Dunbaratu

I want to make a sledding rover.

Looking at the shots of the inside of the capsule it's amazing how accurate the Big Bang Theory (TV show) was when they had the plot about the trip to the space station. They built a set to represent the inside of the capsule and it looks pretty close to right (although they chose a camera angle designed to avoid showing the complex instrument panel so they didn't have to build it.)

That's a suggestion people have made in this thread. Do it like ground scatter, but make the rocks collidable instead of pass-through. Then getting it right becomes just a matter of finding the right setting for the density so it's sparse enough.

Whether the particles are fast moving or not (relative to the craft) depends on how gently you enter the ring (wow that really sounds bad). It shouldn't just automatically destroy the craft to be in the ring if you entered it at a relative velocity difference of only a few meters per second. For example, you might be in an orbit that is at the same altitude as the ring, but inclined by 0.5 degrees from it. As you pass by the ascending and descending nodes you'd drift through the ring, but not at high speed relative to the material of the ring. You and the dust of the ring are both moving at nearly the same orbital velocity, just half a degree off in direction. Similarly if you'd been orbiting at just a little bit higher than the ring and slow down a bit to bring your periapsis inside the ring, you're not necessarily encountering the ring's dust at high velocity.

Or just a few stones. Sparse enough that you are likely to make it through, but not certain so you still need to keep your eyes open and watch out and perhaps deflect a little bit.

Uhm. But the science play *already has* exactly what you're complaining about and you even used it in your example. It doesn't give you any extra science point benefits for successfully making a space station. And yet you appear to have no problem with that but still have a problem with the hypothetical mission system you describe that also gives you no extra money reward for making a space station because it's not part of any mission. WTF is the difference between these two things? It makes no sense unless you're pretending that the mission system would somehow disallow you from doing anything that isn't mentioned in a mission, and that's just a silly strawman as there have been zero suggestions anywhere along those lines. Thus why I can't understand what you are worried about. You seem to be making up a strawman that not only doesn't exist, but isn't GOING to ever exist as its not even remotely similar to anything that has been suggested.

That's also a really good solution. Basically, use the 2.5km "full physics" limit. The ring is a non-colliding picture only. Just a see-through translucent texture on a harmless object, but when you're in it, scatter rocks start being generated within the 2.5km physics range around you, and as they pass far enough away and go "on rails", they actually just disappear entirely.

That observation is not really a problem though, as all the examples of life you are extrapolating from exist on the same planet and are not isolated enough from each other. We can't get access to any observable forms of life that exist completely isolated from the influence of an existing dominant intelligent species. We can't get an untainted sample of how hard it is for unintelligent life to become intelligent when not under the domination of an existing intelligent life ruling over it. It could be that while having intelligent life naturally evolve once on a planet is likely, that having two of them evolving on the same planet, one after the other. isn't nearly as likely because whichever form of life gets there first ends up running the planet. Thus natural selection stops having nearly as strong an influence as artificial selection, which is much faster, becomes the dominant factor. So when all we have to go on is the Earth and no other life to observe but Earth-life, we can't get an untainted sample to test this hypothesis with. It's entirely possible that the reason we can't find other forms of intelligent life on earth is precisely *because* there already is one, and there can only be one. Take the Neanderthals versus Homo Sapiens for example. Once two intelligent species existed in the same ecosystem where they could interact, one of the two quickly went away.

I'd like to see a big window on the hitchhiker can. Give the passengers on space stations some nice views. Something where it's a bit heavier because of the glass, but doesn't have all the other stuff adding mass like the torque and the controls and everything else.

If you feel a hankerin' for old c64 stuff, these days there are emulators that will run everything on a modern computer. And yeah the 1541 drive is probably the weakest point in the C64 and most likely to break first. They were considered pretty low quality even back when they came out. Destroy Him, My Robots. Anyway, enough old computer nostalgia, back to KOS.

This is such a cool idea. I hadn't noticed this existed until now. Time to go grab the file and try to add some more things.

