i submit that they are not.

the value of 9.81m/s^2 also varies with latitude as earth is not perfectly spherical like kerbin is - i think the proper term is oblate spheroid - as its' rotation makes it bulge at the equator so the farther away from the equator you go the less mass is between you and the earth's center of mass, making gravity slightly weaker

really depends on what you want to achieve with it... i have a couple of fuel stations... 3 large orange tanks (i find any more than that redundant) some hab modules and a docking arm for on orbit construction of interplanetary or indeed munar missions... don't forget the pretty solar panels

Docking is a tough one for most people... and I subscribe to everything Sovek here mentioned except the use of MJ for learning purposes. MJ is great for making things easier but it has a learning curve of its' own. Have a look at my tutorial, I hear it's pretty good... There's also vid on "how to make the dock" funny AND informative

here's my first succesful attempt - the imaginatively named SSTO mk 4 it's a two seater for ferrying Kerbals from ground level to my LKO station from where they should be able to catch some sort of other vehicle to distant bases/colonies: It has enough fuel to make orbit and randez-vous without RCS (forgot to add any - the MK4.1 will probably have some) Once the mission is completed it is straightforward to land on the runway as it glides pretty well and can cruise at ~22.000 and ~1400m/s Anyway, it doesn't look like much but it performs really well, I'll probably be getting a lot of use out of it... especially since the station I have is basically a fuel depot with a construction arm for assembling other ships and a hab module meaning i can fully refuel it up there so coming down should leave me with enough fuel to come back up... should test this out though

looking at those indicators i'd say the center of lift is too far back relative to the center of mass... try adding a couple of canards about where the front chutes are and bring the center of lift to where the two indicator spheres intersect but the mass is still forward... that should make the torque from weight pulling down on the front and the lift pulling up on the back a little less significant and make it easier for the nose to come up when you need it to... not to plug my own stuff but it's the closest illustration of this point i have at hand <- at minute 29 or so i highlight the centers of mass and lift... that's about the way i keep them on all my planes edit: alternatively if you're not a fan of canards (although they do add a lot of control) you can just move the engine+wing assembly forward a bit... it will shift your center of mass slightly forward the the center of lift will be more significantly affected so you should still be able to achieve the effect i mentioned

the lateral lean might be due to the orientation of he wheels... the same happens with rovers where if your wheels aren't perpendicular to the ground, the rover will drift to one side or the other... that plane certainly looks airworthy... you could also have a look at the indicators for center of mass, lift and thrust and ensure they are coliniar as an offset center of thrust can cause the plane to drift to one side Edit: removed statement saying i can't see your avionics pack... i'm obviously blind