Tw1

Because they're full of secrets. Their eyes are also their nostrils. Little known facts/conjecture

I think there's something that can be taken away from the op here, at least about exploration, even if it's not quite the intended message. When designing a game, story, toy, play equipment, etc, leaving stuff out can be as useful as adding in. If you sprinkle in sparse, ill defined details, that gives the brain a starting point, imagination fills in the rest, and does so in all kinds of ways. In a playground, a simple metal wheel on a fence can become the controls for all kinds of things. When you add more detail -say you replace the generic wheel with one that looks like it's from a racing car. The kids can still imagine it as controlling a plane or boat, but doing so requires more brain power than before, because now the cues which say "This should be a car" need to be overridden. In KSP, we can take this a little further. In the olden days, things were still undefined. Science was still coming. We could hop from planet, to planet, pretending to discover and explore, with the thought that we'd someday we'd be doing it for 'real'. When "sceince" came, it was... Underwhelming. And the closest thing in stock to mapping... Had a simplistic, immersion harming instant result. The "Biomes" aren't exactly bad, but they don't have much subtlety. Two Mun crators may look different to the discerning explorer, but to the game they're both "highland crators". So while they've added much too the came, in a way, somethings aren't quite as they used to be. This is part of the problem. Unless you've got an eye for subtlety, most of each planet is pretty samey. If only science was about photographing landforms and recording data, rather than collecting points... On the subject of old KSP, old Duna had a few more dramatic landscapes IMHO. Or a well tuned flying pig which looks like it's been thrown together in a junkyard. Some of my favourite craft have been ones with the Frankenstein/home made aesthetic, yet despite their looks, they performed admirably. This is one concern in recent KSP versions for me. The parts are becoming more uniformly styled, and heading towards a commercial space look, over the beautiful mishmash of old. Case in point: The mk1 cockpit, going from fighter jet to commercial, and the inline loosing its patternation and becoming structural part + glass bubble. I do think there's something of the achievable, improvised, do it yourself vibe that's getting lost there. Especially now with the tech tree requiring some parts be less effective than others... And Idk, I can also see the case against the larger parts. Yeah, super asparagus strutted like a bike wheel wasn't the most realistic rocket, but there was a certain level of structural engineering skill required to launch large payloads... It's not quite the same when you can achieve the same just by wheeling out a bigger parts. Unless you scale everything up, and decide that orbital assembly is for suckers...

Binned? Some people remove old versions?

It might be just me, but I'm noticing more big walls of unnecessary text, where someone has quoted the whole post to reply, rather than just highlights, or the relevant section. This is kind of annoying. Takes up space, results in scrolling over the whole thing, not reading the relevant bit, which partially defeats the purpose of quotes. Just me? Anyone else finding this more frequent and annoying? Perhaps some sort of forum etiquette announcement or something might be an idea?

Glory or Death! But sandbox exists and you can travel through space with ten struts and a probe core if you're a smart cheapskate.

Cool. Hooligan labs' parts are still around?

Well, what's the wait? To Ike!

I've never done planets, but I've made posters, Facebook banners amd posters for uni clubs, mermaids, the odd genderbend, and once fooled a fair amount of my year at school with a fake poster campaign, before I even shelled out for photoshop, so.... Gimp is an excellent program. Some things it even has advantages over photoshop. It looks much friendlier for a start, and it's free of adobe's weird keyboard shortcuts. Like basically everything, the trick to getting good is a partly studying how the program works, and some reading up on art theories, and how digital images work, but mostly it's practice, and experience. You've got to start somewhere. Some tips - Get the hang of layers, layer groups, transparency, and then maybe blending modes. Masking can wait. Do different types of things on different layers. Like, have a layer for clouds, or for vegetation, or even multiple for different layers, and different types, and achieving different effects. Think about lighting. Some layer modes lend themselves well to creating highlights or shadows. This comes in handy because - The dodge and burn tools in Gimp aren't that amazing, and you can easily change the highlights or shadows without altering the underlying drawing. Also, colour to alpha tool. Leaves other methods of clearing backgrounds for dead, even photoshop's fancy tools. Learn this. You might want to also learn a little Blender. A minimum, you'll get some shapes and lighting to start with. One trick you can use is multiple of the same layer serving different roles. It could be useful having the same rendered ball as a lower layer to to draw over, then again on a higher layer in a mode like darken only to create matching shadows. Are you looking to make them photorealistic? The trick is to star with actual photos. Drawing in lines can be useful, but it will take a bit of blurring and clever smudging to hide them. Get yourself some good photos to work with - best to avoid using anything which which someone may be unhappy if you used their images. Go for high resolution images from the start. The results are almost always going to be better. I have a graphics tablet, but tbh, most of the time I prefer to use the mouse when drawing digitally. Unless I really want that hand drawn look, I can do better with precision placement of path anchors, distortion tools, shape tools, etc. Gimp isn't the best for this type of art though, it can loose track of the pen. There are other programs out there which are Also free, but more drawing specialised. You can do it though, most of my Was drawn in Gimp. Ok that's probably enough for now, I should probably sleep.

Squad forbid, but should KSP ever include extrakerbestrials....

But there does seem to be a believing audience. At some point, those believing the message may become the ones passing it on.

