vger

Europa, all the way.

Reboots are often pathetic because niche marketing is no longer common. The most important age demographic has dwindled down to being nothing but teenagers - the age group that is easiest to swindle. If you're not a teenager, you're not the target audience for practically anything. This is the same reason R and NC-17 films have become much more rare, whereas a couple decades ago, they made up the majority of blockbuster films. Kirk? Depends on your definition of goofy. He was goofy in TOS, but definitely not in the same way. Shatner's melodramatic portrayal of Kirk is quite infamous. TOS also has a lot more light-hearted humor in it though, which explains a lot. If you don't mind that, and get past how much the show has aged, you should be able to enjoy it. For me it's my 2nd favorite, right behind TNG.

Well... in a future where engines are unbelievably fast and efficient, and the cost of running it is no more than buying a tank of gas... yeah, perfect calculations wouldn't be that big of a deal. But there would still be some pilots who would do it. It's like the difference between someone who knows how to drive a car, vs someone who drives like a madman (without ever crashing). The guy who knows how to drive, will save a lot of fuel and maintenance costs in the long run.

Heh, yeah. It's not the among the first things that people think of as a significant object, especially in the wake of Pluto's humiliation. And we still have the absence of a couple other gas giants to make us wonder even more. Treating Eeloo as a Pluto analogue further confuses the issue. Eeloo 'crosses' Jool's orbit. Pluto crosses Neptune, not Jupiter.

Slightly OT question, but does anyone else typically find that a return mission to Minmus is easier than Mun?

That's probably due to the oversimplified aerodynamics engine than anything else. They wanted it easy enough to get planes in the air even if your airfoil is ugly.

Volumetric lights/fog seems to me the best way to simulate a comet tail. I don't know if that would be too much of a performance hog or not though. A lot of the lag-fest games that support it, use it EVERYWHERE. But just one or two light sources, where the only thing around that can possibly cast a shadow is a ship?

So are you more or less asking for the ability to put tracking stations on other planets, thereby expanding the range of an asteroid-detection system?

Rescue mission to assist another agency (nation) would be pretty cool.

Wow... have I somehow missed something about this game? I have never lost contact with a probe. Is it just because I managed to cover target worlds with enough of them before worrying about constant contact? Or is this a mod-related question?

<<<bloody doublepost>>>

I feel like Jool is Jupiter, even if that is just based on the name similarity. It just may be lacking more interesting stripe patterns because gas giants are underdeveloped so far. And if it is meant to be Saturn... it had better get a ring system.

Not really. What defines an asteroid is its orbit. This is oversimplified (since it doesn't cover things like comets), but... for an object of a certain size... if it orbits the sun, it's an asteroid. If it orbits a planet, it's a moon.

Were this done, it would have to be about the events leading up to the opening shot we see now. It starts out all serious, like an epic space film, things go haywire, and then the true nature of the Kerbal comes out, resulting in a lot of screaming and crying for Mommie. And then by some miracle, the pod survives the Munar impact, and everybody is happy. ....until they realize they have no way to get home.

Ascending/descending nodes are somewhat confusing, especially when you try to reach a world and forget to take the inclination of its orbit into account. The first time I aimed for Eve, things just happened to be timed right, and I was able to hook up without worrying about inclination. But most of the time, there's no way that would work. Once your inclination matches your target, you have a LOT less to worry about with getting a transfer to work. Doing it with Minmus makes good practice for the future when trying to reach distant worlds.

I've thought about this on more than one occasion. It would give us an excuse to send a couple extra science instruments. Sometimes a little color on the horizon just adds a little something to the scenery though, even if its impact on flight is minimal. That said... on the topic of thick atmospheres, is there a reason they won't work with the KSP physics? TBH I would like to have such a planet. There need to be things that REALLY require some deviant vessel design for a successful mission. Perhaps even going as far as blocking radio signals so that you lose contact with the probe, thereby forcing a risky Kerb'd mission to see what's down there. A body with cloud cover thick enough to interfere with solar power would be cool too. Imagine a world that had to be explored in total darkness, demanding creative solutions to powering the lander.

