Sandworm

I don't think this mod can mesh with Squad's philosophy regarding missions. The opted not to enable defined or goal-specific missions in favor of procedural generation. Duration requirements also reminds everyone of the absurdity of a space 'simulation' without any mention of life support.

State secrets. So much of rocket tech lies behind classified doors that publicly-viewable cameras are a problem. They cannot be turned on until everything is buttoned up. It's not the spacecraft itself so much as things like antennae, which by their shape give away their purpose and frequencies. Remember that this rocket's real job is launching giant spy sats (ie all those NRO launches).

"American manned combat spacecraft. Study 1973. The space cruiser was a US Navy design for a single-place crewed space interceptor designed to destroy Soviet satellites used to track the location of US warships. In the first half of the 1970's the US Navy began serious development work on a space cruiser - a single-place crewed space interceptor intended for "scientific and military applications". The Navy was specifically interested in knocking out Soviet satellites used to track the location of US warships. The space cruiser was to have been launched into orbit by a Poseidon missile from a ballistic missile submarine." http://www.astronautix.com/craft/spauiser.htm At one point there were extensive plans for a USAF version of Shuttle to be launched from Vandenberg. They actually build the launch facilities for this before it was canceled.

100g+ rockets are not rare. Thousands, possibly millions, have been fired. Google "FFAR" for Folding Fin Aerial Rocket. Those little guys pull 100+Gs getting out of their tubes. The Canadian CRV7 is probably the fastest accelerating and is famous for being more accurate than the 20mm cannons mounted on many aircraft. I believe they top out at around 3000m/s, but that's impressive given their size/price. There are even stories of practice rockets (no warheads) punching holes through tanks.

They are too big imho. But so is minmus. They should be small little things that are harder to intercept. I'd consider keeping them at the stock size. That would make for more interesting landings.

Cannot happen. Under warp RT drops connections readily. You would need a mechanism to accommodate these drops, but then there isn't much point in the continuousness requirement. Perfectly doable. Was done using contract manager. Whether the resource is stock or mod-added doesn't matter. Very tricky. The contract would have to keep track of which kerbals are where before, after and during the moves. But you could build something similar using smaller requirements such as "in orbit with 3 kerbal" then "in orbit with 6", which you would have to pick up somewhere. Add specific orbit reqs based on a previous to launch a station and you're done. This too was once possible using missioncontroller. This can be done with basic resource and duration requirements. Launch with <=1000 units, stay a month, and still have >=900 units.

I've got a couple of my old mission packs for lying around. But they all involve duration and/or resource requirements. I did a bunch to simulate the realities if interplanetary flight. A sub-mission requirement such as ((in orbit = Sun) and (liquidfuel = 0) for (time=50 days)) forces the player to rely on xenon or monoprop, simulating the reality of boiloff without getting into realfuels-type plugins. Testing missions would also benefit from a duration requirement. Run a test between 10k and 12k is easy. Staying between 10k and 12k for 5 minutes is a much much harder task.

It needs a duration parameter to accommodate and reward those using life support mods. (ie remain in orbit for 10 days) OR... Requirements for specific resources can ape a duration requirement (ie must have at least 5 Oxygen onboard"). With the original mission controller mod we could write contracts that would chain requirements. That made storytelling possible. Go here then go there ... rather than Squad's dwarf-fortress approach allowing only procedurally generated contracts.

Doctor: You'll have normal relationships with normal people at a normal school. Bart Simpson: I don't like how many times you said normal. Every director says these things. It's like when they say "character development" is more important than imagery or when they talk about how great it would be to film in black and white again. Self-aggrandizing artistic dribble imho. Star Wars was about spectacle from literally the first second when episode IV hit audiences with that opening bang. I think he is bragging about how his cgi will be altogether different than anyone else's. His will be better ... even though it isn't finished and he likely hasn't seen much finished product of beyond what's in the trailer. We do know that Disney threw a pile of money to render Big Hero 6 on a massive cloud, actually a couple massive clouds. No doubt Star Wars is has access to similar rendering capacity. http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/18/disney-big-hero-6/ *And Star Trek is relevant because the director for episode 7 (Abrams) just did the last two Trek films, both of which were radical departures from classic trek themes. His selection suggests Disney is looking to move Star Wars away from its roots. Is Scott Bakula still around? That saber gives me hope. It isn't simply a Claymore. It's a flaming cross sword, a very strong religious image. And it's red, a color traditionally associated with the dark side. A fire cross wielded by an evil character might mean they are going in a very interesting direction vis-a-vis the force as a religious conflict.

