Kerbface

How can it be gravitational forces pulling you in? You were pulled up a hill. I doubt it has anything to do with gravity. Must be some sort of untouchable, invisible magnet.

I want a Kerbal named Tom so I can send him off in a little tin can and leave him stranded in a trajectory heading out of the solar system.

Ah, but perhaps not so. What if they had it set up so that a secondary gravitational force would initiate, equal and opposite to the acceleration force. It would nullify it and keep you in a comfortable position.

My point exactly.

Like the opening of Star Wars episode III

Usually I delete the part and pick another one and it seems to work okay after that.

What always does annoy me though, is the constantly used "Spaceship's engines are always on when it's moving" thing. Space is not the air, you don't slow down if you turn off your engines, and if they're always on, you're constantly accelerating. Yet an X-Wing fighter will simply maintain constant velocity while the engines burn. And then it'll go and do a turn while the engines are running and gradually turn in an arc as the ship rotates, killing their velocity in one direction without ever firing in the other one.

Even 2001: A Space Odyssey made some mistakes. The Discovery had no radiators (which apparently was actually an intentional choice to go against logic so audiences wouldn't think they were "wings") and by most estimates, the centrifuge on the Discovery would have been a pretty terrible habitat. It had a 5m radius and went at 5rpm, look what that gets you on spincalc. www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/ There would be a huge pressure distance from your head to your feet, the coriolis effect would have been terrible, you only get moon level gravity and if you walk the wrong direction you would get almost nothing because you'd be eliminating too much rotation. Still really cool though.

Okay, but if you're going with the split second computer battle thing, you don't have to worry about thrust at all, there would be no time to make meaningful changes to thrust, you certainly wouldn't be reversing orbit (which is what the comment I originally replied to was talking about).

Yeah, I was thinking the weight of such a strong hull would probably be the factor that stopped it from working. Still, maybe one day there will be a way to make a strong, rigid, lightweight hull that can hold a vacuum. And what you mentioned was another thing I was thinking of, balloons to get vehicles to a certain height before they launch. I would imagine it would be much easier to make a SSTO vehicle with that method, assuming you don't count the balloon as a stage.

I find Steam annoying and I don't care about any of the features, so on games where I don't have to use it I close it down and buy the games through whatever other method I could. But I don't buy too many games anyway. I'm not so big on gaming as I used to be.

I was just looking at the JP Aerospace site and reading a little about how balloons have been used to reach space and it got me thinking about airships/zeppellins/balloons. It seems there is a project at the moment designing a new type of airship. http://www.businessweek.com/videos/2013-01-22/a-giant-floating-airship-could-be-future-of-flight I was wondering, since I don't know much, what some of the more knowledgeable folks here thought about the possibility of using airships terrestrially and even for orbit (as planned by JP aerospace) in the future. And I had a thought, but it may be unfeasible. If you had a hull with enough structural integrity resisting implosion, wouldn't a depressurised airship creating a near vaccuum be very efficient?

I guess anything big or in large number that was added would need to be really low poly so it could plausibly be run. Cities would be great, but just make them 5 faced rectangular prisms for each building, randomly generate them (I mean the developers should, but in game they should be the same every time you load). Also some highways between important locations like the two space centres and cities. It would be good to see some more dense forests, just with really low poly trees. In terms of facilities, more airports, maybe some depots where you can refuel aircraft. Oh, and a ramp that leads into the water for those making water craft.

My most recent failure was because most of my middle stack of rockets just fell off while my outer ones were still burning.

This is such a cool initiative.

Running gloves, thanks. I've designed a configuration that should dock together. Haven't successfully got any parts into orbit yet though, so I can't say for sure if the docking would work or mess up.

So the Big bang didn't come from a point... it came from everywhere...?

Yeah, that doesn't really explain much. To someone at the target, would the lasers hit at the same time? To someone on Earth? To the people in the ship? Would someone on Earth see the ship travelling at near lightspeed in one direction and the laser travelling at lightspeed in the other? Or would one or both appear slower as to prevent the total difference being more than the speed of light? And for the first one I meant how fast would each other appear to be going and... and how is lightspeed different to standing still without a reference point, and if they're both travelling at opposite lightspeeds to say, a speck of dust or other reference point, how is that possible from the perspective of the reference point? Like even right here on Earth (ignoring atmospheric slowing), how do we have light coming or going from 2 directions simulataneously appearing to be at C? Argh. I'm just confusing myself.

I've seen people make stations that are shaped like hexagonal rings, but looking through the the VAB parts, I can't see anything that would allow this. I can set up parts that will go outwards on 6 sides of a central cylinder, but nothing to connect what comes out of the sides to each other... I feel like I'm explaining this very poorly but hopefully someone will get what I mean. Is it possible to do this? Or would they have used mods or something?

Well... Macey Dean already has weapons, just exploding projectiles built from stock parts.

Here's my question... what happens if you have two ships travelling near light speed heading towards each other, just far away enough to miss, how does time dilation affect their relative speed to each other? And another question. If you fire a laser from Earth and at the same time a ship next to Earth but travelling near-lightspeed in the opposite direction of the laser shoots a different laser in the same direction as the first laser, how does it work that this laser would leave the ship at C relative to the ship, and yet also travel at the same speed relative to Earth as the other laser? Would it? If they were both pointed at the same target (ignoring the fact that the ship would have presumably had to pass through the target to achieve it's speed and trajectory) would they hit it at the same time?

Yes, but in space battles, presumably they would be in approximately the same orbit. Otherwise it would be like people in wars on Earth dropping their troops off to fight with each other in seperate countries and telling them to hike towards each other. It would require a lot of energy and simply be wasteful, and thus it's something nobody in a war would do.

I'm just curious, what sort of level has been seen on these forums? If you've built a base on an off-Kerbin body that you think could be one of the biggest, please post it.

Tim Minchin wrote a song once called "If you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out." That's not to say the thought shouldn't be entertained, but once you see that the evidence is exaggerated or simply made up and that the place really has no remarkable qualities, what's the point in speculating what crazy scifi ideas might cause this nonexistant anomaly?

I was reading the Wikipedia article on these and I may seem dumb for saying this but it didn't seem entirely clear on how they work. It says they catapoult loads, but the way it's described seems more like a cannon. Is that how it works, a big tube that uses an electromagnetic charge to repel a similarly charged payload out? I couldn't find any good diagrams of the inner workings of one either. Is this a plausible option for use in the future on, say, the moon?