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Specialist290

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Posts posted by Specialist290

    The Lurker rises from the depths

    in Welcome Aboard

    Posted

    Welcome to the forums! :)

    You mentioned having some trouble with designing SSTOs. Perhaps you could share some screenshots of your design in the VAB and "in action"? I'm sure our resident experts might be able to diagnose the most likely causes of the issue and recommend a few fixes if they had a good view of the craft. Feel free to also take a look at some of the resources listed in the Drawing Board, which is conveniently linked in my signature; there's a fair bit of material about SSTO and spaceplane design, among other topics.

    Hope this helps!

    Will you skip school/work on 27 April?

    in KSP1 Discussion

    Posted

    I highly doubt that Gerandar meant that he didn't think the game wasn't worth spending money on; just that it wasn't worth losing any further money by missing a work day :P

    As for myself: Well, depending on what you consider "work," you might say that I'll actually be even busier than usual, in a certain sense...

    My name is Alex, and I'm an addict...

    in Welcome Aboard

    Posted

    Welcome to the forums! :)

    As others have implied elsewhere in the thread, KSP is one of those "easy to learn, challenging to master" games. If you just want to mess around to see what you can do by "winging it" that's a perfectly acceptable way to go about things, but if you want to dig deeper into how all the orbital mechanics work, or if you're wanting to try something and running into a brick wall, feel free to ask questions; I'm sure our resident experts will be more than willing to help. Additionally, I maintain a little list of tutorials and resources called the Drawing Board, which is conveniently linked in my signature, which might be occasionally useful for helping smooth out those rough patches as well.

    Hope this helps!

    Finally going to have KSP!

    in Welcome Aboard

    Posted

    Welcome to the forums! :)

    Glad to hear that you thought enough of the game that it stuck with you for a whole year. Taking a quick look at that laptop's specs, it actually looks better than mine, and mine mostly handles the game well (outside of a few annoyingly persistent frame rate issues with relatively larger crafts at launch, which I think is mostly due to the way the game renders ocean water). Do note that, as the current Windows release of KSP is a 32-bit program, only 4 GB of RAM is ever going to benefit you at most.

    At any rate, hope you enjoy the game when you finally get it, and hope the new laptop suits your needs!

    Behavior of the Navball Under Thrust

    in KSP1 Gameplay Questions and Tutorials

    Posted

    A few other questions, to help us diagnose what's actually going on:

    1. When are you actually burning for the maneuver? With some longer burns, it's actually slightly more accurate to start burning before the countdown fully counts down, as the maneuver node planner assumes instantaneous thrust at that particular point.

    2. Which marker are you pointing at when you execute the burn?

    Jool return mission Delta-V

    in KSP1 Discussion

    Posted

    VelocityPolaris: While we're sure there's someone who can answer your question, we of the moderation team would like to drop a friendly reminder that it's probably best to take new questions to a new thread (preferably in Gameplay Questions) rather than reviving a thread that's been dead for almost two years.

    Flashing laser on plane or helicopter

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted · Edited by Specialist290
    Miscellaneous typos and formatting fixes.

    In that worst case scenario, where you have an exceptionally powerful laser, someone with an amazing aim and a pilot that happens to be hit in exactly the wrong spot while looking the wrong way, yes, it might result in significant bodily harm. Yet either one of those is unlikely and the combination of all extremely rare. So in pretty much every realistic scenario it would merely be a distraction that any pilot worth his salt should able to deal with, exactly like I said before.

    Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

    The law of truly large numbers: With a large enough sample size, even the most outrageous and improbable event has a high likelihood of occurring eventually.

    To quote a 2006 review prepared by the Federal Aviation Administration itself: " There were 90 reported instances of laser illumination during the study period [of 13 months]. A total of 53 reports involved laser exposure of commercial aircraft. Lasers illuminated the cockpit in 41 (46%) of the incidents. Of those, 13 (32%) incidents resulted in visual impairment or distraction to a pilot, including 1 incident that reportedly resulted in ocular injury."

    I've also taken the liberty of quoting one of the specific incident summaries from the text as well, specifically the 22 September 2004 incident:

    At 9:30 PM MST, a Delta Airlines B-737 aircraft (DAL 1025) was on final approach to Runway 35 at Salt Lake City (UT) International Airport at approximately 1,300 above ground level (AGL; 5,500 ft MSL), when a green laser light hit the Flight Deck. The First Officer (FO) was flying the aircraft at the time of the incident. Both Captain and FO saw the bright green light coming from the ground at the one to two o’clock position for a period of about 5 seconds. The Captain recognized the light as a laser and turned his eyes away while the FO did not. The FO landed the aircraft safely, but reported some loss of depth perception, causing him to flare too high. After the flight, the FO noticed blurring in his eyes. The next day his vision was more blurred. An ophthalmologist’s examination found retinal edema. The FO was unable to fly for about 3 weeks and remained sensitive to bright lights for some time.

    It's not always accidental, either (29 December 2004):

    At 5:35 PM EST a Cessna Citation, flying at approximately 2,500 AGL, was illuminated with a green laser near Rockaway, NJ, causing a temporary loss of vision for both the pilot and co-pilot, but they were able to safely land the plane. Two days later, one of the Cessna pilots joined federal agents in a police helicopter that was investigating the incident. The cockpit of the helicopter was illuminated with a laser light while flying in the vicinity of the previous illumination. The authorities were able to identify the location of the laser light, and an individual was arrested for both incidents. The suspect later plead guilty in court to interfering with the pilots of a passenger aircraft.

    The main body of the report goes into much more detail about the adverse effects (both potential and documented) of laser pointers on the human eye and how they can be detrimental to normal aircraft operations, but I hope that the two examples I've already quoted are sufficient to demonstrate the point. Thankfully, none of the incidents detailed in that particular study resulted in accidents (much less fatal ones), but laser light incidents already can and do cause much more than "mild discomfort" to pilots quite frequently.

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