Yes, but SG1 was a very loooong series. I think the longest ever. They hit most every base in all of science fiction. They had to do the death star thing eventually. USAF was a partner even though SG was filmed almost totally in Vancouver. But SG1 was a very pro-military show, without much to disagree about politically. It was also very pro-nuclear, with many plots revolving around a rare mineral akin to uranium. It's not a bad thing per se to get military backing on a production, but there are some decisions that seem linked to this partnership. Independence Day (1996) was filmed without USAF support because the plot involved Area51 and couldn't really be changed. US authorities had yet to admit Area51 existed. Then a year later SG1 decides to use Cheyenne Mountain as their fictional HQ. Another scifi series, 7 Days (1998) used Area51 did not get support. Whether these decisions were artistic or political we will never know. But understanding the background can make the show more interesting. And the destroyed carrier group was US navy, not air force. There is significant rivalry between the various forces. USAF would be perfectly happy to see carriers sink on TV just as the USN probably laughed as the Battleship movie opened with a satellite being knocked out of the sky. Since the USN is the world's second-largest air force they couldn't knock down too many planes, but sats are USAF territory. USN supported Battleship. USAF did not.

There is theorizing and there is theorizing. Predictions are always speculative, but the act of making predictions requires an examination and discussion of what came before. The process creates a better-informed audience. I get a lot more out of movies when I have a bit of background on the creators and their politics. They cannot help it bleeding through into the production. Firefly and Farscape were Australian, X-files and X-men were Canadian. It shows. JJ Abrams directed the latest Star Trek movie. That movie did lots of filming at the National Ignition Facility, operated by the US Department of Energy. You don't get into places like that unless the DOE approves of you view on nukes (DOE maintains US nukes and the NIF is tasked with developing bomb tech). The original Star Trek series and movies were very anti-nuclear, but not the last film. Having control over the best nukes wins the day. Star Wars has also maintained a strong anti-nuclear themes (death stars = evil). Given what happened to Abrams' Star Trek reboot, we won't see any death-star superweapons in the hands of evil people. I expect the big evil to be something small, something more akin to terrorism or hacking. That would be a total flip flop from episodes 4-5-6 where the terrorist bombers were the good guys. We cannot have any of that these days. Whether the US military/DOE supports a production can be very telling. Top Gun = Yes. Transformers = Yes. Independence day = No. SHIELD = No. Red October = Yes. Crimson Tide = No.

I think it safe to assume that politics will be a core theme. It's Disney's IP now and they don't do anything without massive audience research. If you map the movies in the order in which they were created, including the rehashes (ie Han shot first), they mirror changes in the American political landscape. That's what happens when scripts see to many focus groups. Heros cannot shoot first anymore. Guns are for self defense. Films can no longer discuss religion. Replace it with Midi-chlorians. Princesses are not born but elected, for two four-year terms no less. And power is handed to an imperial leader by a duped legislature. At this rate I expect the next movie to be about health care reform. To quote Sheldon "I prefer to be disappointed in the order George Lucas intended."

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_8#Secure_boot That;s just the start. Some hardware (mostly special stuff, but including a few graphics cards) retain changes between boots. A change made under one OS might not be recognized or fixable when the second magically appears after the next boot, resulting in annoying, difficult to repeat, issues.

unix /= linux. "time consuming terminal commands for everything" Which OS are you using? I seriously doubt its the approved linux os for KSP/steam (ie ubuntu). And ubuntu /= debian. They are related but certainly not interchangeable. It sounds like you are dual/duel-booting. Don't. Windows and linux don't play nice together. Any number of driver update or security issues can crop up and cause instability. Shoehorning two radically different OSs into a single box will never yield the best experience. Dual booting is a marketing ploy to get people trying linux without removing windows. Use a dedicated machine. KSP on ubuntu linux is stable... very stable. There are quirks here and there depending on your hardware, but all in all it is far more stable than any windows build I've seen. It's probably the most stable 3d game I've ever played. Even my old NES failed every so often. But in over a year of playing KSP I've had only a handful of crashes, and those were all mod-related.

Thanks for the radial command thing. I started using this with a new 64k science-only save last night and it has really simplified things. Slapping a radial command pod onto the side is far easier than trying to shoehorn one of Squad's inline probe cores into the stack.

Lol. That made my day. The really interesting mods, those that make fundamental alterations, are not about eyecandy. After 19 pages of comments, this adaptation of RSS has plenty of clicks already.