Modelling a ring truly accurately as millions of separate individual bits of rock and dust each orbiting on its own would kill any home PC's CPU. You'd need a supercomputer to do it. BUT there's a few tricks that might work to get a thing sort of like a real ring but with some realism removed to make it calculable: 1 - Make it a single solid object in the game engine. Granted a real world solid ring would be orbitally unstable and fall in (thus why Larry Niven had to write a sequel to Ringworld after fans told him he got it wrong, and his sequel includes the discovery that the ring has a system of rockets to provide station-keeping thrust for the ring to hold it in its unstable equilibrium, and the breakdown of that system was the main plot of the book). But in KSP since planets and moons always move "on rails" instead of using moment-by-moment stepwise calculations, SQUAD could design an on-rails equation for the ring's motion that just utterly defies physics and keeps the ring there. 2 - With the ring being a single on-rails object orbiting the planet, the painted texture on the object could contain a lot of transparency in it allowing you to see through the ring. 3 - To make the ring permeable so things can fly through it but will encounter dust as they do so, it's interior could be modeled as an "atmosphere" with drag. The painted texture could show a lot of specs of objects, or the scatter system could be used to show lots of rocks, but the actual slowdown isn't provided by colliding with the rocks. It's provided by the "atmosphere" drag. Here and there a few real rocks could be in the midst of the dust as separate orbiting objects. 4 - Alternatively, the ring could be "painted" with a patchwork of millions of "solid" and "not solid" sections and you have to pass through the "not solid" parts to make it through.

We all know that while the money in the game doesn't matter yet, there are plans to make it start to matter in future updates. When it does start to matter, I propose adding cash rewards for missions to inspect anomalies. (The arches, the monoliths, the face on Duna, etc.) We already have the concept that different zones of some worlds (Mun and Kerbin only for now) count as differently mine-able science zones. I'm proposing that a similar thing be done with the anomolies but since we already have science for biomes make this similar thing be based on cash. It represents private benefactors and/or governments suddenly getting a lot more excited when interesting "cool" things are found that hit the international news with a real "wow" factor.

I think you're deliberately making a strawman fallacy out of the suggestion here. At no point was anyone suggesting that monetized missions should be set up in such a way that there would only ever be ONE of them active at a given time. There would be a few Moho-based missions on offer alongside the Jool missions.

The wing dimensions are so integral to the design of an airplane that there is very little of this imaginary re-usability of pre-shaped wing parts that you're describing. An airplane designer making a new plane does not say "lets bolt the wings from our previous design onto a new fuselage." The redesign is expensive, yes, but not MORE expensive than trying to re-use the wings that were manufactured for a different plane, which is also an engineering mess.

As long as you aren't penalized for the FIRST time you build a thing to your own dimensions I'd be okay with this. The problem is that you were implying that somehow MY space program had already designed everything to the specs listed when that's not true. The game was handed to me that way. At no point had my space program ever asked the engineers to use those specs. So implying that by specifying my own diameter for parts I'm somehow deviating from the previous design is simply false. There *was no* previous design yet if I've just started the game. So only charge a redesign fee if it truly is a redesign. It's not a redesign just because it differs from the game's presets. To give an idea of how silly it is to presume I had predesigned the part sizes - consider that in career mode you have zero availible part designs that are the large diameter at the start. Then all of a sudden without my asking, they suddenly appear at that exact fixed size when I had no input into that decision. Therefore if I ask for them to be a bit smaller or a bit bigger, I am in fact NOT asking for a redesign of an existing part. Those parts don't even exist yet at the start of the game. So, yes, sure, penalize me with money for redesign if I keep changing the diameter again and again. But not for the very first one. The very first one isn't a redesign. It's the first design. Just because it's different than SQUAD's settings doesn't make it different from my first design. That first time I build a rockomax tank, the tweaked size I specified for it IS its first prototype initial designed size. Now at this point that's the lowest cost, least-redesigned size and your suggested cost for redesign should be calculating how much I deviate from THAT size, not SQUAD's preset size.

