KSK

Thanks! Next chapter in progress and I've finally managed to join up the dots on the next part of the plot, which I've been chewing over for a while. As an aside, I was tickled by this announcement in yesterday's devnotes: Just need somebody to make an LV-15 now...

Hmph - time to spread some more rep around it seems, for this thread most richly deserves what I cannot yet give.

Any news on Stage 1. I got a lot of buffering just now. Ahh dammit. End of webcast. Time to find their Twitter page and do some refresh spamming!

Reminds me of Star City from Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: Final Odyssey. That resembled option E if I remember rightly with four very large space elevators tethering the ring.

Details of the fluorine processing here. I like your ideas for useful science vs points science too but yeah - probably not the thread for it.

"Hey, Jeb - how does this thing fly anyway?" "Modern technology, William." "Woaah." I like it - have some fully full-on rep points! Bonus rep if you work in flight controller Rufus Kerman somewhere in the story.

Dammit - weather abort and multi-ninjaed in half a microsecond!

At which point, there will be a sizeable contingent going 'meh - StarTrek did this 200 years ago. Wake me up when something cool happens.' I see a lot of this sort of techno-hipsterism on certain forums and it alternately infuriates and depresses me.

Buy now if you're concerned about possible price hikes but just beware that 1.0 may mean relearning some things with the new aerodynamics model and reentry heating.

Woohooo. CatastrophicFailure set us up the bomb! Edit: Was whiterabbit.doc written by Nedry Kerman?

I see what you did there. And that was one of those moments when you're glad you have an office to yourself so nobody can hear you giggle. Great work as always!

SRBs powered by Magma - what could possibly go right? On a more serious note and in reply to Tw1's excellent post, I think my ideal version of KSP at the moment is Science mode with KER, Kerbal Construction Time, Final Frontier, Kerbal Alarm Clock and an enhanced environment mod installed. Throw in a life support mod for extra logistics considerations if desired. Science mode gives me budgetary freedom whilst retaining some sense of progression and development of my program (what do you mean I have this whole shiny space centre to launch my first RT-10 bottle rocket from. Lalalala - not listening), Construction time gives me multitasking (rather than unlocking the science tree in 10 days and then fastforwarding to whenever the next launch window opens) and a sense of history, especially with Final Frontier added to the mix. KER, KAC for quality of life improvements and prettier graphics for better immersion. Simply having clouds instantly gives much more of a sense of scale to Kerbin. Sadly, I'm finding that the current game build invariably chokes on that particular combination of mods. Maybe 1.0 or 1.1 will improve matters.

I'm wondering if the Goo is the Kraken. Or a part of it anyway. How better to infiltrate kerbal society and particularly their high-tech and research heavy organisations.

I have quite an extensive headcanon, most of which is explored in my First Flight fanfic. I could write up a summary for this thread if anyone is interested and GregroxMun doesn't mind?

KSP is a fantastic sandbox. As a game it doesn't seem to quite know what it wants to be. Career mode isn't deep enough to be a satisfying management or strategy game and doesn't have anywhere near enough content to be any kind of story led game, building game or (sadly) an exploration game.

In this case - they haven't. It used to be the case that a US patent was only published once it had been allowed. For various reasons this was changed and now, like most other patent offices, the US publishes applications after 18 months and this happens automatically. So a published patent is not at all the same thing as an allowed patent. Check out the Google entry for that teleported patent - filed September 2004, published (approximately) 18 months later in April 2006. Since then - nothing. Whilst nobody would ever accuse a patent office of being quick off the mark, I'm guessing that if it hasn't been allowed in the nine years since publication, it's most likely been abandoned or rejected. My guess - some examiner had a good laugh/face palm at this one before having the unenviable job of doing some kind of prior art search for it. After that it was published (because it had to be) and then sank without a trace.

Gigacraps are an inspired unit!

The teleporter 'patent' was hilarious. The inventor reminds me of this guy. Similar idea but more Rube Goldberg than random science-fiction.

They haven't. The patent was filed in 2004, published in 2006 but (perhaps unsurprisingly) there is no date of allowance. Sort of. The claimed invention must be novel, non-obvious and capable of use (amongst other criteria) and it's absolutely the examiner's job to verify those criteria. However, you're right in that whether something works or not (apart from extremely limited cases) is not normally the examiner's concern. 'Capable of use' is the notable criterion here - if something does not and cannot work (for example, a perpetual motion machine) then it is not capable of use and not patentable. This is an interesting case though - I'm not sure if claim 1 would be rejected as being incapable of use. That claimed spacecraft will produce an electromagnetic field and hence is doing something, even if that something is not particularly exciting. However, claim 4: Is gibberish and would almost certainly be rejected.

There's a whole interesting discussion about how to define civilization in here somewhere. I'm reminded of Douglas Adams: “For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so muchâ€â€the wheel, New York, wars and so onâ€â€whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than manâ€â€for precisely the same reasons.†Replace 'intelligent' with 'civilized' in that quote and it still makes the same point. However, if we're assuming a human equivalent civilization and a human equivalent brain that that has the capacity to visualize the future and formulate some kind of long term plan* then sufficient dexterity to make tools and then use those tools to make better tools is about the minimum required for civilization I would say. *even if that plan is: skin animal, make clothes, keep warm, live longer.

Oh man. Just imagine if Earth had rings. Places to visit, resources to access, all within reasonable distances for developing space programs to reach. It would still take a while before those resources became economical to use, I think, but it would be a much more compelling case than asteroid mining.

Nice pics! I especially liked the last one - is that really an Earthlike with a ring system or is it just a clever camera angle? Really pretty either way - Purple Power Interstellar should head out there just because. - - - Updated - - - The Steam thing came as a surprise to me too but console ports have been a possibility for a while it seems. From a 2013 forum post: "We see the arrival of new consoles like the new PlayStation as a great opportunity - the console is a key showcase for game technology. At Frontier we have our own game engine and tools used for all of our games, and we pride ourselves at getting the most out of each machine. When a film company sets out to make a feature film, they imagine the viewer watching in glorious surround sound in a cinema. Clearly the people creating it want it to be watched in the best possible setting that shows off all their creative work, and the same applies to a game. Graphics and audio are moving ever closer to Hollywood-quality visual effects, and we will take full advantage of those capabilities, but it also goes beyond that. As network connectivity gets ever better, control and input capabilities get ever more sophisticated, then so do the opportunities for our games like to shine and transform the players' experience and immersion. For example, our 2014 game Elite: Dangerous is an unashamedly high-end PC and Mac game, but I have every expectation it will come to new consoles, too. People have regularly talked about consoles being "killed" by mobile devices. In practice, these are all just different venues for our games, and with careful thought can be integrated into the same game. It is great to see the next generation of consoles being announced, as mobile devices have become ever closer in performance to the six or so year old current console designs and the new wave of machines will once again push consoles out in front."

Heh - depending how much of a purist you are, you may have blanked it from your memory. Red Matter.

No worries - that'll just be the escaped Red Matter floating loose behind the control board.