Question: Why are TAC resources only added to command pods and not all crew-capable parts? The TAC module is added to all parts with crew capacity (see MM_AddLifeSupportModule.cfg) but TAC resources are only added to parts with both crew capacity AND command (see MM_AddResources.cfg). Many space station-type parts have crew but no command. Is there a logic I'm missing? I removed the requirement from my install and all seems well.

It plays with FAR installed, it does for me, you just won't have any failures of wings and such.

Ya, my bad on that one. I should have included the full-tank price, not the lower default. It's because KSP doesn't take default resource loads when pricing parts. It takes the sticker price, ignoring any included resources, then deducts for any less-than-full tanks. Simply adding a resource to a part will not increase it's price, but including a less-than-full tank will cause the price to drop. So you need to price the part as if the tanks were full and let KSP make the deduction for the less-than-full tanks. My mistake was in bumping up the sticker price by the number of spareparts included by default, rather than the full-tank price. I'll get a new cfg out asap. Try this in place of the spareparts.cfg: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sjbw1ime0j7j7qg/SpareParts_Sandworm_v2.cfg Also ... this strangeness means that the displayed sticker price always assumes that all the tanks are full, which, in the case of Dangit, means that parts look much more expensive than they actually are. But this doesn't impact launch costs, only displayed prices. MkI pod stock sticker price: 600 Displayed stickerprice with Dangit (using cfg above): 3750 Actual launch price: 1230 (Includes 10 units of spareparts) Max price: 3750 (With 40 units of spareparts added by hand in VAB) Min price: 600 (With 10 unit of spareparts removed by hand in VAB)

ok. What should they be using as eva prop under realfuels? I'm seeing them with an empty tank of the stock "EVA Propellant" resource. Edit: When I remove realfuels, they get EVA fuel back. The take it from the pod's monopropellant, converting it into EVA Propellant. With realfuels installed they take nothing. I've fixed the problem by adding 20 units of monopropellant to all the pods that have their mono replaced by hydrazine (via the Mono_to_Hydrazine.cfg). It's a dirty fix, but at least my kerbals can go eva.

Question: My kerbals are going eva without any EVA propellant. Should they be taking hydrazine from the pods? I'm not sure if this is a realfuels issue or not.

cc. Matured was probably a poor choice of words. I meant a matured ksp player not a matured person. Amongst those who have been plating for a long while, few seek out competition between players. That was the downfall of the various challenges. They seek out ideas, interesting play styles and mod combos, but never judge how someone else plays. It is generally the newer players looking to prove their skills that talk about "stock" as some sort of baseline for competition. That fades as new becomes not new.

You'll get over that eventually. Many new players seek the purity of the "stock" game as a basis for comparing themselves with others. KSP is not that type of game. Matured players don't care about external standards, probably because after a few months they know about all the holes in the stock game and know how to exploit them. You will learn to invent and play by your own standards. For instance, I seek a more realistic sim experience but that doesn't mean I'm using every realism mod I can get my hands on. I don't like RemoteTech or DeadlyReentry because, to me, they only ape reality. The difficulties they create are only loosely associated to realworld space programs. I do use various life support mods because, again for me alone, they create an enjoyable challenge. Eventually everyone decides on some combination that suits their own style.

Or they can redefine the game in such as way that makes it "complete" with only the current features. The word I'm thinking about is tycoon. Some ads talk about tycoon-style gameplay. That's a big order. That's, if not multiplayer, multi-actor in the sense of NPCs that the player competes with. It isn't going to happen. It's so far outside of KSP that there is no hope and most players, myself included, simply don't want it. Squad will surely remove any and all tycoon language from the beta announcements, redefining what the "complete" game will be in response to the lack of alpha progress in certain areas. The same principals can be applied to the other features that people actually want. The pro-reality sim fans want reentry damage. Squad could implement that well (a complex system based on heating of parts) or poorly (craft explodes at X g load). Or they could decide to redefine KSP as a wacky cartoon game, not a sim, and declare reentry damage outside of scope. It's all up to them. They have no obligations to do much of anything. Expect more effort put into 'expectation management' than new features.

Here ya go. This rocket relied on using FAR, HGR, RLA and remotetech (note stock fuels). HGR lift and transfer stages, KW fairings, and a tiny RLA engine for the decent stage. It had 14,000m/s worth of deltaV at launch but I could have gotten away with much less. The probe still has 1800 after landing and I may have ditched the second-last stage early. The plan was to hop around to other biomes but I never bothered. This took considerably more effort: And this guy is heading for Ike as soon as I get the time: (nearfuture ion drive, but basically same price as Mun lander shown above.)