I read the full paper, and while I'm not certain I fully understood everything, they seem to be arguing that the results suggest our understanding of the nature of vacuum, and the role of photons are incomplete, and needed revision. They also discuss this in some detai. Something else must be happening. They are likening it to a jet engine, grabbing some of its reaction mass from the air around it, but with photons and vaccum.

Someone make this a contract mod.

Or perhaps some clever thrust vectoring?

Hey guys. I'm looking to get a new computer. Got to be a laptop, for portability, and capable handling adobe suit, and cad programs particularly Rhino + Grasshopper, and rivit- without trouble. And of course, KSP. Two models I'm interested in : MSI GL62 15.6in Core i7 Gaming Notebook Or Metabox-Alpha-N150RD-Laptop Probably with these part selections: Probably leaning towards the second one, partially due to aesthetics, the power port placement, (Also I like having the vga port, I use those a bit, ). The differences seems to be in the ram, one's takes ddr4 and is expandable to 32gb, rather than ddr3 and 16gb. There's also the possibility of getting an extra SSD in one if I act soon enough to get certain deals. (Also differences in screens, but I'm not quite sure how they'd compare, and it's not my top priority. Also, it will hopefully be plugged in most of the time. ) So any comments on these models or the merits of different parts would be much appreciated. My old machine was an acer v3-571g with an i7 3630qm, and a nVIDIA 640m, 8gb ram, 4gb graphics ram, 1 Tb hard drive. For most of its life, it ran KSP like a champ, apart from several hiccups. Edit: also looking at some Asus gaming laptops with similar specs but more Vram. They're more expensive, though so... This one's not so bad. Might this, with its 4720hq be better than the Metabox option?

Yep. Imagine that though...

Yes. There's a difference between something being scaled up and simplified for gameplay purposes, and something that's defying physics all together. The Rapier engines arguably also fall into this category, they are tiny, and don't require any of the complex precooling rl equivalents do. They were never used due to budget cuts when the space race ended, and the anti nuclear movement. They're as much retro- future as they are near future. They are also not completely realistic, iicr they would require warm up and warm down times, with thrust proportional to heat.

Scissors icon? I'm not seeing anything like that. I just get a pop up window. Occasionally I can get rid of it by cutting, but most of the time it refuses to be moved or selected

It really depends what you want from a base. It's it for launching new missions, a scientific outpost, tourist destination, or a permanent colony? Or is your only concern costs of setting up? I like my Mun bases, as they feel classic sci fi, and you can rover there. The tidal locking makes the day night experience so unlike that here on earth. I like Minmus because it's so beautiful, and easier to land and launch from, and makes for interesting base designs when you consider working in low gravity. (though the longer orbital period makes interplanetary less simple.) Laythe makes most sense as the start of a true second home for the kerbals, for obvious reasons, and the length of travel time forces a higher degree of independence than one closer to home. Moho has plenty of launch windows and short travel time, but that transfer delta V and levels of solar exposure? I think not. Eve? Hard to get off, risk of atmosphere and ocean contamination... Probably not. Duna- has atmosphere, possibly water, resonable to get to and back? Sounds alright. Dres.... Takes a while to get to, similar to the Mun but colder... Not the most interesting a choice, though theo is the resources.. Eeloo is pretty similar, but with even more delta-v and time to get there.

We're starting to move off the original topic here, but this has been a big theme of some of us's rants on career for a long time now. The game has focused far too much on the ticking off of one time goals. The science collection, part and building unlocking, even the significance of one time historic firsts all give a save a finite experience. Instead, they should’ve focused on two other things: a rewarding space exploration experience, and keeping your space program going through good management of benifits vs costs. It would've been great if they'd followed a model like sims or simcity, where there's always something new to manage due to complex interactions within the City, (or between everything your space program has going on), and just watching and experiencing can be a joy in itself.

Woops, that was poorly worded. I meant within the distance that ports start to attract, but thinking about it, sounds like finding out what those parts are in the first place might make it just as bad or worse than what it’s doing currently. Though this sounds like an argument for using the shielded docking ports, if they're not active until open.

Woah. That's so inefficient. Is there no way it could just check within a certain distance for docking ports? Like maybe having a separate list for docking ports? And/or a simple off switch for a port's "Magnetism"?

Literally every time I've seen this thread title this song gets in my head.

Hey, the mobile editor still really needs some work. It seems impossible to remove quotes or spoilers, and repositioning them is a big struggle. You end up being un able to reply because of the mess that's stuck in the editing box. Even a simple delete button on them would be very helpful.

Look at all you younguns. Probably never even heard of the great April purge, the great form glitch. Back in the day even getting to general discussion was up hill both ways in harsh, irradiated vacuum. Anyway the first forum debate I recall was the moho atmosphere removal discussion. But that pales compared to the Great Female Kerbal Squabbles of (might have been 14?), and the DLC debate. I recall the GFKS going for days, and over multiple threads.. Parts were thrown, the planets shook, and different perspectives where exchanged in a mix of civil and somewhat less than civil ways. I stayed out of the DLC debate, as it was a fuss about a hypothetical coming from one offhand comment and I buy so few computer games I've not really experienced the troubles of bad DLC.

Doesn't really merit a full sub form. Sub forums are for broad categories. But start a thread in science or the lounge (if you want discussion around the realism, vs discussion around broader uses in fiction) , and see if it takes off.