In the midst of another thread where someone was claiming it was perfectly safe to land by ignoring the horizontal movement of the ground and not bothering to match velocity with it, I made the comment that this would only be true on a body that was perfectly smooth and perfectly frictionless such that you could land on it as it skids past under you and your lander would happily rest atop the skidding surface and be okay. And then I thought, "Wow that would be a lot of fun to actually have a planet like that somewhere in the game." Granted, being zero friction might be a bit much, but being very low friction could be interesting. I don't know if Unity engine deals with varying friction of surfaces, but if it does it would be neat to have a place where when you land there you can, essentially, go EVA and ice-scate around using your jetpack (and have the challenge of it being hard to stop, and hard to get your lander to stop sliding.) This is not a request for a new planet. I'd be happy with just altering an existing location to be like this. Minmus's flat bottomlands seem like an obvious choice for this as they almost already look like ice sheets.

The version on Spaceport is 0.92, but the string inside the C# program that reports the version number on the screen didn't get updated and so the terminal window in the game still shows 0.91. This has happened a lot before with KOS mod - with the string showing in the game being behind the version it says it is in spaceport.

I cheated. I just found a truetype font that looks like a commodore 64, and just used it to mock up that screen in Gimp.

That would be a good idea except that you can't read radar altitude above about 10,000 m or so. so you can't do it on a world with atmosphere. You'd just get captured on the first pass for being too low.

That is false. It requires no knowledge of the source code to know that items following ellipses that were precalculated using the laws of physics does in fact constitute using physics. All that requires is knowing what the English words "using" and "physics" means, and realizing that if physics wasn't taken into account, you wouldn't even have known to make the shape of the path be an ellipse. If you were ignoring physics you could have made it a rectangle, or a line, or a triangle.

That seems sadly very appropriate for Kerbal technology. Thematically it would be right. But gameplay wise....shudder.

I'm done with the troll. If he's pretending he didn't already know this then he's just lying.

Now that you've admitted that the only reason it works is because the atmosphere takes care of the problem for you, and you finally admitted that the horizontal velocity of the surface of the planet is a problem that needs to be dealt with in order to land, will you finally admit that we were correct to claim that there's a difference between landing retrograde or prograde and the only reason it works out the same on Kerbin is because of the atmosphere doing the work for you? Now do what I mentioned earlier and do it somewhere without atmosphere that has rotation. If you come down from prograde rotation you don't HAVE to kill all the orbital velocity because coming down to kiss the ground at the ground's speed is what you want. It's stupid and pointless to kill all the orbital velocity first, fall straight down, and then speed up again to match up with the ground when you didn't have to slow down enough to fall straight. Falling down in an arc was good enough, and in fact preferred. And that's why we have been 100% correct to point out that landing prograde uses less fuel than landing retrograde, and if you already knew that then you've been trolling and should be ashamed of yourself.

An update to my skycrane/lander from before, this time using KOS 0.92: New things since last time: Air pressure and drag taken into account Parachute database (for air drag calculation) Speedier loop by moving some things out to lock variables (now that I finally found why locks weren't working before was uppercase letters). Paranoid behavior that assumes a mountain might spring up in front of it. Tested on Kerbin, Mun, Duna, Minmus, and Ike with some highTWR craft and some low TWR craft. Things that could be made better using new features of KOS but I haven't done it yet: (My first goal was just to get it to work and run at all under 0.92 even if it's using methods that 0.92 made obsolete and redundant). Sample the air pressure using instruments (right now it calculates it from wiki database information). Change tfXYZtoENU into a lock expression instead of a subprogram to run each loop iteration. Add better prediction to the PID control of the throttle so it truly is a real PID controller. (Right now it has problems trying to micro-control the movement of massive landers with low torque that cannot rotate very quickly, as they are always behind in their reactions). But those will probably wait because the next project I'm interested in is a target interceptor. (Select a target craft in orbit around the same SOI body and say "Please park yourself within a distance of X meters from that." and have it fix inclinations, adjust orbit until there's a catch-up, and then match velocities when getting near.) I figure eventually we might have RCS translation thrust available and when we finally do, such a script would be a necessary first step toward docking.