Yep. Not something I want high on the priority list, but I LOVE THE IDEA.

Seems documentation on it is pretty limited (maybe that's intentional) or it's strictly a roleplay element. In the Q&A section it states that economy doesn't actually do anything. It used to, but everyone hated it, so now it just remains as a 'title.' On Government: "Alliances are eligible to compete for bonuses, and some of the bonuses apply to nations that are in the alliance and have the same government type as the alliance has chosen." But... for the purposes of this game, having a Democracy would be overkill. Partially in keeping with my namesake on these forums, and trying to do something that feels like the Kerbalverse... inspired by recent events in the World War K series on Youtube, C0mputer L0rd, Mechjeb, ruler of Arctania, stands ready to serve.

Generally, if an asteroid is orbiting a planet (as opposed to the sun) it is known as a moon. They're relatively easier to locate and catalog than things from the asteroid belt because you have a rather precise area in which to search for them.

If you turn your back on them during a Minmus EVA for more than 5 seconds, they'll try to eat it. When WOULDN'T a Kerbal inhale something purple on purpose?

You can make Star Trek realistic. They tried it with ST: The Motion Picture. A LOT of the sluggish nature of that film can be attributed to an attempt to make it feel more like what we knew space travel was really like (which we didn't have much footage of when TOS originally aired). But, the Enterprise in that film looks more impressive than any other. Under impulse it moves like a ship of such size should move. It just feels big. As time went on throughout the film series, it became more and more like jet-fighter combat, with maneuvers that would tear such a massive ship apart. Abrams more or less tried to turn it into Star Was (which is probably why Disney hired him to make Star Wars). But couldn't we find a happy medium between the two extremes? Combine Star Trek with, say... Gravity?

If Paramount really wanted to give Star Trek an extra dose of action, all they needed to do was make a TV show that focused on a Klingon ship. That would've allowed for all the primal urges anyone could ask for, without tearing the original CANON to shreds.

Raven, but bugs me most about what is happening to Star Trek (yeah, ties in with your 'abandoning its roots' thing) is the loss of 'humanity.' When I was a kid, life was a war, more or less. The amount of backstabbing that constantly went on throughout my entire school life and on the street. It was insanity. BUT, there was this Star Trek thing, where camaraderie held importance, and instead of fighting for position, everyone worked together to achieve something greater. Star Trek was my only window into how a civilized society SHOULD behave, and it played its part in keeping me sane. Were that the Abrams Star Trek, what would I see? Spock, Trek's classic 'voice of reason' flipping out and beating the crap out of people at every turn. It's pathetically easy to see why Star Trek got reinvented like this. Hollywood doesn't want to teach lessons anymore. They want us to feel like our CURRENT society is the perfect one, so more and more often, other worlds we see on screen are carbon copies of this one. Even the Smurfs film ended up happening in 'reality' instead of in its fantasy world, because the audience can't relate to it. With the Star Trek reboot... the plan was quite deliberate. In the original timeline, post-WWIII, Cochrin's Warp Ship attracts the Vulcans, and initiates First Contact. The Vulcans, a people who survived their primal era and developed a society that was mostly free of it. Taking humanity by the hand, they help us achieve a (mostly) peaceful space-faring civilization. Take away the Vulcans, and humans are left to evolve (or not, for that matter) with the same wasteful behaviors they've always had, but also in space. The end result is a society just like ours, but with cooler toys. Much more tasteful to the modern audience.

I've known 'dead' corals to be sitting in fish tanks for decades with no signs of wear, so if there's a decay rate, it must be pretty slow.

I'd expect a pretty nasty ionization blackout at least. And... "The mysterious goo seems to be having a kool-aid party." ...sorry.